Moranthology Read Free

nineties?” asks Caitlin Moran.
    This really was a symphonic piece of bullshit. In the piece—600 words long—I lamented that I and my friend (“She’s sixteen—six and ten years on the planet, four leap years—and says her life terrifies her because it seems so long until she’ll die.”) were being culturally crushed by the Baby Boomers.
    â€œSometimes we climb up onto the five-story parking garage, and throw bits of gravel at the people below, and my friend will shout ‘WHO AM I?’ and I laugh until I cry because no one can hear us, and no one can tell her.”
    It’s specious nonesense from beginning to end: for starters, you can’t get access to the roof of any five-story parking garage in Wolverhampton: they’re all completely sealed off, clearly to prevent health & safety issues exactly like the one I’m lying about here. And I honestly don’t think any teenager has ever shouted “WHO AM I????” to the sky, except on dramas on Channel 4, which is exactly where I’d got this from.
    â€œShe has no identity, save that which advertisers sell her,” I continue piously, castigating the whole advertising industry; wholly ignoring the fact that I love the song from the Bran Flakes ad (“They’re tasty/Tasty/Very very tasty/They’re very tasty!”) and am quite emotionally invested in the romantic plotline to the Gold Blend couple.
    I ’d like to quote you more of the terrible pieces I wrote around this time—thrashing around, desperately, for something, anything to write about—but I can’t, because this is where my Fleet Street career ground to a halt for a while. A sum total of five pieces before everyone realized—including, finally, me—that I had absolutely nothing to write about. Or, more truthfully, that I did—but I just didn’t know what it was yet.
    I went underground (back to bed) and tried to work out how I could get a job writing when I knew—and I’m being generous here—absolutely nothing about the world. It took a while, but by the time I was sixteen, I had a plan.
    So I’d finally figured out I couldn’t write about my own life, because I haven’t done anything. I was going to have to write about other, older people, who’ve actually done stuff, instead. I was going to become a rock critic—because I read NME and Melody Maker, and they are publications where writers will use words like “jaguary” and “jubilee” and “shagreen” while describing why they do or don’t like U2, and I think this is probably something I could have a go at.
    I write test reviews of my five favorite albums— Hats by Blue Nile, Pills’n’Thrills’n’Bellyaches by Happy Mondays, High Land, Hard Rain by Aztec Camera, Reading, Writing & Arithmetic by the Sundays, and Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction—and send them to the reviews editor, in an envelope that I carefully scent with Lemon Essence from the kitchen cupboard, to act in lieu of a lemon sponge in a suitcase. I am still working on the presumption that people will only give me work if they somehow associate me with baked goods. Perhaps it’s this kind of erroneous assumption you get educated out of you at Oxbridge.
    The reviews editor calls me the next day and asks me to do a test review of a local gig. When it’s printed, I get £28.42, and become the freelance stringer for the Midlands area: Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Derby. If there’s a band who’ve sold around 2,000 records playing in the backroom of a pub within twenty miles of Spaghetti Junction, I am all over it. I am now, vaguely, in charge of indie in West Mercia.
    After I had been working at Melody Maker for just seven months—working my patch, filing my reviews, stacking up those £28.42s—I wrote a review of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’s new album,