Making It Up as I Go Along Read online

  But a few days later my temperature shot up again, my energy plummeted and suddenly I got an overview of the past year: I’d been sick every three weeks, I was constantly exhausted and I had a box of Max Strength Lemsip about my person at all times. With that, something happened …

  I had a flashback to this really horrible, humourless woman I’d once met in Los Angeles who used to bore on about how the manufacturers of processed sugar should be sued for destroying health, in the same way that cigarette companies were being sued. At the time I’d despised her, thinking she was a no-fun body-fascist, but – unthinkable thought – what if she’d been right? What if refined sugar really was Satan’s dandruff?

  And why was it all right for me to nod along knowingly with Jamie’s Dinners and to shake my head sadly at all the children subsisting on white sugar in all its wondrous forms, but to eat so much of it myself and not expect to get fat/hyper/sick?

  I still don’t know what exactly happened to me, but suddenly I was just sick of being sick and I thought, ‘If there’s a chance that I might feel well occasionally, I’ll give this no-sugar thing a go.’

  It was the most unlikely thing ever. I was so fiercely bonded to sweets, I had planned that, on my death, I’d be buried with a selection box and my coffin would leave the church while the organist played the Flake theme. I loved sugar as much as I had ever loved alcohol – actually maybe even more so, because a bag of M&S fruit gums (the very best kind, connoisseurs will agree, because of their soft texture) had never made me puke on my new shoes or go home with a man I’d just met.

  Being the kind of person I am, I couldn’t just cut down. If I had even one square of Fruit & Nut (still a classic, I think you’ll agree, despite so many upstart pretenders), it would trigger a chocolate-based orgy and there was no knowing where it might end. It was all or nothing, and unfortunately it had to be nothing.

  This might sound self-indulgent, but giving up sugar was a bit like a death. The thought of never eating cheesecake again made me jackknife with grief and I actually dreamt about chocolate, the way you might dream about an old boyfriend who’d broken your heart.

  Without sugar, I felt naked and bare, all alone in a hostile world; it had calmed me when I was anxious, cheered me when I was upset and fired me full of energy when I was knackered (mind you, I’d crash far worse, half an hour later).

  Some kind soul suggested that I attack my cravings with a handful of almonds. Great. Thanks.

  But almonds it is, and I’ve had three straight months without falling sick. Also, I look different – everyone says. They study my face and ask, ‘What is it?’ and I say, ‘I’ve shaved off my moustache.’

  ‘No, no,’ they say. ‘It’s not just that …’ My skin, they say, is glowing and my eyes are clear and bright. Which makes me wonder what I looked like before – from the sounds of things, like something out of Night of the Living Dead.

  However, another massive change awaited me. To be continued …

  First published in Marie Claire, September 2005.

  Learning to Cook

  … Right, you know about the terrible tragedy that befell me when I had to give up sugar on account of my atrocious health? It was horrific – like having to walk away from the love of my life because his mother had put a contract out on me or because he’d decided to join the priesthood.

  Bad and all as that was – and let me make no bones about it, my heart was broken – there was worse to come: it wasn’t just as simple as not eating chocolate, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Bounty ice creams, cheesecakes, summer puddings, custard … I made the shock discovery that sugar is lurking in just about all processed food. Even savoury stuff. Yes, even dinners. The stark truth was staring me in the face: I’d have to start cooking.

  I didn’t cook. I didn’t know how and I didn’t want to learn. The thought of having to have meat ready at the same time as potatoes at the same time as two veg made me want to crouch in a corner, whimpering and rocking. I literally couldn’t boil an egg. Worse, I was quite proud of it (because it subverted men’s expectations of women).

  Preparing dinner for Himself consisted of piercing the cellophane on two plastic trays of ready-made meals and slinging them into the microwave.

