Moranifesto

by Caitlin Moran

  Get excited about slowly rotting! Over the last six months, my first big Aging Sign has made itself apparent: a wattle. My neck has started to gently collapse, and I’m now rocking a small, dangly pleat in the middle—a little as if it’s been taken over by Hyacinth Bucket, who has decided to “treat” me to some manner of dainty neck valance. Faced with these kind of undeniable evidences of aging, there are only really two ways to react: either (a) becoming inexplicably shocked and angry about the nature of time, like some mad drunken alien working on a Time Freezing Bomb on Doctor Who, and who will clearly have to be killed by the end of the episode because their plan to suspend all temporal advancement in the universe is demented or (b) thinking of yourself as your own pet, and being gently fascinated and amused by the mad-ass crazy shit that’s happening to you as you march on down life’s long path. Personally, I’m very fond of my wattle. I like to stroke my wattle when looking out of the window and feeling reflective. If I really liked you, I would allow you to wibble my wattle, over dinner—so long as we were on the second bottle. I like having a new place grow on my body, with no effort from me—save having hunched over a laptop for twenty years while grimacing and eating beef jerky. How exciting! Who knows what will grow next! Maybe I’ll develop an erectable scaly display ruff—or a tail that can drop off when under threat. Everything to play for here! More jerky for me!

  Most of the time, it’s good to be clean. But also, I like to believe you are not the only one who finds your belly button smell intoxicating, and there’s a lot to be said for being the one in your social group who nabs the nickname “the Musky Ox.”

  The cosmetics and beauty industry is valued at $19 trillion. Yet, without exception, everyone looks at their best ten minutes after a shag, sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen, wearing an old baggy shirt and eating cereal. Next time someone tries to sell you Botox, designer gear, or lipstick, just say, “No need, babe—I’ve got cornflakes and cock,” and stroll on.

  It’s Okay My Children Do Not Read

  One of the things about being a parent is realizing you are basically farming the future. That’s what you’re doing: raising the next fifty years. The little people-crops you sow, and so tenderly nurture, will go on to take over the world. That’s their job, and yours.

  And while, as a parent, you are apt to believe that you must cram this delicate future with all you have learned and known, sometimes you are reminded that you have a built-in obsolescence. All your lessons worked for you, where you lived—in the past—but these children are going to live in the future. Perhaps, sometimes, they know a little more than you. Perhaps they can see further down the road. Perhaps you just need to back off. Perhaps the future will tell you what the future is, now.

  We have decided not to drink, my friend James and I—but we are not so strong-minded about smoking.

  We are sitting on the doorstep, hiding from our children—“You don’t smoke, do you, Mummy?” “No!”—and talking about the books we have loved, in the year just passed.

  James loved Stoner—“I had no idea I could cry that much, just from reading words”—and I am becoming tedious about how much I loved Moby-Dick: “I’ve spent twenty years thinking it was some Hemingway-esque bore-athon about angling—but it’s actually explosive homoerotic whale porn! Why don’t they tell you these things?”

  Laurence Sterne, Lorrie Moore, Eimear McBride—this is our real gossip: talking about authors we’ve long heard about but only just got around to reading, as if they’re friends of friends just met.

  And then—after an hour—we move on to the only sensitive topic we have.

  “So . . . your kids reading much?”

  Pause.

  “No.”

  Pause.

  “Mine neither. Just the ones that are made into movies. You know. The Hunger Games.”

  Sigh.

  “Same here. Oh God. What have we done wrong?”

  We are liberal parents. The things other parents fear—their children being gay, marrying someone of a different race, choosing a “risky” career—aren’t even worthy of a shrug. We would not give them a second thought.

  But we have discovered, now, with our teenage children, that there is only one thing we truly fear—our children not reading. Reading being a thing you have to remind them to do—or even coerce them into.

  In November, after years of literary truculence, I found myself desperately offering my younger daughter £2 if she read Adrian Mole, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—placing them in an enticing stack beside her bed.

  She eyed them balefully, like a cat eyes the door to the vet’s surgery.

  “I don’t really want two pounds,” she said, reasonably. “I just want to watch Zoella, on YouTube.”

  And why does this agonize me? Oh God—for so many reasons. Because I need us to have shared literary references—“Don’t Panic!,” “You are sleepy, like the Dormouse”—in order for us to feel like a proper family, bound together by “our” books.

  Because every book you read, as a child, becomes a whole new room in your head—and I want them to live in a mansion of people, universes, and centuries, and phrases like “runcible spoon.”

  Because there’s an air about someone who’s gallivanted, joyously, through a library in their early years that I revere—far more than I revere someone who has traveled the world, been born beautiful, or wears a cheap acrylic fake-fur coat like it’s worth £1 million.

  Because—and this is the key thing—I worry they will not manage without it. That books are needed. That they will suffer without books. That it will ruin them.

  “Because it made us who we are, didn’t it?” James says. “Reading saved us. We’d be nothing without books.”

