Moranthology Read online

  3. These days, everyone gets in trouble for smoking. The last time I got caught having a sneaky fag by one of my kids, I was able to reply—with James Bond-like, ninja-swiftness—“This isn’t mine, darling! I’m just holding it for Uncle Nathan!” Unfortunately, when I repeated the maneuver this summer, I didn’t know that ‘Uncle Nathan’ was supposed to have given up six months ago, and that I’d just ratted him up in front of his kids. Who immediately started crying about him getting cancer, and wailing that they didn’t want to be half-orphans, and had to be placated with having virtually all of that day’s gin-fund spent on ice cream, and bubble-swords. It looks like I’m going to have to revert to the excuse of their earlier years: “It’s not a cigarette, darlings—it’s Sooty’s wand! A naughty boy set fire to it, and mummy was trying to put it out.”

  4. Scottish people do actually notice if you’re Scottish or not. If you’re ludicrously impressionable/borderline human clay/me, after a couple of hours in a region with a strong accent, it can be easy to find yourself “catching” “being local.” You can convince yourself it’s both a friendly, and a beautiful, thing, to start throwing in “lassie” here, and a “pet” there, and that the locals will presume that you talk like this all the time at home. The reality is, of course, that they are thinking, “Why is this idiot moon-faced London woman talking like the Russ Abbott character C U Jimmy, the noo?” This August, I triumphantly smashed all my previous accent-slip records. Usually, it takes a couple of hours, and a couple of whiskies, for the idiomatic “monkey see, monkey do” reflex to kick in. This year, I got off the London-Edinburgh train at 8 AM, and walked over to the taxi line. “Taxi?” the driver said. “Aye,” I replied. My husband turned and walked away, mortified.

  5. Foxes eschew board games. If a 2 AM, al-fresco game of Scrabble should end up being abandoned, due to excessive “wobbly tiredness,” do bring it back indoors again. Leaving it on the lawn is apparently some manner of provocation to urban foxes, who will snittishly do a plop on it—as if saying “Here is my disdain for your dandy self-satisfied middle-class Viognier-fueled word-games. And it’s on a double word score.”

  At The Times, they love making me do stupid stuff. It’s why I love working for them. Who would not wish to be rung up at 9 am and asked if they want to dress up as Kate Middleton/meet Keith Richards on International Talk Like a Pirate Day/learn to do the “Single Ladies”-by-Beyoncé dance?

  In this instance, the 9 am phonecall from the office was asking me if I’d like to be an imaginary dwarf, playing the gaming phenomenon that is World of Warcraft. Obviously, I said “Yes”—once I’d looked up what the Dwarven is for “Yes” (“Ai,” apparently).

  A week later—because of this feature—I was invited on the Richard & Judy show to talk about World of Warcraft, as some manner of “expert.” As I’m sure this feature insinuates, I really was not that. Still, in order to illustrate what we were discussing, they suggested that I play the game, live on air, so that the viewers could get a flavor of life in an online fantasy world. Panicking, the second we got on air, I pressed the wrong button, and steered my dwarf off a platform and under the Deep Run train to Stormwind City, where he died instantly.

  “Well,” Richard Madeley said, after a second. “The life of a dwarf really is nasty, brutish and short, isn’t it?”

  I AM A DWARF CALLED “SCOTTBAIO”

  When Keith at the office gives me World of Warcraft, bidding me to “spend a bit of time with it—it’s really addictive,” I do that special thing that women can do where you roll your eyes inside your head, secretly, to show that you know more than the men. Yeah right, I’m going to get addicted to World of Warcraft. Yeah right, I’m going to join a worldwide, online community of over eight million people, running around a gigantic and complex fantasy world, engaged on a series of quests.

  I’ll tell you right now, in my head, Keith: it’s all highly unlikely. I’m not into pixie cobblers. I like real life. If I had to marry one of the cast of Lord of the Rings, it would be Sam Gamgee—the only completely prosaic, normal, non-magic one, who comes across like the owner of a garage in Cricklewood having a particularly bad day, what with this vexatious epic quest, and all.

  In a nutshell: dragons embarrass me.

