Me Life Story

by Scarlett Moffatt

  Published by Blink Publishing

  3.08, The Plaza,

  535 Kings Road,

  Chelsea Harbour,

  London, SW10 0SZ

  www.blinkpublishing.co.uk

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  Hardback – 978-1-911-600-46-6

  Trade paperback – 978-1-911-600-49-7

  Ebook – 978-1-911-600-50-3

  All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.

  Copyright © Scarlett Moffatt, 2017

  All photos courtesy of the author unless otherwise specified

  All illustrations © Shutterstock

  Scarlett Moffatt has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  Blink Publishing is an imprint of the Bonnier Publishing Group

  www.bonnierpublishing.co.uk

  To my mam and dad (for all your love and support), to

  Ava (for making me laugh everyday), to my auntie Kirsty,

  nanny and pappy (for always being there and for all

  those sleepovers where I got to watch Carry On movies as

  a kid), and to the future generation of the family parties

  Joshua and Noah xx

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Sofa, So Good!

  1. Everyone Starts Out as an Arsehole

  2. How Is Evaporated Milk There if it’s Already Evaporated?

  3. If You Like Piña Coladas and Getting Caught in the Rain

  4. Strictly Scarlett

  5. Bikes and Bells

  6. Do You Want to Go to the Prom with Me?

  7. Quarter Litre of Vodka and a Blue Panda Pop, Please

  8. Dad Said I’m His Favourite, Sorry

  9. Do You Need a Bag with That?

  10. Irony: Getting Burgled Dressed as a Burglar

  11. Those Dark Dole Days

  12. ‘You Want Me to Watch the TV for a Living?’

  13. Scarlett Mo’fat to Scarlett No’fat

  14. Let’s Get Ready to Jungle

  15. I’m Not Quite a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

  16. And the New Queen of the Jungle

  17. Christmas Time, Cold Mashed Potato and Wine

  18. London and its Smashed Avocado

  19. Saturday Night Takeaway (Mine’s a Chicken Kebab)

  20. By Guv’nor It’s Mary Bleeding Poppins

  21. The Time I Watched Jeremy Kyle with Kevin Bacon

  22. That’s a Streetmate

  23. Cross my Palm with Silver

  Epilogue: The Young Girl and Her Plaits Fable

  Acknowledgements

  AMOFFZON

  Top customer reviews

  Love the book. Love the girl.

  By Elisabeth Moffatt

  Format: Hardback | Verified Purchase

  Absolutely loved this book from start to finish – it made me laugh out loud. And I’m shocked at just how truthful Scarlett has been. Some very emotional pages which I must admit brought a tear to my eye. An added note: Scarlett’s mother sounds like a hoot. 10/10!

  My sister is a LEGEND!

  By Ava Moffatt

  Format: Hardback | Verified Purchase

  Eleven out of ten. Best book I’ve ever read! I loved reading it, I feel like I almost know Scarlett lol.

  One word: canny.

  By Mark Moffatt

  Format: Hardback | Verified Purchase

  Could not put this book down. Read it in a day.

  Nice one kid.

  INTRODUCTION:

  Sofa, So Good!

  Ant always stands on the left and Dec on the right. They call it the 180-degree rule.

  Over its lifespan, your sofa will be witness to roughly 293 arguments and 1,369 cuddles.

  We find on average £1.80 hidden in our sofas every month. That equates to nearly £180 over the sofa’s lifetime (champion: that’ll buy 211 sausage rolls from Gregg’s).

  As I stand there shaking like a shitting dog and smelling of mealworms, I clench Joel Dommett’s hand. Ant and Dec are about to announce who has won I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! And to be perfectly honest I have no idea how I even made it onto the show, never mind made the final two.

  I was all ready to say, ‘Well done Joel, mate, you’ve done it, you’ve won!’ But when Dec announced, ‘And the new … Queen of the Jungle is …’, it actually took me brain at least five seconds to process what the words actually meant. ‘Queen? Hang on, that must mean I have won, because, well, Joel has a penis and the Queen doesn’t have a penis.’

  I could barely contain my emotions as I was ushered to the throne by Geordie royalty Ant and Dec. Wow! The show I had watched since I was eleven years old, the show that for the past two years people had watched me watch on Gogglebox. Nothing felt real as I was crowned the Queen of the Jungle.

  Being on the I’m a Celeb throne is my most celebrated sit thus far. This book tells me life story through a whole series of seats. I’m always happiest sitting down. I think there is nothing better than simply sitting around with your family. The comfort and security of the family sofa is where you can truly be yourself, where you can sob your heart out and not be judged, where you can laugh so hard your belly aches.

  We all love being a couch potato watching the television from time to time and I personally see it as a hobby. If you want to get into the technicalities of it, I know you’re not physically doing much, but your eyes are getting a good workout, aren’t they? I mean, really you’re practically doing bicep curls – reaching into the packet of crisps, bringing them up to your mouth and repeat. Your legs get some exercise too, as you’ve got to do a Usain Bolt to the kitchen and make a brew during the ad breaks.

