October 1992
‘So that blue tattoo on his arm, the one he covers up,’ I say to Mam, ‘is that his first wife’s name?’ I’m packing a suitcase and detaching a poster of Michael Hutchence with his big doe love-me eyes from my wall, leaving Blu Tack scars behind.
I am leaving home. Mam looks sad, but sad in a way that leaves room to start knocking down the MDF that separates my bedroom and the bathroom, and installing a mock neopalatial sunken bath with a two-speed whirlpool.
‘What?’ she says. ‘Oh, that? That blurry tattoo? It says “Vera”. He used to scrub at his arm with iron wool to make it blurry. That’s how they got rid of tattoos then.’
It’s October. I’ve just turned nineteen. Six weeks ago, clutching two Bs that I’d somehow scraped despite everything, I spent ten minutes on the telephone with a kind woman in a university administration office far away in Scotland. That call changed the entire course of my life. I got into uni on ‘clearing’. After some garbled chat about who I was and my love of words, whoever this brilliant, understanding human being was took pity on me and shoved me in to study a BA in English literature. I had a place at the University of Stirling. No, I didn’t know where it was either. Nevertheless, I said yes on the spot. I got my dad’s big AA map down and found it. Stirling was on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Dad said he’d drive me there.
Two days later a reading list arrived via Royal Mail, with a cover note, which I carried around with me for years, that said, ‘Good luck, Miss Dent.’ The list was ten books long, consisting of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory and Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe and The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells. I didn’t know how I was going to shoplift all of them, but I could make a start that day. I’d slid downwards for a while on the game of snakes and ladders, but I was on the rise again. If I studied English and maybe worked for the student paper – wasn’t that what famous people did? They edited student papers or maybe performed in plays and then they were noticed by BBC Two and got their own series, were catapulted into the nation’s hearts and spent weekends hanging around the Groucho Club drinking White Russians with Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
‘How long was he married to Vera?’ I say to Mam, taking down a poster of Matt Dillon brooding in a vest.
Mam’s face creases to think.
‘Oh, no, he wasn’t married to Vera, he was married to Maureen,’ she says.
‘You said Vera,’ I correct her. ‘On his arm, Vera.’
‘Oh, Vera was the one he was with before he went in the army,’ says Mam.
‘I’ve never heard of her,’ I say.
‘Yes, you have,’ she says. ‘That’s the one he had the little boy with.’
‘He had the what?’ I say, feeling the colour drain from my face.
‘Michael,’ she says. ‘Oh.’
I look at her.
‘I thought you knew about this one,’ she says.
‘No, I didn’t know about this one,’ I say, the floor moving beneath me.
My father, I had just found out, also had a son called Michael. Somewhere, out there. As far as Mam knew, he was not in touch with him.
My father, it transpired, did not join the army as a teenager out of a post-war patriotic fervour; the line he’d spun my entire life. Dad was a military man! All he’d yearned to do from being a tiny boy was to join up and be prepared to fight for his country in case the Nazis made another appearance! This was a lie too. He just got someone in Liverpool up the duff and was basically on the bloody run. I wasn’t angry at Dad. It’s hard to stay angry at a person when your only chance of freedom requires them to give you cash for your first month’s rent.
I never, ever spoke to Dad about Michael. He made talking about things he didn’t want to talk about impossible. But I did think over the years that it must have been very difficult for Dad getting someone pregnant early in the Fifties when he had such Catholic parents. My ability to find excuses for my dad was pretty honed by this point: Michael was all religion’s fault. If anything, this mess-up was on the Pope. And the telephone exchange. I mean, how was Dad supposed to stay in touch with his first child when he was in the army, right?
I wandered out onto the tarmac outside Southdale Street, smoked a menthol Silk Cut and rubbed Cilla’s belly as she kipped with four paws in the air, under the ‘Warning – Dog’ sign. I loved Currock – shaking the Currock part out of me was going to prove very hard – but it was time for me to go.
In Scotland I was introduced to the perilous joys of Buckfast Tonic Wine.
‘It’s made in an abbey by wee monks,’ my flatmate Agnes told me, pouring me a glass in my first week as a Stirling resident. This fortified caffeinated grape juice had quite the reputation, although not quite as holy water; rather for encouraging drinkers to roll about in the streets and fight the local police. If you overlooked all that, it was actually rather drinkable. For the mornings after, I was tutored in the restorative power of a can of cold Barr’s Irn-Bru: a bright-orange, bubblegum-flavoured, hangover-blitzing nectar. It was ‘made in Scotland from girders’ according to the adverts that played on Grampian TV. I found the adverts intoxicating. I’d grown up eight miles from the Scottish border in the blissfully ignorant belief that if you ever strayed over there they probably ate and drank the same things we did.
I was wrong. Every day in my new adopted country was a fresh treat. In my first year I learned to love the claggy happiness of Tunnock’s caramel wafers wrapped in fawn tartan wrappers. These delicious things required serious commitment to chomp through. Any English fairy could eat a Penguin or a Breakaway. Only Scotland could invent a chocolate biscuit that actually hurts your mouth. They are a nation of glorious contrarians. They take something perfectly design-friendly, like a sausage, call it Lorne Sausage and serve it in regimented flat rectangles. They didn’t bother with fancy modern sliced bread like Mighty White; no, their sliced bread looked like something from 1940. It was a thin, tall loaf, wrapped in tartan-patterned greaseproof paper. At breakfast they added white tatty scones to their fry-ups – mashed leftover spud mixed with flour, cut into triangles and fried in a pan full of leftover bacon fat. Each Sunday night, my flatmates would return from visits to their families with ‘tablet’ – a sort of homemade fudge made from condensed milk and sugar. Everyone’s ‘wee nan’ had a secret recipe.
None of the above did much for the size of my arse, because, roughly speaking, none of the real joys of Nineties Scottish cuisine were terribly healthy. Although I never set eyes on a battered Mars Bar – a tourist thing newspapers harped on about in the Nineties – it does give away something really, really brilliant about Scotland. They took chip shops very seriously; much more so than the English. In Stirling, the fryers were on from 11 a.m. till 11 p.m. daily, seven days a week. Chips were fresh, hot and fried in beef dripping, then pelted with salt and sweet brown sauce. Any item within reason was flung into the deep-fat fryer: slices of pizza, pakoras, onion rings, haggis, white puddings, black puddings, sausages and chicken tikka. The Scots, I found out quickly, had their own specific chip-shop language. Any item with chips was ‘a supper’, even if you were eating it at 11 a.m. Anything without chips was ‘single’, almost as if you were explaining its relationship status. The Scots – confirming that they are God’s own people – invented something called ‘the munchy box’: a fourteen-inch pizza box containing a sumptuous smorgasbord of pick ’n’ mix deep-fried things: onion bhajis, battered sausages, shaved kebab meat, chicken nuggets, scampi and so on and so forth. The munchy box was a positive boon during the Nineties for stoned people playing Mortal Kombat on Super Nintendo who could only eat with one hand while leading Sonya through martial arts battles.
