To WAG Or Not To WAG...?

Happy New Year, Blogverse! I know I’ve been MIA recently, but Real Life has been slightly mad over the past few weeks and shows no real signs of getting back to normal, but I have at least vaguely remembered how to write. Here goes…

As you probably know by now, my taste in men is somewhat eclectic (much like my taste in art, films, books, music, shoes, clothes…hey wait, I’m sensing a theme here…) This analogy also extends to sport. Well, to sports MEN at any rate…I’m the first person to admit that I love rugby more than any other sport as much for the (ahem) talent as for the game itself; there’s something to be said for hulking great forwards and super-speedy backs, and I even find the broken noses attractive. Well, in some cases, at least. But, fickle woman that I am, my early adolescence was shaped by my complete and utter devotion to football. Not for the game itself, you understand – I support West Ham, for gods sake; it’s a running joke among my friends that this means I don’t understand or like football – but for the men who played it. My first crush was Ryan Giggs (ahh, Giggsy…*sigh*) and then I fell headlong into the path of Liverpool’s ‘Spice Boys’, headed by Jamie Redknapp. By the time David Beckham came along, I was a fully-fledged adolescent WAG-in-waiting. Long after I turned to other specimens of masculinity to lust after, there was still a teeny-weeny part of me that hankered for WAGdom.

And why not, I thought? After all, when your other half earns X-many squillions a week and all you do is (seemingly) shop, what’s not to love? To be able to say, “Ooh, original vintage Vivienne Westwood pirate boots? I’ll take six pairs please!” – Well, that sounds like my kinda heaven! I dreamed of being a ‘lady of leisure’, buying tons of gorgeous outfits so that when the cameras spotted me in the stands on Saturdays being ‘supportive’, I’d look good on the big screens. And I could holiday ANYWHERE I WANTED. In the WORLD! Cushty…I’d even make like the Victorian philanthropists of old and do Good Works, giving time and money to charity while looking stunning in the latest outfit especially designed for me by Alexander McQueen. And all I’d have to do was look vaguely interested on Saturday afternoons and pretend I understood the offside rule. Piece of cake. And we loved them, didn’t we, the WAGs? They were like gorgeous, glamorous butterflies who, for the briefest of moments, captured the country. No, make that the world.

And oh, how I wanted to be one; to be gorgeous and glamorous and jet out to Bali for a month in the off-season without thinking about it! But then I grew up. I don’t have the face, the figure or the hair to be a WAG and, as footballers were replaced by others in my affections, my dreams of WAGdom became just that: a dream; a gloriously childish fantasy I had once indulged in before actors, rock stars, vampires and rugby players took over. (What can I say; I had a thing about James Marsters in Buffy, ok?)

But then, as dreams do, things started to turn sour when the reality check finally kicked in. Getting married in Vera Wang and having the whole thing covered in OK magazine seemed less appealing when the revelations started; infidelities, affairs with lap dancers and prostitutes...suddenly the whole thing seemed less glamorous and more tawdry, and we realised that being a WAG and ‘standing by your man’ meant so much more than freezing your D&G-clad arse off on the side of a football pitch. Wayne Rooney, John Terry, Ashley Cole…not even the Queen of the WAGs, Lady Beckham herself, was immune to the scandals when it was revealed that David had had a ‘thing’ with Rebecca Loos; the whole thing became frankly unpalatable and, although many made the decision to not castrate the ungrateful wretches with a pair of blunted nail scissors, who among us didn’t give a tiny cry of, “about time she saw the light” when the lovely Cheryl Cole finally gave that scumbag Ashley the heave-ho?

