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Milf Teeth

Ten Things My Kid Won't Believe About 2013

Including pissy little internet bitches, the NHS, Rihanna and a cure for HIV.
SH

My kid is one and a half years old and starting to talk. She can already ask, through the power of two-word sentences, if Granny just left the room to take a shit. This means I’ve only got about 12 years before she develops historical consciousness and asks what life was like back when she was a baby. I think I should start practicing my answers now.

So, child, here are ten things you won't believe about 2013 when I tell you them in the future.

1: Pornography, in 2013, was still available in print format! Stored on very high-up shelves in shops, ensuring that any wheelchair-bound breast enthusiast had to ask for it out loud, which was still embarrassing, and buying condoms was still embarrassing, and flossing your teeth was – if you were British – still embarrassing, so we preferred not to bother flossing and just to bleed from our gums a little instead.  

#2: In 2013 we still had to recharge everything just to get a few hours’ companionship. Phones, laptops and cameras were all plugged into a hole in the wall from which they sucked magic into themselves. Coffee shop freelancers like myself would awkwardly hunt for elusive sockets in cafe walls, our MacBook wires all tangled together like Medusa’s hair. Then we'd try to type in the wifi password, which was always "wackaccino128", found stuck to a mirror, written on a bit of paper, in the handwriting of a clown. We would spin two lesbian teas and one aspirational lifestyle sandwich into a six-hour chair rental – made easier by the staff forgetting to tell you that your aspirational lifestyle sandwich was ready now, as they would put it in the grill and then leave it on the side and then just sort of forget about it, and you, and everything in the world apart from Nietzsche. We’d then spend another five hours Facebook-stalking people we disliked, before doing 25 minutes hard freelance work on a conceptually transgressive spreadsheet about a cupboard. #3: Everybody took pictures of themselves with their phones and put them online. Daughter darling, your mother didn’t actually take that many as she thought she had shit hair, but then her boyfriend said “WHY do you keep saying you have shit hair, you have nice hair, it’s just like a better version of my hair.” And they looked into the mirror together and realised that they looked weirdly similar, and both came from Yorkshire, so were probably family. It was a happy moment. So I can now tell you the secret of 21st century self-esteem: get a boyfriend who is related to you, but not to your kid, and has the same hair as yours, only less so. #4: In early 2013 a baby was cured of HIV, and then TIME Magazine announced a cure for cancer to be imminent. I urged the medicine gods to hurry it to my friend Matilda, an artist who is 30 and having chemotherapy. Since the surgery she has had a colostomy bag of warm shit strapped to her stomach, and everything hurts – she says the finger pain alone feels like she’s been doing a ten-hour ukulele flashmob in December. Now she’s joined a colostomy forum and has got, she says, “lots of new friends called things like Fuzzbutt, who are all 70 and wear lacy diamante colostomy bag covers and probably do each other up the pretend bumhole”. All of this colon cancer stuff is really inconvenient as Mattie is also 23 weeks pregnant. #5: In 2013, my child, your mother had mixed feelings about the Daft Punk album that everybody else was very excited about. While it was no doubt a masterpiece, she remembered when they were making that album, at their place just up the hill from her old home in Hollywood, where she would hear exciting news from their studio but then she found out she was pregnant with you and had to move back to England and enter into an eternal winter of the soul. Only joking!! It’s just it is so cold as I write this that I have contracted scurvy and I cannot remember the colours of the sky apart from snow. #6: In 2013 the internet was full of pissy little bitches and it was surprisingly easy to become one. #7: Channel Four showed documentaries about dogging. #8: Rihanna’s publicity people flew a load of journalists around on a plane to look at the popstar with the tired eyes. #9: We didn’t have any actual decade names for 20 years (2000 - 2020). #10: The Arab Spring rumbled on as the background to our lives; Syria grew into a monster crow eating a baby’s hand. Assad still hadn’t been toppled as of April 5th, 2013 but his karma would come. Meanwhile, a man called David Cameron would be remembered, if at all, as someone who dismantled the NHS and led us to a health insurance system like the USA. Where, even though you can pay hundreds of dollars every month in case you get something wrong with you, you still pay again when you do get something wrong with you, only, it’s less than it would cost if you weren’t insured. But sometimes if you’re not insured you can do a deal with the doctors in the hospital because they are all employed as individual contractors, so you can, for example, ask the anaesthetist if she takes cash and then try to slip her a grand separately – in cash. I know about this because I saw it happen in Cedars Sinai, the most glamorous hospital in Los Angeles, where I was forced to spend one long day having a lot of testing and my insurers were charged $30,000. Someone came to my hospital bed with a credit card machine to take the deposit off me. They played advertising into my headphones during my MRI scan – recruitment ads to join the military. “STRONG!” came the booming voice, as I tried not to flinch in my tunnel of stillness. “ARMY STRONG!” And so, my little girl, I can at least explain one mystery to you from the early part of the 21st century: why the Americans were spending so long on wars and not winning them. It’s because they were trying to recruit soldiers from hospital beds.

Still, by the time I tell you all of these things, your wars will be being fought by drones, sent in to smash up other drones, controlled by human beings six coastlines away. Let’s hope the drones are up-to-date with their health insurance and have a battery life that lasts longer than two hours.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – The Notches On Your Bedpost Don't Mean Shit

Tagged:2013StuffSophie Heawood
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