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When your usual party look is a Peacocks dress, cheap eyeliner and some Spanx, how does a proper makeover compare?
Apparently, British women will spend £3.6 billion on getting ready for Christmas parties this year. £3.6 billion! On dresses, make-up, treatments and accessories! This figure stuns me just as surely as a blow to the side of the head.
Why? Why? Why is this happening? I feel like I need a quick debrief here, ladies:
1) It’s winter — a season when you will be covered, at all times, head to toe in clothing, and, in all probability, in a pretty dimly lit room to boot. In these happy circumstances, let’s be honest — you don’t need to be making any effort at all. Expensive blow-dry? Spray tan? Manicure? Are you out of your mind?
2) You have neither the time nor the money. You’ve just blown £100 on an inflatable mattress, you still haven’t ordered that obscure electrical novelty space-waste that your brother-in-law asked for from iwantone.com, and God knows that you’re going to have to do something about that smell in the bathroom before your guests arrive. This is not the time to be throwing tenners at pointless insecurities about your hair, or arse. It’s Christmas time, not Arsemas time.
3) Everyone will be trashed. No one’s going to notice anything. They’re all going to be singing All I Want for Christmas is You in painful falsettos, and falling over. And if there’s the slightest chance that people won’t be trashed, I strongly recommend that you feign cystitis, stay at home and drink snowballs while watching My Fair Lady instead.
No. If it’s not enough for a woman to turn up at a party upright, cheerful and broadly speaking, hygienic, then frankly it’s no party that I want a part of.
So when the editor said, “Caitlin — do you want to go and have a dedicated team of people prepare you for a Christmas party? Spend five hours being subjected to every beauty treatment under the sun? Basically get Harrods Urban Retreat to put you up on blocks, like in the Grand Prix, and turn you from some cheapskate barmaid slattern into a Proper Woman?”, I accepted like a shot. Why? Because I was convinced that, by the end of the process, I would be able scientifically to prove that I would be less ready to party than when I originally started out, in my favourite party dress from Pearl Lowe at Peacocks (£45), H&M eyeshadow (£3.99), Topshop necklace (£9.99) and comfortable shoes. Total preparation time: 20 minutes.
So here’s the Urban Retreat. I can’t deny that it’s very nice. Swisher than my bedroom. They give you champagne, everywhere smells of Chanel No 5. And look! Over there! It’s Matt Horne from Gavin and Stacey, buying Christmas presents. I think it might be a Clairol Foot Spa. I hope his mum likes it!
The first treatment is aimed squarely at my arse: the Mama Mio Bootcamp, which promises “a butt-lift and tummy tuck in one hour”. I’m so flooded with scepticism about this claim that it makes me a bit high. I’m very practical about “inch loss”. I know that simply stuffing my belly and arse into a £26 pair of Spanx takes less than a minute, and doesn’t involve lying in a darkened room for a whole hour while an — admittedly very lovely — lady massages my colon, does a mild AHA peel and applies a seaweed wrap. In the background an extraordinary “mystical” Egyptian version of Phil Collins’ Part Time Lover adds to the magic.
By the end of the procedure I’ve had a very relaxing reflexology session and my skin is as smooth as a baby’s — but I’ve not lost an inch, and the chances of showing off my newly peachy bum at a party is, even for me, fairly remote. Exfoliated arse-skin has no place at a drinks reception. This is an hour that I could have spent listening to Robyn, or reading George Orwell. Fail.
Eyelashes.
I’ll come clean here: eyelashes are low on my agenda. If you’re the kind of person who uses nearly a metre of eyeliner every day — as I am — faffing with your eyelashes is like sticking Post-it Notes on the Great Wall of China.
Occasionally — on rare “eyelash days” — I have used the Girls Aloud falseeyelash range. But, as with all false eyelashes, I have found that the evening tends to end with one stuck to your cardigan as you walk around looking a bit bonk-eyed, like Thom Yorke from Radiohead. No. I’m not an “eyelashgirl”.
However, the minute I am introduced to Kathryn, I know that I am about to convert to the world of Eyelash Eminence. Her lashes are the lushest, most natural, dewy milkmaid lashes I have ever seen. “I want lashes like yours!” I say, pointing at her face like an idiot. These are couture lashes, individually glued to the existing ones, which stay on for about six weeks. The first session lasts two hours, after which you get top-ups every month or so.
My day is so packed with lady-faffing that we have time for only an hour’s worth but, even at half-strength, I love my new eyelashes so much that I book in for the top-up before she has even finished. My eyes look — and there’s no room for false modesty here — like the most magical thing that ever existed. I make the Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny look like her eyes are bald. This is a beauty treatment I can get behind because it’s going to save me time.
Every morning I’m going to wake up with eyelashes so severely lush that I won’t even have to wear eyeliner. These are words I never thought I would hear myself say. I’m so enthusiastic I immediately make myself forget how insanely expensive they are (£180! Crikey!) so that I don’t ruin the happiness.
On to the nails. Again, I’m not really a “nails” kind of girl. On the few occasions when I’ve bothered, I’ve stuck on one coat of something suitably moody by the legendary cheap make-up titan Barry M, and chipped it off by the end of the evening. By and large, I am genuinely disbelieving that women regularly forfeit the use of their hands for up to an hour to make their fingertips look red, or brown. It seems so little reward for so much effort. After all, simply chopping up beetroot gives you pretty much the same effect. Or, perhaps, one could colour in the nails with a felt-tip instead?
However, having a manicure is all part of being a proper lady, and so I am wheeled over to the Nail Area, where I am to have what is seen as the equivalent of the cure for Aids in the world of manicures: UV gel. This stuff stays on for up to two weeks without chipping, cracking or looking tragic.
As Stephanie applies the gel varnish — in a limited range of shades (I choose a Gothy burgundy) — I run her through my worries about the manicure. “If it stays on for two weeks, what if burgundy goes out of fashion this week?” I fret.
“You’ll be fine,” she soothes.
As Stephanie repeatedly coats my nails, then puts them under a hand-sized sunbed, to set them, Paco deals with my hair. Paco — I think it would be fair to say — is a bit of a diva. He fixes me with gimlet eyes and says: “I don’t know what I’m gonna do — but you’re gonna lahve it!”
I do know what he’s going to do — he’s going to give me gigantic hair because I’ve told him to. I like big hair. My default is always to “biggen”. While he puts in rollers, and fiddles with clips, the Laura Mercier team give me “big hair” make-up; what at the time looked like siren glamour, but on reflection might have made me look like a fortysomething prostitute extra in Howards’ Way.
And then we’re on to the final bit — the dress. Harrods was skimmed on my behalf for a suitably grown-up, spendy frock, and here I am in something tight, black and zippy by Victoria Beckham. Aside from the slightly uncomfortable knowledge that this is Carol Vorderman’s favourite dress, it’s a hot piece of gear — it has the effect of making your arse look like the most provocative thing in the postcode, plus the neck-to-knee zip begs to be tugged at in a quiet corner. A vertiginous pair of YSL heels helps me to look like one of the girls in the Addicted to Love video.
But after ten minutes in the outfit, I realise that I would never set foot outside the photo studio in it. For starters, I can’t set a foot anywhere — it’s so tight around the knees that I can’t walk. I’d need to be brought into the room on a fork-lift truck, deposited on a bar stool and then picked up again at the end of the evening. And that’s before we’ve even turned to the shoes, which I can barely stand in. The idea of walking in them is hysterical — like climbing stairs in rollerskates.
Besides, as I look in the mirror, I don’t like what this whole look is saying. I look like exactly what I am: someone who’s had five hours and a load of money spent on them, and now looks as carefully done up as a doll. But one who can’t be played with.
