Eight ways to get that ‘back to school’ feeling as an adult

1. Get new hair! But don’t go to your usual stylist, or even a stylist at all. For that under-10s look, simply ask an arthritic relative to give you a “sensible trim” with some kitchen scissors.

Or alternatively, for the faint whiff of teenage rebellion, go to Superdrug and buy any packet dye with a name that sounds like a Wetherspoons cocktail – ‘Blackcurrant bonanza’ or ‘raspberry razzle’ or something – and apply it, ensuring at least one third ends up daubed around your ears and neck.

2. Buy a new pencil case! As few adults really have call for pencil cases in their lives, here are a few things you could store in it instead: make up, money, heartburn tablets, hair grips, plastic cutlery stolen from M&S, wet wipes.

3. Set yourself homework! Write it down in a diary at the beginning of the week, put the diary in your bag and ignore it until at least 8:35pm on Sunday night, then get it out with sinking heart and discover you have to build an entire scale model of Tutankhamun’s tomb out of balsa wood by tomorrow morning.

4. Have an argument with your mother! Take your pick from the following topics: high heeled shoes; trainers that cost more than the council tax; why you can’t have a belly button ring; why you can’t go to Jenny Miller’s party; and how if Jenny Miller jumped off a bridge you probably would do it too because Jenny Miller would make it look awesome. If your mother isn’t readily available, draw a face on a sofa cushion and shout at that instead.

5. Make a new best friend! Pretty much anyone will do, since you can break friends again in about a week under the flimsy excuse of your choice. How about that lady at the bus stop? Quick, ask her if she likes Taylor Swift. Or pandas.

6. Invent a cool personality quirk! I had an ironic imaginary friend for a whole term in year seven – try that. Or give yourself an awesome new nickname, like ‘The Lorenzonator’. Everyone will want to be in your gang. 

7. Do some involuntary exercise! Ask friends to help create that true back to school experience by picking you last for their sports teams, vocally critiquing your ability, then not showering afterwards.

8. Invent a nonsensical game! Pick a euphemism for farting, trick people into saying it through a series of innocent questions, then laugh maniacally until you get a stitch.

In which I'm hanging on the telephone

So last week we talked about pogonophobia, the fear of beards. This week I have a new one for you: nomophobia, the fear of being without a mobile phone. Disappointingly it’s not derived from Latin or anything, it’s just short for ‘no-mobile-phone phobia’ – which does make me wonder if the phobia naming people are just phoning it in these days - but still, it’s my word discovery of the month.

According to a study by AppRiver reported in The Times this week, over 50 per cent of Britons now suffer from nomophobia. “42 per cent even take their devices to the beach!” it cried.

I’m skeptical on the first figure. Turns out they only surveyed 1000 “workers”, which doesn’t take into account the numbers of babies and children and elderly people who don’t have phones at all. But on the second point – why WOULDN’T you take your phone to the beach? Of all the places that being able to track down companions through the whizzy voodoo of mobile technology is useful, it is the beach.

Otherwise, what happens when little Jimmy goes off to find an ice cream stand with Zzapp lollies and ends up trailing for a mile and a half along the coast (because Zzapp lollies are actually the ultimate lolly, but woefully underecognised since the late 90s)? Pre-mobiles, I guess you either alerted the coastguard or just went home and admitted you never liked Little Jimmy much anyway.

Of course, I’m as nomophobic as they come. If I ever leave my phone at home by mistake, I spend the day convinced my whole family is going to die in a freak accident – which is a subset fear known as tree-falls-in-a-forest-a-phobia, ie. things might still happen in the world, even if I’m not immediately aware that they have.

It’s a conversation I often have with my mother, who suffers from the opposite fear: that if she has her mobile phone with her, and indeed turns it on, all kinds of dreadful people will immediately start calling and ruin her day. “Jane Bravo has her phone on! QUICK, think of a tedious excuse to ring her!” the masses would scream. Never mind that about six people, maximum, even have her number and half of those live in the same house.

“What if I was on my deathbed?” I demand, “and you had your phone turned off?” “Oh, I’d find out eventually,” comes the airy reply.

So I put it to you, survey people, which is worse: fanatical phone use, or people who would rather be told by carrier pigeon when their children are expiring in another part of the country? I’m off to hunt down a Zzapp lolly while you think about it.

In which Paxo takes a stand against pogonophobia

“I can’t believe this paper considers Jeremy Paxman’s facial hair important enough to devote a half-page story to,” harrumphed a letter in The Scotsman this week. “Perhaps you can also update us next time he cuts his toenails?” 

I should maybe say that I was in Edinburgh, not just reading my way around the British Isles looking for grumpy people – but I suspect there were many similar moans south of Hadrian’s Wall as well.

Ok, Man Grows Beard might not be the biggest scoop since Watergate, but there are several things the “IT’S NOT NEWS!” brigade could do well to understand here. 

Firstly, it’s August. ‘Tis the season known as silly, not just because nothing much happens, but because even if it does happen, we’d rather give our brains a summer holiday and focus on a roller-skating squirrel instead. When I spent August as a rookie reporter on this very paper, we ran a front-pager headed “Baby born with teeth!”. The photo didn’t even show the teeth. 

In September all the Back to School news will start again and we’ll have to concentrate on interest rates and climate change and which new delicious thing gives us cancer each week, and we’ll sit around saying, “ahhh… do you remember that lovely evening we spent in August, finishing up the limoncello and laughing about a man on telly’s chin?”

Secondly, beards kinda are news these days. They’re the biggest thing to happen to men’s faces since eyebrow piercing fell out of favour. Until gender-neutral make up finds its place in society (and any man who claims he’s never looked at the Maybelline counter with a pang of longing to conceal his hangover eye-bags is definitely lying), hair is the only real option men have for cosmetic customisation.

So go crazy, chaps! Have fun! There’s a veritable chin wardrobe of styles to try out there, from lustrous moustaches to manicured goatees, or fashion’s current fave, the lumberjack fuzz cloud beloved of Mumford and Sons, Brian Blessed and Mr Twit. Jeremy’s salt-and-pepper speckling was a modest but notable stand against the BBC’s reported pogonophobia, to use a word we’ve all only just learned – a sort of ‘talk to the follicles, cos the face ain’t listening’ thing.

Thirdly, if a man’s hair is not news then, I put it to you, neither is a woman’s. One day of chat about a male presenter’s appearance garners a sea of well-meaning splutters, but we still have whole magazines devoted to little more than whether or not Gwyneth Paltrow has wrinkly knees. 

It may be trivial, but at least Paxo’s beard was technically news in being, well, new - bare breasts have been around since cave ladies first grew them, but it doesn’t stop The Sun giving them page 3 priority on a daily basis. 

So shhhh, killjoys. You’ll get your proper articles back soon enough. And if you don’t like it, maybe write a few more letters about Kelly Brook bikini shots not being news either.

Eight things I wish I'd been told on A level results day

This is not me on A level results day. But I am jumping in the air.

1. They don’t matter nearly as much as you think they do.

How important do your results feel to you, right now? Right, now take that amount, divide it by three, half it, chip off another bit for good measure, and that is how important they actually are. And I’m saying that as a 25 year old. By the time you’re 80, those results will probably look like a little speck of lint that you flick off the rich, eventful canvas of your life.

Except for this week, and the odd smug tawzzock who will ask you during your first uni term, you will almost never talk about your A level results again. Which is a shame if they’re quite good and you were going to have them screen printed on a t-shirt, but never mind.


2. That teacher you just accidentally hugged?

It’s fine, nobody saw.


3. You will forget almost everything you learned for those exams.

In years to come, little nuggets of isolated information will resurface, but never quite when you need them. As a result you will spend much future time hunched over pub quiz tables, pummelling your temples trying to remember which was Crick and Watson and which was Loftus and Palmer and just how many hours you spent writing those multicoloured revision cards anyway.


4. Everyone will be fine.

Those who didn’t get the grades they wanted, will be fine. Those who did but have no clue how they want to use them yet, will be fine. Even the one who had to be excused from the English Lit paper because of a badly-timed stomach upset, will be fine.


5. University will also be fine.

Chances are, it will be brilliant. Don’t spend the fortnight before you leave weeping into a pillow, because it will be tiring and futile and you will miss all the good drinking occasions.


6. You are now a grown up, but you don’t need all the crockery yet.

Far be it from me to deny you the ritual trip to the big Tesco Extra with your misty-eyed parents, but if you buy all the crockery and cookware now, in eight months time you will be packing up two forks and half a bowl, cursing everyone you’ve just spent three terms frantically bonding with. Just buy some Pot Noodles and make do.


