I turned round in my chair, initially impressed that whoever it was had recognised me, clad as I was in a brown monks habit-style hairdressers cloak and with my now Tina Turner-style hair currently plastered in evil-smelling peroxide (the things we do for anything approximating beauty, eh?) The person who had spoken my name was Jill, my very first boss when I was eighteen years old and working at a local radio station.
Jill and I had got on unusually well, mainly because we were both irritating pedants. On my first day she had asked me to type up a sales proposal, and when I'd got about half way through she loomed over my shoulder to check what I was doing. Her face, reflected in the computer monitor, crumpled in surprise.
"I usually have to tell people how to set these documents out properly" she said. "You've even done all the punctuation at the beginning right; everyone usually gets that wrong until I've explained it properly" From that moment on, it was spelling-grammar-and-correct-font-based love at first sight. I was constantly being told by everybody else in the office how "difficult" Jill was, but I thought she was great. Which, I must say, has been a pattern in my working life generally. Anybody deemed to be a bit "weird" or "hard to get on with" has for some reason always evolved into my office best friend; people I've always ended up liking immensely. The nice, normal people always either ended up boring me rigid and/or (take your pick!) not really taking to me for some unknown reason...(yes, I am being sarcastic).
Jill and I got on so well that we stayed in contact after I left the radio station a year later; still sending each-other Christmas and birthday cards every year (we are so the type of people who remember birthdays!). So when I actually saw her at the hairdressers, it was a nice surprise.
"Do you know each-other?" asked the scary crop-haired lady who was plastering Jill's roots with a red-based concoction.
"Yes!" I said. "She was my very first boss, when I was eighteen. Oooh - and guess what, Jill? I was only thinking this the other day, actually - remember when I started working with you? I was eighteen and you were thirty-three...well, now I'm thirty-three! Isn't that weird?"
The salon fell into silence. Jill's expression morphed from pleasantly smiley to unhappily frowny in a split-second, and I realised I'd just done something you should never do to another woman...advertise how old she is in front of a load of strangers.
"Well...it was nice to see you, dear" Jill said stonily, and with that she went back to her magazine. And I sensed that that was it; a tentatively pedantic friendship cultivated over the last sixteen years, finished. My birthday's in about a month's time, but this year I'm not sure if I'll be getting a precisely-written card from Jill. More's the pity.
And so I went back to my book, Caitlin Moran's 'How to be a Woman'. I love Caitlin Moran. Her Celebrity Watch column in The Times every Friday is worth the website subscription fee alone. And the book didn't disappoint; it was full of truisms that made me want to shout aloud (but you'll be reassured to hear that I didn't) "Yes! I've always thought that too! But I thought I was the only one!" Men wanting to understand "what women want" or "how women think" should read it. It'll be a revelation.
Caitlin's book, coupled with one I also finished last week, Douglas Kennedy's 'The Moment', made me think a lot about what it really means to be female. Caitlin's because...well, with a title like 'How to be a Woman' you couldn't not really think about it. Caitlin makes wonderfully witty, fresh and convincing arguments about how women should be proud to call themselves feminists...how we should all stand on a chair, right now, and shout "I AM A FEMINIST!" (Which I didn't actually do, seeing as I was a) at the hairdressers and b) sitting in a swivel-chair which may have caused a nasty accident were I to stand on it, especially seeing as there was an inordinate number of scissors lying around). But it was inspiring, all the same.
Less directly, 'The Moment' made me think about how there are still so many simple, day-to-day things men can do that women can't. In the book, the protagonist (a writer) spends a lot of his time at the grubby Cafe Istanbul in East Berlin, drinking "congealed Turkish coffee". He describes his surroundings as along the lines of "grimy, with peeling wallpaper and undesirable-looking men sitting at the corner table every day for hours on end...but it was a place in which I could be left alone to write...left completely to my own devices and feeling strangely content"
The protagonist's first 'happy' memory is of similar circumstances; going to a cafe on his own with a book for the first time, and relaxing in that feeling of delicious solitude. I could identify with that feeling, yet at the same time think: a woman could never get quite the same contentment, especially not in the Cafe Istanbul, where - however old or unattractive she may have been - almost certainly one of those "undesirable men" would have tried to approach her; she'd have rejected him and then she'd have felt uncomfortable so however much she liked the cafe, she wouldn't have gone back there again. It doesn't matter how much equality legislation is passed; on a basic, day-to-day level women are, quite simply, less free than men.
So there you go. All that random thought - in a forty-five minute trip to the hairdressers. Next time I think I'll just read a copy of 'Hello' and marvel at Kate Middleton's gravity-defying hair instead.
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