Moranthology (21 page)

 

Part Four

E
NTHUSIASMS,
A
DVICES, AND
D
EATHS

In which I meet Paul McCartney FROM THE BEATLES and ask him what would happen if—“Heaven forfend, Sir Paul”—his face got smashed up in an horrific car accident, mourn the deaths of Amy Winehouse and Elizabeth Taylor, open the “Nutters Letter Box,” and offer a blow-by-blow of the Royal Wedding. But, first: back to a small domestic misunderstanding.

 

M
Y
F
RENCH
D
RESS

I
t is 7:48
PM
. I am just about to leave the house for a night out with friends. I have checked I have a spare pair of tights in my handbag, ensured that the working remote is actually in the oldest child's hand—no more panicked, 10
PM
“WE CANT FID [sic] THE CONTROLLS!!!” texts for
me
—and now, the last thing that needs to be done is to bid my husband adieu.

I walk into his “study,” where he is listening to a reggae compilation while contemplating his new Fotheringay mug, which is full of tea. He has a happy look on his face.

“I'm off now, love,” I say.

“Have a great night,” he says, taking his headphones off, and beaming.

There is a pause. I kind of . . . stand at him a bit. Loom, maybe.

“I'm off now,” I say, again, more purposefully. “Off into London. To see people.”

“Make sure you've got your keys!” he says, cheerfully. “Have a great night. Send my love to . . . whichever bunch of arch, chain-smoking homosexuals you're on loan to tonight.”

There is another pause. I stare at him quite intently. He stares back, confused. Pete can tell there is some manner of urgent business left unattended here—but he does not know what. I can sense his heart rate accelerating, like a panicked lab rat on sighting a speculum. The rat does not know exactly what is going to happen next—but it knows it's going to be bad.

“Do you . . . want a lift to Finsbury Park?” he asks, eventually.

“HOW DO YOU THINK I LOOK?” I shout.

Pete is immediately both contrite—“Sorry!”—but also back in charted territory again.

Twelve years ago, shortly before our wedding, I told him—with the kind of fearless honesty that lovers can afford—that I would only ever impose two rules on our marriage. 1) That he must never, ever throw me a surprise birthday party in our living room again. And 2) that every time I appear in front of him in a new outfit, he must say, without hesitation: “You look so thin in that!”

“You look so thin in that!” Pete says—delighted to be back on firm ground. He puts his headphones back on. He clearly thinks all the business has been concluded.

“Phew. Have a great night out,” he says—going back to staring at his Fotheringay mug, which depicts the whole band as fifteenth-century minstrels. “I'll see you in the morning.”

Unfortunately for Pete, “You look so thin in that” is
not
the droids I am looking for in this particular conversation. The dress I am in is a bit of a new development, in terms of my “fashion range.” It's a 1950s tea-dress in shape—but in pattern, it's got an African-textile theme going on. I'm wearing it with zebra skin sandals, and a snakeskin clutch. Basically, I need to know if I look like some manner of “Lady Ace Ventura—Pet Detective” in it. I don't know if this “lysergic safari” thing is working.

Were I with any of my female friends or relationships, they would have understood this instantly. My sister Weena, for instance, would have greeted me with “You're perverting the assumed prejudices of post-war chicks, with some kind of ‘demented gay Ghanian disco' vibe. It's
Mad Men
vs. Brixton Market. You're essentially saying you're a liberal—but with big tits. Nice. Catch that bus with confidence.”

This is what women do—tell each other what story their outfits are projecting, by way of confirming that the wearer has got it right. The women who love you recite back to you the aspiration and impact of your “look”—hence a group of eight of us being able to greet our friend Hughes with, “Post-divorce slutty secretary—but with unexpected neon rave stilletos! You're a sexy lady who will not cling to one man tonight, but seek the communal ecstactic uprising of a room full of partygoers instead. In this Pizza Express we are having dinner in.”

Women speak the language of clothes. Everything we wear is a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter—or, sometimes, just an exclamation mark.

Unfortunately, however, Pete does not speak the language of clothes. My dress and zebra sandals are essentially shouting at him in French. Unable to make out a word they are saying, he panics.