Dad drove me to Stirling in a van brim full of all my worldly belongings. Other Freshers seemed to be travelling light, arriving with a small rucksack containing The Dark Side of the Moon on cassette and some wet wipes to tide them over until they next went home. But as I made this leap from one world to another, I was sure that was the last time I’d live in Cumbria again. I arrived with my beloved fake Eames chair that made me look like one of the intellectuals on Channel 4’s cool anarchic debate show After Dark. I packed my stereo, my Deee-Lite CDs, my DJ Sasha bootleg cassettes and several split-leg dresses and feather boas, in case an emergency Brand New Heavies concert broke out. As the Nineties continued, my fashion sense did not improve.
‘Why are ye’ wanderin’ aboot like a pure bam?’ Agnes would say, when I appeared in the kitchen in a charity-shop cocktail dress that made me look, I supposed, exactly like Jackie Onassis.
‘You’re wearing a Rangers tracksuit,’ I’d snap back, putting on my oversized sunglasses. ‘You have no right to talk about fashion.’
Agnes played football for Stirling Women and in the holidays, aged nineteen, ran one of the bars at Ibrox Stadium.
‘Seriously, mon, get te’ fuck,’ she’d laugh. ‘I’m casual. You’re chippin’ aboot lookin’ like a bluebottle.’
As a settler from another country, I was always treated kindly by the Scots, despite the fact that thirty years of Tory government had left millions of them even more resentful about ‘the fuckin’ English’ than ever before. Many felt forgotten, looked down upon, swindled and snubbed all at once. The dream of Scottish independence never felt far from the surface in any pub chat. Cos they ‘hated the fuckin’ English, maan’. All of us.
‘The thing is, youse are all a bunch of posh yah-yah cunts, that’s why,’ my friend Gary would say in thick Kilmarnock tones.
‘What, even me?’ I’d say.
He’d cave immediately.
‘Actually … no, not the Northerners,’ he’d say. ‘Youse lot are OK. Youse lot are like us.’
Something has been vaguely troubling me about Dad, which happened on the very first day of term. It was a very subtle thing, but I dwelt on it for weeks afterwards.
‘This is Grace,’ my father shouts across the car park in a weird American accent. ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of her.’
A group of bewildered Finnish PhD students, returning for their final year at university, turn around to stare at me. I’m an anonymous Fresher they have no reason to know, unloading a car. They shrug and walk away. I never see those students ever again. Or any of the other strangers my father insists on introducing me to on my first day at university, now feigning an ever-so-slightly German accent. The interactions make no sense. I go along with it at the time, but there is an exuberance and a lack of reasoning in his actions that is just a bit askew.
It’s impossible to pinpoint when all the stuff with Dad began. It is one of the biggest kickers for families like ours when we try to remember. There’s no beginning to mark, should we even want to pause, take stock and get our bearings.
But maybe this was it, decades before it got really bad. There. That moment in the car park. Early Nineties.
No, it had to be later. When he became obsessive about peeling onions before stacking them in the fridge in a neat wall to save space? Their brown gossamer skins troubled him as they were ‘taking up too much room’.
But aren’t dads just weird anyway?
That’s their job. Being weird, embarrassing you and driving you places. And my dad loved to drive, although sometime in the Nineties he became mysteriously cagey about getting behind the wheel. Sometimes on the simplest trips, my mother said, he got completely lost.
The confused Finnish students disappear out of the car park.
Other Freshers wander past on their first day in Scotland carrying lava lamps and Betty Blue posters.
‘They seem like a good bunch,’ my dad says, not being American anymore. He was very proud that I’d got to uni. Even if he never quite knew what I studied. He was always proud of me – even years later, when he didn’t 100 per cent know who I was.
‘My only little girl, off to university,’ he says, picking up a box.
Oh yes, his only little girl – he never stopped with that either.
‘Do you think there is something wrong with Dad?’ I said to Mam on the phone a few weeks after I left.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘Oh, just some of the stuff he does,’ I said. ‘It’s like he’s got dementia.’
‘Oh, Grace, he’s not got dementia,’ she sighed. ‘He’s just a dickhead.’
This university campus that I’d made my new home felt oddly adrift from the outside world. Built in the grounds of the Airdrie Castle estate, our uni halls sat in the centre of 360 acres of greenery, overlooked by mountains and pelted by rain almost twelve months a year. From September until January the grassy knolls and forest glades behind our halls of residence would fetch up a sumptuous scattering of potent magic mushrooms. On news of a new crop ripening, students would converge carrying old ice-cream boxes to commence foraging. Soon, the sounds of Ozric Tentacles tormented the corridors as we lay around on our beds with our ankles in the air, beaming at the ceiling when we should have been finding the magic realism in Woolf’s Orlando. The first year passed in a joyous blink until the grades arrived. Friends began going home at weekends and instead of reappearing carrying their wee nan’s teeth-rotting tablet, they simply didn’t reappear at all, ever again, quietly throwing in the towel on uni life. Now this frightened me. Going home was not an option. I had to fix up, and sharpish.
1993
‘The lead story should be that the tarmac is bought from England. From Hull,’ an irate student is telling us. ‘It’s not even Scottish tarmac. We make tarmac in Scotland!’
At the second-year Welcome Meeting for the University of Stirling student newspaper, I am having my first experience of news. Inveigling my way into the world of print is very much part of my new five-year plan.
‘The scoop is the waste of university money,’ another agrees. ‘We should put that on the cover. “Cash Squandered in English Tarmac Scandal.”’
This is not going well. Journalism, if the last seventeen minutes are anything to go by, does not seem terribly exciting. It feels nothing like Piers Morgan’s ‘Bizarre’ column where he’d have one arm around Bruce Springsteen by now and an exclusive on the Bros come-back. Instead, today’s red-hot topics include: press ethics, whether the campus rabbit population should be subject to culling (they were eating all the campus chrysanthemums) and a heady debate over whether bunnygate is a better front page than the absolute scandal of the tarmac expenditure. Several of them are dressed as actual grown-ups in shirts, ties and pleasant sweaters.
‘Is there any room for anything kind of, um, funny?’ I ask, raising a hand.
‘Such as?’ says the editor
‘Er, well, like satire, maybe.’
I don’t really mean satire. I mean silliness.
I just know they’ll go for satire because boring people since George I’s reign have claimed to have a great respect for satire.
