But years later—now—you know there is no ending. You will never learn to have just two glasses, because you don’t want to have just two glasses—you don’t want to miss a trick; you will ride every tiger that passes by the pub door, until you know them by name, and call them in from the street.
As intimations of the grave occur—the child now up to your shoulder, the wondering horror of remembering something from twenty-five years ago—a hangover seems a slight prospect, in comparison. Indeed, it seems kind of necessary.
Because you don’t fight these hangovers, now—you don’t deny them, or try to wash them away. Instead, you lie perfectly limply in the beast’s jaws until it takes you for a corpse—and finally moves on, around five p.m.
You offer no resistance—you sit squarely in the center of the thermonuclear sweats, the urine like treacle, the sporadic pulses of self-loathing where you must find a mirror in order to tell yourself, “Dude, no. You are not an international terrorist,” and you let them have their full head. You allow the full horror.
And you say to yourself, “I am currently in the kiln, being burnished. My enamel is being baked. This is where I become truly powerful, and unafraid. Every one of these I sit through, unblinking, takes me up a level. So that, when Death finally comes, I will just treat him as nothing more than a hangover, too. I will come to him in the doorway in this cheap polyester slip, with this disheveled hair, and this sausage sandwich, and simply say to him: ‘Dude, do you know where I left my purse last night? I think I left it in the cab.’”
I Don’t Know What to Do When I’m Alone
Until I was eighteen I don’t think I’d ever spent more than four hours on my own. There were eight children, two adults, and three large, demented Alsatian dogs in our house, and so “learning how to cope when alone” was a skill I never really had the chance to develop. Not even when on the toilet—where the shower curtain could suddenly and dramatically be pulled back, revealing three children staring at you from a bath full of Mr. Bubble. Perhaps that explains why I’m traumatized by it now.
My husband went away with the kids for the weekend, leaving me to hit a big deadline. After doing my traditional farewell—standing in the doorway, wailing, “DON’T GO! I CANNOT TOLERATE THE LONELINESS! DO NOT LEAVE ME OR I WILL DIE, I WILL LITERALLY DIE!”—I went back into the silent, empty old house and turned into someone completely different.
You’re different when you’re alone. Well, I am. There’s a whole other me that lives a whole other life when I’m the only one around. Obviously I smoke in the kitchen, watch Antiques Roadshow (“Mum, this is boring—it’s just a man saying a chair is old”), and live on the sofa; slowly building a castle wall of dirty cereal bowls and teacups while wearing a dressing gown that is so repulsively stained and funky that I now fear putting it in the washing machine, lest it make the drum smell forever.
Essentially—as all people on their own are apt to do—I turn into The Dude from The Big Lebowski, but without his rigorous sporting lifestyle (bowling while drinking beer and eating chips).
However, in addition to all my quotidian “lonely behaviors,” there are several other things I do when I’m alone which are a bit more . . . specialist. For instance:
I listen to Jeff Buckley. I don’t know why I feel embarrassed to listen to him when my husband is around—this is a man who has fifty thousand records, is insanely open-minded about all music, and also had a childhood crush on the Dooleys. He is the last person to find me listening to Jeff Buckley and sneer about it—not least because he has Jeff Buckley records himself. And yet—if my husband walked into a room where I was playing “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” I would feel more mortified than if he’d found me, I dunno, taking a “sexy” selfie, or leaving the comment “When will the Pulitzer committee honor this amazing woman?” under one of my articles online. Loving Jeff Buckley is such a . . . woman thing to do, with his beautiful face, and his falsetto voice, and his tragic early death in the Mississippi River. I like to cry when listening to Jeff—cry while watching my reflection in the window and pretending I’m in the video for the song. I also like to pretend I’m Jeff by singing along, and I like to pretend that what I am doing is “weaving intoxicating modal harmonies” around my own original vocal take—rather than, as is the actual case, semihitting random notes in a barrage of unpleasant noise, in an empty house. Whilst crying.
