Is It Just Me? (2 page)

Excuse me?

Yes, hello? Who’s rudely interrupting my tome, please?

It’s me. Me. Your eighteen-year-old self, Miranda. Don’t you recognise me? Six feet tall, thin as a rail, school-issue straw boater, one red, one green sock, and a lacrosse stick slung over my shoulder?

Oh, well, hello. My dear gangly young self. How absolutely lovely to see you in all your
Mallory Towers
finery. Why, I was just –

This isn’t a social call.

Oh?

I’m just a bit freaked right now, as I don’t particularly like the way you’re talking, actually . . .

I think I’m talking jolly good sense, thank you very much.

No, you’re not. So
ner
. For starters, you’re saying we went on a date and got loo roll stuck in our pants. Please say that’s not true . . . please . . .

Of course it’s not true. (It’s true, reader, true.)

PHEW. Because talk about total mortificato; I mean, I might as well just give up . . .

OK, let’s drop it now . . .

No, but seriously, massivo dweeb alert.

All
right
.

And telling people in a book – not that many people will read this rubbish.

Rude. Can you leave, please?

One mo-mo. You’re basically saying life is a series of embarrassing moments which leave you feeling alone in your confusion and shame. I am not sure I like that.

Well, I’m hoping that by sharing our discomfort with the way life sometimes goes, others will relate to us and we’ll all feel a little bit less alone.

OK, but please DON’T tell anyone that in Maths yesterday when Mr Beckett asked me to define Pi I said, ‘It depends on the filling.’

I think you’ll find you’ve just told them.

Oh . . . bog off.

You
bog off.

Consider me bogged . . .
^*
runs away embarrassed, trips over a lacrosse boot and falls into a laundry basket
^*
Meant to do that.

Sorry about her, where were we? Oh yes, messing up romantic prospects . . . Has anyone else ever drunkenly addressed a post box as ‘darling’, certain that it was their stout, red-jumper-clad then-boyfriend? And gone in for a kiss, fully embracing the post box? The real boyfriend was ten feet away, silently looking on at this crazy woman and her post box cuddling antics. Are these – the loo roll, the prawn and, worryingly, many more besides – common occurrences or, well . . .
is it just me
?

This is the nub of life, isn’t it, dear reader? (Good word, ‘nub’. Say it loud, say it proud; wherever you are, one, two, three . . .
NUB
. Lovely, very satisfying.) Yes, the nub of life is surely negotiating and avoiding idiocy. Doing your best to hit the pillow at night without, for once, having to go over the day in your head for its one excruciating moment. Last night, I lay on my bed in what I can only describe as my ‘foetal-cringe-ball’ position, as I re-lived my opening gambit to an important man at a formal work do.

I’ll set the scene: a drinks party. I am standing in a group of people I feel relatively comfortable with, no drink has been spilt, I am conversationally fluent, no nibble has landed on clothing causing an embarrassing stain: so far so good. Then my agent comes over to introduce me to an important head honcho who is apparently keen to meet and perhaps work with me. Clearly a risk taker.

I go in for the handshake. He goes in for the kiss. But don’t worry; as he leans in I quickly move my hand before it ends up anywhere inappropriate. I further save the moment by aiming for the correct side of the cheek for the kiss, avoiding that, ‘Oh, we nearly snogged, ha ha’ hideousness. Tick, well done me.

But then here it comes, the hateful post-introductory conversational hiatus. Who’s going to start the formalities and break the ice? Surely my agent will say something? I start to panic: it’s me,
I’ve
got to say something. Quick.

‘So, Bob . . . how do you pronounce ‘Bob’?’

‘Ummm . . .
Bob
,’ said Bob, looking perplexed.

‘Right, good, no, I thought so, I just . . . good.’

My agent has never stared at anyone with such disappointment. Bob looks confused, very confused . . . And, of course, I’ve created another conversational pause. We’re back where we started.

