Not much wakes me up. I slept through the Great Storm of ’87, the Tsunami of 2004 (admittedly, the reason was probably that I was in England), and most of my lectures at Uni 1998-2001– particularly those of a hunchbacked spittler nicknamed Gladrags who tried to tell me my poetry would show such promise if only I stayed conscious. But something made me lurch from sleep this week, so I knew it must be important. I was tipsily lolling on a late night C2C back from a gig in the big smoke, and enjoying the background mumbling of the tracks and the chatter. I remember nothing of my friends’ conversation other than the mention of Belton Hills being raped for the sake of 16 beds. “WHAT?” They’d done the impossible. I was awake.

They reiterated that the proposed building on the site of the glorious fields near Hadleigh Castle was for a mere sixteen beds in a new Fair Havens hospice development, and for (a much more lucrative) conference centre. We all raged about it, then went home.

I’ve felt angry and sick about it ever since. Why build on this site, when there are so many other places? Why scrub out that patch of green that fills everyone’s hearts as their trains trundle in and out of the town, as they walk their dogs, as they play with their kids? Why encroach on that vast spread of ‘untouchable’ history which surrounds the castle ruins, which gives a sense of preserved calm and escape before you hit the built-up reality? Why take away something which can never be got back –so a select few families can comfort themselves that their relatives’ passings are somehow nicer because they are doing it in a former field? Why eradicate nature and beauty for a conference centre so that good-hearted workers of the hospice can be rewarded for their work by sitting in their meetings and staring out at the estuary – awkwardly ignoring the fact they have made a whole town that bit unhappier?

Some might say this is harsh response. It is harsh. Dying people deserve somewhere nice to do it – of course they do. But if everyone who has ever watched someone in their final stages of their lives was honest, they would say the environs outside the particular room they are dying in are pretty irrelevant. The administrations of death are pragmatic – they are not things of beauty. Once you get to the stage of needing hospice care, you are beyond demanding the silence of rolling hills and an unlimited view of the changing tides. The kindnesses you need are not big – like fields and skies. They are small – like a kind voice and a held hand.

A dear family friend of ours – Karen Eaton, one of the sweetest ladies I have ever known – spent her final weeks in Fair Havens hospice along Chalkwell Avenue. She complained of a stomach upset at ours one Christmas, and within a year she had been taken by a relentless bowel cancer. Her room at Fair Havens was all that it should have been. Roomy enough, nicely decorated, well-equipped; respectful of her condition and fate. I sat and watched my mum hold the hand of our friend who was barely recognisable as the person she once was, as she lay in silence, eyes closed, occasionally being fed water through a straw. Karen didn’t need an illustrious address to give her death dignity, she didn’t need views of fields and sky; she was beyond that, heavily drugged, and the curtains were shut. She needed solid regular care of her needs, and to know loved ones were simply ‘there’. She needed to not be in pain, and to not feel alone. Whatever else went through her mind is personal to her – but I would be willing to wager it was nothing to do with the fancy Chalkwell house she was in, or the proximity to the sea. These are merely things that look good in a brochure for possible clients – they are never important factors when it comes to those awful final days.

Karen’s favourite saying was ‘Love and Light’. She signed off her cards this way; she lived her life by its inspiration, and in the end, she needed only that. Love, and the light which came from whichever spiritual discourse she had with herself; the light of hope of what would come after the pain.

Fair Havens should know – should be better. And they should care for this town’s comforts in life as they do so well for those in death. Those fields – those views, those comforts to thousands – can never be got back from the claws of the diggers.

Decorate other rooms. Have a board room in some other functional place.
Stay away from Belton Hills.

Lovely Karen

It is 10:46 on the day of my column deadline. I am writing this while eating toasted tea-cakes in bed. I feel like some kind of bohemian slattern bashing her confessions into a gilt typewriter with a wonky ‘S’ key while a naked man grunts beside her. But in this case, the man is a dog, and the typewriter is an iPad.

 
That’s right mofos. I bought myself an iPad, and I am in love. (I would insert exploding heart emoticons here if I thought they’d get loyally reproduced by the print staff.)

 
I feel a bit swish. Tip tap. Tip tap. I know there are fancier technological purchases a girl could make, but they’re not as cute. I have been putting off buying one of these bad boys because I felt it was a luxury when I already have a laptop – but when my laptop started to whir and delay displaying the words I had just typed like my thoughts were being reviewed by some sort of logic council, I thought to myself “The only practical thing to do is buy something pretty. That is what a hard-working girl needs to operate efficiently in a modern world.”

