Is It Just Me? (4 page)

No. Negativo. This I will not accept. My whole life is going to be like this moment, this Talking Heads moment at school. I’ll forge a niche as a curator of edgy, interesting music, discovering new bands, perhaps trawling obscure gig venues scouting for talent. I’ll be a John Peel figure. A cowboy. A well-informed musical cowboy with the legs of a goddess.

Oh, bless you. No, that won’t happen. Your musical tastes will fossilise, and your record collection will forever be that of a Berkshire schoolgirl in 1991. Sorry.

But won’t I meet bands at gigs?

You won’t go to gigs.

What? Everyone goes to gigs.

Not you, I’m afraid. Actually, I tell a lie. You will attend the
Smash Hits
Poll Winners Party at the age of twenty-six.

Twenty-six. But that’s untrendy now. At eighteen.

I know, I know. But, my little one, you will go. At twenty-six. And you’ll have quite a nice time in the brief bits where you’re not worried about being arrested. Not because you’d had any reason to be arrested. But because the presence of a policeman there makes you look and feel guilty. (In fact, MDRC, I usually go red in the presence of a policeman and do a kind of bob and say ‘Evening’, whatever time of the day it is. Why,
why
does that happen?) I also have to warn you, Little Miranda, that you stick out like a giant in a sea of nine-year-old pop fans at the Poll Winners Party. In fact, at one point, when you stand up to dance in a moment of excitement as the boy band A1 do a rendition of A-Ha, you are tapped on the shoulder by a tiny pre-teenage girl behind you, who asks you to sit down because she can’t see.

But don’t worry, gigs-wise, things aren’t
that
bad. In your thirties you’ll come very close to booking a ticket to see Michael Ball live.

Who’s Michael Ball? Is he alt rock, post-punk or New Wave?

Um . . . sort of.

But won’t I stalk bands? Won’t I be a groupie? I always thought I’d quite like to be a groupie. That’s very me. Loud, wild parties that go on till dawn. Dancing with leather-clad rockers.

I’m going to have to stop you there. That’s not you. You
will
be a groupie, just not of musicians. All of your stalker-ish energy will be channelled into the aggressive stage-dooring of comedy actors and actresses. And the odd tennis player. (By the way, Goran Ivanisevic is still not our husband. I KNOW. Don’t worry, there’s time . . .) Maybe if Noel Coward had been around in our twenties and thirties, you would have gone to one of his ‘gigs’. Possibly even bought the tour T-shirt and slipped into his dressing room with a flagon of Pimms. But no. No gigs.

Why not?

Oh, lots of reasons. Most of them fear-based. Fear of crowds, fear of loud noise, fear of sweat. Fear of a festival. You’ve got to have a muso gene to want to spend four days in mud in June in England. Then there’s fear of ‘cool’. Fear of being coerced into dancing, or of dancing when it’s not appropriate to dance. If you have the muso gene, you can just get up and dance wherever. You can be in a slightly arty café at night, no one else is dancing but there’s a bit of room, you’re feeling it, so you get up and off you go. How can anyone be so liberated and un-British, yet still technically British? Unfathomable.

Big Miranda, please tell me I get better at dancing.

Afraid not. Largely because of the fact that you are going to remain tall. And dancing when you’re as tall as we are goes beyond indignity and strays into the territory of health and safety risk. Once at a wedding, I attempted to ‘mosh’, and I got a bit carried away . . . and . . . well, let’s just say that marquee structure clearly wasn’t stable if me clinging on to one of its poles in a brief moment of misplaced exuberance brought the whole thing down.

Oh, Big Miranda, that’s appalls-balls . . .

Can you not call me ‘Big Miranda’, please? And ‘appalls-balls’ . . .?

‘Appalling’. Bella made it up at school last term. She’s so cool.

Right. Well, yes, it was a bit appalls-balls. But I must say, it was very amusing. Aunts swept off chairs by a marquee ceiling swooping down and forcing them into a flowerbed. Much flailing to escape from the billowing, sail-like covering. A swearing vicar. All the stuff that makes life worth living. But, because you have basically decent manners and dislike being the cause of physical injury in others, you’ll never be truly free on the dance floor.

