My 5 most wicked Halloween reads

I love Halloween and I generally spend it in my darkened living room, watching horror films with my husband (and hiding from trick-or-treaters, of course – I genuinely don’t understand this tradition. In its true form, it’s properly menacing, and in its modern incarnation it’s just… people’s kids interrupting my evening to ask me for sweets. EH?). And I’m planning to write much more about my favourite scary movies very soon. But whilst rummaging through our bookshelves tonight for a suitably scary book to crack on with this witching season, I thought it might be nice to write about some of the spooky reads I’ve loved in the past. Some are more obvious than others, and since I’ve yet to read Frankenstein, Dracula or anything by Stephen King (although they’re all lurking in our house), there might be a few surprises in this little list…

The sci-fi one

Arguably the novel that spawned the now-common horror trope of murderous kids (seen skipping maniacally through everything from 1984’s Children Of The Corn to Orphan a decade ago), John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos – itself filmed as Village Of The Damned in 1960 – is a genuinely chilling tale of golden-eyed, pale-skinned little darlings who wreak havoc in the village of Midwich (and I’m not talking about knocking on doors to ask for Haribo). There’s an element of this plot that’s especially unsettling if you’re a woman of child-bearing age, FYI. Moral of the story: don’t trust children.

The murder mystery

I’m obsessed with Agatha Christie. I don’t think I’ve ever read another mystery writer who creates such menacing atmospheres with such a spare, understated prose style – she gets under your skin while making it seem effortless. I’ve read all her crime novels and Hallowe’en Party is a particularly sinister one. I’ve always felt that her work took on a darker tone in the 1960s (less vicarage-and-library-based crime, more hidden Nazis and elements of the occult), and this 1969 Poirot outing is no exception, featuring a mardy 13-year-old girl who boasts of having witnessed a murder, then ends up dead in the apple-bobbing tub. Moral of the story: don’t show off.

The creepy comedy

Cat Out Of Hell by Lynne Truss is eerie and hilarious in equal parts – as you’d expect from a novel about talking cats embroiled in a battle of good vs evil. Written for the Hammer horror brand, it’s the perfect Halloween read for cat people who adore their moggies, but also suspect they might be planning to kill them while they sleep. Moral of the story: don’t turn your back on Tiddles.

The occult classic

Having seen the movie adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby first, I enjoyed the novel much more. The slick, uncluttered writing and period domestic detail frames the mounting horror perfectly, and I found I cared more about the book’s Rosemary than Mia Farrow’s kind-of-annoying screen portrayal. Moral of the story: don’t move house.

The gothic horror

Judging by Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales Of Mystery and Imagination, the imagination in question was pretty twisted (in the best possible way). Let’s face it, if you woke up and found you were the main character in an EAP story, you’d know pretty quickly that you were absolutely screwed. If there’s a horrible way to be killed, tortured or driven insane, Poe’s characters have been there, seen it and got every despair-soaked T-shirt. These are the kind of macabre, grotesque stories that will trouble you when you turn the light off at night. Moral of the stories: just… don’t.

No offence… but CAN WE NOT?

I’ve written a few things on this blog, and elsewhere, about the fact that I don’t want children. And when I first did that, around a year ago, for Condé Nast Brides magazine, where I worked at the time, it felt as if I was saying something that few women were at the time. That’s not to say I’d never read a piece by another female journalist or blogger discussing how she didn’t want to be a mother, or that I was some kind of pioneer (I really wasn’t) but I’d certainly not seen loads of them. After all, why would I have? Women who choose to be child-free are a minority, and I’d guess that until recently the wider world hasn’t been that interested in talking about them. Fine.

Now, in this age of identity being at the forefront of everything, I get the sense that the tide is turning slightly. Recently, in the course of my new life as a freelance sub editor/writer, I’ve come across more than one request from journalists looking for women who have chosen not to have kids and who would be happy to be case studies for a magazine or newspaper article.

My first response to this was to think, Yay! I’d love to be involved. And, theoretically, I would. I’d relish any opportunity to show that my choice is a valid one, that my life is exactly as I want it to be and that I’m not sat in my house looking at baby clothes online or wishing I was at a kids’ party at the local swimming pool (re the former, I bloody love shopping for baby clothes for my friends’ kids and I swoon at the cuteness. Re the latter, I’d rather burn in hell than be near that horror). That, yes, I might be lonely when I’m old but so are the billions of old people with the billions of kids who never come to see them.

However, here’s the rub. As much as I’m happy to see child-free women getting their moment, there’s one thing that bothers me about how it’s being done. These invitations to represent in the national press always come with a caveat: they want to know why you don’t want kids. And often, they seem to think there’ll be multiple reasons. And whilst I have plenty to say and write about my child-free life (it’s one of the reasons I started this blog), if I had to write that feature, or be interviewed for it, it’d be five words long.