7. You’ll stay in touch with your friends, don’t worry.

Because it is 2006 and in a little over a month, this great new thing called Facebook will enter your life and suddenly staying in touch with people you love will be easier. Unfortunately staying in touch with people you don’t love will become a whole lot easier too.


8. Don't let anyone, especially not a local newspaper photographer, take a photo of you leaping in the air.

You're better than that.

In which I'll have the big salad

 
I’m going to New York! Strike up the marching band! Bring on the dancing sailors! Pour me a root beer and put a bagel in my face! Start spreading the news, give my regards to Broadway, and show me the way to the Staten Island ferry so I can ride across the river with the wind in my perm, like at the beginning of Working Girl.

In fact by the time you read this, taxis and baggage restrictions and giant duty-free Toblerones willing, I’ll be in New York. I’ve never been before, can you tell?  I’ve never been to America, in fact. I’ve only got as close as Canada, which as telly would have you believe is about as close as going to Luton airport and saying you’ve seen Big Ben.

So because I’ve been waiting a full quarter century of my life to finally take a bite from the Big Apple (and by ‘apple’ I mean ‘baked goods’, and by ‘big’ I mean, “is that a doughnut or a dinghy? Oh well too late I ate it.”), I’m putting a lot of pressure on my week’s holiday to fulfill every expectation that TV and films have impressed on me.

Not the exciting things though, you understand. Because my taste in telly is sitcoms where not much happen, and my taste in films is comedies where even less happens, my hopes for the concrete jungle where dreams are made consists  mainly of sitting in coffee shops, getting almost run over by a taxi and eating a really big pretzel.

But I want to do those things EXACTLY like they did them on Seinfeld, and Friends, and Annie Hall, and When Harry Met Sally, and How I Met Your Mother, and Elf. I want to go to a deli, order a whole heap of incongruous ingredients “on rye”, then fail to eat them because I’m too engrossed in a neurotic anecdote about a dinner party (I will make up the neurotic anecdote; it’s not important). 

I’d quite like to master the art of tipping correctly, coolly, casually, without flailing like a sweaty-palmed fool, then come home and apply that skill on my visits to the hairdresser. I want to find out for definite what a Twinkie is.

I reckon the closest I’ll get to Sex and the City is probably being splashed by a big puddle, but that’s a-ok by me.

In which Madness really underplayed the whole situation

Many people seemed concerned, during the past few weeks, about the logistics of my flat move.

“Are you hiring a van?” they’d ask. “We would, except neither of us can actually drive,” I’d cheerily respond. This is one of our special joint failings, one of which we’re weirdly proud, although  less so whenever we go on holiday and have to spend three hours on a bus with a cohort of elderly Spanish women in pastel shellsuits.

He didn’t learn because he grew up in a city and had no need for it, I didn’t  because at 17 I’d rather have spent all the money in the world buying ratty things off eBay than on letting a stern adult confirm for me at weekly intervals what I have known all along – that I would be a terrible, terrible driver. I watched friends pass their tests in quick succession, marvelled at the skill of it all, then generously let them drive me about. Even now we’re all 25, I still have a moment of going, “This is so ruddy grown-up. Look! You’re doing the levers and everything!” each time I’m in a passenger seat.

“So you’re hiring a man with a van?” they’d say, twitching a bit. “Men with ven?” “Mmm yah, we thought of that,” I lie. “But in the end it seemed easier if my parents just came up to help.” Then they would look at me with that special look, the one usually reserved for people who send Christmas cards signed from their cat. By ‘easier’, they realise I mean cheaper, and nicer, and

And easier it was, for us. Not so much for the Bravo family car, which started getting a bit weebly after the second load of absolutely crucial objet d’arts (“What’s that?” “It’s a reproduction Roman battle helmet.” “Why do you have one?” “Why WOULDN’T I have one?”).

Then a little more weebly, then at the point where a human might be summoning old lovers to their bedside and divvying up the family heirlooms, and then after one final, valiant crawl from Old Flat to New Flat with a bootload of stuff, it died. I’d like to think it arrived in Ford Mondeo heaven to a hero’s welcome, having its bumpers massaged while the vehicular St Peter tells it “You did good, girl. You did good.”

But all praise must really go to my parents, grand masters in the stoical handling of truly rubbish situations. As I watched them being winched on the back of a flat bed truck at 11pm to be relayed back from London to Worthing, I realised two things: 1) driving really is a whole lot of hassle. And 2) next time, we might just get a man with a van. Or a woman with a van. Anybody unrelated to me.

In which Gemma, Boots Woman and Wide Man leave my life

I’d thought plenty about how much I’ll miss my flatmates when I move house this weekend, but it’s only just occurred to me how much I’ll miss all the other people. The background people, who fill up our little patch of North London like faithful extras on Holby City. The ones I’ve never actually spoken to, but who have become completely woven into the fabric of my daily life over the past three years.

Most of these people I see at the bus stop. I find bus stops are generally perfect microcosms of the larger world, if you look hard enough, or are determined enough to use the word “microcosm”. And I’m so attached to all my regular bus-buddies that I’ve given them my own names.

There’s Generic Gemma, who probably isn’t called Gemma at all but looks SO like a Gemma that if I found out her actual name I wouldn’t believe it. Gemma is so generic that it’s actually become her defining characteristic. I imagine she likes ready salted crisps the best.

There’s Boots Woman, a well-dressed lady who had a pair of studded ankle boots so nice that I spent the best part of three days combing the internet until I found identical ones and bought them. Then every time I wore the boots and she was at  bus stop, I would hide behind the bin in case she saw them, realised I’d copied her, and pitied me.

There’s Wide Man, so-called not because he’s especially enormous, or because he seems like a wily urban wheeler-dealer (he doesn’t), but because he is a very unusual and specific shape - starting off pretty average at the top and then becoming very wide around the hips, with short little legs, giving him the overall appearance of a walking Weeble. He also has distinctive facial hair, of the kind normally seen on television magicians and frequenters of fantasy role play gaming societies. I like Wide Man, because he is always there. Same brown suit, same rucksack, reassuringly consistent. Wide Man wobbles, but he doesn’t fall down.

Of course, the best thing about my imaginary relationships with these characters is the tiny hope that maybe they have imaginary relationships with me too. I’d like to think I’m “Belvita Girl”, after my breakfast biscuit habit (and the crumbs that remain in my hair afterwards), or perhaps “The Traffic Maverick”, after my stubborn refusal to walk 20 foot up the road to use the zebra crossing. I could cope with “Bag Rummager” or even “Bunions”.

But if none of them even notice I’ve gone next week, well, that would be quite hurtful. Three years of unspoken, imaginary friendship has got to count for something.

In which the kitchen sink is only the beginning

 
Moving house, they say, is the most stressful thing a person does in their lifetime.

During the big portions of one’s life when one is not moving house, it’s easy to scoff at this – it’s just putting things in boxes then taking them out again a few miles to the left! Not more stressful, surely, than bereavement or performing open heart surgery or when the comedy magician asks for a volunteer from the audience and looks straight at you?

But then you move house, and realise that every smug beaming glossy magazine shoot of a low-rent celeb “relaxing in her new Hertfordshire mansion” is a fat great lie, because moving house is Satan’s pastime. Nothing is designed to expose your flawed humanity more than having to sort through every single item you own and justify its place in your life.

For my boyfriend this is a swift process, because he owns approximately 12 things. He will put his 12 things in a box, dust his hands off, then mosey on into our new life and casually put the kettle on. Sooner or later I suppose he will notice that I’m not there, because I’ll be trapped under a mountain of my own greedy consumerism, quietly muttering about how I really DO need the third ornamental tea set while my spine snaps like a twig.

The problem isn’t even too many clothes, or shoes, or useful things like kitchenware. It’s all the surplus other stuff, the useless but lovely stuff that I can’t throw away because I’ve laden it with personal significance and sentimental value. And dust.

Here, just so you know I’m not exaggerating, are some of the things I own that might not be ‘strictly necessary’ in the new flat:

Four hatboxes
A birdcage
A dressmaker’s dummy called Gertrude
A steamer trunk with nothing in it
A mannequin head
Two rotary dial telephones
A telephone shaped like a duck
A set of antlers
A tiger print cowboy hat
A basket big enough for a grown man to sit inside
Two suitcases far too dilapidated to use outside the house
A box of dead butterflies
A framed poster of Marc Bolan
A musical box with a wind-up clown in it
A bunch of dried lavender
A box containing every piece of tissue paper ever to enter my possession, in case one day I “do some craft”
Three rolls of Christmas wrapping paper
A framed photo of my great auntie Margaret, dressed as a cowgirl
A 3ft promotional Guinness blackboard
A soda siphon that doesn’t work
A cuddly toy!

