Eurovision bingo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

In which I whistle while I smirk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which Kel never really died

With no.1 brother, 1994

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which we walk like the wind

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

 “No. You’ll chafe.”

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

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

“Proper, in bras.”

“Yeah. Except for the bras.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which musicals are the new not-musicals

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

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

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

1.    Cabaret 

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

2.    Bugsy Malone 

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

3.    The Rocky Horror Show 

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

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

In which school rules really take the biscuit

image: offthemeathook.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which Messenger gtg

image: michelo.co.uk

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

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

Things I learned from MSN messenger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration credit due to @MSNRemembrance

In which I get The Glums

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring cleaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambridge too far

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which love is not a marmalade sandwich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pfft.

Lame.

In which Knowles bowls us over

image: alancross.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Football: a short play

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

“No,” says my boyfriend.

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

“This isn’t the theatre.”

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

“No.”

“That’s a shame.”

Pause

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

Pause

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

Pause

“Do people still use clackers?”

“What?”

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

“You mean rattles.”

“I mean clackers.”

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

“Oh. Do people still use rattles then?”

“No.”

“What about orange slices on a tray?”

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

“Possibly.”

Pause

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

“Two minutes.”

“Whoops-a-daisy.”

“Quite.”

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

Pause

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

“I was worried people might sing at you.”

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

“Yes.”

“In our goal?”

“Yes.”

Pause

“Minstrel?”

The greatest things I ever bought in HMV*

 Steps – 5,6,7,8

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

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

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

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

The Strokes – Is This It

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

The Chronicles of Narnia DVD boxset

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

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


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

The biggest disappointments of 2012

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

Netflix  

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

Draw Something 

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

Onesies  

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

The Olympics Closing Ceremony

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

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

Viva Forever  

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

“And better songs.”  

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

The Mayan apocalypse  

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

In which the stockings come down

With brother no.1, Christmas 1993

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which the princess is not a panda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Christmas from all at Bravo Enterprises!

We open on a single snowflake, drifting gently through a night sky to land on the upturned nose of a child, wearing a bobble hat. Holding a puppy. The music tinkles in: a baby-voiced woman whispers a melancholy cover of Wombling Merry Christmas, at a third of the speed of the original. There are some pan pipes in the background, and the whistling of a winter breeze through some pine branches on a distant hilltop.

Cut to a bevvy of slow-motion women in sequinned cocktail dresses, laughing into each other's hair as they put on lipstick for the office party and open secret Santa presents, all of which turn out to be a loofah set. They are very happy with the loofah sets, and laugh into each other's hair some more. Outside the window, a train travels past. The snow is now thick as a duvet, and yet it is not delayed. It is not First Great Western or First Capital Connect, but a special variety of First Festive Express with nostalgic slam doors and velvet curtains and a toilet that smells of cinnamon whirls.

Cut to the North Pole, where Mrs Claus has been working very, very hard to make Christmas magical for her apparently incapacitated husband and family. Santa and the elves smile vacantly from the sofa while she whirls around in a tinsel haze, prepping sprouts and making nativity costumes and buying the right girdle for Granny and icing the cake and finding the spare batteries and de-icing the car and giving Dasher his antler medication and wrestling a polar bear for the last orange-centered Christmas pudding at the Lapland Superstore, because as we all know, only Mums can do these things without risking serious physical harm. Good old Mums!

Shortly afterwards Mrs Claus will neck a bottle of cooking sherry and slump in a miserable heap under the weight of society's sexist expectation - but it's ok because the advert will be over by then and she can cheer herself up with a nice bit of sale shopping.

Cut to a black forest gateau the size of a paddling pool, over which Olly Murs and someone from TOWIE hold hands and sway, as a Nolan sister plays piano, sitting in the centre of an enormous king prawn ring. Underneath the buffet table, a Furby and a Bratz doll have fallen in love.

The child from earlier arrives at the party, creating a sense of narrative cohesion. The snowflake has melted, but we know it is the same child because the puppy is now wearing the bobble hat. One of the sparkling, laughing ladies puts down their loofah set and scoops the child up in her arms, so that it can place the star on top of the Christmas tree. The Festive Express races past the window, this time drawn incongruously by reindeer. One of the reindeer winks at the puppy. The words [insert heartwarming message] appear on screen, then some small print explaining all items are non-returnable and may cause choking.

Fade out.

Weep.