  We also all love diving into a good book now and then. When I was little I used to always choose the same three books to read (or for my parents to read to me). It would either be a children’s illustrated Bible (although I’m not particularly religious), anything by Dr Seuss and Aesop’s Fables. That’s because I love how the stories in these books always have a motivational quote, a life lesson or a moral at the end. So that’s what I’ve done in this book for you. As well as this, I have started each chapter with one of my true loves in life: facts. This is because I was one of those weird children that actually enjoyed learning. Hopefully, you can take away a few snippets of information from this book and shock your friends with some new-found knowledge. So, say your friend briefly mentions the fact there seems to be a lot of pigeons in town today, you can add, ‘Did you know birds cannot urinate?’

  So I want you to take a seat, whether it be in the comfort of your own sofa, on the top deck of the bus, the Tube (so you don’t have to make eye contact with anybody) or on the throne of the house (the toilet). I want you to get comfortable and get ready to laugh, cry and maybe even learn as I chat to you about some of the highs and lows of my life.

  So yeah, so far, sitting on my arse has worked out pretty well for me. That’s why I always think:

  Chapter One

  EVERYONE STARTS OUT AS AN ARSEHOLE

  Everyone starts out as an arsehole (we form around it in the womb).

  Down the sides of sofas, underneath carpets, eaten by children and pets alike … somewhere in the world
there are over a million missing Scrabble tiles.

  The first nativity scene didn’t appear until 1223. It is a re-enactment of Jesus’s birthday (which was not actually 25 December, it was more likely 17 June, scientists now think).

  It all started with a game of Scrabble (as most good tales do). The year 1990, me mam Elisabeth, known to her friends as Betty, then aged twenty, had black Tina Turner-inspired permed hair and stood pretty and petite at five foot two. My mam has always had golden sun-kissed skin, which she normally hides under layers and layers of black clothes. With Disney princess features of a button nose, little round face and blue eyes she is just beautiful. Now we all get a mix of our parents and from my mam I took my monobrow, my coarse hair and little sticky-out ears. But I would also like to think I get my intelligence from her. She can digest a whole book in one day, she can do a Sudoku faster than anyone I know and can complete a Rubik’s cube in less than ten minutes. Despite this she still loves trash TV like Mob Wives and Toddlers and Tiaras. She is such a fussy eater and eats nothing but beige food (chips, rice, bread – even her condiments like salad cream and mayo are beige). I definitely get my sarcasm from her; her tongue is so sharp she can cut glass with it.

  My dad, Mark, who everyone knows as Toffo, was then twenty-four with an Alan Shearer haircut (that’s what he asks for when he goes to the barbers). Standing at five foot seven he has the cheekiest chappy smile you have ever seen. My dad isn’t really a sun worshipper and has what I like to call ginger skin, translucently pale with freckles (I can say this because I love gingers and I inherited this skin from him). He loves historical documentaries and football and I get my passion for museums and conspiracy theories from him. He eats nothing beige and instead eats anything that has once had a pulse (he also doesn’t believe in sell-by dates; he thinks it’s a conspiracy against consumers).

  They are the complete opposites in every aspect but that’s why they work so well together. They had no idea that when they first laid eyes on each other in 1988, as their eyes met across the Queen’s pub dance floor and the sound of ‘The Only Way Is Up’ by Yazz and the Plastic Population filled their ears, they had found their soulmate. And that just two years later, on this day, ‘the Scrabble day’, the pair of them would have just found out they were both expecting a little baby girl (me).

  Undecided on names, they did what every couple does – made a brew, sat themselves down on their very nineties brown floral sofa and played a game of Scrabble to determine who would pick the order of the names of their firstborn precious child. They had both already chosen names from their favourite movies to narrow the search down.

  My mam had chosen Gone with the Wind, more specifically Scarlett O’Hara; the insecure, spoilt, intelligent heroine who is hopeless around men and who made a smashing dress out of a pair of curtains (I feel like this namesake explains a lot about how I ended up, especially the A* I got in GCSE textiles for making a corset).

  My dad had chosen his favourite movie too. I know what you’re thinking: did he choose a classic dad film, like The Godfather – did he want to name me after Diane Keaton? Or maybe Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde? Oh no, not my dad, because that would be far too normal. Nope, my dad is a huge sci-fi fan and his favourite movie involves a woman giving birth through her stomach to a freaky, phlegm-covered creature from God knows what planet. That’s right, Sigourney Weaver in Alien. (I feel like this other namesake explains my love of UFOs and why I have never been brave enough to give birth.)

  Thank God my mam knew the word quixotism (eighty-one points on a triple word score). So now as I’m about to start school as a five-year-old child, I have to learn how to spell my full name (which in all honesty I couldn’t properly spell until I was about ten).

  Scarlett Sigourney Moffatt.

  Being named after stars from the big screen, it isn’t surprising that one of my favourite things to do was to sit down and get engrossed in watching the TV.

  That and reading; I have always loved to read and to be read to. When I was little I remember sometimes wishing the day away as I’d love it when 8.30 p.m. would come round. ‘What do you want for your supper, little one?’ my dad would shout through from the kitchen (because clearly it’s easier to shout than to walk ten steps into the living room). ‘Two crumpets please, with the edges cut off.’ Nine out of ten times it would be crumpets with a ridiculous amount of butter on (almost more butter than actual crumpet) then my mam or dad would take me to my bedroom, tuck me in and read me a story.

