21

Eggs Benedict

GILLIAN, A GRADUATE of the Prudence Prendergast Finishing School, was at a loss to know the correct etiquette for finding a live sperm donor. She’d thought about insemination, but the anonymity of it worried her. What if he had bad teeth? Ingrowing toenails? A tendency to heavy-metal music? The question was: how did one go about enticing a man with whom one wanted to have babies? Perfume ads were full of promises of romantic attraction. Obsession said, ‘I’m a fun-loving babe.’ Allure said, ‘You’ll have to buy me an expensive dinner first.’ What Gillian needed was a perfume which said, ‘Fabulously Shagable Sex Goddess Who Wants You To Father Her Children. And I’m Ovulating Now.’

With her eggs counting down to their monthly blast off, she enlisted the help of a computer dating service. Her perfect match, it appeared, was Benedict, a six-foot-one, thirty-two-year-old Open University lecturer, with hazel eyes who liked travel. He was, Gillian decided, N.B.F.M.K. (Not Bad For Milton Keynes). But she lost her appetite even before they sat down for dinner.

‘What makes Chinese women so wonderful,’ said Ben, authoritatively, sucking an olive from its tiny skewer, ‘is the small vagina. It just goes “Pop!”’

What would he make of her? Gillian wondered, grimly. Channel Tunnel? ‘Yes, quite satisfactory,’ she retorted snidely, ‘if you’ve got a minute penis. Personally,’ she said, pushing up on to her high heels, ‘I prefer a man who touches the sides. Like nature, I abhor a vacuum.’

He wasn’t a N.B.F.M.K. after all, but an A.A.A. (Absolutely Awful Anywhere).

And so her biological clock ticked on.