Don’t cut your own fringe. It is far, far more difficult than you could ever imagine.
For that matter, don’t cut anyone else’s, either. Good friendships have ended that way.
Every time your heart gets broken, breathe deep—it grows bigger as it mends. Imagine each line of red scar tissue on it with pride—the same pride you’ll one day have for stretch marks on your belly, after having a baby. Skin and hearts tear to make great things. Don’t be afraid.
And if your mind tears, do not fear that, either. Depression takes a layer of skin off—so accept that you feel more of the world than most people. Did you hear what I said? YOU FEEL MORE OF THE WORLD THAN MOST PEOPLE. That’s amazing. And anxiety works like electricity in your bones—it keeps you wakeful and driven—so use those extra hours, those extra sleepless days, that your adrenaline-poisoned body is giving you. You are living longer. You live in double time. Insist that that’s a blessing. Fake that until you make that, too.
When in doubt, listen to David Bowie. In 1968, Bowie was a gay, ginger, bonk-eyed, snaggletoothed freak walking around south London in a dress, being shouted at by thugs. Four years later, he was still exactly that—but everyone else wanted to be like him, too. If David Bowie could make being David Bowie cool, you can make being you cool. PLUS, unlike David Bowie, you get to listen to David Bowie for inspiration. So you’re one up on him, really. YOU’RE ALREADY ONE AHEAD OF DAVID BOWIE.
Go out there and change the world so it works for you, and every girl like you. I know you will.
Ten Things Teenage Boys Need to Know
Everything in the previous list. It’s all exactly the same for you.
Things Cookery Books Never Tell You
Whenever it says “an onion,” you should use ten onions.
Whenever it says “a clove of garlic,” you should use twenty cloves of garlic.
Similarly upscale vanilla, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, chili, and glacé cherries (the last because they’re so astonishingly delicious that you will eat half of the tub before you even open the recipe book). Recipe books routinely underestimate how much of THE DELICIOUS THINGS you can handle. You can handle a lot of THE DELICIOUS THINGS.
Whenever it says “leave onions to brown (for five minutes),” that should actually read “leave onions to brown (FOR HALF A SODDING HOUR WHILE ALL YOUR TIMINGS GO OUT OF THE WINDOW AND YOUR GUESTS BEGIN TO STARVE AND YOU DESPAIR OF THE SISYPHEAN TASK YOU HAVE GIVEN YOURSELF).” Be wise to this. Start cooking yesterday.
Brussels sprouts with goat cheese on them is an ASTONISHINGLY lovely dish—and yet no one will ever believe you. Ever. For it sounds like the most disgusting thing invented. Bitter ack ack ack sprouts and BOAK cheese that smells of goat. Even typing about it now, I’m dry-heaving into my mouth. I’m REPULSED. And yet I know that, next time I make them, I’ll be hovering over a dish of them in the kitchen, with a fork, going, “Oh my GOD, these are so unexpectedly moreish!”
You will never use that jar of za’atar in your cupboard. You might as well redeploy it as potpourri now.
Bovril in Bolognese—amazing.
Bovril and ketchup in Bolognese—you’ll lose your mind.
Cooking might be all well and good—but the best meal in the world is a cheese sandwich, and you know it.
Most people, when sharpening knives, cannot help but doing a “Yeah—I’m sharpening a knife. Check me out. This is a primal skill” face. Do not be one of those people. All the way through sharpening a knife, say, repeatedly, “Gosh, I’m so sorry I’m just sharpening a knife. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m an idiot! An idiot with a tool! I’m just using a thing I bought from Lakeland, for £7.99. I am in no way primal. If a bear attacked me, I’d definitely die.”
You know Nigella’s Sauternes Custard, Heston’s Pine Needle Dust Christmas Pudding, and Jamie’s Ultimate Trifle? They are all, unquestionably, delicious. No doubt about that. But if you squared off the ratio of time, effort, and cost in making them against a bag of Milky Way Magic Stars, are they really better than giving the man in the newsagent’s 42p, then choffing the lot as you take the 43 bus down Holloway Road? Nuh.