I’ll never dance?

Oh, you’ll dance. But you’ll settle for ironic dancing, which is really where you just dance the finale of
Grease
, enthusiastically and badly, to whatever music is playing. Over the years you will dance the finale of
Grease
to everything from hardcore drum’n’bass (no, I don’t know, either) to the Blue Danube waltz. You’ll become known for it. Ironic dancing is, I think I can confirm, the solution to the dancing problem. It’s all very knowing, you get to have a nice time making fun of your five left feet and your limby-ness, but underneath it all you can actually have a jolly good bop. Terrific.

One thing we do get excellent at as regards dance, and that’s watching it. One of our favourite television programmes in our thirties is focused around the art of ballroom dancing.

Granny alert. Were you born in 1912? What about ‘jamming’? Will I ever turn into the person who whips out a guitar at the end of a party like crazy cousin Steve? Make sweet music?

Oh, come on. Firstly, you’re not the person who can stay awake long enough to see the end of a party. Admit it, even now with your insatiable appetite and the lure of a Penguin you can’t stay awake for a midnight feast. Staying up all night has always been a chore and just gets worse as the years go on. (NB: tips for staying up all night: throw a glass of water in your face, rub ice cubes in your eyes, eat coffee granules, do cola shots and lick a 9-volt battery.)

Secondly, you do
not
want to be that guitar jamming person. Everyone hates that person. The person in the dirty T-shirt who breaks up the party by dragging out a guitar and performing their innovative, minor-key acoustic version of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. (Please note – cool, crazy cousin Steve can now be found working in Greggs on the Waterlooville High Street.) That’s not how an evening should end. An evening should end at 10.45 p.m. sharp with ‘I’m in the Mood for Dancing’, enjoyed whilst throwing a few shapes, eating pizza with one hand, before falling over sideways onto a bean bag (simultaneously crushing the person whose rendition of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ you’ve just interrupted).

Oh. Actually, that does sound sort of amaze-balls.

If you mean amazing, it is. It really is. It’s the kind of fun you were born to have. Other people may be born to sit around in smoky rooms listening to Radiohead and not washing their hair for six months because apparently it eventually cleans itself but, for you, music’s not meant to be a downer, a conversation-starter or a status symbol. For you, it’s just a reassuring sugar-rush. A bag of Flumps. A choc-ice. Something to enhance . . .
jollity
.

‘JOLLITY’? It’s sounding dweeby again.

Embrace your inner music dweeb. For by telling you this, and any readers who might also lack the muso gene, you can learn that jollity is every bit as worthwhile as cool. More so, in fact. You’ll defend jollity until you fall exhausted to the floor. You’ll stop trying to join a club that you weren’t born to be a member of. You’ll stop wondering why dancing to Billy Joel is some kind of guilty pleasure, while an undernourished student smoking a spliff to Pink Floyd is somehow acceptable. It’s one area where you’re able to just be who you are, not caring one jot whether or not your neighbours can hear you singing along to
Annie.
^*
sings in an embarrassing American accent
^*
‘The sun’ll come out tomorrowww . . .’

^*
whispers
^*
That does sound more me.

We are all about the musical, Little M. Now put down that Guns N’ Roses tape you were about to put on (and pretend to love).

I will. And do you know what I am going to do? There’s still time to go to the music block for Miss Everett’s
The Sound of Music
auditions . . .

Well done. Go, girl.

Yeah. Because knowing all this, I must be in with a good chance of scooping a lead role.

Right, don’t get your hopes up . . . Hello? She’s gone. Oh, dear. We only get the part of ‘Waltzing Man in Ballroom scene’. I am
not
bitter. It’s fine. No really, I’m over it . . . (it could have least have been ‘Waltzing Woman’). As I say, over it . . .

