In which I'm free

Printed 03/02/11.

You know you're getting  to A Certain Age* when you stop 'going shopping' and just start 'going to Debenhams'. When the terrifying urban jungle that is the high street starts overwhelming you, when you've done one this-way-that-way pavement dance too many with pedestrians as you charge from shop to shop, when you need the reassurance of knowing there's a cafe where you can have a nice cup of tea and a sit down just an escalator ride away. That's when the department store comes beckoning from the shadows.

"Come to me!" it whispers in your ear like a slightly seedy Auntie, as you lie supine on the floor of the River Island changing room with a taffeta playlist stuck halfway over your head. "I have everything you need. Don't waste your precious energy gadding about like a fool - within my doors you can buy a pillowcase, some pants and a teacake in 20 minutes."

Until now, I'd never fully understood the appeal of the department store. Much in the same way that those massive buffet restaurants who serve every cuisine are basically always delivering quantity at the expense of quality ("Lasagne and pad thai on the same plate, mmmm a taste sensation"), I'd assumed department stores always just covered every base, weakly, instead of selling one thing really damned well.


Guarded by their army of terrifying make-up ladies (original skin tone unknown) department stores felt to me as a teenager like somewhere you would always leave having purchased a towelling dressing gown, no matter what you originally went in to buy.

But no longer. Now, I get it. The Are You Being Served fantasy suddenly makes sense to me. Department Stores are like tiny, complete little worlds. Their appeal lies in the idea that if you got locked in for the night, everything would be perfectly fine! You'd eat all the toasted teacakes in the cafe, sleep in the beds, and spend the rest of the time trying on beachwear in a hilarious filmic montage. When those people got stranded in the snow last year and were invited to spend the night in a nearby John Lewis, my Mum rang me up in the throws of absolute jealousy and wonderment - and it was then I realised the truth. We would all, really, just like to live in a department store.

Which one, though? In Worthing you basically have Debenhams or Beales, with the slightly depressing lesser option of BHS if needed. Debenhams is the shinier of the two, more in touch with the outside world, but Beales has a homespun charm that can't be matched.

In London, meanwhile, the department store provides a invaluable port in the Oxford Street storm. There's Debenhams and John Lewis for sales shopping that starts on cocktail dresses and will always inevitably end up at control pants, House of Fraser for pretending to be a young urbanite who goes to drinks functions (instead of a young luddite who goes to Nandos for a treat) and then, the Grandaddy of them all - Selfridges.

For years, I was as intimidated by Selfridges as everyone else. It's posh! It has Fendi handbags! It has people who can afford to buy Fendi handbags! Am I even allowed in here wearing jeans? But then I uncovered its secret. The great equaliser.

Here it is: it has a Topshop. And I can afford Topshop! It's right at the back and you have to walk through a load of mortgage-defying stationery to get to it, but it has one, and thus, I have as much right to shop in Selfridges as every Arab Sheikh and his wife. "Don't mind me," I silently say, as I trot past the Cartier and through the millionaire's bedding section. "I am just a simple gal, on my way to Topshop."

"But if we happen to get stranded here for the night, don't think I'm not going to town on the Chanel."


*For many people, that Certain Age is somewhere in the midst of mortgage repayments, parents' evenings and menopause. In my head, however, it's about 26.

In which the buff boys had better beware

To be printed 27/01/11.

We're at the end of what was really a very newsy week. Just as the papers were cracking their knuckles and sitting down for a session of prime punning on their 'Johnson-out-balls-in'-style headlines, the world decided to throw a  bit more (decidedly less punnable) news at them. Then a bit more. Then a bit more, then some more after that.

But amid all the resignations and stepping downs and bowing outs, there was one demise that I'm afraid will go sadly unnoticed. Except by a clutch of under-informed thirteen year old girls looking for torso pictures of One Direction to put in their lockers. Yes, Sugar magazine is going to that great wastepaper basket* in the sky.

A large proportion of you won't appreciate what a sad loss that is. Because, obviously, nobody reads magazines anymore! Do they? Not the yoof, anyway, who we all know get all their information from weekly podcasts transmitted directly into their brains from speakers in the Topshop changing rooms, at a frequency only the under-18s can hear. But for any female alive before 1992, or any male who has ever had  a young female ask him anything about female functioning that they really rather wouldn't answer, the loss of teen mags is a cause for lamentation.
 
Coming from a family of averagely strict principals (yes to the hair dye, no to the Faliraki holiday), I graduated through  a well-worn chronology of girls' mags. I started on Girl Talk, but wasn't allowed Shout! because it talked about training bras. Then I moved onto Shout! but wasn't allowed Mizz, because it talked about periods. Then I was allowed Mizz, but wasn't allowed Sugar because it talked about kissing boys. By the time I was allowed Sugar, I had realised that far juicier titbits could be got out of my Mum's Woman's Weekly, albeit with a side portion of menopause and hair thinning.

There was one gloriously libertine phase where a dog-eared copy of More found its way into the waiting room magazine pile at my dancing school, leading us all to race to ballet early for a sacred ten minutes poring, goggle-eyed, over the pages. I still consider More a bit too racy for me now if I'm honest. There's no pets corner, for one.

But the joy of girls' magazines wasn't just down to their information, it was also about the participation. I spent a significant portion of my tweens staging humiliating accidents in front of boys (in girl-mag-speak, "lush lads", "gorge guys" or "fit fellas", always alliterative) outside McDonald's, just so I could sell the story to the Cringe page for a £10 Tammy voucher. Aside from flavoured lipgloss, embarrassment was essentially the currency of these publications. If your parents weren't humiliating you, it was your teachers. Or your friends. Or your little sister, who just happens to have a snot attack over new hoodie as a buff boy walks past outside Morrisons.

Then, of course, there was the crowning glory of the girls' mag - the problem page. This was where we learned to outwardly say "eww, what a freak," while inwardly going "phew, glad that's normal." Where practising snogging on the back of your hand was a sane, sensible thing to do. Where the answer to everything, every single thing, was "just be yourself! And maybe phone this helpline." Aunt Sally in the Sunday Times has definitely got the wrong idea.

But the saddest thing of all about Sugar folding? I'll never work there now. And I had a whole folder of Cringe stories saved up, just in case.

*Recycling box, I mean. Sorry, sorry.

In which 2011 is the year of a thousand stars

To be printed 20/01/2011.

"Just got wished a happy new year by Billy Mitchell. 2011 will be the year of my induction into celebrity circles."

I tweeted this at 1am on New Year's Day. Clearly I had my priorities right - after singing an interpretation of auld lang sine composed entirely of the words "schmurrh durr, der dur," and avoiding the advances of the Octogenerian who claims to want a new years' cheek peck but WILL go for the lips at the last minute (I like to call him Old Man Syne), everyone knows that new year is for bettering oneself. And as everyone also knows, thanks to our culture's relentless veneration of flash in the pan notoriety, the best way to better oneself is to make friends with famous people! Hoorah!

I haven't just started, of course - encountering underwhelming celebrities has been a hobby of mine for years, but it's only now I'm going pro. It helps to be living in an area of London almost entirely populated with ageing soapstars. Minty in the corner shop, Michelle Collins in Caffe Nero, Craig Charles helping a drunk lady onto the bus. It's like C-list safari. With Billy, or Perry as I will call him once we're invited to pie and Pictionary parties at his house, we're aiming to slide gradually into a warm but casual friendship based on doing the same pub quiz and breathing the same oxygen for a significant part of the day.

It isn't borne out of a tragic urge to climb the social ladder, you understand (it might be but we'll pretend it's not). Conversely, I actually have a theory that lame celebrity encounters, administered regularly, can be good for the self esteem. It makes us feel better to know that just because someone is on Eastenders, or DIY SOS, or was once the body double for the man in The Brittas Empire, it doesn't mean they don't go to the shop and buy their own Twiglets. When you've seen Tracey Thorn from Everything but the Girl dribble a bit of beer down her chin, you get an overwhelming sense that somehow it's OK To Be You.


But I'm not just sending you off into the world, yelling "Go forth! Rub shoulders, and anything else you want to, with the famous!" Oh no. A self-bettering activity like this needs some structure, and a healthy element of competition to keep it interesting. And so, I proudly unveil the Lame to Fame points system:

2 points -

Anyone you have queued, or paid substantial amounts of money, to meet.
Anyone you have camped out behind railings to scream at for three fleeting seconds.
Anyone so famous that it won't just be your anecdote, but a large-scale anecdote covering an extensive group of people. Like if you ever witnessed Prince Charles ride a bike into the Thames, or something.
Boris Johnson*.

