Moranthology (22 page)

 

So that's the color. But what about the size?

C
HICKS
W
ITH
B
IG
H
AIR
A
RE
M
Y
C
HICKS

U
ntil the age of twenty-five, the biggest fear in my life was that I would go bald. If I considered it for even one second, I had the kind of sweaty, spiralling panic that other people describe on being stuck in pot holes, or standing at the top of the Empire State Building.

My fear of hair loss was based in cool analysis of fact: as a teenage girl, I was quietly unappealing.

“You have a round, ruddy face, such as a peasant's,” my sister told me, at one point, using her “helpful” voice. “Like a Halloween pumpkin—but not as sexy.”

As we were also poor, I didn't have the resources—such as fashion, makeup, or cocaine—to increase my allure to the viewing eye. Simply, then, my hair was a precious commodity—as I could grow it very, very long. Long hair is pretty much the only beauty you can acquire if you have no money at all.

By the time I was thirteen, my hair was down to my hips. I had tended it assiduously. Nothing was too good for it. I would sit around, eating jam sandwiches, whispering, “Grow! Grow!” at my head, in what I deemed to be a voice encouraging to follicles.

At one point, I read in a nineteenth-century guide to beauty that rinsing with a beaten raw egg would add luster and shine. Consequently, I spent nearly two years walking around with an eggy, slightly sulphurous air. I was less “nymphette,” and more “omelette.”

Over these years of intense hair cultivation—I was essentially a “hair farmer,” tending the hairfield on my head—my focus shifted, slowly but significantly, from having “long” hair, to wanting “big” hair.

“This is basically a ‘hair cape,' ” I realized, looking down, when I was around fifteen. “I look like Captain Caveman. I don't need
length.
What I need, is
width.
This hair needs to be predominantly based on my head. I'm going bouffy.”

Turning, again, to my nineteenth-century guide to beauty, I noted that Victorian women would achieve their gigantic updos by padding out their hair with “rats”: tiny pillows they would pin to their heads, and then arrange their own hair over, in a series of billows, knots and waves.

Keen to have my hair in an updo the size of a hat, I started to use “rats” myself. At the time, however, the only things I could find in the house that approximated “rats” were the tissue-paper liners for the terrycloth diapers my mother used on the babies.

While seeming, at first, to be securely fixed to my head, these liners would regularly fall out while I stood at bus stops, walked through parks, tried to purchase goods at a grocery store, etc. Then I, and anyone else around, would all stare at what appeared to be a giant sanitary napkin on the floor, which had just fallen out of my head.

“My rats,” I would explain. It never seemed to make things better.

In the years since, I have, thank God, worked out how to satisfy my Hair Larging urges in a slightly more practical way—essentially by taking half the length off, then backcombing for ten minutes solidly every morning, in the way other people do yoga, or walk the dog.

As I joyfully embiggen myself into the vague silhouette of Chewbacca, I have time to reflect on just what it is about big hair that I find so elementally appealing.

Firstly, there is the obvious matter of perspective. By having big hair, it makes my body look smaller in comparison. As far as an aid to looking slimmer goes, this is the easiest one ever conceieved of. No fad diets, corsetry, optical illusion spray tanning, or artful couture: just a massive do.

Secondly, when it comes to wanting to look glamorous, there's something winningly practical about having huge hair. Heels cripple you; the bugle-beading on an expensive dress will chafe. Huge hair, on the other hand, can't fall off. You never leave you hair in the back of a cab. It's unbreakable, unstealable, and, most importantly of all, costs nothing. Aimed with a comb, you can whip your do up like egg-whites into a gigantic hair meringue, without it costing you a penny. Big hair is the party-do Marx would have backed, for sure.

And finally, while I am not prejudiced against people with small hair—as far as I know, there as never been any “small hair on big hair” violence recorded on “the streets”; we are not in conflict—there's something about big-haired chicks that makes me instantly inclined to like them. The iconography of big-haired women is compelling: cackling bar-maids in tight leopardskin; Rizzo in
Grease,
backcombing in the school toilets; Tracy in
Hairspray
wailing “But our First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, rats her hair!” when the teachers condemn her beehive. Dusty. Alexis Colby-Carrington. Winehouse.

