AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Bon Jovi’s ‘Please Come Home for Christmas’ starts playing. Mum pulls a face.
‘Not a fan of this one?’ I ask.
‘It’s not a real Christmas song, is it?’ she replies. ‘There’s all sorts of songs on this playlist that shouldn’t really be on a traditional Christmas playlist. I noticed the bloody Cheeky Girls on the list. They’re yet to rear their heads.’
God help them when they do.
‘Alexa, skip,’ Mum says.
‘It’s not an Alexa,’ I tell her.
‘Right,’ she says with a bat of her hand. ‘Hey, Silly. Hey, Silly!’
‘Silly?’
‘The one you talk to on your phone,’ she points out.
‘Siri?’ I say back to her.
‘Siri? Is that what she’s called? Well, that is silly. Okay, Google, Simon, Baby Jesus – help me out, Billie. Skip this one.’
‘It’s a Smarty,’ I remind her – I talked her though it yesterday. ‘Smarty, skip this one.’
Bon Jovi is replaced by Chris Rhea, with ‘Driving Home for Christmas’.
‘Much better,’ Mum says. ‘I did try to figure out your coffee machine. I gave it a good go.’
Not too good a go, I hope.
‘I didn’t break it,’ she insists. ‘Blooming hell, look at your face.’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I reply. ‘No one tells you how expensive it is, having a house. Well, they do, but all they talk about is mortgages and bills. No one tells you how expensive it is or all the things that can break, like appliances, and all the stuff that gets destroyed just because it’s windy and all the neighbourhood trampolines decide to congregate on your garage roof.’
‘I know all too well, darling, why do you think I’m downsizing?’ she replies.
‘And, of course, I didn’t think I’d be doing it all on my own, but then bloody—’
‘Oi,’ Mum snaps, brandishing her wooden spoon at me. ‘No men allowed, remember, not even by name.’
I laugh.
‘Sorry! Thank you,’ I reply. ‘You’re absolutely right.’
Mum takes her phone out of her apron pocket, glances at it, and then drops it back in.
‘You get that coffee machine fired up, I’ll go wake your sister, see if she wants any breakfast,’ Mum says. She wipes her hands before heading upstairs.
Yeah, okay, good luck getting Jess out of bed on a morning for anything.
I feel my own phone vibrate in my dressing gown pocket. I assume it’s going to be from Angie, checking up on me, but it’s just an app notification. It’s from Matcher. Ha! The last thing I need right now is a dating app.
Single all the way this year? We’ve got you covered. Click here.
Curiosity gets the better of me, so I take the bait. The app looks the same as it always does. No new messages, just a series of old ones with people I grew tired of messaging with, but when there’s no spark, there’s no spark. What’s the point of forcing conversation for the sake of it, if you know it’s not going to go anywhere?
One thing that’s different is a red banner at the top which reads: Mingle All the Way. Oh, this is that thing Angie was talking about.
I browse the page. It’s a user-generated calendar of events for groups of singles to mix. I guess in somewhere like London it would be packed with events. Here, where the pool is much smaller, by the time you consider the fact that most people are only on here for quick hook-ups, or to meet one person (like I naively used it for), there’s not a ton going on, but there’s at least something organised by someone once a day.