5 points -

Anyone famous who has a conversation longer than 30 seconds with you.
Anyone who has been in both The Bill AND one of our three major soaps (Eastenders, Corrie, Emmerdale).
Anyone famous internationally.
A member of Girls Aloud.

10 points -

Anyone who gets you excited enough to do a little squeal, but whom nobody you're with has ever heard of.
Anyone you recognise purely by voice, or isolated body part.
Any celebrity in a situation that would be considered embarrassing to a normal human. Bonus points if you actually help the celeb, like picking food off their face or pointing out the loo roll trailing from their shoe.

*Everyone has seen Boris Johnson.

In which we enter the age of austerity

I've always had an issue with people hating January. It may be a month entirely given over to grey skies, DFS adverts and images of lycra-clad celebrities next to cut-outs of their flabbier selves, exhaling, but it is also my birthday month, and as such I won't hear a word against it. So while you're supping on your cabbage soup and signing your first-born over to David Lloyd, you can always remember that somewhere, I'm sticking my face in a cake while other people clap. Isn't that a comfort?

And besides my personal felicitations (I can see why this might not be good news enough to redeem the entire month - after all, finding me the perfect present is a chore akin to fighting fat with Kerry Katona), there are plenty of other reasons to love January. Rather than see it as the drill master of months, demanding you better yourself with the help of screechy whistle, you should look at it as a kind of half-hearted warm-up for the year ahead.

Nothing in January has to be done with any real gumption, because anything a bit substandard can be shrugged off with a simple "meh, it's January". January is a dress rehearsal month, where you almost intentionally fail at things, knowing that nobody expected much anyway. And like dress rehearsals, if you actually do the thing brilliantly then it's bad, because the real event will then inevitably be a letdown. The real event in this case being February, and the letdown being pancakes that won't flip, a lenten vow that lasts 40 minutes and a Valentine's Day spent alone in a slanket eating a SaraLee gateau.

Take your lead from the world of fashion magazines (always a trusted source for a real grasp on reality). The September issue of Vogue is always a weighty tome, because that is the true New Year. September is about whipping yourself back into shape, evolving a new look and buying a new pencil case from WH Smith. It always has been. Meanwhile, January's Vogue is always a pitiful slip of a thing, barely enough to wedge a draft out from the bottom of the door. This month's issue has Victoria Beckham on the cover, and even she's wearing a Granny jumper. The jig is up. January operates at half-mast. It's on dial-up, not broadband. Relax, your gluts are never going to look any different.

I only wish that more people could be enlightened on this viewpoint. Because while my new year's resolutions reflect the real pace of the month - "take rubbish out", "tweeze eyebrows sometime before April", etc - everyone else in my life seems to be psyching up for the self-renovation of the century.
New Boyfriend has declared an Age of Austerity and compiled a spreadsheet of all his monthly outgoings (£120 on beer, £8 on Weetabix). 

My mate Pete, formerly the man for whom a hamper of Sainsbury's Basics noodles was a decadent Christmas present, is potentially buying a third of a flat. Just as I've vowed to party more and care less, all of my nearest and dearest are climbing mountains then going to bed at 11 with a copy National Geographic. It's wrong.

And what's more, it's no fun. For me. So with just two weeks to go until my birthday, I'm selflessly devoting my month to helping those less fortunate than myself… to give up and wait till February. Cake for everybody!

In which I am retching even as I write

To be printed 06/01/10.

It's been a weird weekend. Of course, the Christmas period is always a time of general topsy-turviness, what with everybody eating Lindor for breakfast, buying half-price bikinis and having no idea what day it is, but that last weekend was a proper mind-confuddler. Given that New Year's Day always feels like a Sunday, and Bank Holidays always feel like a Sunday, and then there was an actual Sunday sandwiched in the middle that didn't feel as much like a Sunday as the fake Sundays either side.

But my confusing Christmas started two weeks earlier, when I got home and discovered that in my absence, my family have started wearing slippers.

As an adult child moving out of home, there are many things you worry about. You worry that they'll forget your name or give your bedroom to the guinea pigs. You worry that they'll suddenly develop a taste for DFS pleather sofas and start buying ornaments from QVC. You worry that they'll decide Worthing is too cosmopolitan and exciting for them, and move to Bognor. But you never think you'll have to worry about them suddenly taking up a habit as dangerous and perverse as slipper-wearing.

We have never been a slipper family. I'd like to think it's because the Bravos are free spirits, trekking bravely through life on the bare (or sock-clad) feet that God gave them. But more likely it's because we're lazy, and because taking one pair of shoes off, only to put another, slightly softer, pair of shoes on, feels like quite an effort compared to just taking them off and being done with it.

But if I'm honest it's more than just laziness. I genuinely don't get the point of slippers. Maybe it's something that I'll start to understand with age, like slips or valance sheets. If your feet are cold, you want to warm them - this I understand. But surely, that's what big socks are for. Big socks are great, I am a cheerleader for big socks. They offer insulation for your tootsies without losing the feeling of freedom you get from being shoeless. In fact, on the right kind of flooring socks give you MORE freedom. Remember Risky Business? I think you see my point.

Why you'd want to surrender to another shoe instead of the freeing sock is beyond me. Ladies - imagine you come home at night and take your bra off (sheer, comfortable, free-hanging bliss), only to immediately put on something basically the same as a bra, but with a different name and a fleecy lining. You're just cheating yourself.

Plus, there's just something so poncey about slippers. Those proper, towelling mule ones. They produce the same stomach-clenching reflex in me as flip-flops. They instantly render even the most dignified and impressive of persons a powerless, shuffling twerp.

It doesn't mean I love my family any less, of course. But somehow I feel it's driven a wall between us. I'm finding it harder to look at them and see myself reflected back. And in the spirit of family loyalty, I'd like it to be heard: when I find out who has done this to them, there will be hell to pay.

In which it never happened anyway

Printed 23/12/10.

I'm writing this on Saturday, so I have a five-day buffer zone from which to wonder what I'm about to wonder without having to believe it might actually come true. What if I get stranded in London for Christmas?

When Bing Crosby sang about a White Christmas, I don't think he ever took the issue into consideration. Why would he, he had all the natty jumpers and roaring fires and fur-trimmed ladies that he needed right there at the Holiday Inn*. His days would be merry and bright (partly because he was in a film studio).

But for where I'm sitting now - in the window of Muswell Hill Caffe Nero with a hot chocolate the size of my head - it's looking like a distinct possibility. The snow has reached the mid-level milestone of on my gauge of Bad Snowness: when you can no longer see where the pavement ends and the road begins, basically you're in trouble. And the country's rail services being as wussy as they are (I always like to picture Southern as a wheebly girl who doesn't want to get her hair wet), I'm already anticipating an Arctic hell mission to get back to Worthing on the 23rd.

You always assume that in these situations, everything will miraculously work out ok. Your Dad will somehow commandeer a husky-drawn sleigh to zip you down the A24. You'll hitch a lift in a van with a polka band, like in Home Alone. You don't let yourself entertain the idea that you might have to spend Christmas with an M&S stuffing sandwich playing Guess Who against yourself**.

I'm one of the lucky ones, though, as by finishing work on the 23rd I have a whole 30 hours in which to hike, bike and possibly kayak back to my parents' house. But for my friends who are working on Christmas Eve, with every snowflake that falls they edge closer to the possibility of a lonely yule. So they're forming pre-emptive survival plans in case the worst happens, where all the snow victims gather to pool their food stocks and residual body heat, play charades and wrap up things they've found in the flat for each other as poignant makeshift presents.

"My own toilet brush! Used! Aw Billy, you shouldn't have. Pass the turkey twizzlers." Then when the snow finally thaws, they will find that their hearts have melted a little too, and realise that wherever there is love, you can create your own Christmas. 

So I'm praying that the snow will hold off long enough for not just me, but everyone to make it safely home. Partly in the spirit of goodwill to all mankind, and partly because I just know that if they have the DIY lonely London Christmas without me, I'm going to be properly jealous.



*Incidentally, I always picture the Holiday Inn like a lovely version of a Premier Inn, with more seasonal charm and less Lenny Henry. Instead of the little tray of tea bags and biscuits, there might be mulled wine and a tiny gingerbread house. And shampoo actually worth pocketing when you leave. It is also worth saying, I have never watched Holiday Inn.

** Actually I play a mean game of solo charades. So long and elaborate are my mimes that by the end, I've forgotten what the original answer was.

