How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

When I was thirteen, I found myself being given a book with a rather serious title along the lines of Your Preparation for Adolescence which dwelt long on the temptation to sin and the perils of marijuana. Seeing as all I learned from it were a few rather outdated slang words for puff, I can’t help but fantasise how things would have turned out had I managed to send this little gem back in time to my thirteenth birthday.

Part memoir, part rant and an attempt to rewrite The Female Eunuch from a bar stool, How to be a Woman is a hilarious amble through subjects both serious and not, that affect women in Britain today, the sort of stuff that people need a few drinks inside them to discuss:

So whilst How to be a Woman is the story of all the times that I – uninformed, underprepared, fatally deluded as to my ability to ‘style out’ a poncho – got being a woman wrong, in the 21st century, merely recounting experience doesn’t seem to be enough any more. Yes, an old-fashioned feminist ‘consciousness raising’ still has enormous value. When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.

She marches through most of the above before getting to marriage; the obscene cost, and the ultimate disappointment of the ceremony itself. She illustrates this with her own nuptials:

I don’t want to exaggerate but, by God, it was a bad wedding... My father is in a suit he shoplifted from Ciro Citterio, and some shoes he shoplifted from Burtons – but he looks calm, wise and not a little emotional about giving away his first child in marriage. “Oh my lovely daughter,” he says, smelling a little of whisky.

Realising she is walking too quickly up the aisle, she slows down to a pace so slow, her sisters suspect that she has cystitis:

Still, I look fine compared to husband to be. He’s so nervous he’s a very pale green, and is shaking like a sock on a washing line. “I’ve never seen a more anxious groom,” the registrar confides, later. “I had to give him two shots of whisky.”

The ceremony over, the guests decamp to the watering hole:

An hour later and everyone’s in the bar. Many of our invited guests haven’t been able to make it, because it’s two days after Christmas and they’re with their families in Scotland, Devon and Ireland. My family are taking advantage of the free bar – many of them can’t walk anymore, and, of the ones that can, two of the have found a memorial to a dead knight, and are giving his statue a ‘saucy’ pole dance.

The reader may now have drawn the conclusion that Caitlin Moran doesn’t do weddings:

I was similarly lacklustre at Cathy and John’s wedding, when Cathy’s dad gave me a tour of their beautiful, all-white house, as I trailed along behind, swigging red wine. “And this is my favourite view,” Cathy’s dad said, as we reached the master bedroom, and he strode over to the window. “On a clear day, you can see right down the valley.” Then a bat flew in through the window, and right into my face. I don’t know if you’ve every had a bat fly into your face, but you don’t have an enormous amount of time to work out your coping technique. You kind of... ride on instinct. My instinct, it turned out, was to scream “WHAT THE FUCKING?”, and hurl my red wine right across the world’s whitest room.

Still, she knows exactly how to rectify the situation:

Bombing into the kitchen, I returned with a bottle of white wine, and started sloshing it around, in a dedicated manner. “White wine gets red wine stains out!” I shouted. “I saw it on telly!” I maniacally started pouring the white wine into the now scarlet rug, and scrubbing it with a tea towel. Cathy’s dad came across the room – slightly faster than I thought a man of his age would be capable of – and gently prised the bottle from my hand. He stared at it – now empty – for a moment. “Ah,” he said, regretfully, “The ’93 Alsace Grand Cru.” There was a long pause. “Still,” he said, with enormous grace, touching the bottle with his fingertips. “It was a little too warm to drink.”

Her feminism is just as important as her humour and Moran tackles her subjects of sexism, motherhood, abortion, role models, weight and adolescence with equal gravity and laughter.

I feel I probably owe the author a bit of an apology, as I’ve never given her much time for her prodigious column writing. I grumbled that most of it wasn’t my thing, (to be objective, that goes for almost all columnists), missing the point that Moran writes well, and is very funny as well as being an excellent polemicist and debater.

I felt almost wistful for my thirteen year old self as I read How to be a Woman, and it is testament to the book’s clarity of thinking that I wish I’d had the chance to read it then. I’m sure it would have helped me muddle through just a little bit better than just knowing that a large weight of cannabis used to be called a brick...

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend

A real time piece from the 1980s, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ is a brilliantly funny slice of social observation, drawn through the eyes of its eponymous hero. Sue Townsend’s pen was as sharp as ever during the later books, but unfortunately, Adrian himself had begun to depress me and I stopped reading them...

A hypochondriac who thinks he’s an intellectual, Adrian bumbles through life with a complete lack of self unawareness. His diary captures his frustrations with his family, his school and his love for the treacle haired Pandora Braithwaite.