For me, looking like this isn’t what going to a party is about. I don’t want to look incredibly hot, or stand-out amazing. I want to look cheerful, not smelly, and amusing. Being aggressively sexy tends, in my admittedly very limited experience, to make men nervous or stupid, and other women very tetchy. It’s a bit like bringing a tiger to a party. The initial response will be gratifying — “Oh my God, you brought a tiger to the party!” — but the rest of the evening it’s inconvenient, awkward and occasionally dangerous.
As I put back on what I arrived in — admittedly with some difficulty, as I pull things over my metre-wide hair — I am glad to be leaving the tiger here at Harrods. Although the eyelashes are undoubtedly life-changing — all the following week people ask “Have you lost weight?”, “Have you just come back from holiday?” — it’s a thrill to have confirmed, at the age of 35, that even if I spent £3.6 billion on myself to get ready for a party, I’d have a much better time if I simply Febrezed something in the washing basket, gave my face a rinse and spent the £3.5 billion on gin instead.
All Caitlin Moran’s treatments are available at the Urban Retreat (urbanretreat.co.uk, 020-7893-8333). She wore a dress £1,700 by Victoria Beckham (Harrods, 020-7730 1234) The Lights, Camera, Photo package with make-up, hairstyling, fashion by Harrods and a photo session with the photographer Tony McGee is £1,750
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Who’s up and who’s down on the fame barometer
10 UP Elton John
When the news that Elton John and partner David Furnish had been delivered of a baby, via a surrogate mother, CW was delighted to note that their advent into parenthood appeared to be marked by the same aesthetic criteria as the rest of their life: that the whole affair should abide by the motto: “It must be the best.”But, having decided which interior designer should decorate the nursery (“the best”) and what baby clothes to buy (“the best”), they had clearly paused for a moment — over the best sashimi nibbles — and asked themselves: “Surely the child’s birth date must be ‘the best’, too? After all, it’s going to be all over his passport, bank details and Facebook account. Imagine if the kid had an ugly birth date — like March 8. Or a ‘fat’ birthdate — like August 30. Ugh. BUT WHAT IS ‘THE BEST’ BIRTH DATE?”
Thankfully, the kid was born on Christmas Day — the day God chose to have His son. That MUST be the best birth date. After all, God was a blinging guy with a lot of choices.
9 DOWN Michael Jackson
They’ve made a diamond out of a hank of his burnt hair, put a value of $5 million on the syringe that killed him and revealed that he was so “addicted” to eating carrots he started to turn orange, but still — 19 months after his death — new allegations about Michael Jackson continue to light up all 152 storeys on the WTF? Tower.It was claimed this week that Jackson’s personal physician Dr Conrad Murray waited up to 21 minutes to call 911 after Jackson stopped breathing — busy carrying out a “one-handed version of CPR”.
It is a testimony to the dolorousness of this allegation that, were “one-handed version of CPR” a euphemism for masturbation, it would be better than the reality: trying, against all medical training, to restart someone’s heart with just one hand. And why just one hand? Was it a tribute to Jackson? Was he wearing a sole, white glitter-glove as he pumped away at the dying legend? WHAT’S GOING ON?
8 DOWN Paula Abdul
Things were never destined to be wholly straightforward in the life of the former pop star and American Idol judge Paula Abdul. This is, after all, a woman who shot to fame in 1989 with Opposites Attract — a song and accompanying video that centred on the dilemma of a woman who is romantically and sexually obsessed with an evil-looking, animated alley-cat with a flat-top and a penchant for fags (“I like to smoke”).After years of allegations about her “recreational proclivities” — CW believes that this is the modish, non-libellous way of saying “imagine a living vase full of pills and booze” — Abdul has finally faced her critics head-on.
“I’ve never been physically drunk in my life,” she said — which, to be fair, does sound exactly like the kind of thing you’d say when you’re drunk, just after: “I assume you, officer, I’ve only had a touple of small sherries.” Adbul then concluded, as the kicker: “I’ve never had a drugs problem — but I am goofy.”
CW says — if you think you’re Goofy, dude, you prolly do wanna slow down a trifle.
7 UP Natalie Portman
Portman, the noted British actress who plays Queen Amidala in the later, worse, Star Wars films, has announced that she is to be blessed with issue! Come the summer, she and her fiancé Benjamin Millepied will hear the pitterpatter of tiny feet.Or, if it takes after the father, one thousand tiny feet.
6 DOWN Gwyneth Paltrow
Sad confession from the Oscar-winning actress Paltrow, who explained that she had suffered from postnatal depression after the birth of her second child Moses. “I couldn’t access my emotions. I couldn’t access my heart. I thought I was a terrible mother,” she told Good Housekeeping magazine.As a mother-of-two itself, CW knows only too well of the malaise of which Paltrow speaks. In the postpartum state, it is too easy to lose all sense of perspective and hope.
CW thinks, however, that it can pinpoint why Paltrow’s depression was so bad: cheese.
As a vegan, Paltrow would not have had recourse to cheese. As millions of exhausted mothers before her have discovered, the only real cure for postnatal depression is yellow, dairy and smells of cheese, ie: cheese. Crackers and cheese; cheese on toast; putting a whole Stilton on your head — aka “the Cheese Helmet” — and eating your way out of it. HURRAH FOR CHEESE! Or, as CW likes to think of it: “The Prozac that’s better on a baked potato.”
5 UP Nicole Richie
Nicole, daughter of Lionel Richie, he of the crisps adverts, this week married her boyfriend, Joel Madden of rock band Good Charlotte. Photographs show Richie making her solemn vows in front of a small congregation that includes Gwen Stefani, Gavin Rossdale, Quincy Jones — and an elephant.“I absolutely love elephants. They’re good energy,” said Richie — who clearly has not recently tried to plug an electrical item into an elephant.
Was the elephant a joint decision between Richie and her husband-to-be? “No,” she said. “I have a system of how I get things done and sometimes it’s better if he doesn’t know. The elephant was definitely one of them.”
As a long-term observer of love, CW feels greatly cheered about the prospects for the Richie/Madden marriage. Any relationship in which a wife can just order a secret elephant, without her husband noticing, is going to make it all the way over the finishing line, CW reckons.
4 DOWN Rochelle
Love news from the barricades of pop. Rochelle, of lady-group the Saturdays — for those unversed in their oeuvre, CW would urge you to imagine the entire shop window of Miss Selfridge, grown sentient — has dumped inamorato Marvin, from man-band JLS, and is now “being squired” by the grime artist Chipmunk instead.
From the vantage point of its Rocking Chair of Observation, CW notes a “love trend” within Rochelle, to wit: dating only men named after cartoon characters, such as Marvin the Martian, and Alvin from Alvin and the Chipmunks and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakwel.
Having noticed this tendency, CW feels suitably emboldened to predict Rochelle’s next four inamoratos: Donald Trump, Micky Dolenz from the Monkees, Shaggy and anyone called “The Moog”
3 UP Brangelina
Another week, another news story about the marriage of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. A “love guru”, 83-year-old Ram Lalji Siyag, has apparently been helping their “troubled marriage”. Since they met him last year, the guru has improved their relationship by helping them “come up with a mantra” that “symbolises the bond they share.”“They end the day by chanting the sacred word he has given them,” a friend said. “And now they no longer argue.”
Yes. CW has an identical, one-word mantra for its marriage, which it, too, repeats at the end of the day, magically forestalling all arguments. It is “Drink?”