In which An Evening at Alfie's glamorised the truth

To be printed 16/12/10.

I've just had my first grown-up domestic disaster. It's amazing, really, after four years of living in properties that can only be described as "squat chic" (all the rodent problems and peeling paint one could ever want, but for £500 a month instead of free), that I haven't had one before. All my pipes have remained miraculously unburst, all my precariously-creviced ceilings intact. I've never been able to call my office with the sound of gushing water and explosions in the background, to say I can't come in because my house might disintegrate. Not once.

Until Saturday, when we get up to find the boiler has leaked a puddle all over the kitchen floor. It takes me by surprise, not least because I've never really thought of boilers as being full of water before. In my head, boilers have always been full of gas. Great, swollen, noxious boxes just waiting to give us all carbon monoxide poisoning like Rita in Coronation Street. But no, it turns out mine has decided to furnish us with a DIY pool instead, the generous thing.

The trouble is that when you have no experience of your own domestic disasters, all your ideas of how to deal with them are based on things you've seen in films. And in films, most likely, I would end up riding a tidal wave through a window, screaming, “TELL BILLY JOE I ALWAYS LOVED HIM”, before a mutant crawls out of the plughole and tries for world domination.

 So I flap. "Find a knob!" I shriek, "there must be a knob! Look for one with 'Water Be-Gone' embossed on it."  Boyfriend, meanwhile, is relishing the opportunity to prove his handyman credentials. He locates the knob, and triumphantly turns it. The wrong way.

So then the leak becomes a gushing waterfall, the puddle becomes a lake and the flap becomes a full-blown flail. We start a comedy receptacle-swapping routine with the fruit bowl and the top bit of the food processor, chanting, "one, two, three, GO" as we slosh the river across the kitchen into the sink. It feel a bit like a challenge from the Crystal Maze, but without the natty jumpsuits, prize money, or fun. Still, I'm quite pleased with our conveyor belt system - it's great teamwork, not to mention the most action the food processor has seen in ages.

But it soon transpires that we can't keep it up indefinitely. Our arms are tired, for one, and water is probably starting to seep through the ceiling into the flat below. So I phone the landlord while Boyfriend attempts to redeem himself with another go at the knob. This time the water stops.

Several hours, many towels and a visit from some plumbers (“Never fiddle with the boiler,” they tut. “You might get a shock.” “Well QUITE,” says I), the kitchen is habitable again, and we’re fairly smug at our flat-saving, knob-turning achievements.

“You do realise,” says my flatmate when she gets home and we’ve re-enacted the whole receptacle-swapping performance for her, “that there’s a massive bucket right there in the corner?”

In which we're not sure if they do know it's Christmas, actually

Printed 09/12/10.

The Most Underrated Christmas Songs Ever

The Waitresses, Christmas Wrapping

Everyone loves a song that tells a story. Two Little Boys. Copa Cobana. We feel a far closer affinity with a song when we properly listen to the lyrics for the first time and realise, oh my days, Tony gets shot! Patti Smith's Redondo Beach is about a girl drowning, but it has such a jaunty tune that you might just never realise.

So Christmas Wrapping, while also earning points for 80s new wave, winkle picker-wearing credibility, is wonderful because of its stirring narrative. The ups! The downs! It's been a hectic year… she missed lots of dates through various arbitrary mishaps…she's spending Christmas by herself… she's even got a tiny turkey. But then a last-minute trip to the grocery store leaves her face-to-face with the object of her desire, and you get to chorus in with the killer line, "You mean you forgot cranberries too?!" It's understated magic.

East 17, Stay Another Day

This is my earliest Top of the Pops memory ever. Brian and the boys swathed in white furry jackets, snow falling on their bristly little heads. Despite no mention of Santa, elves or drunk Grannies, Stay Another Day is a crucial Christmas track because it's perfect slow-dance fodder. It is ripe for school discos, office parties and particularly dismal pub lock-ins. It's the one time of the year where even gristly tough guys who will later run themselves over with their own cars, can open up and cry a little. And that is very, very special.

The Ramones, Merry Christmas (I don't wanna fight tonight)

If ever there was an antidote to a bejumpered Cliff Richard, it's a beleathered Ramone. Merry Christmas (I don't wanna fight tonight) is a yuletide anthem for people who would rather watch Eastenders than the Vicar of Dibley. And like all yuletide anthems, it includes a meaningful message, but this one doesn't stretch itself too far. It's not peace on earth, for everyone, for ever, but merely peace in our living room, for tonight. It sets us a goal that we can all strive for. And as Bob Geldof knows, start small and sometime you can create something big.

It also has a pretty kickin' beat.

 

The Pretenders, 2000 Miles

This song suffers in two ways – firstly by being very easily confused with The Proclaimers' 1000 Miles, which, let's face it, is not only a more rousing song but also only demands a journey of half the length (and these things matter to everyone forced to take a bracing post-dinner walk on Christmas day).

And secondly, by not really sounding much like a Christmas song at all, except for featuring the word Christmas sporadically in the lyrics. Which makes it the perfect track for Scrooges, slipping a little festive cheer into their ears without them realising. You might want to try the same with their drinks.

Slade, Merry Xmas Everybody

Only joking.

In which Oscar Wilde must have had his reasons

To be printed.

It's always interesting to see your hometown through the eyes of a tourist. It's particularly interesting when the tourist in question is your New Boyfriend, on a giddy whirlwind trip that involves meeting your parents, Grandma, schoolfriends and Teville Gate in one day.

There are numerous telltale signs of potential lunacy that people look for when they start dating someone – hidden Michael Buble albums, teddy bears, hairs on the palms of their hands. But when the suggestion "let's go to Brighton for the day" is met with the response "no, I'd rather see Worthing" from your new beau, you might feel you have legitimate cause to worry.

I could have talked him out of it. I could have pointed out that while a day trip to Brighton would provide an actual day's worth of things to do - buying hemp, eating goat's cheese, getting spontaneous piercings - a day trip to Worthing would have been over in the time it would take me to say, "um, there's the pier." I could have explained that visiting a seaside town in the bleak midwinter tends to infuse one with a lingering melancholy for weeks to come, as though one's soul has been given a good once-over with a cold, wet flannel.

But I didn't. Being the patriotic bundle of Sussex pride that I am, I said, "yes! Let's do it! It's been MONTHS since I spent an afternoon doing battle with a 2p machine." So off we trundled to Worthing, on the 9.17 from Victoria, burdened with one hangover, one caffeine headache, one Cornish pasty and one weighty copy of the Observer. Mistake number one, naturally, was not remembering that an eye-wateringly early start wouldn't mean All the More Time for Grade-A Fun, but actually just that nothing would be open yet.

"There's the law courts," I said, before running through a brief history of the town's more newsworthy trials of late. He took a photo. "There's some council buildings," I said. He took a photo. "Here's Worthing library, where I briefly worked before finding the pressures of town-centre book borrowing too much and moving to the altogether less 'urban' Goring branch," I said. Photo. "We still have a Wimpy." Photo.

And while I tried my best to do justice to Worthing's lovely art deco architecture, our literary history, budding artistic community and slightly bigger than average H&M, it was always the less remarkable elements of the town that NB was drawn to. Places I hadn't been since I was 12, having been too busy standing on the A259 with a sign saying "anywhere with a Pret." Because in the same way Parisians never go up the Eiffel tower, the charm of the English seaside town, with its tearooms and slot machines and non-ironic visits from Canon and Ball, is often lost on us residents.

Sometimes you just need an outsider to come along and say "hey, the Guildbourne Centre looks interesting - let's go in there."

In which he liked it, so he put a ring on it

Printed 25/11/10.

The trouble with writing columns a few days in advance is that I'm basically the last journalist to say "Royal Wedding, rah rah rah." But here goes anyway. Ahem. Royal wedding! Rah rah rah! The love, the smiles, the laughter, the beautiful, shiny hair. And the TELLY. Sometimes we need events like this to remind us of two things 1) we are capable, as a nation, of producing spectacularly bad telly. And 2) we are even more capable of watching it.

So now we can look forward to nine months of the sort of programming that makes T4 Movie Specials look insightful and well-informed. Programmes that take one basic, three-second fact and eek it out into an hour of televisual fluff* by inviting people who may have been in the same room as the happy couple, once, to speculate on what they may, or may not, be thinking or planning.

"Having been seen on numerous occasions wearing dresses, the bride may well choose to sport one for the big day," Jenni Bond will ponder. "The couple enjoy food, as proved by this one blurry photo of them eating chips in a St Andrews bus shelter," TV chef James Martin will say. "Maybe there will be chips at the wedding breakfast!" Maybe.