Things Not to Say on Social Media, as They’ve Been Colonized by Annoying People
“Mmmmkay?”
“There are no words.”
“No—just no.”
In an argument about “issues”: “You’ve thrown [subject matter] under the bus!” Dude, you’ve only got 140 characters. There’re no buses on Twitter. Just say “betrayed”—then use the seventeen characters you’ve saved to CALM THE FUCK DOWN. Tweet yourself an emoji of a panda or something.
“[name of town or place] I am in you!”
“#blessed” (unless you’re doing it as a deliberate parody—and even that will probably be passé by next week).
“Nom nom nom.”
“You won’t believe this!” Note: Humans are a species that still have to consciously work out if unicorns are real or not. Of course we’ll believe “this.” We’ll believe anything.
“Need. Coffee.”
“David Camer-WRONG,” “Tony B-LIAR.” Yeah, we get it, Rik from The Young Ones. Now go and iron your yellow dungarees.
Times I’ve Had My Heart Broken
When Andy Taylor (not the one from Duran Duran) told me that David Vaughan was “only joking” when he asked me out (1985).
When the dog died (1987).
All of us on the stairs, scared, crying (1988).
Artax the horse dying in the Swamps of Sadness in The Neverending Story (the book, not the film) (1989).
Matty Vale asking me if my nickname is “Fatty” (1990).
[redacted] kisses [redacted] in front of me at the Sony Christmas party, and tells me they’re getting married (1991).
[further redacted] hits me, and I realize that he actually hates me—despite his shoes being under my bed (1994).
The midwife says, “I’m sorry—we can’t detect a heartbeat anymore” (1999).
Coming home that night—me limping, sore—and playing “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” And it hits me that I will never see that child’s face. There will be no first time. Two heartbreaks in twenty-four hours. We cannot stop crying (1999).
When my firstborn daughter is two, and is so scared of a cow, she farts in fear when it moves near her. I don’t know why this breaks my heart. But it does. I cannot bear it. I pick her up and run away (2001).
Empty chair around a table on Christmas Day (2008).
Three empty chairs (2009).
Deleting a number from my phone (2011).
Finding the photograph where, now, it seems so, so obvious what would happen next (2013).
Storing the chairs in the basement (2014).
Reasons Why the Future Will Be Better Than the Past
It always is.
David Bowie might be pretending to be dead.
Telescopes keep finding new bursting nebulae that look like horses, eyes, lava lamps, sundaes, ribbons, and spawn. In tens of thousands of colors, across billions of miles, from a trillion years ago. And yet the amount of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang. Every atom of you, and me, once swirled around inside them. We are all stardust. We are golden. We are unique kaleidoscope rearrangements of everything that has gone before, and everything that will ever come again. The telescopes show us all there will ever be—and, also, right down inside ourselves.
You can put a tincture of marijuana in a vape.
Tofu technology is really moving on.
Western culture’s voracious hunger for novelty and the new means that, eventually, it will be a thirst for new stories, and stars, that open up the media, TV, and Hollywood to women, people of color, and LGBT. It’ll be the start of the most joyous transfer of power, money, and influence ever. We’ll laugh, cry, and eat a lot of popcorn watching this revolution.
Every graph plotting the world’s wealth, life expectancy, peace, and health has been moving inexorably upwards for the last 120
years. We make light out of waves and lungs from machines, and can grow lunch in the desert, or in space. We’re a long way off living in mud, wearing mud, eating mud, and screaming every time the sun comes out.
We haven’t had our black Beatles yet.
Or our female Bowie.
Or our lesbian Elvis.
Or a city run by women, or an empire founded without genocide, or a company run to save the world, or an endangered species or habitat adopted by a billionaire—just for lolz—and funded and protected until it thrives again. All these things could happen. All these things could happen next year. The world could be unimaginably different, and amazing. Because:
It always is.