2 UP Zsa Zsa Gabor
Gabor — landmark sex-siren, nine times a bride, author of the quote “I guess I’m a good housekeeper: every time I get divorced, I keep the house” — has had a bad week. After a stay in hospital, the world’s greatest expert on wedding cake has, sadly, had to have her leg amputated — making her now, presumably, “Zsa Gabor”.1 UP Derek Acorah
After his titanic win at last week’s Celebrity Watch Awards 2010 — in which he walked away with the coveted “Most Outrageous Bullshit” trophy — the TV psychic Acorah has put in some sterling work towards winning the award again this year. Over eight pages in OK!, Britain’s most prominent ghost-botherer harasses the centuries-dead for their predictions on what 2011 holds for more than a dozen celebrities, including The Only Way is Essex star Amy Childs.“She’s just a flash in the pan, this one. She is pushing for a level of fame she’ll never quite reach. Sorry, love!” Acorah pronounces — scarcely a left-field prediction for the star of an ITV2 reality show whose trademark pastime is “vajazzling”: the gluing of multicoloured crystals onto the vagina.
In a compendium of rank taradiddle, Acorah goes on to make pronouncements on Angelina Jolie, David Beckham and Katie Price — safe in the knowledge that it will take 12 months before these communiqués from Heaven can be 100 per cent dismissed.
He claims that Beckham will become a “great peacemaker”, raising the possibility that Henry VIII mumbled a bit over that one and was actually saying “A great PEAS maker”: ie, that David will learn how to cook peas in 2011. The reality star Chantelle Houghton is counselled that she will get over her divorce from Preston from the Ordinary Boys. “When he has gone, she will go to bed, and the maturity will start to happen,” Acorah says, gnomically — making Houghton sound a bit like a wheel of Camembert being put to ripen in a cave.
Perhaps the best prediction concerns Prince William and Kate Middleton, who are informed that they will “save” the British monarchy, have four children and be “like Antony and Cleopatra” — surely worrying news given this means that William will get fatally confused, then kill himself; while Kate will spend her last moments trying to look cheerful and stylish while being attacked by a snake.
To those who believe that there is even a faint chance that those we have loved and lost may communicate with us via a few gifted souls, CW likes to point out that such an individual would probably not be trolling around in a deserted tobacco warehouse in East London with Yvette Fielding on Living’s Most Haunted, and touting fortune-cookie homilies on the future fertility of Kerry Katona to OK!
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Over the past ten years, a favourite game of the Gallery’s curators has been one which, for the purposes of decency, the Gallery will retitle here as “Kiss Order”.
In Kiss Order, you take any collective of individuals – the Beatles, former Doctors in Doctor Who, your uncles – and put them in the order that you would most like to “kiss” them. For ultimate effectiveness, this should be done with a huddle of quite tipsy friends and played very rapidly – so people don’t have time to think about, or censor, what they’re saying, and simply blurt out things like “Ralph Malph!” to consequent, lifelong mortification.
Over the years, in all the games of Kiss Order the Gallery has played, there was one particular match that proved most controversial. Even now, the Gallery is repeatedly teased about its choices. But it stands firm. The Gallery believes that, when it comes to Star Wars, this is the order in which you should fancy the best trilogy of all time. (Obviously it goes without saying that the Gallery doesn’t “believe” in the three later films. It might have ordered its uncles in kissing preference, but it’s not weird.)
1) Han Solo. Well, this is a given. The Gallery is prepared to believe that there has never been a round of Kiss Order played, ever, that isn’t topped by Han Solo – even if it’s played by racist Chinese lesbians. He’s a space cowboy in a white blouse with the most beautiful “Duh?” face ever recorded. Just his legs make the Gallery cry. When Leia says she loves him, and Han goes simply, “I know,” it reduces every woman to sobbing, incoherent love-noises. The only Han moment better than that is when they’re in a corridor on Hoth, and he holds her face in his hands like he’s going to spend the rest of his life eating her mouth very, very slowly, in between shooting at Darth Vader, her rubbish dad. Waaaaaaah. The Gallery has to go and lie down now.
2) Chewbacca. But it’s back up again for Chewbacca. Yes. Chewbacca. Do you have a problem with this? The Gallery would like to point out to you that, as a rule, if you are not pro an 8ft, super-strong half-Sasquatch, half-mechanical genius with the most expressive “RARRRRGHL” this side of the galaxy, you’re not really paying attention to where the good times lie. On the day the Star Wars Kiss Order controversy kicked off, the Gallery vaguely remembers lying drunkenly on the floor shouting, “Chewie’s the one who keeps that spaceship going! If it weren’t for him, they’d still be stuck on Yavin 4 waiting for spare parts! PUNCH IT, CHEWIE!”, before being helped to bed.
3) R2-D2. The Gallery is aware that, after Han, the usual cast members to get het up about are bounty hunter Boba Fett (nice arse, brisk, business-like manner) and Lando Calrissian (he’s got a whole city, plus a smokin’ tache). But the Gallery demurs. The Gallery says: think about it. Of all the creatures in George Lucas’s universes, which one do you think is most likely to still be in the Cantina at 5am, knocking back shots, playing pool and projecting that SOS message from Leia against the wall again, “for a laugh”, interspersed with classic episodes of Daffy Duck and, let’s face it, some porn? Yeah – it’s R2-D2. That’s one spunky little robot. In a universe of infinite menace, the Gallery reckons you generally want to get your hoggins with something that’s up for a ruckus, got a “cheeky wink” app and can shoot an electrical beam out of his front flaps. Again, on the legendary night of the Star Wars Kiss Order game, the Gallery recalls ending up on the floor, slurring, “It’s got to be R2-D2. He’s got a lot of ports. You know what I mean.”
4) NOT Darth Vader and NOT Luke Skywalker. Darth is usually very popular in this game – the Gallery has to presume due to a combination of the leather, the power and the asthma. When questioned on the basis of her fervent Darth love, my sister replies, “Everyone likes a man with a passion for architecture and self-build. Really, the Death Star is just like an episode of Grand Designs that got out of hand.” Personally, however, the Gallery can’t go for a man who could stop your “chattiness” with a “psychic strangle”. The Gallery enjoys telling its five favourite anecdotes too much. And as for Luke – well, the Gallery scarcely thinks this is a controversial decision. Skywalker’s a Bieber-haired Milky Bar Kid who just saps around, getting in the way of perfectly decent shots that could have had more of Han in them. The Gallery never met a Luke lover it would trust further than it could psychically levitate them while standing in a marsh on Dagobah, looking a bit cross-eyed. And that – given how strong the Force is in the Gallery – is saying something.
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OK, I’m going to start with everything that’s wrong about the BBC. It’s overstaffed. Its management appear rudderless and timid. There are so many layers of bureaucracy and compliance that thousands of great ideas get slowly choked to death under piles of paperwork and fear. The amazing wardrobe department got sold off.
It keeps firing women over the age of 50 (Moira Stuart, Arlene Phillips, that bird off Countryfile). It’s got far too many panel shows where a bunch of male comedians essentially shout, “YOUR AGENT IS INFERIOR TO MINE!” at each other. BBC Three is still embarrassing. The afternoon dramas on Radio 4 never fail to sink the spirits. But nonetheless, they are works of genius compared to the comedies on Radio 4, which emit a palpable grey mist of dolorousness that can, over time, cause mildew in the houses of listeners.
So that’s the bad stuff. Pretty much all the other stuff about the BBC, though, is good stuff. Really. Even the things people currently think is bad stuff is actually good stuff.
Take, for instance, BBC wages. Much has been made over the past couple of years about the BBC’s escalating talent-bill, hiked in order to keep up with competitors. Graham Norton, Jonathan Ross (before he left), Chris Moyles, Anne Robinson and Jeremy Paxman have all had their wages revealed, discussed and roundly criticised, mainly in the Daily Mail, but also by some sane people too.
