Scarlett Says

by Scarlett Moffatt

  We’re lucky to have such good doctors too. I always think when I go to the doctor’s that I’ll get a fit one, but I never have. Gutted. It’s funny how doctors always ask if you’re OK. No, I’m at the doctor’s, of course I’m bloody not. I don’t like the fact they know everything about you too. I mean, everything. That scares me. What if I do fancy a doctor sometime and he’s read all me notes about the time I had a dodgy tummy? He’s hardly going to fancy me then, is he? It must be weird if you’re married to a gynaecologist. They’re at work all day and then they get home and the last thing they probably want to look at is another one. It’d be a right busman’s holiday.

  I’m a proper drama queen when it comes to being ill. Every time I have a really bad hangover I google me symptoms and think I’m dying. Or I’ll get a headache behind one eye and convince myself I’ve got a brain tumour. Rabies, scabies and jelly babies, that’s me. I’ve always got something. Don’t ever google your symptoms when you’re feeling shit, because there are only ever two outcomes – you’re either dying or you’re pregnant. I’m one of those people the doctors must dread because I’ve already diagnosed meself.

  Brothels

  Carrying on with the political theme, let’s talk about brothels. One of my favourite places in the world to go is Amsterdam. It’s beautiful and I also find it hilarious. It’s so bizarre that people go to London to see the Christmas windows, but when you go to Amsterdam you go and have a look at all the women in the windows. You can always see men coming out of brothels looking dead sheepish and they scuttle off down the street.

  I think if it were to make the women safer, brothels should be legalized. But then again, I’m not sure it would be good to promote that kind of thing. What would the advert look like in the paper? And what would you call the place? Open all hours? I find it weird that there’s a need for it. There’s plenty to see on the internet, isn’t there? I’ve never really understood it, but I guess I’m not a man . . .

  Pigeons

  If any of you read my tweets, you’ll know I’m obsessed with baby pigeons. I’d always wondered why you never see them and now I know. I looked them up the other day and they’re bloody ugly. I reckon they hide away until they get older because they’re so horrible looking. Seriously, google them.

  Pigeons are evil and they nick your chips up north. I’m not a fan. But I saw some kids kicking one once and I felt dead sad for it. I told my dad about it and he said you’re allowed to kick them because they’re vermin. I’m not sure that’s true. And even if it is, I don’t think that’s OK. They may be ugly chip nickers but they don’t deserve violence.

  Badgers

  I use badgers in every phrase going. I say ‘crazy as a badger’, ‘cock-eyed as a badger’, ‘mad as a badger’ . . . I don’t know why but they’re quite a vital part of my diction.

  The badger cull is horrible. And they are vicious little things, but you still can’t go around shooting badgers. Who do people think they are? Badgers can’t defend themselves from guns. Leave the badgers alone.

  Were badgers around on earth before humans? I reckon they probably were, so they’ve got more right to be here than we have. Even if they weren’t, you can’t just go into badgers’ homes and start shooting around, can you? What’s wrong with the world? I’m going to start a petition. Even if just a few people from my Twitter sign up for it, we can help them.

  Weddings

  We’ll almost always have someone in our extended circle who’s getting married, so it’s a constant topic of conversation. I love weddings, and my best mate Sarah is getting married soon and I’m dead excited. I’m always the bridesmaid.

  There’s something magical about a wedding. I love the fact that someone is saying, ‘I like you that much that I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’

  I also love the fact that something normally kicks off because I enjoy a drama. I love all the wedding food and all the cheesy songs and I’m always the first one on the dance floor and the last one off. I properly go for it and by the end I’m sweating like a fat man at a buffet.

  For some reason I become a sign language expert when I’m dancing at weddings and I act out all the songs. If a deaf person was watching me, they would totally know what song I was dancing to. In fact, that should be a quiz on the telly.30

  Ed Sheeran

  One thing I’m a bit over is every wedding I go to at the moment having a song by Ed Sheeran. All his songs sound the same and I’m sick of hearing them. I’ve been to, like, five, where they’ve played the same song and it just makes me feel sad. Me mam and dad’s generation had Marvin Gaye and I’ve got Ed Sheeran. Although actually, they told me the other day they mainly had ‘Lady in Red’ in their day, so maybe that’s not much better.

