I've been thinking about today's young pop stars, and maybe I've been a little harsh here and there. After all, what's left for them to do? The Olympian Age has passed and the Hall of Fame is now as full as a Pizza Express on a Sat lunchtime. All the wild, dangerous territory has been covered. Is it fair for the likes of me to tell Justin Timberlake that at the high point of his career he is merely bestriding the peak of a previously unconquered molehill?
It struck me that this is shamefully unconstructive thinking on my behalf. I told myself I should take a lesson from the ambitious and motivated souls of the mountaineering fraternity, who had a problem after Sir Edmund Hilary had been the first up Everest. They had the flexibility of mind to invent new versions of the same achievement, such as being the first to reach the summit without oxygen.
This realisation has led me to appreciate several careers in a new way. So respect is due to:
Noel Gallagher: who was the first to climb Everest in a Beatles T-shirt.
Robbie Williams: the first to do so in a Beatles T-shirt and a comedy bobble hat. (His place in history is doubly secured by the incredible variety of funny faces he pulled while on the way up. His achievement in this area is likely to remain forever unchallenged, in my opinion.)
Victoria Beckham: the first to reach the summit without a discernable sense of rhythm.
Gareth Gates: the first to reach the summit by helicopter.
Blazin' Squad: the first to reach the summit and still be too young to go to the pub to celebrate afterwards.
Credit where credit’s due.
SAAPies Nomination #01: Binge Reader of the Year.
I've just spotted something in my stats. Someone spent 136 minutes here last night and read nearly the whole seven monthsworth.
I don't know who you are but that deserves a shout out and a half. Reveal yourself below or by email and claim a prize from amazon, which I will buy for you via Blorgy's amazon link, for it was thence you came.
Or maybe see you in seven months or so.
Heard 'Girlfriend' by the fearsome P Diddy on the radio yesterday. In between declaring that he needs someone at home love him, The Did included a delicious line about how he wondered if all the girls he had on the road were 'just using' him. !.
A brilliant reversal of reality, that. Like having a goldfish and calling it Credit Card.
I feel I've reached a sort of crossroads.
Through the Autumn I became increasingly interested in the outside influences that my chldn would have to withstand in the coming years. The records on the radio, the videos they were being exposed to on cable TV (or the Lingerie Channel as I call it) began to interest me in new ways.
Perhaps it is just a change that parents go through, a time when the inward, nurturing view of the family is reshaped by the need to face the inevitable intrusions of the outside world.
What we should teach our chldn about sex is the sharpest thorn on this particular stem. To teach healthy values at home is one thing but we do so in the sure knowledge that these will be relentlessly assailed and undermined by powerful forces lying in wait every day, forces that preach a different message from every billboard, flat screen and bus stop.
Recently I have wanted to write about the government funding of abstinence programs in the US, how incredibly unconstructive an approach this is and how there are alternatives. I wanted to write about the odious editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, on Desert Island Discs. Nice music: blinkered, twisted opinions. A hypocrite who claims to promote middle class decency but is doing the reverse, bemoaning the moral decline of Britain while describing it in salacious detail.
I didn't, because I couldn't unpick all the strands of what I wanted to say quickly enough, and because I didn't start this blog with quite that sort of thing in mind. Meanwhile 'Myths About Men' was getting noticed, which confused me. I nearly didn't post it for the second reason above, but I did; it has doubled my traffic.
I wrote a parody of Belle de Jour because I felt there was something less than honest about it. Another has since appeared, in many ways funnier but much cruder, and written purely for laughs. Am I missing the point? I ask myself: can anyone be both a proud father and a Jeremiah? And be readable, I mean. I have no interest in being 'a voice crying in the wildebeest' as Jake once put it.
Back to the crossroads. I have constructive suggestions and I could air them, but the net is full of opinions already. I could continue to illustrate best practice in parenting with well chosen illustrations from my own experience. (The last time I did that no one commented, and I'm afraid I have got rather hooked on the high quality commenting I've been getting recently.) Or I could, I suppose, try to do both. Now you have your say.