Are you weeping yet? Good.

In which I twhinge

This weekend, I tweeted Wandsworth Council to complain about the organisation of the Battersea Park fireworks display.

I’d like to pretend that it was an uncharacteristic move, borne out of sleep-deprivation, frustration at having to collect pre-booked tickets from the park before noon on the day of the fireworks, and perhaps a touch of over-excitement because frankly, I love fireworks more than most things in life.

I could pretend that, but I know in my heart (and also my brain) that the weekend before, I tweeted Natwest to complain about their shoddy customer service. While I was still in Natwest. I once tweeted Eat to complain that staff had forgotten the puff pastry top to my chicken soup, then discovered it sodden inside the pot. And complained some more.

I never used to be a complainer, mind. I’ve been an enthusiastic tutter and sigher for years, but it’s only recently that I’ve started channeling my dissatisfaction into something more productive. They say it’s never to late to take up a new hobby, and I’m happy to have found a pastime that is both calorie-burning and committed to the greater good.

It’s also a undeniable sign that I am becoming my mother, who once phoned up Baxter’s soup to complain about getting the wrong soup in her can and received £4 in compensation vouchers. “It was my son’s favourite,” she told them. “He’s very disappointed.” The son was 18.

The problem, of course, is that official complaining is so much quicker and easier than it used to be. Twenty years ago, doing a complaint also involved finding a pen, or dialing a number, possibly referring to a Filofax or angrily operating a Photostat machine, by the end of which your anger had probably melted away into just feeling slightly peckish, and all would be calm again.

Now, social media has opened up super express highways for complaining. We can eat an unsatisfactory croissant, receive bad customer service and whinge about it on Twitter before we’ve even wiped the sleep from our eyes. What’s more, we can do it publicly, like ringing a great big bell in the town square and yelling “Hear ye, hear ye! I only got three prawns in my sandwich and M&S are doing DIDDLY SQUAT about it.”

The good thing about all this digital disgruntledness, of course, is that it gives brands the chance to be brilliant back. The brilliant Bodyform video response to a snarky male Facebook commenter, for example, or o2 getting down wiv da kids when replying to ragey messages.

Wandsworth Council, by the way, never replied. But it must be said the fireworks were grand.

Skyfall snoozegate

What did we all think of Skyfall, then? Skyfall! New Bond! Ooh, the explosions! The cars! The shooting! The women, doing shooting! Scary Javier Bardem! Lovely Judi Dench!

Actually I can’t fake it anymore. You’ve wheedled it out of me, blasted watercooler enthusiasm. I fell asleep.

In my defense are the following points: 1) I have never managed to stay awake through a Bond film, so had very little point of reference for this one. Pretty much all I know is the shooting, the ladies, the cars and the fact that every so often he regenerates into a different man, leading me to assume Bond is part Timelord.

2) That Adele song really is very soothing. 3) I’d had a moderately rich Ben and Jerry’s first.

4) Not to go all Hipster Victorian on you, but massive, implausible CGI action sequences just leave me cold. Well done on your clever computing and that, but I’m the girl who preferred the old The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe from 1988, where Aslan looked like a giant talking shoebrush. I like a little authenticity. As soon as anyone in a film has hung by their fingertips from a speeding anything and not immediately died, you have lost me.

5) I don’t particularly fancy Daniel Craig. I’m sure he’s a lovely man, and he’s certainly very good at doing The Exercise and getting The Muscles – but frankly, I like my powerful, world-saving male heroes to have a higher gawk factor (see: earlier Doctor Who reference).

6) It was warm. 7) It was after 8pm. 8) I was sitting down.

In case Sam Mendes is reading this and on the verge of snotty tears, I’d like to stress that these last three are definitely the main factors in Skyfall Snoozegate. I’d say I’ve been semi-conscious for about 37 per cent of all the films I’ve ever watched. High profile releases I’ve napped through include The Notebook, Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones, The Third Man, Casablanca, Withnail and I and at least half of the Harry Potters.

The most expensive nap I’ve ever had was during the 2008 remake of The Women, which I saw in Leicester Square at the princely sum of £11 WITH student discount – though judging by the 15 minutes of action I saw before The Land of Zs beckoned, I didn’t waste a penny.

My cinema sleepytimes aren’t dependent on quality of movie, however. More on the quality of seating, and whether or not there’s a High Inquisitor sat near me (“Who’s that? What’s she doing? Is he doing to die?”) that requires politely smothering with my coat/pillow first.