The argument seems to be that it doesn’t matter what the “market rate” is on ITV1, Channel 4 or Sky, if you work for the BBC, you should be prepared to do it at a massive discount, out of principle, and that a commensurate part of running the BBC should be to make your talent accept as small a fee as possible. Well, that’s not the way I think. I like the BBC paying big wages. I like that we pay creative people lots of money to make things for a public-service broadcaster. I think it makes us, as a country, look cool. It’s like when we have top surgeons working for the NHS, or bishops who like gays.
I don’t want the BBC to end up only employing talent prepared to work for below market rate, because then the BBC will consist only of a) pinko, liberal bleeding-heart Marxist sandal-wearers, or b) upper middle-class public-school toffs sitting on a nice trust fund. EVEN MORE THAN IT IS NOW. Imagine.
Similarly, there are arguments that the BBC website is crushing the competition. That, being funded by the licence fee, it poses an unfair rival to commercial broadcasters. The BBC must take that market-leading website down, and stick to its proper job – making Wallace & Gromit and documentaries about sharks – instead. But the way I look at it, that’s a good thing about the BBC. Haha! It’s won the internet! Not only is it the most respected broadcasting organisation in the world, but it knocks out a market-leading website on the side, to boot! A bit like how Paul Newman was one of the sexiest men in the world and made great salad dressings as well.
I like the BBC’s polymath hotness. I don’t get the arguments against it. I know I’m just a woman, in a cardigan, in North London, but my understanding of global, market-driven capitalism is that we’re kind of generally pro massively successful organisations crushing the competition in whatever way they can. That’s just kind of… the game.
I even have a favourite bit of irony about the success of the BBC being “bad”. It’s when politicians, pundits or businessmen appear on Question Time to have a go at the BBC. As they sit there, going, “Rah rah rah,” one can’t help but reflect that there just aren’t political debate shows, where some of the most powerful people in the country can be quizzed by the general public, live, on an unfailingly entertaining programme, on any other channels. IF IT WEREN’T FOR THE BBC, YOU WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO SLAG OFF THE BBC. JUST THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A MINUTE.
I know the BBC is often creaky, smelly, objectionable, wrong-headed, embarrassing, dull, mad and apt to repeat itself – but so was my grandmother, and I love them both. Talk to anyone from another country, and they’re genuinely astounded that anyone in the UK would ever slag off the BBC. I think they think it might actually be treason, like trying to kill the Queen.
“But, but – David Attenborough!” they will say, staring at you as if you’re dangerously insane. “The Thick of It! Doctor Who! EastEnders! Bleak House! Newsnight! Life on Mars! Sherlock! In the Night Garden! BBC Four! Radio 4! The Olympics coverage! iPlayer!”
“I know,” I say – so in love with the BBC that I can even forgive it for brutally rejecting my startlingly brilliant sitcom proposal last year. “I know.”
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Yes, 2010 was a good year for the kind of woman idiots might deem ‘large’, but the wise would call ‘banquetty’
This was the year arses made a comeback. Fabulous, round, pillowy, billowy arses. Skirt-filling, knicker-swelling arses. The kind of arse you want to watch walking down the street until it passes totally from view. The kind of arse that makes you want to land a cheerful, over-excited slap, right on its juddering apex. Arses. Oh, arses.
It wasn’t just the year of arses, mind. It was an amazing year for tits, too. Big, soft tits. Heavy, hand-filling tits. The kind of tits that make dresses look like they’re bursting, and bras look like holy architecture. Tits that make you – male or female, straight or gay – want to gently nestle your head between them and happily burble, “Umma mumma bumma pumma wumma”, with a look of milky bliss soft-focusing your face. On top of that, 2010 was equally good for upper-arms as squishy as rum babas and bellies with the round, soft swell of cake, or apple pulp. Yes. 2010 was a good year for the kind of woman idiots might deem “large”, but the wise would call “banquetty”.
And if all this was down to anyone, it was down to the gorgeous, God-assed Christina Hendricks, playing the gorgeous, God-assed Joanie Holloway in the TV series Mad Men. Named 2010’s Sexiest Woman in the World in a poll by Esquire magazine, Hendricks’ astonishing 39D-30-39 figure basically blew the entire world’s mind, after years of boy-legged chicks with ironing-board jaws and ketosis breath haunting up the red carpet like vector-graphic ghosts.
It’s hard to over-emphasise her impact. She was like an A-bomb. An Arse Bomb. One LA news anchor ground to a halt in an interview, after Hendricks said that she’d received a call telling her she was up for an Emmy, “when I was in the bath”. Going quiet for a moment, Brian McFayden tried to explain his mental situation while dealing with that information – “I was just gonna say that… I wasn’t gonna be like, ‘Oh, I’m hitting on you,’ but you’ve got an amazing body” – before digging his hole down another storey by stuttering, “I’m saying you’re a beautiful woman, and I would like… the bath… the way you made… what I’m trying to say is you were drawing your bath and I was just thinking… wow, that’s awesome.” He might just as well have run out of the studio screaming, “I just can’t HANDLE the HOTNESS!”
By July, Hendricks was being cited as a sanity-restoring role model for women who had spent decades bombarded with size zero millionairesses. Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone announced that Hendricks was “fabulous”, adding, “We need more of these role models. It shouldn’t be so unusual,” to a chorus of female agreement.
Of course, if we’re going to laud Hendricks for her sterling work in fighting patriarchal bullshit, we must also acknowledge that, as her ardent admirers, we are also undeniably treating her like a sex object. In a good way – in a swooning, devoted “YOU GO, GIRL!” way – but nonetheless like a piece of meat. “I am an actress,” she said, with justifiable sorrow and annoyance. “But all anyone talks about is how I look.” We’ll get over it one day, Christina. We promise we’ll treat you like a normal human being soon. Just… not while you’re in that dress.
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Never mind whiskers on kittens. Beyoncé, a lake and a big, blue cider bus — these are a few of Caitlin Moran’s favourite things
1 The biggest must-see of the festival is your first drink and fag of the event, consumed in a spot of mystical rockin’ vibement, as according to your own personal beliefs. Many find this place to simply be “right next to the bar I have just purchased this drink from”, downing the shot in one before immediately consuming another — but these are the kind of blow-hard Vikings who will doubtless end the day sunburnt, trouserless and incapable of speech beneath an inflatable armchair that has “confused” them by 11pm.
The wiser imbiber takes his/her first drink — untouched — on a thoughtful and anticipatory walk through the festival site, soaking up the atmos, noting the changes — “The toilets in West Holts field now face eastwards. Interesting” — before finding some lofty vantage point on a high hill. Here, overlooking the whole festival site — boiling away down below like some magical, over-excited jambalaya — one can have a moment of impossible, joyous smugness at being in the greatest festival on earth, before some drunken 18-year-old dressed as a Second World War fighter pilot kicks over their drink, mumbling “Sorry dude! Been on the wobbly eggs since 11am!”
2 U2 tonight. Something here for everyone: U2 lovers will delight in a greatest hits set from one of the most thrilling live bands on the planet. U2 haters, on the other hand, can watch the “BONO PAY UP” protest, taking part in the audience during the band’s set, when activists Art Uncut bring attention to the Irish band’s tax-exile status — they are now officially based in the Netherlands, thus avoiding millions of pounds in tax — by erecting a massive, light-up “BONO PAY UP” sign, which they will then process with through the crowd.
Those who find themselves squarely in the middle of U2 love and U2 hate can hum along to Where the Streets Have No Name while tutting about VAT. Double bubble.
3 Badly pitched tents. For old hands at the festival, noting the ill-chosen tent spots of festival newcomers is always a highlight.
“I will put my tent right next to this line of portable loos — they will lend me protection from the blowing gales!” some bright-eyed newcomer will think.
“Oh no, my love!” you cry, inwardly. “Come 3am, some manner of Poo Nile will be flowing majestically over your sleeping-bag! That shelter is no shelter at ALL.”