The alcohol has returned to our lives. I thought we had suffered enough, and to little purpose. Last night we had a nice Chilean red.
I have enjoyed wine all my life, or so it seems. I think it brings out the optimist in me. In fact Mel accuses me of saying “This is getting better down the bottle“ indiscriminately.
Does anyone know of a wine that gets noticeably worse down the bottle?
Mel, as ever, says I am not getting enough exercise. I, as ever, disagree. Apart from visits to the park with Jake it is true that I don't really exercise formally, but I contend that my life is busy enough as it is and that I do not wish to sacrifice any of my current commitments. I have proposed that I leave for the train three minutes later than normal for a week, walk faster and see whether this makes any noticeable difference.
I detect a familiar pattern. Experience teaches that a Spring fitness drive round here is usually because M has become self-conscious about her own post Xmas enlargement. Her attempts to address this are always hampered by the fact that she can't bear to change or exercise in front of other people if she thinks she’s overweight. This rules out trips to gyms, pools and the like so she has always tried to find something to do at home. Her current solution has been to buy a small, robust trampoline. Gentle, informal, flexible.
She refuses to use it in the living room as she is concerned about hitting her head on the ceiling, so she's been putting it in the garden. Her self-consciousness also requires that, until she feels presentable, she will only use it in the hours of darkness. I think the various resulting noises may have been the most effective attempt so far at scaring the foxes out there. Time will tell.
Jake's homework has been interesting. He has been doing 'The Weather', which has required him to think more widely about the world. Neither Pokemon, YuGiOh or Beyblades promote weather sensitivity and looking out of the window has proved a novel sensation. We have also watched the weather forecast on TV – another first for him – and he correctly spotted that it is the only programme he has ever watched that doesn't have continuous music under speech.
The chldn are now back to playing with the toys they liked before Xmas intruded. Present fatigue, however, has yet to hit 'Cluedo', which has been a big success and we have been playing regularly on Sun evenings. I always enjoyed the game as a child and I was delighted to find that the modern game is absolutely identical. Surely there's a lesson there for our sports administrators? My only quibble is that the board has been redesigned to be more visually interesting, and all the extra detail can make it rather difficult to find the lead piping when required.
Last night Zoe won again which makes me proud. And also rather annoyed.
4.56 pm.
I've just discovered that SAAP is Blog of the Moment over at Blorgy.
You all know that I'm not given to auto-aspirated trumpet playing so I won't dwell on this as an achievement. I would merely like to acknowledge publicly the help of the thirteen people that have done this for me. If I could type that funny noise that Howard Dean made at the end of his recent speech in Iowa I would, but I don't think normal letters would be capable of capturing its vividness adequately.
So I'll just say "Thanks, guys".
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Update: 4.40 pm Monday.
SAAP still Number One! Amazing. Fifteen more people get anonymous but warm thanks.
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Update 2 - The Parent Returns: 10.31 pm Tuesday.
Back at No 1. Not my doing. Thanks to another fifteen worthy blogsouls.
So why do I write about pop music here? Why am I interested in it at all?
Because when I was younger it mattered to me. A lot. Some of my tastes were pretentious; Caravaggio and Rembrandt I liked, Magritte, Palestrina, Robert Graves, even Tolkien. But none of these spoke so directly to me about my life and times. Seven inch singles were couched in a direct language that needed no study beyond the outlay of time sat by a radio or record player.
The popular music of the 60s and 70s may have been radical but for me it was not about solutions. It was about breaking down the isolation and inexperience of youth. It told its growing listeners that they were not alone, that life was complicated, that the joys and sorrows of our own lives were not unique. All this I found profoundly reassuring. To this day the best of pop still does the same job. It also formed and sloganised some new emerging communal values as the cultural and economic landscape evolved.
(I think to a great degree this legacy has been squandered and hijacked in equal measure. Some of the values currently promoted by the music business are scarcely defensible by even the most thick skinned liberal.)
But then over the years the music gradually receded. It could find no place in my busy life. Most of the album-based material that appeared during my early adulthood didn't speak to me in the same ways. It seemed designed to reach out to stressed teenagers. If they were the people making the music then so be it. I was happy for them all to talk to themselves.
