Saturday 18 February 2012

Wannabe



Oh dear. I’m here again ranting about wimmin and fishin’ again. It’s very boring, and this is no way to start a posting. My lovely friend, who runs the brilliant Ladies Fishing, asked the editor of a very well known British Magazine when they would feature women on the front cover. Here was his response:

Tried it once, back in 1996. Pretty brunette, long, bare arms in a fishing waistcoat... remember it well. Thought: "with a huge male readership, this issue's sales are going to be sky high". So, can anyone tell me why it was the worst seller ever?

I suppose I had better answer his question. I think I have to think about what men were like in 1996. I like to think that all men were either mourning the split up of the Stone Roses and participating in lager fuelled Oasis V Blur debates. If they were in Edinburgh, they were clearly shooting up heroine and seeing babies crawl along ceilings and getting lost in the toilet and shouting “lager, lager, lager, shouting”. .. Were they indeed feeling guilty about living in a house, a very big house in the country and buying animals floating in formaldehyde? Did they take girls to the supermarket? Not knowing why but having to start it somewhere, so they started it. There. Did they wear three lions on their shirts only to tear them off again condemning them forever to mixed feelings about Gareth Southgate? A possible answer could be that they had other things on their mind like Kate Moss in Calvin Klein adverts and Louise Wener.


I was 14 in 1996 and buying the NME every single week. It was a ritual a sacrifice to music that was starting to dominate my life. My best friend and I decorated our room with images of Jarvis Cocker and pretentiously left copies of The Face strewn over our boarding school bunk beds. I would listen to John Peel every night and I felt like the coolest girl on earth. Come to think of it, buying The Face at 14 was pretty cool. However, I don’t think either of us really knew what on earth we were reading our minds were probably a little bit too addled by Tim Wheeler of Ash and that lad from the Bluetones.


My long-winded, nostalgia ridden point is this: 1996 was rather a while ago; John Major was Prime Minister, O.J Simpson went on trial. Times have changed.
More women have taken up fly fishing and its popularity is growing. We weren’t all killed by BSE, the Stone Roses have reformed. Oasis won. Dear Mr Editor, please roll with it, move with the times or I’ll have to draw upon something called Girl Power, invented in 1996 by the Spice Girls.