So it was no slight on you, Mr Bond. Or you, Judi. Or any of you, clever special effects folks, or you, lighting guys, or you, Daniel Craig’s official abs sculptor. Jolly good job, all of you. And I can say that with enthusiasm, because I’m feeling terribly well rested.

In which it may or may not be THE LAW

The other day, my flatmate discovered that the school where she teaches had been accidentally paying her too much. And they wanted it back.

“But they can’t!” I spluttered. “They’ve given it to you, it’s yours. You’ve won the luck lottery! It’s in your bank - it can’t come out again, it’s like… a ship in a bottle! It’s.. it’s.. THE LAW.

It isn't the law, of course. It's the law of being embarrassed to say you can't give it back because you spaffed it all on ASOS.com. I realised as I said it that: firstly, my knowledge of this legal area is based entirely on the time in Friends when Phoebe’s bank gave her money by accident and let her keep it, and secondly, that there are many things that we all assume are THE LAW which really aren’t the law at all.

Such as a shop being legally obliged to sell you something cheap if it’s marked at the wrong price. Why do we believe that? Do we think it’s, like, punishment for their clerical error? “You got sloppy with the pricing gun, chump, now flog me this discount ceramic puppy ornament and choke on the bitter taste of your own incompetence.”

I imagine these shonky misconceptions are about 20% based on things we’ve seen on telly, 15% on our innate sense of human fairness, and 65% on things our mums say, because their mums said them, because their grandmothers said them, because in 1894 you could probably demand your neighbour’s best goat as penance for them giving you the shifty eye in the post office.

Another classic is: places that serve food must have a customer toilet! It is THE LAW. We know of course that this one can’t actually be THE LAW, because if it was then all the Pret A Mangers within Zone 2 would have been shut down. But we continue believing it, presumably based on some warped digestive science logic that says if you can put it in one end, you must provide means for it to come out the other. You hear it, every day, every hour probably, echoing around the cafes and kiosks of the nation – somebody’s mum, saying, “Well they must have a toilet, they serve food! It’s THE LAW” whilst doing an agitated wee dance by the napkin dispenser.

My absolute favourite, however, is the enduring urban legend that says a pregnant woman caught short can relieve herself in a policeman’s helmet. Everybody loves this one, despite knowing really that finding a policeman in a helmet these days is more elusive a mission than finding a functional loo with paper and an antibac hand gel dispenser.

But I’m happy to say that after much extensive googling on the topic (one of my favourite things about the internet is that you can type in “pregnant wee helmet” and it knows exactly what you mean), I haven’t found anything conclusively saying it isn’t true. So by THE LAW of believing things are THE LAW unless you’re told they absolutely aren’t, it must be THE LAW. Go, find a pregnant lady looking desperate in a toiletless café and tell her about it now.

In which we don't name that tune

I know this is a long shot, but do you know what song this is?

*Ahem.*

“Dum dum, do-do-duuuuh duuhh duhhh”. No? You must know it! “Dum dum, do-do-duuuuh duuhh duhhh”. Seriously? Come on. “Do-DO-duuuuh duuUUH”- oh I give up.

I’ve spent hours scouring the whole internet for this song. Scouring. Page five of Google. I’ve hummed it into a Shazam app, whistled it to my flatmates and sung it down the phone to my mother, but all have failed to identify it. My boyfriend and I heard it in a restaurant on Saturday and, in a move of predictable lethargy that we’ve regretted ever since, didn’t ask anyone who was singing it.

We think it might be glam rock. It sounds a bit like Slade, but definitely isn’t Slade. Although while on the hunt for the song, I’ve rediscovered just how much I love Slade - aside from a flagrant disregard for spelling that I can only assume slipped under the taste radar in the 70s because everyone was so zonked on Blue Nun and angelica-topped trifle - they had some really solid tunes. Coz I Luv You; Everyday; the one that was on the advert for the Fiat Cinquecento. Slade are for life, folks, not just for Christmas.

It isn't Status Quo either

Back to the song hunt – we thought it might have been Kiss, but it isn’t. We thought it might have been any of the related artists that Spotify points you to from Kiss, and spend a full two hours clicking through them on a musical breadcrumb trail (“The Sweet! COR I love The Sweet. YOU KNOW. Oh wait, I was thinking of Mud”). But it isn’t. 

