Donald Trump & the end of love in London

Posted on Posted in All The Single Ladies, Bad Romance, Book, Dating, Donald Trump, Heartbreak, Love, Saki of Sex, Sex & Relationships, Shoes, Short StoriesLeave a comment
In her 1983 novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron explained her compulsion to turn aspects of her life into a repertoire of jokes.
She made everything into a story, she wrote:
‘Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.’
And so it is with me and this blog in which I am describing certain dates in such detail now because soon I shall tell you tales of other women braver than me and I want to secure your sympathies – so you are lusty for the retribution they take.
I know matters have gone irretrievably wrong when the line I’m going to tell the Millennial enters my head – the one that will make him laugh, with that adorable snort that’s addictive to provoke.  
‘People say #MeToo ruined dating for men,’ I told him, of my second (and final) date with a man so full on in the first week I was already calling him The Mad Macedonian:
‘#MeToo hasn’t ruined dating for men – they’re using accounts of what sexual maniacs got away with as a tip sheet… We went to dinner at this place he picked that I thought was fancy since it was in Westbourne Grove, only to end up sat in too-fancy shoes on a table next to stacked chairs and a mop and bucket.’
‘For whatever reason he announced he had to wash his hands and that his penis was very small, and then, after we’d eaten, calculated my exact share of the bill and walked me to a bus stop where he grabbed me by the pussy. Donald Trump-inspired. Right in the middle of the street.’
That one was laughable at the time. Not tragic. Just deranged. 
But the next man who caused a Millennial-ready line to pop into my head, well – I’d got my hopes up…
He was a divorcee which I thought exciting, since divorcees – it strikes me – believe love exists, and know they lost it. They were honest with themselves and brave too. So they’re back, hunting for what I’m hunting for, which no man I’ve met yet seems to be.
This man departed one October morning saying he owed me an orgasm. (Actually four but he wasn’t counting.) Cancelled all the dates we planned subsequently, without suggesting rearranging and – when I enquired – explained he was looking into a trip abroad since he had time off and nothing else to do.
‘This is the tale,’ I knew then and there, ‘of the man who’d prefer to spend seven days in Auschwitz than see me again.’
‘Of course I’m writing this later, much much later,’ Ephron admitted…
At the time, I did not laugh. I howled.
For more tales of Bad Romance come back next Sunday night or buy the book here. 

To publish unpublishable books, look to your readers

Posted on Posted in Bad Romance, Book, Book Review, Julie Burchill, Saki of Sex, UnboundLeave a comment

An author always writes the book she wants to read. So my short story collection, Bad Romance, was intended for women like me. Now, every time I get a letter from a beautiful creature who loved it, I keep her words with me. Because I know I’ll need them to sustain me the next time I try to publish a book. For me, they prove – so deliciously – that my audience does exist when everyone in the publishing industry insists it does not.

I wrote my first tale, Julia’s Baby, when seized by the black urge to pull apart a white wedding. The second story, Goddess Sequence, came to me when I was drunk and wishing to revenge myself against a man who had not so much broken my heart as torn it out and stamped on it. Both stories turned out old fashioned peculiarly English things – like the twisted tales of Dahl, Saki and Waugh. My first reader, my friend Sarah, laughed at them, wanted more… I wrote on…

I did not know short stories did not sell. Above all, I’m aware of a reader and aware of their previous commercial successes. In the 1920s, the most popular writer in the Soviet Union was a short story writer called Mikhail Zoshchenko who described how incredibly shit it was to live in the Soviet Union. Dark but very, very funny…

So here we are, I thought, in the 21st century, with more single people alive than at any point in history, and the last heroine properly poking fun at how we live now – still Bridget Jones (who is married with a baby now…)

To live in a city like London today is to experience daily struggles undelineated and uninterrogated by memoir writers (who by definition write about themselves) and literary novels which – Rose Tremain recently pointed out – prove almost impossible to finish. I try not to sound bitter but sometimes it’s hard. All I’ve had from those in charge are rejection slips which you’re just expected to take – and are as Isaac Asimov once said – ‘like lacerations to the soul.’

Without readers, Bad Romance would still be languishing in a drawer somewhere. But then, after years of failing to get an agent, I was put in touch with an undeniably brilliant one by a friend and this lady arranged for me to meet Katy Guest, projects editor at the crowdfunding publisher Unbound.

I was excited to meet Guest because she was the last ever literary editor of the Independent on Sunday and her opinion mattered to me dearly. She was the first person with any power to tell me she loved my stories and thought if we could just get enough readers to believe in Bad Romance, the critics would love it too.

I had no idea how hard it would be to beg readers to pay upfront for a book that did not exist. But I was lucky that Julia’s Baby had by then been published in The Spectator so I had evidence of what we could achieve together. Thanks to 300 plus book-mad individuals, we managed to raise the cash we needed within 90 days.