Notes on cohabiting

 

It’s three weeks now until I move out of my flat and in with a boy.

“The Boy”, I might say, if that particular relationship shorthand didn’t make me want to claw my skin off. Besides, it’s misleading. ‘Boy’ suggests I might be hosting imaginary tea parties with an impish Peter Pan figure, while what I’ve got – Xbox habits and Hobnob consumption aside – is very definitely a man.

A man who I’ve spent three years making very, very certain I like enough to see every single day, even when he’s got a cold or a big spot or is doing his “why we need to renationalise the railways” speech again. We technically lived together for three months two years ago and managed to get through without a single argument despite all of his worldly possessions being piled up on my bedroom carpet - so by comparison this should be easy. But there’s still no guarantee we won’t wake up one day to discover we’ve turned into Al and Peggy from Married With Children.

So instead of dwelling on the unknown, we’re looking forward to all the little certainties. “When we live together,” we say, doing another night bus trip between E5 and N10, “I won’t accidentally leave my stuff at your house because there will only be one house and we’ll be in it.”

“When we live together,” we say, co-ordinating our schedules each week to find an evening we’re both free, “this won’t be a problem. I’ll just come home and THERE YOU ARE.” I know about 86 per cent of you are now laughing hollowly and going, ‘yeah, exactly – THERE YOU ARE. Every. Ruddy. Night’. But shhh, because we are adorably optimistic and you mustn’t burst our bubble yet.

There are other things too, things I didn’t know I even had feelings about until I realised they were going to change.

For example: all the food in the kitchen will be mine, to eat as I please. All mine! After seven years of flatsharing, seven years of whose-marmite-is-that-did-you-eat-my-chickpeas-well-it-was-going-off-ooh-they-won’t-notice-a-slice-my-tomatoes-were-posher-you-thief, the idea of a kitchen where nothing needs to be eaten covertly with the light off is a novelty of giddy proportions.

I’ll have a proper place to keep towels, that isn’t the back of my bedroom door. Sometimes they might even be dry! We’ll have the washing machine all to ourselves too, a luxury so rare that I might start doing every pair of tights individually. I’ll be able to sing in the shower, and whistle on the loo, and leave things in places without returning hours later to find they’ve been tidied away into the bin.

Of course, just like Monica in that episode of Friends, I’m focusing on these bits so that I don’t spend every day from now until the move weeping salty tears over my soon to be ex-flatmates, because they will no longer be there every day to lend me hairspray, say ‘yes you should definitely have another bowl of custard’ and laugh at terrible TV until we wee ourselves.

Now I have three weeks to teach The Man all of their many skills by way of replacement. And probably buy some new towels.

In which Waynetta Windsor is on 500/1

It occurred to me that I haven’t done a feeling-sorry-for-Kate-Middleton column in quite a while, so if you don’t mind I’m going to address that now.

Aside from the obvious potential sympathies – the heavy sense of duty under the critical gaze of the public, the pressure to cart one’s eight-months preggo frame around on a pair of nude stilettos, the constant worry that it might come out already earing a crown (ouch) – I got thinking the other day about the names.

One of the most exciting bits of having a baby, I’ve always imagined, is the naming. Oh the possibilities! You have a veritable rainbow of colourful options to dip your parental paintbrush in. And despite knowing you’ll probably plump for ‘Emma’ or ‘Jack’ in the end because of mutterings about tradition from the grandparent camp, and about playground bullying from the judgemental friend camp, how blissful to read the baby names book from cover to cover and imagine for a few exhilarating weeks that you’re going to have progeny called Xavier and Persephone.

I once read about a woman in a magazine who called her son ‘Ritz’ because she found an old box of the crackers in her pantry a week before the birth (not a euphemism). That’s how free the naming game is these days - you can just walk into the kitchen, pick your favourite product and spend 18 years running around after a human called “Dairylea”.

But Will and Kate, we can safely assume, won’t have this freedom. When we’re talking about future monarchs, apparently, it has to be a name that wouldn’t look amiss in a neck ruff.

William Hill have placed 4/1 odds on Charlotte, 5/2 on Alexandra, 5/1 on Elizabeth, 6/1 on Diana and 7/1 on Victoria. Anne, Mary and Catherine all follow (giving one’s child your own name is truly the selfie of parenting, isn’t it?) with kingly standards George, Charles, James, Edward and John on the boys’ list. Yawn.

If I were the Duchess, I would compromise with what I like to call ‘The Jonathan Ross school of naming’, or ‘business in the front, party in the middle’. Give them a sensible first name, pour all your wacky urges into the middle name, and then they have the option of using either, depending on whether they grow up to be an accountant or a pottery café proprietor.

**BREAKING** As I write this, I’ve also just read that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s baby are calling their baby ‘Kai Georgia Donda West’. If the royal couple were to follow that lead and christen theirs Donda too, it would be as thought the national anthem were starting up every time it was called.

Just a thought.

In which Pride and Purists probably won't cut it

It must be a tiresome life, being a purist. Spending all that time in pursed-lipped disapproval each time the world reinvents the wheel, or makes a new flavor of crisp. All the tutting and harrumphing and ruining perfectly good dinners by complaining that your tapas isn’t authentic enough*.

I’ve been puristic about few things in my time, and managed to stay puristic about even fewer. Fancy dress is one; I hate it when people turn up in a wipe-clean black and white sack off the internet and think they’re the spirit of Carnaby Street.

Pride and Prejudice adaptations are another. When something as completely, flawlessly brilliant as the 1995 BBC version is still delighting fans the world over, why would you even bother with the effort and expense of making further, obviously inferior versions – like Keira Knightley’s 2005 pout-athon, or this new PD James crime sequel to mark the book’s bicentennial?

Why not just have Colin Firth’s wet shirt listed as a Grade II heritage site, for coaches of schoolchildren to visit on field trips? Then the TV and film people could tick Pride and Prejudice off the list, mark it done forever, and move onto other things. Like The Very Hungry Caterpillar: The Musical.

But mostly, it’s quite pleasant to enjoy something that the purists hate. It’s refreshing. It’s like everyone else sitting in a bad smell when you’ve got a blissfully blocked up nose. Which as it happens, is exactly how I felt about Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.

After all the months of mounting hype and previews and product tie-ins and everyone going, “gee, you’d think that if they’ve got enough good bits for a three-minute trailer, they’d have, like, finished the film by now”, I was fully prepared to be crashingly disappointed. But the beauty of going into something prepared to be disappointed is (and I guess this was Eeyore’s philosophy) most likely, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Yes there’s the raucous R’n’B soundtrack, but isn’t that exactly how jazz would have sounded to traditional ears in the 20s? Yes, it’s gaudy and overblown and cartoonish and Leo DiCaprio’s accent is like nothing that’s ever left another mouth, ever, but as a cinematic experience it left me feeling exactly the same way the book did – invigorated, slightly confused, and craving a cocktail.

So if I prepare to be thoroughly scornful of Death Comes to Pemberley, covering my eyes with my Regency needlepoint every time Matthew Rhys fails, well, to have Colin Firth’s exact face, then I might just be pleasantly surprised. As long as they’ve got the fancy dress right, and nobody complains about the tapas.


*By the way, I’ve decided not to tolerate mutterings about “authentic” food any more. What, do you think nobody in the whole of Spain or Italy ever cooked a dodgy meal? Does every backstreet caff in every country outside of this one serve up manna from heaven on a daily basis? Do you think the reason 17th century farmers didn’t use a certain kind of oil is because it would be criminally inauthentic, rather than just because they didn’t have a Waitrose?

In which 100 years is too much, and not nearly enough

One hundred years ago this week, Emily Wilding Davison threw herself in front of a horse. By chance or very possibly design, it was the king’s horse, and her fate became legend as the most famous martyr of the suffragette movement.

Did you watch Clare Balding’s documentary too? Oh good. Fantastic, wasn’t it?  If you didn’t, I must bid you put down your Coco Pops and 4oD-it this instant, because it needs to be seen. Especially if your overriding image of the suffragettes is the mum in Mary Poppins doing a merry jig in a yellow petticoat. The sinister, brutal reality of the battle for women’s votes was about as far from Disney fable as it gets.

As a teenager at Davison High School for Girls, which wasn’t named after Emily although I always liked to imagine it was, the message of her cause managed to penetrate the almighty cloud of Clearasil and Impulse and Maroon 5 and hormonal angst for four years without us quite realising it. Our teachers drummed ambition into us along with long division. In 2004 we won the Global Rock Challenge with a dance about the suffragettes, and cried snotty tears of joy at Prince Edward as we collected our award.

