Me book, like!

I'm pleased to announce that my new book, BiOlogy, is now available! It's a collection of short stories themed around bisexuality, and if you'd like to buy a copy (which would delight me to yet unsurpassed realms of joy), you can do so via the link below. Thanks people!

http://clairelouisathomas.blogspot.com/p/my-books.html

Alas, soap justice

Once upon a time, soaps were the distributors of natural justice. Dirty Den only had to knock up his teenaged daughter's best mate to deserve being shot into a canal by a man hiding a gun in a bunch of wilting daffs, whereas Emmerdale's Bob Hope was punished for crimes against hosiery by being forced to shack up with Viv "The Quacking Mullet" Windsor for what felt like an eternity. Nowadays, soap stars get off lightly. Nobody's punished. Chester's favourite murderer, widemouthed Warren Fox has come back from the dead and is busy enjoying living his second life to the full, while Coronation Street's John Stape is continuing his career of rubbish villainy while wife Fiz is safely glued to the neonatal unit of Weatherfield General. Abductions, manslaughters, identity theft, underage sex with a pupil - John's criminal record is as long as your arm, and yet everything he does seems so hapless and weak-kneed that I just roll my eyes, like a sufferer of terminal Nintendo syndrome. Maybe the writers just can't be bothered to punish him, but I still don't see why viewers should be punished by his continued appearance on screen. And EastEnders! Normally the one soap that can be relied upon to dish out the grimmest, Victorian reformatory-style moral punishments, this has gone by the wall too, as Ian Beale, after a lifetime of grovelling, sidling, completely irredeemable awfulness, is still getting smart blondes to sleep with him. Honestly, Glenda. Surely you can do better than that.

I'm rather disenchanted generally with soaps at the moment. The constant recycling of characters and plots is getting me down. Squawking tart Kat Moon has dragged her hapless Alfie back to haunt my viewing, and now cousin (and ex-shag) Michael is set to hove into view. Michael is inoffensive to the eye, wears suits and is described as "having his eye on a few Walford ladies". So, not at all like Nick "Every Five Years Like Halley's Shitbomb" Tilsley returning to Corrie with a new face, then. Michael will do the same tired old rounds as everyone else - Kat, Janine, either slapper Roxy or Ronnie the Mucus Queen - then settle for a while with someone. That's what they all do. I'm just praying that this time it will be St. Tracy the barmaid. She's well overdue for someone to put a smile on her face.

But there is good news. Troublesome middle-class Maisie Wylde is set to depart from the Dales with younger brother Will in tow. Maisie can't see further than the end of her Babyliss curling wand, and the ultimate illustration of this is that she accepts, then rethinks and declines a proposal of marriage from Nikhil Sharma before she goes, silly bitch. Nikhil is tall, elegant, wealthy and has an independent income that he has amassed from confectionery. Confectionery, Maisie. I know you're a size eight, but even you ought to be able to spot that you might have been onto a good thing by shacking up with the Sweetie King.

But, as ever, as one soap waxes, another will wane. Maisie may have lightened the load of Emmerdale, but down in EastEnders, pin-eyed, tomato-faced Phil Mitchell is still alive and breeding.

It's like I said. There's no justice in soap any more.