Later we begin to think it might not be glam rock at all. It sounds a bit like the chorus from John Lennon’s Instant Karma, so maybe it could be an elusive Beatles song that we somehow managed not to hear during the last 24 years. It would help if we knew any of the words, or more than two bars of the tune. As someone who spends half her life frantically whistling music for others to identify (I can do all seven minutes of Bo-Rap without stopping for air), this has become my Everest. 

Eventually, we begin to think it perhaps doesn’t exist at all. Maybe we wrote it together in our heads – in which case, we should probably book ourselves some studio time pronto and lay this baby down, because it’s going to be massive. Bigger than Slade, even.

Basically, this has been a roundabout, 454-word way of asking: do any of YOU know what the song is? And if so, could you tell me before I flip and punch through a wall or something? Ta.

In which I avoid making a 'custardy' gag

I have developed a new approach to autumn meal planning: start with the custard and work backwards. Now, everything I eat after 3pm is simply warming up for the evening custard. Paving the way. Vegetables, rice, protein; all just a digestive chore until I reach the river of golden reward that is the custard.

Since I hit on this new regime, it’s made the lesser aspects of seasonal shift all the more palatable. Rain? Custard. Dark? Custard. Getting dressed under the covers, because you can see your own breath in your bedroom? Excellent, more custard.

Of course, some people don’t like custard. I didn’t, for a portion of my childhood. I didn’t trust it. For one thing, it covered up my pudding to the point where I worried it was gone forever. It introduced an unwieldy liquid element into formerly solid desserts. It looked like the gunge from Get Your Own Back and tasted like… well, like yellow.

But soon, I began to recognize custard’s supreme power as an accompaniment. It can transform even the most dismal of dessert options into something comfortingly stodgy and sublime. Put a rich tea, the pauper’s tea-dunker, into the bottom of a bowl of custard and it instantly gains the kudos of a far superior biscuit. Add some cut up banana and you’ve got a pud so wholly delicious that it forgets it has anything to do with fruit.

All the coolest people are into custard. Doctor Who, who famously eats it with fishfingers (a combo which makes more sense when you acknowledge that hollandaise, as my friend Daisy pointed out, is just ‘savoury custard’); Custard from Rhubarb and Custard. In the process of writing this, I even found a wikianswers article called ‘Does Zac Efron like custard?’, to which the answer was a resounding ‘yes!’.

The best thing I have ever done with custard was melt a chocolate Freddo in the middle of it. The second thing was invent custard porridge. The third was the thing everyone has done with custard, which is to add a little water to the powder and make a freaky moving liqui-solid, like the kind of science experiment enthusiastic parents do with their children in half term to make sure TV doesn’t turn their brains to bin juice.

 I’ve had fancy custard, of course, made with cream and vanilla and all manner of heavenly manna, but it was almost too delicious to be allowed as a genuine foodstuff – like sticking a spoon in some cake icing and calling it dinner. Bird’s custard, however, with its exciting powder-mixing ritual and vague whiff of wartime austerity, feels like the more everyday treat.

Naysayers would argue that without egg, it isn’t proper custard at all. But then, naysayers would probably also claim you can’t write a whole column about custard, and I’ve just proved them wrong.

Eight things every fresher should know

1)    There will be other fun in your life, beyond this term. I mean, not loads of it. And you’ll never have booze that cheap or hair that shiny or standards that low again. But there will be other fun, it doesn’t all dry up at 19 - so don’t feel you’ve got to consume every bit of fun on offer now, like it’s an all you can eat buffet and they’ve just refreshed the prawn toasts. There will be dinner parties, and office dos in your future. Sometimes strangers will fall over in the street. See, fun!

2)    Seek out your own kind. During my first week at uni, I sacked off a fresher’s party to watch a Fawlty Towers DVD in someone’s bedroom with a group of other alternative thrill-seekers. Those people are still my friends now.

3)    It’s ok to make temporary friends. Really. Everyone does it. I mean, on the moral barometer it won’t put you up there between Mother Theresa and Aslan, but making a few emergency pals as human buffers and then ditching them two weeks in when you discover they’re really into KT Tunstall and making their own yoghurt is just a natural defense tactic. Nobody will hold it against you. Except maybe whatshisname and thingumybob.