 
It is 11:08 on the day of my column deadline. I just paused in writing my column so I could perform the important task of assigning the features editor ‘VIP email status’ and a noise which makes me feel professional and productive when he emails me to see where my column is. It’s quite time consuming, having this much means of efficiency. I’m not getting much done. I might need another tea-cake…

 
I finally gave in and bought this beaut when I found a cheque I had forgotten to pay in. I figured it was like bonus money, so not naughty at all. I don’t know why it should feel like such a luxurious purchase when I spend most of my waking hours typing; why feel guilty spending my money on a thing which is totally functional?

 
The answer is I have never been comfortable spending money on big things. I hardly ever spend more than ten pounds on an item of clothing because it feels like a silly waste. Sometimes I wish I was the kind of girl who could stand swooning in a shop window at a pair of sky-high Jimmy Choos then go in and proudly blow £300 on a credit card… but if I did that I would probably die. If not out of buyer’s remorse then certainly because I’d tumble to my death in the heels. I am a clumsy oaf who should not seek to raise herself above 5’7″.

 
I suppose I am so uncomfortable with big spends because we never had much money when I was a kid. My mum pretty much raised us on her own and for many years she had that awfully common single-parent’s frustration of not being able to quite afford to earn her own money while raising her children. I paid for my school lunches with tickets, and milk and bread was bought by counting out coins from a huge Gilbey’s gin bottle. Finding a fifty pee in there felt dead fancy. I thought all families did this.

 
I went to a funeral of an old man named Charlie Jones with my mum a few years ago, and during a hymn she casually turned to me and said that when we were little he used to go to the butchers and bring us back huge bags of meat because he knew we didn’t have much. I didn’t quite know what to do with that. I just thought he was a nice old man we saw occasionally; one of the motley peripheral characters that made up our strange patchwork family. I felt like I should get up and sing some epic gospel number about braising steak to thank him. But I didn’t.

 
So I’ll never buy designer heels and this iPad only made it back from Currys to my bed because I found a forgotten cheque in an old broken bag with some stale gum and a lipstick I will never wear because it makes me look like  a dead prostitute. I’m glad I feel swish typing on it. I’m glad I don’t feel like expensive things are an entitlement in an age where under-10s feel like Dickensian waifs if they’re not at least on a waiting list for the new iPhone. I’m glad I know what it’s like to count twenty pees out of a gin bottle and that a man named Charlie Jones was kind to my mum. It makes things feel a lot more special, and makes me even more determined to try and make a living from tapping away on this pretty pretty thing.

 
It’s 12:26, and I’m going to toast all that with another tea-cake.

It was as my neck cricked while being told by an agitated director to lurch into Russell Howard’s groin for the twelth time that I thought “I’m beginning to suspect this job isn’t as glamorous as I thought.” I tried to shake it off so I could get the take right, but it was hard – because now I was aware that the liquid glycerine sprayed on to make me look ‘clammy’ was now running into my eyeballs and stinging like a wasp stuck in a tent.

I know several teenage girls who would disagree with me and think that having any sort of proximity to this man and his bits would be the height of glamour, (the scene was loosely based on the ‘scientific discovery’ that oral sex cures morning sickness – I’m guessing the scientist was a man…) but the truth is I mostly just stared at the Diesel tag on his jeans pocket and thought “I like that font.” In between takes Russ would continue a story of when he was delirious in hospital and tried to buy the male nurses for his premiership football team, while I laughed and repositioned my pregnancy suit which was permanently on the wonk and make me look like more like the elephant man that an expectant mother.

Later, I sat eating a jacket potato in the dark and thought about the nature of glamour. I’d switched the light off because the dressing-room bulb was blinking. There was no natural light and no air because we were deep in the bowels of the studios, shooting in the labyrinthine halls of an old hospital set. The tap dripped, and I wondered if this is what prison feels like after lights-out. It was quite meditative actually, eating a potato in the dark. The dressing room walls were as thin as paper, and to my left I could hear the producer briefing an old lady how to be a Jamaican gangster, and to my right the costume lady talking a ‘glamour model’ through the lacing procedure of an all-body thong. I was glad I wasn’t old and being made to practice how to say “WAGWAAAN” – and that I had started saying no to all the excruciating ‘sexy’ scenes which always made me want to die. I never thought I’d be glad to just do a simple hospital bed fellatio scene.