Not going out and seeing people. I don’t do that when I’m alone—even though that would, obviously, stop me from being alone—because it would mean coming back to an empty house. And on some level I fear that the house—having been utterly empty for the evening—might kind of seal up and not let me back in, and I would be reduced to kneeling in front of the letterbox, calling out to the cats to vouch for me. Yes—I am basically worried my house won’t love me anymore if I leave it. Oh God, that’s projection, isn’t it? Is the house my mum? I can’t work it out. Also, I can’t leave the house.
I start liking the cats. Normally, my relationship with the cats is, at best, frosty. I find them needy and stupid—after seven years, they still haven’t grasped that not only will kneading my leg not yield the delicious mother-cat milk which they so obviously desire but also leads to them being lightly chucked across the room. After seven years of flying across the room, they still haven’t learned this. Seven years. They also keep trying to kind of get inside my hands when I’m typing, stand on the stairs stupidly where my foot is about to land, and scratch my new chair. I find them utterly vexing. However, within twenty minutes of my husband and children leaving, I will hunt through the house to find the cats, bring them downstairs, and drape them over my shoulders. I dote on them. “Come over here, little matey!” I’ll cry, sitting on the sofa. “Come and see if you can get the delicious mother-cat milk out of my leg! Scratch away!”
I can’t sleep. Normally I’m out like a light by ten p.m. With my husband away, however, two a.m. will roll around and I’ll still be depressingly wakeful. I’ve worked out, with science, what’s going on—my husband must emit some kind of soporific miasma, like human valerian, that minutely regulates my body clock, and this is part of the reason I was initially attracted to him.
Still, it is best that I can’t sleep—given that I need to be awake to hear the burglars and murderers in the kitchen, making small, weird noises. The number of burglars and murderers who troop through the house when I’m alone is astonishing. Perhaps they all come together, on a minibus. Burglars and murderers don’t like being alone, either.
Printers Are Evil
It’s war.
Look, I’m only going to talk about this if we all promise not to get angry about it. I know most columns about abortion, Israel, freedom of speech, Europe, and the prospect of a female Doctor in Doctor Who should start like this—but, to be fair, those are all subjects we could all agree on if everyone went down the pub, with the conversation chaired by a couple of mums who made it very clear that everyone had to be on best behavior, no shouting, and all to be finished by five p.m. so they could get back and pop a whites wash on.
This subject, however, has no such possibility of resolve. For it is printers. Printers—the motherbeeping hate units that inspire more loathing than any other invention on earth. Their evil unreliability is the high-water mark by which every other device, past and future, must be measured. To purchase one is an act comparable to purchasing a succubus, demon, or tiny Nazi for £200, plus VAT.
The printer’s grasp of evil is perfect—for they prey on your weakest moment, when you need them most. There’s a taxi idling outside—all you need to do is print out your train tickets/boarding pass/homework/speech notes. You bought the printer four months ago and you’ve only used it six times, so pressing “Print” will mean a joyous printing sound, followed by you running out of the house. Hang on. What. What? WHAT? “Replace cyan cartridge.” “Invalid driver.” “Print is not aligned.” “Paper jam.”
What are you SAYING to me? What does this MEAN?
“Print i
s not aligned”—that’s just a Situationist slogan about post-Internet media, daubed on a wall. It’s not telling me what button to press. HOW am I supposed to “align print”? Do you want me to do a seminar on a 360 joined-up media? Because, so help me God, I will—except I can’t, because I would need to print out all my notes on it first.
“Invalid driver”? To me, this means “too drunk to get home, order a taxi.” IT’S NOT TELLING ME WHICH PART OF THE PRINTER TO PUNCH.
“Paper jam.” Okay—I know that one. It’s the state wherein a single, noncomplex sheet of A4 paper has, by some inexplicable process, been rendered into a solid origami swan of bullshit by your printer. Said swan is now lodged in a part of your printer wholly inaccessible by any of the useless trapdoors, which means you have to grab the swan’s tail and yank it from the machine, even as the manual insists this will totally invalidate your warranty. But that doesn’t matter! Because you’re about to throw the printer out of the window anyway!
