Fiancés have soft curly hair, pink faces from permanently blushing at their predicament, starry eyes, and a mosaic of scarlet lipstick on their downy cheeks from having been embraced by so many new aunts-in-law.

They also manage to appear vacant and engaged at the same time by having a far away abstracted expression on their faces. People naturally assume they are dreaming of the moment when they and their betrothed will be one flesh; actually they are completely shell-shocked by all the talk about soft furnishing and wedding-present lists.

Caught off guard, they have a trapped expression.

As one fiancé said, just before his wedding: “I feel as though I’m going into hospital for a major operation and all the anaesthetists are on strike.”

On their desks they have photographs of their fiancées given them by their fiancées, looking mistily soppy in pearls.



BACHELORS

Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this age they are regarded as single men. Most of them are very tidy, smell of mothballs, and have an obsessional old maid’s fix about one of their ashtrays being moved an inch to the right. Because they are not married, or living with a woman, they don’t feel the need to bath very often. Occasionally they have a shower after cricket and pinch their married friends’ towels. They can be recognised by their white underpants. (Married men have pale blue or pink-streaked underpants, because one of their wife’s scarves has run in the washing machine.)

Bachelors dread Christmas because they’ve got so many god-children to remember, and have a very high threshold of boredom through enduring so many grisly evenings with awful girls thrust on them by their married friends.

By way of revenge, they spend a great deal of time sponging off their married friends, turning up for lunch on Sunday and not leaving until the Epilogue, and knocking their disgusting pipes out on the carpet so that they get a chance to look up the wife’s skirt when she bends over to sweep up the mess.

They also get wildly irritated by their friends’ children, cast venomous glances at a two-year-old, and say: “Isn’t it time he went to prep school?”

A married man often rings up his bachelor friend and after a lot of humming and hawing asks if he can borrow the flat to ‘change in’ that afternoon. When the bachelor gets home in the evening, he often finds various bits of female underclothing, and his bed has been far more tidily made than he left it that morning.

Married friends are also inclined to turn up with whisky bottles, having been locked out by their wives, and spend all night berating the matrimonial state.

It is hardly surprising that although a lot of bachelors would like to get married, they cannot bring themselves to take the plunge—like bathing on Christmas Day.


“So pleased to beat you …”