My concerns changed. Suddenly I no longer had a brigade of high profile spokespersons and I didn't feel the need to look further. The only exception to this was hip hop, in which I recognised something genuinely passionate and new, though it clearly wasn't aimed at me.
Pop music redarkened my doorstep when I had been for some years a father, once my chldn were old enough not to want Tumbletots tapes in the car any more. The bankruptcy of the chart system was to some extent rammed down my throat at this point. It became something I could not ignore. At first I merely listened unwillingly, lost without reference points or compass. Then I began to think I should know about this stuff, to guide my young charges and then, increasingly, to protect them.
That's why.
Mary Tudor (1553–1558) - Bloody Mary - is the only English monarch to have a cocktail named after her. This has always struck me as a bit strange because she was not rated as a drinker by her contemporaries. She was best known in her own time for burning heretics.
After one carbonised breakfast too many we’ve acknowledged her legacy anew and set the record straight. Our toaster has been renamed 'Flaming Mary'.
I would like to make it clear that although I believe everything that appears below under 'Myths...' I accept that it may seem unnecessarily strident in tone for some tastes.
Basically I wasn't having a good morning. Lots of shouting, arguments over cereals vs porridge, several missing shoes and, worst of all, several rounds of burnt toast. Again.
That's all.
I am absolutely fed up with hearing that men have a built in urge towards promiscuity and that the basis for this is: that a man must impregnate as many women as possible and is programmed to do so as part of a master survival strategy for the human race. This is so much mendacious self-serving twaddle and it needs to be challenged. Could anyone, and I bet it was a man, have come up with a more perfect legitimation of rapacious sexual behaviour?
There is a gigantic assumption at the centre of this idea, as follows: that the best way for a man to have surviving genes is to have sex with as many females as possible. In my opionion this is just giving oversexed males a bogus set of Darwinian credentials. I think any critical approach to effective survival strategies for the human race should include some views from the female side. Ask them if they think it helps the species, mate.
There is an alternate model, namely that a man settles with one woman in her fertile years, impregnates her, defends her and their offspring, raises as many healthy heirs as possible and passes his accumulated knowledge to them. As a strategy this is not unknown in the animal world, and it is also the actual model for all successful, self-sustaining human societies we know about. The analysis above that concentrates on child-making to the exclusion of child-rearing ignores our actual human experience: we are all created in a moment but raised over years and socialised over a lifetime.
Smashing up family systems, breaking the links between fathers and offspring, isolating mothers; all old tricks which have seen good service in the hands of despots and slave owners down the centuries. All the hellholes of the world conform to the Seed Scatterer, sexual playground model. Is there any lesson there for all you pseudo-scientific fornicators?
The same goes for the “It's the ancestral hunter in me” line used by some men as justification for serial adultery and deception. Let's think about this. How many ancient tribesmen went out hunting armed only with their willies? Any tribe that did would have got pretty hungry pretty quickly. A blunter weapon with more limited range could hardly be devised. Does not this beautiful piece of chop logic rely on a false equivalence between hunting to eat and looking for sexual gratification?
Perhaps these ideas are no longer current with the youth of today. If they aren't then it's no thanks to the tidal wave of images of glamorous promiscuity pumped out by our media controllers and their advertising buddies.
I'm quite sure there are men out there with high sex drives. Selfish, irresponsible men. Do we want these characters over-represented in our gene pool? Do we want this kind of behaviour to become more prevalent? Or less?
Forgot to mention. I watched the excellent Little Britain last night. Did anyone else notice that the old lady in the flat was watching the credits to 'The Good Life' on her telly and her radio was playing 'The Good Life' by In Ten City?
Accident, spooky coincidence or the innest of in in jokes?
The subject has come up again because of Kelis's ‘Milkshake’.
We had an extended discussion about it last night over supper and, for once, I was the doveish party. I actually don't mind this one, basically because any unsuitable content is well hidden behind a metaphor. and metaphors are the lifeblood of art and poetry. ‘Milkshake’ is neither of these, of course, but I think it's a good record. Furthermore it has prompted no awkward questions, and if it did they could easily be dealt with on a literal level.