Tents pitched “handily” near the Dance Tent — closing time: never — score similar schadenfraude.
4 Beyoncé. Three years ago, when Jay-Z played a “controversial” but ultimately amazing headlining slot at Glastonbury, the TV cameras repeatedly zoomed in on his wife, the thigh-tastic Beyoncé, grooving supportively at the side of the stage. At the time, no one knew, but she was looking out across the mud-splattered, cider-addled, BO-reeking crowd and thought, “One day, I — sexy, fragrant, powerful Beyoncé — am going to come back to play Single Ladies, in my wellies! This is now my greatest ambition!”
Personally, I will be getting steers on the unlikely headliners of Glastonbury 2013 by seeing which of Beyoncé’s mates are side of stage for this year. I’m really hoping for EITHER Dr Dre OR Britney Spears.
5 “I HEART SAUSAGES” Flag.
No one knows who owns the 10ft high ten-foot-high “I HEART SAUSAGES” flag, no one knows where he got it from — presumably a flag-shop owned by someone really into sausages. But for the last four years, the gigantic “I HEART SAUSAGES” flag, waved from the centre of the audience, has been a mainstay of Glastonbury’s headlining acts. Aside from being a cheerful reminder of how fantastic sausages are, it’s also a great moment when a legendary act — Bruce Springsteen, say — looks out into the audience, notices it, and clearly thinks, “Sausages? I was about to sing Born in the USA, but now, all I can think about is sausages. Man, I’d like a link in a bap.” There are bonus points when the “I HEART SAUSAGES” flag completely obscures, say, Matt Bellamy from Muses’s close-up as he sings a song about aliens coming to take over the world. Aliens — and sausages, Matt.
6 The Cider Bus. In my early years of attending Glastonbury, I, in my youthful naivety, believed that drugs were a necessary part of the event. Wide-eyed and overly chatty, I would motor around the site, convinced that, I was now, in the words of Westlife, flying without wings, Occasionally, I would see the Cider Bus, a bright blue double-decker bus, selling “both” kinds of scrumpy — cold and hot — and think “Coh! Cider! The lightweight tipple of peasants! Someone as much like Iggy Pop as myself eschews such an item!”
Years later, having knocked all narcotics on the head, I tried the scrumpy of the Cider Bus and woke, some hours later, with a memory of having told my sister “We’re all dogs now. Happy dogs,” then dropping on to all fours and racing around the Green Fields, barking. Man, the locals really know what they’re doing with that scrumpy. It makes drugs look as passé as — ham sandwiches.
The Cider Bus is a portal into another world. Treat it with respect.
7 The Lake. Someone’s made a beautiful lake up in the Green Futures Field. Last year, I spent half an hour watching an incredible, gigantic remote-control dragonfly being flown around and across the lake, marvelling at the creativity and genius of the people who run these Elysian fields.
“You can’t even see the battery!” I thought.
Then I realised it was a real dragonfly.
8 Celebrities’ personal on-site wifi networks. Activate your mobile to seek out “All wifi networks”, and you can see which acts have decided to be their own media nodes. As I write backstage, I can see wifi networks belonging to Beyoncé, Coldplay, U2, and “Donald’s Hot Dogs”. “Donald’s Hot Dogs is either a) the cunning pseudonym of some band playing a secret gig up in the Park field on Saturday night, or b) the most tech-savvy hot-dog stall known to man.
9 New Eavis baby. Emily Eavis, daughter of Glastonbury’s Godfather, Michael, and now co-runner of Glastonbury, had her first baby two weeks ago, and will doubtless be descending from the Eavis farmhouse to show her daughter around her inheritance and birthright. This, then, makes the new baby the best potential celebrity-spot of the weekend. In 30 years, grizzled festival-goers will wish to go up to the now-adult Eavis III and say, “I saw you in a Babybjörn sling, at your first ever Glastonbury! Emitting tiny rock’n’roll deposits of posset on your mother’s shoulder, and looking unhappy during Stuff’n’Ting’s Nice Up Breakfast set! Can I have six guest passes for my mates, please?”
10 The Wombles. Unlikely controversy has raged around the booking of the Wombles — Michael Eavis has, in a rare moment of rage, called their set “a mistake” — but, given the muddy conditions of 2011, the Wombles are perfect. First, everyone will enjoy a moment of instant, thumb-sucking regression the minute that the opening chords to Wombling Free ring out. And second, after their set, the Wombles can immediately be put on a 40 degree wash in the nearest washing machine, and be good as new by tea-time.
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The Hour (BBC Two)
The Apprentice (BBC One)
What did I think The Hour was going to be? From the trailers, I thought that I knew. It seemed to be an open-and-shut case of the BBC going “Mad Men? Fast, clever, lavishly stylised period drama — that has been exported all over the world in a million boxed sets? That’s classic BBC territory! We should have been all over something like this like a pigeon on a chip! Knackers! This has been a massive operational failure!”
Pause.
“Miss Mountshaw! Order 50 pencil skirts, 19 ashtrays, 2 trench-coats, a wind-up record player and a cocktail shaker. Alan! Call casting! I need a chick with an ass, and a fella with a lantern jaw who’ll appeal to both women and gay bloggers. Rory! Check Twitter and see if George Michael’s slagged off Jeremy Clarkson again. It’s nothing to do with this project — I just find the fellow amusing. Right! Right! Let’s show those sons of bitches at Lionsgate TV how we do things in downtown White City! Activate the multimillion-pound budget !”
But in the event, those BBC trailers for The Hour — heavily stylised; all Saul Bass-esque graphic design, sliding split screens and fruity 1950s winking — turned out to be a bit of a red herring. Twenty minutes into The Hour and you wouldn’t have been comparing it to anything at all. The BBC might have commissioned it in the wake of losing the broadcasting rights to Mad Men but The Hour is too much its own creature to be seen as a “spoiler from Blighty”.
I’ll square with you: I got to the end of the first episode and then gorged on the preview DVD of the second episode. And when I got to the end of that, having watched two hours back to back, I rang round TV critic friends to see if they had Episode 3. When they didn’t — or were lying to me because they didn’t want to give up their PRECIOUS — I was so disappointed and deflated that I just gave in and went to bed an hour early. The rest of the day seemed too inevitably whack to bother with.
So what is The Hour? Well, first off, it’s pacey: there’s stuff going on all over here. A man stabbed in the throat on the District Line; a debutante weeping in a phone box: nose bleeding as she dabbed at it with a silk glove. There are secret messages in crosswords; working-class kids trying to take over the BBC; Kennedy running for vice-president. In the last minute we find the debutante dead: hanging from the shower rail with a broken neck. “They are everywhere,” she had told her oldest friend, the TV reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) hours before she died. “They’ll kill me if they know I am talking to you.”
When he finds her, she’s still twitching: a foot off the floor, wallpaper clawed to shreds around her.
“Cut her down! Give her CPR!” you shout.
But it’s 1956. No one knows CPR in 1956. All Freddie can do is shout her name as she dies in his arms — kick-starting his off-the-diary investigation into who “they” are.
So yes, The Hour is a thriller: there’s a mystery here that, by the end of the series, needs to be solved. But what will almost certainly take The Hour to a second series is that, at heart, it’s a love triangle in a BBC newsroom, at the time of the Suez Crisis. They might as well have subtitled it Two Boys, a Girl, a Channel & a Canal.
All-round alchemic casting has The Wire’s Dominic West as Hector Madden — a lantern-jawed, privileged, musky but ostensibly dim newsreader. Brideshead Revisited’s Ben Whishaw is the nervy, gobby, Scrappy-Doo journalist Freddie Lyon — all bum-freezer jackets and outbursts. And The Crimson Petal and the White’s Romola Garai is Bel Rowley — producer of the BBC’s first live hour of heavyweight news: bluestocking; Bakewell; barefaced of make-up.