‘Satire,’ they all nod. ‘Yes, satire.’
Bingo, I think.
‘You could write something funny exposing this tarmac expenditure scandal for what it is? Like in “Rotten Boroughs” in Private Eye.’
‘Um …’ I say, chancing my arm, ‘I was thinking more like … a column about campus life. About all the different tribes … and, well, the gossip we’re all talking about on a Sunday morning on our sofas.’
‘We don’t have a gossip column,’ says a third year who has actual leather elbow patches on his jumper. ‘Gossip is a bit naff.’
This may be true, but gossip is the lifeblood of the campus. We are 3,000 twenty-somethings living in a glorified nature reserve on the side of a mountain in sideways sleet. What else is there to talk about other than each other’s business?
‘Also,’ says the editor, ‘we can’t go around printing things about people that aren’t true.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be making things up,’ I say. ‘Just printing what happened and taking the piss out of things a bit.’
I look hopefully at them as they stare back as if I’ve asked to whip off my top and bounce on a trampette on page three.
‘Let’s come back to that,’ the third year says. Then a Fresher who smells of chlorine asks if he could write up the regional front-crawl heats happening at the uni pool and debate moves on to the recent verruca outbreak.
‘Maybe that’s the cover,’ a voice says. ‘“Uni Wrongfooted by Verruca Scandal.”’
I flounce out of the door, vowing never to darken their doors again. Not a soul notices.
At a loss, yet undeterred, next I hit up the drama club. Here things then went from bad to worse. The first meeting involved playing a long improvisation game of swapping hats and pretending to be at a bus stop – the memory of which still gives me atopic eczema. The goal that term seemed to be to stage Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, despite my firm reasoning that audiences throughout time were only ever sitting through it out of politeness. Within a month, I had a strong sense that I was not cut out to hang with actor types. I just did not know where to look whenever someone in loon pants and leg warmers began hamming up Lady Macbeth’s speech. From reading the newspapers I knew that the Cambridge Footlights seemed to propel folk like Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry from unknown students straight into the heart of the media establishment. But being with people like this gave me clues as to why there were so few working-class thespians. It was just so show-offy. I was fine with being pretentious in the privacy of my own head, but in public? With people looking? Writing felt much more like a job for me. That’s showing off in private. But how?
Salvation beckoned weeks later: a piece of A4 paper stuck to a noticeboard in the English Department.
‘Writers Wanted’ for a new campus fanzine called Mental Block. This was a pun on the bleak, cell-like concrete-block rooms in which we all lived. I wrote down the number on my arm, took a deep breath and telephoned the editor. He was a boy called Keith, a gentle-sounding but mischievous third year. He wanted the fanzine to take an irreverent look at campus life. I liked the phrase ‘irreverent look’. That, alongside ‘sideways swipe’ and ‘backwards glance’, was my favourite type of writing. He’d found a few other willing writers already. It sounded perfect. It sounded a tiny bit Smash Hits-y.
1994
During the spring term of 1994 I sat at my desk overlooking the western extremity of the Ochil Hills, typing nonsense into an electric typewriter. I wrote a ‘cool or not cool’ barometer – which was an idea blatantly thieved from The Face magazine – and also some silly lists (the word ‘listicle’ was yet to be invented). After printing out these particular slices of copy at the newsagent, I trimmed the words with scissors and Pritt-Sticked them back onto a blank A4 page, fitting them around blurry black-and-white pictures. The finished product was nothing short of horrible to look at. It was part Smash Hits, part kidnapper’s ransom letter. It was festooned with spelling mistakes and blank gaps where the pieces didn’t fit. I filled these holes with shit BIC-pen illustrations. My writing style was verbose and erratic and it leaned heavily on weak in-jokes that only seventeen people understood. The following decades didn’t see me improve a great deal, but this was the rawest version. I delivered the pages to Keith by hand outside a pub and ran off before he could look at it. What if he didn’t laugh?
‘Do more,’ said Keith the next day when I passed him in the corridor. ‘It was great. There’s more space to fill.’ So I did.
My next contributions were bolder. I invented news items about the ‘Balls Up’ Juggling Club and the patient girlfriend clique who hung around the rugby boys. I wrote about the glamorous clique of Erasmus students and prolific shaggers. I wrote tips on how to feign blindness in a thin corridor towards someone you’d drunkenly fumbled at the Coors Beer Two-for-One night. I rated the private study booths on the top floor of the library in order of the most exhilarating to copulate in. None of this could I ever show my parents. Along the way, I began to develop a style – or, at least, I began to rob and recycle bits of the things I loved. There were elements of Karen Krizanovich’s Sky magazine pithiness, plus the self-involved chuntering of Victoria Wood’s Kitty from As Seen on TV. Victor Lewis-Smith, restaurant and TV columnist, was definitely in there too. I loved how Lewis-Smith, in print, played the part of a man just on the edge of his own sanity. Each time we erected a little trestle table in the main uni foyer to begin flogging copies of Mental Block, I fretted that no one would care, but then a crowd would appear and the issues began to vanish. Then, within the hour, a blowback of fury and giddiness and shrieking would begin about the things we had said. Yes, some people were piggin’ livid, but most found it funny. And my name was printed all over it. The feeling was intoxicating. Better than any Class A. Better than a Brownie Badge or carrying a flag in church. Better, almost, than a letter printed in the NME defending Nicky Wire. When something you write strikes a chord and ends up widely read, it feels a bit, in your brain at least, like being loved. Particularly when you write silly things. Clearly silly things won’t win you as many prizes as being serious; however, you only have to write once at a silly frequency that makes a stranger really snort with laughter and then you’re in their hearts, just a little bit, forever. I’d take silly over serious any day.
Obviously over the next few issues, I began to push my luck. I wrote reviews of atrocious campus food and invented fake small ads for disgusting fake products. I took several pot shots at the Principal of the university himself, who was, according to my mushroom-addled pseudo-communist mind, both slothful and corrupt as well as a terrifying symbol of the petite-bourgeoisie establishment. It was quite a flight of imagination on my part, bearing in mind that the Principal was actually a terribly nice man called Alasdair whose main job was juggling teaching budgets. Thankfully, Generation X students were allowed to work organically through our stage of being nauseating little berks without it spoiling our futures. We could gob off, push people’s buttons, flip-flop between beliefs and act atrociously without anyone screengrabbing the evidence and storing it in a folder as a weapon. We didn’t know the Shangri-La in which we were living. After about a year, Keith, as the editor, was threatened with ejection from the campus without honours if we carried on. Mental Block ground completely to a halt for a while and then trickled on a little longer in a more prim, censored way, which upset nobody. This was no fun at all. All funny writing has to cause a little collateral damage. Then Keith graduated, taking his honours and running before the Principal could change his mind. Desperate to write something, I slunk back to the official student paper and begged them to let me write a less defamatory campus-life column called ‘The Squealer’. Kindly, they gave me the time of day. Of course, by now, I yearned to spread my audience wider. Cosmopolitan, I read, were looking for ‘student writers’. A competition in the back of one of the magazines offered a prize that included a trip to the Groucho Club to meet Marcelle D’Argy Smith, work experience at National Magazines in London and a chance to see your writing in their pages. They wanted a covering letter describing why I was the bright, vibrant young woman they needed and five feature ideas. One evening soon after, I drank half a bottle of Thunderbird, shoved a piece of A4 in my typewriter and bashed out the title ‘Clitoris Allsorts: Ten ways to make your hotspot work for you and him.’ It was a heinous title, but something told me it might get a reaction.