My favourite news nugget so far has been that the stag do, to be arranged in ominous fashion by Prince Harry, will be held "in either Gloucestershire or Botswana." I imagine this was in a similar style to my 16th birthday party, which was going to be held in either Worthing, or Kuala Lumpur. In the end it was held in Worthing.

But it seems to me that there's one big televisual trick everyone is missing. We don't want polite, carefully-lit interviews where they guffaw over how droll each other is. We want to see a wailing bride puffing on a fag and blowing her nose on a bit of tulle petticoat. We want to see a groom whose idea of a romantic reception is hiring three bikini-clad Vegas dancers and a blackjack table. I want to see a beautiful, catastrophic collision between the royal wedding and BBC Three's Don't Tell The Bride.

For the uninitiated among you, this is the genius concept: a couple love each other very very much and want to be joined together in holy matrimony, but what with her fake tan budget and his new hubcaps, they can't afford it. So generous Auntie Beeb gives them £12,000 to spend on the big day – but on the condition that every single thing is picked and planned by the groom.

Each episode is always full of shots where you can practically feel the director off-camera, rubbing his hands with glee. "I don't care which colour he picks for the bridesmaid's dresses, as long as it isn't orange," says Bride. Cut to shot of groom in bridal shop saying "Hmm, orange. I reckon she'd love that, I do." You get the idea.

Is there any aspect of the royal wedding that would not be more glorious in this format? I'd even concede to them stretching the budget slightly – 15 grand, say – if it meant we could watch Katie trying on a dress three sizes too big that Wills got on sale in TK Maxx after spending half his budget on the Botswanan stag do. We could watch Camilla and Carol go head to head after financial restrictions mean that the Middletons have to watch the ceremony on a big screen outside a barn conversion.

And at the end, when the happy couple are swaying gently to Take That's Rule the World as Harry necks a bridesmaid in a hay bale, we'll all believe it's true love. "You done me proud, babe," she'll hiccup. "You done me proud."


*I like to call this phenomenon 'the X-Factor Results Show approach'.

In which a child by any other name would smell as posh

Printed 18/11/10.
 
Ok, respect to Ed Miliband for calling his baby something normal. To have resisted the urge to christen his second child Le Creuset, Agamemnon or Thor is a feat we should all applaud, I suppose. But honestly, wasn't it the outcome we all expected - Ed using his Family Man Moment to be as un-Cameronish as possible. And basically the only more Joe-Public name than Sam is Dave, understandably vetoed despite hilarity value, he's basically dished up predictable move no.1.

As a Samuel, he joins noble but unglamorous ranks. Dr Samuel Johnson, famous lexicographer. Samuel Pepys, diarist and wig-sporter. Samuel Smith, of the excellent pub chain. One of my ex-boyfriends. I could go on (just).

Plus, you have to wonder. For decades we've reproached parents for giving their children fantastical names under the assumption that the kids will stand out from their classmates, and subsequently be bullied. In my own youth, certainly, this was true. When everyone on the entire register was called Emma, Gemma, Lee and Luke, a Gerronimo or Bodicea would have been prime fodder for a hockey cupboard 'incident'. My own parents' naming decisions were doubly difficult, give that our comedy surname was already going to earn us a monthly kicking. If they'd slipped up and called one of my brothers Johnny, I believe he may have had to be home-schooled. 

But are we really in the same position now? As far as I can tell, one of the greatest human rights advancements of the 21st century has been that we can now title our offspring with reference to the Geldof Dictionary of Modern Ridiculousness, and nobody is allowed to judge. Nowadays people name their kids the way they used to paint their own mugs, as an expression of how creative and interesting they are. Of course, over time mugs will become chipped and tea-stained and eventually be replaced, whereas children will grow up and sue you - but that's by the by.

What's more, while a sturdy, salt-of-the-earth name might serve you well in a sturdy, salt-of-the-earth town, let's remember that baby Miliband is going to grow up in North London. Which is more flimsy, salt-of-the-Waitrose-premium-range. As a resident for the last four years, I'll tell you now - you can't do a morning Starbucks run without falling over a million infants called Tarquin, Simba or Chive. So I can't help but worry that actually, little baby Samuel risks standing out among his friends and being bullied on merit of having a name that doesn't sound like a crockery design in The Conran Shop.

It doesn't have enough vintage panache to count as one of the Victoriana crew - the Arthurs and Ediths and Winstons and what-have-you - but nor is it enigmatically 'foreign', or one of those names invented by jamming together bits of other names – Jashella or Kennethiqua or something. He might try to seek refuge amid the Biblical kids, but frankly, a Samuel is never going to be able to hold his own against a load of Silases and Tituses and Delilahs.

So I wish you well, baby Miliband. May your everyman moniker simultaneously anchor you to the ground and propel you to the stars. But if you want to change your name to Schubert Soya IV, it's ok. We understand.

In which nobody dies

Printed 11/11/10.
 
The trouble with being a meed-yah professional is that nothing you do will ever sound that serious. Or at least, it won't for the ample percentage of us who aren't Jon Snow or Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Obviously, I hear you cry, writing for the Herald is about as serious a job as they come - but in my day job at the Channel 4 Food site, I am rarely likely to be quizzing a war criminal or clamping a crucial artery.

No one will accept "I have to work late, it's all kicking off on the Come Dine With Me Facbook page" as a legitimate cancellation excuse. Likewise, "I have to go to a cake tasting," or "the background on our twitter feed needs changing and no one can decide on a colour palette." The other day I arrived at the office to hear a colleague earnestly trying to explain the term 'facepalm' to a client down the phone. It's hardly the square mile.

But the upside of being whipped cream on the vocational landscape is that we can accurately and enjoyably use the mantra: no one will die." If these recipes don't get uploaded, no one will die*. If we misspell pestle and mortar, no one will die. If Jamie Oliver's face gets smooshed up by some erroneous photoshopping, no one will die.


Meanwhile my doctor friends, lawyer friends, even to a lesser extent depending on the level of knife crime or tricksy gymnastic equipment in their schools, teacher friends, can't really say that with confidence. I hadn't realised it until now, but 'would prefer to have icing sugar, not blood, on hands' may just have been my top job-seeking criteria.

Being a year out of uni, my pals and I are at a notable stage of what-have-you-done?ness. In order to earn top kudos at the one-year mark, you have to either: have travelled somewhere exotic to do something worthy (supported by multiple pictures of you hugging orphans), got an important job (or at least one that can be suitably dressed to sound important when confronted with the worthy traveller), or become significantly more attractive than you were when you graduated.

Lower points are awarded for moving home to save money (sensible but depressing) or contracting an exciting illness (worthy travellers often score an unfair double on this count). Harshly, post graduate studying endeavours don't really count, as those people have prolonged their time in the cosy bosom of education and must wait to be judged on their eventual transferral to the Real World - by which point, the theory is, they'll have got some colour back in their cheeks and learned not to bring Sainsbury's Basics table wine to dinner parties.

So while my meed-yah endeavours might not garner medals or get me a spread in an alumni magazine, I can take comfort in two things: someone might eat some marvellous cake one day because of me, and if not, at least no one will die.


*This is temporarily ignoring the recent mishap in a Swedish magazine where 'grams' was omitted from an ingredients listing, meaning the recipe contained a potentially fatal dosage of nutmeg.

In which I say thank you for the music

To be printed 04/11/10.

Karaoke. In these times of puyrotechnic, lycra-clad X-Factor domination, in a land where Kate Weasel's roots are the only ones we're going back to, there is something so pure and uncorrupted about a good old sing song. No judgement, no public vote, just the chance to bawl your brains out in a padded room until everything seems better again. But just like boybands, not all karaoke tracks are created equal. Here's what your karaoke choice says about you:

Gangsta's Paradise

Falling into the 'soulful rap' category (as opposed to 'sexy rap', 'booty-shaking rap' and 'shooting everybody then getting a hot tub rap'), men feel that a song like Gangsta's Paradise gives them a chance to showcase both their badass urban credentials and their softer, sensitive side - the side that might teach kids to read good in an inner city comprehensive. In reality, it showcases the alarming number of adolescent hours spent in their bedrooms memorising lyrics they don't understand, and fawning over pictures of Michelle Pfeiffer.