It's the hair of the working-class girl on the make; on the town. A party helmet. A gigantic hair aura, indicating holy razziness—such as the Virgin Mary would have had, if she'd been in the Ronettes.

 

Hair takes us, naturally and easily, to the most famous hair of the twenty-first century. Not my own, alas—although it is something I am working on all the hours that God sends—but that of the Duchess of Cambridge, née Kate Middleton, our future Queen of England.

The Royal Wedding in March, 2011 was one of the big media events of the last ten years. Broadcasters and newspapers the world over wondered just how they could make their coverage truly reflect the grandeur, history and emotion of this occasion. On the one hand, this was something that would be included in encyclopedias, and be thought to reflect upon the age. On the other—two young, cheerful people in love. How best to report on this juddering disparity? How? HOW?

Thankfully, I knew: just write down everything Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet said on Twitter throughout the ceremony.

T
HE
B
EST
R
OYAL
W
EDDING
E
VER

I
t might have been a Royal Wedding but, really, there was no pressure.

Should William and Kate have turned on ITV1's
Six O'Clock New
s the night before their wedding—perhaps in their bathrobes, in face packs, eating Shreddies—presenter Julie Etchingham would have soothed their nerves:

“This wedding,” Etchingham said, standing outside Buckingham Palace, “is an opportunity for optimism about the future—in a moment when our history is marked by tough economic times at home, and DISASTER and DEATH
all around the world.”

Well. That is quite an implication to take on board: that your wedding will, in some way, negate the effect of the Fukushima nuclear plant leak. However confident in your frock, finger buffet and vodka ice luge you may initially have been, it's got to be a bit of a jolt when
the news
tells you that your nuptials have the perceived ability to counteract radioactivity.

But the joy of something like a Royal Wedding, of course, is that everyone
does
go a little bit nuts around it. Last week
wasn't
a normal week. It was like the last day of the school year, or Friday at Glastonbury: everything upside down. Nothing usual. The shops ran out of bunting, lager and charcoal, the news disappeared from papers and TV, and what would normally be a workday turned into a holiday where it was perfectly acceptable to be sitting on the sofa at 11
AM
, blind drunk, using an enormous foam rubber Union Jack hand to ferry peanuts to your mouth.

And so it was that the eve of the Royal Wedding had all the novelty of the day you move house—displacing all your usual objects and routines, and ending up with a supper of sardines and marmalade in the front garden, using only tablespoons. Odd conversations happened. On Thursday's episode of political show
This Week,
for instance, Richard Madeley claimed that the next day would see the marriage “consummated” at Westminster Abbey—an event inexplicably left out of
The Times's
souvenir fourteen-page Order of Service.

Later in the show, presenter Andrew Neil asked him if he, Madeley, would “Get rid of Charles, and make William king?”

Madeley replied, “Well if he was gaga, obviously,” with the kind of breezy certainty that suggested that, should our heir apparent actually “go gaga,” Madeley would step up to the plate and finish Charles off with a spade, as if he were an old badger knocked down by a car.

As the sun set on April 28th, 2011, it was clear that this was a day that would live on in everyone's mind as the day Kerry Katona [@KerryKatona] tweeted, “Best of luck Kate and Wills. Hope it doesn't end like my last two,” and Jeff Brazier [@JeffBrazier] (former boyfriend of the late Jade Goody, of
Big Brother
fame) made his big Royal Wedding statement: “Wills, I think your missus is fit. And for that reason, I just want to say, ‘Well done.' ”

Friday April 29, 2011

8:35
AM
. It seemed that Kate Garraway had got the short straw: ITV1 had sent her out of London, away from the wedding, to Buckleberry—home of the Middletons. This is Middletonia. Middletonaria. Middletonton.

In a strapless dress and slightly incongruous furry bolero cardigan—it was colder than everyone thought it would be—Garraway was sitting outside Buckleberry's pub, surrounded by locals. One of them was holding a giant rabbit, which is wearing a Union Jack top hat.

“Buckleberry has become the center of the universe!” Garraway said—patently not true either in terms of the wedding (those international news crews aren't camped outside Westminster Abbey for nothing) or the composition of the universe (it has no observable center).

