The Virginity Project is cock-a-hoop with JOY!
What better way to celebrate the departure of George Bush and the election of Barack Obama than by listening to Alice Cooper?
Hot off the presses comes the 'shocking' revelation that the nineteen year old actor who plays Harry Potter lost his cherry to an 'older' woman - at the age of sixteen. Gosh, I might have to go and have a lie down. To be frank, the only thing that shocks me is how come this child managed to turn into a stud muffin whilst I wasn't looking. Magic, I guess.
What did we do before the Internet? Now there’s a question….
How did we cope in the days before we could post our daily
status for the world to see and understand? Or reach blindly out into the ether
and discuss the un-discussable with faceless strangers on digital talk boards? And twitter a running commentary of every hiccup, highlight
and hiatus of our day in the hope that someone else might relate to how we
feel? In short, in days of old, how on earth did we connect with our fellow
human beings?
The answer is, we probably didn’t. Remember that old phrase, to suffer in silence? Well, there was a whole bunch of suffering and a big heap of silence in days gone by. The personal was not for general consumption like it is today. Unless, of course, you were ‘Ubique’, a brave lady who was driven to write this letter to a well known women's magazine in 1935….
‘Can any mother help me? She began, ‘I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbours. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading but with no library am very limited with books. I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I am all alone in the house. I sew, read and write stories galore, but in spite of good resolutions, and the engaging company of cat and dog, I do brood and ‘dig the dead’
In short, she fired a starting gun, the echo of which was to ring out for the next fifty-five years. The Cooperative Correspondence Club, or the CCC, as it came to be known was raised from the depths of a deep longing to communicate, to share and to understand how other people, women in particular, felt. Men had networks. They had work, clubs and they played games together. Women, particularly those in rural areas were separated from the herd, isolated, often with young children in tow and no-one else to talk to.
Women from all over Britain responded to the familiarity of this cri de coeur. Ladies from all walks of life overcame the limitations of common communications – and the etiquette of the day - to create something quite unique.
‘I am indeed sorry for ‘Ubique’ in her trouble’, wrote ‘Mother of Three’….’I wonder if Ubique would care to correspond with readers. I should be very pleased to exchange letters with her and this would give her fresh thoughts and would, I should think, cheer her up. Perhaps she would tell me if she cares for this idea.’
Ubique cared for this idea very much but she also didn’t have a lot of money for stamps. As an alternative, she suggested that they form a correspondence magazine. Each woman, writing under a pseudonym, would contribute something they had written, on any subject and mail it to Ubique. She would assemble the articles into a magazine, stitching the pages together by hand and mail the completed magazine to the first person on a pre-arranged list.
For the next fifty-five years, a group of twenty-four women did exactly this. Each month they wrote and created articles for CCC on the same subjects that interest us today. They wrote about their families and children, they chewed over politics, sex, orgasms, childbirth, religion, affairs – of the heart and otherwise – and just about everything else that women talk about now.
For fifty-five years, this magazine was read, digested, stuck in an envelope and posted onto the next person until the month drew to an end and it would all begin again.
Why am I not surprised as I write this? Because people have an innate need to connect to other human beings is why. Ask the question again: what on earth did we do before the Internet was invented? Here is your answer. People reached out to each other in precisely the same way they do now. The format was a little different but the motivation was just the same. The Cooperative Correspondence Club was a genuine precursor to the Internet. Had these ladies been around today, I have no doubt that they would have met on an Internet discussion board instead.
But would they ever have met in person? That I don’t know. This isn’t Guardian Soulmates after all. A unique set of circumstances meant that the CCC did meet in person and the war was the catalyst for this. In their effort to survive and make the best of a difficult situation, the war ended up drawing people closer together. People phoned and wrote to each other and some members of the CCC sent their children to billet with other members who lived in the countryside. Friendships were solidified and when the war was over, the CCC decided to hold a yearly ‘luncheon’ and catch up with each other face to face.
