In which a title would be giving too much away

Warning: this article contains spoilers. Meaning, it tells you what I think about some things before you might otherwise have found them out.

It has been a week of many spoilers. First came the miserable news that Helen Fielding, in an authorial power trip of George R.R. Martin proportions, has killed off Mark Darcy before the start of the new Bridget Jones book.  Mark Darcy, the perfect non-perfect man. Reincarnated from Austen, clothed in a reindeer jumper, played by Colin Firth in a turn of such solemn, understated swooniness that I carried pictures of him round in my pencil case for most of year nine.

As devoted fans (I tell people my favourite film is Some Like it Hot, but it is actually Bridget Jones’s Diary and probably will be forever) we were already worried about the prospect of a third book. Would we have Bridget tweeting? Bridget twerking? Bridget starting her own fro-yo company and selling it from a van at boutique festivals?

But the idea of Bridget’s happy ending, well, ending all together, is a twist nobody was ready for. Plus it turns out Mark’s been dead for five years already, giving us no proper mourning period - so really it’s just as well that the spoilers emerged a week early, to prepare us before we all sat down with the book and a mug of Chardonnay to have our hearts broken on the first page.

After Darcy’s death knell came a day of Breaking Bad fans shrieking over the final episode – or more accurately, Breaking Bad fans shrieking over other Breaking Bad fans shrieking over the final episode, because they hadn’t seen it yet. “SPOILERS!” comes the siren, each time someone blinks in a way that suggests they might be about to spill some details.

But what is the grace period? A day? A week? Are there still people walking around with their fingers in their ears, humming, because they don’t know who shot JR? Back when everyone watched TV at the same time, remember, there were no spoilers. In fact, people bought TV magazines to get spoilers ON PURPOSE.

Personally, I’m just not that bothered. I still regularly skip to the last page of books to find out who’s still alive – in case I die myself before I finish it. I think there’s something to be said, in an uncertain world, for knowing a bit about what’s going to happen before it does.

After all, when you think about it, restaurant reviews are really just ‘food spoilers’. Doctor’s appointments are sort of just ‘life spoilers’. Traffic reports, GDP projections, utility bills: spoilers, spoilers, SPOILERS.

“I was going to check the weather forecast,” I might say next time I arrive somewhere drenched and wearing inappropriate shoes, “but, you know, spoilers.”

In which the pudding carousel's still turning

It’s not very often that Worthing pops up in my Twitter feed. Usually because I follow 90s hero Dave Benson Phillips, or because my dad is plugging his comedy nights (Matt’s Comedy Club, Worthing’s premier/only comedy club – you should all go).

But this week I was alerted by a non-resident to something I didn’t even know about my hometown - that alongside the swish new swimming pool and distinctly above-average H&M, it can currently boast ‘Wimpy of the Year’ on Chapel Road. Wimpy of the Year! I know, I’d forgotten it existed too.

But it turns out there are still 220 of them in the UK, mainly concentrated around Surrey, Sussex, Essex and London. Despite not having eaten there since I was yea high to a seagull’s eye, Wimpy Worthing has stolen my heart from afar because it has one of the loveliest examples of a branded Facebook page I have seen in a long time. And that is coming from someone who spends half her day job working on branded Facebook pages.

I bid you, go and join the page immediately. Meet managers Nick and Charlie, marvel at the height of their rocky road sundaes, enter their competition to win a bottle of special sauce (the fewer questions asked the better) by guessing how many tables the restaurant has, and succumb to their home-fried charms.

“Have you tried one of our fantastically refreshing cheese toasties?” they ask. “No!” I cry back to the screen, “but boy, do I want to now!”

There are many other things to love about Wimpy too. The blithe optimism of a company that subtitles itself, “The Home of Fresh-Cooked, Nutritional Meals” above a picture of a burger with cheesy nachos and sour cream on top just has to be admired.

When I was young, I remember my mum considering Wimpy a more refined alternative to McDonalds, based mainly around the face they gave you actual cutlery and had that nice rotating dessert carousel. Puddings taste better when you’ve studied them intensely from all angles first, obviously.

Plus, I’m suffering from gourmet fast food fatigue syndrome. In a year where every variation on artery-blocking, truffle-infused, peanut butter-slathered, bone marrow-smeared ‘dirty’ burgers and hot dogs under the sun have been peddled through the London food scene to the point where I generally book myself two hours after lunch to lie on the floor, quietly groaning and rubbing my belly, there’s something so appealing about a nice, simple plate of calories without any trendy connotations.

So Nick and Charlie, if you’re reading this – save me a nacho burger, hash browns and a hot chocolate with cream on top. I’m coming to Wimpy Worthing next time I’m home, and I want the works.Diary of

In which Lady Mary's froideur has nothing on my flat

www.itv.com

I know it’s September now, but if I’m honest I still haven’t fully forgiven Dan Stevens for ruining Christmas.

