Is It Just Me? (11 page)

I hope you’ve ticked a fair few boxes but, if not, don’t fret, for we have much, much further to romp together, and many more marvellous activities to sample.

What I will ask of you is to partake in a task. I fear that Little Miranda might be right in that we are verging on obsessional about our mobile phones. So our first pit-stop task is:

GOOD LUCK AND GOD SPEED

And now onwards with Miss Book and, may I say that, so far, I have been greatly enjoying writing her. Reasons include:

1. You can leave social events early, saying that you ‘need to get back to the BOOK, you know. It’s not going to write itself, that BOOK. What’s that? You didn’t know I was writing a BOOK? Oh, bless you. Well, I am. I am a BOOK WRITER. Yes, please feel free to
   check me out
   ’
   ^*
   sweeps elegantly out
   ^*
   
2. You can wear glasses and a beret, and sit in your local café with a little notebook and a pencil. If anyone looks askance at you, you can draw yourself up to your full height and say, ‘Yes? What am I doing and why am I wearing this? Oh, just gathering material for my book. I am much like the French philosophers. Yes, you do have to be very clever to write a book actually, thank you for asking. And no, these are not lens-free glasses for effect. And furthermore, I am not essentially here in the hope of impressing the male customers . . .’
   
3. Everything you do can be written off as ‘research’. So far, in ‘researching’ this book, I have seen fourteen musicals, eaten three Battenberg cakes, been on a bouncy castle, danced wild and free to Billy Joel and thrown a jelly at my grandmother. And if none of those things actually make it into the book? Well,
   pfft
   . Who cares? I’m a ker-ay-zee creative animal. My process takes whatever it takes, man. I break all the rules.
   

I now declare this lovely pit stop over. Onwards, I say, onwards – please replenish teas, stack up biscuits and re-heat your roast, for we are about to venture bravely forth into the subject that is . . . oh goodness me, it’s going to be a big one, but it has to be done . . . BEAUTY.

A
friend said something to me recently, which gave me pause for thought. A rare occurrence, you say? Well, that’s a little cheeky of you, MDRC, but, in this case, absolutely correct. You have learned, now that we are on chapter six together, that I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound serious thinking. The glasses and beret in the café were just to impress potential suitors (always good to try new tacks). I am nowhere close to one of them French philosophers; I basically lollop through life like an amiable hound. An Irish Wolf Hound, you say? Again, that’s a bit cheeky of you. (But equally, fair enough. I think if I were to associate myself with any breed of hound, then an Irish Wolf Hound would be the loftiest and lollopiest – look, I’ve just created a new word – of all the dogs.) So, far be it from me to plunge into the great debates of the moment. I shall leave that to the professionals; I’ve got bollards to fall over and soup to spill and jaunts to go on. But this friend – she did get me thinking. What she said was:

‘Miranda, you’ve
got
to start taking yourself seriously as a woman.’

She said this in response to the frayed, overstuffed handbag – and by handbag I obviously mean rucksack – that I’ve taken to carrying around with me. Is it just me who hasn’t bought in to the need for a £700 Mulberry bag? There is no need when my current rucksack straps on like a dream, giving me a pleasingly, outward-bound Girl Guide-ish look, and can comfortably hold a small dog, a cagoule, chewing gum, tights, an emergency sandwich, a London A–Z, a banana, a box of tissues, a tube of cleansing hand gel, three bottles of water and fifteen notebooks (in which I pen my philosophical musings – by which I mean doodles of how Goran and I will look on our wedding day). I see it as one of my very finest purchases.

But, no. In the eyes of this friend (and by ‘friend’ I now mean ‘handily placed representative of mainstream thought in twenty-first century Western Culture’), my wonderful carrying-sack is apparently an indication that I’m not ‘taking myself seriously as a woman’.

What in the name of Moira Stewart, Fiona Bruce and all the serious-est of the serious women folk does she mean by this?