It might be because I was woozy on body spray fumes at the time, but as a school girl I honestly don’t remember ever believing there was anything I wouldn’t be able to do on account of my gender. No, that came later. That came when I realised there’s still a whole, horrible chunk of society who value a woman’s body far beyond her brain.

It came the first time I noticed how many shops still shelve music, science and technology magazines as ‘Men’s Interest’. And when I discovered that I could expect to earn 15 per cent less than the men who graduated alongside me. And when I read that two women are killed every week in the UK as a result of domestic violence – a figure that hasn’t changed in 15 years.

My mother taught me regularly, well before I was old enough to, that I must always vote - “because of the suffragettes.”  And I do.

I haven’t yet had the pleasure of voting in a government I’ve actually wanted (or a London mayor who isn’t a Bash Street Kid come to life) but at least I’ve had the pleasure of contribution. Exercising my right, to decide who governs me – and with it, the pleasure of knowing I can whinge and moan to my heart’s content about our politicians, because I played my part. Because I could.

So as Emily Davison’s centenary is commemorated on our screens and in our papers, I’d rather use it as a rallying call, not a memorial, to carry on what the sister suffragettes kicked off – to men and women, because human rights are everybody’s issue. And the march is far from over.

Eurovision bingo

For many people who don’t love sport, it’s often difficult to identify with the hardcore fans. It’s puzzling, the way they manage to feel such very strong feelings about something they’ve not been directly involved in themselves, and probably can’t even do. As Jerry Seinfeld had it, the appropriate retort to ‘We won! We won!’ is “No, they won. You watched.”

But not so for me. Because when I see sporty people getting themselves in a happy tizz over people they’ve never met doing something successfully several hundred miles away, I just think to myself: 1997. Dublin.  Katrina and the Waves, Love Shine a Light. I understand.

I taped the whole of Eurovision 1997 off the telly on a VHS, which I then watched daily for a fortnight afterwards, savouring every moment of the glorious victory. I memorised the dance moves, I chuckled at what I understood of Terry Wogan’s pithy commentary, I marvelled at the Riverdance interval entertainment. I can still, if really pushed, sing you three bars of the Maltese entry. That is how big I went on Eurovision ’97.

I went slightly smaller on Eurovision ’98, but only slightly (Imaani, ‘Where Are You?’ and what do you MEAN you don’t remember the red pleather coat?) then kept up more or less the same pace for the subsequent 14 years except with the eventual introduction of alcohol and more elaborate snacks.

Because the beautiful thing about being a Eurovision fan is pretty much the same as the beautiful thing about being a sports fan, or a Joe McElderry fan – it’s the hope. The lovely hope that can’t be diminished by a million nil points, or all the neighbourly Balkan voting in the world, that one day we will win again. That day might, MIGHT just be Saturday.

And so to help you all enjoy the event as much as I do, here is your official* Eurovision bingo card:

1 point: White suits; plastic suits; tin foil suits; a lady in a dress that opens up into a small marquee upon a strategic key change; a song ostensibly sung in English but consisting entirely of phrases never uttered on British soil; a tambourine.

2 points: Teeth so white they are almost blue; a man with a face that looks shiny like moist Tupperware; lyrics that include “balloons”, “the moon”, “wolves”, or “biscuits”; anybody repeating the Bonnie Tyler sat nav joke (unless it is you).

3 points: Anybody giving the UK more than 3 points.

Enjoy!

In which I whistle while I smirk

I discovered a horrifying thing the other day. I was watching 10 Years Younger on Really, which the quippier among you will probably point out is a horrifying thing in itself, and the eerily smooth plastic surgeon was talking about wrinkles.

Now, normally these segments are relatively low-anxiety viewing for me. I don’t smoke; I don’t use sunbeds; I slather factor 50 on my face all summer like butter on a freckle-prone crumpet. I’ll admit it, I even felt a little ripple of smugness as the surgeon told the makeover victim that years of dragging on cigarettes had given her deep-set lines around her lips that even terrifying lasers couldn’t fix.

But then, THEN, the awful bit came. “Smoking or frequent whistling can create these lines,” said the voiceover. Sorry, what the what? Frequent whistling? WHISTLING? The clean-living cheery person’s indulgence of choice? WHISTLING will make me wrinkly? WHISTLING?

I am nothing if not a frequent whistler. Being devoid of all genuine musical talent, whistling is my only outlet – so it’s just as well that I am terrific at it. Not to show off or anything, but I can whistle whilst inhaling and exhaling, meaning that (with an IV drip to keep me going) I could technically whistle forever. I have a whole whistling playlist on Spotify. I’ve considered starting a whistling band.

So now I have a choice – either I keep on doing something I love and accept that in 20 years I will have a mouth that looks permanently like an origami cat’s bum, or I wean myself off whistling and live a quieter, less jolly, less creased life. Apart from the hope that repeating the word often enough in a column might somehow win me a free skiing trip to Whistler, there’s not much consolation either way in this scenario.

Having arrived on the steeper side of 25, I’ve been amazed by how quickly anti-aging has become something I’m supposed to care about. No sooner had I blown out my birthday candles (which was probably pretty aging, now I come to think about it) than I started noticing the fine lines under my eyes, and the aisles full of goo promising to get rid of them.

Then it’s a continual inner battle between my moral compass, which says “age gracefully! Pay no heed to our youth-obsessed society and its shallow conceptions of beauty. Besides, you’re 25 – don’t be annoying and ridiculous”, and the part of me with eyes and a mirror, who wants to throw £20 at Boots every month in the hope it’ll keep me peachy-skinned forever.

Besides, if I wait until I’m 40 to use wrinkle cream, like a normal person, will I wish I’d started at 25? The whole business is depressing. I’d put on a sad song like Mr Bojangles to help ease me through the pain, except it has ruddy whistling in it.

In which Kel never really died

With no.1 brother, 1994

A slightly worrying thing happened the other day. Fully of my own accord, and without being involved in any kind of dare, I pulled half of my hair up into a ponytail right on the top of my head, swung it about a bit, and decided it didn’t look terrible. It looked a bit like Clarissa, she who Explained it All.

Then Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack started playing out of nowhere, and I threw some rad breakdancing shapes before settling down in my inflatable armchair with a copy of Live and Kicking magazine and a Push Pop.

Ok everything after the ponytail is a lie, but it could just as easily not be. Because the 90s are back, my friends. And they’re taking no prisoners.

They’ve been threatening to come back for practically as long as they’ve been away, to be honest, but we’ve eventually reached a point where their return into our lives and wardrobes is so natural that we barely even notice it’s happening.

We think we’re living in the moment; we’re all ‘Skype’ this and ‘sheep’s yoghurt’ that, then one day we suddenly get a real hunger on for a packet of Space Raiders and before we know it we’re doing the Saturday Night dance wearing one of those snap bracelets you buy from school trip gift shops. It’s almost as if it’s revenge for us finally closing down Ceefax.

The golden decade of distance has more than passed now, and we’re all high on Buzzfeed nostalgia lists like they’re cherryade Panda Pop. But it’s especially exciting/depressing, I’m finding, because this is the first decade revival where I’m old enough to remember the first time round.

Back at the millennium, when there was that big Abba renaissance and the 70s were massive, it was all shiny and new to me. Likewise for the 80s thing that reigned supreme through the second half of the noughties, my main reference point was old Jackie annuals I found at car boot sales, and photos of my parents with a baby me.

But while I’ve definitely got firsthand memories of the 90s, I’m not entirely sure how one does them as an adult. I’ll probably go out and buy a tamagotchi and a Polly Pocket lipgloss ring, only to discover I’m meant to be kicking back with a Magic Eye picture in some minimalist tailoring. Will Anneka Rice’s jumpsuit come out of mothballs? Will we all start saying “dead good” again? Will CBBC ever re-run The Biz?

According to the golden rule of decade distance (a clean two decades is needed), we’re currently only to up to 1993 – so I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see. Get your votes in now, everybody.

In which we walk like the wind

“Do I have to buy special exercise trousers? And trainers? Can’t I just do it in jeans and Converse?”

 “No. You’ll chafe.”

“I won’t. I do everything in jeans and Converse.”

“Well, you won’t look… proper. We need to look proper.”

“Proper, in bras.”

“Yeah. Except for the bras.”

If any of this is giving you de ja vu – well, first congratulations! You’ve won my attentive reader prize, which consists of a hand-decorated baseball cap, a party blower and a Chupa Chup – and secondly, you’d be right. I wrote about doing the MoonWalk last year, then did it, and now I’m doing it again.