  To ensure we stayed healthy (although we didn’t), I made us take a daily vitamin pill the size of a horse tablet. And every Thursday we went to my mammy’s for dinner, ensuring that we got at least one hot, home-cooked meal a week. One Thursday she’d give us spaghetti bolognese, the next chicken casserole, the next spaghetti bolognese, the next chicken casserole. Even when we went away the spaghetti/casserole two-hander would continue and when we returned we’d slot smoothly back in, as if we’d never been gone. Very comforting. A fixed point in an uncertain world.

  I was so disconnected from all culinary business that when Siobhán visited with her toddler and needed to open a tin of baby food, I spent many fruitless minutes hunting through drawers and cupboards before I realized that, actually, I didn’t have a tin-opener. I mean, who doesn’t have a tin-opener?!

  Then Siobhán dropped her glass (probably from the tin-opener shock), and when I went to sweep up the broken bits I discovered I hadn’t a clue where the dustpan and brush lived. I was pretty sure I had one, but for the life of me … Again, I must admit I was quite proud of this.

  I scorned domestic goddesses. Cooking for others? Making a rod for your own back, more like. But I was too beaten to resist – I was on day four of my Percy Pig cold turkey (the worst day; I kept hallucinating that I could see bags of Penny Pigs, when everyone knows Penny Pigs were discontinued over two years ago) – and I surrendered to the inevitable.

  Overnight, I booked lessons, bought cookbooks and invested in some Le Creuset.

  The classes were a revelation. Instead of making shank of lamb and loin of pork and other pompous, terrifying stuff, the teacher made Thai curries and things I actually liked.

  Once I started, I found cooking to be the most charming thing ever: I was mesmerized that you can take all these separate, disparate things, put them together in a certain way and suddenly you have this delicious dinner. It was like magic!

  Because I’m such an all-or-nothing person, I went overboard to embrace the new me. I bought a folder and started tearing out recipes from magazines; it now contains three recipes.

  The real sign that I’d undergone a profound change happened on a recent mini-break: instead of scouting out the nearest chemist, I went to a kitchen shop and bought a slotted spoon, a Y-shaped peeler and a pastry brush. (I haven’t a notion what to do with the pastry brush, but I’m hopeful it’ll come in handy at some stage.)

  I can hardly believe it’s me, and yet I always flirted with a soft-focus vision of myself, pottering about my kitchen in a kaftan and gold flipflops; when glamorous friends dropped in unexpectedly, I’d throw together a delicious four-course banquet from three mouldy tomatoes at the bottom of the fridge.

  However, it’s not all fun and games. In the first financial quarter since the new me, M&S’s shares have dropped by 19 per cent and I’m sure it’s all my fault. I used to have a kitchen that gleamed with cleanliness but now it’s a spattered shambles. And what about cooking smells in your hair? Am I the only person who cooks wearing a shower cap?

  I’ve also made the painful discovery that not everyone loves a gourmet-swot. When I told a friend that, for dinner, I’d made pork and apple sausages with lentils in a red wine reduction (she asked, I wasn’t boasting, simply answering a question), she said, ‘Christ, you can’t do anything by halves, can you?’ This was not meant as a compliment.

/>   And then, of course, there’s the farmers’ market. At my local one I buy spices and swotty multi-grain bread and manky-looking organic vegetables and chat about recipes and stuff to the stallholders and it’s all very nice.

  The problem is that music is provided by pan-pipe-playing, poncho-wearing types, and family groups sway about to them, sipping at their freshly squeezed organic apple juice, and frankly the whole hippy-dippy carry-on makes my scalp sweat with embarrassment. But what can I do? These are my people now.

  mariankeyes.com, October 2007.

  How to Break Up with Your Hairdresser

  It’s the old story. Girl meets hairdresser. Girl falls in love with hairdresser. Girl falls out of love with hairdresser and in love with another hairdresser who works at the same saloon. Girl is doomed to a lifetime of yearning and bad hair. The end.

