Introduction.xhtml

When I became journalist at the age of fifteen, it was a matter of simple expediency.

Having been homeschooled for the previous five years, I had no academic qualifications whatsoever. As a resident of a housing project in Wolverhampton, this seemed to leave me with a grand total of three future employment options:

1) prostitution,

2) working the check-out at the Gateway supermarket, Warstones Drive, or,

3) becoming a writer: an option I only knew of because that was what Jo March in Little Women, and Mother in The Railway Children, had done when they also fell upon hard times.

Considering all the options, I immediately eliminated Gateway, on the basis that their tabards were of a green hue—which gave my ruddy skin tone a particularly bilious tinge.

The prostitution, meanwhile, also got the ixnay—primarily in acknowledgment that I was, at the time, sharing a bunk-bed with my sister Caz. As she put it, quite reasonably, “I don’t want to listen to you being ridden like a show-pony three feet from my face. Plus, I think your Johns might hit their head on the Paddington Bear lampshade.”

So, writing it was. It’s a choice I’ve never regretted—although I do have the odd, panging moment when I consider just how useful a 40-percent discount on anything from the Gateway deli counter might have been. That is a lot of cheap Black Forest ham.

I began writing. I had a list of words and phrases I loved: a collection like others might collect records, or badges. Jaguary. Lilac. Catholic. Uxurious. Jubilee. Isosoles. Leopardskin. Mimosa. Shagreen. Iodine. Collodial mercury. Ardent. Attar of Roses. Corybantic. Viola. These would, surely, be useful. I knew I wanted to write intense things—write until I’d written myself new shoes and new hair and new friends, and a new life away from the inexorably compacting walls of our house. Words can be weapons, or love-spells, or just motorcars you can drive across county borders.

But what I didn’t know was what to write intensely about, or how to write about it. I had no subject. I had no subjectivity. I was just a bundle of sprawling words.

As a bundle of sprawling words, I entered writing competitions, and, at 15, won one—The Observer’s “Young Reporter of the Year.” In the letter announcing that I’d won, they offered me a chance to visit their offices, in London.

This was—clearly—my chance to pitch for a job. They had no teenagers working on the paper—ipso facto, if I went down there and made the right impression, that job was mine. I was going to pitch my ass off at these guys. I was not coming home until I had a promise of further work from them in the bag.

I spent the evening before preparing for my first ever job interview in the best way I knew how.

“People like people who bring cake!” I said to myself, at 11 PM. I was creaming butter and sugar in a bowl. The sideboard was covered in zested lemons.

“A lovely lemon and cream sponge! By bringing cake, I will become associated in their minds with cake, and they will think favorably of me, re: future employ!”

At the time, I was heavily under the influence of the autobiographies of actress, comedian and writer Maureen Lipman (imagine a Carol Burnett who spent most of her life telling amusing anecdotes on NPR). Lipman seems to spend all her time giving her friends and colleagues in the media gifts—engraved lockets, bunches of flowers, thoughtful chocolate selections.

We didn’t have any kind of cake box or cake tin, for transportation down to London, so I put the sponge into a small, red suitcase I had recently bought from a tag sale, and went to bed.

The production and transportation of the lemon cream sponge—done in order to secure the job at The Observer—had taken maybe seven hours, in total. This was six hours and fifty-eight minutes more than I had spent thinking about the actual job. Indeed, to be more specific, it was six hours and fifty-eight minutes more than I had ever considered what I would actually ever write.

So here I am, the next day, in London. Getting off the coach at Victoria Station wearing a gigantic hat—to make me look thinner—and carrying a lemon sponge in a suitcase. If I carry the suitcase by the handle, the cake will tip on the side—so I am carrying it flat, like a tray, in both hands. The time is 11:15 AM. I am due at the Observer offices, in Battersea, at 12:30 PM.

“Just enough time to go to the British Museum and Buckingham Palace!” I think, having looked at the tiny map of London I have in my pocket. I am keen that this journey to London will mix business with pleasure—perhaps to creature a new thing, “Plizness.”

I set off, carrying my suitcase out in front of me, like a crown on a pillow.

