Moranthology

by Caitlin Moran

  If there was one single thing we could learn from the life of Michael Jackson, it would seem—other than that sequin-appliquéd military-wear dates unexpectedly well—it is that child stardom is a terrible idea.

  So at Michael Jackson’s memorial on Tuesday, it was interesting to see that one of the twelve live performances came from Shaheen Jafargholi—the Welsh, twelve-year-old semi-finalist from this year’s Britain’s Got Talent.

  Introduced on stage by Smokey Robinson to sing “Who’s Lovin’ You?”—a song which, as Robinson helpfully pointed out, a nine-year-old Jackson had sung with “such knowingness and pain.” HELLO! THERE’S A CLUE THERE!—Jafargholi had to face down a worldwide audience of millions and, right in front of him, the entire Jackson family, Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey, and Michael Jackson, dead, ten feet away from him. So no pressure or crippling emotional resonance there then.

  It’s impossible to think of a single aspect of it that wasn’t dazzlingly inappropriate. It was a supernova of wrongness. It’s almost the next evolutionary stage in incorrect action. Performing children at Michael Jackson’s funeral?

  The next day, chat-show host Larry King said that, when he’d asked Motown founder Berry Gordy who Shaheen was, Gordy replied, “I have no cotton pickin’ idea—but if I were still in the business, I would sign him tomorrow.”

  Of course he would. Because while Michael Jackson might have been lying before him in a coffin, dead at fifty, it was in front of an audience of millions. And that’s the bottom line.

  Of course, the late Michael Jackson wasn’t the only person to have had a problem with drug abuse. I, too, had a dark past of substance abuse that I wished to confess to Times readers—prompted by the 2009 press hoo-ha over Julie Meyerson’s controversial book, The Lost Boy: A True Story, in which she explained she’d kicked her teenage son out of her house when he refused to give up smoking dope. (This book caused one of those brief media flaps in 2009 that allowed the fifty craziest columnists to write regular pieces about how, basically, all women are awful and should never be allowed to do anything, particularly have children.)

  As I explained in the following piece, during my stoner years, I should have kicked myself out of my own house, except I was too stoned.

  I AM CAITLIN MORAN, AND I WAS A SKUNK ADDICT

  I was addicted to skunk weed for four years. That it’s taken me three weeks of shouty headlines about Julie Myerson’s son to remember this tells you pretty much everything you need to know about dope-smokers.

  But then again, “addicted” is quite an extreme word, isn’t it? It’s quite . . . final. Was I “addicted”? Yes, I smoked every day, twice as much on weekends, could neither watch TV, listen to records or have my tea without a “bifter spritzer,” made a bong out of a Coke can, then another one out of an old fishtank, had three dealers, didn’t really have any friends that weren’t stoners, chose which bands I was going to interview on the basis of whether I could get stoned with them or not, and, once, gave a wasp a blow-back. But is that really “addiction”? You could just say that I liked it a lot. To be honest, I behaved almost identically when I first got into couscous. That stuff is so fluffy.

  This, of course, is another problem with dope smokers. They can’t really take a strong line on anything—because everything’s relative, their mouth’s too dry to argue, and their synapses look like an Upside-Down Pudding that’s been smashed about with a stick.

  I want to make it clear that I don’t smoke now. I haven’t taken anything since I was twenty-two because, and I will be honest with you here, I eventually went stark raving mad, and ended up riding a bicycle up and down Holloway Road, trying to “sweat the poison out.” At the time, I was so fat from a stoner diet of deep-fried crispy beef and Mango Soleros that I had bought the bicycle—the chunkiest, most industrial mountain bike in the shop—on the basis that it made me look “thinner” than all the other, smaller, more aerodynamic bicycles available. As a consequence, I could scarcely pedal it more than fifty yards without having to lie down in someone’s front yard for a rest. I was operating on some pretty exciting and innovative logic at the time.

  I started smoking weed when I was seventeen, because that is just what you do if you like the Beatles. If this were America, I could probably now sue Paul McCartney, wholly on this basis.