My other half, who Does pop culture, has been wittering on about the upcoming Thor film for, ooh, ages now. For the uninitiated, Thor is a comic book character based on the Norse God. He's a blond bodybuilder who wanders round in his pants carrying a hammer, a bit like a stoner trying to put together a flat pack bookcase, or a hard-up porn actor looking for work. I found this faintly risible, so had no interest in the film, until Other Half was looking at some preview pictures online, and I saw the actor whose name has figured prominently in these discussions.
And then it clicked.
The name of Chris Hemsworth was not one I knew from Hollywood. Rather, he did three years in a little town called Summer Bay, as Home and Away's Kim Hyde, son of sub-Fisher school principal Barry. (He was a shirtless tearaway who argued constantly with his over-strict dad.)
Suddenly my interest rocketed. This film is going to be great. I'm particularly looking forward to the scene where spoilt blonde Nicole Franklin, she with the A-level in flouncing, transmogrifies into Thor's wife, the goddess Sif. Or the one where Thor parks his goat-drawn chariot in the disabled space by the diner, causing Irene to eye her cooking sherry longingly before she goes for a moody walk on the beach in the hope of seeing Aden with his abs out. Or the scene where Alf Roberts calls Thor a flamin' great galah for leaving his hammer Mjolnir at the caravan park.
That would be a seriously great film.
It set me wondering what other soap characters of the past could get a new lease of life in the rash of hyperinflated-budgeted comic films Hollywood is currently spawning. And there are loads! Think about it...
Ex-EastEnder Amira Shah is a strong contender for Wonderwoman. Surely the hair-tossing Amira in her crippling heels would adore bullet-proof bracelets. And with the Lasso of Truth, she could have saved herself a lot of heartache by forcing the truth out of her sexually confused, tousle-haired husband months back, instead of accepting all his rubbish excuses because she was too busy doing her nails to think for herself. ("No, honestly, Amira, Christian's just giving me bodybuilding tips. Naked bodybuilding tips behind the Masala Masood bins," Never was denial so painfully unconvincing.)
And Fred Elliott? Poor lost Fred. I say, surely he could carve out a new career as intergalactic slaphead the Silver Surfer? I say? Or Kim Tate as Elektra, complete with the famous mirror in which she checked her lippy after ensuring it could no longer be misted by Frank's irksome habit of breathing. Kim, the original stilettoed assassin, saw to that. In fact, now The Bill has gone west, I'm seeing that comic book films could be the next soap graveyard. Bets are on now that Ashley Peacock ends up as the Punisher. Twelve to one and under starters' orders.

The TV Diet - Five Swaps to Drop Your Pop-Culture

Magazines are always telling you to swap stuff. How you can save £800 on a beautifully cut belted black coat that makes you look like a cross between Lauren Bacall and Joan Crawford by buying a ratty one stitched by weeping peasant children from Primark (belt not included.) How you can save 600 calories by swapping a sextuple-chocolate muffin topped with a Mars Duo for half an After Eight mint, which isn't going to quieten anyone's raving PMS. How you can drop a dress size practically unnoticed by swapping the Pizza Hut blow-out plus Star Wars DVD marathon for a piece of carrot peeling and a brisk run over to Buenos Aires.

And it's all bollocks, isn't it? So I thought I would contribute by suggesting my own top four pop-culture phenomena, why you should swap them and what you could swap them for. It's just a bit of fun, so if you want to lynch me, keep it verbal. We're all adults now. Allegedly.


1. Glee

Some people enjoy watching anything between a dozen and a gross of identikit Americans leaping around in outfits that fell out of Bring It On. It troubles many of my dear friends not a whit that these wide-eyed teens all have teeth like an orthodontist's wet dream and a choice of three noses between the lot of them. Apart from the teacher whose acid one-liners are so often claimed to be "the only reason I watch it, honestly", I can only presume the cast were ordered wholesale. Personally I find it frighteningly surreal, depressing, vacuous, giddy and...I could go on. Swap for the Truman Show, which at least acknowledges the sense of constant surrealistic nightmare. Or Brave New World. Gleeks (I shudder as I type) are oh so many Lenina Crownes, ultimately greeting my horrified face with a blank look and an offer of yet more visual soma. No offence.

2. Twilight

You may be Team Jacob, your pubescent sister may be Team Edward, I represent Team Get A Frigging Life. Death-heavy romance or psychological abuse with fangs, take it your way. With marketing using the same colour scheme, poses and font as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's cynically pushed as cutesy paranormal for the impressionable generation. Instead, watch Twinklight, a low-budget cinematic treat which consists of two over-made-up, skinny teenaged lads getting grubby while wearing crappy pound-shop plastic fangs. It doesn't pretend to be anything it's not, and at one point I think that one lad catches a fang in the other's foreskin. Fun for all the family.

3. The Inbetweeners

For a show so lauded for its insightful realism, it holds no resonance for my own teens. Four irksome posh lads from Guildford try and fail to get some sex. Think Carry On with A-levels. They are not real teenagers. None of them ever order a butter pie in a chippy because it's the cheapest. None of them have ever bought a pint of milk off a milk float at six a.m. on a Saturday morning while they waited with a raging hangover for the first bus out of Huncoats. They never eat their own weight in Dairy Milk, gloomily pondering why their legs are so huge. Swap for Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, which contains fag-cadging students, people with ordinary jobs, and a concept of upmarket socialising as drinking in a pub where the staff occasionally scrape the sick off the floor. It's like coming home, I tell you.