‘The first time I went to this luncheon….I was extremely nervous…I walked up and down, I was nervous to go in…I sort of crept in…and across the room there was this woman and we looked at each other…we never forgot this….there was a kind of glance or recognition between us, a sort of affinity straightaway.’
The very best thing, I am pleased to report, is that in 2003, whilst researching a subject for her master’s thesis, Jenna Bailey came across the beginnings of the CCC’s correspondence stashed away in the Mass Observation archive at Sussex University. As she delved into the archive, she realised that not only did she have a great subject for her thesis on her hands, but that she also had the beginnings of a great book.
‘Can Any Mother Help Me?’ is that book and you can buy it today on Amazon. Do not be fooled by the chick-litesque cover of this tome. This is rock solid stuff from cover to cover. These women were absolutely at their best when spinning the very real tales of their lives.
‘Can Any Mother Help Me?’ grips with a genuine cinematic tension and tightness as women recall episodes from their lives with real skill. ‘Yonire’ was forced to fight off a dear family friend in a church late one dark night. Such was the ferocity of his advance that she was forced to beat him over the head with her shoe….
‘I climbed over him and up the organ loft stairs and found a light. I switched it on and saw him lying in a pool of blood with the top of his head battered in, unconscious, and, for all I knew, dead. I was quite certain he was dead. Well, what would you have done?’
Amelia’s description of her battle to get to work during the Great Fog of 1952 is second to none. And Isis will keep you glued to your seat with the unrequited story of her love for her doctor, a passion that was to last a full three years…..
‘On one of the last afternoons in May, having done my housework and fed Matthew, I had a bath and changed into a summer dress and was just sitting down to write something for CCC when Doctor X appeared. He was wearing a natty summer suit and appeared to be in no hurry at all. When I asked, ‘Shall I fetch Matthew in?’ he said, ‘Not yet. Come and talk to me first.’….
This is a book of the finest order. For so many different reasons. If you don’t read it and spend the next year mailing it to all your friends, I will eat my hat. Don’t make me eat my hat. Or make me think of a smart ending for this post.
Pathetically, I had two, yes, two drinks of an alcoholic nature last night and feel rather the worse for wear. Don’t readers, whatever you do, ever give up alcohol. This will only ever serve to render you useless on the days that you do succumb.
Thank god for the Internet, at least I can tell you how I feel. That makes me feel slightly better. Kate is: tired but happy. And keen for you to enjoy this book as much I did. Here it is.
This will begin to make sense as I go along, but for the moment, can you imagine how much time I spend reading? I read anything I can get my mitts on, at any time of the day or night. Books, magazines, blogs, your newspaper on the tube, you name it; I am probably reading it right now. As a result, I frequently find bits and pieces that I think you might find interesting. So you know what? I thought I would share them with you.
First up is Dude of the Day (well I think he’s a dude). It’s actually a regular feature from the Observer Woman called ‘What I know about Women’. This week’s young man is called Will.i.am and he’s a rapper. I couldn’t name one of his songs if my life depended on it but I like his style. Here he is.
The following also kept me quiet for a while. It’s an article about the psychology of story telling and it backs up much of what I have discovered on my travels: that we all have an innate need to tell, and to hear, stories.
I also obsessed over this for a full fifteen minutes. It’s not an article as such but I have made it my life’s mission to visit this place at least once in my lifetime. Could someone please put me out of my misery and tell me what grits are while they’re at it?
I got slightly carried away with this too. My blogging buddy Charon QC asked the British public what irritated them. Quite a lot it would seem….I stuck my oar in a couple of times.
Finally, and this has nothing to do with any of the above but I thought I would tell you anyway. Carl, the driver at a company I freelance at came to work yesterday morning and told us a story of his own.
It was his 50th birthday the night before last and as befits a man who still likes to spend a night out on the razz, he was driving his car through Chalk Farm at 3am on Friday morning when he came upon the following: two people having sex in the street. They weren’t just having sex, they were rutting like their lives depended on it.