The thing is, the more you learn about printers, the more you hate them. You know that infuriating little “whurdegurdy deee huurrrr dee hurrr” that an ink printer makes for three minutes, on start-up, that makes it sound like a pompous man at the dinner table about to say “I’m not racist, but . . .”? That’s the printer lavishly squirting ink out, to “clear the nozzles”—ink which PC World recently calculated costs £2,291 per gallon. That is more expensive than blood, or liquid Ecstasy. This means it’s perfectly possible to run a cartridge dry simply from turning a printer on and off again—without ever printing a single document. Yes. Things suddenly make more sense now, don’t they?
But don’t think getting a laser printer would be better—according to an Australian study, the ultrafine particles they emit cause a health risk equal to passive smoking. Whether from stress or lung cancer, your printer will kill you.
In Game of Thrones, the unfortunate Arya has witnessed most of those she loves being slaughtered. Consequently, she now recites a list of those she must now kill, like a prayer: “Cersei, Joffrey, Walder Frey, the Mountain, Meryn Trant.”
I have an almost identical prayer, except mine goes “Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu.” One of each of the eleven printers whose last act was to insist “Wifi not detected,” even as I bodily rubbed them against the router, screaming, “LOOK! THERE IT IS! CONNECT!” Or insisted they needed a full cyan cartridge, even though I was printing in black and white—essentially acting like some rock star insisting they want all the blue M&M’s removed from their rider. I threw them all out of the window. All.
How can printers have become so spoiled and demanding? They are the ultimate basic bitch item. I have devices in my pocket that will allow me to video-conference someone on a beach in Tasmania—and yet my pampered, toad-like printer, used just six times a year, cannot manage to do something that peasants were handling in the sixteenth century by using carved pieces of wood. COME ON! I beg any half-competent organization to start making printers. John Lewis, Waitrose—even ISIS, at a push. The world cannot tolerate this much longer. Our spiritual cyan is running dry. We have a paper jam in our souls. PRINT IS NOT ALIGNED.
The Exact Amount of Famous I Am: 35 Percent
The thing about being famous is that it’s (a) absolutely not what you think it will be and (b) there are such degrees of fame as to make opposite ends of the spectrum seem like different worlds. At one end—Kate Middleton. At the other—Matt Cardle from The X Factor, or Cat Bin Lady. My friend once went out with a drum ’n’ bass DJ who was, as she explained, “Absolutely legendary—to a very small community.” When pressed as to how small that community was, she screwed her eyes up for a minute and went, “Nine.”
Anyway. I’ve worked out how famous I am. It is exactly 35 percent.
Fame is rarely an on/off button: one moment in the darkness of anonymity, the next in the light of fame. If, of course, you think fame is the light—and not, when all is said and done, the real darkness, after all.
But the key thing is that fame is not binary—either/or. Fame is, instead, a dimmer switch with a million increments of notoriety across the scale.
On the dimmer switch of fame, I’m currently—after a solid couple of months of promo for a new book—Newsnight, The One Show, intense Q&A with Good Housekeeping—at around “35 percent famous.” I can tell you exactly how famous this is: famous enough to be invited onto the red carpet at the Glamour Awards, to pick up a trophy—only to be greeted with “PALOMA! PALOMA!” from paparazzi who believed I was the similarly badger-haired Paloma Faith. That’s exactly how famous I am. To be announced as a winner—while the paps go “Who?”
It’s only very specific people who ever know who I am: Girls who wear eyeliner. Homosexuals into sci-fi. Librarians. Benedict Cumberbatch fans. Dirty, boozy mums. English teachers. Badass Marxist-feminist nannas. Times readers—the ones who don’t just get the paper for the Business and Sport.
I have to say, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the perfect level, and type, of fame: I can be fairly assured of getting a discount on kale in health food shops, an overdue library book fine waived, or priority service in a gay bar—yet will be left to buy multipacks of sanitary towels in the Big Tesco, Edmonton, in peace.