  From the very start, I was a terrible stoner. Not in any sense of being hardcore, and wild, like some crazy-eyed loner on a voyage to Valhalla. I mean literally terrible. Every time I smoked I passed out. I once got so stoned interviewing Radiohead that I had to be put to bed in the bass player’s spare bedroom. Except I was so stoned I missed the door to the spare bedroom, kept walking up the stairs, and went and slept in the loft, instead—where a wasps’ nest had been recently fumigated, and the floor was covered in crunchy, dead wasps. In the morning, my lovely millionaire genius host was distraught.

  “You slept in the waspy loft!” he horrored.

  “Oh it’s ok,” I said, cheerfully. “I was stoned!”

  I did a kind of “We all know what it’s like when you’re so stoned you interview the biggest band in the world by just nodding at them, then break into their loft and sleep on some insect’s” face. He just stared at me like I was mad.

  Of course, it’s a miracle I had a job at all. Work-rate wise, a ferocious skunk habit suits someone who can survive on the proceeds of six, maybe seven hours of work a week, tops. You’re looking at musicians “between albums,” housewives, pre-school children, royalty, etc. Despite Michael Phelps’s admirable efforts in this area, it is not really the ideal drug for Olympic athletes—or, indeed, anyone who really needs to get a jiggy on in furthering their life. Everything grinds to a halt when you start smoking. In the four years I was chonged off my num-nuts, there was one, sole innovation in my life: the invention of the Shoe Wall—a wall in the hall where I banged in twenty nails, in dispiritingly uneven lines, and then hung up all my shoes. Needless to say, when I finally did stop smoking, I remodelled the entire house, lost sixty pounds, took down the Shoe Wall and quadrupled my work rate in six months flat.

  Towards the end of my four-year skunk-in, signs of the End of Days started to accumulate. A friend who had been smoking since he was thirteen totally wigged out, and developed schizophrenia. Although sympathetic, my main reaction was to think, “Some people can handle it, and some people can’t,” and then smugly light up a big fat jay. I was also starting to notice that it was taking huge amounts of skunk to get half as wasted as before—necessitating the invention of first the Coke can bong, and then the fishtank bong, as my smoking took on a borderline industrial intensity. Paranoid I was being ripped off, I “tested” the potency of the skunk on a wasp by trapping it under a glass and giving it a blow-back. The wasp just lay on the floor, clearly considering buying a chunky bicycle, so I knew that, sadly, it must all be down to me.

  It was as I was doing bongs out of my fishtank, while watching Later . . . with Jools Holland, that the end came. For some reason, as soon as the Beautiful South came on stage, I just went mad. Not in a “Hurrah! Amazing! The Beautiful South!” way—but in a way that meant, within an hour I was hysterical, holding onto the kettle, and screaming, “This is normal! This is normal!” at myself over and over again.

  It turned out that it was “just” a panic attack—the first of a solid eighteen months of them—but however much I tried to calm myself down with a fishtank full of rabidly psycho-active cannabis, bafflingly, it just seemed to make the situation worse. Eventually, even I had to acknowledge that my stoner days were over, and I quit.

  Do I regret spending four years off my face? No, not really—but only because I can’t really remember any of it. I’m not being facetious. My memory’s shot to bits. Apparently, we went to Montpelier once, for a week. I have absolute no recall of this.

  Did I, then, learn anything, from four years of wandering through the rabbit holes of my mind, l
ike Alice in Wonderland? To that, at least, I can say “yes.” I learned that wasps buzz four notes lower when they’re wasted. And that I am a terrible, terrible stoner.

  In 2009, I interviewed the then-Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. It would be wrong to say it was as a long-game tactic to get in contact with Obama. Very wrong. Not only did Gordon—who was lovely—singularly fail to hook me up with Obama, but I nearly never got to Downing Street in the first place. It was a VERY vexatious day.

  I AM LATE TO INTERVIEW THE PRIME MINISTER

  Of course I’m not going to be late to interview Gordon Brown. Don’t be ridiculous. He’s the Prime Minister of Great Britain, for goodness sake. I’m going to leave the house at 11:30 AM.