“It's a top-notch item,” he says, staring at it. “Unusual. It's, ah, amazing that ‘they' keep coming up with innovative things—even in 2012. That's . . . got to be good news for the fashion industry!”

There is a small pause—then he starts laughing so hysterically at the desperation of what he has just said that he slides off his chair, headphones still in hand, and kneels on the floor, red-faced, and weeping.

He's still there when I leave the house. Which is a bit annoying, because I did actually want a lift to Finsbury Park. My zebra skin sandals are chafing.

 

SPOILER ALERT: there are many, many plot details in the following review—so LOOK AWAY NOW if you've still not seen it, you baffling Holmes-hater.

S
HERLOCK
R
EVIEW
3: A
S
G
OOD
A
S
T
ELEVISION
G
ETS

I
n many ways,
Sherlock
doesn't really come across as a TV show. The levels of fandom it inspires in the UK are what you'd more readily associate with a pop star, or a rock band. People queued at 5:30
AM
to get tickets for the premiere screening at the BFI. There are whole websites devoted to fans' imagining of sexual encounters between Holmes and Dr Watson. There are women who cry when you say the words “Benedict Cumberbatch”—and not simply because they are trying to spell it in their heads, and failing.

And so to “A Scandal in Belgravia,” the first of three new feature-length
Sherlock
s, charged with the tricky task of topping one of the most triumphant debut seasons of all time.

Within the first two minutes, writer Steven Moffat made it clear he wasn't intending to start things off quietly, while he found his feet: a pearly-arsed dominatrix known as “The Woman” entered a bedroom, holding a riding crop, asking: “Have you been wicked, Your Highness?”

“Yes, Miss Adler,” a posh voice replied.

And then the opening title sequence rolled. Yeah. That's right. The first episode of the new season of
Sherlock
was about a Kate Middleton S&M blackmail scenario. In your face,
Waterloo Road.

The next hour and a half were, to be scientific, as good as it's possible for television to be: other program makers must have been biting their wrists in a combination of jealousy and awe. Not only does
Sherlock
have the embarrassment of riches that is a cast list that reads “Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Lara Pulver, Rupert Graves,” but its episode subject was the potent one of “Sherlock Holmes and love.”

Having spent the first season setting Holmes up as one of the foremost men of the twenty-first century, “a man with an achieveable super-power”—all milk and ice and billion-dollar synapse blinking—this season seems to be about examining his weaknesses, instead. They've built him up—now they're going to knock him down. Or, in this case, blow up him, by throwing a fantastic pair of tits at him.

For Sherlock cannot fathom Irene Adler—“The Woman”—a high-class dominatrix with incriminating pictures of Middleton (it's hinted, anyway, if never made obvious) on her phone.

Played by Lara
True Blood
Pulver, Irene Adler lives in a beautiful house of monochrome damask, and her lipstick is as red as damask roses. On the orders of the Palace, Holmes is sent to the monochrome house to retrieve the pictures, and Adler prepares for his arrival.

“What will you wear?” her lover/assistant, Kate, asks.

“The Battle Suit,” Adler replies.

When Holmes arrives—pretending to be a vicar, ridiculously; he's already acting like an idiot—she greets him naked. The Business Suit. He's pole-axed by her—not just by the quiet authority of her bare arse, swishing past him on the sofa; but her face, too. He cannot read her. Holmes, who can read everyone—he glances at Watson, for reassurance: notes his shoes mean he has a date tonight, his stubble that he used an electric shaver—cannot decipher a single thing about Adler. She can hide herself wholly, even when naked. Particularly when naked. After all, as she reminds Holmes, “However hard you try [with a disguise], it's always a self-portrait.”

Holmes is so stupefied by the novelty of being outsmarted that he doesn't even realize he fancies her, at this point.

And Adler, against all her judgment and nature, fancies Holmes, too. Adler is as clever as Holmes, but also as damaged: she keeps blackmail material on her phone because she “makes her way in the world” with a series of deals and dodges; she has “friends” she regularly sedates with the syringes in her bedside cabinet. Nearly everything in the world bores her. Sex isn't fun—it's just a job. What really excites her is detectives, and detective stories. Despite being a lesbian, what ultimately excites her is Sherlock Holmes.

