DIARY
RUBY WAX
God has been cruel to women. Femi- nists throughout the land will stick a fatwa on my head, but I know from bitter person- al experience, having only weeks ago deliv- ered my third child, that these are the hard, cold facts. He has decided that in the last few months of pregnancy, however mighty your education, however many degrees or honours you have, He is going to hack off your IQ points and give you the mind of a fish. Each thought lasts four to five seconds and then fades away into a filing cabinet you'll never find again. I know He in His infinite wisdom would probably say you don't need your intelligence when you're making a baby, so in His infinite wisdom He taketh it away. He tooketh mine away for so long, after the baby was born I couldn't come up with a name. I have been warned that I have 40 days to register my child's name. I am very close to my dead- line and live in fear of what happens if I don't come up with something. I thought at first I'd do what the Red Indians do, name it after the first thing you see after it's born, but I don't think 'Forceps will quite do. I picture my house being surrounded by blaz- ing sirens and some policeman screaming, 'Come out of that house with your hands up and a name!'
But I digress. My brains have gone. Which would explain why I found myself on the front cover of Hello! magazine in Jan- uary holding up my newborn. Hello! maga- zine offers a lot of cash for newborns. If they're still wet you can earn up to five-fig- ure sums. Three years ago Hello! magazine called me up and asked if I would pose with my first child. I said 'How dare you' and hung up. Three years later I'm on my third child, my body's crumbled slightly and my brain rather more, so I call Hello! magazine and say, `Remember me? You made me an Offer five years ago. Halve it.' So Sven, the Photographer in leather jacket, leather Pants and leather brain arrived saying things like, 'Yeah, yeah, I love it, give me more, you're looking sexy, spread 'em' to my two-week-old.' And I got the cash. Enough to wallpaper the Vatican in Specta- tor magazines if I so choose.
Something I did for a lot of money last week was to rent myself out to Saatchi and Saatchi for one of their 'weekend work- shops'. The event took place at a Butlin's Holiday Camp, where the Saatchiites were divided into 30 teams. Each team in turn made a commercial with a home video camera about Saatchi and Saatchi which was to be judged by one of their grands fro- mages. Does it sound like a good way to spend the weekend? My brief was to go around with a cameraman and interview the employees about what their commer- cials were all about and how they managed to come up with their concepts. I went up to the first team, who had been at work for over six hours. They were scrunched around a white piece of paper with some arrows on it and a few words circled. They said they were still 'brainstorming'. Anoth- er group had written in bold felt-tip, 'Saatchi and Saatchi. We've got the ener- gy!' The word 'energy' was crossed out. Then they wrote, 'We've got the ideas.' The 'ideas' was crossed out. And I just said, 'You have no idea, do you?' They were all wearing T-shirts which read 'We've got the balls!' with the 'balls' crossed out. Imagine the face of an animal just before you run it over, and you have imagined how happy they looked to see me. I said I was sorry, but Charles Saatchi had acquired me along with some modern art piece of a cow's head being eaten by maggots. I was part of the package. He got both of us for the price of one. No one laughed.
Ihad to do The Family Show for the BBC. It is, they said, 'the year of the fami- ly'. In fact, it is another gimmick by the BBC to look as though they are conscien- tious about something other than ratings. They made me go in front of an audience full of angry single mothers, furious old people and bored, joy-riding teenagers, and do stand-up comedy. I would rather have done a musical comedy in a cancer ward. For dessert, Esther Rantzen came on look- ing sincere and worried to advertise some- thing called Agewatch. Now I love Esther, but the mind boggles at what Agewatch could be. Someone calls in and says, 'I think I might be getting old. Could you come over?' Then an expert comes ,over with a checklist and says, 'Any sign of a liver spot? Check. Do you wander around aimlessly holding a kettle, but not knowing what you're doing with it? Check. When you sit down does your poop come out of your collar? Check. Yup, you're definitely old.' I think Esther Rantzen will be getting a knighthood out of this one.
For the rest of the time everyone just gabbled on about this awful buzzword of the 1990s, 'relationship'. Is your relation- ship right or wrong, good or bad? This 'relationship' business is one big waste of time, in this case licence-payers' time. It's just Mother Nature urging you to breed, breed, breed. She doesn't care about star signs. She just wants to make sure there's someone fleshing out the world. Fish just swim upstream to lay those eggs. They don't think about commitment or what kind of car the guy drives, they just lay 'em and hightail it back downriver and float around or whatever they do. You don't need to read Marie Claire to learn anything about relationships. Learn from nature. Learn from our friend the spider. Just mate once and then kill him.
Curse of the Pharaohs.
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