The reason for writing this entry is that I’ve just read an interview with Abbey Clancy, the impossibly tall and glamorous girlfriend of the impossibly tall and, er, not Peter Crouch. Last year, having just found out that she was pregnant with their first child, Abbey also found out that Peter was alleged to have slept with a prostitute who had sold her story to the News of the World. As you do. Naturally, the tabloid press went wild, and Abbey was plunged headlong into the media spotlight. She refuses to comment on whether he did or didn’t do it, but she has stood by her man and as far as she’s concerned, that’s that. What struck me about the interview with Abbey were the comments she made about the misconceptions Joe Public has about the WAGs: that they all set out to snare a footballer husband; that all they do is shop; that they don’t have two brain cells to rub together. As she points out, you have to be able to take care of yourself, even if you do end up living the dream and attaining WAGdom. She freely admits that the thing she’s most proud of is that her work as a model and TV presenter meant that she could afford to pay for her younger brother and sister, who were having a terrible time at school, to go to a private school; her little brother went from failing everything to taking and passing all his GCSE’s a year early.

The funny thing is, she’s right. Suppose you do end up marrying the next David Beckham and living the high life as the new Queen of the WAGs (sorry, Posh). And suppose that Lover-Boy ends up having an affair with someone else and you decide to do the sensible thing and kick him to the kerb. What are you going to do with yourself then? Even the current nation’s sweetheart, the lovely Cheryl, has had to make a go of her solo career and her work on the X Factor (although it must make Ashley sick to his stomach that his ex-wife probably earns more money than he does and is more loved by the lads who would previously have worshipped his skills on the pitch. And here I refer to a quote from my brother who, when discussing Girls Aloud and the lovely Cheryl, noted “oh, they sing as well?” Bless…) So long as the women who plough the fields of WAGdom are prepared to work for their designer togs, they’re all right by me, cos once he’s gone, girls, a woman has to pay her own way.

And you know what? Good luck to ‘em, I say. Because there is no way in hell that anything could induce me to nail my colours to the mast of WAGdom these days; not for a whole shop if Vivienne Westwood pirate boots. Although if David Beckham ever DOES come knocking, I may well be persuaded to change my mind.

Now being a rugby ‘Scrummy’ on the other hand…

I Have A Dream...

No, before you ask, this is not me doing my Martin Luther King impression. Not that I've ever done such an impersonation but, hey, there's a first time for everything...I digress. No, this is about an actual dream that I have and the great Dr King's word's just seemed appropriate.

Not that this is the sort of politically-charged ideological dream that he had. Don't get me wrong, I have my own Utopian fantasies where everyone gets along with everyone else and everyone is happy and there's no war/famine/pestilence/Simon Cowell, but it's not that kind of dream I'm blogging about. Nor is it the sort of dream where I'm slowly spit-roasting David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osbourne over an open fire whilst cackling like a hag, although maybe both of those are worth blog entries in their own right...nope, this dream is both a little more sensible, a little more modest and a little more fantastical.

I have a dream. My dream is to have a library.

Yeah, yeah, you can stop laughing now. It's true - I am absolutely desperate to have a library of my own. I feel dreadful for my poor books at the moment, scattered around in two bookcases, various boxes and several piles on the floor; it's inhumane to treat them like that. My books deserve to be on beautifully designed shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling; in an ideal world they'd be spiralling round and round in an endless labyrinth (like in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Carlos Ruiz Zafon's masterpiece 'The Shadow of the Wind' - if such a place really existed, I would move in at once), but if not then just shelves as far as the eye could see would do. I've been fascinated by libraries ever since I was a child and I was taken to get my very first library ticket; having become an ardent reader and lover of books by the age of 3, the idea that I could just go to this place and take out as many books as I wanted, before bringing them back and exchanging them for more, was a concept that seemed too good to be true. Second-hand and antique book shops have always cast a spell over me, but so have libraries, and every time I was taken to a Stately 'Ome or still-inhabited castle, I was always endlessly delighted by the different libraries I saw (and always slightly put out that I couldn't go up to the shelves to a) see what Lord and Lady Such-and-Such were reading and b) take a book down from the endless shelves and curl up for an hour or so to have a good read). I was fortunate to have been blessed with a godmother who is a librarian, so she was always able to provide me with hits of the good stuff, and so enamoured was I of libraries as a child that I was library prefect at both Primary and Secondary school (yes, yes, I was a girlie swot for a time). Books have been my saviours, my friends and my kindred spirits since my early childhood; their myriad voices speak to me across time, space and language and they have both moved and inspired me in ways I could not have imagined when I first started out on this journey as A Reader.

