How to Be a Woman

  Ten minutes later, I had it explained to me that, as a devout Christian, this was literally the first time she had ever heard the word ‘fuck’.

  I was similarly lacklustre at Cathy and John’s wedding, when Cathy’s dad gave me a tour of their beautiful, all-white house, as I trailed along behind, swigging red wine.

  ‘And this is my favourite view,’ Cathy’s dad said, as we reached the master bedroom, and he strode over to the window. ‘On a clear day, you can see right down the valley.’

  Then a bat flew in through the window, and right into my face.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had a bat fly into your face, but you don’t have an enormous amount of time to work out your coping technique. You kind of … ride on instinct. My instinct, it turned out, was to scream ‘WHAT THE FUCKING?’, and hurl my red wine right across the world’s whitest room.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Cathy’s dad said, with the restraint and politeness of his kind. ‘I’ll get some tissues.’

  ‘FUCK!’ I shouted, running down the hallway. ‘FUCK! I’m on this. FUCK!’

  Bombing into the kitchen, I returned with a bottle of white wine, and started sloshing it around, in a dedicated manner.

  ‘White wine gets red wine stains out!’ I shouted. ‘I saw it on telly!’

  I maniacally started pouring the white wine onto the now-scarlet rug, and scrubbing it with a tea towel.

  Cathy’s dad came across the room – slightly faster than I thought a man of his age would be capable of – and gently prised the bottle from my hand. He stared at it – now empty – for a moment.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, regretfully. ‘The ’93 Alsace Grand Cru.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Still,’ he said, with enormous grace, touching the bottle with his fingertips. ‘It was a little too warm to drink.’

  It took an hour and a half for a minicab to arrive from Tiverton. I spent the waiting time behind a barn, eating cheese to sober up.

  5) YOU. But, at the end of the day, who really cares how many people you make miserable by evacuating them out onto a freezing lawn in Coventry two days after Christmas, putting them in a fairy-ring sing-song, or making them suicidal in a bad jacket? It’s your big day, after all! The bride! You deserve to have a single day where it’s all about YOU! THIS IS YOUR BIG DAY! IT’S THE BEST DAY OF YOUR LIFE!

  There are two hitches with this. The first is that you should always be distrustful of days that are preordained to be legendary: a sad trail of disappointing New Year’s Eves, Christmas Days, romantic mini-breaks, first shags and birthdays should tell us this. Aside from getting my mother tanked on White Russians, the quickest and easiest way to kill the fun good-times is to put a massive pressure of expectation on it in advance. Really, anything a woman is assured should be ‘the best day of your life’ should be run from a mile. It rarely works out well. Recall that another day which is often touted as ‘the best of your life’ is when you give birth to your children. I hardly need remind you of how likely that is to end with you calling out to a Godless heaven for as much morphine as your body can handle without you actually having a cardiac arrest.

  And secondly, I don’t think this demented wedding lust does our collective image any good. It makes us look like our frame of reference for fun is very small. I feel a little like Del Boy falling sideways through the bar here but – ‘Play it cool, girls, play it cool.’ When I hear women talking about how their wedding is going to be/was the best day of their life, I can’t help but think, You just haven’t taken enough MDMA in a field at 3am, love.

  All weddings seem to boil down to acting like Michael Jackson at the height of his insanity – pretending to be a celebrity for one, insanely expensive day. And we know why the celebrities have pet monkeys and stupid shoes and the Elephant Man’s skeleton and a funfair and swimming pools shaped like guitars. BECAUSE THEY’RE DYING INSIDE. THEY’RE STARING INTO THE VOID. They have seen, for one second, their own, ultimate, mote-like inconsequentiality in a universe that is endless, and responded by hiring someone to be in charge of wrangling the straw in their soft drinks. We communally pity these people as damaged idiots.

  And yet, women now think of it as our ‘reward’ to spend one incredibly expensive day acting like these twats, before biting the bullet, settling down and never having another ‘special’ day again. Of course, a great deal of not having any more special days, ever again, comes down to the fact you’ve just spunked £21,000 on 16,000 vol-au-vents and a ‘light jazz’ band – but the symbolism of it all is unbearably potent.

