Started out with nothing

I liked Seasick Steve’s song title I Started Out With Nothin And I Still Got Most Of It Left. Partly because it’s amusing and partly because it’s economical: it tells you everything you need to know about the man - his image and his music. Which mean you don’t actually have to listen to him.

We’re watching him on TV, and Partner (who is a guitarist) says: the blues is much more interesting to play than it is to listen to.

When you think about it, that probably applies to most music. Jazz? Definitely. Folk? Often. Rock? If it’s guitar solos or drum solos, almost certainly- although, at its best, I still think it’s the type of music most likely to excite and entrance the people listening as well as the people playing it.

Actually, you can probably apply the theory to most kinds of artistic activity. Lots of people paint but it doesn’t mean their paintings are any good. Lots of people write poetry but 99 per cent is crap. (OK, lots of people write blogs as well... I’m not sure I like where this is going.)

Over the years, I’ve been the bored recipient of a lot of mediocre music, writing, exhibitions, theatre, television and film. The great thing is that it hasn’t stopped me continuing to search out all these things. Even in the cultural desert I now call home, there’s not a week goes by that I don’t come across something that makes me want to shout: take notice of this, someone here has a vision. And it’s in those moments of discovery that I’m happiest, because just for a while I can forget I’m supposed to be a middle-aged cynic.

You can't put your arms around a memory

I’ve just come back from Liverpool where I spent some of my formative years. There’s a bit of a nostalgia fest going on there at the moment and it’s left me feeling more confused than ever about the fact I’m not 20 any more and what the hell I’m going to do about it.

Emotional roller coaster? More like a bloody ghost train. Liverpool in Capital of Culture year is buzzy, user friendly, full of public art and high-profile events (and shops). It’s famous. When I went there as a student it was still full of bomb sites. And infamous. No-one wanted to know.

So why do so many people wish it was 1977 (or thereabouts) again? Because if you were in the right place at the right time, there wasn’t a better place to be. I suppose everyone feels like that about the place where they first learned to be themselves. But Eric’s club in Liverpool, which three decades later has been well and truly commodified, was something special.

That’s just a fact: I’m not going to go on about it. The fact that other people are going on about it is what is making me so uncomfortable right now. I don't want to pretend that those times didn't happen, or didn't matter. I just don't want to be one of those people who live in the past. The hard bit is working out how to be true to the person you were then, without always looking backwards. Between embracing nostalgia and rejecting the past, there must be a way that works. Liverpool’s grown up now, but beneath the corporate stuff it hasn’t lost the vein of anarchy and playfulness that was always a part of its culture. I’m grown up now but there’s got to still be a link with the self I discovered back then. I guess every mid-life crisis is the point where you realise it's time to start that search.

I'm not a number

Is it just me, or does every website in the world carry a Google Ad telling readers how to lose weight? Facebook’s tendency to typecast is becoming particularly sinister. It knows how old I am, and every time I log in I find it inviting me to buy a new boiler or to lose ten pounds. Funnily enough, I have done both of these things this year already.

David Cassidy and the concrete ceiling

One day in the mid 1970s I horrified my English teacher when she found me reading Jackie magazine. She knew my favourite book was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and couldn’t understand how I could hold two such contradictory positions.

Holding contradictory positions is, of course, a requirement of being a teenager (or any other transitional period, eg becoming middle-aged). And, as a talking head said in a recent TV programme about the magazine ‘If it was in Jackie... Jackie magazine was the bible.’

Outside the classroom, Jackie taught me everything I knew. How to put on make-up (I still do it the same way today). How to lose weight by eating half a Mars bar instead of a whole one. What to wear. How to talk to boys. There was sensible advice from Cathy and Claire, and some slightly less sensible (in fact, rather dodgy) fortune-telling quizzes. And there were, of course, the posters of Marc Bolan and David Cassidy, even if it was tricky putting them up without getting sellotape on the wallpaper (I think I was at university before they invented blu-tack).

It was also, as another talking head put it, ‘a 1950s bubble merging into the 1970s’. I didn’t realise until I bought a copy of a Jackie anthology for my sister’s birthday how shocking its real message was. Any girl shown in the magazine who had a job was a secretary or, if she was really glamorous, a receptionist. That was it.

When I started secondary school, the headmistress went round the class asking us what we wanted to be when we grew up. The majority chose to be hairdressers or air stewardesses (and this was a grammar school, where you might have expected some aspirations). Well, the only role models we had for 'career women' were scary spinsters like her and her colleagues.

By the time you got to sixth form, things had changed a bit. If you were top of the class you were going to university. A little below and you were going to teacher training college. Anyone left after that was going to work in a bank. University wasn’t a career move: it was an end in itself. No-one suggested what you might do afterwards. I’m not sure anyone actually came out and said it, but I got the impression that the main purpose of university was upward mobility via marriage. I was expected to find a nice middle-class boy who would go into a nice professional job so I wouldn’t have to worry about a career... Actually, what I did do at university was discover feminism.

This is recent history. So why are we surprised by headlines about the ‘concrete ceiling’? There are many good reasons why there are so few women in the board room. Partly it’s because, in the business world, social bonding is done through conversations about football not conversations about shoes. Partly it’s because women are too sensible to buy into the long-hours culture: we’d rather have a life. And partly it’s because we were never taught to want it. Partly, of course, it’s also because we grew up in an era where working for ‘the man’ (as opposed to ‘a man’) was not something to aspire to anyway.

But there weren’t alternative role models for girls, either. When I started looking beyond Jackie magazine, I had to find my inspiration in things written by men and about men: there was, after all, no book called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.

Philip Larkin was right

I used to say that I would have ‘Philip Larkin was right’ on my gravestone, as a tribute to his best known poem. Well, I’m grown-up now and I’ve got over it, but I still think he was right about other things. For example, saying the 1960s began in 1963. OK, he didn’t actually say ‘the 1960s’ in Annus Mirabilis (that would not have grabbed attention in the same way). But the principle is the same: it’s not the years with noughts at the end that are necessarily the milestones. The 1960s didn’t begin in 1960. They didn’t actually begin in 1963 either. As far as I can remember it was much later than that. I’ve been reading a book based on a 1950s childhood and in some ways Shena Mackay could be describing my own childhood in the 60s. When I got to the description of the first day at school, the thing that jumped out at me was: ‘some game such as In and Out the Dusty Bluebells’. It’s strange when you thought you had forgotten something and it suddenly comes back. I remember the infant school hall, bare feet, that song - not a playground game but something to dance to in PE lessons. One of my earliest memories, except until I read that page I hadn’t realised that I still remembered it. The 1960s began around the time I went to junior school, with only a few years to go before 1970. Before that, there was ‘Listen with Mother’, free orange juice, and wallcharts stating ‘Thirty pennies make half-a-crown’. Afterwards, there was ‘modern maths’ and Concorde and getting ready for New Money... It’s been downhill all the way since then.