Time for an exercise, which I shall call ‘Say It Out Loud With Miranda’. Please take a moment to sit back, breathe and intone: ‘I am taking myself seriously as a woman.’ Note your response. If you’re reading this on the bus, or surreptitiously in the cinema, or in any other public scenario, then please note
other
people’s responses. (If you are male, and teenaged, and reading this in a room with other teenage boys, then for your own safety I advise you not to participate.)

The rest of you – what comes to mind when you say those words? Is it a fine lady scientist, a ballsy young anarchist with tights on her head or a feminist intellectual from the 1970s nose-down in Simone de Beauvoir? Or is it what I think my friend meant when she said ‘woman’, which is really ‘aesthetic object’. Clothes-horse. Show pony. General beautiful piece of well-groomed stuff that’s lovely to look at?

I reckon, to my great dismay, that she did indeed mean the latter. And in saying that I don’t take myself seriously in this regard her assessment of me is absolutely bang-on. If taking oneself seriously as a woman means committing to a life of grooming, pumicing, pruning and polishing one’s exterior for the benefit of onlookers, then I may as well heave my unwieldy rucksack to the top of a bleak Scottish hill and make my home there under a stone, where I’ll fashion shoes out of mud and clothes out of leaves.

And – I must ask – do
men
have to do this? Is this a thing for them, too? What would it mean to ‘take yourself seriously as a man’? Let’s see. Attention All Men – please put down the
Top Gear
annual and join me in a round of ‘Say It Out Loud With Miranda’. Lean back, and growl ‘I am taking myself seriously as a man.’ What springs to mind? Is it a singlet, a tool belt and a roll of electrical tape? Or is it a sharp suit, a cocktail and the presidency of the International Monetary Fund? Or perhaps you suddenly feel the need to hole up in a dingy pub and start yelling ‘Ref!’ at the telly? Whatever it is, it’s not likely to have much to do with grooming, or carrying a particular type of slightly-too-small and essentially useless bag masquerading as a clutch (good word).

Basically, it’s not got very much to do with aesthetics. And aesthetics – if I may be momentarily shouty and hare-brained and mad (it doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s magnificent) – MAKE ME WANT TO STOVE MY HEAD IN WITH A HAIRDRYER. Gosh, I do hope it’s not just me.

Excuse me . . .

No excuse
me
, eighteen-year-old me, for you find your older self in the middle of a rant about the issue of beauty.

What, areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty? Like the Lake District?

Oh, dear, how very naïve you are. No, I’m referring to the issue of
human
beauty.

Ooh, like David Van Day from Dollar? He’s beautiful.

Sshh! There’s no need to tell everyone we thought that.

But ‘Mirror Mirror’ from the Dollar Album was our first single . . .

Again, sshh! And you were surprised by the lack of muso gene? No, I’m talking about human female beauty.

Oh, don’t – we’ve just been trying on outfits for the inter-school disco tomorrow night. Hideola. And Bella has told me that my attempt to go Demi Moore-chic . . .

Remind me?

High-waisted jeans, tucked-in white shirt and cropped leather jacket – the
St Elmo’s Fire
look – makes me look like a lesbian. Which apparently isn’t a good thing. So now I am back to a mini skirt and white tights, but what to wear on top . . .

Does it matter this much?

Yes, it does, coz Milly’s brother Biffo is going to be there and I fancy the pants off him – he’s the spit of Emilio Estevez. I think I am going to go with my bat wing stripy shirt . . .

Wow, OK . . .

Coz that’s smarter. Oh, I can see Bella is putting a hairdryer up her arms again . . .

Why?

Durh! So that her Princess Di dress sleeves are as puffy as they can go. Bella has all the right clothes. She teased me for not having shoulder pads in my jacket the other day so I’m going to do what Milly does and put crusty bread rolls under my bra straps so they look like shoulder pads. If only my hair would do something vaguely respectable. I put lemon in it all day to try and make it frizzy and go a bit blonde in the sun, but wasps kept attacking me.

80’s fashion really isn’t for you, I’m afraid – it’s 1991, move on: embrace the new decade.

Are we trendy in the 90’s then?

Umm . . . we’re still kind of waiting for our decade . . .