Freddie has loved Bel for years before we arrived — “You’ve always been the only one for me,” he says, suddenly, in a moment of unusual candour.
But Bel has them nicknamed as “Moneypenny” and “James” — they are co-conspirators in revolutionising BBC news broadcasts; the progenitors of The Hour. They are not to be lovers. When the ripped, bullish Hector turns up — gifted the presenting job on their new show by well-connected relatives — Freddie hates him instantly. He spends all his time and fury constructing the most gratuitous, waspish insults for Hector.
“She [BEL] said you were witty,” Hector says, with the nobelesse oblige of the posh. “She’s easy to make laugh,” Freddie replies, with the casual possessiveness of someone close.
But while Freddie has the advantage of closeness, Hector has the advantage of chemistry. Bel knows he’s a bumptious div — and a married bumptious div, at that — but there’s something else going on here: they can’t stand near each other without fidgeting; the eye contact heats up at twice the normal speed. He’s a terrible newsreader but he allows Bel to criticise him , seemingly for the first time in his life.
“You have a certain … gravity,” he explains, as he bids her goodnight, in the rain, and it’s clear that he means both kinds: she’s an intellectual heavyweight but she’s also the planet that these moons-of-boys revolve around.
There’s a thrill in watching a female character like this, and it’s possibly the only parallel with Mad Men, other than the fact that the men wear suits: Bel echoes Peggy Olson’s bare-faced, bright industry: women in an era (Mad Men, 1962; The Hour, 1956) when they were getting the first glimpses of being allowed to play like the boys. Bel might not be allowed in the smoking room at Hector’s private club but she, along with den mother Lix (Anna Chancellor) is dictating the BBC’s hard-news agenda.
Perhaps it’s the writer Abi Morgan’s way with a woman, but the dynamic of Freddie and Bel’s relationship has a real poignancy: Whishaw looks like a … boy … next to Garai’s huge-eyed, solid-hipped stateliness. There’s something rather lovely about how much bigger she is, in every sense, than him. It’s almost as if the actors have been scaled up or down to represent their future potential in 1950s Britain.
And 1950s Britain looks, as you would expect from a BBC drama, just wonderful: matching the soundtrack, there’s a deft jazzy brushwork on all the period details: debutantes in foaming white cocktail dresses; cigarettes in rainy doorways; English Rose Kitchens with a still-meagre collection of tins stored in rows. You can bet your ass every inch of parquet the heels and brogues tap across is date correct.
But the period porn is just a bonus. It’s the three main characters — five feet up from the shoes sent over from Angels The Costumiers in tissue-lined boxes — that make every hour of The Hour fly. I’m jonesing for the third hour like a kid made to wait too long for Christmas.
The final of The Apprentice — and it was a sad night for those who’ve treated every Wednesday night as an unbreakable appointment to watch Britain’s greatest business buffoons galloping around Dingbat Zoo trying to make like little Rockefellers and failing.
As I’ve posited before, in a world where we agree that we should attempt chillaxed tolerance of every possible manifestation of humanity, the sole exception to this is “contestants on The Apprentice”. Every ham-armed cat strangler in jail will have someone, somewhere, pointing out, quite rightly, that such cat-vexing behaviour is begat of a traumatic childhood.
Show the viewing public Leon Doyle, however, a fast-food entrepreneur from Leeds suggesting “Leon-treprunuer” as a team name and they will be merciless in their roasting on Twitter. In a rampantly capitalist age, perhaps the only people legitimately left to hate are rampant capitalists. We are all, ultimately, their bitches.
It had always seemed obvious to me who would win this series — and, so, on Sunday night, it came to pass: we found out that Lord Sugar’s new business partner is the “mad inventor” Tom Pellereau — a man who gave off the vibe of perpetually being 30 seconds away from banging his head on a bathtub, and regaining conciousness while shouting “I’ve invented the Flux Capacitor! Get into the DeLorean, Nick Hewer! We’re going Back to the Future!”
I’d always found Tom very likeable , but that wasn’t why Sugar was hiring him, of course. Lord Sugar doesn’t care about “likeability”. Lord Sugar would hire a radioactive isotope shaped like Jeremy Clarkson if it could earn him anything upwards of 50 quid. No. The point where I knew Tom would win was when I saw his previous infamous invention — the Stylfile, the world’s first “curved nailfile”.
Pink, S-shaped and three times more expensive than a normal nail file, it had that unmistakeable air that screams “Amstrad”. Innovative, yes — but pointlessly innovative. Like the AmScreen, those TVs installed in petrol stations, trying to flog you stuff as you pump diesel into a Ford Galaxy, thinking “Oh God. Five hours on the M4 now. Oh God.” Or the Amstrad E-m@iler, which allowed you to “Amsurf” the internet “without a PC”, using a machine that looked like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, but without a face.
As Lord Sugar pointed his sausagey finger at Tom and said “You’re hired”, the business equivalent of saying “I do”, and Tom beamed, I thought: “Yes. This was meant to happen. There is a man who will have invented the AmsSundial by Christmas. God bless you, Doc Pellereau.” -
In a way not morbid or maudlin, all I can do is YouTube Amy Winehouse. I watch her in the kitchen, in the bedroom; in the garden, on the laptop, while I hack back gloomy loops of summer hops. Her voice seems unsuited for the outdoors, but I want her propped up on a garden chair. In the sunshine, now.
In my head I call her “Winehouse”, like a cartoon character or a punky kid: Winehouse with her tattoos and her stapled-on beehive; Winehouse with her long ankles, bottle in hand, tottery and roaring. A post-apocalyptic Marge Simpson; Betty Boop in charge of a pirate ship. Winehouse on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, shrugging off host Simon Amstell’s jokey, awkward concern, with the downbeat timing of Joan Rivers or Dennis Leary.
Would Amy like to collaborate with MOR chanteuse Katie Melua, Amstell wondered.
“I’d rather get cat Aids,” Winehouse replied tartly, funnier than any comedian on the show, but still Winehouse – Amy Winehouse with the voice, with the astonishing voice, like Billie Holiday scared, angry, hot; tooling up. “Life is like a pipe/ And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside,” she sings in Back to Black: a tendon-tight song that, halfway through, just dissolves into its own awfulness – leaving only the tolling of a church bell, and Winehouse singing “Black…/ Black…” like it’s the only direction she has left. One of the best singles of the 21st century, Winehouse wrote it when she was 23. In the video, she dresses for a funeral. Sharp. Tight skirt. Eyeliner. She puts her gloves on, tearless. By the age of 24, she has five Grammys. By 27, she’s dead.
I can’t stop watching her because I can’t work out exactly how I feel about her dying. Her death is not something unexpected, after all – it had been coming down the tunnel for a long time. And yet it still rattled everyone – our preparedness is no preparation at all.
“This is how we will feel when polar bears finally become extinct,” I think, “after all that sad waiting. Or when the last tiger dies.”
We still won’t quite understand why – even though we watched almost every minute of it happen. I’m not the only one puzzled – friends, particularly women, keep fretting over Winehouse’s death. It’s not some wailing, pent-up boo-hoo, like when Diana died. Rather, it’s like when woodland animals circle another woodland animal who has died, uncomprehending as to why they have gone. How they could have gone.
Perhaps part of it is that we didn’t see who Winehouse really was, at the time. Like everyone, I’d always thought her problem was alcohol and drugs: those years of being photographed in bloody shoes, bleakly marauding at 3am. When the Hawley Arms in Camden – epicentre of the drunken world at that time – burnt down, everyone joked Winehouse had done it, by accident. Winehouse, with an unfortunate combination of crack pipe and Elnett hairspray.