  Here’s my story. I had a hairdresser, we’ll call him Eric. He was competent but unimaginative, even a little surly, but I’d previously been through the Hairdresser Wars, so I was grateful for someone who didn’t try to ‘challenge’ me and who didn’t push me out of my comfort zone with high-maintenance cuts and edgy new products that I didn’t know how to use. (Salt spray, anyone?) Also, I liked that he spoke very little, as I believe that excessive small talk damages the immune system. Eric suited me.

  However, when Eric went on holiday I was shunted on to Sabrina (not her real name). I told her what I wanted, knowing that she would completely ignore me and give me Blowdry of the Week, the strange combover-from-the-back they were sending everyone else out with, and I consoled myself with the fact that at least my hair would be clean. But when she switched off her dryer I was astonished and humbled. She had done exactly what I had asked for. This Sabrina ‘got’ me in a way Eric never had. A happier future unfurled ahead of me. I saw myself running in slow motion down a hill, with my really, really nice hair bouncing behind me. I wanted Sabrina to be my hairdresser for ever. Then the cold truth hit me. There was no way I could have her. I was sworn to another. Everyone, from the top down – i.e. the terrifying receptionist – knew I was Eric’s client.

  There was nothing I could do. There’s no protocol for breaking up with your hairdresser. If I had wanted to end my marriage it would have been easier. I’d say, ‘We need to talk.’ Then, ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ Or, ‘I just can’t do this any more’ (the current favourite phrase from relationship-enders), and that would be it. I’d be free!

  The same problem applies to same-sex friendships. I had a friend and we used to see each other a lot, then we didn’t see each other so often, then when I did see her I found myself thinking, ‘Was she … always so stingy?’ And, ‘God, I wish she’d stop “weighing” me’ (checking me out not-very-discreetly to see how much fatter I’d got since the last time we’d met). Quite simply we had – yes! – drifted apart. But until the end of time we’ll have to meet up three times a year and squeeze out enough conversation to fill two miserable hours and go home sapped of the will to live, knowing we’ll have to do it all again in four months’ time.

  But back to Eric and Sabrina. I embarked on a course of subterfuge, like having an affair. ‘Secret’ appointments – Eric’s day off was Thursday, so I started booking all my appointments for Thursdays and faking disappointment when I heard that Eric wasn’t in, then very, very quickly, in a high, tight voice, suggesting that perhaps Sabrina could do me instead. But it didn’t always suit me to come on Thursdays, so more imaginative manipulation was called for. I’d ring and ask what times Eric was available and would murmur, ‘Oh dear, no, I can’t do nine. Or ten. Or eleven. Isn’t that a bummer?’ Only when I’d established the one hour of the day when Eric wasn’t available, would I be able to say, ‘But sadly, that’s the very time I want to come in.’

  The thing is – and you might find this hard to believe if you’ve had as many hair disasters as I have – that hairdressers are not stupid. They have a low territorial cunning and hair saloons are snakepits, hotbeds of bitchiness, where each stylist regards all the others as mortal rivals and clients are jealously guarded. Eric noticed my absence but he couldn’t front me up and tearfully accuse me of playing away. He had to content himself with giving me wounded passive-aggressive smiles whenever I took my place at Sabrina’s station.

  Then! Everything changed! Eric got a job at another saloon! He invited me to jump ship with him, and as I stuttered my excuses his eyes locked with mine in the mirror and he said silkily, ‘Unless you’d prefer to stay with Sabrina.’ Having delivered his killer blow, he turned on his heel and stalked away with dignity, and although I was now free to openly love Sabrina, the whole thing felt a little sour.

  It’s all very tricky. At the moment I want to break up with my dentist. His waiting room has a very poor magazine selection and he’s mingy with his post-surgery painkillers. (My friend’s dentist gives out Vicodin like they’re Smarties.) But I can’t just abruptly abandon my dentist for Vicodin-man, he has all my notes; somehow I’ll have to get them off him.

  It seems that the only time you can properly break up with someone is if you’ve slept with them, and am I being unreasonable in not wanting to have sex with my dentist in order that I can go elsewhere?

