Is It Just Me? Read Online Free Page B

know. But, my little one, you will go. At twenty-six. And you’ll have quite a nice time in the brief bits where you’re not worried about being arrested. Not because you’d had any reason to be arrested. But because the presence of a policeman there makes you look and feel guilty. (In fact, MDRC, I usually go red in the presence of a policeman and do a kind of bob and say ‘Evening’, whatever time of the day it is. Why,
why
does that happen?) I also have to warn you, Little Miranda, that you stick out like a giant in a sea of nine-year-old pop fans at the Poll Winners Party. In fact, at one point, when you stand up to dance in a moment of excitement as the boy band A1 do a rendition of A-Ha, you are tapped on the shoulder by a tiny pre-teenage girl behind you, who asks you to sit down because she can’t see.

    But don’t worry, gigs-wise, things aren’t
that
bad. In your thirties you’ll come very close to booking a ticket to see Michael Ball live.
    Who’s Michael Ball? Is he alt rock, post-punk or New Wave?
    Um . . . sort of.
    But won’t I stalk bands? Won’t I be a groupie? I always thought I’d quite like to be a groupie. That’s very me. Loud, wild parties that go on till dawn. Dancing with leather-clad rockers.
    I’m going to have to stop you there. That’s not you. You
will
be a groupie, just not of musicians. All of your stalker-ish energy will be channelled into the aggressive stage-dooring of comedy actors and actresses. And the odd tennis player. (By the way, Goran Ivanisevic is still not our husband. I KNOW. Don’t worry, there’s time . . .) Maybe if Noel Coward had been around in our twenties and thirties, you would have gone to one of his ‘gigs’. Possibly even bought the tour T-shirt and slipped into his dressing room with a flagon of Pimms. But no. No gigs.
    Why not?
    Oh, lots of reasons. Most of them fear-based. Fear of crowds, fear of loud noise, fear of sweat. Fear of a festival. You’ve got to have a muso gene to want to spend four days in mud in June in England. Then there’s fear of ‘cool’. Fear of being coerced into dancing, or of dancing when it’s not appropriate to dance. If you have the muso gene, you can just get up and dance wherever. You can be in a slightly arty café at night, no one else is dancing but there’s a bit of room, you’re feeling it, so you get up and off you go. How can anyone be so liberated and un-British, yet still technically British? Unfathomable.
    Big Miranda, please tell me I get better at dancing.
    Afraid not. Largely because of the fact that you are going to remain tall. And dancing when you’re as tall as we are goes beyond indignity and strays into the territory of health and safety risk. Once at a wedding, I attempted to ‘mosh’, and I got a bit carried away . . . and . . . well, let’s just say that marquee structure clearly wasn’t stable if me clinging on to one of its poles in a brief moment of misplaced exuberance brought the whole thing down.
    Oh, Big Miranda, that’s appalls-balls . . .
    Can you not call me ‘Big Miranda’, please? And ‘appalls-balls’ . . .?
    ‘Appalling’. Bella made it up at school last term. She’s so cool.
    Right. Well, yes, it was a bit appalls-balls. But I must say, it was very amusing. Aunts swept off chairs by a marquee ceiling swooping down and forcing them into a flowerbed. Much flailing to escape from the billowing, sail-like covering. A swearing vicar. All the stuff that makes life worth living. But, because you have basically decent manners and dislike being the cause of physical injury in others, you’ll never be truly free on the dance floor.
    I’ll never dance?
    Oh, you’ll dance. But you’ll settle for ironic dancing, which is really where you just dance the finale of
Grease
, enthusiastically and badly, to whatever music is playing. Over the years you will dance the finale of
Grease
to everything from hardcore drum’n’bass (no, I don’t know, either) to the Blue