4. X-Factor

Sub-pub karaoke sung by risible human vacuums desperately clawing at the cliff edge of potential fame. Swap for real pub karaoke, which at least involves leaving the house.

All Change

I'm going through the change. No, not the change of life, the change of clothes. No, I'm not hormonal. No, I'm not mad. No, I haven't suddenly decided that jeggings are sensible wear for ordinary women, instead of a satanic instrument designed to make size 12 legs look like the results of a hippopotamus' botched liposuction operation wapped in a square inch of cling film. And with stitching in the most unfortunate place, as though your labia had gone crispy. No, my feelings on jeggings are utterly immutable. They will never change.
But the real change of clothes, which has nothing to do with jeggings, hits all of us. All women, once they pass twenty-six, come into contact with the change of clothes. One day you're bounding down a midwinter street in a skirt the size of a cake frill, praying you don't slip off your towering stilettos in case your arse cheeks get frozen to the pavement; the next you're standing in Oasis' fitting room giving girly squeals at the thought of getting your knees out for the lads. One day your black hoodie looks all yoof-duz-sexy with your perfect makeup and immaculate hair; the next time you wear it for those country walks you've started taking, you daren't stand still in case a passing farmer mistakes you for a hay bale in a tarpaulin. And then you know the change of clothes has begun.
The thing is - the point I've been trying to make, in my laboured, smart-arsed way - that what looks good in your teens and early twenties is practically anything. You lie around doing frankly bugger all, eating cheesecake out of the packet and drinking so much your liver threatens to leave home, and yet you never seem to rise above a size 10. Your skin has the bloom of a perfect peach, your hair is fragrant and shining, and you can wear whatever you goddamn please. (Looking back, it's rather a pity you spent your time dating candidates for Dickhead of the Year award and whingeing about the size of your bum. You could have done so much more.)
And then you hit twenty-five, and it's fine, nothing really changes, and quietly you congratulate yourself on ageing gracefully and accepting your move towards mature womanhood....until your twenty-seventh birthday, where everything suddenly goes HAYWIRE. You develop a stack of spare tyres. You look at a cake and instantly put on a pound; except if it's a choux bun, then you put on three. And suddenly you have a wardrobe of shoes you can't walk in, skirts that showcase your cellulite, and size 8 tops that rise remorselessly over your size 14 muffin top whenever the laundry situation gets desperate enough for you to need to force them over the vast pallid barrage balloons that pass for your bangers these days. And all that sophisticated black number does is make you look like a widow left out in the rain.
And so cometh the change of clothes. My days of t-shirts and combats are sadly going west, bloody fast. Of late, my wardrobe has developed a creeping diversity; reds and hot pinks now sit in among the ranks of black, and as a desperate attempt to hide my bangers, I even bought a kimono top in a very loud print that makes me look like a rockery. Skirts skim my knees and my shoes boast smart wedge heels. I've even started covering up my exuberant cleavage with a scarf now and then. And as I totter past the mirror in the belted black coat that I faintly imagine makes me look like Lauren Bacall, I suddenly think: whoa. I look like a GROWN-UP.
I can't tell you how unnerving that is. It's so unnerving that after the second time I had to watch an episode of He-Man and eat Jammy Dodgers just to reassert my self-identity as a big kid. It's therapy for my identity, but I promise you, it's done my waistline no good at all.

Maybe It's Because I'm Not A Londoner

I am Not Good at modern life. One symptom of this is that I really, really hate London. Not London where people live, places like Ealing and Richmond. No, central London, where my day job occasionally takes me. That's the bit I hate.
I walk everywhere in central London, being as how the thought of of being crammed in a minuscule metal cartridge and shot through tunnels that both in looks and hygiene resemble someone's actual rectum after winning Top Eater at a chili cook-off inspires me with fear the like of which only Amy Winehouse's gynaecologist can understand. And when you walk, you see a lot. A lot of milling tourists pointing at the Household Cavalry and taking up the entire footpath to do it. A lot of beetroot-faced, yelling maniacs driving cars who like to park on pedestrian crossings, then run over your foot as you attempt to cross when it is your legal right to do so. A lot of fashionably-dressed people running flat-out with a trolley case bumping along the pavement behind them and a large decaf soy latte in the other hand. I've been laid out by those before.
I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me Nottingham or give me death. Actually, death is about right. I often wonder if I'm going to survive the day in London, what with all the road rage flying about, and what with how my liver jacks up bile production enough to shrivel itself the moment I walk out of St. Pancras onto Euston Road. It's not that I don't like places other than where I live - Sheffield and Liverpool are two cities that remain close to my heart. Manchester too, despite the hubris. Or maybe because of it. I like modesty in my cities, but Manchester's hubris is the turkey-strut of the mill-boy made good, curiously loveable and emblematic of its history. By contrast, London's hubris is just plain smug. Probably because it has such an innate and massive economic advantage over everywhere else in the British Isles that it seems like Usain Bolt striding out to race the 100m sprint against a fat lad from Hull. It has all the best jobs, all the government (not that most cities would compete for that advantage) enough blue plaques to tile a swimming pool, and money chucked at the egregious place from all over the world. And what have we got in Nottingham? Caves, which are cliffs with holes in. And in Sheffield? The hospice of the British manufacturing industry, dying on its arse.
No, wait. It's not all that bad. I've just thought; they still have to fight their way through the tourists to get to work. Perhaps they're being punished enough after all.