We then moved on to review our policies in general re censorship, and after an exhaustive exchange of views we decided that our existing guidelines should stand. We took a decision a while ago not to switch off the radio instantly if offensive material appeared, partly on the basis that it draws attention to the said material and partly because we can't know which songs are unsuitable if we've never heard them before.
There are also some practical considerations that work against any such rapid reaction censorship. In the car it's not appropriate to keep fiddling with the radio while negotiating roundabouts etc. and it's not wise to make sudden dashes across a crowded kitchen full of paint pots and PVA glue bottles.
Interestingly I heard Mark Lawson discussing this very matter on Front Row last week while peeling carrots (me, not him). He said his young daughter had asked about the meaning of ‘Milkshake’ and he admitted that he had side-stepped the question. I was quite pleased to learn that someone as brainy and media savvy as him has problems in this area too. I did also allow myself a small feeling of pride; we would never do that.
I wonder if radio producers ever think about their peaktime output. Currently the whole listening experience is packed with unwelcome surprises, a bit like finding sex toys in a Barbie set. Give me ‘Je T'aime’ any time. At least I could credibly pass that off as the sound of a foot massage in progress, if necessary.
Hooray! And a big round of applause for the return of the excellent Time Team. Children's television seems so devoid of content at the moment, and the adverts consistently put the programmes to shame in terms of originality, pace and wit. Not so Time Team, which has pulled off the fantastic feat of taking archaeology and making it exciting. Partly by the use of reconstructive techniques and eye-catching graphics, partly by a marvellous collection of non-standard, passionate people, but mostly by the best use of the tension between time and task in TV since Thunderbirds. “We've only got six minutes to get those Bronze Age artefacts out of there!” Fantastic, and the only good excuse for tea in front of the telly currently on offer.
I stayed up to watch Trainspotting and went to bed disappointed. Can anyone tell me why this scrappy film was ever lauded for anything? Its soundtrack is revered and constantly referenced. Why? Twenty year old records by Iggy Pop and Lou Reed can hardly count as groundbreaking. Was this the first film ever to have no incidental music and instead to use a mixture of off-the-peg classics and current, trendy dance beats? Apart from telling me (relentlessly) that heroin is horrible, and one funny speech about how being Scottish doesn't necessarily make Scots like the open air, I got almost nothing out of it. Was the book better?
We heard scratching behind the kitchen units three nights ago. Mel is terrified of mice and while she does not wish to kill or even upset them she does not want to share our pan cupboard with them either. Her answer has been to install an ultrasonic mouse scarer next to the microwave and leave it permanently switched on. She has high hopes but I'm concerned that it will clash somehow with the ultrasonic cat scarer that's still going strong out in the garden on a stick.
I feel we need a little more information here. Are cats and mice scared by the same frequencies? Their heads are different sizes so I assume it takes different wavelengths to unsettle them. If this is correct I have two questions.
1. If both devices are equally effective but species specific, then every time we open the garden door do we run the risk of filling the kitchen with cats and the garden with mice?
2. Could running both devices together create any unforeseen, potentially harmful effects? If so, would operating the microwave concurrently create a dangerous vortex in the space-time continuum?
“Could everybody be famous?” asked Zoe yesterday evening. Was there enough to go round? And if there wasn't, was getting fame in fact stealing it from somebody else who didn't have it any more?
As a series of questions this led us on to all sorts of interesting areas.
Jake wanted to know what was the best thing to be famous for, which turned out to be a much trickier question than it first looked. I nearly said “Having lots of money” but then I thought of all the people in history who had lots of money but wanted to be known for something else or wanted people to forget how they had made it.
I tried to formulate something that one could be famous for that didn't damage your health, warp your personality or distort your relationships. I told him that being a TV vet was probably pretty good - mid ranking pay, not too much occupational danger, early nights, gentle fans who were probably not excessively zealous. I suspect from his reaction that he didn't particularly enjoy that answer.
I explained further. To set out to become famous puts a candidate in three possible states.