4)    It’s good to make friends with some rich kids. University is all about expanding your horizons, and discovering the diverse world beyond your doorstep. For me, as for many students*, this meant associating with rich people for the first time. Not family-gets-an-Ocado-delivery rich, but seriously rich. Doesn’t-have-a-student-loan rich. Daddy-owns-most-of-Wiltshire rich. It was fascinating. Because underneath all the cashmere and acres of glossy hair, they’re really just like us – and nothing proves that more effectively than watching them puke into their own Mulberry bag at the counter of a Chicken Cottage.

5)    Don’t buy all the books. Don’t even buy most of the books. Because there’s this wonderful thing called a library, and another wonderful thing called ‘pretending you’ve read them’. Sadly it took me until halfway through my second year to discover the first, but I cottoned on to the second almost immediately.

6)    You will either get fatter, or thinner. But most likely the first one.

7)    Man cannot live on instant noodles alone. But if you throw in some sweet chilli sauce and a mushroom every now and again, you’re golden. Or you could do what I did, and embrace culinary independence by branching out with your eating in new and exciting ways. I became addicted to peppered mackerel fillets from Tesco. I discovered falafel. I invented 'pstub', the official fourth meal of the day. I once spread ketchup on some rye bread, just to see.

8)    Create a fun fresher persona. To this day, we still fondly remember Embryology Pete. Who he was, how he was significant in our lives or what he’s doing now, I couldn’t tell you, but that’s not important. He was Embryology Pete! EMBRYOLOGY PETE. Legend.


*Unless of course you are rich, in which case you’ll get to meet POOR people for the first time. We’re great, we’re just like you, except when we’re given presents we take the wrapping paper off carefully and put it in drawer so we can use it again.

In which Page 3's days are numbered

It’s a pretty good rule of thumb, when wanting to test the sense of any life situation, to ask yourself: how would I explain this to a child? If you can’t communicate the logic of something in simple terms a kid can grasp, there’s a good chance it might be completely ridiculous. Extra light mayonnaise, for instance. Or why they let the contestants on Four in a Bed decide each other’s scores.

Now, I’d like you to think about how you would explain the existence of Page 3 to a child who has never encountered it before. Go on – have the imaginary conversation in your head. I’ll wait.

Tricky, isn’t it? Because when you stop to think about it, Page 3 is like an embarrassing old curtain pelmet from the 70s that everyone has somehow forgotten to take down. I like to think that when it finally ceases to be, just like smoking in restaurants, it’ll seem oddly incredible that it was ever A Thing in the first place.

The explain-it-to-a-child reason is just one of many being currently given by people signing the No More Page 3 petition on change.org. At the time of writing, it has over 17,000 signatures. It gained 6,000 just today. The campaign, an open letter to The Sun’s editor Dominic Mohan, was started by writer Lucy Anne Holmes when she noticed, flicking through its coverage of the Paralympics, that despite page after page of awesome achievements, the biggest image of a woman in the whole paper was still the semi-naked one.

“George Alagiah doesn’t say, ‘And now let’s look at Courtney, 21, from Warrington’s bare breasts,’ in the middle of the 6 O’ Clock News, does he?” reasons Holmes. The petition isn’t about restricting the freedom of the press. It’s not about condemning glamour models, or the people who like to look at them. It’s simply about asking, nicely, that they be taken out of the newspaper – because in case we weren’t all clear on this, boobs aren’t news.

Whether The Sun reports ‘news’ at all is a whole other debate, of course. But to write it off as an archaic, ignorant rag is to blithely ignore the influence it still has on a massive chunk of the population – not to mention anyone who ‘accidentally’ reads it on the bus. Page 3 is so entrenched a part of the mainstream media that loads of readers don’t even stop to question it. If we can’t change the whole paper, we can at least try to change this.

And while it’s heartening how strong and swift the response to Lucy’s campaign has been, it’s also been fist-gnawingly infuriating how many idiots still think “you’re just jealous” is an adequate comeback.

One argument commonly touted is empowerment. Or that the women who pose on Page 3 are actually exploiting the punters, as a sort of penance for being so easily pleased by a casual flash of mammary. Maybe they are. But rather than debate the endless intricacies of the power struggle, I want to ask: why does anyone have to exploit anyone? Can’t we just, y’know, take a break from all the exploiting for a while? If two wrongs don’t make a right, surely two exploitations don’t make a real advancement for either gender.