But when a friend said, “What if her biggest problem wasn’t drink or drugs, but her eating disorders?”, the YouTube footage suddenly felt like it was being played again; but now, with new subtitles.
So here is Amy Winehouse at the Mercury Awards in 2007, coming on stage to gasps, the bright neons of her dress playing badly against the pint-sized hollows of her collarbone. Everyone thinks it’s the crack – but she gives interviews where she says she spends all morning running on a treadmill. She wears hotpants and cut-off shirts, revealing that tiny, knotted belly – even in winter, even in snow. She cooks for everyone, but doesn’t touch anything herself. “All she eats is Haribo,” a friend reveals to the Daily Mirror. With an eating disorder like that, you’d have all the tolerance for drink and drugs of a newborn baby.
And because eating disorders are all about trying to regain control, it solves the biggest confusion I have had about Winehouse, since I heard she’d died: how you could have a talent – such a once-in-a-generation, seemingly gravityless, endless talent – and let it get so battered by your addictions that your big album, in 2006, is also your last. Surely you’d want to protect it as you would a child, serve it as you would an empress? Couldn’t she discipline herself? To keep her very Winehouseness safe? Well, she was. She was very busy disciplining herself. She wasn’t eating.
For anyone without a talent like Winehouse’s – and that’s all of us – we just stare, like unjealous Salieris, and wonder how someone could have something so astonishing move through them – yet not have it elevate them at the same time. We become like children. Couldn’t that talent, somehow, have saved her? Couldn’t a song as astonishing as Back to Black vouch for her against demons? Couldn’t Amy Winehouse just climb on to her voice, like it was a lion, and jump out of the window, and ride far, far away?
But then, perhaps that’s what she did.
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There was noisy sex in a caravan and rain but our writer fell in love with Aber at 13 and still loves it today
We first went to Aberystwyth when I was 13, at the height of my parents’ hippydom. We had no TV, we lived on huge pans of lentil soup and I ran barefoot across fields so much that the skin on my soles was like cork-tiling.
We spent our summers in a caravan with no toilet, in a field outside Pontrhydifendigaid, near Tregaron: eight kids, two parents and three huge dogs. In my memory, when you walked towards the caravan, the faces and legs of all the humans and animals were pressed up against the glass of the window, like a terrine. That caravan was very full. When my parents had sex, the ’van would rock like a fairground ride and all the kids would sit in the front room quietly singing California Girls by the Beach Boys — to block out the sounds — until it was over. Our harmonies were terrible. We were not the Wilsons.
But we did not spend much time in that caravan. Later we had a Volkswagen camper van — the greatest vehicle ever created; a cheery cupboard on wheels. When my parents had finished noisily conjoining, they would take us on postcoital journeys across West Wales: up to Porthmadog, down to St Davids — right round the yawning pig-jaw of Cardigan Bay.
Wide white estuaries, book-stack fishing villages and bleak, wet-slate hamlets where it always lashed rain against the solitary phonebox.
I don’t know why it took us four months finally to go to the nearest biggest town, Aberystwyth, but when we did, something in my heart twanged. It wasn’t like falling in love. I just felt … not unhappy any more.
The quiet litany of pubescent frets that I counted, daily, like rosary beads — I was fat, I was lonely, I knew too much about my parents’ sex life, I didn’t have any shoes and I wanted, more than anything, to be best friends with the Duchess of York — all stilled the first time that our campervan drove down Great Darkgate Street and turned left on to the seafront.
There was something so perfect about Aber that it halted my lifelong internal monologue. I needed silence to take the place in fully. It had a Gothic university like a castle, castle ruins like a smashed cake, a clifftop Victorian theme park that appeared to have been commissioned by a pissed H. G. Wells (a funicular railway! A camera obscura! A golf course with giant golf balls!) and then — slicing the town in half like a fabulous blindness — the cold, hard, glitter-glue of the sea. Apparently, dolphins chased by the rock pools at dawn.
My face pressed against the window, wetting it with breath, I wanted to concentrate on this town. And then eat it, whole, like a crisp sandwich, but even better.
“This place is s****ing brilliant!” I chirped from the back of the van.
“Don’t swear in front of the f***ing kids,” my dad replied.
Twenty-three years later and I’m back with my husband and my kids — to the only place that makes me happy and quiet. I came here with Pete when we were first in love, then again with each baby. And now we come every year, at the end of August; migratory creatures that can be followed on a map. We take the same apartment on the seafront, go to the same restaurants, do the same things, have the same days. I think even the conversations are the same: “No beach has better pebbles!” “No castle has better views!” “No freak shops have a better array of skull-shaped bongs, dude!”
The first day is Arrival — falling from the car, dehydrated and shrunken-legged, after a journey that is always an hour longer than you remember. Aber’s magic is that, 90 miles from the nearest motorway,it is near to, and on the way to, nothing except the dolphins in the bay.
You come to Aber only if you’re going to stay in Aber. A night at least. A week usually … Or the rest of your life if you’re one of the hippies who first pitched up here in the 1960s, or one of the 8,000 students a year who come here for their degrees, then don’t leave. We throw everything into the apartment, then walk along the seafront. The sea! The sea! Sailor blue! Or else with bad weather, as hard, thrilling and unstoppable as a sword — to the Olive Branch, on the corner of Pier Street. It’s a comfortable, higgledy, pine-and-spider-plants joint and, if we’re lucky, the table by the window will be free. We’ll eat good Greek food — my husband is Greek, so he’s picky about these things — while staring across the bay to the distant shadows of Anglesey and Snowdonia. Because it’s the first day of the holidays, I will have had at least two glasses of wine by the time we finish and go down to the beach for the first time.
Pete and I lean against each other as the kids fall into the waves for the first time, and then the second, before we wring out their shorts and spread them on the beach to dry.
It’s a fine pebble-and-shale beach — crunchy, not clacking — and the currents bring a junk-shop variety to the stones on the tide line. Quartz, slate, igneous Ordovician, meta-limestone from the Lleyn, cider-bottle glass smoothed to emerald. We fill our pockets with the most interesting ones; the ones shaped like letters, or animals or, once, a Volkswagen caravanette, just like the one we used to have. You can crab, happily, for hours off the boardwalk; legs hanging into the sea. In summer the boardwalk is filled with coachloads of Orthodox Jews — hats and curls buffeted by the sea breeze. It seems right that they’d come here — Barmouth is too normal, Tenby too twee. Aber feels as practical and time-suspended as they are. It’s far too windy for urban spores of anti-Semitism to take a hold here.
The sea turns silky and electric-green as the sun goes down — tide rising by the minute, sucking at your knees until you leave the bay and walk home. Safe, looking out from the apartment window, the bay explodes into sunset — fire, fire, pink nuclear fury, and then the utter insanity of Welsh starlight, mirrored by the trawler lights, heading for Ireland.
The next day is a proper beach day and we head 16 miles up the coast, to Ynyslas. There’s a picnic in the boot from Ultracomida, on Pier Street — a jewel-like Spanish restaurant-cum-deli with breads, cheeses, olive oils and pastries — and the drive takes you high enough to see the lion-back Cambrian Mountains, which chase you all the way to the end of Dyfed.
Ynyslas is a National Nature Reserve consisting of nothing but sky, sandpools and dunes. Over a morning you follow the tide out, past endless, new, creature-filled sandpools, until you reach a newly revealed sandbar, miles out to sea.
The afternoon is then spent in a slow, contemplative retreat back to the mainland — racing across the sand as the tide comes back in, throwing together doomed sandcastles and writing our names — MUMMY, DADDY, DORA, EAVIE — in metre-high letters on the beach, in the way that, two decades ago, my siblings and I wrote CAIT, CAZ, EDDIE, WEENA, PRINNIE, GEZMO, JIMMY, JOFISH, in the same, not-same sand.
