Guinea pigs and Caitlin Moran wrecked my weekend

I have had a seriously crap weekend and I’m laying the blame fairly and squarely on guinea pigs and Caitlin Moran.

Years back when we visited a friend of mine in Italy, I got this revolting virus which left me with palindromic rheumatism. This bizarrely crap disease means you get totally random pains in random parts of the body at random times – so maybe nothing for months and then suddenly it hits you in the neck or the knees or wherever.  My ex-doctor and I played detectives on what could have been the cause and we narrowed it down to guinea-pig urine.  Don’t ask – you really don’t want to know but no, I wasn’t drinking it (at least, not intentionally). So now you know why I hate, loathe, despise guinea pigs. And if (heaven forfend) you keep the bastard stinking little shits as pets (why? why?), may I urge you to handle them and their piss with rubber gloves and industrial quantities of disinfectant.

Anyhow. Usually I take SAMe (S-Adenosylmethionine) and haven’t had a ‘session’ for nearly a year.  To be honest, I was feeling smug and figured I’d banished the damn thing from my body through sheer wishful thinking and force of will.  So I came off the SAMe while we were in Turkey (okay, I ran out and it’s relatively expensive so I didn’t bother to re-order).  And yesterday I got sledgehammered with pain: knee, neck, shoulders, both wrists, jaw.  Jaw?  Not on, not remotely on.  All of a sudden, in two seconds flat, I went from feeling pretty good about myself to ancient and crone-like.

And then I made the big mistake of re-reading my old books.  Not all of them but just bits of a few – and really, truly, I don’t think I’ve learned a thing in fifteen, twenty years or whatever.  So mind as well as body slapped me hard with a kipper. 

Never mind, I thought.  Lie on the sofa and cheer yourself up by reading Caitlin Moran.  Now I don’t read newspapers so she hasn’t really been on my radar.  I knew she was a columnist for The Times  and that she had a reputation for being funny and that was it.  Frankly columnists make me twitch (witness my pal, Liz Jones) but a friend recently thrust the book at me saying I had to read it. So last night I started reading and, despite myself, I started laughing…a lot.  She really is funny.  And smart. And self-deprecating.  And I agreed with everything she said. Everything.  Caitlin Moran and I are in total agreement on:

·         Bushes.  As in pubic hair. 

·         Porn. 

·         Feminism.

·         Sexism.

·         High heels.

·         Giving birth.

·         Children v careers.

·         Children + love

·         Strip clubs.

·         Weddings.

·         Shopping.

·         Gay men.

·         The music industry.

·         The newspaper industry.

·         Knickers.

·         Celebrities

·         Katie Price

·         Childlessness

·         Designer handbags

·         Per Una in M&S

In fact, I had to struggle to find something, anything I didn’t agree with. Yellow shoes. That was it. I can’t see a situation in which I would wear yellow shoes.  Though, feck, who knows? She’s probably right about that too.  I had to stop reading when she started talking about going out clubbing with Lady Gaga because by then I was just rolling on the floor in a foetal ball sobbing.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Caitlin Moran is 35.  Thirty-fecking-five.  I’m fifteen years older than her and nowhere near as smart or funny.  Everything I think she thinks better. She writes like a fucking dream. She’s got two kids and a wildly successful career and she sounds nice, really nice: she’s not a screwed up narcissist like Liz fecking Jones. Really I might as well stop writing and just post up chunks of her book instead with ‘I agree with Caitlin Moran’ scrawled at the bottom. 

So, there you have it. I spent the rest of the weekend feeling totally, pathetically, self-indulgently sorry for myself.  Hating guinea pigs.  Loathing myself.  And loathing and loving Caitlin Moran, damn her fecking 35-year old eyes, in equal measures.  

Pop v Sex (don't be a numpty)

So, we’re driving down the M5 in the pouring rain en route to Cardiff and Mike Stock is going moralistic on the radio.  He reckons that, "As far as music is concerned, it has been a slow but unmistakable descent into pornography... Put some sexualised dancing and scantily-clad females in the video, and get it on the box.  Job done."
‘Who is this twat?’ I ask Adrian.
‘Mike Stock.  Stock Aitken Waterman? That Stock.’
‘Huh?’
‘Kylie Minogue?  FFS, you were a rock journalist once.’
Yeah, well, another lifetime.  Anyhow.  He’s blowing a storm of biblical righteous indignation. He being Mike Stock, not Adrian.  Seems those bad broadcasters and record labels should “clean up their act’.  Lady Gaga is “just a pole dancer”. Nicole Scherzinger was a disgrace on Britain’s Got Talent.  Rihanna is a bit of a slut and Katy Perry is just..just…just…beyond.  Or words to that effect. 

"I've always held out for decent pop, which to me is music that can be appreciated by all ages," he rambles on. "The more racy stuff that you see going on nowadays is not something you could put two to ten-year-olds in front of, and you're embarrassed if you sit there with your mum. I find that [style] almost anti-pop because it targets the 18-25 year-olds to the exclusion of everybody else." 

Okay, so he didn’t say that on the radio (and, no, I didn’t take down notes while I was bombing down the outside lane) but I looked it up afterwards because, really, WTF?

Take sex out of pop music?  Don’t be a numpty.  Pop music IS sex.  It always has been.  If you take out the sex you’re left with the Teletubby song or Cliff Richards singing Summer Holiday (and, hey, if you’re ingenious enough, you can even find sex in those).

Okay, so you’re thinking ‘oh gawd, liberal fecking parent rant’ but no, not really.  I don’t like children being exposed to inappropriate sexuality any more than anyone else. 

* Should young girls wear t-shirts with PORN STAR in sequins across their non-existent breasts?  Feck no.
* Should they be given pole dancing kits and taught provocative dances for their stage-school shows?  Not in my book.
* Should they totter round in high heels and go to ‘pamper parties’ to get makeup slathered over their soft perfect faces, when they should be running round with bare feet and mud on their mushes?  Shit no. 

But, see, who chooses those things?  Okay, you can argue that the manufacturers are responsible but seriously guys, you don’t like them?  Don’t bloody buy them.  I listened to Stock whine on about how parents were telling him they didn’t like their children watching sexy videos and I just wanted to shout at him and them and say, well don’t let them!  Be a bit more proactive.  Don't just let your children wander compass-less around cyberspace (yes, there are bandits; yes there are dragons); don't just park them in front of a TV and presume broadcasters will be honourable babysitters.

I had to YouTube Nichole Scherzinger and her BGT “performance” and, yeah, they shouldn’t have shown it.  No way.  Because, let’s be honest, she is a crap singer and can’t move for toffee.  It’s a lame song.  Was it suitable for a ‘family show’ – no, because children should see better quality than that.  But really – the sexual innuendos of the song would go straight over a small child’s head and, hey, don’t you think that it might be interesting and maybe responsible to engage with older children about the messages going on here?   Except we’re all too scared to talk about sex, aren’t we? 

And maybe this is why people get so uptight about all this.  It’s not about protecting children from sexuality; it’s about us as parents protecting ourselves against having to talk to our children about sexuality…

Go on.  Shoot me!