Because all I can tell you is: I just don’t fancy it.

I didn’t write a list of pros and cons. I didn’t wake up all broody but then look in the mirror and decide I just couldn’t risk losing my banging body (I’m more Victoria sponge than Victoria’s Secret), my career (chief subs don’t get the big bucks), my hectic social life (I’m a committed sofa dweller) or my insatiable wanderlust for tropical holidays (SPIDERS!). And (note to press) neither does anyone else. Nobody chooses not to have a child because they value some random thing in their life. We don’t do it… because we don’t want it.

So nope, there’s nothing I can envisage losing by having a child. Apart from MY INNATE FEELING OF WHO I AM, WHO I’M NOT, AND WHAT I WANT IN LIFE. Is that not enough?

I’ve never felt like a mother. Or a potential mother. Or broody. And that’s about it.

For any mothers reading this, how did you “decide” to have a baby? I bet you didn’t. You and your partner might have discussed the timing, or the practicalities, but I very much doubt you both sat down and shared your reasons for wanting a baby. I’d guess you just WANTED A BABY. And that it was something you’d always inherently known. When you get pregnant, nobody asks you why you did it. And I understand that: it’s natural, it’s normal, it’s what people do.

And while I understand that not wanting a baby is less common, that doesn’t mean we should be made to feel it’s not natural, not normal, or not what people do. Remember when society used to think that about homosexuality?

So when I’m asked why I don’t want kids, I want to say that I don’t want kids the same way I don’t want to eat snails, bungee jump, read chick-lit or open a kebab shop. It’s simply not something that calls to me. Granted, you can’t shape a two-page (or even a one-page) feature around that, but wouldn’t it be nice if the angle could change? If instead of having to explain why we are and who we are, we could share why we’re happy with the “lack” in our lives? Why we’re not sad, empty, lonely or envious? Why we really don’t feel we’re missing out because our friends are at play dates and we’re watching Netflix?

The focus right now seems to be on us having to argue for our right to be different, to have chosen a path that most people don’t. And doesn’t that seem very un-2019 to you?

Nothing personal: my experience of redundancy

I was made redundant in July this year and it was a pretty painful blow. When the MD of the company stood in our office and told us that our magazine was being sold, and that the buyers were closing the deal purely to close us down, I was heartbroken. I can’t be sure, but I think I was the only one in the room whose eyes were leaking.

You see, that job had meant something very special to me. Sure, it was a plum chief sub editor role on a beautiful, successful, market-leading and prestigious glossy magazine – which, after almost 20 years of grafting in the industry, I felt I deserved. But more than that, it was a job I landed in when I really needed to. It restored my faith in many ways, and I never took any part of it for granted: the job itself, which let me write and contribute ideas in a way many chief sub roles simply don’t; the editor who asked for, and valued, my ideas for everything from features to cover lines; the small (but perfectly formed!) team of lovely, experienced and talented people who quickly became my rock-solid friends. For the two and a half years I worked there, I never had a day when I didn’t want to go to work. I never felt undervalued, unappreciated or overworked. Which, as a sub editor, is never something you can be flippant about.

So, when the axe fell, it was a big deal for me. It wasn’t personal, it wasn’t vindictive, and as someone who’d been in magazines for a long time, I knew that I was bloody lucky not to have faced redundancy before. I know plenty of talented, hard-working creatives who’ve been through the whole demoralising process two, three or four times. But it didn’t hurt any less. For a few weeks, I was numb. We still had an issue to finish, and I put my heart and soul into it the same way I’ve done for every issue of every magazine I’ve ever worked for since I was a 23-year-old rookie. Our swansong issue was particularly beautiful, and I was terribly proud of it, which made it even more bittersweet.

I didn’t get a huge payout when I left, so I didn’t have the luxury of taking time off. I had to get out there, get working and get paid – which meant hitting the freelance scene. I’d done it before, and it had been absolutely fine. In fact, it had led directly to the brilliant job I’m now lamenting having lost. But this time it felt different. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to start schlepping around London’s publishing companies asking where the toilets were every week. I wanted to stay where I was.

But humans are adaptable animals and, two and a half months later, I feel as if I’ve been freelancing for years. It’s not what I would have chosen, but I’m rolling with it and I’m able, thankfully, to see the positives. I’m not short of work, for which I am extremely grateful. I get to meet new people, experience new offices, learn new things (every magazine does things differently, so however experienced you are, you can never think you know it all) and get a steer on where I might like to work in the future. I’ve never been someone whose priority is “getting out on time”, but there’s no denying that, as a freelancer, you don’t need to be married to the job in the way most chief subs do. It’s not a “perk” that necessarily makes me tick, but it’s certainly one that makes it easier for me to do other things than just work… such as writing this blog – something I couldn’t have done in the jobs where I pretty much lived at my desk.