  But what else am I to do?

  First published in You, April 2008.

  How to Deal with Hostile Hairdressers

  As we established in the previous piece, I’m very lucky because I have a lovely hairdresser and I’ve gone to her for a long time and I really like her and she never keeps me waiting and she does exactly as I ask and she never suggests that it might be ‘Time for a change’, and when I ask her to take half an inch off the ends, she takes half an inch off the ends and not half a foot, and when I took a notion and wanted colouredy extensions, she didn’t shriek, ‘What?! At your age?!’ She simply calmly went and organized the colouredy extensions. And when I said to her recently, ‘I’d like to change my colour,’ she changed my colour. And when I didn’t like it, I was able to say, ‘I don’t know about this … could we try something else?’ And she calmly complied and she didn’t take offence and I knew she wouldn’t take offence and I am very lucky.

  However, recently (I’ll be vague about dates because I don’t want the poor chap to be identifiable) I was away from home and wanted to have my hair blow-dried and so I went to a hairdresser’s that I’d never been to before. This hairdresser’s is part of a chain and I think that always make things worse because they have rigid and elaborate customer-humiliating protocols in place. Anyway, the second I stepped through the doors, it all came rushing back to me! The power struggle for ownership of your spirit that goes on in most hairdresser’s.

  The idea is that they break you, break your spirit entirely, and when they’ve reduced you to a nothing with no sense of self, with no voice of your own, then they will rebuild you in their image and you will do exactly what they tell you to do and use the products that they sell you, and perhaps even buy a hairdryer and maybe even a house from them. They own you – soul, hair, everything.

  But I can help you. I have a guide right here to help you!

  Step One: The Arrival. When you arrive, the receptionist will ignore you – they will be on the phone or pretend to be checking something in their book or on their screen. They are not bad people, they are simply doing what they’ve been trained to do. In the past I used to stand there like an anxious sap, staring miserably, trying to catch their eye, thinking, ‘Please look at me, please don’t make me feel invisible.’ But you don’t have to be like me. Oh no! Instead, take out your phone! Call a good friend, someone you haven’t seen for a while,
and commence a warm and lengthy catch-up!

  Step Two: The Coat Removal. When you have finished your call – and take your time about it, enjoy your chat – the receptionist will offer to take your coat. Be vigilant! This is where the second blow to your self-esteem will be struck. Some ‘friendly’ comment will be made on your appearance. On my visit a few days ago the person said, ‘Well! You’re very colourful today!’ Then he exchanged a look with his colleague and a silent snigger passed between them.

  There was one time when a hairdresser’s receptionist stared at my handbag and said, ‘Is that Prada?’ And when I said it was, he said, ‘From the cheap range?’ (This is an honest-to-God, swear-on-my-nephew’s-life fact. I could actually tell you this man’s name, but of course I won’t.) Do not think that you will avoid this essential part of the humiliation process by having no coat to give. ‘No coat?’ they will say, all wide-eyed and scornful. ‘Well! Let’s hope it doesn’t rain.’

  There are a couple of ways of dealing with Step Two. You can fight fire with fire and respond in kind with some comment on their appearance. For example, ‘I love your spots. They’re so …’ cough, snigger ‘… youthful.’ Or you can do something totally different. You can stare at them, hold their gaze and think the words, ‘I feel boundless compassion for you.’ Hold the gaze for a couple of seconds longer than is considered mannerly and force love out from behind your eyes. This will badly rattle them.

  Step Three: The Wait. ‘Elijah will be down in a moment,’ the receptionist will tell you. But as we all know, Elijah will NOT be down in a moment. Elijah will be down when it suits him. Elijah is on Twitter, trolling his ex. Or Elijah is out the back having a cigarette. Or indeed Elijah may be doing nothing and may be keen to see you. But he cannot! Alas, he cannot! Because rules are rules and The Wait is vital – it says to the client, ‘Your time is as nothing. You are blessed to be in here and it’s important that you know it.’