We cut away from Garraway to the crowds lining the Mall. A huge cheer had gone up, and the director clearly wished to see what it was. Alas—it was a huge Portapotty-emptying truck, at which the crowds were cheerfully and ironically waving their Union Jack flags. British crowds know exactly how to behave on a Big Day such as this, when the eyes of the world are upon them. You cheer the oomska-wagon with just as much fervor as you would cheer Princess Michael of Kent. It's one of the sly perks of being a subject.

Class-based bitchiness, meanwhile, is one of the sly perks of being a TV news anchor. Alistair Stewart had been outside the Goring Hotel since 6
AM
, reporting on the nothing-happening emptiness that would, eventually, be stepped into by Kate Middleton on her way to the Abbey.

“The police presence is marvelously understated here,” he smoothed. “Sometimes it's difficult to work out if it's a Middleton—or a member of staff.”

A
nother one of the great things about this wedding is that it is happening so early. As a nation on a public holiday sets up the cafetiere and argues over the last Coco Pops variety pack, the King of Swaziland and Elton John are having to get into central London on a day with limited public transport options, then queue up for twenty minutes to get into Westminster Abbey.

Look—it is only 9:15
AM
, and there is David Beckham, stuck in a celebrity-and-dignitaries traffic jam, and practicing his “staring into the distance looking noble” face while the crowd outside shouts, “Becks! Becks! Becks! Becks!”

Perhaps it is the sheer shock of the early hour, but Beckham's eyebrows appear to be verging just ever so slightly towards “Ming the Merciless.” Next to him, his heavily pregnant wife, Victoria, stands in four-inch Louboutins, a ticking human time bomb. With the time currently 9:16
AM
, and the service not due to end until 12:15, her pregnant bladder will be a matter of fretting concern to all the mothers watching on television.

“That poor cow still on that pew?” they will ask, as they themselves take advantage of their own, immediately-to-hand toilet facilities. “Let's hope she doesn't sneeze, or it is game over.”

Last night, before the wedding began, there were a couple of things you would have felt incredibly confident in betting on. 1) The recurrence of the phrases “That dress,” “Fairytale wedding,” “What Britain does best,” “The eyes of the world,” “Diana's boys” and “Princess Beatrice, there, wearing a . . . thing.”

2) Most women in the country crying quite heavily at some point during the ceremony.

And, finally, the most certain of all, 3) The BBC providing the definitive coverage of the event: solemn, reverent, knowing, stately, informed, and wholly befitting a royal occasion.

In the event, however, the BBC's coverage
is
solemn, reverent, knowing, stately and informed—and it doesn't befit this royal occasion at all. While the BBC gives us a thorough behind-the-scenes tour of the Household Cavalry's schedule today (“These boys have been shining their boots since 5
AM
!”) and thoughtful talking-heads in the studio, who marvel over the architecture of Westminster Abbey, ITV1 gets right in there: forcing milliner Stephen Jones to comment on other milliner's creations as they walk through the Abbey doors (“It's very . . . pretty,” he offered, eventually, with a cat's bum mouth), giving us the money shots of Earl Spencer turning up (“There he is with his new fiancée—there's always a new one, isn't there?”), and zooming in on Prince Harry's girlfriend, Chelsy Davies, the minute she emerged from a car (“The wonderful thing about Kate is that she's so natural,” Julie Etchingham mewed, as Chelsey's cheerfully bright orange face moved up the aisle).

In what was perhaps the definitive editorial decision of the day, at 9:30
AM
, ITV1 cut from a live interview with David Cameron, who was being rather shiny and pious (“I know the whole nation wishes those young people a very great deal of luck”) to show Tara Palmer-Tompkinson's arrival at Westminster Abbey instead.

The only possible reason for this newsflash-like urgency—Cameron was literally mid-sentence—was to see if Palmer-Tomkinson had, as had been speculated in the press, got her “new nose,” following the recent collapse of her septum: thus making it abundantly clear that, for today at least, a minxy aristocrat's nasal integrity out-ranked anything the Prime Minister could say or do.