1. Wanting fame but not having it. This is misery and is the point at which most contenders remain. Permanently.
2. Being famous. This is not a lot better because those who attain fame know with certainty that it can be taken away again. Active, current celebrities are all well aware of this and run as fast as they can on the fame treadmill to ward off the possibility of relegation to the obscurity they fought so hard to escape. I remember Phil Collins saying that he realised it could all end tomorrow. Eventually it did, and in his case it was worth the wait.
3. Having been famous. The flipside, the twilight world. Paradise lost and only ever regained by the very few. More miserable than state 1 above, often with the added torment that celebrity did not bring with it financial security or emotional equilibrium.
Would I like either of them to become famous? Is it better to be anonymous and fulfilled? Is that possible or is fame the only kind of fulfilment? The thinking cap is on.
SAAP has just had its 10,000th visitor. At 5.26. I wish I knew who it was but all I have is an IP address.
It's not every day that one gains an order of magnitude so I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the visitors who have made up that number (even those who came looking for 'pictures of veruccas'). Without you that counter would still read 0.
Also thanks to:
Adam, who was the first to link me:
the 70 or so sites that have linked to me since:
Angela who first got me noticed in the US:
Pete (and Karen), Gert, Mike, Nigel, Zed and Peter, who, in a few short weeks in September 2003, introduced me to a wider readership in the UK, and were very kind while doing so.
Now what? It'll be nine times as many visitors before anything as exciting happens again. I suppose I'll have to go back to thinking about what to put here tomorrow.
I was delighted with the reaction to my ideas about Creative Weighting in the UK Top Forty, so here are a few thoughts collected over the holiday period.
Gary Jules (Mad World) got plus marks all round for a cheap recording, a video featuring no jewellery, and not being very good looking either.
Westlife (Mandy) got plus marks for the sitar in verse 2. Groundbreaking stuff. The slow witted might ask why exactly a sitar was in there but 'why' has never been a question with a natural home in pop music.
Unfortunately they then got minus points for using tubular bells in verse 3. Never a good idea, only ever pulled off to much effect by Tchaikovsky. They should have left them where they belong, in the 1812 Overture.
Sophie Ellis Bextor (I Won't Change You) got minus marks for everything. No change there, then.
A brief aside. Blazin' Squad strike me as the Belle de Jour of the UK charts, i.e. based on an American idea and featuring gratuitous and unoriginal sexual content masquerading as cutting edge culture.
I have the decaff granules, I have the skimmed milk. Now what I need to know is: what kind of joyless, self-denying water would be suitable to complete my penitent's cup of coffee?
And so we enter the dark, post-tinsel days. The Holly and the Ivy are now not only full grown but are also newly resident in the wheelie bin. A deep tiredness has beset the adults; the chldn are listless, the pestosterone rush of December just a faint memory. It's all very different from that expectant time filled with lightheaded eagerness that lies less than a month behind us.
Remorse and monkish austerity have replaced the former good cheer, and thoughts have turned to waistlines and livers. January is the new Lent, and our deepest privations are no longer saved for the preparations for Christ's death but instead we celebrate his birth by giving up alcohol, after wetting his head all too thoroughly.
Mel is looking at diets again, including the Atkins. I'm not keen. I've told her the only Atkins I'll be doing is the Chet Atkins Diet, which allows you to pick between meals.
Presents.
The really tricky one, this.
As the world set out on the usual festive pillaging I found myself struggling with issues that seemed to broaden and deepen with every window of the Advent calendar. Christmas now seems to me to be the designated place where acquisitiveness runs full face into the problem of morality in childrearing.
Teaching chldn not to kill or steal is not the problem here - the traditional Christmas message covers peace and goodwill pretty well. It's the modern revised Christmas message that troubles me, the one about getting your wishes granted. The question can be stated thus: 'What should we teach them to want?'
I would love to teach them to despise material goods but I realise that despising material goods is a lot easier after you've had some to despise. I did try this one out on Jake but he (correctly) connected what I was saying to my refusal to buy him a remote control aeroplane costing several hundreds of pounds. All the while the clock was running and in the end I ran out of time. Next year we will all be older and perhaps the picture will be clearer.