Working 9 to 5… and not a second more!
(Joke: even as a freelancer, I offer to stay late if it’ll help)

When you’ve worked your arse off, taken a billion taxis home in the early hours and worked through most of your lunch breaks, all in the name of doing a good job, being a team player and climbing the ladder, it’s frustrating AF to suddenly plummet back down the snake to what is, essentially, a junior position, on junior pay, with no responsibility, no authority and no guaranteed income. It’s hard on the pride, the confidence and the bank balance, and there’s no denying that.

But it’s also a chance to take a step back, to work out what you want and where you’d like to be, and what you’d happily never set eyes on again. I didn’t choose it and I don’t always love it, but I’m grateful that I’m in a position where I can see the benefits, appreciate the positives (eg I’m solidly booked, I can pay my half of the mortgage and our crazy ginger cat will not go hungry, yay!) and carry on with the rest of my life without feeling too compromised by something that was out of my control.

It’s not easy, but I know I’m luckier than some, and I’m trusting that, like last time I was in this situation, there’s a brilliant job out there with my name on it.

Otherwise, you’ll find me behind a skip in Bromley, taking money from men to talk dirty to them. It’s a shame that they’ll all be terribly disappointed when I start banging on about how my cat comes in from the garden with slugs stuck in his tail…

So, you think you know Jodie Marsh? Part 4 of my series about my female icons

Jodie Marsh first strutted onto my radar in the same way she probably strutted onto yours: by rocking up to an FHM party in 2004 wearing a top made of two belts. (She got a lot of flak for that, but as someone who can’t even get a bikini top to stay where it’s meant to be for more than ten minutes, I say fair play to her.) At the time, I was a mid-twenties girl working for a teen mag, so I didn’t have any huge interest in glamour models or men’s mags, and I didn’t give Jodie much thought until she appeared in Celebrity Big Brother a couple of years later. I was glued to that series, and I witnessed Pete Burns and Michael Barrymore shamelessly ganging up on her (the irony – they themselves later fell out badly, with George Galloway siding with Burns to create a particularly toxic pair of Mean Girls). I liked Jodie on that show but, again, I didn’t think too much about her once she exited.

Then, about a year ago, I started Googling her, because I vaguely remembered liking the lipstick she’d worn with the infamous belt outfit, and I was trying to find out what it might be (my all-consuming lipstick obsession is well documented here and elsewhere!). I never did find out, but that search took me on a magical mystery tour of all things Marsh. I read interviews, I looked at her social media, I watched a YouTube video of her demonstrating her make-up routine… and I found her to be utterly fascinating and, more to the point, likeable. Anyone who makes their name by taking their clothes off inevitably attracts criticism – and Jodie has had her fair share and more. It’s especially seen as “not the done thing” for us women to admire glamour models (more on why I think that’s absolute bunk in a bit).

But the more I followed her around the internet on my search for that elusive lipstick, the more I came to like her. I can relate to any woman who unashamedly likes make-up and deviating from the yawn-inducing “natural look”, and Jodie personifies the kind of bright, unapologetic, Manga-meets-Jessica Rabbit glamour that I love (she currently has bright blue hair.) But her appeal, and the reason she’s on my icon list, goes deeper than the lips and the lashes. Because what a lot of people probably don’t know (and I didn’t know until I started The Great Lipstick Quest of 2018) is that Jodie Marsh is one tough cookie – in the best possible way. She admitted feeling suicidal after her troubled stint on Big Brother, and that’s a sobering thing to read, as someone who watched the show. But bloody hell, she rose from those ashes like a flame-haired phoenix (her red-hair era was cool as). She’s since become a successful businesswoman (she currently has a clothes line and a range of nutrition products – I’ve ordered from her and it’s a very professional service, btw), made documentaries (including one about bullying) and even been the bodybuilding champion of America (I know, right? Anyone else doing that would have been celebrated for that achievement).

It’s hard not to feel inspired by everything she’s done – and by how she appears to live her life. Obviously I don’t know her, and nobody’s social-media presence gives the full picture, but I get a real sense that Jodie grabs life by the balls, falls down and gets up again, and works her socks off to achieve her dreams. She’s had her heart broken, she’s been slated in the media, but she’s still standing tall – in fabulous cowboy boots or killer heels, of course. Or, more to the point, she’s reclining on a sun lounger in the garden of her lovely big house, with her dogs and her cats and her boyfriend, living her best life.

Which brings me to the idea of how people choose to live their lives and the tedious (and dubious) morality that’s creeping into people’s choices. I wouldn’t personally flash the flesh in a magazine for any money, but that’s mainly because my boobs are down by my knees at this point and I look like an Ewok when I have my picture taken even fully clothed (my husband won’t let me look at any pictures he takes of me, because he knows I’ll ask him to delete them!). But I don’t have a problem with any woman making a living by doing so, if they’re comfortable with it. We, as a society, have made it frowned upon on so many platforms (and I do understand the reasons why that’s the case), yet what is every twenty-something woman doing on Instagram these days? At least 15 years ago flashing your body was something only glamour models and celebrities did; I never felt it was something I had to live up to. Now everyone’s at it, and I think that’s a much more pernicious state of affairs, to be honest – not for me, but for women who are now the age I was when Jodie was rocking her belts. Anyway, I really can’t see why anyone should be looking down their nose at a woman who used what she had (and that’s boobs AND brains) to create a secure future, buy a gorgeous house and live the celebrity life that she presumably, at the time, wanted.

