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       A is for … Attitude

      If you ask me how all this got started, I’d say it was with Magda deciding to marry herself.

      You may wish to read that line again.

      She was packing up one of her Spells for Beginners for a customer when she caught me.

      ‘RILEY! IMAGINE! JUST THE PERSON!’

      Magda used to be in television, which is why she speaks in one of those loud overenthusiastic TV researcher’s voices. Then one day she found her hair was too high and her fingernails too long. Now she runs Hocus Pocus at the bottom of the High Street.

      Deciding to get married was a big thing for Magda.

      ‘After all, I’ve been single all my lives.’ (She was previously a vestal virgin and after that a witch. Obviously this was before she went into television.)

      Magda got the idea of marrying herself from some Weirdo of the Day paragraph in her morning paper. Except, of course, being Magda, she didn’t think it was weird at all.

      ‘I THINK IT’S WONDERFUL. TOTALLY EMPOWERING.’

      Apparently the woman who married herself said she’d lived with herself for forty years. She felt she knew herself. She felt ready for the commitment.

      ‘Um … where did this happen exactly?’

      ‘California.’

      Only in California.

      Only in the loony tune town of my birth.

      Over cappuccinos in her coffee shop, I said, ‘So how will it work, Magda? Will you promise to obey? Will you have a joint account? You’re a woman of substance. I hope you’ll insist on a prenup.’

      She said, ‘I’m sorry you feel the need to mock, Riley. I’m surprised you don’t see it. I’m making a statement. For all of us.’

      ‘Us?’

      ‘Single women.’

      And then she said it: ‘Spinsters, Riley.’

      And that was where it started. Because it was like I was hearing it for the first time. That much-maligned, charming, noble, splendid old word.

      Courtesy of Magda MacBride. Spinster of this parish.

      Magda said, ‘It’s time for a new attitude, Riley.’

      ‘Damn it, she’s right,’ I said later to Danny.

      This after I found the spinster sites on the Net: Be at peace with your singleness. Do not apologise for your chosen life-style …

      ‘For God’s sake. It’s all so goddamn craven.’

      It was after that I started noticing things. What things? Well, this for instance, from one of those ‘Things I Wish I’d Known’ columns by some doyenne of the women’s movement.

      I wish I’d known that breaking off my engagement didn’t mean resigning myself to eternal spinsterhood …

      ‘Resigning herself?’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

      And this too, from a celebrity journalist (female, to her shame) interviewing a hot-shot female film producer.

      Despite, perhaps because of, what they are, a certain air of loss, of sadness will always cling to such women …

      ‘A certain air of loss and sadness …’ My Ss spat out on to the table. ‘Ssssimply because she can’t produce a husband and children.’

      So that all of a sudden I’m beginning to get that old Jonathan Aitken feeling, that whole If it falls to me thing. I want to swish that old Sword of Truth in the air. And why? Because the more I think about it, the madder I am, and this because as far as I can see, it’s spinsters that have kept this damn country going. Teachers, civil servants, nurses, secretaries, plus a hundred other occupations, years of faithful service from the single woman and not just after World War One either. And for what? To go on being patronised and condescended to, to have her life considered so much of less worth than that of her married sister. Worse – and this in the new millennium – to continue being the subject of grubby jokes and prurient conjecture, to be caricatured as fey, grey and miserable on stage and screen and in all those fey, grey miserable novels.

      ‘We’re the last minority group,’ I said to Danny. ‘We suffer from prejudice.

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