Because we know now that it was he, and not Julian Fellowes, who demanded Cousin Matthew be killed in the last brutal minute of the Downton Abbey Christmas special, leaving 10 million viewers weeping hopelessly into their trifle, because he fancied a go at Hollywood.

“There, I knew they wouldn’t kill anyone at Christmas!” sighed my too-trusting mother, seconds before Cousin Matthew’s car rammed into what was probably the only other car on a country road for about 100 miles in 1921. It would have been more honest and less jarring if they’d just shown him getting his teeth whitened, putting on some docksiders and hopping on a plane to LA with a duty-free Toblerone under his arm. 

But despite the way they toyed with our emotions like a crumpled Quality Street wrapper, I am prepared to embrace Downton Abbey again when series four starts on Sunday – gingerly, the way you’d embrace the prodigal son who might still take your wallet when you’re not looking.

Because the truth is, I need Downton in the same way I need 100 denier opaque tights, hot water bottle and food items that can be smothered in cheese sauce then baked in the oven. It is part of my autumn/winter arsenal. Just as they say, “there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing choices”, I fully believe that being gloomy in the cold months is only because you haven’t assembled the right kit.

Here, for your reference, is everything on my autumn kit list. Yours might vary, but this is a good start:

Hot water bottle, standard size
Hot water bottle, mini size (for stowing in crevices when you go out)
Blankety socks, three pairs
Comedy sweatshirt (mine is an Adidas one that belonged to my dad in the 90s)
Friends who accept, “I’m not coming, I just got really comfy” as a valid cancellation excuse
Vodka lemsip (preventative)
A bottle of Stone’s Ginger Wine, or anything else sticky
Custard, Bird’s instant
Custard, posh from a tub
A long reaching grabber, for fetching items when you don’t want to get up from under your blanket
All the tea bags you could possibly get through between now and March
A real-time TV obsession, such as Downton Abbey or X-Factor
A time-filling TV obsession, such as re-watching all of Dawson’s Creek on Netflix
A board game obsession (recommend Settlers of Catan for maximum heat-giving tension)
A Tesco home delivery account
An Ocado home delivery account, for posher occasions
A loved one, or a cat, or a realistic body pillow shaped like a loved one. Or a cat.

In which second hand books were my (Sweet Valley) high

I feel guilty even beginning to write a tribute to bookshops in this, the same paper in which two years ago I published a love song to my Kindle so passionate that it could have made a cold, grey machine blush and go a bit squirmy.

The love hasn’t faded, either – I still love my Kindle. With it I have read more, and more widely, and more freely than I ever did before, and on this my pro-e-reader argument has always rested. More reading can’t be a bad thing, whether you’re reading off leather-bound paper or a digital screen, or a holographic image projected onto the insides of your eyelids by a computer companion who lives inside your brain (it’ll come right after hoverboots, I’m convinced).

“Besides, nobody is saying e-readers are better than books!” my speech goes. “That would be like refusing to use MP3s because vinyl looks so much nicer”. We all know real books are lovely, and we will all still want to fill our shelves with them and let people stand around examining them at parties - but when it comes down to practicality, the 5mm thick device that can cart a thousand stories away in your holiday suitcase is always going to triumph.

But then, today, I started thinking about Jabberwocky. The mock-Tudor shop on the corner of Goring Road, Worthing, centre of all imagination as I knew it from the age of eight to 13. Jabberwocky smelled the way all secondhand bookshops should smell – of musty, yellowing pages and old electric heaters and cups of tea and biscuits and Sunday afternoons.

I can’t lie and say I went to Jabberwocky for the classics. They had a great selection of Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s books, so much funnier and far less sissy than Malory Towers, but the pocket money clasped in my sweaty palm had a different goal. It was to get me a slice of the States. Jabberwocky fed my pre-teen craving for all things American, with its seemingly endless supply of Sweet Valley High and The Babysitter’s Club paperbacks.

They never cared how long you lingered, thumbing your way through all the rude bits in Judy Blume before your mum came back from Co-op with the carrots. I think I imagined I would shop there as an adult too, and take my own daughter to get her fix of hand-me-down happiness – but Jabberwocky closed, years ago. I think these days it’s a plant shop.

So it’s all very well championing e-readers as an adult, but my eight year old self would never have had one, even if they’d been invented back then. For kids with a few precious pounds or nothing at all, bookshops and libraries are still the gateway to a hobby that will last them a lifetime.

Cosy, welcoming and accessible, those bookshops of my youth paid it forward in spades – which is more than we can say for Amazon, I guess.

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.