Awkward Situations For Girls Blog

Apparently I am on the telly tonight at 9pm, talking to Greg James about blogging, boys and Twitter.

So if you’ve always wanted to hear me tell a 3-minute anecdote about meeting my boyfriend on Twitter like a total saddo, now’s the time.

Hopefully I left out the bit where, after a year of tweeting, I sent him something akin to ‘I have a crush on you!’ like a kid in the playground. Which - ?!?! - I followed up with ‘but, yeah, crushes fade, so let’s see if it’s still there in a few months, right?’ Nobody should let me speak to men.

Britain Unzipped, 9pm, BBC Three.

Awkward Situations For Girls: Getting Old

For many years I have taken people to task for using the word ‘trendy’.
   “Look at your trendy new haircut!”
   “Just bought some trendy Gok Wan
   designer specs!”
No. Unless you are my mother, her mother, her sister, their great-aunt, or at the very least old enough to call Dame Vera your compadre and recall VE Day first hand, I don’t want to hear it. ‘Trendy’ is a maledictum. (BAD WORD.) It is not acceptable for young finger-on-the-pulse people to label things ‘trendy’: it smells faintly of inherent old fogeyness; a whiff of jumping on a bandwagon rather than wanting to express something because you like it.

Now I’ve laid my cards so plainly on the table, I want to tell you something of moderate distress.

I’ve noticed a recent influx of young people entering my daily orbit. A baby boom of younglings who are - dare I say it? A little bit trendy. Trending trendsters. I’m surrounded by twenty-somethings so much more hip than me that I have started to refer to them as ‘trendy’. Paging Vera Lynn! 

You know the types: the receptionists who spend every penny of their £18k salary in Topshop recreating car boot grunge, presumably bashing their clothes to buggery in the tumble-dryer to look ‘distressed’ before ironing their hair into a pillow case. Or the sartorialists who don purple lacy tights in Shoreditch on a Saturday night - when they’re male; perhaps the PR girls who manage to apply false eyelashes every weekday without creating what everyone else begrudgingly calls Lady Drunk Spider Face. 

I am metaphorically (and probably imminently in reality) standing outside a party to which I am no longer invited, peering through the window at its occupants dancing around with strange haircuts in “jeggings”. 
   “Have you heard the new PLACENTA/WRECKER tune?” - That’s the kind of thing kids are talking about right now, aren’t they; bands we haven’t heard of. - “It’s a tune. Love that shit. PLACENTA/WRECKER are ACE.”

Look, I’ve started saying ‘we’: I want you to tell me that you too feel as old as the hills and similarly haven’t got a clue which electro duo with extraneous punctuation are headlining the new derelicte festival held in an oversized teacup just outside of Brighton. I want to hear that you are increasingly drawn to the music of your past and have begun to attend 90s/00s nights that can only be described as “knowingly-ironic”. Bon Jovi? Destiny’s Child? God forbid, a comfy Green Day?

As a certified old person (30), I’ve additionally found fear in a word I can’t help but associate with that sort-of awkward, youthful self-consciousness: ‘Blogger’. I’ve struggled with blogging recently, and taken a little hiatus for different reasons - some were good, and some were grey matter bad. But increasingly I feel disconnected from young people, and I’m desperate for this not to sound facetious or insincere: the UK riots drove me away from an understanding of one social group of young people; the perpetual fame of WAGs and TOWIE another. I can’t keep up so tirelessly with what’s cool, and I can’t wear crop tops that show my left tit. I’ve found it harder to talk openly here about my opinions and silly feelings in the way that I used to, when deep down I know they’re probably not representative of the zeitgeist. 

The thing is (with a hat-tip to my 90-year-old granddad here, who I sound just like), people younger than me seem to care more than ever about what they look like and how every small thing they do is perceived. Everything has got a little too self-conscious, too affected, and perhaps a little too skin deep. Discomfited ‘trendy’ people blog with their end reader’s opinion in mind, fill Tumblr with images that look right, or share songs they’re listening to across social media platforms knowing their peers will see them. (Why does nobody share that they’re listening to Britney?) It must be so exhausting. I’m exhausted. Wasn’t it great when we all had bad Rachel haircuts and didn’t have to Instagram photos of them for instant feedback (or judgement)? 

Over the past year, three individual hairdressers have suggested it would be easier to ‘fix’ the furrow in my forehead - with botox, one would presume, rather than a lobotomy - instead of cutting a fringe to hide it. Whaaaa? Have I missed a trend, are people really judging me for my furrowed brow? Is it not just a sign of wizened character?

Am I old?

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On being a gadget maverick

I have a secret: I don’t use a case for my iPhone. Or my Kindle. 

Every day, as I cram into the London Underground carriage and look around at the hordes guarding their gadgets protectively in a leather or plastic wallet, hands pushing the case irritatedly out the way while they read, swipe or listen, I feel like… a maverick.