  With stuff like this, you have to look at the men. Do they have one, special day where they feel like kings of the world – and then go back to lives of quiet drudgery? No. They go off and please themselves constantly: as Germaine Greer pointed out in The Whole Woman, they fill their spare time with pleasingly non-productive activities like fishing, golf, listening to records, playing on the Xbox and pretending to be goblins in World of Warcraft. They don’t have this insane, pent-up need to spend one day pretending to be Princess Diana (in the fun years, obviously. Not the throwing-yourself-down-the-stairs bit. Or the bit where Camilla came in and ruined everything).

  Women, meanwhile, spend their spare time taking on the never-ending list of self-improvements, or domestic tasks: housework, homework, counselling the troubled, worming the cat, doing pelvic floor exercises, trying to be inventive with cabbage, and exfoliating ingrowing hairs – somehow mollified by having that one ‘best day of their lives’.

  Surely, women, we would happily exchange one ‘special’ day for a life filled with more modest pleasures?

  Or perhaps we should just junk the whole idea of getting married in the first place. I’m generally against anything where you’re supposed to change your name. When else do you get named something else? On joining a nunnery, or becoming a porn star. As an ostensibly joyful celebration of love, that’s bad company to be in.

  CHAPTER 11

  I Get Into Fashion!

  ‘I bought a dress today!’ I say, as my husband walks through the door. ‘A NEW DRESS! NEW DRESS NEW DRESS NEW DRESS!’

  It is a brown, cheesecloth, peasant-y dress – ‘TWELVE POUNDS, Pete – TWELVE POUNDS!’– which I bought from the market – ‘IT’S FROM THE MARKET, LOVE!’ – on Seven Sisters Road earlier that day. The purchase has excited me hugely – it is the first new item of clothing I’ve bought for nearly two years.

  At the age of 24, I am still not really used to buying clothes. Not only are the clothes I covet at the time – crinolines, tippets, bonnets, red flannel petticoats, button-up black patent booties, damask ballgowns, shagreen gloves, fox-fur muffs and calico nightdresses – not that readily available on Holloway Road – but I have also been stony-ass broke for some time.

  Although I had been earning a decent wage as a journalist, it turns out I had made another one of the big miscalculations of my life: believing that Income Tax is, like menstruation, optional. I haven’t paid a penny of tax for the first four years of my working life.

  ‘I thought they’d ring you up if they wanted it!’ I wail, to the accountant I’d just hired. ‘Or that they’d send you a letter, saying “Guess what – it’s Tax O’Clock!” or something. But they never said anything. The Inland Revenue have not been chatty.’

  My accountant went on to explain how the burden of disclosure rests with the individual, rather than the Revenue, and that I would need to supply all my bank statements, wage slips and expense claims since 1994 – but I wasn’t really listening.

  In part, this was because I know a great many of my bank statements, wage slips and expense claims got left in a skip in Camden in 1996, along with an armchair I now regretted, in retrospect, discarding – but it’s also because I was calculating just how poor I was going to be for the foreseeable future.

  Even with my shonky maths, I estimated that I was going to have to put every penny of my income into paying off my back-tax for at least two years, and that I would have to beg Pete to supp
ort me financially in exchange for bread-and-butter pudding, jokes and sex.

  ‘Yesthat’sfine,’ Pete said, moving me into his house, giving me his spare front-door key. ‘Thatsoundsabsolutelyfine.’

  For the next 24 months, I am as poor as a church mouse, but I do get a lot of opportunity to work on my stand-up routines.

  Two years later, and I’m still going on about the dress. I’m twirling around in it like Scarlett O’Hara in her ballgown.

  ‘It was only 12 pounds!’ I say, guiltily. ‘Twelve pounds! Although it felt lovely to buy something new, I won’t need another dress for years now! I can dress it up and dress it down with accessories! It really will be value for money. That’s my celebratory spending-spree finished.’

  ‘You know,’ Pete says, polishing off his 914th bread-and-butter pudding, ‘all other women buy a lot more clothes than you. A lot. Every lunchtime, all the women in my office come back with something new in a bag. Now you’ve paid off that tax, I think you could buy more clothes, to be honest. If you want. I mean, I don’t care what you wear. You can wear nothing at all if you want. Can I have some more bread-and-butter pudding, please?’