Three hours later, and I finally turn up at the Observer offices. I am trying very, very hard not to cry. All the skin has been flayed off my heels—it turns out that wearing white pixie-boots and no socks is a poor idea if you’re going to walk for three hours. I am soaked in sweat, utterly mortified, and newly enlightened as to the scale of capital cities.

When I woke that morning, I had no idea things were so far apart in London. In Wolverhampton, if you had a reasonable jogging pace, you could touch every single remarkable building in the town in under ten minutes. Fuck it—to be honest, if you sat next to the Man on the Horse statue in Queen’s Square with a tennis ball, you could bounce it off every institute of note without moving. Even the McDonald’s.

London, on the other hand, seems to have endless amounts of wide, gray, straight roads, which stretch on forever, and never have the British Museum, or Buckingham Palace, or—anxiously, from 12:17 PM onwards—the Observer offices at the end of them. I have been lost in a park, and round the back of Trafalgar Square. At one point, I tried to hail a taxi—but was holding the cake-suitcase in both hands at the time, and so looked like someone doing an impression of the wise old monkey in the Lion King holding up a newly-born Simba for veneration, instead. The taxi just drove past.

The kindly folk at The Observer have, understandably, been very worried. A fifteen-year-old girl has been missing in London for three hours—then turns up weeping and limping. They sit me down in a conference room, and prepare to ask me if I’ve been sexually assaulted.

“I really wanted to see the British Museum’s collection of cuneiform tablets!” I say, trying to satirize the idea of someone being so nerdy they kept the deputy editor of the The Observer waiting for a job interview.

Unfortunately, they think I’m being totally truthful, and try to make me feel better by talking about their favorite exhibits—a conversation I can’t join in on, as, obviously, I never made it to the British Museum. The only museum I’ve ever been in is the one at Bantock House in Wolverhampton, where they have a castle made of foil candy wrappers. It is a very good castle. Shiny. I tell them about the castle. They agree it sounds very special.

But still—still! Extrordinarily, after all of this, when I’ve drunk three glasses of water, quickly dashed a tear from my eye under the guise of adjusting my hat, and had everyone, very kindly, say, “London really IS easy to get lost in” one hundred times—there comes the moment where the deputy editor says, “So! Now we’ve finally got you here, ho ho ho, would you like to work for us?”

Unfortunately, at the time, I am going through a phase of not wanting to say the right thing, or the nice thing—but the legendary thing. I imagine whole days’ worth of conversations in my head, and then analyze them afterwards, from the vantage point of others, on their legendaryness-potential.

In the “being offered a job to write three columns in a national newspaper” scenario, which I’ve run through 300 times, I’ve finally decided that the legendary response—spoken of in awe for years to come (“And then she said—hahah, oh it was brilliant . . .”) is the one I bring out now:

“Work for you? Oh I’d love to. I’d really, really love to.”

I pause—then pick up a paper napkin, dip it in my glass of water, and then make as if to go and wash the walls.

“First I’ll do the walls,” I say, “then the floors—that way, if I drip . . .”

It’s a line from Annie—the scene where Daddy Warbucks asks her to live with him, and Annie initially misunderstands, and thinks he wants her to be his maid. When I imagined delivering this line, I imagine everyone laughing. “We offered her a job—as a columnist—but she parodied her working-class background and obsession with musicals by pretending that we’d offered her a job as an office cleaner, instead! Legendary!”

There is no way everyone in this room won’t have seen Annie. This line is going to be a killer.

Everyone in this room has not seen Annie.

There is another awkward pause.

“Would you like to write some columns for us?” the deputy editor asks, eventually, getting things back on track by pretending what I’ve just said never happened. “During the summer holidays? I think we’d be very interested to hear what you have to say about life—and cuneiform tablets! And tin-foil castles, ho ho ho!”

“Yes please,” I say, in a very simple way. I’ve decided to keep everything very simple from now on.

“So,” the features editor says. She’s really lovely. Glossy-haired. A nice lady. “What would you like to write for us?”

I stare at her.

“What kind of ideas have you got?” she asks, again.

