“Lolita didn’t diet. But today, children twelve or younger are conscious of the width of their hips, the length of their legs, even the slight curve of their stomachs,” I started, cheerfully, although God knows why—I hadn’t actually read Lolita. She was the only twelve-year-old I could think of, I suspect; apart from Laura Ingalls, who wouldn’t really have been appropriate in this context. I just knew Lolita was generally “victim-y,” so chucked her in here. This is what you do, when you know absolutely fucking nothing.
“I had a mini-skirt like Julia Roberts. I thought I should have the legs to go with it,” said Eloise, who I’d just totally made up.
I’d also seen an episode of Casualty where a ballerina eats toilet paper, so I put that in there, too.
The piece ran in March 1992, and astonishingly did not change anyone’s views on anorexia—not even the quote from “a GP” (who I’d made up) going, “These nineteen-year-olds come in here and ask to be put on the Pill, and I’m inclined to pat them on the head and give them Smarties, instead,” which is obviously what I, deep down, thought would cure anorexia at the time. Smarties.
Or here’s another piece I managed to blag at The Observer, around the same time—1993—entitled “We’ve Never Had It So Bad.”
“What’s so great about being a teenager in the material world of the nineties?” asks Caitlin Moran.
This really was a symphonic piece of bullshit. In the piece—600 words long—I lamented that I and my friend (“She’s sixteen—six and ten years on the planet, four leap years—and says her life terrifies her because it seems so long until she’ll die.”) were being culturally crushed by the Baby Boomers.
“Sometimes we climb up onto the five-story parking garage, and throw bits of gravel at the people below, and my friend will shout ‘WHO AM I?’ and I laugh until I cry because no one can hear us, and no one can tell her.”
It’s specious nonesense from beginning to end: for starters, you can’t get access to the roof of any five-story parking garage in Wolverhampton: they’re all completely sealed off, clearly to prevent health & safety issues exactly like the one I’m lying about here. And I honestly don’t think any teenager has ever shouted “WHO AM I????” to the sky, except on dramas on Channel 4, which is exactly where I’d got this from.
“She has no identity, save that which advertisers sell her,” I continue piously, castigating the whole advertising industry; wholly ignoring the fact that I love the song from the Bran Flakes ad (“They’re tasty/Tasty/Very very tasty/They’re very tasty!”) and am quite emotionally invested in the romantic plotline to the Gold Blend couple.
I’d like to quote you more of the terrible pieces I wrote around this time—thrashing around, desperately, for something, anything to write about—but I can’t, because this is where my Fleet Street career ground to a halt for a while. A sum total of five pieces before everyone realized—including, finally, me—that I had absolutely nothing to write about. Or, more truthfully, that I did—but I just didn’t know what it was yet.
I went underground (back to bed) and tried to work out how I could get a job writing when I knew—and I’m being generous here—absolutely nothing about the world. It took a while, but by the time I was sixteen, I had a plan.
So I’d finally figured out I couldn’t write about my own life, because I haven’t done anything. I was going to have to write about other, older people, who’ve actually done stuff, instead. I was going to become a rock critic—because I read NME and Melody Maker, and they are publications where writers will use words like “jaguary” and “jubilee” and “shagreen” while describing why they do or don’t like U2, and I think this is probably something I could have a go at.
I write test reviews of my five favorite albums—Hats by Blue Nile, Pills’n’Thrills’n’Bellyaches by Happy Mondays, High Land, Hard Rain by Aztec Camera, Reading, Writing & Arithmetic by the Sundays, and Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction—and send them to the reviews editor, in an envelope that I carefully scent with Lemon Essence from the kitchen cupboard, to act in lieu of a lemon sponge in a suitcase. I am still working on the presumption that people will only give me work if they somehow associate me with baked goods. Perhaps it’s this kind of erroneous assumption you get educated out of you at Oxbridge.
The reviews editor calls me the next day and asks me to do a test review of a local gig. When it’s printed, I get £28.42, and become the freelance stringer for the Midlands area: Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Derby. If there’s a band who’ve sold around 2,000 records playing in the backroom of a pub within twenty miles of Spaghetti Junction, I am all over it. I am now, vaguely, in charge of indie in West Mercia.