Easter Sunday, 1995
‘’Ere, have an Easter chicken tikka balti pasty,’ Mam says, rustling inside a large brown paper bag. ‘That’ll cheer you up.’ Easter in our house is like a directionless Christmas: the house fit to bursting with Whoops! gun-stickered hot cross buns and Mini Egg cookies, but no real schedule for eating them. Just freeform grazing.
The pasties, £1.99 for six, are from ‘Market Street’, an aisle at the back of Morrisons supermarket where the signage goes all mock Dickensian, as if you’ve taken a wrong turn by the tinned peas, stumbled through the mists of time and wound up in a magical Olde Worlde of baked goods. I pick up the pasty, aware without much thought that it contains approximately 320 calories. I cut the pasty in half, leaving the remainder inside the paper bag for someone else in the family to eat. In approximately one hour’s time I will pass by in search of a pen and hoover it up to help with my sadness. Cosmopolitan do not care about my revolutionary thoughts on the clitoris. Two months have passed. No reply. I vow to myself I’ll enter again next year and be grateful I still have my role at the student paper writing pithy words on the poor quality of scampi in a basket in the main bar. My self-confidence has reduced but the same cannot be said for my bottom.
‘I’m putting weight on again,’ I sigh to Mam. ‘I’d just got a stone off after Christmas.’
‘Oh, you’re volumptuous,’ Mam says, sounding out the errant ‘m’ clearly. ‘Men like something to keep the bed warm.’
In my twenties I began in earnest my lifelong war against weight gain. The pounds slid on and I took them off again. Size sixteen in January, size ten by March, size twelve by April, back at twelve for June. Hungry, hungry, being good, eating again, fatter, hungry. When I am size ten, there is a size sixteen woman inside me dying to get out. She’s in there. Cramped and hot and giddy with starvation, giggling at my conceit. ‘I’ll be back,’ she laughs. ‘Enjoy your defined décolletage and your neat waist … I’ll be fucking back.’
Binge-eating was not my style. Or filling my plate right up. Or over-ordering. Or eating late at night. Or ordering cartwheel-sized pizza deliveries and eating leftovers for breakfast. Or any of the ways thinner people think fatter people get fatter. In my twenties I ate smallish portions and was skilled at going without. But as my body filled out into curves, I already knew that if I wanted those magical Miss World measurements of 36-24-36, I would have a serious fight on my hands in this delicious, ever-changing new world of mega-processed food. You do not, I had begun to see, have to eat almost any of this stuff to put on weight. One thousand calories could pass in a few heavenly bites. Processed food is an extremely user-friendly, mega-efficient transference of fats and carbs down one’s gullet. It’s specifically designed this way. Extremely clever people in corporate test kitchens are paid top dollar to design each item to inspire joy and pleasure. These everyday heroes were wrapping chicken tikka balti pieces in shortcrust pastry and selling them at six for just short of two quid. Which mortal being could turn their nose up at this?
In Carlisle there were now two large ASDAs plus an enormous Tesco and a branch of Morrisons too. If grocery shopping in the Eighties had grown to be exciting, the Nineties sent it skywards. You could eat around the world. Continental and American deliciousness began to fill the aisles. I grew partial to Pom-Bears, Choco Leibniz and even glasses of Sunny D. In advert breaks on Border TV aspirational types with Filofaxes skipped through airports. They lunched on San Marco frozen pizzas and smeared Boursin on baguettes at lunch. They hung out in Brooklyn diners eating frozen griddle waffles, stuffed-crust pizzas or bulging hotdogs with sweet yellow mustards. And it was all available here in the North right now. Yet, not only was this food foreign and exciting, it was also time-saving. You pulled it out of the freezer, shoved it in the oven or banged it in the microwave. It was quick. This was important, the adverts reminded us, as we were busy, busy people. Family life was often portrayed as stressed mothers and slightly dim dads in need of octopus limbs to cope with their demanding brood. These families needed Birds Eye Pan Flair and McCain ‘Quickety Quick’ Micro Chips. The Dents were particularly enchanted by a woman called Aunt Bessie – a benevolent freezer goddess who sweated over roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings so we didn’t need to. No peeling. No measuring. No whisking. Soon everything in Mam’s fridge was so handy that we rarely cooked from scratch at all. I mean, imagine taking a peeler, scraping a carrot, chopping it and then cooking it in boiling water on a hob. I mean, what were we, Vikings? Why make a lasagne yourself when you can buy it for 99p in a plastic tray?
Perhaps the most convenient thing about microwave meals for many families was that they allowed us to grab our dinners separately. This allowed us all to avoid each other. For long spaces of time in Currock, our posh dinner table with the extendable leaves was mainly just a place to shove knick-knacks, petrol receipts and the ironing pile. Things that needed to be discussed together as a family could now be avoided for months or years. Some things that needed to be said were never tackled at all. My dad, who had started to slide on the pounds at this point, came in from work as late as he could, then ate microwaved liver and bacon on a tray facing rolling news on Sky.
‘How was work, Dad?’ I’d ask.
‘Busy,’ he’d say, with no further details.
Did Dad speak to his other kids anymore? None of us knew.
‘Bring us the pepper, precious,’ he’d say.
Now nearing his sixties, he was facing retirement. Lord knows how he would handle having nowhere to hide.
Britain may have now had food for busy people, but relatively speaking the pace of life was still rather gentle, no matter what the adverts said. Particularly in Carlisle, where Easter breaks passed so slowly I could hear my leg-hair growing. By Easter 1995, I was in the third year of a four-year Scottish degree and making a start on my final dissertation. Unless I made a plan soon for what to do after uni, I would need to go home. My Cosmo dreams were clearly over, and I’d just crashed and burned out of the second round of a search for trainee producers on zany, madcap Channel 4 morning show The Big Breakfast with Paula Yates, Gaby Roslin and Chris Evans. The twelve-page application form had rinsed me of every single brainfart I’d had about the show over the past three years. It cost me a seventy-quid return ticket to London, which was three whole Saturdays of my student job flogging Estée Lauder lipstick in Debenhams.