I keep staring. It had literally never occurred to me that I’d have to think of something to write. I thought you just turned up, said something legendary, and then they told you what to write. Like school. Papers are just . . . paid homework, surely? The grown-ups—a shadowy agglomoration who, in my mind, I presume to be politicians, Daddy Warbucks the billionaire and possibly John Craven from Newsround—decide what goes in the papers, and then farm it out to the writers. You don’t have to . . . journalists don’t . . . surely . . .

“ . . . could do a list of the things you feel most passionately about; issues that affect you,” the deputy editor is saying. I have got nothing here. I am all out on a conversation like this. I am going to have to pull the ripcord on this situation.

“I made you a cake!” I say, brightly. “To have with your afternoon tea. A lemon sponge!”

I carefully place the suitcase on the table—having kept it, diligently, horizontal all day. Even when I sat in that “out of order” bus stop and cried—and open it up. People like people who bring cake! By bringing cake, I will become associated in their minds with cake, and they will think favorably of me, re: future employ!

In the punishing August heat, during a three-hour walk around London, all the lemon cream inside the cake has split, and gone rancid. An uneasy smell of vomit-cake fills the room. Everyone looks at me. In my head, I type out the sentence, “Write about this?”

Back in Wolverhampton, on the phone, my new editors suggest that I “read the papers, watch the news—see if there’s something you want to write about.”

I assiduously research every high-profile current affairs story in the media for two weeks straight—then write 600 words about my brother getting lost on Ynylas beach last year. The week after, I file 600 words about going to the library with my brothers and sisters (“We are in the ‘Books So Boring They Should Have Won the Booker Prize’ section.”). My third, and last, piece is about the family going on a picnic.

And then that’s it. That was all The Observer offered me, and it’s finished. I’m unemployed again. I’m going to have to try and find some work.

Six months later, I’m on the phone, pitching ideas to The Guardian. I know they want “teenage-y” things, so I’m doing my best, but I don’t really know much about teenagers, to be honest: being homeschooled, the only teenager I know, apart from myself, is my sister Caz, and she’s currently not speaking to me.

When I go into her room, she makes me stand in the corner, facing away from her, while I talk. Years later, I see the serial killer doing exactly the same thing to his victims in The Blair Witch Project.

“I could write about, erm, keeping a diary, or, erm, fashions,” I say, dubiously. “Or, erm, buses?”

I spend a lot of time on the bus. I’ve noticed a pecking-order in the seating arrangements, and am keen to share my theory that the true visionaries always sit top deck, front left, because that’s the position Dan Ackroyd assumes in the car in The Blues Brothers, and he is my favorite Brother. I have a lot of bus-observation ready to roll.

“You can be as hard-hitting as you like,” the editor says, kindly, as the word “buses” still hovers in the air. Buses.

“Errrrr . . .” I say—the commission slipping away from me. I need to say something. I need to say something ear-catchy. In a panic, I blurt: “Anorexia?”

“Yes!” she says, instantly.

It’s funny because, at the time, I spend most of my free time eating cream crackers covered with Shippam’s Chicken & Ham paste. I am so in love with food that I get excited when the paste squirts up through the tiny holes in the crackers, like worm-casts. If I’ve ever had anorexia, it lasted less than forty-five minutes. I’ve not been very committed to it.

“I’d love to!” I say, before modulating down into my “issues” voice. “It’s a terrible disease, and I can’t believe I’m watching my generation being laid to waste by it.”

I know nothing about anorexia. But now I’ve got 500 words to fill by 5 PM so I do what anyone would do: just make up any old shit.

“Lolita didn’t diet. But today, children twelve or younger are conscious of the width of their hips, the length of their legs, even the slight curve of their stomachs,” I started, cheerfully, although God knows why—I hadn’t actually read Lolita. She was the only twelve-year-old I could think of, I suspect; apart from Laura Ingalls, who wouldn’t really have been appropriate in this context. I just knew Lolita was generally “victim-y,” so chucked her in here. This is what you do, when you know absolutely fucking nothing.