After I had been working at Melody Maker for just seven months—working my patch, filing my reviews, stacking up those £28.42s—I wrote a review of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’s new album, entitled 522.
In the hipster pecking order of the time, Ned’s—as their fans called them—were pretty much the lowest of the low: a group of lads from Stourbridge—the Midlands! My patch!—barely in their twenties, who made amiable, slightly slack-jawed, very white rackets for amiable, slightly slack-jawed, very white youths to leap around to. In terms of funk, or glamor, they rated level with Bovril, or the clog. Additionally, their career was past its best. They were on the wane.
Nonetheless, a lack of funk, hotness or success is not, and never has been, a crime. It’s not even against park by-laws. Therefore, the thermonuclear savaging I proceeded to give that album, over 480 words, was as unnecessary and unprovoked as Chewbacca strafing the local duck pond with the Millennium Falcon.
Actually, I wasn’t using weaponry a quarter as sophisticated as the Millennium Falcon. It was more like Chewbacca falling out of the Millennium Falcon, then wading into the duck pond and kicking the ducks, then stamping on the ducks, then punching the ducks—alarmed, innocent ducks, now all quacking as the Wookiee flailed at them, wholly unprovoked, and who didn’t leave the pond until the water was covered in tail-feathers.
“Hello, boys,” I opened—addressing the band directly. “Funerals are a bummer, aren’t they? Career in a coffin, all we have to do is chuck a bit of earth around, and troop through a thick grey gauze of rain to the wake, and get pissed. I have been chosen to stand, blearily, at the wake, and say a few words at the passing of your ability to ever sell records again. What can I say? The words of one of the great poets—Liam from Flowered Up—seem appropriate: “FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF AND DIE!”
Eighteen years later, and I am still so mortified by what I wrote, I can only look at the middle section through my fingers: “Putrid . . . anthems to nothing . . . stink . . . dirges . . . nasty scribbles . . . no-one gives a flying fuck . . .”
I accused them of being sexless, tuneless, fuckless, revolting: responsible for a musical climate where bands crawled on their bellies with three chords, rather than flying with the aspirations of gods. I was a total wanker.
I ended with: “1994 was the year we waved goodbye to Kurt Cobain and That Bloke Out of Doctor Feelgood. Feel like making it a hat-trick, Jonn(nnnnnnnnn)?”
Yes, that’s right—I ended an album review by wishing death on the lead singer, either by the methodology of Kurt Cobain, who’d shot himself in April, or the lead singer of Doctor Feelgood, who’d died of cancer in August. And spelt his name “sarcastically,” to boot.
The review itself was sub-headlined, “Jesus, Caitlin—there are gonna be repercussions about this one.” As if the magazine itself was alarmed by what I’d written.
Looking back now, I can see what I was doing. I was a seventeen-year-old, working in an office otherwise full of adults. I was a cub, savaging some prey, and bringing back the carcass to the pack elders, to impress them. I wanted to make my mark.
However, even the most cursory examination of the situation shows us that I was not bringing back a mighty Arctic fox. I had just come back with a couple of sa
d, surprised ducks instead.
And of course, we can also see that I was not a white-toothed wolf-cub, either—but a puffin, or a penguin, or a giant hen: some perambulatory creature not built for pugilism. I would never go up to someone at a party and be horrible to their face—so why was I doing it in a magazine? I was just thinking of what I wrote as “some copy”—some space filled on a page, with whatever came into my head at the time.
But of course, it’s not just “copy.” There’s no such thing as “copy.” Putting things on paper doesn’t make it matter less. Putting things on paper makes it matter more.
The bottom line is, I believed I was a nice person—the kind of person who brought a lemon sponge cake to The Observer, and would pick worms off the road, and put them onto the grass with a cheerful “There you go, mate”—but I appeared to be pretending to be a cunt. Why was I doing that? There are enough cunts in the world already. We don’t need any more. The only kind of person who would pretend to be a cunt probably is a cunt. This faux-cuntiness was a cunt’s game. I decide I was going to stop.