I’ll be honest and say that the sacrifice of walking half a midnight marathon in a nattily-decorated bra seems to have lost its cache somewhat since last year, because suddenly everyone around me has become a runner. Just casually, like humphing yourself around for five kilometres on a Saturday morning is as pleasant and desirable an activity as making eggy crumpets in front of Saturday Kitchen. Nobody sent me this memo.

I mean sure, we all went out and did a few wheezy laps of the park after Super Saturday last year. That’s a given. But now I discover many of you carried on, quietly, sneakily, casually doing running, getting better week after week while I was ignorantly sofa-bound, experimenting with new and exciting ways to eat marzipan. I went to watch the marathon on Saturday, and aside from the inspiration and awe at the things a dedicated human body can do, my main shock was just how many of you are at it. Loads of you. It’s incredible.

As a side note: what happened to ‘jogging’? Nobody seems to jog anymore. It’s understandable, because ‘running’ sounds impressive while ‘jogging’ conjures up images of pudgy men in sweatsuits lolloping after a bus. But still, I can’t help feeling jogging was more modest as a physical pursuit. “I’m off for a jog,” sounds like you might trot around the block once, while “I’m going for a run” suggests the kind of full pelt pavement contact only really required when there are zombies or dinosaurs involved.

Anyway – neither running, nor jogging, but power walking as if our lives (or at least breakfasts) depended on it, my Moon Walk compadre and I have two weeks left until the big night. Considering that this is Jo, with whom eight years ago I invented the rule ‘Never run for a train. Simply miss it and retain your dignity’, we definitely have something to prove. Which probably means she can’t do it in jeans and Converse.

(By the way, if you would like to sponsor us and support the Walk the Walk foundation for breast cancer research, it’s here)

In which musicals are the new not-musicals

 
Ignoring all the Ding Dong ding dong for a moment, I can’t help but think it’s nice to have a song from a musical at number two in the charts.

Could this herald a new era in popular music, where the youth stand around outside McDonalds krunking to a bit of Rogers and Hart? Will they drive round in cars with Surrey With a Fringe on Top blaring through the windows? Will we all gather in warehouses and get sweaty to the beats of Cole Porter? Maybe out of this peaceful protest, as well as all the intended political messages, we’ll all learn a new appreciation of musical theatre. Musicals could be the new… not musicals!

I know, I know what you’re going to say. You don’t like musicals. You hate they way they burst into song in public as though it’s normal, and you find it embarrassing when they do a stag leap in the middle of an otherwise aggressive fight scene, you feel no affinity with nuns. I get it.   But so many before you felt the same, and they’ve all been converted. It just takes the right musicals, carefully applied, possibly with the aid of doughnuts or strong gin. Here, to start you off, are my three musicals for people who hate musicals - and in a few years, when you’re on your third coach trip to see Phantom wearing a signed Michael Ball t-shirt, you can write and thank me.

1.    Cabaret 

Cabaret is an excellent gateway musical. It’s dark and sexy, it has a proper plot, and all the singing takes place on a stage rather than in the middle of a meadow or something, so it doesn’t jar nearly as much for the musical phobe. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, it also has literary connections to up the pub quiz ante. And Liza Minnelli, eons before the David Gest, neck-painting phase.

2.    Bugsy Malone 

He who is tired of Bugsy Malone is tired of life, and that is just fact. Aside from the music being iPod-worthy and the story hilarious, Bugsy is a treat because you can sit with IMDB.com on your lap spotting kids who later went on to be in The Bill. Then, as I always do, you can have fun imagining the meeting in which Alan Parker pitched the idea – “so it’s a gangster story… but they’re all children… and there’s this custard…”. Genius.

3.    The Rocky Horror Show 

Your prescribed antidote to the saccharine overload of Julie Andrews twirling on a mountain top (I’m sorry Julie, they just aren’t as discerning as you or I), The Rocky Horror Show is the musical that embraces the freaks and geeks and frizzy of hair and makes everyone else wish they were a freak or a geek too. It is the coolest musical you will find, even if you plan to spend half of it saying, “oh look, the man from the Crystal Maze.”

Plus, you used to do the Time Warp at discos in your youth, didn’t you? There you go, you already know one.

In which school rules really take the biscuit

image: offthemeathook.com

Silly season might be only a warm, distant dream from our current point of perpetual Narnia, but thanks to an over-cautious Canvey Island headteacher we’ve had a lovely glimpse of it this week. Catering staff at Castle View School were banned from cutting flapjacks into triangles after one hit a boy in the face – resulting in an injury I’m insisting on calling an ‘oats-so-dimple’, even if nobody else will.

Having first googled to check that no lasting damage was caused by the pointy pudding (“sore eye” says The Telegraph), I’d like to say thank you, triangularflapjackgate, for giving us a lovely break from all the gloom. If such an incident could be rustled up once a week to give everybody that way inclined the chance to bray “it’s health and safety gone maaaaaaad” for half an hour, we’d all probably be a lot calmer and less inclined to jostle each other on the tube.

But while bizarre rulings on cake geometry make the tabloids, there are plenty of equally nonsensical laws being enforced in schools across the land every day, without so much as a eyelid-bat from the Daily Mail.

When I was a pupil at a certain be-hatted East Worthing girls’ high, for example, it was all about socks. Socks were a big deal. The key to our futures lay in our ankles; covered ankles meant success, exposed ankles meant failure followed by eventual death in a gutter. As prefects we spent hours telling the throngs to pull their socks up, quite literally, while desperately wishing we could run behind the bike sheds and roll down our own. Lesser offences included wearing hair accessories that weren’t the regulation navy blue, and walking the wrong way up a corridor.

A few years previously it had all been about handwriting. Creative handwriting was forbidden at my middle school (royal blue-jumpered, if you’re playing local detective) – presumably because it meant we would later become performance artists, or try to start a chain of vegan juice bars. I spent two years stubbornly dotting my ‘I’s with little balloons and contraband flicks on my ‘g’s and ‘y’s, just to stick it to the man.

Then there was the rule that said we all had to go outside for playtime, even when it was freezing. We were routinely rounded up from our hiding spot in the cosiest corner of the cloakroom and booted out into the icy abyss.

Whether this was supposed to have a profound, character-building effect I can’t be sure, but I can tell you it didn’t work – as an adult with full agency over her temperature, I’ve spent the past three months on a reverse survival mission to stay in my house as long as humanly possible. When I’m forced to go outside for sustenance or loo roll, a little voice in my head says “Lauren Bravo, outside NOW or you lose a house point.”

I would have welcomed a jabby flapjack attack, to be honest. At least I could have eaten it afterwards.

In which Messenger gtg

image: michelo.co.uk

You may not have noticed, but last week we bid farewell to a cultural icon. Or rather, a library of cultural icons - dominated by smiley faces, broken hearts and little hugging people with no legs. On Friday, after 15 years serving hundreds of millions of users, MSN Messenger logged out of our lives forever.

Yes, there’s G-Chat. Sure, we’ve still got Skype.  But when it came to pure, aRbiTrArIlY pUnCtUaTeD cyber-emotion, MSN served noughties adolescents like no other.  For most of us, it was where we first learned that we could express ourselves with typing in a way quite different, possibly better, then with the spoken word. It was where friendships were formed, and destroyed, and put on hold while we went to eat our dinner (brb).

Things I learned from MSN messenger:

Real life acquaintances are overrated. With Messenger, a swift “how’s you?” and a handful of emoticons could bridge the gap of face to face interaction, making your potential social circle as wide as the ocean is deep. Your friend’s cousin’s brother’s best friend’s sister could be a kindred soulmate and you’re being held back by the fact you don’t actually know her? What do you want, a blood pact?

Signing out then in again will not get you a boyfriend. But at times, when you’re a 14-year-old at an all-girls’ school with a crumpled photo of Adam Rickett in your pencil case, the only hope you have rests with making your name bob up and down repeatedly in a boy’s periphery vision until they’re eventually wearied into going out with you.

There is no life event so colossally tragic that it cannot be used as an attention-seeking screen name. Had an argument with someone? Make it your screen name! Failed your geography coursework? Make it your screen name! Great fun was to be had from engaging someone called ‘☹SoSOsad☹‘ in persistently chirpy conversation, never once asking the cause of their subtly-referenced woe. Until you found out they just lost half of their family in a house fire.

In the modern age, you can never be completely sure who you’re talking to. “Hey Zoe.”  “This isn’t Zoe, it’s Debbie.” “Oh. Hey Debbie.” “It’s not Debbie anymore, it’s Sharice.” “Oh. Hey Sharice.” “No, it’s Debbie again. Zoe’s on the toilet.” “Right. Hi Debbie.” “Now it’s Maud.” “lol”.