And now it seems I have discovered a new friend who feels the same way about books as I do and who has written books of his own, one of which has inspired me to give further thought to the idea - the dream - of My Library. Alberto Manguel's two most recent books, 'A Reader on Reading' and 'The Library at Night' are like elegiac love songs to both books and libraries; personal journeys, literary histories and sociological encyclopaedias, they are also brilliantly written and are fast becoming new and treasured friends of mine. Alberto (because I'm on intimate terms with him now, don't you know) has a 30,000-volume library of his own at his home in a 15th century presbytery in France, built in the grounds and adjoining the house, yet completely separate from it. Naturally, I'm incredibly jealous, not just of the library or the number of books in his guardianship (because after all, you never really 'own' a book; you befriend and take care of them for a while before eventually relinquishing custody) but because living in a 15th century presbytery in France sounds like heaven. I digress…again. Anyway, reading about his library and the libraries of others has made me yearn even more for a library of my own; somewhere the books in my keeping can live and breathe, where we can all find sanctuary and renew our friendships, as well as having plenty of room for new acquaintances to join us. The fact that I currently have neither the space to assemble such a library or my own home in which to attempt it (or the money such a project deserves, although I’m quite certain that any right-thinking judge that has to hear the case when my bank-robbing spree comes to an end would understand the reasons for it) is neither here nor there. Everyone has to have a dream, and this is mine.

Of course, taking all my beloved friends over to such a place would be quite an adventure. All my antique books would have to have special glass-fronted shelves to live in, to protect them from the atmosphere and the ravages of time, although they are still able to be read and are happy to be so employed. And in their company would be books on innumerable topics and themes; my crime psychology books would have to be close at hand (what is a library if it doesn’t have a forensic dissection of the mind of Ted Bundy, after all?), as would the books I loved as a child and have kept ever since (step forward Fancy Nancy, Ramona Quimby, Junk and Stargirl). Alice in Wonderland and her journey Through the Looking Glass will converse with Tim Burton’s Oyster Boy and Edward Gorey’s tragic Gashlycrumb Tinies. The fairy tales that I have loved all my life – Charles Perrault, Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Anderson and the grim Grimm brothers – are here, along with the poets whose words give voice to my own emotions. My ‘witchy’ books, both historical and less scholarly, must take their place, along with the art books that carry the images I only wish I was able to create. The comic and the serious will have their own space; Shakespeare will dally with the myths and legends of other countries and different times, and historical and sociological books on countless different subjects will be given homes. Then there are the novels of course, both ‘classic’ and ‘modern’; fantasy, chick-lit and anything and everything in between will line the shelves. Money being no object (this is a fantasy library, after all), there will be numerous editions of books from the Folio Society scattered throughout the room, and my antique book collection will no doubt continue to grow. There will be sacrifices, of course; to own a first edition of Shakespeare’s plays would be an absolute blessing in any library, but I’d be so terrified of damaging it that I’d never read it and what is the point of a book if you can’t make it live by reading? And, of course, there would be space for new friends to join the old, because when you’re a reader there are always new discoveries to make…

My Library may be a long way off its full realisation, but I cannot wallow in the valley of despair. I have a dream, a dream that is deeply rooted in the dream of all readers. I have a dream that one day my books will rise up and live out the true meaning of their creed; that they will sit on the shelves of brotherhood and find their own oasis where they are judged not by the colour of their bindings but by the content of their character. I have a dream that one day, one day, my books will be able to sing the words “free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Until then, I guess they'll have to stay where they are...