“I had a mini-skirt like Julia Roberts. I thought I should have the legs to go with it,” said Eloise, who I’d just totally made up.

I’d also seen an episode of Casualty where a ballerina eats toilet paper, so I put that in there, too.

The piece ran in March 1992, and astonishingly did not change anyone’s views on anorexia—not even the quote from “a GP” (who I’d made up) going, “These nineteen-year-olds come in here and ask to be put on the Pill, and I’m inclined to pat them on the head and give them Smarties, instead,” which is obviously what I, deep down, thought would cure anorexia at the time. Smarties.

Or here’s another piece I managed to blag at The Observer, around the same time—1993—entitled “We’ve Never Had It So Bad.”

“What’s so great about being a teenager in the material world of the nineties?” asks Caitlin Moran.

This really was a symphonic piece of bullshit. In the piece—600 words long—I lamented that I and my friend (“She’s sixteen—six and ten years on the planet, four leap years—and says her life terrifies her because it seems so long until she’ll die.”) were being culturally crushed by the Baby Boomers.

“Sometimes we climb up onto the five-story parking garage, and throw bits of gravel at the people below, and my friend will shout ‘WHO AM I?’ and I laugh until I cry because no one can hear us, and no one can tell her.”

It’s specious nonesense from beginning to end: for starters, you can’t get access to the roof of any five-story parking garage in Wolverhampton: they’re all completely sealed off, clearly to prevent health & safety issues exactly like the one I’m lying about here. And I honestly don’t think any teenager has ever shouted “WHO AM I????” to the sky, except on dramas on Channel 4, which is exactly where I’d got this from.

“She has no identity, save that which advertisers sell her,” I continue piously, castigating the whole advertising industry; wholly ignoring the fact that I love the song from the Bran Flakes ad (“They’re tasty/Tasty/Very very tasty/They’re very tasty!”) and am quite emotionally invested in the romantic plotline to the Gold Blend couple.

I’d like to quote you more of the terrible pieces I wrote around this time—thrashing around, desperately, for something, anything to write about—but I can’t, because this is where my Fleet Street career ground to a halt for a while. A sum total of five pieces before everyone realized—including, finally, me—that I had absolutely nothing to write about. Or, more truthfully, that I did—but I just didn’t know what it was yet.

I went underground (back to bed) and tried to work out how I could get a job writing when I knew—and I’m being generous here—absolutely nothing about the world. It took a while, but by the time I was sixteen, I had a plan.

So I’d finally figured out I couldn’t write about my own life, because I haven’t done anything. I was going to have to write about other, older people, who’ve actually done stuff, instead. I was going to become a rock critic—because I read NME and Melody Maker, and they are publications where writers will use words like “jaguary” and “jubilee” and “shagreen” while describing why they do or don’t like U2, and I think this is probably something I could have a go at.

I write test reviews of my five favorite albums—Hats by Blue Nile, Pills’n’Thrills’n’Bellyaches by Happy Mondays, High Land, Hard Rain by Aztec Camera, Reading, Writing & Arithmetic by the Sundays, and Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction—and send them to the reviews editor, in an envelope that I carefully scent with Lemon Essence from the kitchen cupboard, to act in lieu of a lemon sponge in a suitcase. I am still working on the presumption that people will only give me work if they somehow associate me with baked goods. Perhaps it’s this kind of erroneous assumption you get educated out of you at Oxbridge.

The reviews editor calls me the next day and asks me to do a test review of a local gig. When it’s printed, I get £28.42, and become the freelance stringer for the Midlands area: Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Derby. If there’s a band who’ve sold around 2,000 records playing in the backroom of a pub within twenty miles of Spaghetti Junction, I am all over it. I am now, vaguely, in charge of indie in West Mercia.

After I had been working at Melody Maker for just seven months—working my patch, filing my reviews, stacking up those £28.42s—I wrote a review of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’s new album, entitled 522.

In the hipster pecking order of the time, Ned’s—as their fans called them—were pretty much the lowest of the low: a group of lads from Stourbridge—the Midlands! My patch!—barely in their twenties, who made amiable, slightly slack-jawed, very white rackets for amiable, slightly slack-jawed, very white youths to leap around to. In terms of funk, or glamor, they rated level with Bovril, or the clog. Additionally, their career was past its best. They were on the wane.