‘Which uni?’ a scrunch-faced woman called Fenella asked.
Her bare feet were up on the desk, with her dirty soles facing towards me. This felt a bit rude, but I reasoned it must be a London thing, and as she was the gatekeeper to my future happiness, I should greet it cheerily.
‘Stirling,’ I said, my plump, Kookai-wrapped left arse cheek perched on the corner of a chaise longue.
‘Where’s that?’ she said.
‘Scotland,’ I said.
‘Really?’ she said. It felt like a bad start.
Fenella began the interview in haste.
‘If we wanted to launch a hot-air balloon from the Big Breakfast garden tomorrow, who would you call?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Um, I would get Yellow Pages and find someone with a balloon and speak to them first,’ I said.
‘And?’ she said.
‘And …’ I said. ‘Measure the Big Breakfast garden to give them details of space.’
‘And?’ she said, annoyed.
‘Um … I’m not … I don’t really …’ I said, having now exhausted everything I knew about balloons.
‘Is that it?’ she said, recrossing her feet and flexing her grubby big toes.
‘Well, yes,’ I said.
‘Air traffic control!’ she said manically. ‘Would you not telephone air traffic control? They are the first people I’d call! You’d find the coordinates of the garden and alert air traffic control.’
‘Would I not call the balloon expert first?’ I mumbled.
‘NO,’ she said, and soon I was back at Euston Station, which was galling, as I’d planned to be wearing a vintage puff-ball dress and flirting with Rick from Shed Seven by 5 p.m.
On the train back to Carlisle in time for Easter Sunday, I felt foolish to have even tried.
‘Oh, bugger them,’ Mam said when I got back. ‘Have this Mini Egg cookie. There’s only one left in the bag. Look, it’s lonely. Go on, you look hungry, eat!’
If I was going to be a media person, I needed to be brighter and cooler and cleverer – and I definitely needed a smaller bottom.
1996
Checking my newly re-bony décolletage in the mirror of my uni room, above the desk where my final dissertation sits awaiting its closing chapter, I remind myself that at least I am skinny again. No plan is in place for the future, but skinny takes the edge off everything. I wonder if my daily calorie allowance permits a Knorr Quick Soup. The one without croutons as the croutons are quite fatty. I’ll have it with Ryvita and low-fat cottage cheese, then head off to ‘Float, Don’t Bloat’ aqua aerobics.
Earlier, on my way in to the posher, more grown-up halls of residence that students move into to write their final dissertations, I found a Post-it note attached to my door.
‘Your mother called. She says she will keep trying.’
This does not seem good. It feels instinctively bad. The last time she did this was because Gran had passed away.
Now the shared payphone in the hallway is ringing again.
Mam sounds frazzled. She is on a payphone in the disembarkation hall in Southampton docks.
‘Dad keeps getting dizzy,’ she says. ‘He was going into the cabaret bar on the ship the other night and his head went all waffy.’
‘Was he tipsy?’ I say.
Booze measures on these P&O Euro-cruises they keep going on are famously generous.
‘No. Not really,’ she says. ‘I mean, we’d had some Irish coffees and a carafe of Merlot. And he’d had a couple of little beers, but he wasn’t drunk.’
Mam and Dad, throughout their whole lives, never had proper hobbies. Or any sort of frivolous pastime. They worked and they watched a bit of telly and they slept. Holidays were mainly spent in England or at a push in North Wales. We went to Spain once in the Eighties by coach. It took days to get there, but our adventure was the talk of Currock. Sometimes my parents holidayed within twenty miles of Carlisle itself in a static caravan in Silloth-on-Solway overlooking the West Cumbrian coast. After retirement, with me and Dave gone, a new focus entered their lives: cruising.
‘’Ere, keep an eye out for Page 22 coming back round.’ Mam has got the Teletext cruise pages on. She chucks me the remote control. ‘It’s just gone past, but it’ll be back. Press pause if you see it!’
Mam’s special skill was seeking out last-minute cruise bargains.
‘Mam, there’s 198 pages,’ I’d groan, as the screen beeps and flashes with neon print.
‘I know, but they come round fast, the little buggers,’ she’d say. ‘It’s fourteen nights going out of Palma, for 256 quid, all-inclusive with a balcony! It’s a good one!’
Although the thought of being stuck on a glorified ferry left me cold, my folks loved everything about this new nautical lifestyle. They loved the planning and the packing. It gave them something neutral to chat about. They loved the whole microclimate of being on ship with a thousand other like-minded sixty-somethings, taking Latin American ballroom dancing lessons and enjoying visits from celebrity chefs like James Martin or Gary Rhodes. The ship plodding methodically from port to port, with a schedule posted under their cabin door each night, appealed to my ex-army dad. You could see the Sphinx or the Leaning Tower of Pisa or Vatican City for two or three hours and, most importantly, be back in time for tea. Because the main thing they loved about cruising was the food. Delicious, plentiful food served 24/7: buffet breakfasts, elevenses, long lunches, afternoon teas by the pool, formal dinners and midnight top-deck pizza buffets. Getting your money’s worth was easy. No passenger on a cruise went hungry.
Weight gain was a badge of honour. You could pile on ten extra pounds in a week. Dad packed different-sized trousers, some with elasticated waistbands, for the inevitable spread.
Dad’s health had started to worry us all, in lots of little ways.
Since he’d retired he had grown plumper and certainly sleepier. Sometimes he even seemed a little confused. He’d given up driving. He wouldn’t tell us exactly why. But I knew he’d had some sort of scare. Lately he was experiencing weird tingling sensations in his feet, as well as a constant thirst.
‘This ’ouse is like a bloody sauna!’ he’d roar. ‘And she’s always whackin’ that immersion right up, making me parched.’
In the Seventies my dad was wiry in his army uniform. Now he had a definite belly. Pictures showed it protruding under the cummerbund he wore to shake hands with the Captain on formal dining evenings.
If you tackled Dad on his health, he became grumpy. So what if he slept in his chair all day and half of the evening?
‘I’ve worked all my life,’ he’d snap, eating a family-size bar of Fruit & Nut and slices of custard tart. ‘Can you not just bloody let me be?’
This quickfire grumpiness worked well for him his entire life. He set the boundaries of what could be discussed. You’d try once or twice but then finally give up.
‘So what happened then?’ I say to Mam.
‘The blue suitcase on the conveyer belt, George,’ shouts Mam, with one hand muffling the phone. ‘No, George! The blue one with the yellow ribbon on. That’s ours. I’ve told you five times … Well, we got him a seat and he righted himself eventually, but it was scary.’
