One minute, you were having a nice, normal, maybe slightly flirty conversation, and the next you were having to explain how you’d gone from medicine at Cambridge to a temp job and the school run, and from there it was either “Poor you, what a disaster” or “Gosh, I didn’t think you were the type.” And you knew that the person you were talking to had stopped thinking Hey, she seems all right; maybe I should ask her out and started thinking Hey, she seems like she’s got a lot of baggage; I hope she doesn’t ask me to babysit.