All By Myself

See also: I Will Always Love You, I Will Survive, I Can't Live (If Living Is Without You)

For the vast majority of their day to day lives, many women are forced to hide a part of their true selves. We fight an ongoing battle to suppress certain urges, for fear of judgement, ridicule and repelling menfolk. As a feminist and general disciple of Good Taste, I'd like to pretend I don't even possess them. But play the opening twangs of Eric Carmen's sobalong classic and, like a melancholy moth to a vodka-fuelled flame, we rise up like a tribe of pyjamaed Bridget Jonesbots, ready to wail our way through three minutes of musical spinsterhood. I like to think of it as queen of the Ovary Anthems.

My Way

Frank Sinatra is karaoke ketchup. He blankets all matters of taste with the same sweet, generic charm. One for the rookies, more experiences 'okers should forgo Frank in favour of something less obvious. Like side one of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. With dance routine.

Islands in the Stream

Country and western is a left-field choice, often plumped for by people wanting to deliver a little obligatory naff factor without resorting to a power fist. The trouble is, without a mullet or bucking bronchi to complete the scene, C&W karaoke is in most cases exceptionally boring. Roger Miller's King of the Road is the hip kids' croon du jour, but Islands in the Stream earns more points - though only when sung as Nessa and Uncle Bryn from Gavin and Stacey. Sorry Dolly.

Born to Run

See: All By Myself. But replace 'Ovary Anthems' with the appropriate alternate reproductive organs.

Wuthering Heights

Ladies undertaking this track will do so in the name of lolz, under the guise that it'll sound so ridiculous they couldn't possibly be taking themselves seriously. Do not be fooled. They secretly believe they are going to be ethereal in the extreme, channelling Kate Bush's wide-eyed mad lady insouciance with their wafty arm movements and dog-decibel wailing. Sadly their efforts will be such that Heathcliffe won't let them in the window. However cold it is.

In which I fly, my pretties, fly!

Printed 28/10/10.

As I write this, I am about to embark on my first ever long-haul flight. Ever. In my life.

How one gets to the ripe age of 22 without ever crossing an ocean I'm still not sure, but know it has something to do with a combination of: believing a gap year would require me to wear leather bracelets and have diarrhea on a mountain top, coming from a family that considers Pizza Express a cultural experience, and having friends doomed to spend each year planning riotous expeditions in full knowledge that we will never even attempt to go on them. Instead we will go to the pub and get
our kicks by shredding some beer mats into oblivion.

So today, I am like a wide-eyed child in a montage from a 90s movie. I'm giddy on the novelty. Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me is playing alternately on a loop in my head. I'm flashing my passport indiscriminately at everybody - the lady in WH Smith, the toilet attendant, the man who nicely asked me to take his bag through customs for him - just to make sure nobody can accuse me of pulling an international fast one. I'm already excited about telling the flight attendant that I'm "in it for the long-haul", then doing some hilarious finger-guns.

As with most of my Johnny-come-lately experiences ( mobile phones, crispy duck pancakes, season 4 of Mad Men), it's inevitably going to be a disappointment. After all, my expectations of flying are mainly based on Airplane, the first episode of Miami 7, and anytime they flew anywhere on Friends, when the plane basically looked like a fairly plush dentists' waiting room. If I’m honest, I’m half expecting a smiling stewardess to ask if I want to come and meet the pilot (and I do).

Never a minimalist packer, I am struggling with the hand luggage restrictions. Liquids I can identify, but what constitutes a ‘paste’? Do I have any pastes? Does the melted peanut butter cup moulded to the inside pocket of my handbag count as a paste? And if so, should I declare it? Or eat it? Confused will also lead me to keep my personal items in their clear plastic bag not just for the flight but for my entire holiday, just in case Canada is funny about liquids in general. Perhaps, as a nation, they are not tolerant of spillage.

I will in all likelihood be the only person who watches the safety video (as we plunge to our death above the Atlantic, I feel it would reassure me to have tied my lifejacket in the correct double bow, and be able to quickly locate my whistle. “Bleep bleep!” I would toot, and the rescue operatives would say ‘gee, there’s a passenger who paid attention to the demonstration.- let’s save her life FIRST”). I will take my in-flight leg exercises very seriously, and I will aim to use every item in my little complimentary pouch of comfort – the eye mask, the socks, the blanket, the pen.

I will also, I am pretty sure now, enjoy the plane food. I just know I will. All those individual containers will feel a bit like the kind of packed lunches I was never allowed to have. BA could essentially serve me a Dairylea Lunchables with a Pepperami on the side and I would be happy as a clam.

And if all else fails to entertain me, I know I could spend an absorbing six hours trying to work out exactly what it is that’s holding the plane up. Or, let’s face it, just nap.

In which it's just the drugs talking

Printed 21/10/10.

There is nothing worse than waiting for a cold to come out*. It's like walking around with a cartoon anvil above your head, ready to drop. As son as that scratchy warning niggle at the back of your throat announces itself, you're a ticking slime bomb - you know you only have minimal days in which to get everything done as a functioning human, before you're reduced to a clammy, tissue-strewn corpse who can only say "blargggh".

If properly planned and furnished with the right pharmaceuticals, I believe having a cold can be a positive experience. You get to catch up on your ITV2 viewing, not wear a bra for a couple of days, and uncover a whole fresh new layer of skin on your nose.  So when I felt the warning niggle a couple of days ago, I said "ahoy! What have we here? A cold on the horizon?" and set about battening down my hatches with all the stoicism of a wizened sea captain (who doesn't quite know what battening means).



I even allowed myself a specific window of time in which to be ill. I pencilled it in my mental diary and faxed it over to my white blood cells - a whole weekend in which I had nothing to do but be a snivelling invalid. I did some prep, by binge drinking Berocca for three days in advance and digging out my slipper socks. It was going to be a congestion carnival. A little paracetamol party for one. And best of all, I got to go and spend a stupid amount of money in Boots.

I can probably blame the fact that I've never taken drugs recreationally for the way I feast on pharmaceuticals every time I have an excuse. This doesn't count as recreational, of course; there is nothing leisurely about my attitude to flu treatments. It is a full time job, and I approach it like an Apprentice contestant approaches a weekly task - with minimum knowledge, maximum confidence and a little whiney voice.

And oh, there have been such advancements in the world of lurgy-treatment since my last bout! Strepsils with added vitamin C, Olbas Oil-infused tissues, supplements with guarana so that you can fight germs and go to a rave at the same time. Unfortunately Lemsip still only comes in two flavours, bile and purple bile, but you can now pay an extra quid for a super duper shiny-boxed version which I can only assume, as it claims only to treat the exact same symptoms as the regular version, gives you perfect pitch or something at the same time.

So I embarked on my Designated Weekend of Ill swimming in advantage points, gathered my blanket pile, positioned my tissue bin, made sure I was within easy reach of fluids and the remote control. And waited. And waited some more. When, by Saturday evening, I still felt pretty chipper, I started getting anxious. Either I had managed to bypass the cold altogether, or it was working on its own agenda.

Two days on, I have learned the following things – recovery speed is not directly proportional to the amount you spend on drugs, antibodies do not conform to schedules, and it is far less fun  being a clammy, tissue-strewn corpse who can only say "blargggh" in the office.


*This is a lie. There are plenty of things worse, of course - waiting for a donor organ, waiting for a delivery man to call between 9 and 5, waiting for a night bus in the rain. Waiting for Godot. But being ill gives me an inflated sense of self-importance as well as swollen glands.

In which I'm the apple of their news feed

To be printed 14/07/10.

A lesson in parental love for the 21st century: I got a text from my Dad the other day that read, "Mum noticed you hadn't been tweeting much recently, and we wondered if you were ok?"

I tell this story not to shame my parents for neglect - indeed, I think it shows extraordinary sensitivity on their part that my social networking is monitored for irregularities, rather than just waiting for me to burst into tears over the Easter dinner table and throw a positive pregnancy test/court summons down in front of the Vienetta. No, I'm mentioning it partly because it's hilarious, and partly because it's an interesting comment on our tendencies for chronic oversharing (mainly because it's hilarious.)

I know I write a lot about the internet. I do. It's not like I'm trying to be Ms Totally Facebook '10, but a column on the intricacies of online communication just seems to fall out of my head every six weeks or so as a matter of course. Like Dickens with street urchins or Jane Austen with coquettish husband-chasing, I am just writing what I know*.
 