  And that is true, because we were odd children—working-class, a little bullied, a little lonely—and books were like a combination of map, weapon, and ladder to climb out of our bad years, and into the happy adults we became. And not only were they a survival kit, but also our greatest joy. We had the library. Endless books for free, stacked up around our beds like piles of money in a treasure house.

  Why do our children not need, or want, our carefully collated inheritances—slowly yellowing, and dust-furred, in the bookcase?

  “What have we done wrong?” James sighs again.

  But it’s cold, so we put our cigarettes out, and go in, and see what our children are doing.

  They’ve been spending the evening recording a mockumentary of Made in Chelsea on their phones and editing it on the laptop—looking up how to do so on Google. Then they play Trivial Pursuit, and watch Hairspray—becoming hysterical with laughter, and having to do competitive headstands, in order to calm down.

  And I start thinking—why am I worrying about these children? These happy children? Why am I worried that they might be dumb—when they are answering quiz questions on maths and geography that leave the adults standing? Why am I worried they will be lesser people without literature—when their generation is unprecedentedly tolerant of different sexualities and cultures, has a plummeting use of drink and drugs, and an ability to satirize itself, and anything else, in a way that makes teenagers of the 1990s look like earnest, credulous cavemen? They live in a world of black presidents, lesbian prime ministers—the Internet, with a billion people and a trillion facts, at their fingertips. From their bedrooms! From the beach, or on a bus!

  By way of contrast, when I was a teenager, if I wanted to see outsiders triumph, or witness omniscience, I had to turn to those carefully hoarded novels about Jo March, or Aslan.

  Perhaps it’s just that their lives are better than books. Perhaps it is that. Perhaps you don’t need novels if your life is happy. Perhaps I am a monkey, pitying a man.

  Part Four

  So, in the last section I said I believe everyone should write a manifesto—just to finally get down on paper what they actually believe, find out what it all adds up to.

  The following, then, is
what I came up with on the subjects that intrigue me. You may note I’ve largely left out anything on policies that involve either (a) maths or (b) guns, as these are not my strong areas. My presumption is that, before I actually took this manifesto to the hustings, I would team up with Carol Vorderman and the Doctor, who would take over, respectively, the economy and defense. I’ve looked up “team player” on Google, and that’s definitely what I’d want to be—so long as it didn’t actually involve kicking or catching any balls. I instinctively close my eyes whenever balls come towards me. I think it’s why I have two children.

  So here it is: the actual Moranifesto. I’m only showing you mine under the condition that you then show me yours. We all have to bare our political tits together.

  Electoral reform: i.e., the scrapping of “First Past the Post” and introduction of some form of alternative vote/proportional representation, to end unhappy voters blindly and “tactically” voting for parties they don’t believe in, or not voting at all, thus making the entire system, to use the scientific term, “useless, time-wasting bullshit.”

  State funding of political parties—no more corporate lobbying, or self-interested sponsors—in order to rebuild voter trust. Once a party starts polling more than 7 percent annually in opinion polls, and/or has more than sixty thousand members, funding kicks in.

  Andy Burnham to sing Dr. Hook’s “Sexy Eyes” at the next Labour Party Conference.

  Boris Johnson to be installed as “storefront” prime minister. While the real prime minister is some furiously untelegenic maths nerd who simply wishes to sit in a room for fourteen hours a day with a massive calculator, crunching some serious economics, Boris gets to jet around the world, being amusing, falling over, saying “Blimey!” and riding a bicycle, a bit like Mr. Bean. He is allowed to job-share with Hugh Grant as the prime minister in Love Actually and/or Martin Freeman playing the prime minister as Tim from The Office.

  It should be noted this storefront prime minister has absolutely no powers—he’s just there, like a political Kardashian, to give the media a series of amusing photo ops and interviews, while someone with a brain the size of Mars, but no charisma at all, gets on with the actual “running of the country” stuff.

  The House of Commons to be fully insulated, lined with pine, and turned into a sauna. Debating style now totally recalibrated by (1) emotional vulnerability of everyone being in a towel, (2) searing heat making everyone very relaxed, (3) no speech able to go on for more than five minutes, as the speaker gets too sweaty and has to sit back down again, as they’ve gone a bit dizzy.

  Manifestos to be written with the aim of people reading them—so people actually know what they’re voting for, instead of voting for a prime minister who “seems nice.” This jazzing up to happen by whatever means necessary—forcing J. K. Rowling to write it, having a nudey picture of Benedict Cumberbatch in the centerfold, impregnating each page with a lickable film of beer. Democracy should be entertaining, hot, and alcoholic.

  On the basis of the handy reckoner “Would we invent this now?,” abolition of the House of Lords. Is what we need, in the twenty-first century, a House of Lords? I mean, just the name: “The House of Lords.” They’re not who you want in an emergency. When the shit’s going down with the Avengers, and Captain America’s locked in a basement, and the earth is being dragged into the sun, and everyone’s despairing, you wouldn’t want Black Widow to go, “Hang on! I know! Let’s get the House of Lords in! They’ll sort it out!” The whole idea of Britain being represented by “Lords” is weird. Lords are good for getting drunk—indeed, they are the benchmark—and a-leaping, and they have a high tolerance for fancy dress: all those ermines and gold chains require strong levels of being able to “style it out.” But, seriously, we only tolerate them because “Lords” sounds posh. Given their centuries-old feudal allegiances, weird sexual politics, high-bling gear, and intense insularity, they are basically a souped-up version of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, but with castles instead of caravans.

