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.