  Although I do really love the fact Ed Sheeran looks like he’s wandered on stage through the wrong door. Like he’s in on work experience or something. America has Justin Bieber, who’s like something made in a lab by teenage girls. And we’ve got someone who looks like he sits out on the grass at sixth-form college with a guitar. He looks like he’s just about to tell you about his gap year and that.

  Also, loads of his songs feel like they’re from someone doing a play in GCSE drama. I’m gonna do a song about drugs and bullying and peer pressure. I did really like that video where he was a muppet, though. Anyone who’s got a puppet of themselves as a muppet is all right in my book.

  Marriage

  I do think about getting married, and of course more than ever when I go to a wedding. I feel like Disney has given me unrealistic expectations of marriage. I used to want a handsome prince charming, but then I started to like all the evil ones like Gaston. If you had to choose between the Beast in Beauty and the Beast when he’s a monster or when he’s that wussy prince, I’d choose the Beast. Having said that, Ava said the other day, ‘Why does Belle fancy a dog?’ which is a fair point.

  I try to drum it into my little sister that she doesn’t need a prince. I’m so glad Disney made Frozen because that’s about the sisters and there’s no man coming along to make sure everything is OK. In all the old ones the heroines were saved by lads, but that’s so old-fashioned. Disney needs to make some more modern films where women save the day.

  Proposals

  I’ve always said to me mam that if someone proposes to me on my birthday, Christmas, New Year or Valentine’s Day, I’ll say no because no thought would’ve gone into it. I know I’m too picky but I want someone to put a proper effort in and surprise me. But it doesn’t have to be a really grand gesture.

  I feel like, all of a sudden, engagements have to be this massive thing and really elaborate, and half the time I think they only do it so they can put it on social media. There’s all those videos of people who’ve learnt dances and miming along to songs and stuff – they’re whole productions.

  My friend Sarah’s fiancé proposed to her on Christmas Day by putting a ring on a sausage. That’s funny, but she was saying, ‘I can’t really put that on Facebook.’ But who cares? It’s a private moment for you two. It’s no one else’s business. And if I see one more status update saying, ‘He put a ring on it’, I’ll fucking scream.

  I have kind of been planning my wedding since I was young but I haven’t worked out the finer details because it depends who I end up with. If I marry someone that hasn’t got a lot of money, I’ll get married in a registry office and then go to the pub. If I marry someone rich, I want to arrive at the venue on a unicorn (when I say venue, I mean castle).

  Me mam says I’ve got really tacky wedding taste but I think Jordan’s marriage to Peter Andre was amazing. I loved it. I want mine to be like that. I want a glass carriage. Why the fuck wouldn’t you? I’d also like a Willy Wonka theme. I’d have all the centrepieces as sweets and I’d have Munchkins as waiters. I love Johnny Depp, so I could marry him. Or if he’s not free to be my husband, then the groom can dress up as him. But when he was in Edward Scissorhands, not when he looks like a wino pirate.

  On
e of the main reasons I want a wedding is so I can get loads of presents. I want people to buy me blenders and shit. I want a NutriBullet and that’s a great way to get one. In fact, I reckon I might extend my Ocean’s Eleven stunt so that I get all the wedding presents with a fake wedding.

  I don’t really like it when people ask for money for their wedding gift. I think it’s a bit rude. I do give it to them but I’m a bit resentful about it, like. I know people don’t want toasters any more but I feel weird about handing over cash or putting money into people’s bank accounts. It feels like in The Office when Dawn’s boyfriend says he just tells her to take the money out of his wallet and buy her own birthday present. We might as well just not get each other anything as it all evens out. If I don’t get married, I’m invoicing all the people I’ve bought wedding presents for to get the money back.