And so “A Scandal in Belgravia”
was an hour and a half of two odd, fast, hot people being confused by each other: not quite knowing why they jangle when they're around each other; not quite knowing what to do with their feelings. Both have jobs that involve crushing their emotions: should they continue doing that—or actually trust each other?

In the end, their cataclysmic meeting results in a plane full of corpses rotting on a runway as Mycroft, the British government and the American government despair. “Holmes and Adler” really aren't the new “Hart to Hart.” She's betrayed him, he's betrayed her, and all Holmes's suspicions about love—“The chemistry is terribly simple. And very destructive”—have been borne out. Love will never do for Holmes. He likes things to have conclusions, and endings. Love has no conclusion or ending at all. And, also, he fell in love with a mental. That was quite a big error.

From 8:10
PM
to 9:40
PM
, it was often hard to tell which part of you was being stimulated more by
Sherlock
: the eyes, or the brain. For while the script bounced along with a winning combination of screwball, rat-tat-tat dialogue and parkour-like plot leaps, Paul McGuigan's direction was of movie-like sumptuousness. You lost count of the moments that looked a million dollars. A shot from above of Mycroft (Mark Gatiss) closing his umbrella, and ducking into a café, out of the rain, had a sense of choreography to it; 221b Baker Street has never looked more sumptuous.

McGuigan seemed to particularly revel in the scene where Adler—trying to retrieve her phone—jammed a syringe into Sherlock's arm, and he floated off into a wiggy state of narcoleptic wooze. As Sherlock collapsed backwards, drugged, the camera rotated once, twice beside him—sometimes you couldn't tell if he were falling up, or down. As he finally came in to land, his face was the same color as the white-waxed floorboard he was bouncing off.

Here, in a dream, Holmes found himself on a moor—Adler beside him, on a chaise longue. They were two incongruous, pale, elegant town creatures in all this brutal, wet green. Holmes could still not speak: insensible on barbiturates, his bed rose up out of the moss like a benign tombstone, and Holmes fell upon it, winking out of consciousness, carried into the next scene.

It was as distractingly beautiful a piece of cinematography as you're ever likely to see, and—accompanied by David Arnold and Michael Price's lush, weeping soundtrack—left you walking away from the television after ninety minutes feeling like you'd just been fed lobsters, champagne and truffles through your brain.

The day after broadcast, an ill-tempered kerfuffle kicked off across a couple of blogs, accusing Moffat's script of misogyny. Irene Adler had ended up being rescued by Holmes, the argument went. She fell in love with him and then had to be rescued by him, like some courtesan Snow White. Obviously, as a strident feminist, my “Misogyny Alarm” is always on red-alert—but I have to say, it didn't ding once during
Sherlock;
save for a momentary sigh over just how many high-class call girls I've seen on television over the years (approximately six million), compared to the amount I've actually met (none).

For
Sherlock
is a detective story, not a news show. It doesn't care about statistics, and nor should it. All I could see were two damaged people making a mess of each other's lives, while Martin Freeman did his patented “Martin Freeman eyebrows” from the sidelines. And, obviously, some of the best television this country has ever produced.

 

Two of the biggest-hitting columns in this book—on my hair.

I
W
ISH TO
C
OPYRIGHT
M
Y
H
AIR

I
cannot, in my life, claim to have invented many things. No medicinal breakthrough. No plastic compounds. No movement in figure skating. True, I was part of a committee of fat children in the Midlands who conceived, in 1988, of the Cheese Lollipop—around 50g of cheap Cheddar speared on a fork, and sucked on during marathons of CBBC classic
Cities of Gold
—but I was just a cog, though a rather large cog, in amongst other equally gifted and gigantic cogs. It's also true that I was part of that same committee of fat children who, having all moved into their adolescence, came up with the Sherry Cappuccino one desperate Christmas. The curdled layers of Nescafe and Somerfield Ruby will live on in the minds of all those who experienced it. Indeed, they probably also live on in the cups we used. It was viscous stuff.

