This sociophobia of mine, I reckon it stems from the day I started secondary school, and committed instant social suicide by asking the question, Who is Simon le Bon?
Of course, the fact that I was one of only two people in the class who didn’t own skin-tight jeans didn’t help much; in fact, on mufty day, when we were allowed to pay a small fee and not wear our bottle-green uniform, I managed to turn up in a pink skirt and white blouse that would have gone down perfectly well at primary school a few months earlier. Well nobody told me that everything was different here.
When I realised the mistake with the jeans, obviously I went to my parents, who are the people you can rely on in a pre-teen crisis, aren’t they? And mum told me that she wasn’t going to buy me a new pair of jeans when the ones that I had were in good condition and still fitted me. She attempted to make up for her harshness at Christmas by making sure that Father Christmas brought me a pair of burgundy legwarmers. I found that if you folded the jeans round your legs, and pulled the legwarmers right up, it only looked a little bit like they were flares being worn under legwarmers. This trick worked with my raspberry-coloured cord dungarees, as well. At least, I think I got away with it.
It never really worked, though. You can’t go back from a Simon Le Bon faux-pas. Anyway, I’d worn a really pretty gypsy-style dress to the school Christmas party [I hear you crying would she NEVER learn?] I liked the dress, but you know, a howling crowd of eleven and twelve year olds can’t be wrong. They also owned make-up that hadn’t been given to them by their grannies during a spring-clean.
Shortly after this, I decided I didn’t like trendy clothes anyway. I also didn’t like trendy popstars, and I didn’t really care who they were. This is a mechanism for coping with cognitive dissonance, which I can strongly recommend.