  The next day, while Pete’s at work, I think about what he said. All the other women buy lots more clothes, I think. They have lots more clothes than me. They are doing things differently. I’m not doing what the women do.

  I go upstairs to the bedroom, and look in my wardrobe. Here is the sum total of my clothing, at the age of 24: a black velvet floor-length goth dress, which I bought when I was 17, and now has pile-less, bald patches on the elbow, from ‘wear’. Two pairs of trousers – one black, one navy. A free promotional T-shirt by the band Salad, which has the word ‘Salad’ on it, which I like to wear whilst preparing, or eating, sausages. A green chenille cardigan from Marks & Spencer, which is so nice I’ve twice had to steal it back off my sister Col when she comes for a visit. A Victorian-style nightie, which I often style out as daywear. And my swimming costume.

  I’m not being a proper woman, I think, staring at my wardrobe. All the other women are ‘putting together outfits’ and ‘working on their looks’. I am just ‘putting together the cleanest things’. Now I’ve got some money again, I should sort this out.

  It seems that being a woman is very expensive and time-consuming. My innocence about this is incongruous, given my age, but total. I come from grunge, and then Britpop – scenes where you boast about how little you spent on an outfit (‘Three quid! From a jumble sale!’ ‘Ooooh, pricey – I found this jacket in a skip. On a dead man. Under a fox carcass’) and taking pride in ‘getting ready to go out’ consists of little more than washing your face, putting on your Doc Martens/trainers, and applying black Barry M nail varnish, £1, on the bus into town.

  But now it seems you find ‘the dress’ – but then ‘the dress’ must have ‘the belt’, and a complementary but not overly matching bag must be found, which works with not only the correct hosiery but also something to ‘throw over’, if you become chilly. It’s like fucking Dragon’s Quest – an endless list of things you’ve got to run around and try and find; possibly in a cave, or under a sage. The thing you ‘throw over’ can’t be an anorak, or a picnic rug, salvaged from under the stairs, by the way, but a deconstructed cardigan, hacking-style jacket, £200 pashmina, or a ‘shrug’, which unfamiliar item seems, to my untrained eyes, to be a shrunken cardigan made by a fool. It all looks bloody knackering. It’s going to cut into my bread-and-butter-pudding-making time severely.

  All of this comes to a head in shoes – specifically, heels. I’ve spent my whole life in trainers, or boots, but it’s very clear that, if I am to properly make a go of my twenties, I will just have to go out and get some heels. The women’s magazines I read are all unequivocal about heels: they are a non-negotiable part of being a woman, along with the potential to lactate, and the XX chromosome. Women are supposed to adore heels more than they adore their own bodies, or thoughts. They’re also supposed to have a great many more shoes than body, or thoughts. Unlike your arse, or thoughts of revolution, you just can’t have too many shoes!!!!!!!!!!!

  ‘No one messes with a woman in heels,’ one feature in Elle concludes. ‘They are your greatest weapons in the style wars.’ This shit sounds serious.

  The next day, I go out – determined to give being a grown-up woman a try – and purchase my first pair of high heels. I still haven’t quite got it – the heels I finally, triumphantly, purchase are sky-blue jelly sandals with a block heel from Barratts, £9.99. They make my feet sweat so much I squeak slightly as I walk – like I’ve used mice as insoles, and they’re all slowly being crushed to death. They’re also quite painful in both the toe and heel area – but no matter! I am in heels! I am a woman!

  That night, trying to negotiate a staircase in them at a gig, I stumble, and fall right on top of Graham Coxon from Blur, spilling my whisky and coke all down his leg.

  ‘ARGH!’ Graham shouts.

  ‘These are my great weapons in the style wars,’ I say, sadly. ‘No one messes with a woman in heels. I am a woman.’

  ‘ARGH!’ Graham says again, staring at his wet leg. ‘You fucking idiot.’

  I do not give in easily, though. Thirteen years on and I now have both a great many more pairs of high heels and, indeed, a great many more anecdotes about how wearing them has ended badly for me. In fact, I have a whole box full of such shoes under my bed. Each pair was bought as a down payment on a new life I had seen in a magazine, and subsequently thought I would attain, now I had the ‘right’ shoes. Here they are. Here are all the shoes I don’t wear:

  1) Silver, ankle-strap wedges from Kurt Geiger. I wore them: once, at an awards ceremony. I got three compliments – YES – but also noticed that my gait in them was slightly less feminine and confident than that of Dame Edna Everage, 82, who was also at the event.