  The box containing the game software didn’t quite fit into my handbag, and I was slightly self-conscious about people spotting it as I caught the tube. The last time I felt so embarrassed about the visible contents of my handbag was last spring, when I was carrying around a gigantic book on the history of the Ku Klux Klan. For two long months, that book made me want to shout, “I’m reading this because I know they were bad—not to get tips!” to any halfway full train. Similarly, a visible copy of World of Warcraft makes me want to shout, “I don’t seek to nullify my rampant sexual dysfunctions by pretending to be a Paladin called Thrusthammer Orcbash! IT’S FOR WORK!”

  Of course, the person I want to shout this to the most is myself. I am the judgmental one here. By and large, my theory runs, people into goblins and wizards are people for whom the utopian sexual and racial equality offered by, say, sci-fi, is alarming. All those black chicks in lycra jumpsuits philosophizing about the fallible nature of humanity, and able to vote? Brrrr!

  In short, the entire fantasy genre is the domain of the sweaty, white, non-intellectual Herbert, and has very little to offer me—a sassy, metropolitan, militant feminist with an aversion to a) items of clothing made of skinned Gnoll hide and b) swinging at someone with a two-headed axe.

  Imagine my surprise, then, on being able to write the following sentence: on the first day I had World of Warcraft, I stayed up and played it until 2 AM. I got into bed at 10 PM, switched on the electric blanket, and opened my laptop, with the simple objective of “Getting my bearings” for twenty minutes. Three hours later, I was trying to retrieve the stolen journals of Grelin Whitebeard from a cave full of Rockjaw Troggs, while running a very lucrative trade in killing and skinning boars on the side. Then I accidentally got on the Deeprun Tram to Stormwind City, and had to bale out when I realized I was far too poor to be in a city where “Heavy Mithril Pants” are twenty-seven pieces of silver. 2 AM! I was so engrossed, I forgot to take out my contact lenses, and fell asleep with them glued to my eyes.

  Although I am pathologically, fatally prone to exaggeration, it would be a simple statement of fact to say that World of Warcraft is approximately as addictive as methadone. Indeed, when Robbie Williams recently went into rehab with the ostensibly risible addictions of Red Bull and espresso, I thought, “It’s just as well you have never been on Coldridge Pass trying to deliver a package of Kobold reports to Senir Whitebeard. Then, my friend, you would know true craving.”

  As with all good drugs, World of Warcraft has turned my perceptions of the world upside down. Take, for instance, the very beginning of the game, when you decide on the character you will play. Personally, I’ve never created a character to play a game with before—hey, I have to do that in front of the closet every morning for real, and I think all the ladies will know what I’m saying here. But when it’s for an inconsequential internet diversion, and you have almost infinite choice of what you will become—good, evil, male, female, human, weird minotaur thing with problem hair—it brings to the fore several profound self-realizations. My inner self, it turns out, is a beefy ginger dwarf—one with a huge beard. He is who I want to be. He is secret Caitlin. Discovering this is the kind of thing troubled celebrities pay Dr. Drew a small fortune to discover. I had done it in seven minutes, and with a choice of beard stylings, to boot.

  I named him “Scottbaio”—you remember: Chachi in Happy Days. The obvious ginger dwarf name—and launched him out into the world. Still, at this point, deeply skeptical about the game, I had pre-formulated a plan to make the whole experience tolerable. Whereas the ultimate purpose of most participants is to overcome the evil Horde through a serious of pitched battles and strategic quests, I had
come up with something a little more subtle. I thought the best way to quell the Horde would be to gradually gentrify the Killing Fields, starting by opening a deli, and selling speciality cheese. After all, the lure of endless, sensual evil is nothing compared to a good, spoonable Vacherin. Those demons would be capitulating, buying a Victorian townhouse and coming over to the Alliance in no time.

  However, as a new émigré to the realm of Sha’tar, I knew the deli was something I’d have to work up to slowly. I spent an hour tootling around a very pretty snowy mountain running a few errands—delivering parcels, relaying messages, buying nicer boots, earning a bob or two. Already, the addictive part of WoW was becoming apparent—through a cunning combination of small, quick tasks and longer, more complex ones that can be chipped away at over time—there’s always something you could “pop in” and do, or just spend “ten minutes more” “knocking off.” And—contrary to all perceptions of online gaming being a lonely, solitary pursuit for, ahem, “bachelors”—I found WoW to be an excellent and rewarding family pastime. My two daughters—six and three—were thrilled to sit next to me, watching mummy kill the pigs, and jump over fences.