  Some days I get really excited about the prospect of getting married, and other days I think, I’m a strong, independent woman and I can’t picture myself sitting at home with two kids day after day. I like to think I’ll meet someone who’s adventurous that I could go travelling with and stuff. He’ll probably have to be a millionaire. Is that shallow?

  Tess Daly

  I don’t get her. She has no enthusiasm in her voice, she just sucks the excitement out of everything. She’s like an eight-year-old boy’s idea of how to draw of a pretty lady. ‘She’d be a blonde lady with boobies and a face.’ I love Claudia Winkleman and I feel like Tesss’s always patronizing to her. I reckon she treats Claudia like a slightly slow old man, the ghost of Brucey in between them. Claudia gets a load of stick about her make-up and I don’t understand it. She looks great. And I thought what she did after her daughter’s Halloween costume caught fire was amazing. It was just the most terrifying thing and she was able to talk about it to make sure other people knew what could happen.

  Katie Hopkins

  She only wants to be controversial. Something happens and you’re just waiting for her to say something mean about it. I know I shouldn’t give her the attention, but it makes me angry. She was actually OK on Big Brother. My theory is that she didn’t have the time for her team to come up with shocking opinions, so she was just normal. She seems to say something controversial like clockwork. There’s a disaster or something and all these kittens die in a fire in an orphanage and everyone’s saying how awful it is and she’s like, ‘They were foreign kittens, the orphanage shouldn’t have been open anyway and the fire was started by an immigrant.’

  I loved it when she was on Good Morning doing a thing about how it was tacky for people to name their children after places in the world, like Paris and Brooklyn. And Holly Willoughby laid the smackdown on her and pointed out her daughter is called India. Surely if you’re going on TV knowing you’re talking about that subject, you’d think that one through?

  I can’t be the only one that’s bored by her. The thing is, she reads all of her press, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she finds out about this and slags me off. I wonder what she’ll say. Probably something about my appearance cos she likes doing that, or maybe she’ll imply I’m thick. I’ll get in first. Yes, I know I look like an oompa loompa. I’m genuinely excited now to see what happens.

  Caitlyn Jenner

  I think what she’s done is amazing and it’s helping make the subject much more visible. But there’s a little bit of me that feels the way it’s happened in her life is not how most people could ever approach things. She’s got all this amazing support and she basically picked what she wanted to look like out of a catalogue and then had the money to buy it.

  There was that story a while back when she auditioned famous transgender people to be her friends on her reality show. I’m a bit torn because on one level it’s good but, like all of that stuff, it’s not all real. It’s great that Eddie Redmayne is in that film about the first person who ever had a transgender operation. There are some things I’d be up for being the first to do, but that’s something I’d want to know they’d done a few times before.

  Russell Brand

  I love him. I think he gets a hard time. But I do reckon the sexaholic thing is a bit of a cop-out – he’s just a player, there’s no need to make a medical thing out of it. Stop it, keep it in your trousers. But when I’m listening to him I feel like I’m listening to a poem. He makes me want to go and google words. He’s like the opposite of Jeremy Clarkson. He uses words in a lovely way. He does look a bit grubby, though. My mate described him as being essentially handsome but a bit grubby. I’m not sure me dad would be happy if I brought him home. Having said that, it was ridiculous all that stuff about Manuel from Fawlty Towers’ granddaughter. It wasn’t the nicest thing in the world to do but it’s not the worst thing anyone has ever done.

  Robbie Williams

  I only really knew him on his own. I don’t remember Take That first time around. People of me mam’s generation think of Take That as hot young men doing somersaults on the beach. I remember them as some old men on a roof in Marks & Spencer coats. Gary Barlow is a man so boring that the most exciting thing he ever did involved dodgy tax planning.

  That video where Robbie Williams is singing his own songs at his wife as she’s giving birth . . . I tell you, if that’d been me, I’d have bashed him round the head with the gas and air canister.

