Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy: Film’s secret is the love for those around you in life - Christa Ackroyd

So why as those around me laughed and cried was I enveloped not in a warm fuzzy nostalgia but left feeling ever so slightly disappointed as the film progressed?

Yes the old Bridget was there as she navigated her new life as a forty something widow struggling to raise her two children.

The untidy house, the big knickers versus the sexy underwear for a first date, the pyjamas being worn on the disorganised school run, the crazy jumping on the bed with her two adorable children and that final love scene in the snow .. all ‘ easter eggs’ as it’s known in the business, or at least a nod to the Bridget of old. But something didn’t sit right with me.

It was in part hilariously funny. It was also movingly sad when she picked up her diary and began to write for the first time in four years having left every page blank since the death of her husband, the dashing Mark Darcy.

Tissues were definitely needed for that one. But there was much that didn’t sit right with me and much that I missed from the life of Bridget as we knew and loved her.

Gone was the attic flat that would be lovers climbed the stairs to visit. Gone was even the slightly chubby but oh so realistic Bridget that needed excruciatingly uncomfortable under garments that even then did not prevent her from spilling out of whatever killer frock she had chosen to wear to find her man.

Here was a Bridget not looking for love.

A widow who accepted she had found the love of her life and lost him. And yet love is what she found firstly with the impossibly handsome Rockster some 20 or so years her junior.

And then with the whistle blowing safe but ever so slightly dull school teacher Mr Wallaker with whom she is madly in love within the space of a few short weeks.

It all seemed so improbable that after four years of mourning she should find herself stuck up ‘the magical man tree’ to discover that she is not only worth loving but could turn from cardigan-wearing dishevelled grieving widow into one hot woman who was irresistible to men.

It all seemed a little rom com and rather cliched. And then the lights came up. And I got it in one.

Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy is not a celebration of middle aged woman finds love but a celebration of finding your tribe, of the gift of friendship, of knowing who will be there for you in good times and in bad and knowing that whatever happens there are those who will always have your back.

We arrived at the cinema fashionably late. Three women, different ages, different marital statuses and different outlooks on life who had chosen to spend Sunday afternoon together seeing the ultimate chick flick.

As we crept to our seats (don’t worry the film hadn’t started) we could not see those already seated until the lights came up at the end.

Mostly our packed cinema was crowded with rows and rows of women. Some had come out en masse and taken up the entire row. Others were seated beside one friend. But as far as I could see not one of them had come alone.

Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy is not just an improbable love story about a middle aged woman who never planned to love again and did twice. It is about those who would always be beside her. And we knew always would be.

It was like the best reunion of friends. All of them older, none of them particularly wiser who laughed and cried with her when she needed them the most. Some urged her to get back on the dating scene.

‘Mummy what’s Tinder’ asked Bridget’s cute daughter as she was registered against her will by one well meaning buddy. Others told her to get back to work and find herself, which she did. Big time.

There was far less drinking of white wine and absolutely no blue soup in sight just burnt pasta and the need for a nanny to sort out the chaos of soured milk in the fridge and the sports kit for the morning.

But the same friends who had been there these last 25 years were there for her now. Even Hugh Grant’s deliciously disgraceful Daniel Cleaver showed vulnerability while still chasing whoever would allow him to chase. But he was part of her life in a new and far more important way, as a friend.

Still outrageously flirty which Bridget now smiled ruefully at rather than reciprocating, he came to baby sit, teach her son how to play cards and promised to style her daughter’s hair with a fork. But he was there. And part of the reason she could carry on.

This film has been released as the last in the series of the hugely successful franchise that has become part of our lives, particularly the lives of women.

It has shown us that you do not have to be perfect to be of value. It has shown us you do not have to dress up to the nines to feel good about yourself.

That self doubt is normal and confidence is not everyone’s crutch. And that yes sometimes it is okay to stay in your pyjamas all day if you need to spend just a little time wallowing before you set about bouncing back.

But it also taught me I am not prepared to let Bridget go. That this should not be her last chapter. It is so rare to have an ultimately flawed heroine as our role model.

It is so rare to see films that touch a nerve for a whole generation of womanhood who have been told on the one hand you have to be successful at work, in the home and yes in the bedroom to meet impossible expectations including those we put upon ourselves.

And to see her age gracefully or disgracefully in real time, as we have done, reminds me there is so much of her story left to tell. And I do want more. If it’s the fairytale ending so be it.

But I want to see her travel through her 50s, 60s and beyond with the same angst, because I want to see how she overcomes it, Bridget style. And I want to know that with friends she can and she will.

Even René Zellweger says she is not prepared to give up on Bridget yet. She has implored the genius that is Yorkshire author Helen Fielding to keep on bringing her to life because we know there is more of her life to see.

And that is the genius of the film. It is not what we face but how we face it. And as the cinema audience filed out last week, more importantly who we have to face it with.