A
s I officially lack the muso gene, music isn’t something I could ever legitimately put down as a hobby. (That is, until the musical genre of ‘cheese’ becomes formally recognised.) In fact, announcing what my hobbies are, whether socially, at interviews or on CVs, has always caused more anxiety than it should have in my life. So MDRC (My Dear Reader Chum, lest you forget), together we embrace our second subject and begin another chapter. Are you with tea or some equally reassuring beverage? My current choice is the drinking chocolate sachet. Just add some boiling water and a-yummy-yum-yum – chocolate in liquid form. In fact I might just replenish. Excuse me, as I sashay up to my sachet.
^*
whistles from kitchen whilst sashaying so you don’t get lonely
^*

I’m back, and Mr Mug is replenished (occasionally I find it a bit o’ fun to preface an object with a title: please forgive, and back to Miss Book). It’s time for a bracing discussion on the world of hobbies.

You might be thinking – really? What can
possibly
be said about hobbies? Can they really be included in the list of life’s perils where we might come a cropper and feel all at sea? I am afraid I firmly believe they can.

One of the very
worst
questions you can ask an adult – over and above, ‘When are you going to do something about your hair?’ and ‘In a typical week, what do you eat?’ – is ‘What are your hobbies?’
What are your hobbies?
It should be an easy one. You should be able to spring gratefully forth and say: ‘What are my hobbies? Oh, I’m so glad you asked. I’m actually taking my grade 8 bassoon exam at the weekend; it’s been terribly hard to fit it in around all the rock climbing, and it’s going to be a nightmare getting it and the potter’s wheel into the back of the Volvo, but I must cram it all in before I head off with the choir on a chapel tour of Dieppe. Honestly, I’m a slave to my hobbies. Well, when you’re as thrilled by life as I am, who wouldn’t be?’ At this point, you would shriek with laughter, your flailing arms displacing a beautifully alphabetised archive of graphic novels and a bag of snorkelling equipment.

But, no. Who among us – and
please
say this isn’t just me – when asked that question, doesn’t simply shrug, stare at their shoes and mumble ‘Uh – cinema?’ Only then they remember that they haven’t actually been to the cinema for eight months, and even then they got the wrong time for the film so just wandered into Nando’s and queued there for half an hour before shuffling home with a chicken wing to watch telly. And, no, telly doesn’t count as a hobby, any more than ‘sleeping’ or ‘washing’ or ‘sitting quietly on cushions’ (unless you claim that ‘sitting quietly on cushions’ is meditation, in which case you’re very sneaky indeed).

There are some people born with certain passions, which they’ve happily and confidently carried forwards into adulthood. I envy them because for me, the question of hobbies is a troubling one. As a child, it was easy. Aged ten, you could unashamedly reel off a list of much-loved recreational activities, all of which you enjoyed regularly, and many of which involved some kind of natty uniform and an elaborate badge system. Cubs, Rainbows, gymnastics, roller-skating, kiddie disco, ballet, swimming, trampolining or, in my case, an unwavering passion for the Brownies (hello, Brown Owl, if you’re reading this). If you were a bit more left field, so much the better. You’d have hobbies that marked you out as an ‘imaginative’ child. These might include: playing horses, being a medieval knight in a turret, playing with trains,
being
a train, climbing trees,
being
a tree, hosting elaborate tea-parties for one’s stuffed animals (hands up, I was all about that), or putting on matching C&A tracksuits with your friends, pretending to be an army and going to war – which I assure you I never did. (I did.) If the imaginative side of things wasn’t for you, you could be one of the sticker collectors. That was a highly regarded and specialised hobby, aged ten. As an aside, I will share with you this: I was a collector of, wait for it, National Trust bookmarks. Oh yes, rock and roll. I was sixty before I was sixteen. But I could still put that down as a hobby, thank you very much. Whatever your bent, these were all joyous, clearly identifiable and legitimate pastimes. And we made space for them in our lives, sandwiching them in between homework and tea. They were, simply, things we did. As necessary as washing or eating.