Bad Romance finally appeared this February 8th. Julie Burchill read it, loved it, wrote a rave review. Called me ‘the Saki of sex’. Volunteered the tagline: ‘Bad Romance makes Girls look like Little Women.’ In publication week, it was flagged up on the front cover of ES Magazine and Grazia. Press is a hard thing to get for books and I thought all the attention would demonstrate there was a mass market for my work. It didn’t. Now I watch as books launched with equal – or less – aplomb, succeed as Bad Romance sinks into obscurity.

But then another reader got on her white charger – Alice-Azania Jarvis, features director of ES Magazine, and the master interviewer behind a salon at The Ned whose guests have included everyone from Elizabeth Day to Otegha Uwagba. Those in the know, think hers is the most compelling chat you can get in London and the waiting list to get in is getting about as long as Givenchy’s in the Markle aftermath…

I was so lucky, she had me as a guest, for in the audience, there happened to be another Alice – a Ms. Revel, the book-loving entrepreneur behind Reading In Heels (FutureBook BookTech Company of Year Finalist 2017) which ships out 2000 copies of books she loves to a rapidly expanding horde of readers every month. She asked if we might produce a special paperback edition for her purposes. And as radicals, she and Unbound agreed terms. The book will be shipped out next week.

‘From our point of view, it’s a really exciting move,’ Revel explains. ‘Eventually… as our membership increases, we could potentially fund publication of the writers that our customers want to read. Not just the ones available to us thanks to the big publishers and their schedules…’

To me, every reader who loves my work is a hero and I dearly hope the Reading In Heels girls will become my heroines too… If somehow, in spite of everything, they contrive to make Bad Romance a success, it’ll be thanks to readers, readers and readers alone.

Twelfth Night

Posted on Posted in Bad Romance, Column, Dating1 Comment

In 2018, my New Year’s resolution was to fall in love with a man who had his own parents so I didn’t have to spend Christmas with mine. You might think criteria that consists of ‘no orphans’ would do the trick but twelve months on I’m still as solitary as the fairy on top of the Christmas tree.

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This week I read a ponderous article in The Atlantic (is there any other kind?) that restated the cliche that the Millennial and I hate above all others: ‘dating is a numbers game.’ According to this theory, you’re single because you’ve not met enough men, when our problem is we’ve met far more men than we can stand already. The Millennial, for instance, dated relentlessly throughout the whole of his twenties and is rewarding himself on his 30th birthday (happy birthday heavenly Millennial) by giving up like all the rest of us. By rights, there ought to be a thousand think pieces about how the singles have all gone on strike against the apps that oppress us. Instead, there are just endless articles about how Millennials aren’t having any sex anymore, which only causes me to wonder who the hell they’re surveying since Tinder has unleashed, to my certain knowledge, a chaos of sex unrivalled since the dying days of Ancient Rome.

Yes, here I am, as stuck as the scratched Blondie record my mother gave me for Christmas, going on and on and on about how we’ve Bumbled and Happnd and Pofd for so many years it no longer makes sense. Dating is only a game if that’s how you define roulette, played out in the grottiest, least fun casino on earth. Sure, when we first approached the table, it was all very exciting. We had hope – that’s the chips. And we swiped so fast – that’s the spinning of the wheel. And any match might be our lucky number…

Only they weren’t. We staked our bets and lost. Our stock of chips runs down. Which only inspires desperation. You like the look of a number and pile everything on it, thinking to win back everything you’ve lost. We see other players screeching with happiness and making a great fuss. With this number – that looked so promising in the half-light – our hopes are up. But no, it goes the same way as all the others. We feel so embarrassed… Start to blame ourselves. Conscious that we need to keep a portion of our hope to deal with everything else that’s going on in our lives. That’s why we’re retiring, in ever increasing numbers, and if this were anything but metaphorical, and we’d lost all our money, casual observers would congratulate us for kicking a habit so manifestly depleting our existence.

And so we do, we serial daters, want to stop, we’ve had enough. In no other realm of human endeavour would we be congratulated for doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. ‘Albert Einstein said that was lunacy,’ says the sleepy Millennial, yawning and falling asleep on my sofa.

‘Perhaps,’ I reply, packing up my fairy in a box. ‘That is why they call me batshit crazy.’ 

For more tales of Bad Romance come back next Sunday night or click here. 

 

 

The hidden, horrifying costs of being single

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The Guardian – 5th September 2018

Ordinarily, we like to scare the bejesus out of our youth, in the hope they’ll turn out even more boring and compliant than we are. (“Sex’ll give you gonorrhoea. Drugs’ll kill you. Rock’n’roll died with Amy Winehouse – here’s Ed Sheeran!”) And there’s another kind of aberrant behaviour that society wants to prevent. Kids be warned – we’ve made singledom appallingly expensive!