Nonetheless, a lack of funk, hotness or success is not, and never has been, a crime. It’s not even against park by-laws. Therefore, the thermonuclear savaging I proceeded to give that album, over 480 words, was as unnecessary and unprovoked as Chewbacca strafing the local duck pond with the Millennium Falcon.

Actually, I wasn’t using weaponry a quarter as sophisticated as the Millennium Falcon. It was more like Chewbacca falling out of the Millennium Falcon, then wading into the duck pond and kicking the ducks, then stamping on the ducks, then punching the ducks—alarmed, innocent ducks, now all quacking as the Wookiee flailed at them, wholly unprovoked, and who didn’t leave the pond until the water was covered in tail-feathers.

“Hello, boys,” I opened—addressing the band directly. “Funerals are a bummer, aren’t they? Career in a coffin, all we have to do is chuck a bit of earth around, and troop through a thick grey gauze of rain to the wake, and get pissed. I have been chosen to stand, blearily, at the wake, and say a few words at the passing of your ability to ever sell records again. What can I say? The words of one of the great poets—Liam from Flowered Up—seem appropriate: “FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF AND DIE!”

Eighteen years later, and I am still so mortified by what I wrote, I can only look at the middle section through my fingers: “Putrid . . . anthems to nothing . . . stink . . . dirges . . . nasty scribbles . . . no-one gives a flying fuck . . .”

I accused them of being sexless, tuneless, fuckless, revolting: responsible for a musical climate where bands crawled on their bellies with three chords, rather than flying with the aspirations of gods. I was a total wanker.

I ended with: “1994 was the year we waved goodbye to Kurt Cobain and That Bloke Out of Doctor Feelgood. Feel like making it a hat-trick, Jonn(nnnnnnnnn)?”

Yes, that’s right—I ended an album review by wishing death on the lead singer, either by the methodology of Kurt Cobain, who’d shot himself in April, or the lead singer of Doctor Feelgood, who’d died of cancer in August. And spelt his name “sarcastically,” to boot.

The review itself was sub-headlined, “Jesus, Caitlin—there are gonna be repercussions about this one.” As if the magazine itself was alarmed by what I’d written.

Looking back now, I can see what I was doing. I was a seventeen-year-old, working in an office otherwise full of adults. I was a cub, savaging some prey, and bringing back the carcass to the pack elders, to impress them. I wanted to make my mark.

However, even the most cursory examination of the situation shows us that I was not bringing back a mighty Arctic fox. I had just come back with a couple of sad, surprised ducks instead.

And of course, we can also see that I was not a white-toothed wolf-cub, either—but a puffin, or a penguin, or a giant hen: some perambulatory creature not built for pugilism. I would never go up to someone at a party and be horrible to their face—so why was I doing it in a magazine? I was just thinking of what I wrote as “some copy”—some space filled on a page, with whatever came into my head at the time.

But of course, it’s not just “copy.” There’s no such thing as “copy.” Putting things on paper doesn’t make it matter less. Putting things on paper makes it matter more.

The bottom line is, I believed I was a nice person—the kind of person who brought a lemon sponge cake to The Observer, and would pick worms off the road, and put them onto the grass with a cheerful “There you go, mate”—but I appeared to be pretending to be a cunt. Why was I doing that? There are enough cunts in the world already. We don’t need any more. The only kind of person who would pretend to be a cunt probably is a cunt. This faux-cuntiness was a cunt’s game. I decide I was going to stop.

I’d like to pretend I worked all this out myself, in the weeks after the Ned’s Atomic Dustbin review was printed. That I quietly figured out what my principles were, and who I wanted to be, in a determined, intellectual re-imagining of myself: a rebirth through philosophy, and reason.

In reality, the man who was to eventually be my husband took me to one side at a gig a week later and said, in his mild way, “That review was a bit . . . off.”

