2013

2013 is the story’s present-time frame, the year in which Bridget Jones’s immediate diary entries unfold and the consequences of an earlier year are revisited. Its calendar structure sets daily anxieties beside retrospective memory: the narrative begins in April, returns to a diary from 2012 to explain how Bridget reached her current predicament, and closes with a year-end ledger followed by an account of her life with Mr Wallaker.

The April Present

The 2013 frame opens on Thursday 18 April, when Talitha calls to reserve 24 May for her sixtieth birthday while insisting that the occasion remain discreet. Bridget answers with unconvincing enthusiasm and privately panics. The small exchange establishes a present tense shaped by social obligations and the gap between the composure Bridget performs and the unease she records.

On Friday 19 April, the diary turns that unease into figures. Bridget weighs 134 pounds and records 3,482 calories, 85 insects in the household infestation, 27 insects found in Roxster’s food, and no nits found on Roxster despite three checks. She has received no texts from him, spent 360 minutes obsessing about him, and devoted only 20 minutes to deciding to prepare for a film meeting—with no actual preparation. The numerical format gives the day a comic precision, but its competing totals also show how little control measurement provides over attention or circumstance.

The same date links romantic distraction with professional ambition. Bridget intends to concentrate on presenting her screenplay, an update of Anton Chekhov’s Hedda Gabler set in Queen’s Park. She recalls having studied the play at Bangor University, where she received a Third, and hopes the adaptation might put matters right. Later, as Roxster still has not texted, she admits she cannot concentrate and goes home. The diary’s account of 19 April therefore places the screenplay and the relationship in direct competition for her attention.

The Earlier Diary Inside the Present

After acknowledging that four years have passed since Mark Darcy died, the narrative moves into Part One, labelled as taking place one year earlier. Its 2012 diary extracts are explicitly introduced as the material that shows how Bridget got herself into the mess occupying the 2013 present. This is not a second present-time strand: the older entries are embedded retrospectively, and their purpose is to make the current predicament legible through the record of the preceding year.

The return to the present is marked by the heading “BACK IN THE PRESENT MOMENT.” On Saturday 20 April 2013, Bridget records 4,567 checks for texts from Roxster and no texts from him. Her tally also reports six nits on Billy, none on Mabel or herself, 395 minutes spent thinking about Mark, loss, death, dating disasters, child-rearing, and the previous year, and no sleep. The screenplay meeting with Greenlight Productions is approaching, but she has prepared nothing for it. Her account makes the present feel crowded by unfinished work, practical crises, bereavement, and the wait for a message.

The Year’s Accounting

The final dated ledger is Tuesday 31 December 2013. Its totals preserve the diary’s mixture of comedy and cost: Bridget has lost 17 pounds and gained 18; gained 797 Twitter followers, lost 793, and gained 794; gained one job and lost one; sent 24,383 texts and received 24,284. The screenplay figures are similarly unsettled: 18,000 words written, 17,984 rewritten, and 16,822 written and then put back as they were at the start. The list also counts five people infested with nits and 152 nits extracted, four house fires, two existing children kept intact, and a running total of four children after children have repeatedly been lost and found.

This ledger does not present the year as a clean sequence of improvements. Its gains and reversals sit side by side, and the exact counts turn instability into the diary’s closing form of self-accounting. The final outcome supplies a more settled personal fact: Bridget and Mr Wallaker, whom she sometimes calls Scott, do not marry because neither wants to marry again. Instead, they use the fact that neither has christened their children as a reason to gather at the large country house for a coming-together party. The year thus ends not with a wedding but with a chosen family occasion, framed as a precaution in case the Christian God proves to be the true God, despite both adults being slightly Buddhist.