So if doing glamorous things like telly isn’t glamorous, what is? Beautiful clothes, illustrious parties, rich successful people swanking off with each other? I’ve been to lots of parties that are supposed to have been glamorous, but when you get talking to people, they’re all just ordinary dudes wearing stuff they don’t normally wear, feeling uncomfortable, on display (or invisible), or worst of all – bored. Or they’re cretins who truly believe that wearing an expensive jacket and walking past someone famous while holding a martini glass negates every suspicion they’ve ever had that actually, they’re just ‘ordinary’. Mostly, these parties just feel like work – which surely must be the antithesis of glamour. Lots of secret politics and connived networking and faux-modest gloating and bitching. Bleurgh.

Perhaps glamour doesn’t really exist; perhaps it’s only ever an illusion. Perhaps it’s the unattainable; the worlds we’ll never be invited into, the people we’ll never be. Our perception of glamour in others never lasts when we see that they are real; once we’re inside the worlds and see how they work, they’re not magical anymore. And those who are seen as icons of glamour know the truth inside and are troubled by it; they still look in the mirror and see the nose they’ll always hate and the gathering crow’s feet and the mean thing they did to someone that didn’t deserve it.

I tried to remember when I first was aware of the notion of glamour. I was transported back to sitting on my mother’s bed, aged seven, watching her get ready to go out. I was transfixed by her hair and make-up and clothes, the smell of her Avon creams and her Chanel Number 5. I couldn’t imagine ever being grown up enough to wear heels or nice underwear, or having enough stuff to warrant a handbag. She was a goddess to me; the most beautiful luscious thing I’d ever seen. That was glamour – because I was too young to see that it wasn’t real; that actually, underneath it all, she was sad at the time. That glamour was the cloak of something beautiful, pulled over something ordinary and frail.

“OK, CAN WE HAVE SADIE FOR THE SPEAKING TOILET SCENE PLEASE?”

I stopped pondering, finished my potato, and shuffled down the hall to make-up, where they bronzed my feet for a knicker-dropping scene in a toilet cubicle. I did that, then took a handful of mini-Crunchies and some baby wipes for the train home. And that felt good, because it was the opposite of glamour.

Down a quiet lane in Rochford, by the muddy bank of a river’s dead-end,  nestled in the shadow of an old flour mill and half open to fields of long grass, is an old house.

Like many old houses which became too expensive to run it is now a business. Broomhills Care Home. It is not, as you might think, limited to those who are old. There are younger residents who suffer from Alzheimer’s, and here they are – all tying up their histories in a house which must surely have almost forgotten its own by now.

I found myself at Broomhills last Saturday for a summer fête. My boy’s Nan had just moved in so we went to visit. Matt was understandably nervous of seeing someone he loved in an unfamiliar place, and I was a little nervous too, because I’d never been to a care home and I was afraid of seeing difficult things, and of seeing my boy manfully trying not to be sad.

Let me tell you something. If you ever want to dispel your fear that all care homes are sad places, actually go and visit one. I suppose the bad ones (the ones to be feared, preferably inspected and shut down) don’t have nice events like fêtes. But the nice ones have open doors and open hearts. And jam roly-poly.

It helped I suppose that they had lovely grounds to hold the fête in. Helped too that it was a gloriously sunny day, and that a barbecue was billowing in a corner, manned by a cheery fellow wielding a spatula and a girl gesturing to the mustard and ketchup like a game-show assistant. There were tombolas and cookie stalls and lucky dips and piles of jumble. The garden went from a modest smattering of people oozing familial obligation to a hive of people happy to be there. The care home was fun; who knew?

Nan-Nan, or Isabella Georgina, or Bella for short, is a tiny Welsh lady with huge bright eyes. I felt like I sort of knew her from all the stories I’d heard, but I also felt shy. I didn’t want to fawn over her or be patronisingly polite just because she was old and in a home. I said hello, then mooched about a bit knowing I’d talk to her later. I looked at the stalls. I ate a burger. Then I spilled mustard on my boob and had to go inside to try and clean it off, even though Matt’s mum joked that I was in good company. It was nice of her to say so – but as far as I could see, I was the only one with any stains.) It was as I nosed around that I saw two things that I will never forget.