The Jodie of today is very different, of course. Yes, she still has a cracking body (which she works hard for in her home gym), but she seems to enjoy a quiet, if still pretty fabulous, life. The things she loves doing are the things you can imagine your favourite, most inspirational friends doing. She works hard, she rides motorbikes, she gets tattoos, she donates warm coats to the homeless in winter, she adores rock’n’roll, she eats pizza (isn’t that a novelty?), she adores her animals and her friends and she goes on holiday with her parents. Forget the belts and the reality shows and you could easily imagine her being one of your mates – the funny, down-to-earth one with business smarts, a dirty laugh… and a really nice pink lipstick that I swear I’ll track down one day.

Baby’s got back (bacon): part 3 of my series about my female icons

I’ve waxed lyrical about the blonde bombshell (Marilyn Monroe) and the movie legend with balls (Elizabeth Taylor), so it was only a matter of time until I came to the glamourpuss (glamourpig?) who combines both: Miss Piggy.

I always loved The Muppets as a child, and Muppet Babies as well (anyone my age will know what I’m talking about). But Miss Piggy wasn’t one of my favourites back then. In fact, the Muppet I most adored in those days was Rowlf, the genial piano-playing dog with the floppy ears.

It’s only as an adult that I’ve come to appreciate the brilliance and the icon status of Miss Piggy. She is, without doubt, TV and movie gold: she’s funny, glamorous and OTT. She’s an actual farmyard animal who carries herself (and delivers breathy, sexy dialogue) like Marilyn, drips with jewels and attitude and believes that she is, and deserves, the very best. She’s a born superstar and a feisty (fei-sty?) feminist (ham-inist?) who takes no crap from anyone – one glimpse at that scrunched-in displeased snout would stop even Donald Trump from repeating his faux-pas (oh, and by the way, I do a mean impersonation of that angry noise she makes when she’s crackling 😜 with rage).

But the moment I really came to admire (and relate to) Piggy was when I got together with my now husband. Like Kermit, he is a catch. And like Piggy, I adore him. Also like Kermit, he’s very slim. Me, like Piggy, not so much. In our first months as a couple, I’d cringe at photos of us, joking that I was the Miss Piggy to his Kermit. I still do that now, 13 years later, only these days I’m starting to see it as not a totally awful thing. You know why? Sure, Piggy has some heft on her, but she’s beautiful and glamorous and Kermit loves the bones of her (not in a Sunday roast kind of way). And while I am being totally tongue in cheek here (I just can’t stop myself with the meat jokes), how many other female movie stars do we have who are fêted as being gorgeous, glamorous, smart and iconic whilst also being more pig than twig?

Miss Piggy is a complex mix of false eyelashes and real emotions. And she might “just” be a puppet, but who amongst us can’t relate to, and cheer, that? Wham, bam, thank you, ham!

A love letter to Liz (My female icons: Part 2)

What would Liz do? The short answer to that (Liz being Elizabeth Taylor, of course) is found in this quote, ubiquitously attributed to her on the internet: “Pour yourself a drink, put some lipstick on and pull yourself together.”

I haven’t seen all of Elizabeth’s films, so I don’t actually know whether she ever said this on screen, or indeed in her real life, but if she didn’t, it doesn’t really matter – it’s absolutely the sort of thing she would have said, and that very fact is part of the reason why I love her (she had me at lipstick).

As I said, I haven’t seen all of her films, or even, if I’m honest, many of them (lots of them are on my to-watch list, many are on my avoid-like-the-plague list and the ones I have seen have elicited mixed feelings. I remember sitting through Cleopatra as a teenager, knowing it was meant to be this huge, iconic movie, and that it was the film where Liz and Richard Burton notoriously and explosively fell in love… and yet feeling as if I was watching paint dry (and beige paint at that).

No, my love of Liz, like my love of Marilyn Monroe, isn’t really based on her work as an actress – it’s more about what I’ve read about her as a person (which is quite a lot) and how she inspires me as an enduring style icon. And that’s not to dismiss her achievements as an actor – she won Oscars, she was undoubtedly brilliant and talented… I’m just saying that I fell in love with her from a different angle, one that involved reading about her extensively.