It must have been a dark back alley, I hear you cry. No, actually, it wasn’t. It was a well-lit main street in a busy part of London and they had no clothes on. Nothing. Not a stitch. As naked as the day there were born. Totally in the buff.
How do you like that?
I liked that a lot. I have no wish to reciprocate, but I liked it.
Not quite undercover of the night, but I’m never one to miss the opportunity to reprise a Rolling Stones classic.
Happy Saturday.
Now this is an interview I would like to get. Superseding Lennie Kravitz, currently in position number one with the revelation that he will not be having sex again until he meets Mrs Right and they get married, comes the rather, err, startling news that Flavour Flav lost his virginity at the age of six.
The Virginity Project is speechless. But not so speechless that
we couldn’t think of a few questions to ask if Mr Flav was game. You know where
we are.
Call me a sap but I just read a blog that bought a tear to my eye. Even sadder, but more expected, is the news that its subject, 108, yes, you read that correctly, 108 year old ‘blogger’ Olive Riley has passed away. The truth is that Olive’s eyesight was well beyond the point of actually being able to blog or ‘blob’ as she preferred to call it. Which is no matter because she had a small team of people who were prepared to blob on her behalf.
I applaud these people because they understand the value of what she had to say. Old people are exactly like you or I - just older, and with more experience of being a human being. Furthermore, to look at life through the eyes of an old person is to put your own experiences into perspective. For better or worse, it is always interesting to see how life has changed over the years.
Back in the day, you could cop a mouthful from an old person if you misbehaved. I’ve had a few octogenarian fists shaken at me in my time.
‘What the bleep do you think you’re doing? Our generation fought a bleeping war for the likes of you’.
Straight up! It sounds like a cliché but it’s true and it had no emotional resonance whatsoever for me at the time. What on earth were they talking about? The war was a memory that existed only in the minds of my parents. ‘Rationing’ was something that was mentioned when we wanted too many sweets. ‘Evacuation’ only if we got really unruly.
I had little concept of what life was really like for my elders until I began this project and two things happened. One, I started to interview old people, and two; I began to research the past.
‘Testament of Youth’ was the bullet between the eyes. Published in 1933, this was Vera Brittain’s account of life during wartime. Six hundred and sixty two thousand British men were killed during the First World War. Flick through your Face book page and count your male friends. You don’t need to be a mathematician to work out that many of them wouldn’t be there had the same set of circumstances played themselves out today. They would have gone to war and they would not have come back. Many of them would have been young men, eighteen years old, nineteen years old. Babies.
Different circumstances produced different people. Times were hard and people had an appreciation for the simple things that we take for granted.
On a happier note, the economy has often reflected our libido. Skip forward to the end of the Second World War and people literally had sex to celebrate the fact that they were still alive. Hey presto, the baby boomers were born and in many respects we have never looked back. Of course life is not that simple and that’s what I love about this project, the ability to get perspective by looking into the past.
One might say that it’s a classic case of swings and roundabouts.
Whilst we may shag with an abandon that our grandparents could not, - only, it must be said, because they were terrified of getting pregnant. There was no lack of desire. It’s a commonly held belief that people were prudish about sex in days gone by and I am here to tell you that they were not – modern life has bought a whole new set of issues to contend with.
Are we happier now that we can have sex whenever we like? Maybe. Is the demise of religion a good thing? Perhaps. But as my mother once said to me, a woman who does not ‘do god’, there was a hell of a lot less trouble in the streets in days gone by, when religion gave people structure to their lives. See what I mean? Swings and roundabouts.
‘Don’t ever suggest we should go back to those days’. This is what one of my interviewees once said to me, a woman who did get pregnant in the early sixties (the pill became available to married women in 1962) because the vinegar and water solution that she used as a contraceptive failed to work (now there’s a surprise).
But time marches on and our lives become quicker, less risky, more convenient and in theory, more fulfilled. What am I trying to say? Just that understanding other people’s lives and their personal circumstances helps us to keep our own in check.
