how to be a girl
I've spent the last couple of days with my nose stuck in-between the pages of Lucy Mangan's very witty and beautifully-written Hopscotch and Handbags: The Essential Guide to Being a Girl. The title makes it sound like a dumb, bimbotic book, but all 304 pages are filled with amusing anecdotes (I kept prodding J to read sections, which he didn't quite appreciate, not being a girl, after all) and hilarious observations that were so true to life, so scathingly-written, that I actually took the time to type out sections that I loved.
On teenhood, and talking with your best friend:
So you and your friend bellow at each other on the bus to school. You talk through roll call. During assembly, the entire female contingent is crushed into one back row, so that it can download its thoughts unseen by whichever teacher has the misfortune that day of trying to engage its attention with a moral lecture derived from last night's EastEnders. You talk on your way up the stairs to double maths. If the teacher is big enough and scary enough, you might tacitly withdraw into silence for the duration, otherwise, it's chat, chat, chat and to hell with simultaneous equations. The ingestion of food doesn't slow you down at lunchtime. You can talk on the in-breath, the out-breath and through gluey mouthfuls of Mighty White. By the afternoon, your mouth is like sandpaper, but you rehydrate with sneaky swigs of Coke under your desk in French and carry on. When you part ways after a quick recap of the day's events on the bus home, you rush straight in and call her on the phone. Your dad strides around wondering what on earth you have to say to each other after spending the previous seven hours together. Ohmigod, it is like he just, you know, doesn't have a clue. It is like he is some kind of total mor-on! But you don't have to tell her that. She already knows and understands all. It is very lucky that your discovery of each other coincides with the moment that you and your friends each become the most genuinely, objectively fascinating and complex creatures ever to have walked the earth, otherwise the wealth of groundbreaking data that would have been lost does not bear thinking about.
Amazing, especially that last sentence. Hit the nail on the head, absolutely. That was me, aged fifteen.
On being a geek in school:
Where you set the boffin bar depended on the kind of school you went to. At some, a moderate preference for reading rather than sniffing corrector fluid off your jumper sleeve was enough to get you marked out as a dangerous intellectual, and at others the ability to read without moving your lips made you indistinguishable from Gore Vidal.
On lingerie:
Either you become the proud owner of innumerable matching sets of expensive lingerie, housed in their own drawer and supplemented by quality white cotton bras and knickers that remain dazzingly bright because you would no more think of putting them in a non-white wash than you would think of not rinsing the plates before you put them in the dishwasher. Or you become the less proud but infinitely more understandable owner of fifty-two pairs of knickers which are mentally divided into 'normal day wear', 'period' and 'one step away from floor-cloth'. And three grey bras. And a black one. Somewhere.
On 'becoming a woman', and the pleasures of hanging the washing out:
Well, not actually in hanging it out. That was, is, and evermore shall be a task that redefines the word tedious. But you begin to find yourself taking a step back from the line when you have completed the job and feeling a deep, inexpressible satisfaction at the sight of towels and pillowcases flapping in the breeze. Ah, the healthful, old-fashioned, sun-bleaching, economical airiness of it all! The lovely smell it will have when you bring it in! You may even begin to nod sagely and congratulate yourself on the good drying weather. Only women feel this. There is no turning back to childhood now. It's a long, slow slide to the grave from hereon out. Let's just hope it is flanked by gorgeous piles of freshly laundered, snowy-white linen when you get there.
I guess I must be a woman and an old one at that, because I love staring out at my laundry hanging outside my window, blowing away merrily in the breeze while the sun shines down on it.
Perfect, perfect, perfect.
On teenhood, and talking with your best friend:
So you and your friend bellow at each other on the bus to school. You talk through roll call. During assembly, the entire female contingent is crushed into one back row, so that it can download its thoughts unseen by whichever teacher has the misfortune that day of trying to engage its attention with a moral lecture derived from last night's EastEnders. You talk on your way up the stairs to double maths. If the teacher is big enough and scary enough, you might tacitly withdraw into silence for the duration, otherwise, it's chat, chat, chat and to hell with simultaneous equations. The ingestion of food doesn't slow you down at lunchtime. You can talk on the in-breath, the out-breath and through gluey mouthfuls of Mighty White. By the afternoon, your mouth is like sandpaper, but you rehydrate with sneaky swigs of Coke under your desk in French and carry on. When you part ways after a quick recap of the day's events on the bus home, you rush straight in and call her on the phone. Your dad strides around wondering what on earth you have to say to each other after spending the previous seven hours together. Ohmigod, it is like he just, you know, doesn't have a clue. It is like he is some kind of total mor-on! But you don't have to tell her that. She already knows and understands all. It is very lucky that your discovery of each other coincides with the moment that you and your friends each become the most genuinely, objectively fascinating and complex creatures ever to have walked the earth, otherwise the wealth of groundbreaking data that would have been lost does not bear thinking about.
Amazing, especially that last sentence. Hit the nail on the head, absolutely. That was me, aged fifteen.
On being a geek in school:
Where you set the boffin bar depended on the kind of school you went to. At some, a moderate preference for reading rather than sniffing corrector fluid off your jumper sleeve was enough to get you marked out as a dangerous intellectual, and at others the ability to read without moving your lips made you indistinguishable from Gore Vidal.
On lingerie:
Either you become the proud owner of innumerable matching sets of expensive lingerie, housed in their own drawer and supplemented by quality white cotton bras and knickers that remain dazzingly bright because you would no more think of putting them in a non-white wash than you would think of not rinsing the plates before you put them in the dishwasher. Or you become the less proud but infinitely more understandable owner of fifty-two pairs of knickers which are mentally divided into 'normal day wear', 'period' and 'one step away from floor-cloth'. And three grey bras. And a black one. Somewhere.
On 'becoming a woman', and the pleasures of hanging the washing out:
Well, not actually in hanging it out. That was, is, and evermore shall be a task that redefines the word tedious. But you begin to find yourself taking a step back from the line when you have completed the job and feeling a deep, inexpressible satisfaction at the sight of towels and pillowcases flapping in the breeze. Ah, the healthful, old-fashioned, sun-bleaching, economical airiness of it all! The lovely smell it will have when you bring it in! You may even begin to nod sagely and congratulate yourself on the good drying weather. Only women feel this. There is no turning back to childhood now. It's a long, slow slide to the grave from hereon out. Let's just hope it is flanked by gorgeous piles of freshly laundered, snowy-white linen when you get there.
I guess I must be a woman and an old one at that, because I love staring out at my laundry hanging outside my window, blowing away merrily in the breeze while the sun shines down on it.
Perfect, perfect, perfect.