Imitation of Life

I've just finished watching Imitation of Life, starring Lana Turner. The first film the erstwhile Sweater Girl made after the death of abusive boyfriend Joe Stampanato (stabbed to death by Turner's daughter in self-defence during a family argument) is touchingly domestic in many ways. Turner stars as Lora, a young actress widowed with a daughter, Susie, who takes on Annie Johnston as a maid after the two meet on a beach. Annie, similarly widowed with one daughter, Sarah Jane, whose skin colour is coincidentally much lighter than her mother's. As Susie and Sarah Jane grow up together in the same household, their paths painfully diverge. Susie's mother, achieving greater stardom in every way, gives her daughter everything that money can buy - except her time. Annie gives Sarah Jane the love and time that Susie never gets - but can't give her the lifestyle of a rich girl. The tormented Sarah Jane becomes obsessed with passing as a white girl, an ambition which takes a shocking nosedive when her boyfriend Frankie finds out that she has black blood and assaults her horrifyingly in the street. But even this doesn't stop Sarah Jane running away from home, rejecting her mother and her mother's moral standards to earn her living as a dancer in seedy New York clubs, fighting her background every inch of the way. As the years pass, Annie becomes ill and eventually dies, leaving the newly regretful Sarah Jane to break down publicly over her coffin, acknowledging her mother in public as she never did in life.
Imitation of Life is not perfect. It's a film with its own share of problems - it's got Troy Donahue in it for a start. But it resonates, even today, in more than one way. Sarah Jane's desperate attempts to escape the inescapable, to deny her own heritage, echoes too painfully the experiences of many gay and bi people who find it easier to pass for straight in a heteronormative world. It's easy to understand why a bright young girl, given the option, might try to escape into a life that offers her more than the chance to be someone's maid. Why stay in the cage if the door might be open?
The trouble is that Sarah Jane suffers for her decision to turn her back on what she is. Going under assumed names, moving from job to job to stop her indefatigably disapproving mother tracking her down, and eventually suffering her public breakdown, echoes the decision of so many people who in pursuing a life in keeping with their sexual orientation, end up lying to or evading the family who love them.
I was one of those people, once. After years of struggling with my bisexuality, I came out to myself and my friends at 23. I told myself I didn't need to tell my family, that it was none of their business, any more than any other part of my sex life was their business. There was no need for them to know. It was my business. No one else's.
Four years down the line, I was out at work, to my friends, to my boyfriend, but my family still had no idea. And I was getting involved with LGBT events, drinking in gay pubs, going to Pride. I told my family all this, hoping they might spot the thread. But they didn't. And the more I moved on the scene, the more I started to see the inequalities, hear the biphobia still so casually bandied about, and I didn't want to be part of it any more. My silence had stopped looking like the sensible choice for an adult woman to keep her sex life to herself. It had started to look like plain, crappy cowardice. Like not having the guts to tell the people who loved me most who I actually was. And how could I help to change anything if I stayed silent? How could I tell people it was OK to stand up to the world and be who you are, if I still wore a different face to my family?
I did tell them in the end. And it's been OK. But that's why Imitation of Life is so hard to watch. Because, in this world, there are still hideous inequalities even now. Sarah Jane wouldn't have to be a maid any more, but spare a thought for the people who mask themselves every day behind the resolute "normality" of everyday existence, fearing their family, unlike Annie, might reject them if only they knew the truth. Pray the world changes, and fast.