Further down the corridor where I scrubbed mustard from my ashamed right boob was…a bus stop. A bench with a timetable and a bus-stop sign in a little alcove in the corridor. Apparently some of the residents are so used to getting buses and having routines that they get anxious not being able to carry on as normal, and having a bit of a sit-down in the corridor bus-stop helps. They sit and they wait and the anxiety passes. My heart exploded quietly at the aptness of the metaphor.

Then, as I went back into the garden, I saw a hearse. “Uh oh”, I thought. This was starting to get a bit overwhelming – and not even winning some Dove Satin Bath on the tombola was going to make it better. I looked closer and saw that the hearse was full of balloons. I thought they might be trying to sneak a corpse out without spoiling the party. WHACK SOME BALLOONS IN, BETTE – NO ONE’LL SUSPECT NORRIS IS DEAD TIL TOMORROW. Balloons in a hearse. God. Apparently you had to guess how many there were to win some amazing prize. A free funeral for a loved one of your choice or something, I dunno. I was deeply unsettled. But then I laughed. It seemed like the only thing you could do; laugh at the paraphernalia of death, laugh at all the stuff that scares you.

I ate a cookie, made Matt win me nice smellies on the tombola, and I chatted to Bella. She gave me some sage veterinary advice for my sick dog, and I rubbed some Sanctuary body lotion into her tiny hands while she smiled round at her family. Matt left happy that he’d seen Nan-Nan at a fête, in the sunshine, and we spoke of going back for a visit soon – because we knew it wasn’t a place to be scared of anymore.

To be honest, mustard is more of a threat than death at the moment. That stuff gets everywhere.

(There were 101, by the way. Balloons.)

It was about this time last year that I was stood in a giftshop at Washington’s Dulles Airport, looking for a souvenir to try and encapsulate one of the best trips of my life. I’d just spent a week on a ranch in Colorado with my friend Susie, playing at being cowgirls with real cowboys. I’d galloped at the top of the Rocky mountains on a mad horse named Pebbles who seemed intent on killing me, I’d made a garland of flowers and pine cones on a flat rock by a stream as a memorial to my Dad as an eagle soared overhead. I’d swigged smuggled margherita mix from a lemonade bottle while making a load of reserved Christians bellow Bohemian Rhapsody under the moon on a hay-cart. It was one of those trips which couldn’t rightly be named a holiday because it wasn’t just a break away – a pausing of normal life – but a trip which actually helped to move my life on, a trip which spurred a vital shift in my heart. I had broken up with someone a few months before, and was dealing with all the guilt that comes with having the courage to end something that is not right, even when it’s hard. I needed a break, but I didn’t expect what I actually got; an affirmation I was free. It happened slowly throughout my time there, like a slow sunrise in my heart. I left some stuff behind there in the mountains, and I came home fresh and new.

How could I go about choosing a souvenir to sum this up; a trinket that would remind me every time I looked at it of all the strength I had felt in that one week of my life? Gift shops aren’t usually inspiring places. They are cynically-placed tat-lined hubs of corporate opportunism, tricking you with faux-nostalgia to part with extra money. A truly wonderful trip should need no physical reminder; it lives in the heart. But I wanted to prolong every bit of the experience until I had to board the plane which would take me home. (I was also a bit tipsy on the free champagne I’d supped in the first class lounge Susie and I managed to blag our way into.)

The shop was full of the usual stuff – nodding Reagans, ironic bumper-stickers, patriotic mugs with go-getting slogans and Bush figurines that I wanted to ‘accidentally’ smash to the ground with my bag. There was virtually nothing I wanted, but I didn’t want to leave empty-handed. I wanted to spend my last dollars. So in the end, without really thinking why, I bought a White House toothbrush, an Abraham Lincoln fridge magnet saying “It is not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years”, and some Michelle Obama mints. I thought if I was going to suck a spearmint, I’d like to do it in the style of the First Lady of the United States.