I’m not here to tell you whether any of these things are good or bad, well, not most of the time anyway. I am just here to say that it’s great to know what makes us what we are.
Mass Observation had this idea years ago. Read about them. They are genius. When Cosmo Landesman interviewed me last year for the Sunday Times News Review and called the Virginity Project ‘a kind of Mass Observation for the internet age’. I pretty much died and went to heaven.
Documenting our lives is a good thing. I have said this before, but it makes no difference how many flash forms of communication we invent. You’ll always find good stuff on the Internet but people’s personal stories are irreplaceable. When grandma goes, her stories go with her. Listen to her whilst you have the chance.
Perhaps it is the practice I have been getting with the interviewing of people, or maybe it is a lifelong skill that I simply never noticed, whatever it is, I appear to have an innate ability to get people to talk about stuff - without really trying. Take last week as an example. It was Saturday and it was national expose your flesh day. You know the one I mean. The one day in the year that the sun comes out and people everywhere, much like the ecstatic scrabbling of dogs looking for leads, tear open the doors of their closets and don the most optimistic item of clothing they own in order to celebrate April’s first five minutes of sunshine.
And so it was that I found myself in a strapless sun dress standing outside Somerfields in Brentford, yes, Brentford, at 7pm on a Saturday night. It was my old buddy Mark’s birthday and I had the dress to prove it. We met at The Brewery Tap. On arrival I was reminded of a previous visit, many moons ago. It was vaguely comparable to the scene in American Werewolf where our hero arrives at the back of beyond, pushes open the door to the local pub only to be met by rotating heads and the stony silence of a series of League of Gentlemen look-a-likes.
Except this time they were smiling. Kind of. ‘We don’t get your type around here much’. This was clearly what they were thinking as I perused the facilities. To the right, a pool table – still nobody on it! So far, so good. To the left, the judge and jury, a motley bunch consisting mainly of Brentford’s most ‘senior’ members, and, starboard, our host, stationed behind his taps, much like the captain behind the controls of a large sailing ship.
The pub might not have changed much but I have. I’m more of a driver than a drinker these days and I couldn’t resist half a lager in one of those glasses that looks like the thick glass windows of an old fashioned pub. You don’t get many of those to the pound in your average Gastro pub. Nope, there’s wasn’t a herb-crusted cod nor pan-fried frittata in sight at The Brewery Tap. This is what we would term ‘a proper boozer’. You’ll have a packet of pork scratchings and a pint of Young’s and be glad of it here at the Brewery Tap.
Now, I know I said I had an innate ability to get people to tell me stuff but I’m only half telling the truth. Mark began celebrating his birthday at around midday so I can’t take all the credit. Mr Lager played his part too. It was quite a scene as I stepped out into the self-designated young(er) persons area i.e. the garden. A lot of celebrating had clearly been done and one person was asleep on the table.
The birthday boy was having a fine old time, if you could only get a look behind his sunglasses – so the thing on a Saturday night out in Brentford. My good friend Tania had also been let out of the house for the night, a party girl if ever there was one and it wasn’t long before they were contemplating the piano action in the front bar. Yes ladies and gentleman, this wasn’t just any old real boozer. This was a real boozer where real old people sit around and listen, sometimes even joining in, to another real old person who plays the piano and sings. Tania looked like she had died and gone to heaven. I, meanwhile, spent some time getting to know the birthday guests. The first conversation went something like this:
Him: what do you do with your time then?
Me: I interview people about virginity loss.
Him: (raising eyebrows), I don’t actually remember losing my virginity but I am about to become a grandfather.
My turn to raise my eyebrows now and you would too if you were looking at what I was looking at.
Me: If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?
Him: I’m 39
Me: and how old is your expectant son or daughter?
Him: It’s my son, and he is 13
Here I will leave a long silence in which to contemplate this astonishing piece of news, although in real time I think I did continue to gabble about something whilst lifting up my jaw from its resting place on the pavement. Here was a normal enough looking man, of sane mind, no outward signs of poverty/ill-education or any other cliché ridden stereotype that you might care to reach for in order to explain such a calamity, telling me that his thirteen year old son is about to become a father. Tania has a son who is 13. He is a lovely boy but he still laughs if you tickle him. He is a child.