“It’s just a bit of fun,” is another classic. Of course! Fun! Like a naughty seaside postcard! Where’s the harm? The harm is in yet another generation of humans growing up to believe a woman’s worth is measured by how good she looks in her scanties. The harm is in giving these women fake ‘novelty’ opinions, to remind us that, obviously, you can’t be sexy AND interested in the fiscal crisis. The harm is in objectification being sold like a jolly joke over our morning cereal, to people who either can’t or don’t want to recognise it. There’s the harm. LOOK, I’m pointing at it, like a less amusing Where’s Wally.

Besides, isn’t it frankly insulting for a paper to think you only want to read the news if there’s a pair of bouncy breasts on the opposite page, like the proverbial spoonful of sugar, to take the taste away? If you want fun, folks, there are plenty of other places to find it. Go to a funfair. Have an ice cream. Or if you want, look at a publication that’s specially designed to have naked people in it. There are several out there, I’ve heard.

Then let Courtney, 21 from Warrington, put her jumper back on, so we never have to explain to a confused child why she’s there.

In which love is a full inbox

This weekend, it is mine and my boyfriend’s two-year anniversary. True, I pondered the correct grammatical arrangement of that sentence for about the same amount of time as I’ve spent mulling over the significance of the occasion (my boyfriend’s and mine? My and my boyfriend’s? My boyfriend’s and I’s?) - but still, it’s nice to mark the date.

Of course, it will be hard to top our one-year anniversary, where he took me to see Dolly Parton at the o2 and I bought him a dressing gown, but we can still try. We have gone for the ultimate luxury, staying in a posh hotel in the city we already live in – because nothing says, “I love you” like “oh look, complimentary slippers!”

From the time on our second date when he accidentally stood me up and found me drowning my sorrows in Primark, to the moment last Sunday night where we both realised we secretly didn’t hate Coldplay, it’s been a beautiful journey akin to one of the great Hollywood pairings (Laurel and Hardy?).

But the reason I’m telling you all this isn’t simply an act of awful coupled-up smuggery, you understand (though if my 17-year-old self is reading this, I’d like to say: ‘it’s fine, you get one in the end! Oh, and stop wearing that.’). No, it’s actually an affirmation for anyone out there who might be combing cyberspace and concluding that everybody single left is a Doctor Who monster with the personality of unmarinated tofu.

You see, we met on the internet. Or, as I’m planning on having printed on matching t-shirts soon, ‘Tim Berners-Lee brought us together.’ If you’d like specifics, we went for My Single Friend. Because Match.com is for hussies, POF for cheapskates, and eHarmony for people so keen to get married THIS YEAR that they’ve already bought the cake-topper. Plus, the sign-up-your-mate format guarantees that they do have at least one friend – which, call me a fusspot, is fairly high on my list of criteria.

I find it sort of incredible that there is still a stigma surrounding online dating. It just makes such good sense. Why keep on hoping you’ll bump into the love of your life in a pub, or at a bus stop, when you could search and appropriately filter thousands of eligible people from the comfort of your own sofa? Besides, someone you meet at the bus stop is no less likely to be a murderer than someone you meet online, now are they?

So I bid you, singles, go forth! Find yourself a nice new beau while you’re doing your online Tesco shop, safe in the knowledge that I’ve roadtested the path thoroughly, and two years on still not fallen in any potholes.

I’d better not hold my breath though – he hasn’t seen the follow-up to the dressing gown yet.

(He will tell me he loved this column, by the way, because he is in it. And it is the eternal law of the columnist’s life that people say, “I loved that article” when what they mean is “I was in it! You mentioned ME! I’d be famous if it wasn’t in Worthing!”)

Radio Ga-Ga

If it’s ok with you, I’d like to start this week’s column by quoting a relevant song. “On the radio. Woah-oh-oh-oh, on the radio.” You guessed right - I’m going to talk about radio! (That’s the wireless, for the more autumnal among you, and ‘blank telly’ for the yoof). 

Apart from once choreographing a dance to the Archers theme tune, which I would make my dad perform with me in the kitchen in the gleeful rustic manner I imagined they did it down the Ambridge disco, I never really used to be a radio person. There was a brief phase where Terry Garoghan’s Last Bus To Whitehawk on Southern FM was compulsory listening for everyone in Year 10, but largely, radio was just back-up TV.