‘Can you go back to the doctor?’ I say.
‘Yes, we’re gonna have to,’ she agrees.
I should have stepped in here. Put a stop to the snacks. I should have nagged him to take up jogging too. Or at least walking. Dad’s health was never quite right from around the mid-Nineties onwards. There was always something: his stomach, his joints, his balance. We needed to get him tested.
March 1996
‘The problem would be with ulcers,’ begins the posh man in the white coat. ‘Raised glucose damages the nerves in the feet and this messes with the body’s circulation.’
The specialist at the Cumberland Infirmary, just 1.8 miles across the city from ASDA, is lecturing us about too much sugar. He’s drawn a rudimentary pair of legs on a piece of paper and is circling swirls and arrows around the shins. I try to listen and scribble things down, but there are a lot of long words and they’re passing very quickly. If I get some down at least I could go to the uni library back in Scotland and look them up.
‘This means,’ he continues, ‘that you can get cramps and weird pains in your toes and legs. Which is bothersome.’ More doodling. We all lean forward to see.
‘But the worst part,’ he says, ‘is that when the blood supply is poor it means cuts and sores do not heal. So these can turn to ulcers or gangrene.’
Dad nods. The specialist continues. We have seven and a half minutes of specialist appointment left and the waiting room is full.
‘Obviously if that occurs this wouldn’t be the end of the story,’ the medic continues. ‘We could try addressing some of the basic issues. We can remove all of the necrotic tissue, the peri-wound callus and foreign bodies right down to the viable tissue. That’s simple enough, in theory. Then we can irrigate the wound with saline, dress it, blah-dee-blah. I mean, if it’s an abscess, we’d need to drain it, whip away all the bad stuff … and that’s how we have the most success saving the limb. I have one patient, for example, who …’
‘I’m sorry, what?’ I say.
The doctor carries on talking. My parents do not seem to notice the part where he’s mentioned the possibility of chopping off my dad’s leg.
‘So the dilemma is making a choice and acting quickly,’ the medic says. ‘If we treat infection long-term with antibiotics, we merely increase the risk of amputation.’
‘Hang on!’ I jump in.
My parents bristle. They do not like it when I interrupt doctors. Medical people are very important and we should simply nod gratefully when they talk.
‘Amputation?’ I say. ‘We’re not there now. He’s just dizzy now. He doesn’t have ulcers.’
‘Oh,’ says the doctor, ‘yes. I was just explaining where poor diet and too much sugar leads. Sometimes. What we need to do in the meantime is lower Mr Dent’s blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol. That’s the key thing right now.’
‘So no injections?’ says Mam.
‘No, not now,’ the doctor says. ‘Two pills a day. But please keep a close eye on blood sugar. If we crack that, this can be relatively plain sailing. But … it’s curbing the sugar that patients do seem to have problems with.’
‘Thank you, doctor,’ says my dad, standing up, committing to nothing. I follow him out, deflated.
The specialist bids us goodbye, back out into the corridor. It’s like he’s done this spiel three times already today and will do it fifteen more before home time.
The mystery of Dad’s dizziness, sleepiness and thirst is explained. At the age of sixty, within a decade of the big ASDA opening and a few years cruising the high seas – which I’m sure is entirely coincidental – Dad has developed Type 2 diabetes.
We mooch back to the car in silence.
‘There’s gonna have to be some changes,’ Mam says, her voice trailing off as she’s already fresh out of ideas.
‘Dad,’ I say seriously, ‘you’re gonna have to stop eating chocolate trifle every night. This is serious.’
Dad looks away as if I’m addressing someone else.
‘I think the main problem I’ve got,’ he says solemnly, ‘is which poor bastard is gonna buy half of me socks?’
‘Dad, it’s not funny,’ I say, even if it was very funny. This is one of the ways he distracts you.
‘Oh, come on, precious,’ he says. ‘I’m gonna save a fortune on slippers.’
On the way home, I thought hard about the future. Going to London and pushing to be part of the media scene seemed like a waste of effort. That woman’s bare feet up on the desk? The way she had no idea where my uni was? It spoke volumes. But if I were to come home for good after graduation, I could step in and care for Dad as he got old. That’s what good daughters do. Especially ones from Currock, I thought. Girls like me can have ridiculous dreams, but at the end of the day, they should do the right thing.
May 1996
At a computer in the far corner of a science lab two of my nerdiest uni friends, Alan and Dirk, are in fits of filthy laughter, typing long chains of mysterious code into a keyboard. I’m supposed to be in the university twenty-four-hour study room finishing my dissertation – a 25,000-word post-modern discussion on Virginia Woolf and Rose Tremain. It felt like a good idea when I proposed it. Now, I’d rather watch moss dry on a radiator than write the conclusion.
Besides, I’m curious as to what’s going on in this lab.
The monitor turns ominously black aside from some yellow spindly text. Then it requests another password. Then a page of a hundred or so lines of more code appears, underlined with neon. In years to come, I would know these as ‘links’.
‘Not the dog again,’ moans Dirk.
‘It’s gotta be done,’ says Alan, shaking his head.
‘Dinnae show Grace the dog,’ says Dirk.
‘Show me the dog,’ I say
I’ve seen the heady world of home computers on Tomorrow’s World with Judith Hann. This is going to be some space-age computer-generated animation of a dog for me to smile at.
Alan clicks on some links and types a bit more. He claims to be connecting to another computer on the other side of the world. And then the screen fills with a set of photos, revealing themselves slowly.
A woman with long brown hair is having rather enthusiastic sex with a rather large Great Dane.
‘What? No, noooooooo!’ I cry, covering my eyes but then going in for a proper look. ‘Who, what … how did you get that?’
The boys – being horrible beastly boys – find this hilarious.
In that moment, I knew that something had changed. My friends really were, as they’d claimed several times, talking to strangers all over the world. They were swapping messages, pictures and files via computer using only the phoneline. Some of them were ridiculous top-grade smut, but mostly they were trading essays on Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin sheet music and talking about conspiracy theories with fellow nerds in West Coast America. The world seemed to be shrinking. Talking to America was now as simple and relatively cheap as talking to your friend down the street.
I’ve tried up until this point not to mention something very important about the Seventies, Eighties and most of the Nineties. It’s been difficult, and I think I’ve pulled it off. However, one specific, absolutely crucial fact has been fizzing behind my eyes, which colours every single memory. Just like it does for all Generation X people telling a story about the past. We want to scream this fact continuously because it’s the main reason why everything happened differently back then. We were living on a different planet.
You see, until this point, there was no Internet.
There. I said it. I’ll say it again.
Back then, there was no Internet.