Think through your novelty email address thoroughly before committing. Today’s youths probably have very sensible firstname.lastname@ formats, set up for them by savvy parents before they were even born. But in the giddy days of 2003, we didn’t see job applications or UCAS forms or baffled grandparents; we just saw that ‘bubblyairheaddevilchick87’ was free and wanted to make it our own.

(At the very least, don’t do what I did and choose a Velvet Underground song to be cool, not realising it was also an infamous French S&M novel, then merrily hand it out to friends, relatives, bosses and UCAS before red-facedly discovering the truth three years later. Don't do that.)

Inspiration credit due to @MSNRemembrance

In which I get The Glums

 
Nobody likes a weeper. If the collected works of The Cure, Frankie Valli and 2003 Eurovision disastermongers Jemini are anything to go by, crying is fully unacceptable in most social situations – even situations of heartbreak, which means my sobbing over a lonely-looking pigeon falls woefully short of criteria.

From the first cranium-curdling wails of a newborn baby, crying is a dick move because it demands the attention and action of someone else. And people don’t like to pay attention to things, or move. They’re generally too busy eating a sandwich or doing a lovely crossword to walk across the room and mop up your human rainfall.

Nobody welcomes the awkwardness of crying, either. We all know the feeling of panic that sets in when you realise too late that you’re trapped in the vicinity of a crying person you don’t know very well, leaving you with the Hobson’s Choice of ‘moist hug’ or ‘cold, distant arm pat followed by inappropriate whistling’. If emotions are weather, you’re the bank holiday-ruiner. To be honest, if emotions are emotions you’re capable of that too.

This all leads us on neatly (sorry, was that too longwinded for you? Are you going to cry about it?) to the fact that I’ve seen Les Miserables three times in the last two months. The clue has been very much in the name. Each time has been soggier than the last, building to a moment on the cinema last Wednesday when I gulped so ferociously during the encore of Do You Hear The People Sing that I choked on a pick’n’mix gummy snake and almost expired like a revolutionary.

The second of the three sittings was a Brighton sixth form production starring my baby brother, which made it more acceptable because I can remember him being born – and besides, there is nothing that gives a teenager more credibility among his mates than a copiously weeping relative. 

The other two were a far more straightforward case of cinema crying; crying at the death bits, crying at the love bits, crying worrying if Anne Hathaway will reach the top note of that crescendo in I Dreamed A Dream. As the credits rolled I expected to turn and smile sheepishly at all my fellow weepers as we dried off and headed to the car park, cathartically unburdened. But I couldn’t because it turned out I was the only one.

It’s fine, though. I am comfortable with my perpetually quivering chin. I like to cry in front of my boyfriend every once in a while. Not delicate, maidenly tears rolling down my cheeks like crystal droplets, but proper, shuddering sobs with snot and bits of disintegrated tissue stuck to my face.

I feel it serves as a reminder of just how upset it is possible to make me; but also a sort of reward for never having done anything that produces nearly the same reaction in me as the Christmas finale of Downton Abbey. Which I’m welling up now, just thinking about.

You can carry on eating your sandwich though. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.

Spring cleaning

 My absolute most hated advert at the moment is the Ariel one where the ‘student’ girl washes her “vintage dress”.

You know she’s a ‘student’ because she, like, has a sarky eye-rolling friend in the background and talks about getting weird stains down her “vintage dress”. The fact it’s a “vintage dress” is such a novelty that she can’t stop saying “vintage dress”, even though any person familiar with words knows that in the context of washing, it’s just called a “dress.” And she pronounces it with the stress on the wrong word – “VINtage dress”, not “vintage DRESS”. Besides, it’s clearly not a vintage dress at all, but one of those fakey market stall dresses you get from shops called things like Fashion Girlz. 

However, after several months of happy snarling at poor grubby student vintage dress girl, I’ve come to realise that my hate isn’t based in taste or embarrassment, but jealousy. Because I am 25 years old and I don’t know how to wash things.

Clothes mainly, although come to think of it I’ve had moments with a custard-encrusted saucepan where it just seemed easier to hurl it out a window than wait for the mythical ‘soaking’ to take effect. And despite a fondness verging on fetish for ways to paint, primp and powder my face, I rarely cleanse even that beyond the unavoidable wash it gets in the shower every morning.

“Are you doing a dark wash or a light wash?” my flatmate will ask, brandishing something pale and chiffony. “Um. Well it’s mainly dark. With a pink thing. And a white thing. And a couple of cream things. And these muddy plimsolls,” I’ll reply, watching her retreat in horror.

But genuinely, I believe that separating clothes by colour is a myth invented by housework jobsworths to give us all more hassle. Not putting your new black jeans and your white silk blouse in together I can get on board with; everything else is just scaremongering.

I also have little to no idea at all what fabric conditioner is for, except the vague impression that it’s a bit like moisturiser for your towels and thus completely unnecessary. Because they’re towels. They’re meant to be dry, because they dry you. That’s just physics.

Speaking of dry towels, by the way, I’ve decided that I want the next home I live in to be one with an airing cupboard. It is impossible to feel like a woman of substance and maturity when you still have to hang all your towels on a single hook on the back of your bedroom door like a peasant. Also, all my towels have inexplicable bleach stains on them. Which come to think of it, may be because I’m not washing them properly.

Ambridge too far

 

It’s been a sad week for my mother. One of her beloved guinea pigs died (“We didn’t phone you,” she said, “because we assumed you would see our tribute on Twitter”) and in another cruel twist of technological fate, the BBC announced that it was closing its messageboard for The Archers.

The argument goes that they’re “moving away” from the forum set up, focusing their energy and budget on the bigger, generic social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, with blogs for the lucky few. The last remaining radio messageboard in the Beeb’s online armoury, The Archers’ lovingly-nicknamed ‘Mustardland’ (it’s yellow) attracts around 10,000 visitors and 1,000 regular posters every month. In general terms it’s not a huge audience, but its importance to that audience can’t be underestimated.

Threads reach way beyond the confines of rural Ambridge; every possible topic of modern life, culture and society have been dissected by the community of eager, opinionated listeners. There are regular real-life meet-ups with hundreds of attendees. There have been Archers messageboard marriages. Members of the Archers messageboard have joined forces to transport someone across the country to reach a dying relative. And I know all of this because for years now, my mum has been one of them. 

It’s taken her almost a decade to make the small but significant progress from “owning a mobile phone” to “turning on a mobile phone,” and yet she’s quietly become queen of the forum. She’s made friends, given professional advice, battled trolls and used acronyms I’ve never even heard before. It’s perfectly usual for her to start sentences with, “Well, they’re saying on the Archers messageboard…”. When the site closes at the end of this month, she’ll be genuinely a bit bereft.

It’s easy to assume that internet devotion is a young person’s game. Sure, our parents and grandparents have embraced it as a practicality, a means to book holidays, buy presents, do the food shop, trace the family tree… but surely it’s only those of us who came of age with the web who understand the comfort and community that can be found behind a bright, warm computer screen? 

After all, if I had a pound for every time one of my elders had made a sarky comment about digital followers not being ‘real’ friends and Facebook functionality hardly worthy of dinner table conversation, I might be able to afford better broadband. 

But just like the sarky elders, that attitude is both patronising and just plain wrong. From activism to craft lovers and fantasy fan fiction enthusiasts, wherever there are shared interests, there’s the potential for community – we’re just building it through the sparky, far-reaching realms of the internet rather than a draughty village hall somewhere.

Messageboards may not be the BBC’s imagined future, but who would have thought radio would be either? I’d listen to your fans if I were you, Beeb – they’ve got a keyboard and a wireless router and a nice cup of tea, and they’re not afraid to use them.

In which love is not a marmalade sandwich

Happy Valentine’s Day, darling readers. You look wonderful, by the way. Did you do something new with your hair? Oh, you washed it. Well it’s working for you, keep it up!

Last year I received my first ever Valentine’s card that wasn’t from my father or a corporation wooing me as “Dear potential money-spender”, so forgive me for looking smug. After a shaky 23-year start, I’m pretty much on a Valentine’s roll. I’ve even taken the day off work to cook lamb shanks, the slowest of all food, and bought a dress with hearts all over it. Later I might put on some Sade and have a bath. Of course I haven’t had a bath since 2006, but if you recline dreamily in a shower, you fall over.

The Valentine’s Day before last was a disaster, of course. “But I didn’t even know you liked flowers,” he said earnestly while I wrestled with my tears outside the Odeon. “EVERYBODY likes flowers,” I spat back. “They’re flowers. That’s like, not liking a sunset. Or a kitten in a watering can. Or Judi Dench.”

“Do you want a kitten in a watering can?” he replied. “Is that what I’m supposed to have bought you?”