For the record, the man looked like he had been slapped about the face with a fish. And in amongst the lager, cigarettes and the warmth of a first Saturday evening spent outdoors, I felt sad for this man, and his son, and most of all, for a girl who had managed to conceal a tiny human being inside her body for almost seven months until the bump got too big and the game was up. We want to believe that this doesn’t happen in this day and age, but it does. Virginity loss can be every bit as dramatic now as it was for our parents.
Revelation number two pales a little in comparison but it is no less poignant. The owner of the tale was Dave, a forty two year old man, whom, as it turns out, was a frequent visitor to many of the same watering holes I frequented in my teens. The Cobwebs, The Bull and Bush and The Old Ship. We revisited them in our memories and then got onto first gigs.
Me: ‘My first gig on my own’, (up until13 years old, my brothers took me to gigs. Genesis, Echo and the Bunnymen, Blancmange, I was a pretty eclectic kid), ‘was the Hammersmith Palais to see Africa Bambaataa and The Soul Sonic Force’.
Him: ‘I was conceived outside the Hammersmith Palais’.
There’s not much to say to that except how the monkey nuts did that happen?
As it turned out, he was adopted and he didn’t find out this truly unique piece of information until years later when he questioned his birth mother and she told him the truth about her ‘situation’. Without going into too much detail, a night out at the Hammersmith Palais can be memorable for many a reason, not least for the fumble outside in the car that led to the birth, and the adoption of a son in 1966.
Perhaps I do have one of those faces. Or maybe we are just a generation who are happier with the truth. We no longer live in an era where pregnancy has to be concealed – unless you are thirteen years old. In a week when I was also told a story about a woman who gave birth to her second child and lost her husband to a heart attack on the same day, I realise that truth really is stranger than fiction. You don’t have to scratch the surface of most human beings too hard in order for them to tell you stories that you will never forget. We all have them. Perhaps I might write down a few of my own sometime.
Meanwhile, the party in the pub continued. Not only that, but the ice had begun to melt as Tania and Co talked the pub pianist into playing a selection of Elvis classics and the evening’s entertainment really got underway. Later, as Mark, with two fingers bandaged from an accident earlier in the week, attempted as good a rendition as you could ever expect to hear from a man with only eight digits of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, I fancied our geriatric audience were enjoying themselves more than they let on. But it still wasn’t quite like this in our day, they seemed to say. Actually it was. You just didn’t talk about it is all.
*All names have been changed to protect identity.
It is hard to summarise love in 200 words but that is just what I did last week when a nice lady from Harper Collins emailed and asked if I could contribute to a Valentines Day blog to celebrate the launch of a new book. Said book is a fabulous collection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. Having written a lot about love lately, I was only too happy to continue the theme. You can read it here.
But today’s themed vote for romance goes to Leah and George. Leah and George are two Gorillas’ from the Congo. Leah, the female, has already made history by becoming the first gorilla ever to be photographed using a tool. That’s not an innuendo. In 2005 she was photographed testing the depth of a lake with a stick before wading in. Humans would do well to take heed. This month, the pair made Simian history by becoming the first animals ever to be photographed mating in a face to face position.
Writing in the Gorilla Gazette, a team from the Wildlife Conservation society said:
‘Leah was lying on the ground and George was looking into Leah's eyes.’
Diane Doran-Sheehy, anthropology chair at Stony Brook University has observed more than 500 gorilla matings in the wild—and none were face-to-face.
‘It is an interesting observation and raises questions about why they sometimes engage in it,’ she said.
There may be practical considerations given the apes’ marshy habitat, for example.
‘Perhaps a female doesn’t want to be face down in the swamp,’ Doran-Sheehy said.
Or maybe they just looooooooooooove each other?
