Exactly ten years ago I wrote this,

after which, everything changed.

Exactly ten years ago some people called Alex and Kev, who worked at the Vice website, asked me if I wanted to start writing a column for them. My first attempt ran on Jan the 3rd, 2013, and we decided to call the column Milf Teeth.

(I’ve just checked the emails from Alex and when I suggested the name he replied “yep that's horrible - let's have that.”) I seem to remember my friend Eva coming up with it though but I’m not sure she does - aah the mists of East London time.

That column, in which I started to feel freer than I ever had in writing, set things in motion that would go on to change my life. Until then I had churned out nice enough pieces of journalism about celebrity culture and lifestyle for almost a decade, but I hadn’t really written about my own life, and I certainly hadn’t written the truth about being on my own with a baby and suddenly becoming emotionally dependent on my parents in my mid-thirties. Or how bloody funny that particular mess could be. To me, at least. Recollections may vary.

A senior editor at the Guardian took me out for lunch after about six months of that Vice column and said “Why have you never written like this for us?” “Because you’d never have let me!” I replied, mind-blown, having written for them for a decade. It is genuinely strange, the process of finding your voice, and discovering whether you can exist inside the given style perameters, or if you have to break through those edges to be somehow more respected by those who set them in the first place. Sometimes I think I’m still figuring that stuff out.

Anyway. I’m writing this, on New Years Eve 2023, where I am, once again, spending the whole night with my daughter and my parents, going nowhere. We’re at their house in Yorkshire this time though. My life has moved on quite a bit - and yet -

- I write this from the spare bed at 9:24pm, where I’m sipping on Lemsip and wondering if I should actually take my trousers off, given that I’m underneath the covers and all attempts at civility are now lost. Abandon all trousers all ye who enter here. The bra has already gone. The dog has been humping me a LOT today though, even through the bed covers, so really it’s been preferable to keep the trousers on. The head is pounding, the jig is up, I’m going to schedule this mailout to send tomorrow morning and try to get some sleep now. Is this covid? Or just my brain exploding after a very long year. It’s not an entirely unpleasant feeling, though, this throb, this life force, this hum of my body saying here I am, pick me!

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MILF TEETH

Column one, Jan 3rd 2013.

If you think going out on New Years Eve is shit, you've probably never been forced to spend it in quarantine with whooping cough, in your house on a council estate in Hackney, where your mother is trying, in between your demented coughing fits, to get you into the loft to see if the mysterious noises are squirrels, before saying she's going to get in her car and drive to Trafalgar Square for kicks, because the only alternative is watching telly with you, "and that's hopeless
because everyone on Eastenders is dead," and your dad is staying with you too, only he's gone back to Yorkshire for the day to see someone about something, and will return later on the train that starts in Scotland and passes through Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle, scooping up every pissed up Scot and Geordie it can find on the way, on Hogmanay, before rattling down to London, and the man is an 81-year-old philosopher with a bladder complaint who asked you this week to remind him what a coconut was, and you've got a baby asleep
upstairs whose father is currently refusing to tell you what country he's living in, and you can't even have a drink because you're on antibiotics the size of palomino ponies.

Did I mention that I also found I had an ingrowing pube this morning? I didn't know if those mythical things were real or not. They are! Although I don't think mine actually meant to grow inwards, I think it was just trying to kill itself. Look it's not that I'm experiencing self-pity right now, it's just - let's face it - plenty of monks have set themselves on fire over less.

[PROBABLY WOULDN’T WRITE SOME OF THESE LINES IN 2023 TBH.]

A couple of New Years Eves ago, I was in LA, at a party in an illegal speakeasy downtown. To get in you had to knock on the door and then wait for ages to see if the woman who ran it was in a favourable mood. Everyone said she used to run a brothel. She had short spiky hair and was quite round and menacing, like a pumpkin. My main memory of that place, before it got raided, is that you could smoke at the bar. In fact, you could rack out lines of gak at the bar without anybody doing much. The rest of the room was just piles of plush green sofas. While my friend was having a fight with Baz Lurhrrman at the bar (she accused him of stealing her purse, she was a little unhinged) I was fast asleep on a lovely lime pouffe. So asleep that I missed my lift to Joshua Tree, where some other friends were driving out to take magic mushrooms in the desert, and it's just as well I slept through my ride, because it turned out I was unsuspectingly pregnant at the time, and mushroom babies come out squashed and looking like Aleister Crowley.

Another New Years Eve, we went to Paris, to a party in a Russian oligarch's vast, empty, apartment, where they stashed the champagne in the bath. The oligarch's nephew tried to chat me up by biting my neck and I waited, in vain, to turn into a vampire. I got a bit too drunk, and a bit too hot, and a bit too bored by the sort of rich people who were always going to think this song was about them when it never ever would be, so I went and cooled down by lying on the champagne in the bath. It was, all things told, a shit party. But not as shit as this.