And think about it - back in the days of the coquettish husband-chasing, if anything had been wrong with me (gout, let's say, or prolonged swooning), it would probably have taken days for the tear-stained letter to reach my parents, with all the usual threats of highwaymen, diphtheria and road obstruction by peasant folk to stand in its way. Now all that's needed is a regular log-in to check that the words "Checked myself into rehab for nail varnish remover abuse, fml :(" haven't appeared on the screen, and they can rest assured for another day that their eldest offspring is safe and well in the world.

It could be a bit miff-making, that my parents don't see my online absence and think "oh good, eldest child must be off having a fulfilling career and social life," but instead "cripes, maybe she's in a gutter somewhere." But actually, I'm flattered that my Mum considers online silence as a sign that something's wrong with me. It means that I haven't yet become an Chronic Online Oversharer (or COO for short, as in "coo, looks like Susan and Barry are totally breaking up again…").

Oversharing is probably, notwithstanding identity theft, paedophilia and Chat Roulette, the worst thing about the internet.  They're the new bane of society, COOs, to join the list beneath croc-wearers, close-talkers and people who start every sentence with "I'm not being funny, but" (as sure a sign as ever there was that no, they're not being funny).

In the olden days if you got bad news, you'd probably go and shout it off a hill, or quietly bite on a leather strap until you felt a bit better. Now the magnitude of your misery can be measured in slightly awkward comments from people you occasionally bump into in the Guildbourne Centre. Like the old adage about the tree in the forest - if you have a brutal break up or crippling case of cystitis and nobody reads about it on Facebook, do you actually suffer? The answer is yes, but you're saving us from suffering too. Just something to think about.

And while we're here, I'll take this opportunity to say - Mum, Dad? I'm fine thanks. But don't worry - if I lose a leg or anything, you'll read it here first.

*And I'll cheerfully admit that if there's a class full of teenagers in a century's time writing an essay entitled 'Compare and contrast Bravo's views on self-indulgent status updates with the following passage from More magazine, 2010', my work will be done.

In which Bros had a point.

To be printed 7/10/10.


"I want to be famous," my flatmate Rose has just announced. "Then I want to be less famous, then I want to go on Strictly Come Dancing."

It's as viable a career plan as any these days, where 'judges houses' is more or less akin to 'secretarial college' thirty years ago as a stepping stone to professional success. When I was young, we had three real options for quick and easy fame: 1. Become a Newsround Presspacker (boring, and you had to like news), 2. Go to stage school like the kids from The Biz (expensive, and involved a lot of dancing in canteens) or 3. Settle for getting your picture in the local paper, and bask in the resulting attention from your Grandmother (no comment).


Nowadays though, the tricky part of the plan isn't the fame (when all other avenues have been exhausted, we have a camera and a YouTube account) but the 'getting less famous' bit. There's an art to procuring exactly the right amount of fame. Most of you readers, being sensible, educated people who only use 'at the end of the day' to denote things happening in the evening, would never say that you wanted to be famous. It's tacky and over-obvious, like saying you like white bread better than brown, or that Cheryl's your favourite Girls Aloud.


But if pushed, you might admit that you'd like to be 'well known'. Or 'eminent'. Or 'respected in your field'*. Think of it as Good-Famous and Bad-Famous, if you like. Basically you want to be famous enough to go on Desert Island Discs, but not so famous you get doorstepped by paparazzi.


Famous enough to get to go to the gifting tent awards ceremonies, but not famous enough to have people slagging off your outfit in Heat. Famous enough that maybe, just maybe, they'll put a blue plaque up on your parents' house one day. But not so famous that you ever need to have David Guest at your wedding.


Maintaining your chosen level of fame is like trying to keep two milk pails balanced on your shoulders while dancing a frantic jig. After years of observing celebrity careers the way other people watch birds, I've come to have a special kind of respect for those personalities who manage to go years and years without becoming any more or less famous. Terry Wogan, say, or Linda Bellingham, or Uncle Ben from the rice adverts.


Should you achieve this elusive, cosy, lower rung of fame, that's when the good stuff starts rolling in. You'll get to go to book launches, and charity things in the back of Hello, maybe a little interview in a Sunday supplement from time to time. And if you're super lucky, you get to tan up and shimmy your way through three months of Bruce Forsyth gags, safe in the knowledge that even if you win, you won't really be any more famous at the end of it.


So when Rose reaches the ballroom, which no doubt she absolutely will, I plan to be the token person in the 'YAY ROSE' t-shirt who they interview about her amazing journey. Which is a different brand of fame altogether.


*The natural option for fame-hungry farmers.

In which the rhythm of life is a powerful beat

To be printed 30/09/10

I have just heard my downstairs neighbour phlegming in the shower. I'm sorry to open a column with such a choice divulgence, but if I had to experience it, you might as well too.

It was my own fault - since moving into New Flat, with its nifty four-flats-backing-onto-each-other design, I've taken to sitting with my window open, listening to the buzz of activity. I can hear people as clearly as if I were in the room with them. If I put on a headscarf and some Dean Martin and squint slightly, I feel like I'm in a downtown New York neighbourhood in the 50s - but instead of Italian Mommas screaming at their sons to stop polishing their Vespas and come in for meatballs, I get a hungover rendition of Steel Panther's Eyes of a Panther. And phlegm.

Still, it's a nice attempt at Proper Urban Living - soaking up the sounds of my surroundings rather than blocking them out, maybe being inspired to write a short piece of ghetto poetry. If I do it for long enough, people might start leaning out of their windows to talk to me. We could start a little inter-flat community, where we rig up a pulley system with baskets on string, and send each other freshly-baked flapjacks. I'd like that.

I know that traditionally, noisy neighbours are meant to be a bad thing. But for the incurably curious and otherwise-bored, they can provide entertainment and a nice feeling that you're not alone, eating Nutella from the jar in your pyjamas, but actually part of a wider domestic narrative, like an Alan Bennet play or suchlike.

It's been interesting, actually, not to be the chief noisemakers in New Flat. In Old Flat, we had the monopoly on noise - mainly on merit of being younger than the rest of the street by several decades, and of having floors so wonderfully precarious that every step was to risk showering plaster on the head of our already-depressed downstairs neighbour (he used to stand on the doorstep with a beer can and cry. We did our best to cheer him up, by putting on amusing puppet shows and tap dancing to Glen Miller on his ceiling.)

Our only noise contenders in Old Flat were the couple next door, Kerry and Darren, who we never met or even saw, but who used to have such spectacular break-ups through the wall that I considered writing them down for a radio serial. One night, we spent several hours listening to Kerry dumping Darren for the third time that month, and the next morning, his clothes were all over the pavement where she'd thrown them from an upstairs window. We had to fight the urge to pop round with some Dairy Milk and a sympathetic shoulder.

But as the silent minority in New Flat, we're feeling a need to bring more to the ghetto poetry potential. Luckily, we have a secret weapon – our angel-voiced, opera singing flatmate Rose is going to be our contribution to the aural landscape. As long as she can do Madame Butterfly in the shower to cancel out the noise of the phlegm, I might not need to shut my window just yet.

In which it suddenly IS my cup of tea

Printed 23/09/10.

I have recently started drinking tea. It's come as some relief, after years of being a wannabe tea drinker in the body of a non-tea drinker, to actually just drink the stuff. For years I've loved the paraphernalia of tea - all the pretty cups and pots and biscuit-dunking - but I just never actually had the urge to consume it.

It was partly down to a long dalliance with lactose intolerance - or at least my own special brand of lactose intolerance, where milk was outlawed but cheese and ice cream received a special medical dispensation. Meanwhile, I was turned against milkless tea years ago by those Brita water filter ads ("Wrong again, Thomas… it's MY lovely cup of tea," shudder shudder vomit etc). And anyway, I was a hardened black coffee drinker. In theory I drank black coffee because it was fuss-free and I liked the taste. In reality I drank it because, at 17, it seemed like the closest I could get to being a beatnik without resorting to hard drugs or sandals.

So where tea was concerned, I Just Said No, much to the dismay of at least half the country. Because when people are into tea, they really want to give it to you as well. It's like a kind of beverage evangelism. Imagine something bad has happened – once that initial, reflex reaction, to get hot steaming Tetleys down you by the bucketload, is thwarted, people don't know what to do. Pat you gently on the head? Hug you? Put Everybody Hurts on the stereo and quietly back out of the room? As a non-tea drinker I was tolerated, but necessarily understood.

Then, three weeks ago, as you'll know if you follow this column or ever listen to me whinging at bus stops, I moved flat. And after we'd huffed the first load of boxes in, the first thing I did was make tea, and drink it, without even noticing. Because that's what you're meant to do when you've just moved flat. You're meant to put the radio on and drink a cup of tea – I've learned that much from adverts. You're also meant to wear an oversized denim shirt and stand in an empty room looking poignant with paint on the end of your nose, so I did that too.

