How Can Mary Tell Me What To Do?


Is this new colour naff, everyone? I can't decide. The template's called Love Letter and that's what attracted me to it. It might be a bit too lemon-y, though. And it reminds me vaguely of something I don't like - possibly a confectionery. Also, perhaps a bit too 1985-Wedding-Invite. I can't stand the 1980s.

It’s been a long week, don’t you think? Oh such a very very long week. God knows why. The moon or something like that. Monday seems as long ago as Abba at Eurovision, or Southampton winning the FA Cup in 1976. The occasion of the latter was a Saturday afternoon I remember well, although I’ve never been much of a follower of football, eventually going off it completely when it became obvious I was getting a bit too old to collect the stickers. Of those I most certainly was a fan.

If I remember right the winning goal came at the last minute, and was scored by a player with bad teeth (black teeth? no teeth?). True to form my mum, who loves all the big sporting things like the Grand National and Wimbledon finals, was really ‘avin’ it, waving the iron above her head, tears pricking her eyes – “Come on Southampton! Come on you bastards!” Lou and me would have been lounging on one uncomfortable green-cord-and-black-ash Habitat settee each, watching mum and rolling our eyes at one another. Almost certainly we would have been eating ginger nuts. Boring football, massively entertaining mum. And then all hell broke loose in the ironing corner. ”YES! YES! YEEEES!” - they'd scored and the whistle blew and the dog ran away and hid from more tears, more shouting and swearing. And all this because mum always, always went for “the underdog”. If there’s one overriding thing about our upbringing, one single value we’ve taken from dear mama, it’s to support the underdog even if it's futile.

The long week. Thursday and Friday felt like wading through soup, like that Simpsons thing where Bart looks up at the clock in class and the hands actually start to go backwards. And I like work! I had every intention of coming straight home and getting on with The Project but perhaps because it had felt all week like Friday night would never come, for once I really needed a drink and initiated a spontaneous after work trip to the The Hand & Flower. It’s a nothingy, not-all-that place really, but we rounded up an almost full house of twenty or so and very jolly it all was, too. The wife of one of my colleagues, who makes us cake and sends it into the office with endearing notes and who is definitely a bit of a sort, tagged along, although this time bearing not a lemon drizzle or a choc-orange but photographs of her recent hysterectomy.

”Brace yourselves”, the girls all said – Kitty, Karen, Michelle – and the pictures were duly produced from the handbag while I held onto Karen for fear of fainting. And there it was on some white hospital surface - womb, gnarled ovaries, nobbly cysts, the lot. Extraordinary. Tell you one thing: it bore only a passing resemblance to the textbooks, poor woman.

But it wasn’t all wombs and cysts. Kitty’s from Belfast. Why are they so funny, the Northern Irish? She’s totally pretty and sweet and demure but this is all deception, for she will sneak up behind you when you’re hard at it and whisper, ”I.Will.Fuck.You.Up” or something similarly sinister. At home, where she lives with my lovely Lex (although not in the lesbian sense) she keeps a John Bull printing set and at work on the shelf above her desk a tiny, perfect penis and balls in Blu Tack set in a pretty cameo box on a bed of tissue. Somebody made it for her but we all cherish it. It isn’t remotely gross or anything – just really, really sweet.

There was an office debate going around this week about whether to show said ornament to the new intern on their first day and the upshot of it all was that Kitty did decide to proffer the sacred thing in its little box. ”Welcome to our department, would you like to see this?”, she said, or something like it (I was not present) and she slowly lifted the lid. But the reaction was not good, and they just sort of went ”Ugh”, turned their back and carried on surfing the internet. A big-time backfire. This had obviously eaten away at Kitty all week and last night, after she’d had a few, she began to speak rather darkly of this individual: ”They can have another chance but three strikes and they’re OUT – not even joking” - although of course she was joking (I think).

Maybe the week felt long and hard because the weather turned mid-way through and made it seem like two weeks. Or perhaps it was the big night out on Monday – another work gang. It was the official opening night of the Supremes exhibition at the V&A, sponsored by our catalogue department (we look after Motown). Peach of an evening as we strolled round the back of the Albert Hall (London felt suddenly fun again) and down Kensington Gore to the museum, blossom blowing everywhere. There were loads of us, each sinking at least one bottle of champagne which, rarely, did not run out all night.

OK folks, on a scale of one to ten how gay is this? Eleven out of ten? You see it’s an exhibition of the Supremes’ costumes from the 1960s and 1970s, faaaaaaabulous swirly creations behind glass in psychedelic, furs, silks, nylons and velvets. And plastic – my favourite of all being a 1966 mini-dress made entirely of green and yellow plastic discs stitched over a sort of string-vest frame. Amazing. Nothing you see now ever looks that futuristic.

No Diana, naturally, or poor dead Flo, obviously, but Mary Wilson was there and she got up and spoke and sang a medley of hits which was a good choice, plus a song from the Dreamgirls soundtrack which wasn’t And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going and was not such a good choice. She came across as radiant, absolutely full of life, no longer bitter about it all. She certainly looked remarkable for her age – about 35, you’d probably guess if you didn’t know better – although I imagine she’s had some work done and there were whispers that her luxurious hair was in fact a wig.

She certainly looked younger than a clearly ravenous Vanessa Feltz who barged my friend Andrew out of the way to get to the canapés (which unlike the champagne were a rare sighting throughout) and much better than Bill Wyman and Jimmy Page, both of whom I spied waiting patiently in the queue to meet La Wilson after she’d come off stage and spent a little time refurbishing herself. I bumped into lovely Mark Paytress who wrote the definitive biographies of both Marc Bolan and Sid Vicious and did the excellent Banshees in their own words thing which I’ve read about a million times. Oh and Jonny Blue Eyes from the Glam Rock Night was there, although this time he kept his balls in his kaftan. That mad girl Jo, who used to come to our Northern Soul night, was DJ-ing in the museum foyer. She did it proper ‘60s style, too, getting on the mic after every song and talking, giving it all the Emperor Rosko patter: ”I’ve been asked all night for some Marvin Gaye so heeeeere’s ‘This Love Starved Heart Of Mine’”. I miss all that, really.

Lots of other stuff going on. The Project rolls on of course (1990) and I’m in talks about not one but two, on the face of it better, jobs. I should get to hear what the respective packages are like next week and one of them is almost certainly the perfect job for me. I am pretty excited about it all (and grateful and flattered) but – and there’s always a but – how could I leave my friends behind? How could I leave our shared tiny penis in a box and Electro Friday afternoons? We’ll see.