Oh great . . . Oh cripes, golly and gosh, the boys’ coach has arrived.

As the embarrassingly Enid Blyton-sounding Little Miranda has so amply demonstrated, I’ve never been one of the beautiful crowd. From an early age I seem to have found myself cheerfully opting out of the whole business. It was through necessity, initially. I spent my childhood (the years in which many little girls embrace their ‘inner princess’), clad in 1970s hand-me-downs, primarily from male cousins, which mainly consisted of a selection of beige, brown and orange dungarees. That, combined with a perfectly round pudding-bowl haircut made me look, on a good day, like a cross between Ann Widdecombe, one of The Flower Pot Men, and a monk. I was constantly mistaken for a little boy but I didn’t care one jot. I was happy eating chocolate biscuits and pretending to be a Red Indian. I didn’t give any thought to how I looked. Which was absolutely perfect, and exactly as things should have been.

At boarding school, I remained in the tomboy category – a safe, neutral Switzerland as far as the looks issue was concerned. This gave me the freedom to focus on what mattered most, e.g. how to blow up a ginger beer bottle with a litre of vinegar and bicarbonate of soda (please don’t try this at home).

And don’t forget seeing how much food we could land on Miss Handel’s extremely bouffant hair from the dining-room balcony.

Two grapes and a Jaffa cake, I seem to remember.

Correct. ’Twas hilaire.

Yes, Clare-Bear, Milly, Podge and I were happily exempt from each of the three major gangs: The Beautiful Ones, The Beautiful Ones’ Friends, and The Ugly Ones. (We simply saw ourselves as The Normals, making no great impact on the beauty scale either way.) The Beautiful Ones spent most of their time primping and mirror-peering to maintain their position. The Beautiful Ones’ Friends carried hairbrushes for the Beautiful Ones, basked in their reflected glory, and toiled like Victorian miners to gain the mastery of clothes and make-up which their more comely friends seemed to have been born with. And then there were the girls the Beautiful Ones cruelly dubbed ‘The Ugly Ones’. They slunk miserably from corner to corner, their hair greased flat against their flaking scalps, too beaten down even to club together into some sort of snarky gang. (How absolutely vile all-girls schools can be.)

Now – if you don’t mind – I’m going to get briefly thoughtful and attempt to make a point. I know: this is quite some news. I should hasten to add, however, that it’s a point that would cause a professional sociologist to fling their pencil aside in despair and shout, ‘This Miranda woman, she is making a crude generalisation that fails to even touch the sides of the complex issue!’ But I shall continue, as I believe that my little point does contain a nugget-glimmer of truth.

I can now reveal that my point is . . . (brief
X Factor
-style pause for effect):

IT IS FAR, FAR BETTER NEVER TO HAVE BEEN BEAUTIFUL.

There, I’ve said it. And by beautiful, I mean effortlessly, conventionally, dollishly beautiful from a young age.

I accept that beauty is an entirely subjective issue, and that anyone can find anyone attractive for any one of a million reasons (which is why we all have a secret crush on Huw Edwards. No? But he’s like a big commanding bear of a man when reading a headline . . .? Hello?)

So, to my little theory-ette. As a beautiful young woman in a world full of people with eyes, it’s unlikely that you’re going to have to draw heavily upon your other personal resources – intelligence, wit, compassion and general wily low cunning – in order to just ‘get by’. If you’re gorgeous, you’re going to get by absolutely fine. Everyone will always want you in the room and you’ll be lavished with attention, which you’ll do very little to earn. Whereas, if you look like a sack of offal that’s been drop-kicked down a lift-shaft into a pond, you’re going to spend many of your formative years alone. This may seem miserable – but you’ll have space, space that you can constructively use to discover and hone your skills, learn a language, develop an interest in cosmology, practise the oboe, do whatever you fancy, really, so long as it doesn’t involve being looked at or snogging anyone. And you’ll very likely emerge from your chrysalis aged twenty-five as a highly accomplished young thing ready to take on the world. Meanwhile, The Beautiful Ones will have been so busy having boyfriends and brushing their hair that they’ll just be . . . who they always were.