My agent quickly says, ‘Bob has just come back from Australia.’ Brilliant save, now we can all say, ‘Oooh, lovely,’ and ask inane questions about his trip, bore ourselves silly with small talk and feel socially comfortable.

So there I am on my bed in foetal-cringe-ball position replaying: ‘HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE BOB?’ ‘HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE BOB?’ It wasn’t even as though it was written down to have to ask; somebody had already introduced him as ‘Bob’: that’s how you pronounce it. But even if it WAS written down, it’s Bob. B. O. B. How could you possibly and in any conceivable way mispronounce BOB? ‘HOW DO YOU PRONOUNCE BOB?’

When I was eighteen I was certain that it was just me who regularly came a cropper in life. Any little embarrassment I’d quickly cover up, so as to convince people that I wasn’t really ‘that idiot’. Do a little trip in the street on a jagged bit of pavement, and before anyone could laugh and point the finger, I’d quickly turn it into: ‘Actually, I meant to do that. I’m practising for the triple jump. Olympic triple jump.’ Then follow it with a demonstration. I might even do another triple jump demonstration after a minute or so, to prove it
really
wasn’t a trip. I was quite the triple jumper, with Olympic ambitions, and practise I must.

I was certain – absolutely certain – that everyone else just
breezed
through life. For example, I’d walk past a neighbour’s BBQ, hear the familiar, jolly, incoherent hum of a social occasion from afar and hope that
someone
at that event had sat down to eat a sausage bap and felt the chair sinking into the lawn. Is it just me that regularly experiences the sinking-chair-into-grass scenario? Always awkward. You hope people don’t notice but you invariably slip so far down, and at such an angle, that the chair often tips you up on the lawn as if to say, ‘Don’t sit on me, fatty.’ Rude al fresco chairs.

The trouble was that if at the age of eighteen I
had
braved the BBQ, I wouldn’t have seen others failing, stumbling, muddling through. I never did. I just looked on with envy, miserable in the assumption that everyone else was happy and uninhibited. That everyone else
wanted
to be there, and anticipated absolutely no awkwardness with the experience. I would never have imagined that anyone else was harbouring that most devastating secret of all: that they felt a bit self-conscious, and just wanted to be at home watching telly in their pants.

Then, there was the joyous moment in my teenage years when I saw the film
Dirty Dancing
for the first time, and witnessed the initial meeting of Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. If you don’t know the scene I’m about to refer to, then you must watch the film, but for now let me explain. Jennifer Grey’s opening gambit, in a brief conversational pause when she is totally over-awed by Patrick Swayze’s handsomeness, is: ‘I carried a watermelon,’ whilst no longer in possession of it. The Swayz didn’t know that she’d been carrying one, so telling him she carried a watermelon was possibly the weirdest thing she could have said. ‘Yes’ I thought. ‘There’s another idiot. It’s me and Jennifer Grey versus the world.’

That’s why I love watching
You’ve Been Framed
. Not because it’s the funniest programme on television ever (which it is, closely followed by
The
Planet’s Funniest Animals
– cat falling in a loo, anyone?), but because I secretly play
You’ve Been Framed
bingo. If I’ve done five of the things on the programme that night, Bingo, and reward with a glass of wine.

I remember in my teenage years thinking, ‘I wish I could do things in life
my
way.’ I wished I could negotiate the intricacies of this life with a confidence that meant I could subvert conventions, break the rules and get rid of the need to be ‘acceptable’, which had been stamped on me by my very British upbringing. But a maverick I wasn’t.

At eighteen I thought, ‘Never mind. I shouldn’t worry that Jennifer Grey and I are the only idiots in the world.’ Because hope told me that as I got older I would gain the elegance and confidence to breeze over the speed bumps of life in my own special style. But the fact is (and thank heavens that eighteen-year-old Miranda isn’t around to hear this), I am still an idiot. Life still throws up an almost daily, certainly weekly, moment that seems impossible to navigate with grace. I might deal with it better these days . . . The other day, for example, in a café, I leaned forwards to push my chair back before getting up and the inevitable occurred. A really quite significant fart. But I didn’t cover it up: I admitted it, I laughed it off. I coped. We’ve all done it, right? It’s the pushing back motion of the chair, with the slight bend in the leaning forwards . . .? We’ve all done it, yes? Reader? Hello? Moving on . . .

