COUGARTASTIC

Cougar:

An attractive woman in her 30s or 40s who is on the hunt once again - the cougar is woman in her sexual prime who prefers to hunt rather than be hunted. A cougar's victims are usually under 25, as cougars prefer to mate with men who still have hair. Cougars generally feed and then continue hunting, as they enjoy role reversal. She will not play the usual bullshit games that women in their early twenties participate in. End state, she will be going for the kill, just like you.

All of which paints a frighteningly accurate picture of a recent encounter of mine.

If you’ve been paying attention you will know that I am now knocking on 31 years old. I do not know how this happened and I do not like it one little bit, particularly when my darling little brother recently accused me of entering ‘middle age’. Dear god. Brother dearest defines it thusly: 0-30 years = young, 30-60 = middle age and 60-90 = old. I’m not sure what that means for those of 90+ but right now that is not my main concern. My main concern is that, while I had been happily labouring under the impression that I didn’t look a day over 21 (aided and abetted by Sainsbury’s’s (how to apostrophise??) overzealous alcohol IDing policy) I have in fact moved firmly into the COUGAR camp.

This was brought home to me recently when I met a beautiful, but very young, boy at a party. He looked like the result of some kind of weird scientific experiment where my two favourite ex-boyfriends (both from my late teens) had been spliced together to form my ideal man and then served up to me in 2011. Unfortunately I’m not 19 any more – a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by his friends who, as I hunted him mercilessly from party to pub to club, were a little disgruntled when I walked in on their conversation about how I was ‘like, a cougar’. And when pressed they put my age at 35. Ouch. Undeterred, by the end of the night I had hunted my prey to ground and drunkenly exchanged numbers before stalking off into the wilds of Finsbury Park.

48 hours later, and with my post Royal wedding hangover finally in check, I headed over to the boy’s house to take him up on his offer of a ‘cup of tea’. Is that what the kids are calling it these days? ‘Tea’ turned out to be sitting in his bedroom being subjected to dreadful pop psychology and ‘difficult’ jazz LPs but eventually we cut to the chase and believe me, it was worth it. I drew the line at being offered a family bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a post-coital snack though. Tsk, students.

So, I’ve decided that cougarism is mutually beneficial – I got youth, beauty and stamina and he got to avoid an awkward scene the next day – mainly because I hopped it home that night…there was no way I was letting him see my crumpled, mascara-smeared, middle-aged face in the morning! Oh and, assuming he gets all his homework done in time, he’s invited himself to mine for ‘dinner’ this weekend. I really can’t wait. . .