Like Marilyn, Elizabeth had an iconic image that we can now look back on as being quintessential 1950s and 1960s glamour. Unlike poor Marilyn, though, Liz was still going strong in the ’70s and ’80s, looking opulently glamorous in kaftans and flares, then segueing into shoulder-padded power suits and big hair (and always, of course, with her famous jewels glinting from ears, neck, fingers and wrists).

In terms of how her style resonates with me, and at the risk of repeating what I’ve said about MM, I don’t feel particularly inspired by ’50s Liz: all those off-the-shoulder tops, flared skirts and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof slips aren’t really my thing. No, the Liz I love (fashion-wise) is the one captured so gorgeously in the huge black-and-white photo print we have framed in our living room: it was taken in the early ’60s and she’s walking along a rainy London street with Richard Burton, clutching an umbrella. You can see from her eyes just how in love she is, which is pretty thrilling in itself, and she’s wearing a smart cream or white coat and a pill-box hat: the very embodiment of the fashion era I love, when the nipped-in waists and pencil skirts of the ’50s met the sleek lines and modernity of the ’60s, and briefly, sublimely, merged into my dream wardrobe. I often gaze at that photo on our wall and imagine what it must have felt like to be Elizabeth at that point in time: at the height of her powers, her beauty and her career, deliriously in love and laughing through the London drizzle with the world at her fingertips.

Of course, we all know that it didn’t end that way for “Liz and Dick” (they hated that moniker, so I won’t use it again). Their passion burnt itself out in a maelstrom of children, pets, alcohol, jealousy (sexual and professional) and illness. They married, divorced, married and divorced again, and from what I’ve read, I don’t think either of them ever got over the other. And as tragic as that sounds, I think that’s the Cathy and Heathcliffe ending they would both have wanted us to remember them for.

But what Elizabeth looked like, and who she married, is only half the story, and that’s the main thing I find fascinating about her. She was beautiful, she was an A-list studio actress and she’d been a star since she was a child. And yet… she had balls of steel, the mouth of a trucker and the heart of a lion. As much as my love of Marilyn stemmed from the surprise discovery that the quintessential blonde bombshell was a sensitive, vulnerable and shy person, my love of Liz came from the opposite. This chick was balls to the wall. She swore like a sailor, she played Scrabble with dirty words (yes, we all know I love this), she demanded endless shots of booze when she was heartbroken, she refused to give in to the studio, the public or even the Pope when they objected to who she fell in love with, and she had some serious guts when it came to defending her friends. Here’s the story that makes me want to stand up and cheer, raise a glass to her and make her come back from the dead to be my friend: she was incredibly close friends with actor Montgomery Clift, with whom she’d starred in A Place In The Sun (1951). One night in 1956, minutes after leaving a dinner party hosted by Elizabeth and her then-husband, Michael Wilding, “Monty” crashed his car into a telephone pole. Hearing the smash, Liz ran out to help. And how many of us would have the presence of mind and the lack of squeamishness to do this? She put her hand down his throat to retrieve the teeth he was choking on. And when the press photographers inevitably arrived on the scene, she screamed at them that if they didn’t get away from Monty, she would never let them have a picture of her again. And that, I think, is Elizabeth Taylor’s heart and soul in a snapshot.

Knowing that, we shouldn’t be surprised that in the 1980s she combined life as a perfume maven with fundraising for AIDS charities – like Princess Diana, she did it when very few people were daring to.

Elizabeth Taylor had an incredibly cosseted lifestyle from an early age, yet you’d probably never have known it. She was one of the most celebrated beauties of the 20^th century, yet she had a down-to-earth decency that made her seem right at home unceremoniously drinking a pint in a Welsh mining-village pub when Richard Burton took her home to meet his family. How can you not love that?

So while I adore Marilyn and I think we would have been friends, I always see Liz as the pal I’d have traded dirty jokes with in the pub whilst drinking shots of Sambucca and asking her for life advice.

They don’t make them like Liz any more, and I think that’s a huge, huge shame.

My (not so) secret love affair with Marilyn

Cards on the table: I am obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. And, apart from the fact that I love late 1950s and early 1960s fashion and make-up, this is quite out of character for me. Generally, you couldn’t pay me to watch rom-coms (which many of her films were, even if the phrase hadn’t yet been coined in her day) and the very act of anyone bursting into song midway through a film (as she often did) tends to make me break out in hives.

Also, I’m not particularly interested in the “quintessential” 1950s Marilyn, the one we all know. The giggly, ditsy character; the white dress blowing up around her face; the short blonde curls and glossy red pout; the movie There’s No Business Like Show Business (not my cup of tea at all).

No, the Marilyn that fascinates (and, to some degree, haunts) me is the older, wiser, sadder Marilyn from the early 1960s. The woman in her thirties who’d realised that Hollywood dreams were nightmares hidden in glitter and that nobody wants to see your brain when they’ve already seen your boobs. The one who risked being fired from her last-ever movie, Something’s Got To Give, for flying out to New York to sing a breathy Happy Birthday to President Kennedy, just one of the many men who did her wrong.