And that was how I discovered that I am not too cool for Valentine’s Day. Many of us try, of course, but few truly have the steely, ice-hearted resolve needed to look a day specially devoted to love and affection and snogging and being told you’re lovely right in the face and say, “Pffft. Lame.” Commercialised crap it might be, but so are Cadbury’s crème eggs and don’t try telling me you’ve never looked into their yellow and white fondant hearts and briefly thought, “this is true happiness.”

There was the Valentine’s Day at uni where I swore I was happy doing nothing, then baked a chocolate cake the size of my head and wept into my Collected Works of Chaucer alone at the kitchen table for three hours. There was the one where the object of my crush asked me out, only for us to end up eating marmalade sandwiches and playing Monopoly with his sister.

And then there were all the others; the juvenile years of hoping to find a pink envelope snuck into my desk or classroom tray (I never did, which is fine because looking back on it, I was… well, a child) followed by the four-year tumbleweed of high school, during which our likeliest male Valentine was the caretaker’s son, to whom we had never spoken and about whom we, naturally, made up a two-verse song.

But all along the way I must have known that at some point I’d get to make lamb shanks for a non-imaginary man, while wearing a dress with hearts all over it. Now I’m crossing my fingers for a sunset, a kitten in a watering can, Judi Dench or all of the above - but flowers will do.

Pfft.

Lame.

In which Knowles bowls us over

image: alancross.ca

I’m writing this on Monday evening, having spent the day in a sort of Beyoncé trance. Or Beyoncé trancé, if you will. My knowledge of the Superbowl still doesn’t extend any further than “weird rugby with more adverts than action”, but I’ve watched Beyoncé’s half time performance five times in a bid to learn all the choreography.

It was a performance that made you want to go beyond the bounds of conventional description and use adjectives you would usually use to talk about a ship, or a particularly fine showjumper. Magnificent. Tremendous.  An absolute triumph of stagecraft, vocal gymnastics, and actual gymnastics. A rendition of Halo that made me cry at my desk. And thighs. A pair of thighs like no other, except actually enough like lots of other thighs to have women round the world sighing and reaching happily for a Twix.

As true, solid gold megastars go, they don’t come much finer than B – she’s the perfect recipe of talent, production, mystery (was she really flashing Illuminati symbols during that performance, or was she just having a nice stretch?), down-to-earth-ness (the Tumblr of home photos that featured at least three vaguely unflattering angles) and having shimmering skin that looks as if it would taste like a Werther’s Original.

But of course this means that just like all other solid gold megastars, for everything she does that you love, there will be another thing that makes you squint at a computer screen and go, “Whaaaa?”

This week, that trade off is Beyoncé storming the Superbowl (hurrah!) then announcing she’s coming to perform in the UK in April (hurrah!) as part of a tour called… The Mrs Carter Show. And there’s the “whaaa?”.

Mrs Carter? Oh yes. You’re married, we get it. He liked, it, so he put a ring on it. Sigh.

I’ll accept that despite being a celebrity of stratospheric influence, it isn’t her responsibility to personally empower each young female fan in the world. She didn’t sign up for that. Fine. But it’s frustrating to see someone who could be such a powerful force for feminism make so many odd concessions.

Like last month’s interview for American GQ, in which she declared, “I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men,” next to a seven-page spread in which she’s almost naked throughout. So near… and yet actually quite far.

Make no mistake, it’s not about saying what she should and shouldn’t do – just “wouldn’t it be fantastic if she did, and didn’t?” One day soon, perhaps, Beyoncé will push it further and make the kind of statement that really will help us Run the World (Girls).

But for now, at least we can sit back and enjoy the show.

In which it's my food and I'll Instagram if I want to

According to The New York Times this week, the trend for amateur food photography has reached unacceptable levels, leading some of the city's top restaurants to ban it altogether.

NY hotspots Momofuku Ko and Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare have been some of the first to implement a ban, arguing that over-zealous camerawork is distracting for the chefs and other diners, with happy snappers using flash, standing on chairs and even bringing tripods to dinner, all in an attempt to capture the ultimate gastro-boast.

While some might applaud a backlash against our Instagramming impulses, I've added to my ever-increasing list of Things Restaurants Need to Get the Hell Over (alongside no-bookings policies and 'foam'). In our shaky economic climate, shouldn't restaurants be glad of a little free publicity - even if it's via someone's Pinterest page rather than a critic's column?

Besides, manners work both ways. While watching the person next to your laboriously photograph every course might be irritating, I'd say shaming any customer who reaches for their camera phone is far more damaging to the ambiance. Just like those stories of the Queen drinking finger bowls to avoid embarrassing her dinner guests, I've always thought that the mark of a truly classy restaurant is staff who make you feel at ease, whatever the total bill.

Last year at both haute cuisine Roganic and the notoriously booked-up Dabbous, waiters were perfectly happy for me to snap my food and preserve the memories. Likewise at Heston Blumenthal's Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental, where staff also looked on smiling as we all rotated plates every third bite to make sure we'd tasted the whole menu.

Of course, I'm arguing for discreet iPhone snapping, not a half-hour session with a lighting director. Truly antisocial behaviour deserves a ticking off; if you're going fully Blow Up over a plate of pulled pork then it's fair for staff to have a quiet word, just as it would be for any other activity than genuinely disturbs other diners (here I'd like to nominate tableside frottage, and that drunk guy who once threw up next to me in Pizza Express).

But banning photos altogether smacks of self-importance, of a sort that usually has me running for the nearest burger van. How about just, y'know, trusting your paying customers to conduct themselves properly?

Besides, our slavish Instagram devotion won't last forever. Sooner or later amateur food photography will lose its novelty and we'll move onto something else, like virtual pottery or a microblogging site that features only facial expressions.

The self-important restaurants had just better hope we get bored of food photography before we get bored of them.

Football: a short play

“Shall we get some sweets for the match?” I ask.

“No,” says my boyfriend.

“Why not? You know, like at the theatre.”

“This isn’t the theatre.”

“What about the artistry? The drama? The tears? Look, they have programmes and everything. Do they say what else the footballers have been in before this? Like, The Bill?”

“No.”

“That’s a shame.”

Pause

“I think I’ll buy some Haribo. And some Minstrels. Then we’ve got a choice of chewy and chocolatey to keep us going. Perhaps I’ll have a Haribo if one team scores, and a Minstrel if the other one does. That might make it fun. Not that it won’t be fun anyway. It will be SO much fun. Yay, football.”

Pause

“Look, there’s a young hipster couple. They have dip-dyed hair and drawstring rucksacks. Let’s stand near them.”

Pause

“Do people still use clackers?”

“What?”

“Clackers. Dangerous balls on a string. From the 70s. Clackers.”

“You mean rattles.”

“I mean clackers.”

“No, rattles. People have rattles at football matches.”

“Oh. Do people still use rattles then?”

“No.”

“What about orange slices on a tray?”

“No. Have you based all of your football preconceptions on Gregory’s Girl?”

“Possibly.”

Pause

“Wait, was that a goal? A goal! Oh, in the wrong goal. Oh dear. Fiddlesticks. That was very quick.”

“Two minutes.”

“Whoops-a-daisy.”

“Quite.”

“When does the singing start? Shall we sing now, or do we have to wait until someone falls over? We could do ‘you’re not singing anymore’, except they haven’t started yet so it would feel incoherent. ”

Pause

“Why wasn’t I allowed to wear my leopard print coat?”

“I was worried people might sing at you.”

“That could have been brilliant. We could have had a musical showdown, like a snazzy Mancunian version of West Side Story. Perhaps we could be the leopards and they could be the… zebras. We could harmonise th- ooh was that another goal?”

“Yes.”

“In our goal?”

“Yes.”

Pause

“Minstrel?”

The greatest things I ever bought in HMV*

 Steps – 5,6,7,8

Whenever anyone claims the first record they ever bought was something even vaguely credible, I instantly assume they are lying. Nobody’s first record was Boys and Girls by Blur. Nobody toddled to the shop with their pocket money to buy Blondie’s Heart of Glass. Even in the 60s, when it must have been fairly hard to buy anything that wouldn’t at least gain a kitsch charm over the next half a century, I don’t believe your first record considerations branched beyond the Sound of Music soundtrack or Surfin’ Bird by The Trashmen.

So it is with no shame and a proud heart that I tell you the first record I ever bought was 5,6,7,8 by Steps. It was on cassette (99p in the first week of release, as all children of the 90s are wont to wail during quieter moments in the pub), and we performed a dance to it in Year 5 assembly.

