never Miss a beat

Sometimes you have to be honest with yourself. There comes a point when you need to find the belt for the outfit you’re wearing in your wardrobe but you can’t get into the wardrobe because of the layers of shoes you don’t wear. One of those shoes is there on its own. It doesn’t have a partner; a removal company you used two years ago lost it. You should have chucked the shoe out but you didn’t. The shoe suffered a terrible loss and throwing it away seemed cruel and heartless. That there is your brain making excuses again. I should know. I am a hoarder. I’m my father clinging on to his O-level chemistry jotters for reasons only he understands. I’m doomed to spend my whole life hiding the amounts of crap I have from the man who eventually suffers me, and there will be one who suffers me. Somewhere. Eventually.

Some things I do have good reason to hoard. I’ve been “saving” all my favourite pieces of writing over the past few years for the time when I will read and enjoy them again. I read something, I have an internal debate – “Yes, this is a keeper” or “No, I can let this one go” – and I put them in a box: recycling, or the accurately-titled “stuff”. It’s funny that I never have time to read everything I want in the paper that comes out every day, yet I keep these articles and columns like I’m going to have time to read them one more time. There I go making excuses again. It’s not funny, it’s a disease. I’m sick.

Despite my illness, I defy anyone who tells me there wasn’t some logic behind my decision to hoard all columns and “things written by” Caitlin Moran. I’ve read Caitlin in The Times for years, which is why I was anticipating her book How To Be A Woman so much. I preordered it and immediately tweeted: “This is the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I haven’t been this excited since the Spice Girls released their second album.” It didn’t disappoint. It was my grown-up Spice World. I’ve bought copies for all my friends, I made the male workie at Q read it and I’m going to go through it all again soon with a highlighter.

Even before How To Be A Woman, I’d got to a stage in my Caitlin consumption where I thought it was ridiculous that she didn’t have some sort of Moranipedia of all her witty masterpieces. And so I began to collect all the columns every week. They’re not just in the “stuff” box. I often have to tear them out the Saturday supplements when I’m out and about, so they’ve sort of ended up all over the place; between books, under piles of DVDs, there was one in my sock drawer, another in a handbag I haven’t used for a while…I won’t go on.

But I’m glad I did this because Moran’s words are just my ticket. Every time. There is never a week when I don’t read Caitlin and go, “Yep, Moran made me aware of thoughts I didn’t know I had, she did it in a funny way impossible to argue with, spot on… I’m keeping this bad boy.” And while there is no Master Book of all the Great Works Of C Moran, I exist safe in the knowledge that there’s a nice stash of the good stuff in my possession to keep me going. I won’t hold onto them forever. Just a little while longer…

Top 5 Favourite Moran pieces (excluding How To Be A Woman, obvs):

5. The one about over-packing for a holiday. “Those trousers? Why did you bring those trousers? Toothpaste would have been a good idea.”

4. The one about the domestic over a Mooncup. “‘Is this,’ I say, hopefully, ‘one of those arguments where you list all of the ways I’ve ruined your life – but, by the end of it, you feel oddly saucy…’”

3. The one about The Olympics. “If the Nazis can run a good Olympics, then Sebastian Coe certainly can.”

2. The one about religion being different if it were invented by women. “Men invented burkas, men are banning burkas. And they are the only people who would have invented them.”

1. The one about being poor. Lump in throat stuff. “When you are poor, you feel heavy. Heavy like your limbs are filled with water. Perhaps it is rainwater - there is a lot more rain your life, when you are poor. Rain that can’t be escaped in a cab. Rain that has to be stood in, until the bus comes…”

SPECIAL MENTION: When Moran met Lady Gaga and went to a Berlin sex club. It’s so good I’ve thought twice about laminating my copy. I once took it into my office and (again) made all the dudes read it. I demanded that the tone of every magazine changed to match it. It’s my blueprint for what journalism should be.