“You don’t need it,” I want to whisper. “Jobs did a good enough job. Trust Jobs! Trust the casing it was built with…”

But I guess it’s human nature to protect your babies.

I tend to pull out my Kindle self-consciously - like a self-conscious superhero, I suspect - eyes darting around to see if anyone has spotted that I’m using my gadget naked. Un gadget au naturel. 

What is this obsession with buying a beautiful piece of kit and immediately covering it with a garish rubber fetish suit? 

I saw a girl on the way to work with an iPhone 4S dressed in a bunny suit today. A BUNNY SUIT. (The iPhone 4S, not the girl on the way to work.) It had these alert little bunny ears sticking perkily off the top, like some sort of clitoral stimulant. 

When what he says changes a little bit

When you first meet your fella, you’ll probably say nice things to each other all the time. Stuff about finding each other wildly attractive; “I like your hair pushed back off your face”; general rubbish about being destined for one another because no one else would’ve spotted that clever reference in the film you saw together that one time. 

When you’ve been together a year, your conversation is likely to skew a little more like this, which I enjoyed yesterday:

Him: Are you going to wash your hair today?
Me: *puts on mirror face, tosses hair, smiles through eyelashes* Do I need to? 
Him: Yes. It smells like wet straw. 

Romance doesn’t die: it simply gets absorbed into the practicalities of the everyday. Things you might tolerate with affection at the start of your relationship - “aww, her hair’s like a damp hay-bale!” - become factual truths we chuck in each other’s faces without a care. (“I wasn’t kidding when I said your feet smell like Brie.”) But who else do we do that to? Well…

It’s sort of what we do with family.

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Why I feel uneasy about Lana Del Rey

It’s not because of her fabricated identity – because, let’s face it; that has long been pop music’s way. Bob Dylan, Elton John, Gaga.

It’s not because she’s a bit rubbish live – that’s also frequently pop music’s way. Britney, Milli Vanilli, Steps.

It’s also not because I feel duped by her failed past as Lizzy Grant; I don’t really care about that level of manipulation - what’s in a name? Just as I don’t mind that, despite releasing Video Games as a limited edition 7’ on an obscure label, Lana Del Rey was actually signed to major label Interscope the whole time. I don’t mind all the ‘gangster Nancy Sinatra’ front, or the pertinent outreach to hipster blogs, or the curiously self-conscious posturing.

So what is it that makes me uneasy?

I think it’s her face.


There’s no denying that Lana Del Rey is very pretty, and cosmetic surgery has long been acknowledged an expected part of celebrity. Gone are the years when Posh Spice emphatically denied breast enlargement; here are the days when the media widely reports Cheryl Cole spending £14,000 replacing her teeth, while Katie Price has botox and boob jobs on camera in her reality show.

What’s more, corrective surgery among non-celebrities - so beautifully termed ‘civilians’ by Elizabeth Hurley - is broadly acceptable, should that person’s defect be adequately ‘severe’ enough: perhaps a large nose that engenders bullying; maybe a boob reduction to ease back strain. The war on ageing is also roughly allowed, socially - so long as it doesn’t devolve into the semblance of a cat woman.

But there is something sad and even a little deplorable about a young girl who changes her face and body to improve the chances of a career. Even more so, when an artificially-enhanced sultry look hints at an increased sexuality.

I find myself getting cross about the level to which Lana Del Rey has changed the way she looks to better sell a product. I mind that Lana Del Rey has allegedly had lip augmentation and purportedly changed her appearance through cosmetic surgery… to what end? To look a little more old Hollywood?

It’s ridiculous that LDR is arguably more famous for her manufactured and enhanced image than for her songs. (What kind of message does it send out to kids growing up in our TOWIE culture which celebrates fame over talent time and time again, when a girl with a nice voice had to change the way she looked to be successful? What does it say to young girls, who become insecure about their body image at the age of 9 - that you can’t make it unless you look like you could suck a black hole into your mouth and swallow the universe whole?)

We’re making Lana Del Rey famous for making it after she’d changed the way the way she looks. We keep bloody writing about her. Look, I’m doing it now! We’re idiots.

Cosmetic surgery makes women distrust women who’ve had it. I’m sorry, it does. It undermines our sense of who they are; we wonder why they were so unhappy with themselves that they felt they had to change so significantly (and permanently). Purely from a genetic standpoint, we look at bone structure and evaluate whether we should procreate with that person - whether they’ve inherited good genes which they’d pass on to any offspring, or not. But how can we know if they’ve fannied about away from the genepool?

Enhancing image down to the airbrushing of every last thumbnail has been rife for so long that we’re used to unobtainable, perfect stars. My problem with Lana Del Rey is that she’s 24 and she’s changed her face to make it more sexy. And that, in turn, indicates that she didn’t think she was sexy enough before. And now she wants us to perceive her as more sexy. And what’s sexy about that?

Lana Del Rey’s album, Born To Die, is released on Monday

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