I don’t think Marilyn was even on my radar until I stumbled across a second-hand book called The Assassination Of Marilyn Monroe, about 15 years ago. I wasn’t a Monroe fan, but I was (and am) obsessed with true crime, so I snapped it up. It was a great read, and I’m open to its central theory, but really, it doesn’t matter how many books you read or whether or not you like to dabble in conspiracy theories (I do!), we’ll never actually know whether she was murdered or she killed herself or she accidentally overdosed, so the whole thing is kind of moot.

But what that book did was show me another side to the cartoon image I’d always been vaguely aware of and not interested in. Instead of that dreadful, of-its-time trope she was lumbered with (dumb blonde), I discovered that Marilyn was a smart, well-read, sensitive and troubled person. And somehow, that revelation made me both relate to her and feel protective of her at the same time. I can’t explain it, but ever since I read that book, I’ve felt that Marilyn is “my girl”.

The saddest thing about loving Marilyn now is that when I first became a fan, I was in my late twenties. To me, then, Marilyn was still someone more mature, more worldly, more glamorous than myself. I’m 42 now, and that makes me six years older than she ever lived to be. That sad fact troubles me, for reasons I can’t even articulate.

I’ve watched most of Marilyn’s movies and I think they’re like those Magic Eye pictures from the 90s. On the surface, you’re seeing one thing. If you watch the film with a different slant, you’ll see something else. The first time I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I was so disgusted by all the musical numbers, I totally failed to appreciate a moment of comedy genius from MM. I won’t spoil it by saying what it was, but she delivers that line with such panache that it makes me laugh just thinking about it. I quote it to my husband all the time.

I’m not a film critic, so it’s not for me to say whether Marilyn’s acting or her movies were good, clever or accomplished. But there is, without a doubt, something about her: when she’s on the screen, you don’t want to look anywhere else. That’s a phenomenon I’ve also seen (from a personal point of view) with Rihanna, Angela Bassett and Sarah Paulson. And when it came to MM, the studio bosses saw it too.

My love of Marilyn has crept into my private life (and when I say crept, I mean I put down a red carpet and invited the tanks and bulldozers in). My husband knows that any time I see a print of her, I’ll buy it (our house would look like a spooky shrine if we hadn’t spaced them all out with some care). When we got married, I seriously considered walking down the aisle to I Wanna Be Loved By You from Some Like It Hot (my poor dad was probably wishing I was single at that point), and in the end we changed that to my beloved Pet Shop Boys but settled on Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend for signing the register.

It irks me when I see memes like “Marilyn Monroe was an alcoholic drug addict who slept with married men and died of an overdose, so why are you thinking she’s an icon?” and similar. What those memes are really saying is “this woman was human and flawed and we don’t like that much”. Does anyone ever say we shouldn’t revere Elvis because he was a drug-addled mess, by the way? Or that we should laugh at Michael Jackson for [insert crime you’re happy to fight with his lawyers about here] (Answer: No).

Marilyn was of her time, yet before her time, and I’m sorry for her, and for us, that her magic didn’t last longer.

I absolutely adore some of her movies and especially her early-60s style (hello Capri pants, heels, sleek dresses), but more than that, I feel sure that if Marilyn had sat next to me at work, we would very much have been friends.

RIP, Marilyn.

Love me, love my lipstick

I’m going to be honest. Lipstick is one of my favourite things. You can keep your raindrops on roses and cream-coloured ponies, Julie – nothing puts a smile on my face like a lipstick (I left out the whiskers on kittens line because they have Prozac-like effects on me too, so I can’t snark at them). And as trivial as my love of lippie might sound, I don’t actually think it is – well, no more than many other things that make a lot of people happy (see: football, Instagramming, watching TV).

And yet, I was a late conversion to the cause. I started dabbling with make-up fairly early in life (around 14 or 15), but lipstick was never my No1 interest. As a spotty teenager, my focus in the early days was finding the thickest foundation I could get my hands on. That progressed, via an obsession with 80s music, to a taste for black eyeliner. But my lips were never my focus. I half-heartedly went through a few pinks and peaches in my teenage years, and by the time I went to uni my routine was set in stone: go big on the eyes and pale on the lips. When I moved to London for my first job in magazines, aged 23, I gained access to posher brands and fell in love with Nars Lip Laquer in Chelsea Girl: a thick, gloopy gloss in a beautiful pale 60s pink. Given that at the time I was still in thrall to smoky eyes and bronzer, it made a lot of sense, and if I was 23 again now, I’d wear it again.