I’d like to pretend I worked all this out myself, in the weeks after the Ned’s Atomic Dustbin review was printed. That I quietly figured out what my principles were, and who I wanted to be, in a determined, intellectual re-imagining of myself: a rebirth through philosophy, and reason.
In reality, the man who was to eventually be my husband took me to one side at a gig a week later and said, in his mild way, “That review was a bit . . . off.”
And that was when I realized—in a huge, anxious rush—that I couldn’t do what so many of the writers I enjoyed—A. A. Gill, Julie Burchill and Hunter S. Thompson—did. That gleeful arson, those cool assassinations. I was not, like them, crouched behind my typewriter, picking off marauders with a pearl-handled pistol. I couldn’t manage the daily rages of the columnists who despaired over the parking restrictions, and their tax bills, and the immigrants, and the gay dads, and the BBC, and women’s fat arses in the wrong dresses, and the health and safety regulations. I couldn’t handle the grief.
What I was built for, I felt, was something a bit more . . . herbivore. As I started to reassess my writing style, I thought about what I liked doing—what gave me satisfaction—and realized the primary one was just . . . pointing at things. Pointing out things I liked, and showing them to other people—like a mum shouting, “Look! Moo-cows!” as a train rushes past a farm. I liked pointing at things, and I liked being reasonable and polite about stuff. Or silly. Silly was very, very good. No one ever got hurt by silly.
Best of all was being pointedly silly about serious things: politics, repression, bigotry. Too many commentators are quick to accuse their enemies of being evil. It’s far, far more effective to point out that they’re acting like idiots, instead. I was up for idiot-revealing.
“I am just going to be polite and silly, and point at cool things,” I decided. “When I started writing, I would have killed to have one thing to write about. Now, I have three. Politeness and silliness, and pointing. That’s enough.”
So, yes. If this collection is anything, it is, I hope, either silly, or polite, or pointing at something cool. There is some vaguely serious stuff in here—recently, I have enjoyed taking to my writing bureau, and writing about poverty, benefit reform and the coalition government in the manner of a shit Dickins, or Orwell, but with tits.
The fifteen-year-old wannabe journalist in Wolverhampton, who was desperately looking for something to write about, actually had a million things to write about, all around her: housing projects, and life on benefits, and the wholly altered state that is being grindingly, decades-long poor—too broke to travel to another town, or escape from lingering, low-level dampness, fear and boredom.
But—perhaps in reaction to all this—my underlying, abiding belief is that the world is, still, despite everything, a flat-out amazing place. This book is a collection of instances of how brilliant the world often is—written by a lifelong fan of existence, and the Earth. Yes, there might still be speed bumps; and paperwork; this world can be irksome, and even I—essentially Pollyanna, with a C-section scar—have had a couple of rants in here. I will be honest with you: there is not much in here to increase the pride levels of Nazis, internet trolls, or Lola from Charlie and Lola. That crayoned harpy must die. And I will actually stand by that death wish. Unlike the one I levelled at poor John from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, to whom I now—eighteen years later—apologize to, while lying on my belly in abject prostration and mortification. I am so, so sorry. Tell your mum I’m sorry, too. She must have been dead upset.
But, generally, this is a manifesto for joy. When I got my second chance at being a journalist—being taken on by The Times as a columnist when I was eighteen, in my new persona as the “pointing cheerful person”—I determined to use the opportunity to racket around as many exhilarating things as possible. As a consequence, in this collection, I go to a sex-club with Lady Gaga; smoke fags with Keith Richards; walk twenty-six miles in the rain, eating cake; become an internet dwarf called “Scottbaio,” then accidentally die, on air, on the Richard & Judy show; and confess to, once, having trapped a wasp under a glass, then got it stoned.
The motto I have penned on my knuckles is that this is the best world we have—because it’s the only world we have. It’s the simplest math ever. However many terrible, rankling, peeve-inducing things may occur, there are always libraries. And rain-falling-on-sea. And the moon. And love. There is always something to look back on, with satisfaction, or forward to, with joy. There is always a moment where you boggle at the world—at yourself—at the whole, unlikely, precarious business of being alive—and then start laughing.