  2) Red velvet court shoes, Topshop. Worn them: once, to a birthday dinner in Soho. Despite the fact I was sitting down all evening, the shoes were so tight and painful that I had to ease my feet out of them. Subsequently, things got a bit ‘interesting’ and, when I woke up in the morning, I was only wearing one of them. The other, I vaguely remembered putting on top of a toilet cistern ‘to be safe’, in that all-night Spanish bar round the back of the HMV Megastore on Oxford Street.

  3) Grey velvet court, exactly the same as the red velvet court, save the colour. ‘Good to have this versatile shoe in a neutral colour, as well!’, I thought. Man, I’m good at buying shoes!

  4) Peacock-blue three-inch heels with ruffle on the front. At the party I wore them to, I ended up talking to Noddy Holder from Slade – someone who, as Wolverhampton Royalty, I’ve spent my whole life waiting to meet. Alas, however enthusiastically I tried to immerse myself in Noddytopia, it was an undeniable fact that, by now, my feet were hurting so badly I was standing alternately on one, then the other, with tears in my eyes. Eventually I had to excuse myself from talking to my idol, and sit in a corridor, massaging the balls of my feet, and wincing.

  5) Same again, but in white. ‘Good to have this versatile shoe in a neutral colour, as well!’ I thought. Man, I’m good at buying shoes!

  6) A pair of curly-toed Turkish slippers in silver-grey and berry-red. Like 90 per cent of purchases women make of unwearably batshit gear, in my head, I thought, The kind of thing Kate Moss would slip into, when popping out for fags, as I handed over my debit card. And, like 90 per cent of women after they have done this, I had to subsequently admit that what has a reptilian, boho edge on Kate Moss looks like that game where you have to put on a hat, gloves and scarf before eating a bar of chocolate with a knife and fork, on me. But in a bad way.

  There are another six pairs – gold gladiator sandals that work by way of a toe tourniquet; brown ankle boots that, overnight, went from ‘grungey’ to ‘looking like something an uptight woman called Barbara would wear’; those Doc Marten T-bar shoes that were so heavy, I genuinely thought I was developing ME the first – and, subsequently, last
– time I wore them.

  And yet, my understanding is that my collection of Shoes I Don’t Wear – lined up neatly in a box under my bed, looking like a Terracotta Army, Size 6 – is a fairly modest one, within the spectrum of Women’s Unworn Shoe Collections. I have one friend who has 27 pairs of heels she can’t bear to part with – and yet has worn only once, twice or not at all. All women have one of these caches of shoes hidden, somewhere, in the house.

  Why are all these shoes unworn? Ladies, I’m going to put it on the line. I’m going to say what, over the 13 years, I have gradually realised, and what we all secretly knew anyway, the first time we put heels on: that there’s only ten people in the world, tops, who should actually wear heels. And six of those are drag queens. The rest of us just need to … give up. Surrender. Finally acquiesce to what nature is telling us. We can’t walk in them. WE CANNOT WALK IN THE DAMN THINGS. We might just as well be stepping out in anti-gravity boots, or roller skates.

  The unwearability of high heels is self-evidently all around us – coming to a head at the average wedding reception, a uniformly high-heeled occasion. In our minds, we see it as a serene and elegant gathering of women in their finest. One of the big chances of the year to pretend you’re at the Oscars, in your stilettos. In actuality, of course, it looks like the annual AGM of the Tina Turner Impressionist Union – women staggering around in unaccustomed verticality; foot-flesh spilling out over tight, unkind satin; toes going numb for days afterwards.

  The very few who can walk elegantly in them look amazing, of course – walking in heels is a skill as impressive as being able to tightrope walk, or blow smoke rings. I admire them. I wish them well. I wish I could be them. But they are a tiny minority. For everyone else – the vast majority – we look as inversely elegant as we think we will when we purchase them. We waddle, we go over on our ankles, we can’t dance, and we wince incessantly, whilst hissing, ‘These SODDING shoes. My feet are killing me.’