And, as I suspected, I have discovered that people simply like you more when you drink tea. It's true, they do. As a coffee-drinker, particularly a black coffee-drinker, I aroused suspicion and a little disdain. 'Do you think you're hard or summat?' you could see them thinking. As though I might get wired on caffeine and burn their house down.

But suddenly, as a tea drinker, I'm trusted. I'm safe. I can participate in the office tea round, which is nice, particularly as everyone thought I said no mainly just to get out of making it for anyone else. Which is only half true.

In which it is NOT a euphemism.

To be printed 16/09/10.

In the grand vocabulary of life, there are certain concepts that you have no real grasp of until you reach a certain age. "Fixed rate mortgage", "irritable bowel syndrome" and "making good time" on a car journey are among the ones I thankfully have yet to be initiated in. Ditto making people take their shoes off in your house (It's a FLOOR, what did you think people were going to be doing on it?) and dismissing desserts as "too rich", but there are plenty that I have begun to find myself caring about.

This month's newly-grasped concept is "storage solution". There was a time when it worked the other way round - I bought bits of furniture and attractive boxes and whatnot because I liked them, and then set about acquiring things to put in them. But not now. Now I feel like I'm in a crazed 90s platform game, where I have to run around with a container trying to catch rapidly multiplying accoutrements as they fall from the sky and bury me. It was a defeating moment, on moving day, after I'd decanted everything that I could into my new room's wardrobe and chest of drawers, to stand in a massive heap of tat and realise, like a dunce trying to solve a math's equation, that I had too much stuff and not enough wood to house it.

So I needed storage solutions. A sensible person might have interpreted this as "buy some furniture" - go to Ikea, choose a sturdy receptacle, put things in it. Only in my head did this translate as, "buy a hatbox, an ornamental birdcage and a steamer trunk on eBay".

"Um," said my flatmate, looking at my pile of stuff. "How big is this hatbox?"
"Average hatbox size?"
"So… designed to hold one hat? One."
"Well. Yes, when you put it like that. But I expect it'll be one of those Tardis hatboxes the Victorians were so famed for."
"Tardis hatboxes?"
"Yes."

The trouble with buying quaint antique nik naks as storage solutions is that they didn't just need storage solutions in the olden days. You were either rich, in which case you had plenty of mahogany dressers and roll-top desks to house all of your ming vases and faberge eggs, or you were poor in which case you were terribly chic and minimalist and had one plate, one cup and one pair of good boots, with no ming vases or faberge eggs to speak of. Nobody back then, as far as I can tell, needed eight box files to store all the council tax bills and payslips that they know they're not meant to throw away but aren't sure exactly why.

"What you need," said my Mum, "Is a slut basket." Not, in fact, a euphemism for Chapel Road Wetherspoon's, but the secret weapon of every lazy homemaker. A slut basket is a massive, aesthetically-pleasing basket that you fill with every ugly, awkwardly-shaped thing you own, then put a lid on and pretend it's just decorative. Pandora' box was, I'm pretty sure, actually just the slut basket to end all slut baskets.

And what a revelation it is. I'm a convert. Now my bedroom is more basket than room, but at least I can walk across the floor as nature intended. There's a danger I'm taking the concept a little too far though - I've found myself looking round the rest of the flat and assessing every item as potential basket fodder. Do we really need that there? Would those not be better off In The Basket? In fact,  I'm basically looking a mess myself - would I not be better off in there too, to avoid cluttering up the place?

So I will leave you, with the immortal words: If anybody wants me, I'll be in my slut basket.

In which I hope we've seen the tail end of the WAG.

Printed 09/09/10.

Sigh. Another week, another footballer scandal, another opportunity to score some pun points with the phrase 'playing away'. Of course the surprise lies not in the fact that Wayne Rooney cheated, or even that he found anyone to cheat with (when a friendly green lady ogre is nowhere to be seen, being a multimillionaire is always going to have its uses). But while Coleen proves that her Littlewoods boots range really is made for walking, let us all take heed and hope that this is the beginning of the end for the WAG dream.

It'd be easy, of course, to say that "in my day, little girls wanted to be schoolteachers and nurses and prima ballerinas who visited orphanages on the side". But that's largely bull; I spent most of my formative years wanting to be a professional cheerleader. Actually, an American professional cheerleader. When I was nine I trained myself to hold my fork in my right hand because that was 'what Americans did', and have never quite managed to switch back again.

But still, however flimsy and tinsel-related our dreams may have been, none of us ever planned to make a career purely out of carrying very tiny dogs in very big handbags. I was going to high-kick damn hard for my living, thank you very much. So, just as our mothers before us realised that they could achieve more than taking off their enormous glasses and whipping down their hair to a "Why Miss Jones, you're beautiful!" from a faceless executive, let today's fledgling women learn that being a WAG is probably, all in all, actually quite shit.

My Top 5 Reasons Not To Be A WAG

1) The stupid shoes.

There are heels, there are high heels, and then there's the £400 Louboutin equivalent of those yellow buckets from the Early Learning Centre we used to hold on our feet with string. Just consider all the wonderful, cobbled places that are denied the be-stilted WAGS. You'll never be able to visit the York Shambles in comfort, girls. Think about it.

2)  All that having-to-watch-football

And you never even see them singing the chants, or enjoying the stadium snacks.

3) You must recognise Victoria Beckham as your figurehead, much in the same way the rest of us have the Queen

Sources are as yet unconfirmed as to whether a proportion of each WAG's weekly OK magazine income goes towards keeping Posh in the lifestyle to which she's become accustomed, but I have my suspicions.

4) Having to hold your bag in the crook of your arm.

It aches something chronic, let me tell you. Particularly when you're carrying around the weighty baggage of your unrealised potential alongside the St Tropez top-up wipes.

5) Your husband will inevitably have a dozen tacky affairs, like a massive tedious cliche

And as well as the hurt, betrayal and savage dissolution of a life you built together, you'll have to be photographed coming out of Starbucks wearing a baseball cap. A lot.

In which I proceed to the self-serve warehouse

To be printed 02/09/10.

Things I have learned from moving

1. I don't need any more stuff.

The trouble is, I love stuff. I thrive on things. It's hard to explain, admittedly, why I so badly need to live with a bakelite telephone that doesn't work, a food processor I don't use, some vintage prescription glasses I don't wear or a tailor's dummy that I routinely mistake for a real person in the middle of the night and wake up screaming, but I do. I just do. Sometimes I worry that I measure my life in terms of the sheer volumes of tat I've managed to accumulate. It might be a subconscious desire to perpetuate my memory, so that after I die, there will be vast roomfuls of stuff for my loved ones to sort through for days and days. They can play music, serve snacks; it would be like a big amazing jumble sale where everything's donated by me.

At least, that was how I felt last week. This week, after the heart-, gut- and muscle-wrenching adventure that most call moving house, but I will forever think of as 'Operation Life Dredge', I changed my mind about stuff. I'd like to take this chance to ask: if any of you ever see me buying anything, or even looking like I might be thinking about buying anything, please gently remind me that in three years' time I will be sitting in the middle of the floor, desperately trying to cram said thing into a box, covered in dust, weeping.

2. Start dusting, you slattern.

As Quentin Crisp famously had it, after four years you don't notice the dust. But great though that theory is, it follows the same rule as your hair starting to wash itself if you leave it for three weeks - that is, you will never quite make it long enough to find out if it's true. So after three years of astonishingly slovenly behaviour, my own dust farm had got to the point where it was just easier to move. I'll always wonder how it might have looked if I'd made it that one extra year.


3. There are only so many cheese graters a person needs, and that number is one.

We somehow have three. One is battery powered, one has a special box to catch the gratings and one is a box grater in the traditional style. I plan to spend the next few weeks on an exciting culinary adventure into the logistics of what can and can't be grated. There will be grated toast for breakfast, grated carrot for lunch and grated roast beef and yorkshire pudding for dinner, accompanied by a choice selection of 'graters are great' puns. Until it gets… grating.

4. Ikea hates us all.

You're Swedish and quirky, we get it. We love it. We love that our bookshelf is called Agnetta and our toothbrush holder is called Värgashmargan, and that your meatballs cost less than your carrier bags. We love that if we're a couple, we can hold hands and frolic through the bedding section like in 500 Days of Summer. And if we're single, we can look at the frolicking couples and remember that they break up in the film. There really is something for everyone.