  Indeed, I was marveling at how female-friendly and “untestosteroney” it was, compared to what I expected, when a member of the Horde called “Hellfist” started stoving my head in from behind. Having no idea what to do, I fall back on my old playground technique—I try to talk my way out of it.

  “Please don’t smite me—I’m having an asthma attack!” I type. “I’ve come on a quest by accident, and if you hit me, it’ll be murder!”

  Hellfist makes a clucking chicken sound, to highlight my cowardice, and hits me until I die. When I resurrect in a nearby graveyard, a dwarf warrior called Cadisfael is sitting next to me.

  “I ownz you, n00b,” he says.

  “I’m afraid I’m thirty-one, and don’t have a clue what you’re on about,” I say, as primly as a ginger dwarf named after the over-emotional one from Happy Days can.

  “That means that you are a newbie, and I own you. You are my bitch,” Cadisfael explains, patiently.

  “Buzz off, you Herbert,” I say, trying to jump over a fence.

  “Cait it’s me, Joe,” Cadisfael says, jumping over the fence with ease, and then executing an impressive Russian dance. It’s my fourteen-year-old math genius brother, Joe! He’s tracked me down online! Jesus!

  “I’ve had to regenerate with a new character here,” he explains, rather crossly, as we walk up a mountain. “I don’t usually come to this realm. Sha’tar is for newbie losers. I’m usually in Hellscream, with the hardcore. Over there, I’m a Level 66 mage, with an Epix mount.”

  “I’m in a much higher tax bracket than you,” I counter, trying to smash him with my giant dwarven hammer. He easily dodges the blow.

  I’d like to pretend that Joe and I then spent the next week or so bonding in our fantastical realm—going on a serious of daring raids on the goblin mines together, before drinking a flagon of hot Rhapsody Malt back at the Scarlet Raven tavern. In actual fact, Joe is so repulsed by the easiness of my realm that he logs off after an hour, with a cheery farewell of “I ownz you, n00b! Pwnz!,” which he then has to log back on to explain means a kind of “zapping sound that you make when you hit someone.”

  Still, he’s given me some good tips: find a trainer who will teach me new smiting spells, earn money skinning boars, spend the money on armor, and don’t try and chat to people too much—they find it weird.

  I flagrantly disregard this last rule ten minutes later, in a bar at Anvilmar, where I try to start a conversation with a room of saturnine-looking dwarven warriors.

  “They need a jukebox in here,” I suggest, to kick-start the debate. “Some Queen, bit of classic Bowie. Guns N’ Roses. And maybe one of those frozen margarita machines. Razz the place up a bit.”

  A couple of implacable pugilists issue a polite “LOL” but then go back to buying huge and fatal swords from the weapons vendor. One small gnome girl called Flopsey, however, sidles over.

  “Yeah—maybe a pub quiz, or a meat raffle?” she suggests. We sit down at the table, and spend the next twenty minutes discussing what we’d like to see in WoW to cater to the female palate. We’d like the option to work as prostitutes, we decide—it would be a very quick way of earning money. We’d like to be able to conceive and raise children—seeing if they look like the father, teaching them our spells. We’d like a bigger range of wardrobe and hair styles, and the ability to gain points simply by being amusing, or wise. Or pulling off a good outfit.

  Indeed, it’s turning out to be a thoroughly enjoyable conversation, when Flopsey’s character suddenly issues the message “flirting,” and comes over to my side of the table. Of course! She thinks I’m a buff ginger warrior-priest—called Scottbaio! All this conversation about virtual prostitution has an entirely different spin from her side of the table! She wants my hot dwarf ass!

  So here I am, a thirty-one-year-old mother of two, at 2 AM, sitting in bed in my Bliss Spa Socks—and having some polymorphous cybersexual frisson with a fifteen-year-old gnome called Flopsey, who lives in Antwerp.

  Really, the modern age is a marvel.