There was no Internet.
Did I tell you there was no Internet?
No, come back! It’s important. Humour me.
If Generation X kids seem like creaky relics repeating the same news about our low-fi, offline youth, it might sound like we’re saying it so younger people can count their blessings. But we’re not. We’re actually retelling ourselves, over and over again, because we can’t quite believe it. We look at life now, and life back then, and we feel like time travellers.
We lived through an era when literally every single godforsaken moment of daily life, from opening our eyes, was just one million times more hassle; it was an administrative wilderness without search engines, GPS maps, group chats, YouTube, online dating, selfies, Amazon Prime and the other 175 things we didn’t have that today alone have made things easier so far.
We remember long patches of nothingness between two issues of our favourite print magazine, with no more information available on pop culture. Or feelings of real, cut-off, no-contact separation when someone was out of sight. We remember rarely having a clue about the feelings of strangers, neighbours or celebrities. We remember people being mysterious, elusive, unavailable. And we remember not knowing things: how the definitive answer to the question we had in the shower that morning was probably on the top floor of a library in New York and we’d never know within our whole lifetime. We remember the large ringfences around important people and the intense sense of deference and hierarchy over who we could just approach and speak to. And how impossible it was to be seen or heard or noticed. This kept us all much more neatly in our lanes. We remember how it felt the very first time we were so bold as to send an electronic letter straight to the address of someone important – a journalist, a store manager, a popstar – and … PING! One came back.
If we harp on and on and on about this time, it’s because we feel like living history. We lived through the second Big Bang. It’s like you’re speaking to someone who was there when the wheel was invented, who until that moment spent two decades pulling everything around on an anvil.
As me, Alan and Dirk walked home from the laboratory, I realised why they were so smitten with computers. All the normal rules of getting stuff done seemed to fly out of the window. In the pigeonhole beside my door, there was a boring brown foolscap envelope addressed to me bearing a London postmark. It had taken ten days to reach Stirling. As a mode of communication, it already felt prehistoric. Inside, there was a letter with a bright-red masthead from National Magazines. I gasped, then grinned, then began to really panic.
July 1996
Up and down Wardour Street in Soho, in the West End of London, I walk in search of the capital’s most celebrated showbiz private members’ club.
‘Is this the Groucho Club?’ I shout to the glamorous receptionist, opening a large door with dark glass.
London door numbers always seem to have been given out during a gale. I’m already ten minutes late for the most important tête-à-tête of my life. We’re having lunch, but I do not feel like eating. My toe is poking through my stocking foot, my stomach is churning, my ears are full of white noise. I’m in absolutely no state to meet Marcelle D’Argy Smith, the editor of Cosmopolitan.
After graduation, in June 1996, with ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls blaring from every radio station and ‘Girl Power’ the hot topic of the summer, I moved back to my parents’ place to sleep in the room where Mam kept her wallpaper table and spare cat litter. Despite my promises that I was just on the verge of finding employment, Mam encouraged me to try harder by intruding into the room at 7.05 a.m. each day to clatter the Venetian blinds and shout the names of nearby turnip-picking opportunities. She did not accept I was now an actual intellectual and would only consider employment that required a nuanced understanding of magic realism in Angela Carter’s post-feminist fiction.
‘You can be an intellectual at Southwaite!’ she yelled, waving me off to clear tables at the Granada service station on the M6. This job involved eight-hour shifts of being shouted at by the public over the price of English breakfasts and being sexually harassed by the chef with finger tattoos, which I should have complained about but it actually broke up the day.
From Carlisle, I’d written a begging letter to a man called Toby Young who had started a high-brow, low-culture magazine called Modern Review. He politely rejected me as his assistant. I’d also tried for a BBC broadcast news intern position, which involved a group interview at the Jurys Pond hotel, Glasgow, which was a terrifying cross between Press Gang on CITV and Lord of the Flies. Now, as I turned up at the Groucho Club, I had one lifeline left. An invite to have lunch with Marcelle, Queen of Glam Fash Mags. In my final year, after my second attempt at the Cosmo competition, they’d called me up out of the blue and asked if, as a student, I fancied writing a very small 200-word segment on Prozac usage among female students. This was around the time of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s first book, Prozac Nation; being female and a massive headcase had suddenly become quite trendy. I’d sent them a little piece and they’d allotted me a non-paid role with the lofty title ‘student advisor’. I wasn’t sure what this meant at all, but it sounded grand. Then an official letter arrived asking me to lunch with Marcelle herself. As I lay the night before on a blow-up mattress on my brother’s floor in his squat in Hackney, I struggled to think how I’d fake it as a cool, connected media chick who just casually lunches on Dean Street with an editor. My outfit wouldn’t cut it for a start; a Morgan De Toi skirt made of ruched fake taffeta fabric and a Jane Norman fitted top. I’d look like an interloper. And not, say, an executive producer from Channel 4 here to meet Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot for langoustines.
Photos of the Groucho’s inner sanctum were never available, but I imagined it to be a dark, smokey set of uncarpeted rooms chock full of the British cognoscenti. Damon from Blur would probably be on the piano clanking through ‘Park Life’, with Muriel Grey, clad in a leather mini skirt, discussing the Young British Artists with Tom Paulin. Midway through my first martini, Damien Hirst would waltz in to rapturous cheers, stinking of formaldehyde, then as one we’d unite for a rousing chorus of ‘First We Take Manhattan’ by Leonard Cohen. It would be totally bohemian and I’d fit in just marvellously and learn to be bohemian too. Some years would pass before I accepted that my type of working-class people are really not suited to being bohemian, as bohemian really means chaotic, self-destructive, whimsical and a bit whiffy. Most North London bohemians would be a lot happier if they stopped wife-swapping and got a nice ‘To Do’ list on the go; then their homes might be full of neat rows of fabric-conditioned socks, rather than self-involved sobbing, cat piss and orchids.
A gang of men checking in at the same time as me are dressed in dogtooth suits and thick bottle glasses. They are all various versions of Chris Evans from Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. This gang disappear into a dark side door on the left on the ground floor where a loud lunchtime boozing session seems to be in full swing. Meanwhile, the receptionist points me skywards.
‘Cosmopolitan lunch?’ she says. ‘Top-floor suite. Follow the other girls.’
What other girls?