It’s only now that I see these were the perfect souvenirs. Abraham Lincoln lived in different times. He fought for the abolition of slavery; a battle without which we would never be watching a black woman making a rousing speech such as Michelle did last week to the Democratic National Convention. Some say it was the best speech to have been made in a long while. Only sixty years ago she would have been made to sit in silence on her own section of the bus while people spat the N word in her face. Michelle Obama’s speech was amazing for many other reasons aside from the fact she was there in the first place, but it was mostly amazing because it was still demandeding that thing which is so hard to achieve; change. She spoke of her husband’s grass roots, his dedication and tenacity. She spoke of love and bravery and family values, and none of it sounded trite or overwritten. It sounded true – and it reminded me of the way I felt a year ago, while I was giving my heart a break in America.

“He reminds me that we are playing a long game here and that change is hard, and change is slow, and it never happens all at once. But eventually we get there, we always do.”

I was glad that I had chosen a souvenir with her face on it. I was glad I had made the changes in my life that I knew were right. I was glad I got to ride a horse on a mountain-top, even though I thought I might get hurt. Every time I need to be reminded that from time to time you have to be brave and make things fresh and new, I will suck a Michelle Obama mint.

Prince Harry, eh? Naughty Prince Harry. (Pauses to picture ‘Little Harry’.) Tut tut tut.

So, while I’ve been brushing up on my image-enhancing software skills, I’ve been thinking…if the chess-board was to be modernised and the dude on the horse was to be lobbed out in favour of a prince – what would the little fella look like? A noble gent? A mischievous chancer? What is a prince? History is peppered with stories of these privileged sons of Kings. We are taught to read with storybook tales of romantic chaps who save princesses and declare wild vows of love, action heroes who go on adventures and triumph in the name of Good. But what are they, really, real princes?

Are princes men of blue-blood graced with special qualities unattainable by the common man; crown-wearing heirs to a God-given position of power? Or can they be found closer to home? A cherubic son who brings you a daisy with your soup when you’re ill. A brother who lends you his last tenner so you can buy a dress. A boyfriend who burps your name like Tarzan while dive-bombing into a Magaluf pool. Are they princes, if our hearts say they are?

Prince Harry’s antics in a Las Vegas hotel suite had everyone wittering on about what it means ‘to be a prince’. Was it disgusting and disrespectful that he was cavorting naked with girls who didn’t even have a trust fund? Or was it a breath of fresh air to see that our royals are humans with a sense of fun too?

What are princes actually supposed to do anyway? Being a prince is like waiting for a train which might not come. It’s only natural that some of them get a bit bored and play up. It’s like sitting a kid in a room of fun things and saying “don’t touch anything.”

We’ve had all sorts through the ages. Peaceful princes, spiteful princes, mad princes, jolly princes, princes who eat grass and believe they are a goat, princes who fancy their mums, princes who kill their mums, playboys, gluttons, kleptomaniacs, psychotics, loons, dandies and fools – humble, proud, bonkers, enlightened.

Assuming there is no one type of prince, no one type of person, how then do you go about being ‘prince of the people’, when the people decide that’s what princes must be nowadays? What does it actually mean? That we want to be able to take them to the pub and not have them turn their noses up at our penny-saving burping normality? If you took Prince William to a Wetherspoons he’d probably have half the punters signed up to a life of charity-work by last orders while the local drunks sang like redeemed choirboys around a broken piano. Take Prince Harry to a Wetherpoons and he’d probably down a jagerbomb, disappear into the kitchen and come out naked under an apron, shouting “Madras for all! It’s not even Curry Night, but what the hey, chaps! LOOK! I’VE STUCK SOME PESHWARI ON LITTLE HARRY LIKE A COCONUT BERET!” (Then he’d get told off for making an ostentatious gesture using tax-payers’ money. Then if he went out and got a ‘proper job’ and paid for everyone’s curry with his ‘own money’, he’d get told off for abandoning duty and following his own selfish career ambitions.)

Can the Royals ever get it right?

Perhaps the reason we find it such a problem is that there is no such thing as a prince. A prince is the son of a King – a thing men made up once upon a time. Royalty doesn’t really exist – it is not a tangible thing like being a father, or a brother, or a son; real things. It is a name men seized for themselves when they realised it might just work. They declared themselves special, used God’s name to give their claim some welly, built great intimidating castles, surrounded themselves by weapons and warriors, grabbed priority over all the good stuff and got weaker men to do the stuff they didn’t want to do. And it kind of stuck. Except now they don’t bosh us commoners on the head with a ceremonial mallet and kidnap whichever totty they want to marry. They play polo, go to functions, do safe jobs in their country’s wars, cut ribbons, quietly obey heritage, because heritage is history, because history is a story, and the story has to continue somehow. Of course sometimes they don’t know how to behave, just like we sometimes don’t know how to behave. There are no princes, just like there is no one type of person. There are good boys, and naughty boys. Sometimes we like them, and sometimes we don’t. And that is what makes history interesting. It’s all just stories… (and we like the pictures, right?)

