#wingmam

I must start this week’s post with an apology: when I first set out on this quest for love I immediately introduced you all to my mother, Wing Mam. When doing so I promised that she would make frequent appearances as this journey continued but thus far this has not been the case. For this I am truly sorry, I am sure that she would hate you to think that she has been lagging in her personal endeavours to marry off her children. As I permanently stare at my phone, rigorously swiping and typing my life away, Mam has been beavering away in the background, searching for alternative methods of discovering Husband Bae.

My favourite of these methods is through the use of a publication that those of you unfortunate enough not to live in Cumbria will never have been enlightened by. Let me tell you: no one is worth knowing unless they have graced the hallowed pages of Carlisle Living. If you can imagine an amalgamation of the cutting edge journalism of the New York Times combined with Tatler’s social pages, the motor knowledge of Top Gear (the old one), the restaurant reviews of the Telegraph, and the decorating advice of Ideal Homes, boiled down to focus on a 1000km squared area, you have some idea of the journalistic pinnacle that this publication is. I know what you’re thinking, Wing Mam thought exactly the same thing: prime hunting ground for blog fodder.

Some of you may remember a scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which Anne Hathaway is left in charge of delivering ‘The Book’, a copy of Runway magazine, covered in post-it notes and feedback. The copy of Carlisle Living that lands on my desk once a month bares a strong resemblances to ‘The Book’. Mam carefully goes through each addition, circling and marking any potential suitors. These have so far varied from two men who make muesli, to all four members of a local band, to an Olympic snowboarder.

Wing Mam’s plan still remains half-baked however; how does one get in contact with these people? I know Carlisle is small but not small enough that you can merely loiter around street corners hoping to bump into people you’ve spotted in a magazine. Following the Mobile Bae disaster I am also refusing to feign interest in specific topics purely on the off chance of striking up a conversation about the big honey or maple syrup debate of muesli making (I read up on this topic anyway, just in case the street corner lurking does pay off). Alas, so far Mam’s long list of potential suitors has remained bound to the pages of a magazine.

Wing Mam has not been deterred by this set back though, and refuses to put all her eggs in one basket. In the mean time, anyone that comes within a fifty-metre radius of the house is a possible target. My sister and I quite often have friends to stay. After they have left, if these friends are male, we have to provide Mam with full relationship and character reports, along with a detailed analysis of why they would make an unsuitable son-in-law (apologies to anyone who is reading this and happens to have come to stay recently, you will not have escaped this scrutiny!).

It was during one such debrief/family meal that Wing Mam broached a topic that had clearly been eating away at her. Having read about Pilot Bae she was suddenly worried that she could be proving more of a hinderance than a help in sparking my love life and felt that since the whole family was in one place, now was the time to set a couple of things straight... ‘I just wanted to let you know that if you go on a date with someone and you DO fancy them, don’t feel you can’t go home with them because you’re worried about what your father and I would think. Just maybe send me a message or something so I know where you are’. I nearly choked on my soup. Here was my mother suggesting that I just nip off for the odd one-night stand whenever I fancy it. Obviously, however, this wasn’t a decision that should be made by her and her alone... so she consulted my father. What were his views on my casual sex life? He masticated thoughtfully before responding, ‘To be honest, I go to bed so early that I don’t tend to notice what you do between supper and breakfast anyway so I don’t have a problem with it’.