The Tamperer – If You Buy This Record (Your Life Will Be Better)

The genius of this CD (for I had progressed to CDs by then, and even to cutting up old ones and blue-tacking them onto picture frames as a low budget mosaic) was that once you had bought it, you would have no idea whether or not it had worked, for you didn’t know what your life would have been like had you not. It was the Schrödinger’s Cat of millennial Euro pop. I performed a dance to this one in the church hall.

The Strokes – Is This It

And it WAS it, at the time and for quite a while afterwards. It remained it, until every skinny-jeaned big-haired indie ensemble had melted into one and we all ran out of energy to work out which was the real deal and went back to listening to songs from adverts and cab drivers’ radios instead. Even now the opening chords of that album still make me feel moony and adolescent. I performed dances to it, but only in grimy basement bars in my head.

The Chronicles of Narnia DVD boxset

Not the whizzy CGI faun-fests of recent years, mind, but the proper stuff. The good stuff. The 1988 version where Aslan is a dusty puppet with big glass eyes and Lucy has buck teeth and the Turkish Delight was almost certainly from Safeway.

It was bought while I was at uni, in it a fit of nostalgia for old times. Times when everything was – well, not necessarily nicer, but different. Which I suppose is how we’ll feel about HMV now, too.


*For the purpose of this article we will pretend they were all in HMV, when the real mourning should also be distributed between Woolworths, Our Price and in moments of supreme extravagance, the upstairs bit of WH Smiths.

The biggest disappointments of 2012

All in all, 2012 has been pretty darn great. A significantly above average year. The type of year that the people who make those nostalgic year-you-were-born birthday cards must breathe a sigh of relief over (2003 was a head-scratcher, right guys?).  But rather than give you a column that just says YAY THE OLYMPICS next to a hand-drawn doodle of Clare Balding and Psy the Gangnam Style man sitting on a cloud, I’ve decided to go against the grain of the year and be all negative instead. So here you are – the most disappointing moments of 2012. Hurrah!   

Netflix  

As someone who aims to spend at least 18 hours a day consuming some form of visual media, the arrival of Netflix brought with it great promise. It was cheap, it was instant and it would herald an end to streaming things in stilted two-minute bursts, pretending that the juddering picture is artistic camerawork rather than my shonky broadband connection. The reality was the online equivalent of the dvd collection you get in rented holiday cottages. The Full Monty; Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion; a copy of Hornblower that was probably free with the Sunday Express. Enjoy.   

Draw Something 

It was the hilarious digital Pictionary app that gripped the nation! For three and a half weeks, before it was bought by mobile giant Zynga, everyone stopped playing it and the company promptly lost $5 million in a month.   

Onesies  

This was a disappointment not so much in the sense of expecting much and receiving little, but in the sense that your parents are “disappointed” in you when you make a clanging error in judgment and bring shame upon the family. They started off as a logical evolution of the slanket, an experiment to see just how much snuggly cosiness an adult human can withstand before it all becomes a bit cloying. Then they grew animal ears and were adopted as ironic partywear by the sort of people who jump up and down behind TV news reporters. Comfort has never been so irritating.   

The Olympics Closing Ceremony

Being British, we sat through the first half of the closing ceremony in tense, optimistic silence, willing it to suddenly get lots better, very quickly. Then George Michael decided to use a momentously historic occasion in front of 26 million people to plug his new, unknown single, and we all exploded, turned to each other and went “this is a complete pile of horse turd isn’t it?”  

From that moment on, it was all “Emeli Sande” this and “Jessie J’s crotch” that, and we were free to vent our frustration at the closing ceremony being every bit as rubbish as the rest of the Olympics was brilliant.

Viva Forever  

Being British, we sat through the first half of Viva Forever in tense, optimistic silence, willing it to suddenly get lots better, very quickly. When the curtain went down for the interval, a tumbleweed of dismal silence swept along our row.  “Um,” said someone, eventually. “I sort of thought the Spice Girls had more songs.”   

“And better songs.”  

It turns out we only thought they did, because we were nine at the time.   

The Mayan apocalypse  

It’s only Thursday, so I’m taking a punt on this one.

In which the stockings come down

With brother no.1, Christmas 1993

I am writing this during Twitter’s annual Elf-athon, which is why I imagine you can smell candy corn wafting up from the page. Whatever it is that candy corn might be. Right now the internet is about 70% people chanting “Elf! Elf! Elf!”, giddily drunk on joy and brandy marzipan, 20% people making a lot of noise about how they are purposely NOT watching Elf, or watching Elf purely to tell everyone how little they are enjoying Elf, and 10% spam Schmolex adverts.

I’m in the giddy majority, obviously.  I’ve even cracked out Maximum Christmas Jumper, the sequined one that comes down to my knees, as opposed to Moderate Christmas Jumper and Vaguely Christmassy socks, in which to watch it. But in my heart I know all this cheer is a deflection tool. It’s because I’m hanging onto childhood traditions with all my might, before the cruel sands of passing time drag them away and I’m just left with the Queen’s speech and acid reflux.

Mother Bravo declared many years ago that we would stop doing Christmas stockings when brother no.2 was 18. At that point I was 18 and he was 11, still more or less a vessel of childlike Christmas magic, just about able to forget he knew Father Christmas doesn’t exist if he tried really, really hard.

At the time it seemed beyond reasonable. By then I would be 25, and naturally past such things. I’d probably be occupying my Christmasses with more adult pursuits, like going on ski weekends with investment bankers called Gideon. But time, as time is wont to do, has sprinted past at an Olympic pelt and now brother no.2 is 17 and I am 24 and the idea of a stocking-less Christmas just feels a bit bleak.  What next, no charades? No communal family reading of The Night Before Christmas? We all do that, right?

It was only three years ago that we stopped leaving a mince pie and glass of sherry out for Santa. It had become vaguely ridiculous, what with all members of the family more likely to stay up and drink the sherry than coo over the magical icing sugar trail by the fireplace in the morning, but still. It was sad.

The obvious answer is probably to start having babies, so that the magic of Christmas can be rekindled for a brand new generation. But I hear babies are quite a lot of effort, and I can’t keep my potted basil plant alive. Besides, we wouldn’t want anything to cause a distraction during the Big Bravo Quiz.

So I ask you, at what age is it all meant to stop? 30, you say? Ok good.

In which the princess is not a panda

We should all have guessed, of course – it was a classic deflection technique. Get a new fringe; world coos over new fringe; everybody stops monitoring your womb for five minutes and you can get discreetly pregnant. After all, nobody gets a fringe for no reason. Break up, breakdown, enormous forehead spot, spawning the future sovereign - every fringe tells a story.  

Sidestepping the vague ickiness inherent in the whole nation merrily applauding royal copulation, as though the Duke and Duchess are the Edinburgh zoo pandas, it’s sad that Kate’s chief public value, up to now having been 1. looking flawless and 2. producing an heir, will now inevitably be: looking flawless, while producing an heir.  

On the plus side, maternity wear will give me the likeliest chance I’ve ever had of ‘getting the Middleton look’. Once Kate’s swapped the nude stilettos for a nice pair of plimsolls and a smock top (or “poured her curves” into a comfy sweater dress from Hobbs, as the Daily Mail will doubtless have it), it’ll be far easier for the rest of us to match her in the style stakes. Other than accessorising with an adorable baby monarch, that is.  

But the most uncomfortable thing about the hoo-hah (the media, I mean, not a euphemism for the royal cervix) is how quick everyone is to overlook the way in which we found out. Not a dignified statement from the glowing couple, but Kate rushed to hospital with hyperemesis before the usual 12-week safety curtain has fallen.  

As a recovering emetophobe and, well, a human, I can imagine nothing grimmer than vomiting so much you have to be hospitalised. Except maybe vomiting so much you have to be hospitalised, but not before doing a few weeks of public appearances in restrictive wool coat dresses, all the while looking cheerfully, perfectly poised and maintaining the Shiniest Hair In The World for the braying vulture wake of the world’s press.  

It’s sad, then, not only that Kate is suffering but also that she and Will have had to spill the beans so early and be deprived of their exciting, private, secret-keeping time. The bit before Twitter explodes and the Daily Mail moves into her uterus and Ladbrokes start listing the odds on them naming the kid ‘LK Bennett’. The bit where they get to just be happy, nervous parents-to-be.  

Alright, she’s a pampered Duchess, while there are millions of women for whom a hospital bed and treatment to ease the suffering of pregnancy would be luxury beyond comprehension – but feeling sympathy for one person doesn’t mean you forget about everyone at the other end of the spectrum. Compassion doesn’t run out. So let’s be kind and leave them to it for a while.

In the meantime, I hear one of the Edinburgh pandas has been spotted buying Barry White records and massage oil. Keep your eyes peeled for a new hairdo, everyone.