The third day it will rain — Cluedo — and the fourth day rain, probably, too: the Ceredigion Museum, on Terrace Road, is Aberystwyth’s old theatre, now filled with curious agricultural tools, archaeological finds, stuffed animals, maritime oddities and a dinky café, all in a Womble-ish jumble. Then we might go to Wasabi — Aberyswyth’s sushi restaurant, on Eastgate — before home, and the concluding round of Cluedo.
Day five is probably my favourite: full immersion in Aber. A half-hour walk takes you to the top of Constitution Hill, and the Luna Park — the benevolently ghostly Victorian amusements on top of Aber’s outcast cliff. A candlelit, rickety shrine to the Virgin Mary, halfway up the path, is the point where you stop to eat crisps. At the top it’s tea and Welsh cakes.
Then the funicular railway lands you down in the centre of town again, and lunch at the Treehouse — another of Aber’s jumbled, pitch-pine joints, this time selling soul-cheering local wholefood and chilli hot chocolate. You can spend hours here, on a rainy day, as the windows mist up; the smell of fenugreek, jasmine tea and goat’s cheese making the room pleasingly dreamy as you do the crossword, or stare out of the window at the million greys of wet, Welsh slate rooftops.
And then, when the weather breaks, the castle: a green hill overlooking the sea, with the rib bones of a 14th-century castle poking through. The view is the very best, the one I bone-ache for in London: Cardigan Bay from end to end; the full length of Wales visible in one long sweep.
The first time that I saw it — aged 13, standing here in a wet crocheted poncho, holding my squalling two-year-old brother — I felt insane wild jealousy towards the Prince of Wales.
“I can’t believe he’s the Prince of all this!” I shouted into the wind.
“I would kill for this!”
And then I remembered that, of course, in a roundabout way, he had.
There’s a quiet, stubborn, time-biding, self-contained Welshness to Aberystwyth that makes the idea of it being “ruled over” laughable. This place simply disbelieves that it belongs to anyone but itself.
In the playground, in the dip next to the castle — sheltered, and lavish with white clouds of hydrangea — the slate gravestones from a demolished church have been laid, like purple flagstones, around the perimeter. So many are in Welsh — the stories of farmers and captains and politicians and priests who would have had no idea of England’s existence as they lived, and died, here — having travelled no farther than the mountains behind us and the sea in front.
As the wind blows across again, and the grass sings acid, rain-drowned green, and the bay looks like a billion smashed fish scales stretching for ever, who could ever imagine England, east of here: flat, dusty, half-coloured, quiet, and so, so distant?
In the car, on the way home, I cry — like every time since 1988.
Where to stay
Gwyn Hafan is a light and airy contemporary- style apartment in a converted Victorian building. It overlooks Aberystwyth’s Blue Flag South Beach and Cardigan Bay to the front, and the harbour, marina and town to the rear. The apartment is five minutes’ walk from the centre and sleeps three.Details One week at Gwyn Hafan (01970 611379, gwynhafan.co.uk) starts from £595.
The apartment at 46 Brynglas Road has three double bedrooms and is close to Aberystwyth Arts Centre and the university. Decorated in a modern style, it has a sun terrace and dining area with views over the town.
Details One week starts from £500 (01970 615452, 46brynglas.co.uk) Gwesty Cymru is a terraced house on the seafront that has been beautifully renovated using Welsh architects, craftsmen and artists. It has eight light, modern rooms with handmade oak furniture and classy bathrooms. Downstairs is an excellent restaurant — in warm weather you can eat outside on the terrace overlooking the sea.
Details B&B doubles start at £87. Three-course meals cost about £30 (01970 612252, gwestycymru.com).
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The web didn’t make businesses start giving their stuff away for free, just the arty boho groovy people
All told, this is a marvellous job, and certainly better than anything I hoped for aged 10, when I presumed I would grow up to be – given my class and location – either a picket or a prostitute. Indeed, there is only one real downside to it: a certain kind of person who, on discovering which paper I am employed by, pulls what I can only describe as a “Guardian face”, and makes some disapproving comment along the lines of: “You must have to watch what you say, given who you work for.”
The presumption being that, at 9am every day, Rupert Murdoch walks into my kitchen, points a Taser gun at one of my children, and says: “G’day. Write ‘Gordon Brown is a bonk-eyed homosexual’ in the middle of your ‘wry’ column about zoos, or the kid gets voltage.” I mention all this merely in order to forestall any tiresome comments of “Of course, you would have to say that” following my next declaration, which is this: I THINK YOU SHOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR CONTENT ON THE INTERNET.
Yeah, that’s right. You heard me. The Times is putting up a big paywall, all over the dream of free global communication, and I like it. Despite being so left wing that I cried when I interviewed Tony Benn, and so laid back and groovy that I have, in my time, given a wasp a blowback, I am all for paywalls, prosecuting illegal downloaders, and generally getting all monetising on the internet’s ass. Why? Because the internet is currently split into two halves. The bit that’s making all the money is the bit selling holidays, dishwashers, weekly groceries and fake Viagra. It’s San Francisco during the Gold Rush over there. If you’re selling stuff on the internet – however tatty or unenvironmentally friendly it is – you’ve got it made.
Then there’s the half that makes no money at all – where you can download music, films, TV shows, photography and journalism for free. Because if you’re selling creativity on the internet – brilliant, complex or just plain entertaining visions – it seems you’re not supposed to charge. Or complain about it, either. When Lily Allen spoke up against downloading last year, the internet exploded with – mainly male, it has to be said – commentators, castigating her for wanting to get paid for her work. We’re at the odd point where it now seems reactionary for artists to want to earn a living from art. By contrast, the comparethemeerkat.com crew are driving around in a golden hovercraft, wiping their arses with fifties.
The internet didn’t make businesses start giving their stuff away for free – Topshop isn’t handing out free jumpsuits – just the arty boho groovy people. And simply because they were scared of not looking “cool”. I don’t know quite how it happened, but you have to hand it to The Man. He aced that one. I don’t know how The Man does it, to be honest.
You know what? I liked the 20th century. The 20th century was great; for the first time in history artists stopped starving in garrets or being indentured to wealthy patrons and got paid decent money, thanks to massive tranches of dull yet hard-assed copyright legislation. As a consequence, the 20th century was artistically dominated by the working classes, because, for the first time, they could actually afford to be artistic.
Yes. As I suspect you may have guessed, what all this is essentially saying is that I don’t think journalism should be free, because, tbh, bitch got to make rent. I’ve spent 20 years clawing my way out of a council house in Wolverhampton to reach a point where I can now afford a Nigella Lawson breadbin. If I have to start blogging everything for free, I am simply going to have to fall back on Plan B, and go and hang about in a red-light district somewhere. Meanwhile, the only journalists left will be posh people who can afford to do it as a hobby, in between skiing or renovating a folly. This column would be written by Lady Helen “Melons” Windsor or George Osborne.
However, it’s not writers or musicians who are the workers most affected by free internet content. Have you seen how much free porn there is out there? You will never need to pay to see a penis again, that much is certain. And whoever it was who decided to fill the net with trillions of hours of gratis humping, I bet it wasn’t the cast. If I had spent the afternoon being bummed across a landing by a man who looks like Burt Reynolds, I would want to make sure the resultant work was exploiting every revenue stream it could, in order to buy fur coats and antibiotics.
As a society, we now charge for essential dental work, but somehow found a way to throw in HD spit-roasts for free. What does that say about us? And when someone works out what that says about us, will they get paid for explaining it?