  “11:30?” my husband says. He looks alarmed. He is, in general, an anxious man—he keeps packets of Heinz Ketchup in his wallet, unable to bear the possibility of being boxed into a situation where Daddies’ Tomato Sauce might be the only option. “The interview’s 12:30 PM! Order the cab for 10:15 AM!”

  I am not going to take a cab to Downing Street. In the event of Gordon Brown asking me how I arrived, I want to say, “I travelled on the Underground transportation system of London, England, like the people do.” I’m not quite sure what point I would be making by saying this, but it feels like it might be an important one. Something I could score highly for.

  At 11:15 AM, I go up to my office to print out my sixty-two, carefully planned questions. I approach the printer with great serenity. In the past, the printer and I have had an enmity that has stretched back over generations. I ended its grandmother when the cartridge jammed halfway through printing out a map. Its mother was abandoned to Freecycle, after every functionality save b&w photocopying failed. But this HP Photosmart C480 will not let me down. It’s like Britain and France. We have finally come to an understanding. There will be antagonism and murder between us no more.

  Nineteen minutes later, I am pulling every wire out of the back of the motherf***ing Goddamn betraying piece of shit, and screaming.

  “What do you MEAN, the ‘cartridge alignment sheet has not been detected’? What does that MEAN? I’m supposed to be interviewing THE PRIME MINISTER!”

  I’ve missed my train. I’ve ordered a cab. Already it’s very, very clear that when the controller said, “Yes—we have cars free!” what he meant was, “Yes—we have cars free! Free—to do whatever they like! Play in the sun; drive round and round the park really slowly. Sit and enjoy the sheer joy of North London.”

  I go and stand out in the street. It is now forty minutes until I start talking to Gordon Brown. I am in a totally deserted residential area. When a student driver crawls down the road in her silver AA Driving School vehicle, I think, “I am interviewing the Prime Minister. That probably means I’m legally entitled to flag down that car, and get her to drive me to Archway tube.”

  When the cab finally pulls up, it is an old, battered minivan. I realize with horror that it very closely resembles the van the Iranian terrorists shoot Doc from in Back to the Future. It has curtains inside, which are drawn. It looks like an Acme suicide bomb. It does not look like the kind of thing the policemen on the gates at Downing Street will feel relaxed about.

  As we screech off towards town, the cab driver and I quickly come to an understanding. I am the delusional, sweaty woman who keeps saying, “I have to interview the Prime Minister in thirty-eight minutes!” He is the man who will cause my death when he says, “I don’t know where Downing Street is.”

  This is, I admit, difficult information for me to process. One the one hand, I am alarmed that the cab driver doesn’t know where 10 Downing Street—one of the most famous addresses in the world—is. On the other hand, I don’t either, really. Is it quite near the Strand?

  I have terrible, anxious cottonmouth. There is a liter of water in my handbag. I drink it. Emotionally, the template I am relating to in this situation is the 1986 film Clockwise starring John Cleese, who plays a man battling to reach an appointment on time, despite a series of strokes of ill fortune.

  This alternates from being “useful” to “not useful.” On the one hand, Cleese did, eventually, make that appointment on time. On the other, he arrived cut and bruised, in a monk’s habit, with only one shoe, having had his speech eaten by a goat. It’s not really a possibility I want to consider.

  I abandon the cab at Euston, and run onto the Victoria line, onto the Jubilee line, then down Whitehall. It’s 12:28 PM. By now, the liter of water I drank in the cab is having its unfortunate yet inevitable consequence. I have to ask myself—is the Pulitzer enough recompense for turning up at Downing Street having wet myself? It is not. I downgrade my running to a fraught trot.

  Of course, when I finally get there, Gordon Brown is running twenty minutes late. My cardigan is, I realize, soaked with sweat. I am still stuffing it into my handbag when finally he comes into the room.

  “Prime Minister!” I say, standing up. “Good afternoon! Thank you for agreeing to this interview!”

  That evening, I hand-wash the cardigan. As I pull it out of the bag, I notice it smells odd. Intense.

  “This is the smell of fear,” I think to myself, holding it up to my nose. “This is the smell humans emit when they are at the limits of their terror.”