Part Three
And so we turn to arguably the most important decision you have to make in your life after “Shall I fall in love with this charismatic yet bad man?” and “Will the name ‘Khaleesi’ date well for my baby?”: which party to vote for in the next election.
Which party is for you? Who do you trust? Depending on how long you’ve been on the Internet, and which conversations you’ve been part of, you might just be starting to think that . . .
The answer to all this might be to just . . . make something new. Neither left nor right.
Personally, I like capitalism. I think it’s got lots of great ideas. I live in it, and it means I have a lot of choices for dinner tonight. I believe in people being able to make their own decisions—being able to help themselves, come up with solutions to their own problems, invent things that would be useful to others and make a living from it. Clearly, “the government” can’t do everything. If you’re waiting for the state to make a perfect world, you’ll be a long time waiting.
But I also like socialism. I think it has a lot of great ideas, too. I’ve read what happened to the children of unemployed working-class people in a prewelfare era—Helen Forrester’s Twopence to Cross the Mersey is both heartbreaking and pitiless—and I can categorically state that the policies of Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government are the only difference between her adolescence (malnourished, uneducated, in rags, constantly ill, despairing) and mine (off down the library/adult education center, getting antibiotics from the doctor, wearing clean clothes, working as a writer by the age of sixteen). The state needs to be there to help people who cannot help themselves. That’s just obvious.
Both capitalism and socialism have brilliant aspects. Both can often work for the betterment of humanity—which is, at the end of the day, surely the point of everything.
But the thing is, as I’ve become more politically engaged and informed, I’ve found it harder and harder to know who to vote for. Like most people, I inherited my vote, Labour, from my father. But I’ve voted in every election, save the last, without ever actually reading the Labour Party manifesto. I just . . . believed in them. I was born into it—as you are born, by default, into your parents’ religion—without ever making a decision for myself.
How many people have actually read a manifesto? How do we decide who to vote for? Often, because we’re busy, and politics is boring, it’s on the back of one TV debate, or because our peer group favors one party over another, or because we just kind of “like” the leader—he seems like a nice guy, with his kids, and his kitchen.
Really, we often put less thought and research into our party allegiances than we do planning a holiday.
And—if you are one of those weird, rare, perverted manifesto readers—how much did you actually agree with, and then vote for? People tend to vote for two or three issues—tax, education, health care, immigration, the environment—and ignore, or are ignorant of, the rest. We have to remain ignorant—or ignore—huge chunks of party policy when we vote. Very few people are purely left-wing, or right-wing. More pertinently, increasingly few people actually know what “right-wing” or “left-wing” mean. Ask someone under the age of twenty, and they’ll stare at you with the rainbow pinwheel eyes a Mac displays just before it crashes.
As Armando Iannucci put it in a column in the Observer, “A generation that puts whatever it likes on its playlist, or in its wardrobe, must be asking: ‘Why do I have to pick between two parties?’”
And—to take his point further—pick between two parties founded more than a century ago, when we worked, loved, spent, lived, and believed in ways utterly different, and removed, from the lives we have today?
Shouldn’t we just . . . make new parties? Dozens of new parties? Founded on what life is like now? Built from the ground up, with crucial concerns—the society-altering explosion in part-time work, the need for quality child care, and the awareness of the demographic time bomb of an aging population—hardwired in, as first-strike priorities, rather than tacked on, as afterthoughts, after the economy?
How would we do it?
I believe everyone should write a manifesto. Everyone. Even if it’s only fifteen words long, and simply consists of the words “My manifesto: I would have more shops that sell tea, and fewer that sell coffee.”
This information is important.
Maybe you would be the only person who put this in their manifesto. Or maybe we would find, to our surprise, that millions of people also put this in their manifesto. We suddenly find—wholly unexpectedly—that this is one of the burning issues of the age. Millions of people want more tea shops, and fewer coffee shops.
The next exciting bit is finding out why. Why do people want more tea and less coffee?