My later 20s saw me progress to deeper peaches and pinks (I had one peachy neutral hue that I thought was incredibly flattering and wore faithfully for years, only to be told by a friend that it was “that one that looks like poo”). But still, my eyes were always the focus and it never occurred to me to wear proper statement lipstick. The catalyst, I’m bemused to say, came in around 2009, when Cheryl Cole was on The X Factor. I’m not a fan of Cheryl and I haven’t watched The X Factor in about 8 years, but at that time, my boyfriend and I watched it every week. And what can I say? I just loved Cheryl’s fuchsia lipstick. It looked so good on her that I just had to try it (thankfully not an urge I’ve ever had with marrying footballers or anyone I can’t communicate with). So I started experimenting with bright lipsticks – at that point, fuchsias and reds. And I never looked back. There’s something magical about the transformative power of a bright lip: it’s confidence and swagger in a tube (I’d say the same, by the way, for nails and shoes – the brighter, the better I feel).

Nowadays, I own about 50 lipsticks and 90% of them are bright red, bright orange-red, bright pink, bright orange or deep plum. In other words, not for shrinking violets. Occasionally, when I do a smoky eye (which I know my husband likes), I’ll revert to a soft 60s pink or peach lip, and I can appreciate the look (and if I’m being honest, I think it’s more flattering to my face, because I have nice eyes and a huge jaw), but I never feel quite like myself when I’m wearing it. Because I’ve found the thing that makes me feel like me, and it’s a bright pout. It’s become a huge part of my look, and something that people associate with me. That’s why, for my wedding, I wasn’t interested in any ethereal, “natural beauty” princess look. I knew even before I’d found my dress that three things were non-negotiable: red lips, red nails and red shoes.

I can see that maybe one reason for this is that all my idols, in terms of style and beauty, are the two classic silver-screen goddesses from the 50s and 60s: Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. To me, glamour equals tailored outfits, hourglass figures, big hair, heels and a red lip. So the modern, Kardashian-inspired trends of contouring, tanning and fake lips/lashes/bums really don’t do anything for me (not that they’d be appropriate for a 42-year-old anyway, but hey. What a time to be middle aged!).

To me, bright lipstick represents a confidence that I’m glad I have, because I never had it when I was growing up. It says LOOK AT ME, and I AM NOT SCARED TO HAVE THIS ON MY FACE. It’s a signal to the world that maybe I can’t verbalise, as an introverted person who, when you first meet me, will appear to be quiet and shy. But actually, more than that, it’s just a love of what that colour looks like on my face. It’s bold, it’s cheerful, it’s sexy. And what’s not to love about that?

Let’s hear it (quietly, of course) for the introverts

There’s no doubt that we live in a society designed for extroverts. Everything from getting a date to nailing a promotion is easier if you’re the type who’s not backwards at coming forwards. In most aspects of life we laud, and reward, people who are outwardly confident, outgoing, gregarious and not averse to blowing their own trumpet. Which is all fair enough. Extroverts have a lot to give. But so do those of us on the opposite side of the personality test – we’re just not jumping up and down and shouting about it.

It probably doesn’t help that there’s a fair amount of confusion about what actually constitutes introversion. I consider myself to be a card-carrying introvert and even I’m not sure – where does introversion stop and shyness start? And is quietness part of the deal, or its own entity? Is there a link between my mortal dread of public speaking and organised fun and the fact that I like solitary pursuits such as reading? I suspect (and in my own case, I know) that all these elements bleed into each other in a kind of introversion Venn diagram. But the interesting thing about being quiet, shy or introverted isn’t actually the reality of having those traits, it’s how the traits are perceived – especially in the workplace. And it’s there that I think introverts get the short straw. If you’re quiet in the office, it’s easy for people to think you go home and sit in silence whilst rearranging the dead bodies in the cupboard under your stairs.

Likewise, if you’re not someone who thrives on shouting out ideas in meetings, the assumption is often that you don’t have any (ask us to email you a list and we’ll be all over it). And whilst I wouldn’t ask society to bend to cater for us quieter types, I would ask non-introverts to bear in mind that there’s more than one way to be, and to contribute, and that just because someone isn’t showing you the gamut of their personality or their talent within the first five minutes of knowing you, it doesn’t mean they don’t have it to show. I’ve been called quiet or shy since I was about five years old, and at various points in my life this perception has caused me to be underestimated, overlooked or misunderstood. At school, I was chronically shy (not helped by the kind of relentless bullying that would have shredded Donald Trump’s confidence), and it always surprised me how many of my teachers thought that was some colossal failure on my part, rather than focusing their efforts on the kids who spent English literature lessons spitting paper across the room. I remember one of my teachers suggesting that I would struggle to cope with A-levels (I got straight As) and another mocking me for my “pathetic” attempt to hold hands with a boy and “walk sexily” in a drama class (literally an introvert’s worst nightmare… oh, and a pretty gross thing to ask 14-year-olds to do). I should give a nod here to one of my teachers who seemed to get it – she wrote in one of my reports that I had “a quiet confidence”, and that’s been my mantra ever since.