As it turned out the chldn's presents were in general a great success. Jake got a 100 piece puzzle from one of his grannies which he loved. Unfortunately that didn't stop him from making a 200 piece puzzle out of our Etruscan-style earthenware waterjug by injudicious use of his new 9-in-1 Dethdeela Rocket Launcher, thoughtfully provided by one of his uncles. Zoe loved her Magic Set but is still at the stage when she can only manage to make her audience disappear.
I am keeping an eye on how long they play with each of their presents. We need to learn what works and, as in the concept of Food Miles, I am monitoring Fun Minutes. To my chagrin the home chemistry sets have underperformed in this area, and Zoe's Grow Your Own Crystal set remains as yet unopened. The big winner seems to be Jake's Robot Wars set that consists of six tiny oil drums and a carnivorous dustpan.
I got a copy of 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' which I have now read and probably explains the appearance in Wenesday's post of the first semicolon in the history of SAAP.
We went round to the Butterworths' for drinks on Boxing Day. Spencer B had been given a very impressive keyboard thing with on-board drum machine and bassline generator, sound FX, DJ scratching facility and heavy metal guitar noises. He spent some time watching it with Jake. no one seems to have explained to him what the black and white bits at the front are for though.
Cards.
The cards were completed laboriously and with a fair amount of guesswork. I hope we managed to unite all our friends and relatives with the correct houses, partners and offspring. I'm afraid our card database may finally have slipped over the horizon of retrievability.
There was a time when with one click we could see not only who sent to us last year but also what charity they supported. Sadly where once we could view a neat graphical comparison of year on year turnover on a screen we are now reduced to guesswork based on how far down the ribbons in the hall the cards go. I think we are up on last year; Mel thinks we are down. Neither of us knows for sure.
Discipline.
The period just after Xmas brought home to me the problems of running an incentive-led household as opposed to a discipline-driven one. With Father Christmas's visit over and the big parental presents doled out there was an authority vacuum of alarming proportions. What to do when the good little chldn of Xmas Eve turn into the surly little brats of Boxing Day?
In the presence of such an abundance of toys and sweets I reckoned we needed to find another form of leverage, preferably one that involved no expense. So I decided to look for seasonal games on the net, not with a view to playing them myself but rather to withholding them as a penalty for bad behaviour, as necessary. I found several sites with free games but then wished I hadn't when Jake failed to enter into the spirit of the thing and deliberately behaved irreproachably in order to be able to spend hours shooting elves and reindeer playing Polar Cull 2.
Excess.
I'm not comfortable with the idea of festive bingeing, living as I do in a world straddled by the shadow of hunger and disease. In general I confine myself to extra satsumas and nuts, although I do find it difficult to resist those mutant giant Quality Street brazils. Jake made up for any parental abstemiousness though. He discovered meringues in a big way, eating nine in rapid succession at Christmas Day tea. They soon reappeared. Indeed they came back so quickly that I dubbed them ‘Boomeringues’.
I have nearly finished the Christmas Pudding Vodka that we bought at the school's Winter Fayre. I think my career as a late night commenter may be drawing to a close.
Decorations.
Went up on Xmas Eve and are coming down tonight. That, we feel, is the canonical procedure, although neither the Bible nor the Book of Common Prayer are v forthcoming on the subject.
We have had a lovely tree, not organic but it is biodegradable. The chldn decorated it beautifully with a mixture of glass baubles and some designs of their own, made from the colourful brochures we had received through the year offering us credit cards. The hanging chocolate shapes had a habit of falling out of their paper without trace and, on the morning of the 25th, were the occasion for my first use of Zoe's lie detector.
The Butterworths from three doors down had a battery of hi tech sequenced lights and glowing panels. They even had fibreoptic snow effects on the bushes in front of their house. They looked very nice till they were stolen on Xmas Eve.
Dinner.