  I just remember that ‘Rock DJ’ song’s video getting banned where Robbie got his skin peeled off. Me mam let me stay up late to watch it. I had a really early bedtime all the way through school. I’m pretty sure I had like a 9 p.m. bedtime officially till after A Levels. So my whole teenage years were spent with me pretending to be interested in things that were on a little bit later than my bedtime. And if you wanted to take the day off the next day, you’d have to plant the seed the day before. You’d fuss about with your tea, so they’d think you were really ill. I remember putting my hand near the fire and then putting it on my head and getting my mam to feel how hot my forehead was. I’d spend the whole of Sunday pretending to be ill so I could have Monday off. I once sat so close to the fire to make my head feel hot that me eyebrows got singed. I think that’s a real thing up north, the daughters getting a fuss made of them.

  Me dad used to do so much for us when I was little. Whenever any of our animals died, because he’s a welder, he would make a metal coffin. And when our goldfish died, he cut the finger off a velvet glove and buried him in that. That’s why he’ll do well in the zombie apocalypse cos of the welding. I was obsessed with my hamster, Lucky. If there’s ever a name to tempt fate as a hamster, it’s Lucky. I think my dad replaced him loads of times.

  Steve Irwin

  Do you remember him? The Australian guy who used to get all excited when he’d find a dangerous animal? I used to love Steve Irwin. He probably shouldn’t have poked the animals so much, though.

  The worst people I could be stuck in a bunker with

  Karl Pilkington

  If you’re stuck in a bunker, you need to keep the positivity levels up, and Pilko would definitely spend the whole time moaning about being bored and how cramped it is.

  Joe Pasquale

  No offence, but his voice would irritate the life out of me, and his jokes are from the dawn of time.

  The man from the Go Compare advert

  This needs no explanation.

  John McCririck

  After seeing his lack of personal hygiene on Celebrity Big Brother (he wore the same underpants the entire time he was there) and his constant farting and nose picking, I’d end up vomiting.

  Gillian McKeith

  The woman’s got a face like Alan Sugar’s ball sack and takes great pleasure in analysing other people’s shite and telling them how crap they are at life.

  Katie Hopkins

  I would end up having a full-on argument with her. No two ways about it.

  Positive thinking

  I think a lot of nonsense gets talked about positive thinking sometimes. Especially with all those things that get sent round on the internet of like a
picture of a sunset and some words of wisdom. Sometimes you just want to have a good moan. My nanny thrives off of being negative. She’ll come back from holiday and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, Nanny, how was your holiday?’ and she’ll go, ‘It rained on the Wednesday, didn’t it, Colin?’ And me granddad’s just sitting there nodding. ‘Yeah, it did.’

  You tell me if that doesn’t sound fun.

  Babies with loads of hair

  I find it weird when babies are born with loads of hair, because that’s been in someone’s womb. It would freak me out if my baby came out and had more hair than me. I didn’t get hair until I was three years old and I’m bald in all my baby photos, so maybe I’m just jealous of them?

  The other thing I don’t like is when babies are born with teeth. Hitler was born with teeth, which I think says it all.

  Facebook fakers

  One thing we regularly do is go on the internet and look at the people we know who are always posting photos so everyone can see what a good time they’re having. There’s always people you know like that. It’s basically like they have the camera going with them in real time. The only problem is they spend so long trying to look like they are enjoying themselves they never really do.

  I know this one girl who always looks like she’s as miserable as hell on a night out, but as soon as someone starts taking photos she turns into the life and soul of the party. As soon as she’s sees a flash go off she’s practically doing jazz hands and wrapping herself around a lad she’s met two minutes earlier. She posts pictures with captions like ‘wild night’ and ‘crazy time’ and I’m like, ‘Wild night? You sat on a stool staring at your phone for most of the evening!’

  I am very partial to a selfie meself but I think they also put a lot of pressure on people because it’s all about how many likes you get. Everyone is guilty of deleting them if you don’t get enough likes, and people base their self-worth on whether or not someone thinks they look nice in a photo.