At university, I lost my crippling shyness and gained in confidence, and I have continued to do so for the past 20 years. But I have never been, and never will be, the person who bounds into a situation and dominates it from the get-go. And here’s where the quiet confidence comes in: I might not be saying anything, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to say, or that I don’t believe that what I have to say is worthwhile. The vestiges of shyness and quietness that I carry today aren’t signs that I don’t feel I’m good enough, or smart enough, or funny enough… they’re just what they say on the tin: I can be a bit quiet, and I can be a bit shy. And despite the fact that people spend an awful lot of time trying to “cure” introverts and quiet people, I’m fine with that (it’s funny how you never hear anyone asking a loud person why they can’t try to be a little bit quieter… even when everyone in the room is rolling their eyes and asking the heavens to Make It Stop).

But as much as I defend my right to be introverted and refuse to see it as a personality defect, it’s only the tip of the iceberg in terms of who and what I am. Give me a while to warm up and you’ll find I’m as chatty and fun as anyone. I recently left a job where I worked in an office of 10 people. In my first few days in the role, I don’t think I said very much at all. By the time I left, two years later, I was probably one of the chattiest people in the room (and I was certainly the one cracking the dirty jokes). That’s not because I had some sudden personality change or a lobotomy… it’s because some of us just need to feel comfortable with people before we scuttle out of our hermit-crab shell. I like to think of it like this: remember in the 1980s Care Bears movie, how the bears all unleash their special “belly badge power” – and sunshine and rainbows and hearts radiate out? (It’s less disturbing than it sounds). Well, I like to keep my belly to myself for a while… but when I finally point it your way, that’s when the magic happens. Unless, of course, I’ve had a few hours of enforced socialising with people I don’t know, and I’m exhausted and my stress headache is making my eyeballs throb… because then you’re going to get GRUMPY BEAR and that’s one introverted critter you don’t want to poke.

Oh, the horror (pass the popcorn)

In real life, nobody is more terrified of murderers than I am. And if you left me in a dark forest on my own I would 100% wet myself. Yet those are two of my favourite ingredients for a film (murderers and forests, not incontinence). My husband jokes that we’ve seen EVERY film ever made about a group of attractive young people who go to the woods and get picked off one by one by a psychopath or a family of inbred cannibals (I sense he’s tiring of that particular trope, but I can’t get enough of it). From The Hills Have Eyes to Wrong Turn and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I find nothing more enjoyable on screen than the very situation that, in real life, is my ultimate nightmare fuel. And not just rural bloodbaths: I also like home invasions (favourite: The Strangers), zombies (Resident Evil), monsters (The Mist), scary sci-fi (Event Horizon), deranged survival challenges (The Belko Experiment) and big gruesome torture-fests (Saw). In fact, my first choice for a movie when we’re scrolling through Netflix is always horror. From the classics to the obscure, nothing gets my pulse racing like a movie that promises to scare the life out of me.

The funny thing is, it wasn’t always this way. Until my late twenties I would probably still have hidden behind the sofa for Jaws. If I saw that a “scary” film had an 18 certificate (or, let’s be honest here, even a 15), I’d assume it was way too disturbing for me and avoid it like the plague. The first time I “watched” The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on TV, I actually mostly just listened to it whilst physically hiding behind my boyfriend of the time and repeatedly asking “What’s happening now?”

Another ex introduced me to zombie films, which might have started the process of toughening me up, but I only really hit my horror stride with my now husband. I can’t remember how we got started, but I’m pretty sure it was me dragging him down into the blood-soaked gutter and not the other way around. And for the past decade or so, we have seen some truly horrible films together (it’s a beautiful thing, no?). We even go to FrightFest every year, which is basically like Glastonbury for horror nerds, with back-to-back screenings of all the axe murderers, rampaging creatures and evil nuns that weirdos like us could wish for.

The only horror genres I’m not generally thrilled by are vampires (although I love all the kitschy Hammer Horror Dracula classics) and anything supernatural or based on demonic possession (having said that, Mr Bughuul from Sinister left me too scared to go upstairs on my own, so I can’t claim to be hard as nails where demonic wrong ’uns are concerned).

I’m not a student of film and I can’t discuss the merits of horror from an academic point of view, or its place in the firmament of film-making. But for someone who adores film as entertainment and escapism, I do sometimes wonder why my chosen way to “escape” is by watching disturbing things. But there again, you’ll never catch me skydiving or bungee jumping (and you’d have to drug me like Mr T to get me on a rollercoaster), so it’s possible that scary movies are my adrenaline fix – the only “danger” I’m happy to court. And I think that’s probably fair enough. Some people relax by watching rom-coms or martial arts or costume dramas about the royal family. I’d rather pluck my eyes out with Leatherface’s meat hook – so let’s hear it for the creepy, the gory, the sinister… and anyone currently writing Six Pretty People Go Into The Woods And Only One Comes Out Because Mutant Cannibals, Part 15. I am down for that.