So, I have made a new invention. A drone version of myself. The drone is powered like a light aircraft version of me, able to go out into Friday night airspace, unmanned, and do all of the things I can't do. The drone me is sleek, beautiful, laughs like melting butter, is surrounded by the warmth of human love, is in the right place at the right time, never exits the toilets with bog roll on her shoe, and
always has a driver waiting outside like Mark Ronson.  The drone version of me is not currently watching Top of the Pops.

Tulisa singing on Top of the Pops. Forgive me for what I have done, she sings, cos I'm young, yeah I'm young. Fearne Cotton is pregnant in a big sparkly dress. Reggie Yates’s trousers are done up quite tight. Silver sparkles are raining on the audience like a hen night trapped inside a snowglobe in Norwich.

"Are you ready Top of the Pops?" asks Tulisa. "It's New Years Eve I want to see your hands in the air. Getting. Crazy." There is a frosted penguin on the stage beside her. It has something weird on its mouth, meaning it it is either controlling an evil empire or is implicated in the Mayan apocalypse. There are some middle-aged men in plastic hats in the audience, looking like they're
fresh from helping the police with Operation Yewtree. My mum is still talking about driving to Trafalgar Square. "When I get there, I might," she muses, "jump into the fountain."

At half ten my father arrives home. He looks around at the miserable scenes. "Aren't we going out?" he asks. "No? I've been telling everyone on the train I'm going to see the New Year in in a pub in Hackney," he says. He thinks about it. "They did look quite surprised." My mum can't be bothered any more. "The Hootenanny is on now, it's live!" It's not live mum, they record it in about November, half those people you see on it could already be DEAD. "Oh yes," she says. "Remember when you took me to the Jools Holland recording," she says, "and Carla Bruni was on it and there were all of of those French policemen with guns in the studio! "

"Yes mum," I say. "I remember how we all got ushered out to leave by those cops with guns and I couldn't find you anywhere because you'd rushed over to the Metallica stage and you were getting your photo taken with Lars Ulrich." She beams with pride. My parents are not going out now, but my mum decides to change into her red dress anyway, and put a load of red tinsel round her head. It looks a bit like a crown of thorns on Jesus. I sincerely hope she isn't planning on staging any crucifixions but at this point I would put nothing past the woman.

"New Years Eve seems to have become N.Y.E. these days," Dad says, spelling it out quite slowly. "Enn. Why. Eee" He is reading the Guardian Guide. "Look at this in the listings. House Party Enn. Why. Eee."

And then, the most exciting thing in the world happens. A bunch of kids start kicking our bins outside. Teenage boys in hoodies, screaming at each other as they smash up all the recycling bins. Suddenly I'm hanging out with the window with my phone in my hand, shouting at them "Can you get off my bin because I'm filming you and I've got your FACE," and this hard kid suddenly looks really scared, and he says sorry, sorry miss, and he tries to put my bin back but it's quite hard to tell which bin is which by this point so he just tries to show general soothing tenderness towards all bins, clearly nervous that he is still on camera (he was never on camera). Then he scoots away with his bad boy friends and I lie on the floor coughing and coughing until there is drool rolling off my tongue onto the rug.

And then in another universe the drone me goes out with the bad boys from the bins, as they speed me away in their car, some filthy R'n'B streaming out of the window, and we drive through the London night, through all the lights and the fireworks and all the puke on the pavements, a city that is just trying to wrap its hands down its pants and finger itself.

And we speed past all this, past all the queues for the bar and the dealers and the sad-eyed panda people who are drinking to forget that 2013 is just another whale coming to eat them, and the bad boys take me faraway and make me airtight somewhere on the top of a hill and afterwards we smoke a joint and I say, guys, the good news is that I've decided not to press charges about my recycling bin!
Sorry, no, I say, guys, do that thing to me again with the end of both your tongues, ooh it was like something off Red Tube.

Back in the world of the pre-recorded Hootenanny, the real me looks down and notes that her hymen has grown back.

Anyhow, I'm planning on having a lot more fun next year.

---

(So yes, after I wrote that in 2013, everything changed - but ten years on it also seems that nothing has changed at all, as I did actually manage to stay up after all, with my mum and dad and daughter and the effing Hootenanny. I had to go back downstairs at 12:45 though, after trying to get to sleep, to ask my dad if he could please turn the telly down. There he was, after we’d all gone to bed, with the volume on 25, glued to the Sugababes doing Overload. May we all be so lively at 91 years young. It’s a one-way ticket to a madman’s situation…)

Illustration and photo both by Louise Androlia. We all looked younger then.