How to figure out life, kids
I am not proud to admit this, but it took me three attempts to get my O level maths, back in 1986. Even then, I just about scraped a C.
To this day, I remember that feeling of nausea, walking into the exam hall, sitting down and turning over the paper.
I was forced to revisit that trauma recently, when my son Zac asked me for help with his fractions homework.
My husband is the maths guru in our family but he was working away. So here I was, on the spot, with a nineyear-old about to judge me.
All I can say is, thank the Lord for the internet. To save face, I told him: “You can’t just keep asking me questions, you have to find solutions to these problems by yourself.
“That’s what life is all about, being inquisitive and overcoming obstacles. Go online, type in your problem and see what comes up.”
So we did, and up came the videos, diagrams and explanations.
He quickly understood what to do and whizzed through his homework without asking me again.
“Now,” I asked him, “What did you learn?”
He looked at me with a wry smile and said: “Never to ask you a maths question because the internet will be more helpful.”
“Exactly,” I told him, feeling a bit smug that I’d turned my ignorance into a life hack he won’t forget.
Being a maths duffer needn’t stop you being a clever clogs.
We all have that one thing that really winds us up, don’t we? That bugbear that, as mature adults, we should be able to overlook and get past.
It may not even be that big a deal. But somehow – probably for reasons that go way back – we can’t let it go. Our buttons have been pushed and we just have to let rip.
For me the surefire trigger of that red mist is snobbery.
Because I’ve been on the wrong end of a lot of it over the years.
Growing up in a working class immigrant family in the East Midlands my whole childhood seemed to be punctuated by snubs and rejections that made me feel I was not quite good enough, clever enough, well spoken enough or British enough to fit in.
You might think I’ve overcome all that. I’m happily married. I have two gorgeous children, a career that I love. But it doesn’t take much to send me straight back inside the skin of that sidelined schoolgirl.
The reason I tell you this is that last week I met someone I’d praised in this column and admired from afar. They say never meet your heroes – and how right they are.
I was at a celebrity event trying to drum up support for Operation Smile, a charity which treats kids with hare lips and cleft palates in developing countries..
For every selfie posted as part of its appeal an industry sponsor is donating a dollar – and that will add up to a lot of life-changing operations.
So there I was, dragging people off to special photo booths, full of enthusiasm and bonhomie, when I spotted the new editor of Vogue, Edward Enninful.
I’d recently written about how wonderful it was that a black man would now be at the helm of such an influential publication.
And how I hoped his time there would inspire a new inclusivity.
I didn’t expect he’d know who I was – much less have read the nice things I’d written about him.
I just thought he would make a fantastic selfie for the charity.
So, as he crossed the floor with a model on his arm, I approached him with a polite: “Excuse me...” Nothing. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t break his stride. He just carried on walking. “Excuse me,” I repeated, a bit louder. I was sure he’d heard me, but the only response was his retreating back as he marched off without a backward glance.
I was so shocked I thought I might burst into tears of anger. Suddenly I was right back in that playground – a desperate-to-please girl who wasn’t quite good enough to be part of the cool gang.
Now that I’ve thought it through I can’t say with any certainty that Mr Enninful is a snob. I have no idea what was going through his head when he cut me dead.
But the world he inhabits seems designed to make the rest of us feel somehow lesser.
I’ve long had mixed feelings about those glossy magazines.
You open them up full of anticipation then walk away feeling that everything about you is rubbish – your wardrobe, your hair, your body, your home.
Snobbery reigns supreme on social media too.
Half the stuff online seems to be there to show us how inferior, how “basic” we are.
No wonder so many young people struggle with their mental health when they face all that online one-upmanship.
My advice is if something makes you feel bad, cut it out of your life. Don’t buy the magazines or look at the websites.
Focus on the positive – send a selfie via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to #4MillionSmiles. The more children whose self-worth we boost, the more power we take from the snobs. she won american idol in 2002 and went on to forge a stellar singing career, winning three Grammys and selling 25 million albums and 36 million singles worldwide.
now 35 and a mother, Kelly clarkson has spoken candidly about the pressure the music industry put on her to lose weight at the start of her career, leaving her suicidal.
you’d think these idiots would have realised by now the only vital statistic we’re interested in is the size of a singer’s talent.