We had an intense discussion about whether to cut little crosses on the bases of the brussel sprouts. Tradition said 'Yes', modern energy-conscious best practice said 'Yes', but some Sprout Guru somewhere seems to have decided that they taste better if you don't. In the end we did half with and half without to see which tasted better. The jury of four was split. Mel liked the crossed ones, I liked the uncrossed and the chldn declared that both were disgusting.
We decided to have goose to bolster the trad element, but it was rather large and produced much more fat then we had anticipated, overflowing the shallow dish it sat on. Sauce for the goose became also sauce for a substantial area of the kitchen floor. The whole episode gave new meaning to the term 'Low Fat'.
The Build Up.
The chldn's wish lists got longer and longer with every hour of December television watched. I disliked virtually everything they asked for, with two notable exceptions.
Zoe was keen on a game based around a lie detector. She thought it would be fun. I was broadly in favour as I thought it would be useful on the rare occasions I have to ask things like “Did you hit her/Have you washed your hands etc?” Jake wanted a metal detector with which to find buried treasure. I wanted to give it to Mel to find lost car keys.
Jake spent most of the month telling anyone who cared to listen that Santa Claus didn't exist. Round about the 22nd he seemed to have a kind of deathbed conversion, after which he willingly conceded that SC was a busy man and probably did shop at Argos to save time, as we had explained last year. When he went to see Santa in a large shop on the 23rd he not only had his request ready but he sensibly accompanied it with a small note containing the Argos shop number and stock code to avoid confusion.
Anyone who used the word “Crimbo” was given one warning.
Always a tricky time of year, and never easy to get everything right. This time we tried harder than ever to find that balance between the trad and the mod, the acquisitive and the spiritual, the fat and the thin.
'Generous But Tasteful' was our motto last year. This year it was 'Ancient Yet Modern'. Quite a task. I think having 'Away In A Manger' as a ringtone on the mobe was probably about as near the line as we got. Anyway, in response to several enquiries, and armed with the valuable distance that time can lend, this week I will be giving an appraisal, heading by heading, of how we did.
(An exclusive extract from the forthcoming best-seller by the Guardian's own anonymous prize-winning call girl and literary superstar, soon to be nominated for even greater things.)
Him: God, you're beautiful! So young and gorgeous!
Me: D'ya think so?
Men say the nicest things. Especially when you tie them up.
I have enjoyed my life as a call girl quite unreservedly. The hours are short, the pay is good, the conditions pleasantly horizontal. Park Lane in the golden glow of autumn, the mahogany mini bars, the smell of a freshly hailed taxi: memories only the churlish could fail to savour.
It's amazing how the men who have paid for my attentions have been universally kind and courteous, and I'm sure that all of them were at least a bit guilty about cheating on their wives. I can honestly say that I never found myself in a position where I had to have sex with a man so ugly that he couldn't even get his secretary to f**k him.
But it was never about me; it was just about the price. They stick their thingy in my whatsit and I stuff my hand in their wallet. Most private places are accessible, if you know how.
Working three weeks out of four, mornings off and enough time to read all the noir literature I could carry home atop my Choos - what could be better? I had already seen Pretty Woman three times so I knew in for what I was. I could take it, and take it lying down at that. I clearly understood how the deals would always turn out; me with the body and the money, him with the wet patch.
So what has prostitution done for me? Simple. When I asked the question “What shall I do with my life?”, The Game gave me the answers I liked best. It offered an easy living and an entrée to a life well beyond my earning power as an Arts graduate. Unlike Hamlet I knew very well what my 2.2 solid flesh could do.
Most pertinently, my life as courtesan provided the missing link, that last elusive rung up the ladder to a life as a literary power - material. It gave me privileged access to a world textured with satin, champagne and grit. Wonderful, earthy material vastly more interesting than any life predicted for me could ever have yielded. Truly a grail unsought.
Material that rivets yet is sufficiently alien to all my educated readers that no matter what I write it can sound convincing. As long as the grammar is consistently correct, the vocabulary vivid, and the whole euphonious. Never before in my life have I stood in less fear of contradiction.
Things could go wrong but they never have up till now. My one dread is that businessmen re-embrace m*st*rbation like the teenagers they once were.
Yeah. I guess I'm safe.