I lately seem to read all her articles, as light relief from Man-a-gan.
Tanya writes comical observation pieces for various proper newspapers and The Daily Mail, and has done so since 2004, according to the dates of archived articles.
Some of said articles are quite funny.
She is quite warm and easy to like, overly self-deprecating, but hey, she’s female.
Tanya is not a classic beauty, nor is she of small frame, in fact, she is decidedly odd looking, a bit like Marjory the trash heap from The Fraggles, but I think that adds to her appeal.
Luckily, for Tanya and I, writing, like comedy is one of those fields in which you can get away with looking different and quirky, or fat and ugly if you’re a NUTS reader.
Most of her articles are mainstream, women orientated pieces that far too often use her bulk, & addictive stumbling to induce familiarity, but if it works, and it obviously does, why dig deeper.
The amount of archived articles I found leaves no doubt that Miss Gold is a grafter, often juggling fags & cake like a specialist BDSM master, sometimes even on film.
It still doesn’t explain how this Bridget Jones type has risen up the journo ranks to cover for smiley, mucky, Charlie Brooker.
I respect the advancement of Tanya Gold. I admire her commitment and her accepted lardiness and I like her.
However, I do suspect that aside from the ability to write an amusing story she owes at least some of where she is to her parentage and schooling.
An Oxford educated daughter from a respected Jewish family, her chances of paid work(and successful bribes) were always going to be better than mine, the grammar school educated daughter of an Essex Panel beater.
I thought hard about what my family could offer in return for a publishing deal(of any standard), and there isn’t much.
There was a time my dad could build you an extension entirely out of knocked off pallets, for, say 35 quid, and perhaps a pirate copy of a Disney film for suitably less, but those heady days are gone.
I suddenly and brutally realised that no matter what I write I am contact-less.
I am a ‘basic range’ writer, probably not even worthy enough to be called a writer, a mere collector of words, given less credit than an emo blogger.
I am Adrian Mole, with fewer contacts.
Actually that mildly dramatic and hopefully amusing description of my status was actually a lie as in fact modern technology denotes that even I have contacts. Yeah baby.
These contacts range from real friends and business associates to virtual acquaintances and mailing lists.
My inbox however is a world of spam.
Someone told me the other day that porn makes up only 1% of internet content, with 80% being made up of spam.
Whether this information is a proven fact or not I do not care, nor do I know what the other 19% of content is, all I know that I get a lot of spam.
Whilst spam can never be deemed as a friend, it does have the power to fatten my inbox in a way that briefly allows me to believe I am popular, before reality slaps me into the same league of stupidity as women that hide food from themselves.
There seems to be three levels of email spam.
There is your basic tinned spam, ads for insurance, holidays, credit cards, etc, annoying, but generally harmless.
Second is the more hardcore spreadable spam, huge mails about penis extensions or slimming pills and fake emails from the bank, or eBay. Again not partially harmful, unless your so lacking in self esteem or brain cells you actually read them.
These minor irritations are merely a skid mark on the pants of level three, the king of spam, the deep fried fritter of junk, otherwise known as chain mail.
We’ve all read it, often been coed by it.
Usually they involve a series of pictures such as kittens, babies, & blue skies, which are matched with Dali Lama clichés. At first glance you think, oh how sweet, there is joy in the world and then you find that the path to such joy is restricted by the equation
FW:+ 5² = r (e) demption
Chain mail is mostly send by female colleagues desperate to get 1) a man 2) rid of a man 3) slim 4) pregnant.
If it not a colleague then it’s a MWIA (mums with internet access) who still think kittens are cute.
Of course, some of them are more sinister, with scary moral stories and slightly nastier pictures of sad Polar bears, or Geri Halliwell.
Some of these even come with mafia style threats:
FW this to at least 14 contacts and all your dreams will come true.
FW this to all your contacts and we wont tell your husband your shagging his brother.
FW this to the whole world and little Tilley’s rabbit lives another day.
Like those jokes that appear after someone has died, nobody knows where they come from, but come they do.
Chain mail originated via snail mail and could actually be much more viscous than its current E form. When something is hand written it has a much more urgent and sinister edge to it, and of course in those days there were no kitten pictures to soften the blow.
Chain mail has been used to scam money from people, (such as the pyramid scams of the 1980’s) to frighten people(pictures of fat people), to make people laugh(pictures of fat people), to raise money/awareness of charities(pictures of fat comedians), to promote religion(pictures of beards & nuns) and to annoy the shit out of people (kittens)who use a computer for work purposes.In the history of chain mail, no one has ever used them to get a job. Why? Possibly because it’s a shit idea, but just maybe I am a genius. It is after all a fine line.
It has occurred to me that I have the potential to increase my readers and chances of publishing deals/commissions are much greater and wider using the net than merely having an influential family and Oxford/Cambridge education.
This could be the email version of a fake diploma.
This could be a revolution for the grammar school educated, those lacking in powerful contacts.
In previous years in times of crisis the poor link arms and rise up against repression.
We snuggled together in the London Underground and ate pie & mash, we sat round campfires telling stories of old, we picked fruit, potatoes, and hops for our holidays, and like the ladies at Corrie’s underworld we drunk and shagged our way to happiness, or at least we passed the time until they discovered Prozac and minimum wage.
I know it seems cheap, and indeed perilously stupid, but I am running out of options.
I’ve got a good CV, I paid over £100 for it, so I know its good. Never got a job using it, but times are hard in the media.
I’ve counted the contacts in my email accounts, all three of them, and then my Facebook and myspace. The total number of contacts is 679. The total number of influential contacts is three. How can I work this in my favour? I need a kitten.
I need more than a kitten, I need you.
Help me then, to start a mini uprising, a revolution of better employment in these troubled times.
Help me use the medium of chain mail as a bargain basement tool to express our feelings, to show some love and open the way to a new type of invasion into peoples life’s, or as I like to call it, a marketing strategy.
In return, I get a commission, or maybe an ASBO.
So here’s the deal.
Send this article link to everyone in your email/Facebook/twitter/myspace and something really good will, or will not happen to me, or you, within some undefined point in time and you, yes you, will be responsible for my joy and a new better world in which chain mail CV’s rule.
Just don’t put ‘it really works’ in the title, or the kitten gets it.
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