  I do a lot for charity, but I don’t like to talk about it, apart from in this column, first published in 2009, and then obviously in this book, where I reprint it, desperate not to go on about how much I do for charity. PLEASE don’t use the phrase “She cares too much” about me. It would EMBARRASS memememememe.

  I DO A LOT FOR CHARITY, BUT I WOULD NEVER MENTION IT

  Walking a marathon is eeeeeasy, compared to running it. That’s just obvious. That’s why I agreed to walk a marathon—the Moonwalk, in May.

  Apparently, it’s all in aid of a charity—but I wasn’t really listening to the details, to be honest. All I heard was my friends Dent, Hughes and Kennedy saying how, once they’d finished the Moonwalk, they were going for “a massive champagne breakfast at Claridge’s!”

  In my head, what I could see was a giant sausage—about twenty-six miles long—and a very short stroll—around five and a half inches, and on a plate, next to some hash browns. A twenty-six-mile-walk seemed like a fairly minor consideration, really, in order to have a breakfast like that. Walking? Toddlers do it! Old people! Hens! How hard can it be?

  “Sign me up for the bacon—I mean the walk!” I said, cheerfully. “What are we all wearing? Does one dress up for breakfast? 8 AM seems a little early for heels and a dress—but then, it is Claridge’s.”

  “You won’t care what you’re wearing,” Kennedy said, with an abrupt grimness. Kennedy has done marathons before. She refused to say any more. I felt my sausage get a little smaller.

  The next week, Kennedy sent through an email with our training schedule on it. The email was entitled “THE TALK OF DOOM.” Reading through, it was hard to argue with the declaration. It involved phrases like “You’re going to lose some toenails—get used to it,” and, “If you don’t train, I can guarantee you the marathon is going to be one of the most miserable experiences of your life. Fact.”

  As my previous high-water mark of “miserable experiences” was attending a rave in Warrington where CS gas was released by an angry bouncer, and I ended up having it washed out of my eyes, with milk, by a man off his face on Ecstasy, who kept calling my teeth his “pearls,” I was keen not to add to the pantheon. I went on a training walk the next day.

  Fifteen miles seemed like a reasonable target. Three miles in, I realized that lacy tights are basically the midway point between “exfoliating linen facecloth” and “cilice belt.”

  Four miles in, I realized that my iPhone pedometer app—although free, and, also, pretty—wouldn’t let me listen to music or make phone calls. This meant that, at a pace of 4mph, I was going to spend the next three hours doing nothing but walking in total silence.

  There is something deeply meditative about
simply putting one foot in front of the other. The Aborgines walked the Songlines across Australia. Pilgrimages to Mecca, Knock, Lourdes or the Ganges trigger powerful connections between an ostensibly idling brain, and a constantly perambulating body. I, too, felt this deep, primal connection between body and landscape, from the top of Camden Road to the bottom of it. Then I felt so bored I could have punched a bird off a tree.

  To pass the time—of which I had plenty—I tried to work out the last time I’d faced so many hours of unavoidable tedium. I concluded that it would have been in 1988, when I was thirteen, with no cable, internet or iPod, and hadn’t yet learned how to masturbate. In those days—which I remember as a solid year of Sundays—I would pass the hours by lying on my bed, and seeing how long I could stare at the telegraph pole outside my window without blinking.

  My mother would regularly come in and find me lying on the bed, tears pouring down my face.

  “What’s the matter?” she would ask.

  “Two minutes fifty-one seconds!” I would say—high on how much my eyes hurt.

  It started to rain, hard. I trudged over Waterloo Bridge as buses neatly transferred whole puddles across my right hand side. On the South Bank, I went into Eat to get a coffee. The barrista looked scared. When I saw myself in the mirror, I could see why. My fake leopardskin coat was soaked. My hair ran with water. My sneakers didn’t just squelch when I walked—they glugged. The barrista had looked at all the evidence, and concluded that I must have just failed to commit suicide by jumping in the Thames—and that now I was having a coffee, while I waited for the tide to rise a little higher.

  When I went to pay for the coffee, he gave me a free brownie. I translated this brownie as the message, “Don’t jump again.” It was 486 calories of humanity.