According to research carried out by the Good Housekeeping Institute, “being single carries a price penalty of at least £2,000 a year per individual”. Totting up the figures, I beg to differ. That is a conservative estimate.

First, the government is intent on creating an anti-single state. The most egregious example of this is council tax: on average – in a band D home – you must pay £835 per person if you are married, and a whopping £1,235 if you live on your lonesome. Tory governments, usually so in favour of cutting taxes no matter the social cost, just love keeping them high for singletons. Is it fair to financially punish those who have failed to find true and lasting love?

Our gym memberships are more expensive, our wills are more expensive, even our single person-sized milk cartons are, you guessed it, more expensive. And that’s without examining all the small print. On holiday, we pay extra to sleep alone, fly alone and eat alone.

Then there’s the issue of insurance premiums. “According to insurers, I’d be a better driver tomorrow if I got hitched today,” the financial journalist Emma Lunn has complained. “You can put it to the test by comparing quotes with identical details except marital status.”

Even on a train journey we’re fleeced more offensively for the sub-standard service. The “Two Together” railcard entitles anyone who has someone to hold hands with to a third off off-peak fares. No, there’s nothing to stop two friends buying one together – but how many of us singletons spend every weekend away with the same friend? Why do we get charged more per person by gyms and the National Trust for membership than couples taking out a joint membership?

Of course, things could be worse. We might be living in America. A 2013 survey of the costs of being single found that, factoring in the price of healthcare, “over a lifetime, unmarried women can pay as much as a million dollars more than their married counterparts”. No wonder that every time Beyoncé sings about single ladies the chorus consists of a load of “uh-oh’s”.

Some might argue we shouldn’t worry about the single premium: we’ll all be cajoled into marriage at some point and so rid ourselves of it eventually. But, as Rebecca Traister pointed out in her book All the Single Ladies, there are more unmarried women alive today than at any point in history – and we’re a powerful demographic.

If a woman is single past a certain age, society heaps all the blame – for blame is what it insists on heaping – on her. The birth rate is said to be falling not because many men don’t want to commit but because women are too busy or too picky or too high-powered and put off having children.

Actually, my single friends and I have invested heavily in trying to find a partner we love who loves us so much we become pregnant. On top of all our other single-centric outgoings, according to Match.com we spend on average £1,280 a year on dates (mine have been utterly parlous). I’ve been searching for love since Tinder was invented and all I have to show for it is the lousy state of my bank account. Along with my best friends, I’m fretting about how to have children if conditions don’t improve on the love front. And yes, a single woman’s fertility treatment will cost her twice as much as if she were going through it with a partner.

In the meantime, we’ve also spent a fortune celebrating everyone else’s happinesses – buying house-warming gifts, engagement presents, splurging on hen dos, weddings, christenings. Once, I found a card in a shop that read: “It’s better to have loved and lost than to have spent your life with a psychopath.” And I wish I’d punched the air and borne it home because it’s the closest any cultural artefact has come to celebrating me and my life choices (aside from a book that I wrote myself).

And we’re not just made poorer financially – we’re all but bankrupt culturally. In the 90s, there was Kim Cattrall vamping it up on HBO proving we weren’t sadsacks; now the closest thing we have to a standard bearer for our generation is Fleabag, and who would want to be her?

If you’re past a certain age, everyone expects you to be married with children and if you’re not, complete strangers will demand to know why. Staying single is presented as petrifying on all fronts. The crippling price of remaining so is only one – significant – part of it.

What Would Bridget Do?

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When I was young, I thought Bridget Jones was a joke. Ha, ha, I thought, what a load of bollocks, as she chain-smoked her way into Colin Firth’s boxers. But ever since I turned 30, to my horror I realise it is all true – with added déjà vu – because it is all happening, right now, to me.

Every man you meet is an emotional fuckwit. (If they were ever in the mood for love, they’re taken already.) Your boss will try to sleep with you. (And you lose your job afterwards.) Old friends, post the Pinterest perfect wedding, at which you got unacceptably drunk, are now smug marrieds and treat you as if you have a disease you might transmit to their husbands. You spend the whole Christmas period having to explain to everyone back home why you are still single – as if it is your fault and you have done it on purpose to spite them. And in reply, you never have come up with a line better than there are so many single girls nowadays ‘because beneath our clothes, our bodies are completely covered with scales.’

The only difference between Bridget and I, really, is that Bridget had hope whereas I can’t recognise the meaning of the word. If you’re single, aged 35, everyone seems to think you haven’t tried hard enough. Whereas what you’ve done is tried so hard for so very long you’d rather curl up and die than face a date with yet another Tits-Pervert.

