I wrote for British Vogue about why I wore my mother’s wedding dress after my parents divorced. About sentiment, superstition, heirlooms and searching for a sense of permanence this year. Wishing you all a happier new one. Read Here.
Festive Motherisms Feat. Nora’s Beauty Regime, Merkins, Real Housewives of New York, and Andy Warhol’s Tote Bag…
It’s November and, after posting something about myself looking like a gimp on Twitter, I had to explain to my mother what a gimp is.
Mum: So, what’s the difference between gimp and Grinch? People calling in on the radio and saying, “I don’t mean to be a Grinch but…” What is this Grinch?
Me: It’s like a modern day Scrooge. Usually, but not always, very different to a gimp.
We’ve just eaten a whole block of stilton and crackers. Adverts for food come on…
Mum: All these adverts telling you to stuff your face while there’s an obesity crisis. It makes me want to make a bowl of gruel and eat it in a ditch!
Me: That block of cheese had nothing to do with it?
Mum: No!
Mum has bought my mother-in-law (who hopefully won’t read this) a book about Covent Garden brothels in the 17th century. I’m having a quick read to see if it’s too inappropriate. (It is. But it’s going anyway.)
Mum: The funniest ones are about merkins.
Me: Who’s “merkins”?
Mum: No, darling, merkins are a fake pubic wig.
The internet gifts us with a surprise advert about the world being run by a paedophile ring.
Me: The world is not only run by lizards, but paedophile lizards…
Mum: If there is anything to get the one eyed ignorant is “pedo”. “PEDO!” off they go grabbing their cutlasses and hacking off anything with a limb.
We’re driving through one of the local towns in late November…
Me: Ah, I think it’s rather sweet everyone getting their decorations up.
Mum: Me too.
I sit there quietly surprised. Even mother has nothing cynical to say about the innocent display of hope and cheer this year.
The adverts…
Mum: Now, what is it this time: incontinence pads, funerals or food?
Me: Loans.
Mum: Of course!
I have left some plants with my mother while I move to a tiny rock in the sea for the winter. Unfortunately, due to lockdown this is delayed a month. I go to check on the status of one of the plants.
Me: Orange tree’s feeling very dry. Need to water it every couple of days.
Mum (wistfully): I’m an Aquarian; I tend to over water.
Me: Well…you’re not. You need to water this, please.
Once in a while, you are a sucker for click bait. We’re reading about 102 year-old Nora’s beauty regime.
Mum (impersonating Nora): “And I thought it would be nice to enjoy a slower pace of life after the rat race of Reading.”
Me: Every time I hear these stories in papers I can’t help but think of ‘Withnail’ and “Geoff Wode”…
Mum (continues reading aloud, the journalist now): If you didn’t know, you’d never guess she was 102 –she looks like she’s in her early eighties!
We’re both in hysterics
Mum: Oh! Wonderful. You can’t make it up.
Ever since I watched ‘Jaws’ I have been terrified of the shark-less waters off the coast of North Devon. Thanks to climate change, my paranoia is becoming a reality. I read about sharks off the coast of Devon…
Mum: They’re only friendly sharks, basking sharks.
Me: No, they’re blue sharks. “They rarely bite but can kill!”
Mum: Oh well, that’s alright. Let them have a couple tourists—we need some bad press down here!
Mum is giving me an induction to the “Real Housewives of various regions in the US”…
Mum: Now, you only have to watch the last 5 minutes because that’s when they have a humongous argument because they’ve mix their alcohol with their medication.
Me: Which housewives is this?
Mum (with authority): New York, it’s the best. Atlanta and New York are the best. She considers this for a second. And Orange County.
It’s another gross story of corruption in the government in the papers…
Mum: Follow the money…I’ve always said it.
Me: They don’t even bother hiding it any more it just bare faced—
Mum: Thievery.
Me: Yeah. That’s it.
As an Aquarius, mum is racking it up as a personal triumph that Dolly Parton helped fund the vaccine. We both unanimously agree she is a genius. Mum says..
“Dolly, Socrates and Oscar Wilde, always good for a quote.”