I also used to think that fame might bring confidence. ‘Perhaps fame’s the ticket to freedom,’ I thought: any weird or wrong moments could just be passed off as part of your eccentric famous persona, and thus be beyond judgement. ‘What’s that? Miranda’s got her head in the bin and can’t get it out again? Oh, well. That’s famous people for you. Probably some sort of meditation technique she picked up from Sting.’ You can be whatever you want to be when you are famous, can’t you?

What I’d say to Little Miranda – lying in her dormitory at her all-girls boarding school, dreaming of the bright lights – I’d say, firstly, I am now a tiny weeny bit famous. I know: life, eh? But I also feel duty-bound to say that fame doesn’t bring you freedom from self-consciousness: not a bit of it. Quite the opposite. Recently, I was checking in at an airport and was asked to put my hand luggage in what I elegantly refer to as the ‘hand-luggage-size-measurer-does-your-bag-fit-in-here-hole-cage-bracket-prison’ thing. My bag was a touch on the large side, but it fit; well, more or less. The woman in charge of the desk, a creature so dollishly well-put-together that her only career options must have been ‘air hostess’ or ‘Lady Penelope from
Thunderbirds
’ said, in her most cloying, annoying, sibilant hiss, ‘No, sorry, it has to fit fully in. All the way, please.’ So I did as any mildly offended Englishwoman would have done under the circumstances, and gave my bag a defiant shove. It now fit very nicely – too nicely. It was stuck. My hand luggage was stuck in the ‘hand-luggage-size-measurer-does-your-bag-fit-in-here-hole-cage-bracket-prison’ thing. I asked a burly stranger – always my first port of call – to give it a yank. He did so, and the bracket fell over with a clatter. I was now, officially, ‘causing a kerfuffle’. (Great word, kerfuffle – it keeps on giving. Almost worth causing one just so you can use it.) Then, the
thing
happened: the ‘getting recognised’ thing. All of a sudden, I wasn’t just a bolshy lady accidentally making a fuss – I was Miranda off the telly making a fuss. A small crowd gathered, then a larger crowd and, before I knew it, my shame was being held up before a gang of tittering holidaymakers, all muttering things like: ‘Is it?’ and ‘Who’s she?’ or ‘Is she the one who –?’ with ‘No, it’s not, is it?’ and ‘Was she on
Grand Designs
?’ followed by ‘Doesn’t she look
cross
?’ and ‘I hope her trousers fall down. I think they might be about to fall down.’ A phone was whipped out. I feared becoming a YouTube sensation, one of the day’s ‘Top Hits’ alongside a video of a fat panda eating a Yorkie bar. Far from easing the pain, the tiniest bit of well-known-ness only magnifies it. You shift from curiosity to accidental freak show.

^*
eighteen-year-old Miranda charges in, panting, in a green pleated skirt and fetching Aertex shirt
^*
Hiya. What have I missed? What have you been talking about?

Oh, hello you. Aren’t you meant to be playing lacrosse or something?

Nope. Match got rained off.

It didn’t, though, did it? You actually got sent off for putting sweets and cigarettes on the half-time plate instead of oranges.

Who wants an orange when there are Wham bars in the world? So, what’s been going on?

I’ve been continuing to explain to my lovely reader that I’ve often found life rather . . . tricky. As you know, we’re a bit awkward, aren’t we?

Yeah. But don’t worry, we’re going to grow out of that by the time we’re twenty-eight. Life will be sorted by then. I’ll be nearly thirty. That’s REALLY old. By the time I am twenty-eight, I’ll have the love and support of a confident husband, achieved my career goals and be poised for a graceful old age. Hang on, why are you laughing?