He starts the year with a worthy set of New Year’s resolutions:

8. After hearing the disgusting noises from downstairs last night, I have also vowed never to drink alcohol.

My father got the dog drunk on cherry brandy at the party last night. If the RSPCA hear about it he could get done.

Woodbine smoking OAP Bert Baxter is another thorn in Adrian’s side. After looking after him for the Good Samaritans for a few months, he finds himself having to clean up his filthy home:

Pandora and I went to look at Bert’s house today. It is a truly awesome sight. If Bert took all his empty beer bottles back to the off-license he might get enough money on the empties to pay off his rent arrears... My father took Bert’s beer bottles back to the off-license this morning. The boot, back seat and floor of the car were filled with them. The car stank of brown ale. He ran out of petrol on the way and called the AA. The AA man was most uncivil, he said it wasn’t the Automobile Association my father needed, it was Alcoholics Anonymous.

He drily recounts the time that Bert comes to visit, driven over by Pandora’s father:

Pandora’s father stayed for a quick drink, then a pre-lunch one, then a chaser, then one for the road. Then the had one to prove that he never got drunk during the day... I had to endure watching my father do his imitation of some bloke called Frank Sinatra singing ‘One for my baby and one more for the road’. Pandora’s father pretended to be the bartender with our Tupperware custard jug.

New Year comes round again so quickly. His last entry for the year ends thus:

My father came crashing through the front door at 1 a.m. carrying a lump of coal in his hand. Drunk as usual. My mother started going on about what a wonderful son I was and how much she loved me. It’s a pity she never says anything like that when she’s sober.

And so onto Adrian’s Growing Pains...

The Wee Book of Calvin by Bill Duncan

A hilarious exploration of the North-East of Scotland, The Wee Book of Calvin analyses the people of the region through their language and behaviour with particular attention paid to all things dour...


Of course, no book on Scotland can omit its most famous alcoholic export, Whisky. Uisge beath. The water of life:

‘Freedom and whisky gang thegither’, according to Scotland’s national Bard. In the North-East, wild mood swings, gratuitous insult, physical and verbal abuse of strangers, imagined slight, self-injury, false bonhomie, spontaneous singing of Frank Sinatra songs in a broad Dundonian accent, delirium tremens, unwanted sexual attentions, incontinence, unaccompanied public dancing, indecent exposure, memory blackout, insolvency, uncontrollable facial tics, temporary loss of motor functions, social ridicule, divorce, sexual dysfunction, random violence, a face prematurely ravaged by thousands of ruptured blood vessels and whisky gang thegither.

Duncan gives a potted history of distilling in Scotland, before ruminating on some of its more unfortunate side effects, exemplified by some horrifying newspaper headlines gleaned from the local press:

Each instance of fracas, disorder and alcoholic mayhem accompanied by the tired litany: ‘The accused had been drinking heavily... the accused had no recollection of the incident... a history of alcohol-related offences.’

He leaves us with a treatise on the hangover, with its age-old trinity of sin, guilt and self-loathing. The hangover, his uncle once explained to him, is the yin to whisky’s yang:

...as a Calvinist he recognized The Hangover as a necessary moral device, balancing polarized cosmic forces in a zen-like harmony, each moment of pleasure tempered by the certainty of its opposite.

Or to put it more simply:

The hangover – yer payment fur havin a guid time.

Dear Bill by Richard Ingrams and John Wells

The Dear Bill letters in Private Eye were the fortnightly round-up of the week's events in politics during Margaret Thatcher's time in office. The Eye had previously satirised the Wilson administration with Mrs. Wilson's Diary, and they continued the theme during the Major Years with The Secret Diary of John Major aged 47 3/4, but Dear Bill was special. It was brilliant.


There's a family story that a copy of the letters, having been given to my father as a Christmas present, had been left lying on a table somewhere, when my Grandmother chanced upon them. She read a few and remarked that she didn't think that they ought to have been published! In my mind, Private Eye's Prime Ministerial satires have never achieved the humour that they did with this series, but I suppose I might be biased, as there are copious references to 'electric soup' and 'snorts' throughout, hence it's inclusion in the 120 Units blog.

The following is from 30 September 1988, and is my favourite. It gets quoted often, normally at length...

Dear Bill, Did Maurice get my obscene greetings from Madrid on his fax machine? I was left alone for hours in the Embassy while the Boss went off to discuss Gibraltar, and the Ambassador very kindly granted me the freedom of his den, complete with half a case of El Matador Knockout Infuriator. By the time I met up with the Boss in the Prado the horizon was performing a rhumba and when somebody mentioned El Greco I remember asking for a large one.

The letters somehow endeared Dennis to the nation as a sozzled old buffoon who was essentially harmless. I'm not sure that was the authors' intent, but it's telling that Wells finished up doing impersinations of Dennis by the end of the Thatcher's tenure in Downing Street.