“I did it again, chaps! Silly Harry!”

I’ve never been to a pussy riot, but I’m willling to wager it’s a pretty full on experience. The clue’s in the name. Pussy Riot. WOAH. It definitely sounds like something you need a good nap before, and possibly a Red Bull to get you started. Maybe some Kleenex, or a code word for “let’s get the fuck out of here”. It conjures wild and surreal pictures. Women railing knickerless in a town square with placards saying things like “Ban the C-bomb” and “Look! No Pants! AND I HAVEN’T SHAVED!” General female craziness abounds in the brain. Ovary Raves in secret fields off the M25. Progesterone Proms – where everyone has to wear a corsage in the colour of their Favourite Emotion. The East-Anglian Labia Conference, where they all stand around the buffet table and tut at the cocktail sausages (before swallowing them whole).

It sounds, in short, like the kind of crazy-bird attention-seeking thing that usually would barely get an eyebrow raise from me (I’m vainly trying to guard against wrinkles – so something has to be pretty major for me to risk a crease that Amanda Holden would call a ravine and have botoxed immediately.)

Pussy Riot.

The Tale of Pussy Riot (ha – sounds like a Beatrix Potter book that never got published) is something that could so easily have passed me by. I wrote recently how I don’t have a telly or the internet at home, so news pervades my cotton wool cocoon with the invasiveness of a mild seabreeze. I used to be depressed by the same old stories, history repeating itself – the signs that humans never learn, or seldom learn enough. I would not have been – but now am – ashamed to admit that most of my news intake now comes via the grabbability of Tweets. If Stephen Fry tells me to read something, chances are I will. If one of the many wonderful writers I follow retweets something of interest, chances are I’ll click, and I’ll learn something. I’m not a fool – I don’t relinquish my scrutiny and believe everything I read – but I do pick up my nuggets of current affairs this way, like a magpie flying over a field of buttons.

It’s the last week alone that has made me realise my approach to news is not only highly random, but also irresponsible. I’m 32 for goodness sake. I should know what’s going on in the world. I should pay attention to what’s important. I should stop giggling every time someone says pussy.

So, on a responsible whim, I clicked on a link Salman Rushdie had retweeted, to the statements of the jailed members of the Russian punk-feminist group Pussy Riot. I took the time to read. It took a while. Those gals are quite wordy. After I had finished, I not only knew something more of the story, I knew something more about Russia, and the women who were (actually) not best represented by their vociferous band name, or even by their own actions.  I learnt these women by reading their words. And, aside from the occasional snobbish and patronising swipe at the entire population of Russia (apparently limp-brained buffoons who can’t think for themselves), they were some of the most inspiring, eloquent and intelligent words I have ever read. They were important words. They were words which lit the soul.

These girls – Maria Alyokhina, Yekatarina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova – whose crime it was to get up on the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and dance around a bit (badly, like day-glo-wielding stoners at an Ovary Rave) chanting “Our Lady – Chase Putin Out” – have now had two years of their freedom, two years of their lives on this earth, gobbled by a state that wants to crush any expression which does not toe the party line, even when it results in the entire world protesting. This column is not the right place to dissect the politics of modern Russia, the boisterous union of a supposedly secular state and church – and I certainly am not the person to do it well – but this column could be a thing which plays a tiny part in granting the wish of Maria Alyokhina that their incarceration will not mean a loss of freedom:

“Nobody can take away my inner freedom. It lives in the word, it will go on living thanks to openness, when this will be heard and read by thousands of people.”

To play your tiny part, read the statements here (the second statement, by Maria is particularly engaging):

www.nplusonemag.com/pussy-riot-closing-statements

I’ve grown up a little because of this story. In fact I’d happily give my whole face over to eyebrow-raised wrinkles to give this story – this bright button in the field of so much ‘news’ – the response and respect it deserves.

I might stop giggling at the word pussy when it crops up in the news. I might even stop google-imaging other important stories – like Prince Harry’s nads. Maybe.

“Go girls! Buy you a pint when you get out.”