And that’s usually when I make a cup of tea, and start typing.*
*Actually, it’s not. I usually leave it for at least another three hours of pissing around on the Topshop website, attacking in-growing hairs on my leg with tweezers, and looking at dream apartments in New York, before panicking, and beginning to hammer at stuff a scanty hour and thirty-seven minutes before deadline—but that’s not as an inspiring sentence to end on. It kind of ruins things, tbh.
Part One
CAFFEINE, GHOSTBUSTERS, AND MARIJUANA
In which I explain why Ghostbusters is the greatest film in the world, watch Michael Jackson’s memorial service in a state of some astonishment, and keep the Prime Minister waiting. But I start where I always end: in bed, confusing my husband.
I thought long and hard about what the first piece should be in what is the nearest I will ever get to releasing a The Beatles Blue Album, or The Beatles Red Album. Some incredibly righteous piece about the welfare system? A rhapsodic eulogy to how much I want to bang Sherlock in Sherlock? Or a carefully-weighed take-down of trans-phobia, sexism and homophobia, as mediated through the unlikely, yet ultimately fitting, imagery of the Moon Landings? Don’t worry—they’re all in here. Especially the Sherlock thing. There’s a lot of Sherlock love in here. In many ways, this book might as well be called “Deduce THIS, Sexlock Holmes!” with a picture of me licking his meerschaum, cross-eyed and screaming.
However, in the end, I ignored the more worthwhile, culturally valid and heart-felt stuff in favor of a ratty, decades-long, rumbling semi-feud with my husband instead.
CALL ME PUFFIN
12:17 AM. We are just going to sleep. I can hear Pete’s breathing is modulating into REM. In the loft, the boiler powers down into standby mode. The duvet is perfectly snugged in. The day is done.
“I love you, Bear,” I say.
“Mvv mmo too,” he replies. There is a silence. It is followed by a second silence. Then:
Me: “Bear. It’s funny, isn’t it? Bear. I call you Bear.”
Pete: “Mmrg.”
Me: “But you . . . you have no nickname for me. It would be nice if you had a nickname for me.”
Pete: “Marrrp.”
Me: “Beca
use, you know, it’s been sixteen years now. I’ve had lots of slightly noisome nicknames for you—Bear, Pie, Mr. Poo, The Wurbles—but you’ve never had a nickname for me.”
Pete: “Mrrrrrb.”
Me: “I mean, a nickname arises out of a need, doesn’t it? To rename something in order to display ownership; or indicate that you see in someone an aspect that no one else can, and which demands unique acknowledgment. So not having a nickname for me kind of suggests you would quite happily let me be stolen by tinkers; or that you can’t really tell the difference between me, my sisters and Moira Stuart.”
Pete, unhappily: “Mrrrrrp.”
Me: “Seriously: I think I really would quite like a nickname. It would make me feel more loved. I would feel a lot more loved if you could come up with a nickname for me. Now. Do it now.”
Pete, turning over in bed: “I’m asleep.”
Me: “I’ll help you brainstorm. It needs to be playful—yet tender.”
Pete, disbelievingly: “Playful yet tender. Is this actually happening?”
Me: “Yes. And, ideally, it would be reflective of the unique insight you have into me, after all those years. What comes to mind when you think of me?”
Pete: “The word ‘me.’ ”
Me: “Do it properly!”
Pete: “Seriously. The word ‘me.’ You say it a lot. That, and ‘serum.’ But I don’t really know what that means.”
Me: “Not what I say—It’s got to be what you think. WHY DO YOU LOVE ME?”
Pete, vaguely: “You’re a woman?”
Me, firmly: “My nickname can’t be ‘Woman.’ All my feminist friends will write a petition against me. What else is springing to mind?”
Pete: “You’re wholly unaware of how much work I have to do tomorrow.”
Me, helpfully: “I’m unexpectedly practical, aren’t I? Like, I mended the stereo on that rental car that time. Something along the lines of ‘MacGyver,’ or ‘John McClane’—that’s the character Bruce Willis plays in Die Hard. But with a sexy twist. Maybe ‘Bare Grylls.’ But that only really works on paper. We need something more . . . aural.”