  Then I look into my handbag, and realize that it is not the smell of fear—it is actually the smell of a burst free sample of Fructis hair serum. I still don’t really know what the smell of fear is.

  You can see how badly I travel. Downing Street is seven miles from my house, and getting there nearly induced a conniptive fit. It is why all my holidays are to places as nearby as possible: Brighton. Aberystwyth. Sometimes, Bath. You’ll notice, as you go through this book, that there aren’t many exotic journeys to far-distant places. That’s because I don’t really hold with “abroad.” I think the only time I venture out of the country this entire book is to go to Berlin to interview Lady Gaga—something my subconscious is clearly so disgruntled about that I passive-aggressively miss my flight, and make her wait three hours for me. Yes, Gaga—I punished you for not being in Leicester. How DARE you be in another country.

  I’m not a natural passport-profferer.

  WHAT I LEARNED UP A MOUNTAIN THIS SUMMER

  A wise man once said that on a journey, it is not where you go, but who you become that really matters. Aside from the fact that this reveals that he clearly left his wife—or, possibly, mum—in charge of small, “non-mattering” journey issues like tickets, accommodations, packing, researching which restaurants will accept a 6:30 PM booking for a party with three children and an egg allergy, and where and when it would be expedient to stop and go to the toilet, it is obvious what journeys he really meant: vacations. In the absence of partition and mass migration, they’re the only big journeys we ever undertake these days. The premise is that when we go on vacation, it should—if it’s a good vacation—change us a little. It should improve us. We should acquire both the reddened, sun-damaged complexion of a bumpkin and some knowledge. In short, we should return from our holidays cleverer.

  Well I’m afraid that this is not a sentiment I can hold by. I don’t want to get cleverer on my vacations. I want to get stupider. Once I’m off the clock, I don’t want to have to think at all. If I have to have more than one thought a day—preferably the thought “Yes, I think I would like to eat a cheese sandwich in the bath, while reading Cosmo”—then I have, clearly, failed to book the right vacation. On the right vacation, nice things would just happen to me for six days, and on the seventh, I would be put into a coma, and posted back to London, first class.

  By the time I come home, I want my brain to have totally calcified through extreme lack of use. I want to be as dumb as a bag of hair, covered in sand I’m too listless and witless to brush off, and so relaxed I stand in the middle of the front room, staring at my own feet and going “Wha?” for an hour and a ha
lf.

  So you can imagine, then, my disappointment when I realized that, over the course of my summer vacations, I actually had learned a few things. Thankfully, nearly all of them were stupid.

  1. You can make a child climb a mountain, if it thinks there’s a Disney Store at the top. Obviously you can’t stand at the bottom of Stac Pollaidh and outright say, “There is a Disney Store at the top of that mountain. Those are not clouds up there—that is Disney Magic!” No—the trick is simply not to say that there isn’t one up there. Imply that one would normally expect there to be one on top of a Highland mountain—but that the only way of really knowing is to spray that midge repellent all over your face, get your rain poncho on, and ship up 2,000 feet. Of course, when you get to the top, and the kids wail, “But there is no Disney Store here!,” then you must bring in the second half of the Mountain Climbing for Recalcitrant Children Plan. You must say: “JESUS! It has CLOSED DOWN! This recession has hit the retail sector HARD!” Then re-motivate the children for the climb back down by not saying, but certainly kind of implying that there might be a fire sale going on in the parking lot below, with High School Musical figurines at half-price. But only if they hurry.

  2. When it comes to sleeper trains, there are two types of people in this world. The first delight in the dollhouse-like neatness of the cabins. They adore the blankety bunk beds, and are soothed into sleep by the night-long rattle of the locomotive’s trundle. The second give the stink eye as soon as they step inside, spend all night sighing, and ruin the morning croissant-in-a-bag breakfast by wailing, “That was like spending all night in the video to the Cure’s ‘Close To Me’! I am glad I am not going in one of those again—oh I am, in seven days. Maybe I will mention how fatally dispirited about this I am EVERY TEN MINUTES FOR THE REST OF THE VACATION.”