That aside, however, it's clear that, in a version of
It's a Wonderful Life
where I took the James Stewart role, and plunged suicidally off the bridge, Bedford Falls would simply shrug, and carry on with the eggnog, same as they always did. I haven't really contributed to mankind's magnificent struggle one iota.

However, there is one meager, paltry innovation I feel I can lay claim to in my otherwise uncreative life, and that is my hair. On Halloween 2003—note the date, hair historians, as I'm sure there must be, somewhere. Maybe at De Montford University, Leicester—I made drunkenly merry with a can of spray-in gray hair paint. On waking in the morning, I looked in the mirror, and was astonished at what I saw. What I saw was The Hair of My Life. The Hair of My Soul. I had one icy whoosh of hair over my left eye. A blue-gray streak. A frosted lock. It looked a bit Eleanor Bron, a bit Morticia, a bit the wise monkey elder in
The Lion King
. Clearly, this was the Recipe of Me. I went to the hairdressers, and got them to make me semi-gray permanently.

For the first three years, me and my hair were very happy. True, old people were apt to come up to me at bus stops and commiserate (“Ooooh, you're like me. I went completely gray at twenty-nine, after I had shingles. You want to get yourself one of those dye-jobbies from Boots.”), but I felt I was on some kind of Hair Quest. I felt I was pushing the boundaries. I felt I was creative.

Then the bomb fell. Last summer, my brother Eddie—the maverick Cheese Lollipop committee member who, in 1988, had suggested we concentrate our cutlery research solely on the fork—rang me from Brighton.

“I've just seen a woman with your hair,” he said. “In Peacocks,” he added. “Buying leggings.”

Initially, I was flattered. I visit Brighton quite a lot. It was not outside the realms of possibility that this woman had seen my hair, and simply been inspired. I couldn't blame her. I am in the possession of hair dynamite.

Then my sister, also in Brighton, rang a month later.

“I've seen FIVE WOMEN with your hair,” she blurted out, immediately.

At this point, I must admit, I felt bad. These women had, fairly obviously, not copied their hair from me. They had copied it from the woman who copied me. They did not know their hair history.

The way things were going, there was every chance that my hair would go down in history as “origin unknown.”

Then, a week before the end of the school term, things escalated dramatically, albeit mainly in my mind. Outside the school gates one morning—as startling as the sight of a polar bear—there was a mother
with my hair
. On my own territory! Bold as the slightly brassy gray tone her—clearly inferior—hairdresser had come up with!

While dealing with the fear of dying in hair-dying obscurity had been unpleasant, this new scenario was a different kettle of fish altogether. I think all women know what another woman stealing your signature style means. I recalled, from my teenage years, my friend Julie's fury on noting that a female classmate had appropriated her then-trademark—a Puffa jacket, worn with badges on the elasticated hem.

“It's war,” she said, flatly, smoking a cigarette in Burger King, as you could, in those days.

And of course, this hair-stealing woman was, indeed, declaring war on me. For who would ever copy the hairstyle of someone they saw every day, if they thought they looked
worse
with it? The hair-stealing mother believed my hair looked
better
on her. That it was, by and large, a good hairdo, but
ruined by the addition of my face
. She was dissing me. This was clearly the act that would lead to the outbreak of war.

But just how does one fight a Hair War? Unsatisfyingly, this is the question I am currently stuck on, with another five weeks of the summer holidays to go, until I face my follicular nemesis again. The way I see it, I've got only three options. 1) Kill her—the sensible but possibly immoral option. 2) Kill myself—irresponsible, given my prominence in the pick-up rotation. 3) Get an entirely new do—frankly, I might as well be asked to traverse to Mordor to cast the One Ring into the Crack of Doom. I'm thirty-two. I'm too old for that kind of quest. This is the hair, for better or worse, I will die with.

So here I am, backed into a hair standoff I never asked for. I can't believe there aren't government guidelines on this kind of thing. I'm tearing my hair out.