You imagined if there was ever a crisis in which all the telly in the country was turned off (as, I don’t know, a punishment from the government or a Dalek invasion), the family might be forced to gather round a radio, acting out the scenes for each other to make sure our eyes didn’t grow bored and stop working. It was quaint, that radio was still A Thing.

But then, as I grew older and began the inevitable and increasingly speedy transformation into my mother, I started to understand radio. It’s like a nice friend. The radio is the busy person’s refuge, and the lonely person’s companion. Unlike telly, it doesn’t demand all of your attention – it’s content just to waffle away in the background. And like a real mate, sometimes it annoys you and sometimes it plays rubbish music, but you still refrain from kicking it in the head.

In fact, there’s something morally noble about the radio (bear with me). The way I see it, it’s less selfish than simply putting your own music on, because you’re being forced to share with the rest of the nation – and thus get to feel smug and self-sacrificing afterwards. “I don’t even like Keane. But what did I do? I listened to it anyway! I’m basically a modern day Joan of Arc.”

Having made you sit through this much, I may as well announce now that I’m a BBC Radio 2 listener. Does that disgust you? Are you still there? I realise in radio terms it’s like saying you’re really into Vienetta, or Amazon gift vouchers. It’s a populist choice. But it has musicals and classic pop and jazz and Chris Evans and Moira Stewart and an organist and GOSH DARNIT, it makes me feel cosy inside.

In fact, we’re a Radio 2 flat – especially since I started turning them all on at once in an effort to ward off the mice. Sometimes I’ll shake things up with a little bit of 6Music, or enjoy a session of late night Magic FM with a silent cab driver – but it’s to R2 that my heart belongs. Even when they play the same Amy MacDonald track every hour for a month. Even when Jo Whiley’s on.

I imagine eventually I’ll start blending in a bit of Radio 4 too, to supplement the quality chat with some worldly knowledge. Besides, it would be nice to crack out that dance routine again.

In which I personally state some stuff

My parents are clearing out my old bedroom. Considering I left home six years ago and they’ve been living in a room still semi-bedecked with purple and silver teen tat ever since, I haven’t taken too heavy a hand with the disposal process.

In fact, I have had no opinions on the disposal process at all, which is for the best as I am the worst type of sentimental hoarder. I never throw away birthday cards for fear the sender might subsequently die. I still have my friend Sarah’s Year 8 English project in a cupboard because I couldn’t bear the thought of her heartlessly binning it. Twelve years ago.

I’m aware that there is a magical, elusive point in time between ‘soulless humanoid’ and ‘drowning in pointless nostalgic detritus’ at which it becomes fine to throw stuff away, but I have never been able to clock exactly when it occurs. What, for example, do you do with theatre programmes? To come home, still floating on that happy cultural high, and instantly commit the programme to the bin seems like the behavior of an ice-hearted monster – not to mention a waste of £4.50.

But when it gets picked up years later, covered in a duvet of dust, by someone who is helping you move, and they ask in a condescending tone, “What do you need THIS for?” and you’re forced to explain that you’ve been keeping it as an emergency mousemat despite already having a mousemat and in fact not even using a mouse anymore… well, you feel like a fool.

So yes, they were clearing out and I was staying out.

“We’ve found your personal statement!” my youngest brother declared down the phone last week. “It’s really embarrassing!”

Well, of course it is. It is cripplingly embarrassing. I think I even knew it was when I wrote it, but probably thought at the time that willingness to humiliate oneself on paper in front of authority figures might actually go some way to earning me a place at uni (besides, everything one writes as a teenager is humiliating and naff. I bet Mozart listened back to the early concertos and went ‘OH GOD.’)

I reckon UCAS could, and should, make a really decent toilet book out of the worst personal statements submitted each year. Mine opens with the immortal line, “Some people dream of seeing their name in lights. I’m more interested in seeing mine in print”. BLARRGH.

But writing a personal statement is just practice for applying for jobs as an adult, of course. And anyone doing that know there is another magical, elusive point – this time it’s where the inversely proportional goals of ‘making yourself look like you’d be good at the job’ and ‘not sounding like an arrogant tit’ converge in perfect balance, and nobody in the history of the world has ever achieved it.

If I were High Ruler of the Universe (which I shall never be, because I couldn’t write a decent enough application), cover letters would be done away with in favour of real life tasks that exposed crucial truths about the applicant’s personality. Such as making them watch Steel Magnolias to see if they cried at the correct bits. Or asking them the correct amount of time to hold onto a birthday card before throwing it away.