I am asking mum if she has a tote bag I can use to go shopping. She brandishes her hideous tote.
Me: What is this?
Mum: My tote.
Me: Your Co-Op ‘bag for life’?
Mum: Andy Warhol would have had a bag like this.
Me: Probably would’ve, actually.
This was before some tosser hacked mum out of Facebook for stirring a hive of Syd Barrett fanatics and informing them that, actually, rather than a “sex god” he was deeply unwell…
Mum: Guide ropes—they make glow in the dark ones now.
Me: Yes, I know you shared it 6 times already on Facebook.
Mum: I got letters of gratitude!
Me: I hope you’re getting paid the amount of free advertising you’re giving them!
My mother doesn’t like doing anything boring anymore which now includes: bending.
Mum: Please get that sock for me.
Me: Yes, master.
Having experienced an appalling bout of acne in my early 30s, I have utmost sympathy for the people Mum’s reading about with mask acne.
Mum: Mask acne is a new thing.
Me: Macne.
Mum: Oh, that’s good did you make that up?
Me (rather unimpressed with myself): Yeah.
Mum: Write it down.
Me: No, I think someone else will have thought of that already.
Mum: Well, I’ve read a couple of things about this and haven’t seen it.
Me (starting to believe in my new term): Don’t know how they missed it…
Mum: Too obvious, maybe.
We’re talking about how the virus is mutating. Mum is an expert…
“I know so much about this fucking virus I could draw it for you – basically, the spiky bit has changed.”
Now we’re watching Real Housewives of New Jersey, in horror.
Me: How do they find such appalling clothes?
Mum: Money.
Me and Mum (in unison): “Takes a lot of money to look that cheap.”
Mum has been to the library and been told to interact with automated systems and download an “app” by a man standing “a hundred feet away”. She is not happy about it.
“I think, frankly, people don’t observe the existing rules, these very simple rules, so now we have these dementedly complicated regulations– we’re so entangled in regulations nobody knows what they’re doing!”
Talking about the deranged Matt Hancock.
Me: Did you see that clip of him pretending to cry when he was actually laughing?
Mum: No, what was that? His grandfather’s died or something.
Me: No, this was when the vaccine was approved.
Mum: I should think he was laughing, nothing to cry about. What’s there to cry about that?
Me: Relief?
Mum: Oh, right ok. Your life.
I’m doing an online shop for mum during a gale when the phone line goes…
Me: Hello?
Mum: Hello? What happened there?
Me: Wi-Fi cut out.
Mum: I thought you’d been carried away by a cormorant.
I have no idea how we got on this subject but here it is…
Mum: Oh, I love mad rich men.
Me: Who doesn’t.
Mum: Doesn’t what?
Me: Love mad rich men.
Mum: Well, there are people that are mad north, northwest. And there are people like Jeffrey Epstein.
Me: Well I obviously don’t love Jeffrey Epstein, mum, do I?
Mum (not listening, carried away by the winds of Shakespeare): When the wind’s in the east …I can tell a hawk from a handsaw.
Mum and I (in unison): Mmmhmmm!
Merry Christmas one and all. I hope you have a cosy day wherever you are, or aren’t. And Merry Christmas to mum, who is home alone this year, I’m sure looking chic, and hopefully carrying her Co-Op tote.
Locked-down And Out In London
May 8th
“Pandemic! Got that pandemic.”
We can continue with The Wire as someone is feeling a bit stronger this week – less overwhelmed and more outraged. Eerily, season four’s first episode opens with the kids on the corner selling their wares, previously given names such as “WMD”, “Bin Laden”, and “Red Top”. Today shouting, “Pandemic! Got that pandemic!”
It rings out through the empty streets of the episode. And the next, and the next. Possibly through the whole series.
“Pandemic! Got that pandemic.”
The children’s play area in the local park is covered by metal grating to stop the kids passing the virus on to each other as they play, to their mothers and their fathers; the reality of dystopia is much more subtle than it has been portrayed in books and films, and that’s all the more unsettling.
