Is It Just Me? (6 page)

You panic. ‘My life is meaningless,’ you think. ‘I’m just a shallow little pizza-eating wage-slave.’ So you begin to cast around for a hobby. You suddenly appear – for a fleeting moment – at a hula-hooping class. You phone the Martial Arts School then hang up in fear as soon as they answer. You start to pay a little more attention to yellowing cards in newsagents’ windows inviting you to join Nigel and Ceri and their group of aspiring vegan cooks for a demonstration at the community centre, Tuesdays at 7.30 p.m. (no classes on Wiccan holidays).

Then, after a short period spent anxiously hovering on the fringes of hobby-land, you take the plunge. You put in a phone call, and before you know it, you’ve joined a book group.

Your evening at Book Group will, inevitably, go something like this:

Still, at least those quests for a hobby are motivated by something essentially noble, some sort of desire to expand one’s horizons and better oneself. But in one’s thirties another, slightly more sinister, gang of new-hobby-ists emerges:
the Man-Finders
. These are the women who take up traditionally masculine activities in order to find a mate. They will feign interest in Indoor Rock Climbing, Car Mechanics, Boxing. Or for the less out-and-out Man-Finder, they will attempt to meet their future Mr Right through the hallowed dancing classes of salsa. Actually, I highly recommend you attend one. Not because you’re likely to meet an available man, but because there’s nothing in the world funnier than twenty-five single women dancing in pairs with one another, each in the throes of a devastating existential crisis, while a perky instructor shouts out, ‘Hips, ladies, hips! Feel the rhythm!’ (Note to anyone considering joining a class: there is no need to turn up in full
Strictly Come Dancing
salsa outfit including fake tan. Everyone just wears jeans. Briefly awkward.)

^*
Eighteen-year-old Miranda sulkily stomps in
^*
We got WALTZING MAN IN BALLROOM SCENE.

Talking of dancing in all-female pairs . . .

Don’t laugh . . . I am in a total bate about this . . .

I am not laughing: I still feel your pain, Little M . . .

I don’t think I will ever get over this.

Don’t worry, you don’t.

It could at least have been Waltzing WOMAN.

I know, I know.

I hate being tall. Dire strait pants. And now – as if my life couldn’t get any more hideola – I’ve got to go and pretend to be interested in watching Bella try on her new pixie boots. She’s the first one in the school to have a pair – typical. Last term she laughed at my bat wing jumper because it was BHS.

Could I please get back to my Mrs Chapter?

Mrs Chapter? Weirdo.

I’ll give you Mrs Chapter and raise you ‘Dire strait pants’ . . . Off you trot, Waltzing Man in Ballroom Scene.

Meanie. At least I’ll be on stage . . . Bet you can’t say that about your old thirty-eight-year-old self.
^*
shuffles off victorious
^*

Ummm . . .

And let Mrs Chapter resume . . . What I know for
sure
isn’t just me, and spans all generations, is the New Year’s Resolution Hobby Syndrome. At the stroke of midnight on December 31st, anything is possible. The sun has got his hat on, the world is your oyster and whatever you pledge to do, you’ll do. Very often, people will pledge to learn a language: ‘I’ll learn Italian, I am definitely going to learn Italian. And then I’ll rent a villa in Tuscany this summer, and probably take a lover, because I’ll be fluent by then. I’ll be swishing around the markets speaking fluent Italian looking gorgeous, because by then I’ll also have lost three stone.’

In January, you’ll attend one Italian class and only then remember the horror of reading out loud with a terrible accent in front of classmates, let alone thirtysomething strangers, and decide that classes ‘aren’t really the way to go. Bit restrictive.’ So you’ll buy the relevant Linguaphone material at vast expense; you’ll try it once, and decide that it’s really much too much for you to be getting on with at this very busy stage of your life. Honestly, who’s going to get home after a long day at work, put on a pair of headphones and say ‘Where is the station?’ in Italian, over and over again? That would be the act of a mad person. No, forget languages.

By now it’s March, and it’s too late to start another new year’s resolution: you’ll simply have to wait until December 31st again. Everybody knows you can’t start something new in March. That would be ridiculous. Similar to starting a diet on a Thursday. Madness. (All diets start on a Monday, as on the Thursday before you start you
have
to eat everything out of your fridge and cupboards for the following Monday. It’s a marvellous system.)

But before you know it, it’s December 31st again. This year, because you’re a little tipsy, your new year’s resolution will be something more exciting. This will be the year you finally express your creativity. ‘This year,’ you announce, ‘is going to be The Year I Get Really Into Hats. Ladies and gents, I am going to be a milliner.’

‘HOORAH,’ everyone shouts. ‘You’d be marvellous at that, marvellous.’

‘Yes, I’m definitely a hat person.’

‘Oh, you are
such
a hat person.’

