Molly Bloom
writer and recherchist

So I sit down to pen this profile, fingering tusks of absinthe and dried tears from my eyes. Home-made aioli and pitta bread lay disconsolately in a bowl beside my drumming fingers. This is my profile, I realise. All mine. No one else's. Still in my flannelette pyjamas, me, the dilettante dater. I bought a large chocolate cake with the words 'arrivederci' spooled across it in child-like icing handwriting. Can't you chefs learn to write proper? I quipped in the shop. They just stared at me. My day? White on black. Running my hand across the smooth onyx of my piano, running my legs across the crumpled tarmacadam of Putney village, running my fantasies across the stiff limbs of a West Indian man. All this aside, I like nothing better than lounging across my chaise longe with a bottle of Sauvignon and a unsubtitled version of the Werckmeister Harmonies.

Still in flanelette, I take a book to the Common: Saul Bellow, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joyce. Sigh. The tyranny of choice. Rising to the fridge to fetch my rosehip cordial, I snag a thread of the arm of my linen shirt and resolve to either a) sand the chair; b) get a new chair; or c) get a fucking life.