  I realise now just how blessed I am to have had such an amazing upbringing with loving parents because I understand that not everybody has a childhood like this. But I don’t take the relationship I have with them for granted. Don’t get me wrong, me and my mam argue like cat and dog as we are so similar (she would never admit this). But they are my best friends. It might sound sad to some, but we are the County Durham Von Trapps, the Bishop Auckland Brady Bunch; we even sing together in the house. Sickening, I know.

  So when I wasn’t being a geek obsessing over Aesop’s Fables or Dr Seuss I was watching the good old telly box. My earliest memory of this is when I’m about five years old and I’m sat on my nanny’s comfy sofa propped up on a big V-shaped pregnancy pillow. Now my nanny (my mam’s mam), Christine Smiles – I know, great name! – is one of those amazing stereotypical nannies. She has a cute little brown pixie crop which sits on top of her four-foot-eleven-inch body (she claims she should be given free wedged shoes from the government) and she is always wearing an olive-green dressing gown and knitting. When she isn’t knitting she likes to moan about the weather, and she gives the greatest hugs and always has a freezer full of goodies like screwballs, choc ices and Arctic rolls. And she has always, for as long as I can remember, had strange little sayings and songs like this little tune:

  ‘No, you cannit push your nanny off the bus

  No, you cannit push your nanny off the bus

  You cannit push your nanny, coz she’s your mammy’s mammy

  Don’t push your nanny off the bus.’

  However, there is one thing about her that’s a little different to a typical nan: she was only thirty-seven when she became a nanny. Looking back now, it’s crazy to think I saw her as my old nanny when I’m only a decade away from being that age myself.

  We would sit together for hours on her grass-green leather recliner couch (you cannot ever decline a recline) as she brought me endless supplies of Horlicks and peanut-butter sandwiches. Sometimes she would even let me eat the peanut butter straight from the jar with a little silver teaspoon. If it was a hot summer’s night we would share a big bowl of tinned fruit with squirty cream. My favourite thing to watch with my nanny was Norman Wisdom. A lot of the jokes (as I was only five) would go straight over my head, but there’s one episode where he loses his trousers out of the train window that made me laugh so hard I would cry. I’d annoy my nanny by asking her to rewind that bit over and over again. The living room would literally shake because of the vibrations from rewinding the VHS player. I would shush the inanimate object telling him (yes, the VHS player was male) to be quiet in case he woke up my Grandad Tommy who was always napping.

  I used to love it when I got to have a sleepover on a Saturday at my nanny and grandad’s. I’d lie in bed with my Noddy toy (I have had this plush Noddy since I was three years old; he has faded over the years and has had his bell in his hat changed about twenty times and he smells like damp, but he is a safety blanket to me) and I would watch the same two films that I’d watched the last time I slept over. Carry On Screaming! and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Always in that order so I could go to sleep dreaming of a chocolate river. I’d raid my nanny’s knitting cupboard when I watched Willy Wonka as it was full of family-sized chocolate bars, normally fruit and nut (so I would pick the fruit out as no one wants one of their five a day in a chocolate bar). It’s like the unwritten law that you have to eat sweets and chocolate whilst watching this movie; it creates a sweet ambience – that and t
he fact my mouth always waters when Augustus falls in all that chocolate, the lucky guy. Growing up on Norman Wisdom and Carry On movies from the age of five, it’s not surprising that I have an unusual sense of humour.

  As a family we all have quite a warped sense of humour so I can’t pinpoint directly whose genes I get it from. We have never been one of those families that sit down formally at a table for Sunday roast and make pleasantries. I mean when I was a kid we would go to my nanny’s every Sunday and Grandad would make a cracking dinner, but we would all sit on the couch with the television on. That said, it was switched on purely for background noise so we weren’t really watching it properly. Normally it would be an EastEnders omnibus so I’d just get a glimpse of Phil Mitchell and his egghead or hear Peggy screaming, ‘Get out of my pub!’

  Sundays are some of my favourite ever family memories. There would be a constant whistle in my nanny’s house on a Sunday: the kettle would permanently be on the go as there was always at least nine of us wanting a brew. Drinking strong cups of Yorkshire tea from the age of five must be a northern thing; I think all that caffeine does something to your brain and makes you instantly friendlier. Me and my cousin Keegan (who is two years younger than me) would be asking for our Sunday dinner to be put in a bowl because the dogs would be trying to get to our plates and the gravy was that watery it would be spilling all over the carpet. We didn’t want to risk spillage because we didn’t want to get in trouble and not be allowed a slice of Arctic roll.

  Ah, the joy of all of us sat around, winding each other up. Ever since I can remember, my family have always been brutal. Slating each other, character building as my mother would say. In our family, the more you love someone the more you insult them. A loving conversation and a sign of affection on a classic Moffatt Sunday would go like this:

  Uncle Danny: ‘You alreet like, dick lips?’

  Dad: ‘Aye, sound, shitty arse, how’s work gannin’?’