In the last month, on a signing tour for my novel How to Build a Girl, the kind of people who recognize me have given me: a free cashmere shawl, a necklace with a quote from Ghostbusters on it, a bottle of gin, a crocheted vagina, and a postcard from a fourteen-year-old girl saying she wished I was a lesbian. Does it make me feel happy? Obviously, yes: this part of 35 percent fame is very simple. This bit doesn’t feel like “fame,” which you imagine to be hot, and white, and possibly blinding: this is just a warm, mellow “knowing”—where both parties hold each other’s hands and say “thank you,” simultaneously, several times over, and both mean it. Because words are dead until they are read, and a writer without a reader is nothing. And a writer with a reader and a cashmere travel wrap is clearly having a very good day indeed.
Sometimes, the signings last two hours, three hours, and a couple of people shake, or cry, when I say “Hello”—which is understandable given that they have been standing for three hours. And when this happens I am awestruck by just what it is when someone declares themselves “a fan,” and waits three hours to spend two minutes with you: that they have made themselves utterly vulnerable in a way that is oddly brave. They trust you enough to believe you won’t make them feel like a dick for waiting in a line, and you are utterly respectful and grateful for the leap of faith they have made. Unless you are a dick, you make sure they walk away feeling it was not a stupid thing to have done: you hug, and you kiss, and you tell them that they can do amazing things, too, and that they must, and that their hair is beautiful, because it is, and their eyes look like the eyes of revolutionaries, and their shoes are perfect for dancing in, and the dress their mother made them—with its print of Frida Kahlo—makes it clear that they are too good for this town, and that they must run away, and break some hearts, and change the world. And that when they do, you will cheer them on, in the way they have cheered you on—because you know each other now.
Do you know what 35 percent fame does? Not 100 percent fame—the raging, uncontrollable furnace in which, say, Amy Winehouse or Michael Jackson lived—but this lovely, manageable torch glow? It basically makes you be a better person. At 35 percent famous, it’s rare you leave the house without someone on Twitter noting they saw you on a bus, or in Pret, or going to see Boyhood at the Odeon.
And so you—previously God-less, unschooled in being constantly observed and being judged—finally feel what it’s like for your every action to be noted by an omnipresent eye. You start to live in a way that is exaggeratedly good—ostentatiously giving homeless people tenners, helping mums with buggies up stairs—hoping someone will Instagram it, captioned, “More Moran nobleness! She is such a humanitarian!”
But, after a while, you note that constantly pretending to be a decent person and actually be
ing one are basically the same thing. And that 35 percent fame has worked for you by way of the warm, positive affirmation that parents give a querulous child. That it makes you calm, and purposeful, in a way you would never have anticipated. That the mask, when it eats into the face, can be—unexpectedly—a serendipitous thing.
All the Different Ways I Have Annoyed Famous People
The thing is, even if you’re a bit famous yourself—cruising around on your 35 percent, enjoying occasional, modest discounts in secondhand bookshops—you are still liable to be a total arse when around other famous people. It’s almost as if you learned nothing, ever.
Not counting my father’s favorite drinking anecdote—that, in 1980, he once nearly knocked over Midlands Today presenter Alan Towers on a zebra crossing—the first famous person my family encountered was the writer Helen Cresswell, in 1982.
Author of children’s series The Bagthorpe Saga, Cresswell came to a literary fair in Wolverhampton to sign copies of her latest book. The whole family queued for an hour to meet her, and when we finally got to the top of the queue, we regretfully explained to her our situation: that, no, we hadn’t read any of her books yet—as we were waiting to get them out of the library—and so could she, therefore, just sign a copy of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, instead?
She—baffled yet courteous—did so. We—ebullient—capered away like joyous chimps. The famous lady (whose books we hadn’t read!) had signed a book (that she had nothing to do with!)—and it had only taken all afternoon! Bonus round! GOLD RUN! COWABUNGA! TOUCH THE GLORY OF THE FAMOUS PEOPLE!
In the twenty-nine years that have passed since that incident, my job has involved meeting many, many famous people. Indeed at one point, in my early twenties—during Britpop—I was probably on about twenty famous people a day. I subsequently developed a hacking Fame Cough.
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