Moran - Moranifesto

To Lizzie and Nancy hang the wet towels up they cannot dry on the floor for the love of baby jesus hang the towels on the towel rail you are breaking a good woman here

Also to Nye Bevan.Thank you for approximately half of my life

So, welcome to my second collection of writing. Hello! I embrace you. I am sorry about the smell. I get very sweaty when I write. I dont know why. One day, I will learn how to varnish my armpits, and it will be easier to be my friend again. Until thenI apologize.

Ive been a columnist for twenty-three years now. I started when I was seventeen, at The Times, when I faxed them a speculative column from the fax machine at the Stars newsagent on Warstones Drive, Wolverhampton.

The Times offered me a job, so I moved down to London and started writing about what I knew: pop music, TV, film, radio. Life stuff, like What to do in a nightclub (always work out a dance routine in advance; keep your money in your bra) and How to smoke a cigarette in a cool way (always make sure you put it in your mouth the right way round; the taste of smoldering filter is deeply unpleasant).

Mainly, I just tried to be funny. And I stayed away from anything politicalbecause politics wasnt for seventeen-year-old girls trying to be funny. That was for serious adult men, in suits, who knew people in Parliament, or had been politicians themselves, or wanted to be politicians in the future. Politics was for the political people, and I was not one of them.

Anyway, the years passed and I grew up, and, as one does, I read the newspapers, and I watched the news, and I started to have opinions on politicsthis is stupid! that is amazing! why are we not doing this?but still I didnt write about politics: because I wasnt a Professional Politics Person. I thought that the grown-ups would round on me if I didthat they would read that column and point out that I did not have the education, or knowledge, to have an opinion on these things, and I would be shamed for writing something foolish, or ignorant, or which didnt go into huge details about the Whig government of 1715.

But then, in 2011, I wrote How to Be a Woman in a huge, five-month frenzy. I had spent years wanting to write a book about feminism, but had thought it would be the same deal as with politics: that feminism was a job for Professional Feminist People, and that it wasnt something you could rock up to unless youd been to the right university, joined the right groups, read the right books, and learned the right history and terminology. Maybe youd even need to know about the Whig government of 1715 here, too. I didnt know. It was entirely possible.

However, the arrival of my daughters viscerally overrode that fear: as they began school, I became so wild with panic that they would, as they started to go out in society, have to deal with all the same crushing, debilitating, time-wasting, unjoyous bullshit Id had to deal with when I was their agethe same, anxious, enraging, dull deforming of the female spiritthat I wrote the book anyway. I wanted to write something that laid out, all in one place, as much as I was able, why the world is as it is for women, and pass on as many tools as I was able for them to analyze it, and deal with it, while at the same time detailing all the times Id been a massive knobhead, so they could, maybe, avoid perhaps half of all the mistakes Id made.

And when How to Be a Woman took off, in the most unexpected waydespite me not being a Professional Feminist PersonI started to think, Maybe theres something to learn here. Maybe you dont need to be the right kind of person to write about big things. Maybe anyone thoughtful, and making an effort, can contribute to the debate. Maybe there are thousands of us who are not thinking, and not writing, and not talkingjust because we think we are the wrong kind of person. SoI am going to write about politics now. Firstly, because I think I should; and secondly, because Im old enough now not to care if people think I cant. I love getting older. You might lose skin elasticity, but you also lose the amount of fucks you give. Its awesome.

So I rang my editor at The Times and told her that I would now like to give up my humorous column in the Magazine, and move to the Op-Ed pagesbecause thats where all the Professional Political People writeand that I would write only serious political pieces from now on. Because you cant write a column for a glossy magazine where, one week, you detail how much you hate printers and then, the next, Syria. Thats just not one of the careers on offer.

And she replied, You massive idiot. Of course you can do both. In fact, you should do both. Theres a whole section of people wholl never read the Op-Ed pages, because they dont think politics is for thembut theyll read it if they come across it accidentally, in a glossy magazine. Really, its the only place you should write about politics if you want to reach as many people as possible. Im going to say it againyoure a massive idiot.

So, I stayedand this collection is the result of that conversation.

To my great relief, I didnt have to give up the fun, joyous stuffand so half of what follows is getting drunk with Benedict Cumberbatch; boggling over the rainy, catastrophic Queens Jubilee; hangovers; cystitis; and being quite angry about the utter betraying motherfuck properties of printers. Its reviewing documentaries about David Bowie and falling in love with him all over again, and sharing all my hard-won advice about dealing with people on the 5:2 diet.

And the other half is about the wider world, which starts to feel far less abstract, and closer, and more pressing as you get older: Syria, abortion, welfare, rape, the death of Margaret Thatcher, FGM, renewable energy, ironic bigotry, refugees, austerity, and inequality. The things which shape the outside worldwhich seem distant, merely issuesbut which at any minute can come into your house, or that of those you love, and blow all their plans away. The stuff we think we can escape when we shut the front dooronly to find it has come in through the kitchen window and is sitting on the table, waiting for you. Setting fire to your books, and your calendar, and your life.

And as I collected all these pieces together for this book, I started to see that a lot of what I was saying all seemed to... join up a bit. That these things interconnectof course they do! everything in the world is interconnected! the primary point of that Kevin Bacon game was to teach us this!and that my instinct was to start trying to lay these things out in some form of worldview, in which I might make suggestions for how I think things might change.

Basically, I thought it would be cowardly not to. After twenty-three years of commenting on things, youre not really just commenting on things anymore. Youre starting to... suggest alternatives. Youre forming a plan. And once youve thought of the word Moranifesto you know what you have to do. Make a cup of tea, roll up a ciggie, put on David Bowie, and play that classic working-class game: How I would change the world.

But alongside this blatant attempt at world domination, this book is a snapshot of where we are now, sixteen years into the new century: as to which is the most problematic part of a modern womans body.

I hope you enjoy reading it. I ate a lot of cheese writing itnot that I regret this decision at all. If I have any motto, in my later years, it is Never regret the cheese. Je ne regrette Brie-en.

Only a crisisactual or perceivedproduces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.