As I walked nervously up the three flights of stairs, there was a small nagging truth at the pit of my stomach that I needed to put a sock in. I didn’t really like Cosmopolitan magazine. In fact, all women’s mags had begun to lose their shine by now. My childlike faith in their mantras about ‘having it all’ was on the wane. As a teen, these magazines gave us girls a sneaky glimpse at what it’s like to be a real adult lady. It looked brilliant. By my mid-twenties I’d be wearing three shades of eyeshadow during the daytime, eating a lot of honeydew melon to replenish my water levels and dating men who fancied unconventionally pretty girls who made up for it with feistiness and brains. I’d have a lovely apartment with coordinated scatter cushions, my career would be on the rise and I’d spend weekends mini-breaking in European capitals or having second dates in country meadows, for which I’d chuck together a salad featuring three types of leaf: lollo rosso, rocket and watercress. Sexually, I’d be at it constantly, four times a week, in six positions that coordinated with my star sign. Despite being in the boardroom every other week asking for more money, I’d also know ‘when the time was right’ to have babies. They never mentioned women like me who loved being handed a cute baby but loved more the moment I could hand one back, swathed in relief that the feeling of anxiety and responsibility wasn’t permanent. The more I read glossy magazines the less I felt like a woman. More like a curious bystander. I needed to really keep this quiet.
The best thing about the Cosmo lunch was how proud it made Mam.
‘Our Grace is off to work for Cosmo,’ she told the other mams in Morrisons, unless they spotted her first and went and hid behind the Eccles cakes.
‘Marcelle D’Argy Smith, the editor of Cosmopolitan,’ Mam would say, ‘she asked for our Grace in person.’
I open the door. And there she is. She is not alone. This is by no means a tête-à-tête. There are fifteen other girls here.
At the far end of a large oval table, looking like a glorious high-sea captain, Marcelle D’Argy Smith stands wearing a navy blazer, a nude Breton-style jumper and navy culottes. She is as tiny as a fawn. A perfect mini-sized woman.
I had never seen her like, although I would grow accustomed to these forces of nature over the years: Tina Weaver, deputy editor of the Mirror, clip-clopping across the newsroom in her Giuseppe Zanotti heels. Ad guru Sly Bailey, imperious in Hervé Léger. There is extraordinary power in an expensively pulled together woman. A mensch with all her aesthetic plates spinning at once. Marcelle, for example, had that specific genre of hair that media women possess, which needs not one hairdresser but three different specialisms: one person who cuts, one person who colours, one who comes to your house to blow-dry at 7 a.m., after your tennis lesson but before your 10 a.m. cosmetic launch breakfast at The Ivy.
Her pink-ash manicure was offset by a chunky gold Rolex watch. Her jawline was razor sharp, with no under-flapping wobble, and her sharp cheekbones jutted upwards like two signposts to the gods. Marcelle was the type of perfect woman who, when I stand next to her, makes me feel like a diplodocus jumping into a child’s sandpit, hoping to play nicely, but instead maiming the residents. Still, however intimidated I felt, and however I felt about women’s magazines, I wanted to be in this sandpit.
Marcelle’s long eyelashes flap as she humours the gaggle of hot young things in smart-casual clothes. As a Northern working-class woman, I will always be exceptionally bad at smart-casual. I just don’t have the bone structure. I’m either ‘smart’ (a bit like Imelda Marcos) or ‘casual’ (going to the tip). I manage to take a seat at the far end of the table with no one noticing.
This is a group lunch of competition winners. How have I missed this?
At my end of the table, the girl beside me is chatting about sailing. Not sailing as in seven nights all-inclusive around the Med with your own porthole, but sailing in her family’s yacht. The other girls chat confidently about steady boyfriends, intriguing fourth-round interviews, their shorthand skills and their places on post-graduate print journalism courses.
What? I need another course on top of my degree?
Most alarmingly, they all seem to have sorted out placements at the magazine.
Can you just do that?
Don’t you have to wait to be asked?
Then lunch arrives and things get much worse.
‘Carré d’agneau,’ murmurs a waitress, placing an angular section of lamb, ribs protruding, the lower side leaking blood, in the space before me. It comes with a small silver terrine of white gloop, which she informs me is ‘pommes aligot’.
Pomme à la go?
Quickly cooked apples?
Why didn’t I listen properly in French?
There are at least four choices of knives and fork.
What would Aunty Frieda do? I think.
I sneak a quick spoon of the white stuff into my mouth. It’s cheesy mash.
This is all fine, I am supposed to be here, I tell myself quietly.
The lamb sits on the plate, glowering back at me. This is nothing like the lamb my mother makes, wrapped loosely in foil and whacked on a low heat for four hours. It looks like an autopsy with a garnish. It’s bloody and sharp and green in places. I take the knife and fork and begin at the west wing of the beast, realising quickly that this fat and flesh are rock hard. I regroup and attack again between the boney ribs. Blood oozes across the plate. It is raw.
‘Oh, I love it rare,’ one of the girls says.
You can eat raw lamb? How do I not know that?
Back then there were a million things I didn’t know about the world of fancy food. Thank God I didn’t. If I’d known about the rules of etiquette and the faux pas waiting to trip me up, I’d never have left my bedroom.
After ten minutes of sawing and chewing and listening to a girl with a blonde bob tell us about being up in a helicopter with CNN, I’ve eaten two forkfuls of hard lamb fat with a powdery herb crust. Either my plate is getting fuller or I am getting smaller. Smaller and smaller with every bite, like Mrs Pepperpot.
‘I really feel like I’m in the presence of some very special young women.’ Marcelle gestures to a girl wearing a Chanel jacket over a floaty vintage Ghost dress who is off on a trip to Malawi to build an AIDS hospice with her bare hands before returning to her internship at the magazine.
‘You were lucky,’ one of Marcelle’s assistants says to her. ‘You got the last free space. We’re booked up until next year.’
A large piece of wispy sage has wrapped itself around my back tooth. I try to dislodge it with my tongue, while nodding and smiling. As Marcelle leaves, after the main (which she didn’t eat) and before pudding, I know that not only have I not spoken to her, as I was too shy and completely intimidated, but I will never see her again.
In the BHS café in Oxford Street, down the road from the Groucho, I ordered an all-day breakfast and somewhere between the beans and the fried bread I had a little cry. I knew a good daughter would stay close to her dad as his health declined, but I also knew that, despite the disaster of that Cosmo lunch, the lure of London and the media life was huge. I thought about the catch-22 of paying rent every month without work, but not being able to work without any experience of actually working. Then I thought about Marcelle D’Argy Smith striding into the Groucho Club with her just-stepped-out-of-a-salon hair, all heads turning as she moved around the room, brimming with power and steely charisma.
As I lifted the delicious life-restoring beige stodge to my mouth, the answer seemed clear. I had to jump one way or the other, and I chose London. No matter if I had nothing to come here for. Or anywhere to stay aside from Bob’s floor for a few nights (I couldn’t impose on him for longer than that, no matter how kind he was about it). I needed to pack a bag and come to London for good. But I was going to have to toughen up. And stop being so polite. And start lying. Really, really lying.