Sometimes I think I’m a really rubbish girl. Growing up I was a bit of a tomboy. I never had a Barbie and I used to crew cut the hair of any dolly or bear that I was given. I never really liked those freakish babies that used to cry and wet themselves as their eyes were then, and still are today, inherently evil to me. Whilst other girls in my road were playing with their My Little Ponies and Sylvanian Families, I was blasting the head off some mutant freak on the ZX Spectrum, something which I still own, treasure and do till this day. In the playground, whilst the girls were concerned with Skip-its and yo-yos, I was running around with the boys being Transformers and telling wimpish girls that the school toilets were haunted by a demon headmaster who hated blonde girls with a passion, and if you smelt hand soap, he was coming to get you.
Even now, I still am a rubbish girl. Don’t get me wrong, I have good personal hygiene, own perfume, have high heels and own a couple of dresses, but I am not one of the girl crowd and have never been. After primary school, I thought, in my pre-teenage head before all those hormones took control that I would benefit from going to a girls school and duly went off for five years and encountered the biggest bitch fest that you could ever encounter. I was never one of them and couldn’t have stood out from the crowd anymore unless I was blue skinned with purple hair. I was never concerned with the latest fashion accessories or haircuts; all I was interested in was if Oasis were going to stick together for another week or whether the local shop had the Melody Maker in on a Wednesday morning for the journey to school.
Today, I do wear make up everyday, well apart from those housebound days when I know no one will see me and I can lounge in trakkie bottoms and an old t-shirt and watch crap TV without the threat of anyone I know seeing me sans face. I will make an effort when I go out, unless I’m off to the newsagents on a Saturday/Sunday morning, which I’ll happy walk to in my pyjamas, but it is only about 100 yards away and I’ll go back to bed anyway with the paper anyway. I do, however, secretly envy men. You really are quite lucky in some ways, boyos. I know that is quite a blanket statement but girls are quite a bewildering species on the whole as they hardly ever say what they mean and constantly contradict themselves. Men, however, say what they mean and aren’t afraid of the consequences. They often have far witter things to say and usually have seen all the films that I’ve seen and enjoy the same TV programmes, so I like them instantly. More importantly, they are, 99% of the time, less shallow as friends. They couldn’t give a shit about the type of jeans you wear or who made the jacket you’re wearing, they usually like you for your interests and enthusiasm and are far easier to relate to because of it.
I do have more things in common with my men friends. We talk about films and music and computer games and crap television. We trade insults and I have been told that I am every bit as rude and crass and blokey as them. We go to gigs and go clubbing and go to the pub, and generally have an amazing time, with no real sexual tension between us. We make each other laugh at the most ridiculous things. When they tell potentially offensive jokes about women, I laugh along as I don’t feel part of and have never felt part of the ‘girl crowd’.
There was a definite boy/girl split with the last course that I took: girls one side of the room, boys the other, with me slap bang in between the boys. I once spent a lunch hour with the girls once, who did nothing but bitch about the boys, talk about handbags and the latest skirt length and at the end of the hour I was willing a giant meteor to drop from the sky and take me out. They themselves were ok as people, if you could get past the thinly veiled bitchy comments, but it was just the inanity of their conversations which drove me to complete and utter distraction.
I turned to one of my men friends a couple of weeks ago and said that I should have been a boy. His response: “There is always time, Kate. There is always time”. Cheers Nick.