ITV1 had grasped what the BBC hadn't, or perhaps couldn't: that the way this country views the Royal Family has changed, and for the better. The ridiculous, childlike deference we had when Charles and Diana married—an era where there was the assumption that Diana would be a virgin, outrage at the creation of a
Spitting Image
puppet of the Queen Mother, and my father told me, in all seriousness, that I should never criticize the Queen in public “because you might get a punch in the face” (I was seven)—has gone, and it is better for all of us that it has. Opinions on what the national reaction to the life and death of Diana “meant” are two-a-penny, but I can't help but think that what we all learned, along the way, is that princes and princesses can be as lonely, hopeful, confused, unfaithful, devious, lost, simple, kindhearted, silly and breakable as the rest of us, and that demanding that they be anything other than fallible and human is apt to work out extremely badly for everyone involved.

The healthiest way William and Kate's future “subjects” could deal with watching their wedding, then, was to approach it as they would attending the wedding of a friend: i.e.: turning up in all good faith, having a couple of drinks, then cheerfully spend the rest of whole day taking the mick out of the décor, food, music, location and fellow-guests. Watch this just as they would watch
X Factor—
cheering the “good guys,” slagging off the ridiculous or amusing elements on Twitter. And this, in the event, is just what ITV1 did.

By 10
AM
, all the celebrities and dignitaries were assembled in the Abbey, and it was time to reflect on whose presence was sorely missed, due to the limited guest list. Personally, I yearned for Bill Clinton—old Big Dog. He was brilliant at the Olympic Bids—always in the background of a shot, mine-sweeping the room for poon and canapés. Tony Blair, similarly, would have been a good booking—or, failing him, Michael Sheen, who could have done the ceremony as Blair, then gone to the reception as either Brian Clough, or David Frost.

Guy Ritchie's arrival, meanwhile, underlined how awesome it would have been if he and Madonna had kept it together, and she was now stalking around the Abbey like Cruella de Ville with abs, making Nick Clegg cry with terror. And who didn't want George Michael there—a little bit stoned, having valet-parked his Jeep into a nearby tree? Thank goodness, then, that he could appear by proxy, via Twitter, while watching the ceremony from home—where, he informed us, he was wearing “Union Jack pants.”

10:10
AM
and Huw Edwards on the BBC was getting very stressed about the day's schedule. “Prince William has
ten seconds
to appear,” he said, making it all sound a bit like an episode of
24.

10:11, and—a minute behind schedule—William finally emerged in the bright red uniform of the Irish Guards. As pop critic Tim Jonze [@timjonze] puts it on Twitter, “He's come dressed as Pete Doherty, circa 2003!”

Over CNN, horror instantly broke out amongst the American pundits with the advent of the minibuses, which were ferrying the wider royal family to the Abbey.

“These are airport shuttle buses!” one wailed—presumably laboring under the belief that the only way royalty and the aristocracy can be transported around is in a gigantic hollowed-out pumpkin, pulled by unicorns. What the American commentators failed to understand is that one of the things that Britain does best is putting loads of people on a bus. Look at
Summer Holiday.
Away-matches. Pakistani weddings in Wolverhampton. With this bus thing, we were playing to our strengths.

Martin Kemp [@realmartinkemp] from Spandau Ballet didn't think so, though: “Mini buses? Gimme a break,” he snorted on Twitter. “Spandau or Duran wouldn't get in one of those. I bet Elton won't be going to the part in one. Off with the head of who organized that.”

On the BBC, Kate Middleton had finally emerged from the Goring in a whiteout of flashbulbs. Even though we could not really see her, womankind had noticed one thing and was punching the air: the dress was sleeved! Yes! Finally the reign of evil sleevelessness is OVER! GOD BLESS YOU MIDDLETON! FASHION WILL NOW ALLOWS US TO HIDE OUR UPPER ARMS AGAIN, AS GOD INTENDED. Were the BBC to have a Body Dysmorphia-O-Meter, it would have registered an instant 40 percent drop across the nation. Our future Queen's biggest legacy had begun.

Sleeves aside, these first shots of Middleton in the car were not ideal. The framing of the telephoto lens was such that both her head, and her lower-torso, were cut off from view, and all we could see was Ms. Middleton's décolletage.

“It's a limited view, but a delightful view,” Huw Edwards intoned, solemnly, as if he were now the BBC's Official State Perver. As the bride's father, Michael Middleton fussed around, placing the dress and train into the car, Edwards continued, “He is making sure everything is unsoiled, and undamaged”—an unfortunate narrative accompaniment to a man on his knees, half-buried under his daughter's dress, on the morning of her wedding.