Old men sit solo on their benches, catching the rays two meters apart, as if the park was designed with this very future in mind.
On an empty bench, there’s a plastic bottle filled with stagnant water and red carnations to remember the dead. She was called Clara and she died in 1998, when this future was still a twinkle.
I watch Graham Brady, the Tory MP who thinks people like staying at home during a pandemic too much, in disbelief. As his foul utterances limp off his tongue, his mouth becomes dry and cloying, his body so ashamed of the words coming out of it that it tries to shut his mouth in any means possible, directing all moisture away from this orifice and towards his armpits. But his self-assurance is a fiercer force and it keeps him talking, pushing for lockdown to be eased before it’s safe. People are “too willing” to stay at home and not go to the jobs they’ve hated their whole lives in order to save their lives, and their loved ones lives, and possibly even this guy’s life.
I think of a time earlier this year when a friend and I were walking back through Soho, only to find Old Compton Street closed off by police, then Wardour, Greek, Frith… everywhere rushed to be closed off by a large number of police. It must be serious; this is literally the whole of Soho. I ask a policeman what’s going on, he is busy and, unanswering, he shoos me along. Up at Soho Square, I ask another.
“Bomb threat,” he says.
Oh shit.
Behind him, his colleague is trying to stop, and physically block, a man desperately trying to return to work. Having informed the man there is a bomb threat, he’s trying to shield this man from something that could kill him, and the man is pushing and saying, “I don’t care! I have to get back to work! It’s just over there, just let me through!”
The desperation to get back to his job, the fear at being late back from lunch, the complete disregard for his own life for want of his job was very sad. My friend and I agreed that surely, in any sane country, you’d just leave for an hour or two and then return. Or, should the bomb go off, just clock off for the day.
On the news later, it turns out they had discovered an unexplored WW2 bomb. So don’t tell me people don’t cling to their jobs. I just think people like Bradbury have found it a surprise that most people cling to their lives more dearly.
And so, there is hope.
I hear the first scree of a swift: summer has arrived on May 6th – at exactly the same time as it arrived with my sister, it turns out. And the swift and the summer is more welcome than ever. With the swift’s forked tail trails every summer that has come before this one, good and bad, happy and sad, every future summer, every blue sky and setting sun. And we long for it. We long for them all.
The plane trees that were pollarded within an inch of their lives are thick with green leaves that wave like a celebration.
I miss the charity shops, the displays in their windows have been the same for two months now and they used to take such pride in changing them every week. I miss going in and saying how overpriced everything was: “£65 for a pair of Miss Sixty sunglasses?! Fuck off.” Only to find an absolute score hiding on the rails.
I miss my family.
The whistling sound of pigeon wings haunts us like an angel of death. Except it’s the angel of shit.
Blue, white and black face masks litter the streets. They are like all things left on the street, a sorry sight. When I lived in Dalston it was strands of weaves that tumbled and drifted along the roads. Saturday and Sunday morning it was like walking through a Sergio Leone set. I preferred the weaves.
A friend sends me a poetry exchange that I don’t take part in in any orthodox manner, I “break the rules”. And because I broke the rules, they break the rules and don’t send me a poem, but a song by a Brazilian man called Caetano Veloso:
I walk down Portobello road to the sound of reggae
I’m alive
The age of gold, yes the age of old
The age of gold
The age of music is past
I hear them talk as I walk yes I hear them talk
I hear they say
“Expect the final blast”
I walk down Portobello road to the sound of reggae
I’m alive
I’m alive, vivo muito vivo feel the sound of music
Banging in my belly
Know that one day I must die
I’m alive
And I know that one day I must die
I’m alive
Yes I know that one day I must die
I’m alive vivo muito vivo
In the eletric cinema or on the telly
Nine out of ten movie stars make me cry
I’m alive
And nine out of ten movie stars make me cry
I’m alive
A few days later I think of this song as a man drives with his top down smiling and listening to loud reggae. And as the sun pats my cheeks and the reggae drifts in to the distance, I think, this is living
“Baby Hats! Got them Baby Sun Hats!”