  Surely what we want is basically the Council of Elrond—a collection of people all eminent in their fields, taken from a proportionately representative background and paid a wage that reflects the serious and vital nature of what they do so they’re not tempted to take backhanders, and—most crucially—can afford nicer bras and stockings when they’re photographed taking cocaine with sex workers.

  Relocation of Westminster. Again, using the handy measuring device “Would we invent this now?,” I suspect we would not start from scratch with our center of government in an old Victorian Gothic building with a huge clock tower strapped to it, right on the banks of the Thames, where it will be at terrible risk in the event of climate-change flooding. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to think we’d located the seat of administrative power in this country somewhere where there is absolutely no chance of waking up one day and seeing our prime minister floating down the Thames, shouting, “Help! Help! Someone get a pedalo! I’m heading towards Southend!” Anyone who’s been to the Houses of Parliament can see that, while it’s an amazing tourist attraction—the medieval hall! famous clock! mad old Black Rod banging on the door with a stick!—it’s not a place to do business. There aren’t enough offices, it’s cramped and outdated, it’s an insane security risk—all those shootable, bombable windows overlooking the river—and there aren’t enough women’s toilets, because, when they built it, women were still sitting at home, wearing huge hats and saying, sadly, “I cannot work out which I would like best—a slightly looser corset or the vote.”

  It is, however, an amazing place to sit in one of the eight subsidized bars and get drunk. I mean, it’s awesome. On that terrace with an Aperol spritz, trying to work out if you fancy Michael Portillo or not? In that sole respect, it’s peerless.

  Obviously, I know that, in many ways, I’m arguing against my core values to veto a big Gothic booze barn that’s on the labels of HP Sauce as being the seat of our democracy. In another dream, that’s probably what I would have invented.

  But this dream is a practical dream, spurred on by the recent estimate that it will cost £3 billion to refurbish the Houses of Parliament to make it a slightly more modern building in an impractical location that’s still too small.

  I’d relocate it, wholesale. I’d put it in Birmingham—the center of the country, the safest from flooding. As a Midlands girl, I think it would be incredibly healthy for the center of government to leave London—insular, overpriced, wanky—and put it in the middle of a city with a brilliantly dry, witty, dolorous sense of humor. Politics badly needs to be in a place where it will hear someone going, “To be fair, you look like a bit of a dick,” when they’re rehearsing their speeches.

  London is a basket with too many eggs in it—media, politics, business, the City—and it would be healthy to put the big old emu egg of government in a second basket, 120 miles up the M1. The resistance to its relocation tells you everything you need to know about how government views “the regions”—this presumption that civilization ends north of Hampstead. If it does, then this is an excellent reason to spend that £3 billion on building a fabulous, fit-for-purpose modern Parliament—with things like crèches, public spaces, and maybe even living quarters, to cut down on all those expenses claims. It would bring “civilization” to “the regions.”

  The current Houses of Parliament can then be turned into luxury flats and sold for vast profit—because that’s just what we do with everything. Probably even Dame Judi Dench, eventually.

  Energy security. See “How Wind Turbines Keep Us Free.”

  Banning of the phrase “hardworking people.” Man, that’s a phrase I could happily never hear again. “Hardworking people.” Although it’s understandable, in a capitalist economy, why “hardworking people” is the default phrase politicians use when talking about people—it is their effort, and financial contribution to the economy, which is most valued, and visible—it is a bit arse-about-tit, in terms of priorities. Firstly, it neatly ignor
es anyone who isn’t in work—students, the sick, the disabled, full-time carers, and the unemployed, who, we must remember, aren’t all sitting on a pile of empty Kestrel cans, cackling, “Haha, I love being on the dole, me. I’m doing it just to screw people who are employed over,” but the majority of whom are desperately looking for work so they can enjoy having more than £57.90 a week, in order to indulge in such luxuries as a coat, or a bus fare.

  And secondly, the presumed financial contribution from someone who is, above all else, “hardworking” and tax-paying is not all it seems.

  For, if you “work hard” at a job which makes you ill, anxious, depressed, or unfit—if “working hard” for those extra hours means you don’t have time to exercise, and rely on ready-meals—you could negate your tax value pretty quickly.

  Currently, nearly half the British population takes prescription drugs—cholesterol-lowering statins, ACE inhibitors for high blood pressure, or painkillers: nearly one in five women in economically deprived areas is being prescribed antidepressants. Eight million people in Britain suffer from anxiety disorders.

  The cost of these medicines to the NHS was £15 billion in 2013. On top of this, we spend nearly £9 billion on Type 2 diabetes—a disease which is largely and easily preventable through good diet and a bit of moving around, but which currently results in 135 amputations a week. Amputations! In the twenty-first century!