Perhaps it is because they are furious with multinational coffee chains avoiding tax in foreign territories. Perhaps they are enraged by coffee chains’ tactics of deliberately opening up next to independent cafés in order to close them down. Perhaps they believe that the higher caffeine content in coffee, coupled with its rising popularity, has noticeably changed the personalities of people in previously tea-drinking countries: making them more short-tempered, anxious, and prone to headaches. Perhaps they wish to reclaim an important aspect of British identity—a brew—that they feel is being eroded. Or perhaps they just prefer tea to coffee.
The important thing would be suddenly having the information that millions of people are both concerned by this issue and are offering a solution—“They should serve tea in libraries, with profits funding new books!” “Companies should be compelled to have signs on their doors stating their tax status and last payments!” “Independent businesses should receive preferential business rates, in order to encourage British companies!” “They should bring back hanging!”—all discovered because everyone now writes a manifesto.
I would then have all these manifestos uploaded into a database.
I know I am slightly unusual sexually—I still have a thing for Gonzo from The Muppet Show—but I find that quite arousing. The ability to see into the hearts and minds of all my fellow citizens—see their worries, and fears, and hopes—and then scroll through thousands of mad, brilliant, useful, stupid, genius solutions.
Currently, the only way we have to see what people want, and are worried by, are (a) polls and (b) the markets. The reason that capitalism has been, so far, the most successful way to run a society is because the markets show us what people want. Someone invents something, someone else buys it—now we know it was needful.
Compared to communist systems, where it was centrally decided what bread should be made and where it should be sold—resulting in empty shops and millions of unhappy communists being left without toast, or freedom of speech—the market system palpably works better.
But it’s not perfect. For one, it’s incredibly wasteful: the millions of tons of unsold clothing, food, and goods going into landfills, or being incinerated, tell us that. In the current system, however much research a company does, it still can’t preempt everyone deciding not to buy 2007’s ill-advised venture into fluorescent vests, and them all ending up on a recycling boat to China. The market provides and the consumers reject. It’s a fairly simplistic system—a brutal and dumb tool.
And secondly, it is highly calibrated to
want, but doesn’t really register need.
In screenwriting, “want vs. need” is a key concept for your characters and plot. In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett wants Ashley Wilkes, the anemic fop—but what she actually needs is to learn to become independent by her own means, and take over Tara. In Star Wars, Han wants to earn money running a cash-in-hand mission for the Rebel Alliance—but what he actually needs is to become part of something bigger, and overthrow the Imperial forces.
And so it is with, broadly, capitalism vs. socialism. We want a £3 latte, we want an iPhone, we want a cheap top from Primark. These are the things that drive us. We don’t mind paying for them. Indeed, culturally, to spend money on these things is a signifier of self, and status.
But what we need is a well-run society, with infrastructure, health care, education, and justice. The thing is—as Scarlett and Han could tell you—your wants are what tend to get you out of bed in the morning, and motivate you in the short term. You tend to find your needs—possibly accidentally—later on. They are part of a grander narrative. And, in the beginning, they tend to be harder to sell. Han would never have put his life, Falcon, and Wookiee in danger to fight for freedom at the beginning of the movie.
We’re far happier to pay for wants than for needs. No one ever got angry with society for KitKat Chunkies going up to 52p. But suggest an income tax rise to pay for sustainable fuel, and the outrage leads to it being scrapped—despite the fact that (a) we will palpably run out of oil in a way we will never run out of KitKat Chunkies and (b) KitKat Chunkies are arguably less useful to us, in the long run, than the polar ice caps.
Also—annoyingly—we tend to find out what we need, and learn it’s not available, at times in our lives when we are too busy to protest much about it.
By the time a big need kicks in—say, emergency psychiatric care for a loved one undergoing a massive psychotic breakdown—you’re too busy talking them down off a multistory car park roof to organize a protest against poor mental health care provision in this country.
Moranifesto Page 20