And that was when I realized—in a huge, anxious rush—that I couldn’t do what so many of the writers I enjoyed—A. A. Gill, Julie Burchill and Hunter S. Thompson—did. That gleeful arson, those cool assassinations. I was not, like them, crouched behind my typewriter, picking off marauders with a pearl-handled pistol. I couldn’t manage the daily rages of the columnists who despaired over the parking restrictions, and their tax bills, and the immigrants, and the gay dads, and the BBC, and women’s fat arses in the wrong dresses, and the health and safety regulations. I couldn’t handle the grief.

What I was built for, I felt, was something a bit more . . . herbivore. As I started to reassess my writing style, I thought about what I liked doing—what gave me satisfaction—and realized the primary one was just . . . pointing at things. Pointing out things I liked, and showing them to other people—like a mum shouting, “Look! Moo-cows!” as a train rushes past a farm. I liked pointing at things, and I liked being reasonable and polite about stuff. Or silly. Silly was very, very good. No one ever got hurt by silly.

Best of all was being pointedly silly about serious things: politics, repression, bigotry. Too many commentators are quick to accuse their enemies of being evil. It’s far, far more effective to point out that they’re acting like idiots, instead. I was up for idiot-revealing.

“I am just going to be polite and silly, and point at cool things,” I decided. “When I started writing, I would have killed to have one thing to write about. Now, I have three. Politeness and silliness, and pointing. That’s enough.”

So, yes. If this collection is anything, it is, I hope, either silly, or polite, or pointing at something cool. There is some vaguely serious stuff in here—recently, I have enjoyed taking to my writing bureau, and writing about poverty, benefit reform and the coalition government in the manner of a shit Dickins, or Orwell, but with tits.

The fifteen-year-old wannabe journalist in Wolverhampton, who was desperately looking for something to write about, actually had a million things to write about, all around her: housing projects, and life on benefits, and the wholly altered state that is being grindingly, decades-long poor—too broke to travel to another town, or escape from lingering, low-level dampness, fear and boredom.

But—perhaps in reaction to all this—my underlying, abiding belief is that the world is, still, despite everything, a flat-out amazing place. This book is a collection of instances of how brilliant the world often is—written by a lifelong fan of existence, and the Earth. Yes, there might still be speed bumps; and paperwork; this world can be irksome, and even I—essentially Pollyanna, with a C-section scar—have had a couple of rants in here. I will be honest with you: there is not much in here to increase the pride levels of Nazis, internet trolls, or Lola from Charlie and Lola. That crayoned harpy must die. And I will actually stand by that death wish. Unlike the one I levelled at poor John from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, to whom I now—eighteen years later—apologize to, while lying on my belly in abject prostration and mortification. I am so, so sorry. Tell your mum I’m sorry, too. She must have been dead upset.

But, generally, this is a manifesto for joy. When I got my second chance at being a journalist—being taken on by The Times as a columnist when I was eighteen, in my new persona as the “pointing cheerful person”—I determined to use the opportunity to racket around as many exhilarating things as possible. As a consequence, in this collection, I go to a sex-club with Lady Gaga; smoke fags with Keith Richards; walk twenty-six miles in the rain, eating cake; become an internet dwarf called “Scottbaio,” then accidentally die, on air, on the Richard & Judy show; and confess to, once, having trapped a wasp under a glass, then got it stoned.

The motto I have penned on my knuckles is that this is the best world we have—because it’s the only world we have. It’s the simplest math ever. However many terrible, rankling, peeve-inducing things may occur, there are always libraries. And rain-falling-on-sea. And the moon. And love. There is always something to look back on, with satisfaction, or forward to, with joy. There is always a moment where you boggle at the world—at yourself—at the whole, unlikely, precarious business of being alive—and then start laughing.

And that’s usually when I make a cup of tea, and start typing.*

*Actually, it’s not. I usually leave it for at least another three hours of pissing around on the Topshop website, attacking in-growing hairs on my leg with tweezers, and looking at dream apartments in New York, before panicking, and beginning to hammer at stuff a scanty hour and thirty-seven minutes before deadline—but that’s not as an inspiring sentence to end on. It kind of ruins things, tbh.