But, for the love of Abba, why can't you just write 'double' and 'single' on your sheets instead of all the baffling geometric diagrams? So that philistines like myself don't get all the way back from Edmonton to find they've bought the wrong size and their bed curls up like a banana. Please. Thanks.

In which the A's have it

To be printed 26/08/10.


It was an odd feeling, last Thursday, to realise that I'm probably never going to get exam results again. Excepting blood tests, eye exams, pregnancy tests, potentially a driving test if I ever learn to steer a Morrisons trolley without causing a pile-up in the cereal aisle, my results-receiving years are over.

This is no bad thing, of course. I can happily go the rest of my years without the crippling nausea, the sweaty palms, the phantom memories of ridiculous answers looming up in your dreams. Did I accidentally answer 8b entirely in reference to Kylie lyrics? Did that HAPPEN? 

It's great prep for all kinds of social awkwardness later in life, getting exam results - all that publicly expressed emotion, walking around with the knowledge that at any moment, for no reason at all, you might burst out and accidentally hug a teacher.

Then there's the diplomatic 'what-did-you-get-no-what-did-you-get' shuffle, a minefield of potential face-palm moments. There will always be one acquaintance who tells you, with a completely neutral expression, that they got two Ds and an E. Always. This leaves you with two choices - either to guess wildly at an appropriate emotion and run with it ("Two Ds AND an E?? Whoooah there, amazing! Wonderful! Congrats! Shall we hug now?") or to just nod, adopt a similarly neutral expression and hope they'll jump in and save you* ("Riiiiight….that's… yeah, cool….mm. Shall we hug now?").

But more than unwittingly insulting people and pandemic hugging, the main evil to be dodged on results day has got to be the photographer. Are you female? Reasonably attractive? Wearing a flimsy t-shirt? Can you jump off a bench? Darling, we're gonna make you a star.

Notwithstanding the excellent publication in which I'm writing (the Herald never stoops to clichés, no siree), newspaper coverage of results days is becoming a cult phenomenon, for all the wrong reasons. There's even a blog, sexyalevels.tumblr.com, to celebrate results photos in all their backwards glory. It is fair enough, I feel, to gently remind the media that boys do exams too. They do, I've seen them! Fat girls as well. And spotty girls. And girls wearing loose, high-necked clothing who never feel the urge to leap in the air, throw their arms round each other or make excited faces with their ear clamped to a phone.

It's hard to escape the irony, though – that after years of telling us completely the opposite, the media now seem only to believe that nubile blonde females have a shot at academic success. Do we want our children to grow up believing that only attractive women have brains? What about an attractive woman's right to be thick, if she so wishes? At this rate, all the pretty teenage girls in this fine country will be racing off to do biochemistry degrees, and then where will we find our glamour models and reality TV contestants? Eh?

And it's comprehensive arguments like that, folks, that got me results just about worth jumping off a bench for.

*They won't. But you probably never need to see them again.

In which I have a tendency to curmudge.

To be printed 19/08/10.

I'm rather scared I might be becoming a curmudgeon. I'm not sure any kind of measuring device exists for curmudgeonliness, but if it did I'd say I was edging worryingly up the scale, somewhere in the Jack Dee region, beyond Alan Davies, heading dangerously towards Bernard Black.

I used to be in favour of fun. There was a time, I dimly remember, before 80 per cent of my energy was expended waving an angry fist at people who take too long at railway station ticket machines. But now, like a permanent case of PMT, everything annoys me. Rarely a day goes by now where I don't have to stop myself thwacking a slow tourist over the head with their own map. When I'm Queen of the World, all tube and train stations will have tannoy announcements saying, "You may not be in a hurry, but everyone else is. So GET A BLEEDING MOVE ON."

I may not have a driver's license, but I pride myself on being a really good walker. I power along like a suede-shod guided missile, bobbing and weaving through crowds with ease. I know how to use my elbows sparingly but effectively and I never wear huge, vision-obscuring rucksacks or stop dead in the middle of Oxford Street to rummage through my bag, causing a ten-people pile up behind me. But striving for this constant level of pedestrian perfection means I am constantly disappointed when everyone else falls short of my exacting standards.

Likewise people who sit down on the outer, aisle-side seat on trains or buses, then insist I clamber over to the inside instead of just moving across, like a decent human being. What baffles me is not the strategic bag-placement - we all try to get away with that one after all, as there is nothing as loathsome as having to share three foot of personal space with someone who might be a) smelly or b) insane - no, it's the determination to remain aisle-side, whatever happens. Do you honestly think I'm going to refuse to let you off? That you'll politely request to be freed for disembarkation, and I'll just turn round and say "Naaah, you're not going anywhere darlin'"?

Am I painting a curmudgeonly enough picture? I have mental files, whole clunking cabinets of peeves and grievances, all accumulating in my head on a daily basis. People who need things repeated more than once. People who try to fish your sentences without any idea what you're going to say. Shop staff who don't give you enough time to get your change back in your purse and your purse in your bag before they move on to the next person. The sign in the window of TK Maxx that says "Always up to 60 per cent less".

But the trouble is, the very act of being irritable has now become irritating. It's the currency of stocking filler books, stand-up comedy and columns like this, harping on about how stupid and ineffectual the world is because people say, "at the end of the day" more often than Wordsworth would have approved of*.

So I am taking precautionary measures before the problem gets out of hand, and putting myself on a strict anti-grump programme. It involves precise dosage of Julie Andrews movies, administered daily, followed by regular sessions of kitten-stroking while listening to The New Seekers' 1971 hit I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing.

Of course, the challenge with this last step is managing to hum along sweetly without replacing the lyrics with "I'd like to teach the world to go about their daily business in an efficient manner without CONSTANTLY GETTING ON MY TITS", but I'm doing my best. Which is all a reasonable person can ask for.

*Actually Wordsworth might have been quite a fan of the phrase, given its suggestions of sunsets and his big love for the natural sublime.

In which Percy gets a spring clean.

Printed 05/11/10.

You might notice that I'm walking a little more lightly on my feet today. There is a spring in my step, a serenity in my smile. I can see clearly, now the receipts have gone. Because yesterday, readers, was purse clearout day.

I don't know how often you replace your purse/wallet/sporren/velvet pouch, but if your money-storing habits are anything like mine, you'll know that the day you get a new one is a Big Deal. 

Transferring the contents over is like rebooting your life. It's immensely cathartic – you sort through the crumpled remnants of your being and create new order. Purse zen, if you will. I've always liked to think that Eminem's 2002 hit Cleanin' Out My Closet could have worked just as well as Cleanin' Out My Wallet, though his receipts stash might just have been too scintillating for young ears.

Some of you might be reading this, saying "but don't you just move it all from the old purse to the new one?" * The answer, dear philistines, is NO. That would be like buying a new house and filling it with the broken sofa bed, stained rug and half-eaten packet of bran flakes from your old house. New purse day is an opportunity for reflection of a kind that doesn't come along very often, and should be taken full advantage of. Think of it as a much-cheaper therapy session, with a lovely new-leather smell.

Yes, it's a process that produces many different emotions. From confusion ("When did I spend £55 in B&Q?" "Why do I have a business card from a kitchen fitter named Clive?" "When was I ever in Cheam?"), to misty-eyed nostalgia ("Ohhh, the time we bought that cheesecake from Londis then ate it on that bus before that mad bloke weed out the window… good times guys, good times.").

There's a fair bit of self-examination inherent in purse clearing-out as well. You don't want to be doing it in a vulnerable frame of mind, in case you just can't handle the truth. The truth being that the reason you're skint isn't, as you tell everyone, the ruddy government/Student Loans company/rocketing council tax rates, but because you spend £37 a week on Frijj chocolate milk. 

Then there's all the things you bought because the changing room mirror lied, only to stash away in your Wardrobe Corner of Shame as soon as you got them home. You can't hide from them on purse clearout day. You must confront your reckless purchasing and vow to do better (come to think of it, was the Wardrobe Corner of Shame what Eminem was actually talking about? Must google.)

And forget looking at someone's iPod as a window into their soul – I'd rather rummage through the wallet of a potential beau any day. What's this, a Holland and Barrett habit? £62 in Millets? Alas, it clearly wasn't to be. Likewise, anyone with a nearly-full Nandos loyalty card would be worth sticking with. At least until they worked up to the half-chicken.

*Others of you might be reading this saying, "But I throw my receipts and old train tickets and things away as I go." If this is the case, you probably need to find another columnist. There is nothing here for you.