‘I’m going to design hats. Maybe I’ll turn professional, maybe I’ll do the hats for the Royal Wedding.’ (I am presuming that Prince Harry and Pippa Middleton are getting married soon-ish.) And you really believe – not just in that tipsy moment, but for a good while afterwards – that you’re going to design hats. The thought sustains you through the grim early weeks of January. But then the year dribbles on into February, and you’ve not yet booked any classes and, to be honest, your friends don’t seem as convinced or supportive as they were last year, and maybe you’ll learn Spanish – it was just Italian that wasn’t right. But not right now. You’ve got far too much on. (You haven’t.)

Still, there’s always gardening. Anyone can make merry with a patch of soil and a happy desire to grow carrots, or so you’d think. But can they? Really? In your twenties – no. There’s still the hangover from those teenage notions of cool. In your forties, I think you’re allowed an allotment, but only if married/partnered or professionally wildly successful. In your fifties and sixties, if you’re still single then fine, go nuts: get sixteen cats, move to Cumbria and spend the rest of your life talking about fennel. Give into eccentric spinsterhood. But in your thirties . . . well, it’s a muddy (pun intended) area.

I think you can only justify gardening if a) you blather on loudly about how you’re growing your own organic vegetables to save the environment and control what you put in your body or b) if you’ve always been the ‘wacky one’ in your friendship group. The one who wore a headscarf at twenty-two, made patterned tights look marvellous and nearly had a professional career as a cartoonist. To truly enjoy and inhabit the odder hobbies, you need to have already sown the seeds (pun still absolutely intended and I am thrilled with myself) of eccentricity.

The only acceptable hobby, throughout all stages of life, is cookery. As a child: adorable baked items. Twenties: much appreciated spag bol and fry-ups. Thirties and forties: lovely stuff with butternut squash and chorizo from the
Guardian
food section. Fifties and sixties: beef wellington from the
Sunday Telegraph
magazine. Seventies and eighties: back to the adorable baked items. Perfect. The only teeny tiny downside of this hobby is that I HATE COOKING.

Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely adore the eating of the food. It’s just the awful boring, frightening putting together of it that makes me want to shove my own fists in my mouth. It’s a lovely idea: follow the recipe and you’ll end up with something exactly like the pretty picture in the book, only even more delicious. But the reality’s rather different. Within fifteen minutes of embarking on a dish I generally find myself in tears in the middle of what appears to be a bombsite, looking like a mentally unstable art teacher in a butter-splattered apron, wondering a) just how I am supposed to get hold of a thimble and a half of FairTrade hazelnut oil (why is there
always
the one impossible-to-find recipe ingredient? Sesame paste, anyone?) and b) just how I managed to get flour through two closed doors onto the living-room curtains, when I don’t recall having used any flour and oh-this-is-terrible-let’s-just-go-out-and-get-a-Wagamama’s-and-to-hell-with-the-cost, dammit.

Enough from me on this subject. My Dear Reader Chum, what are your hobbies? What sets your heart on fire? Do you find this whole business a conundrum as well
?
It’s not just me, is it? Why don’t you write in and let me know? (Except, obviously, don’t actually write in, unless ‘Writing in to things’ is your hobby; in which case, I don’t mean to be rude but that’s dull and maybe you should try collecting stickers.) Hopefully, I’ll run into you one day at Book Group. Or Cookery. Or Flower Arranging. Or Welding. Or Warhammer Society. Or – here’s a thought – a special Ballet Class for ‘Oddly Shaped Socially Awkward People Who Have No Talent For Ballet’. Oh yes, let’s do that please. Come on, you know you want to. We might sustain the odd injury, but we’ll put on one hell of an end-of-term show.
The Nutcracker
, anybody? I’ll play the furious crackers; who’s up for the enigmatic nut? What do you mean that’s not
exactly
what it’s about?

O
ne wholly legitimate reason for not maintaining hobbies in one’s twenties and early thirties would, of course, be that our jobs are so all-consuming, so important, that we simply don’t have time to waste on arts and crafts and hurling ourselves off diving-boards, thank you very much. Yes, we all hopped onto the career ladder moments after leaving school or university, and began slowly and confidently to clamber up within an industry. An industry that suited us perfectly and we felt passionately about. Not to mention a big fat juicy wage packet, which meant we could afford to go on classy, European city breaks at the weekend, shuffling around Florence in a pair of Ugg boots like a true professional. No sitting around in our pants on the sofa, with a tub of Maltesers, wondering if ‘taking up sewing in a big way’ would give our lives a little purpose. (Just a random example – nothing to do with my evening last night.)

Let’s be honest, that’s
not
how it happens, or at least I for one certainly didn’t get the whole career thing sorted out for a fair while. I spent nearly a decade in low-key office jobs looking forward to tea-breaks, idly wondering if any of my dreams would ever come true, and partaking in what I call ‘merry prankage’. (May I point out for those readers who are familiar with my televisual mother and her hallowed phrase, that I just made correct use of the term, ‘what I call’. I followed it with a phrase unique to me, something that only
I
call, not what we
all
call. Now, onwards with my, what I call, book. Which is an example of the phrase being used incorrectly. We all call it a book. All of us. Point made.)