Sometimes, when I’ve cracked open the prosecco at 3pm on a Tuesday, I get to thinking I might cheer myself up by buying that card they used to have in Scribbler which reads: ‘It is better to have loved and lost than to have spent your life with a psychopath.’ That could be my motto. Why does no one recognise this as a signature achievement? Akin to being crowned runner-up in the Great British Bake Off. Or winning bronze in a bout of synchronised swimming.

It seems as if, every week, I lose another comrade to pregnancy. You’ve always shared everything so now she’s holding forth on the state of her discharge, intent on becoming a baby-making machine for 2019, and limbering up to breastfeed in public with great gusto. She gained a ‘hubby’ and lost all sense of proportion. Soon, she’ll stop speaking to you. Because you stop calling her. You’re so grossed out by the updates on the ‘quality’ of her cervical mucus. 

Yes, you like babies too. But have no means of begetting them. And seized by that strange lust, feel a desperate urge to smoke. When you’re so asthmatic that’d be suicide. You keep wanting to write to Helen Fielding and demand: What Would Bridget Do? For it is a truth universally acknowledged that Mr. Darcy is nowhere to be found on dating apps – so what on earth…?

I need such advice because the worst thing about being the reincarnation of Bridget Jones is feeling so alone. Socially – and culturally too. We have no single icons – save Fleabag – who is the married person’s wet dream of what single girls really are, underneath (so desperate and demented they’d do anything up to and including fucking their BFF’s man.) And Lena Dunham – who, I maintain, despite many howls to the contrary, just isn’t funny. And I read the whole of ‘Not That Kind of Girl’ so I know what I am talking about. It was no doubt Lena, and all her indepth accounts of the inner frothings of her vagina, that created the fashion for such grotesque confessions.

Yuck, I grimace, with a savage shudder. In 2019, we still single bastards need a new Bridget for the Tinder age. And so perhaps it is time to imitate her real achievement: consoling herself by writing it all down. Sod it, since I am her, I may as well take control of my life. And start a diary.   

For more tales of Bad Romance come back on Sunday night or click here. 

Talking dirty good, gap yah bad: why no one wants to date a do-gooder

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The Guardian

Potentially worrying news for the human race. If future generations are bred from those we want to sleep with, do-gooders are dying out. No one – no matter how depraved – wants to rip the socks and Birkenstocks off anyone.

Yes, if you want us to be brutal we’ll confess – when it comes to sex – we’d rather pull the balaclava off an actual mugger than the bib and clipboard off a chugger. And, worse and worse still, the boffins are on to us – exposing this weird, terrible (and, until now, mercifully secret) perversion. A team of researchers at Yale and Oxford has shown that while we admire people who spend their time helping impoverished communities and donating money for malaria-combating mosquito nets, we’re not keen on shagging them. In fact, we don’t even want to be friends with them. As human beings, we prefer those who concentrate their time and energy on friends and family rather than complete unknowns in dire predicaments.

“When helping strangers conflicts with helping family and kin, people prefer those who show favouritism, even if that results in doing less good overall,” explains Molly Crockett, who authored the study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Participants were asked to choose between two “equally moral” scenarios and overwhelmingly preferred those who – for instance – would choose to spend the day with their “lonely mother” over “building homes for Habitat for Humanity”.

As an ex-dating columnist, I was already aware of such bias. It’s even evident on Tinder. Dick pics are posted and no one bats an eyelid. But just try uploading a picture of yourself “do-gooding” on a “gap yah”. Some cruel soul is likely to screengrab and share it with the “Humanitarians of Tinder” Tumblr page. In app-land, all mockery is reserved for the well-meaning.

Of course, one could argue there’s not just psychology but sound sense behind our distrust of those who are so intent on doing good for others. After all, how are they to know what is best for people they don’t know?

In Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity, the New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar explores why we are so sceptical of “do-gooders” and why their good deeds make us so uncomfortable. She cites the remarkable tale of two parents who founded a leprosy colony in India and chose to live there – in huts with no walls – even though their two small children might have caught the disease or been “eaten by panthers”.

She points to the Austrian social critic Ivan Illich, who made a speech to young Americans wanting to help out Mexico in 1968. “If you insist on working with the poor,” he said, “At least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don’t even understand what you are doing or what people think of you.”

But back to the sex. Do-gooding is all well and good. But unfortunately, when it comes to making babies and hence the future of humanity, we all prefer someone who can – quite simply – do us. So if your notion of “talking dirty” consists of a blow-by-blow account of constructing a mud hut from the brown banks of the Zambezi. Just stop. You’re doing it all wrong.