Bohemian APG, or something ...

I was talking about writers with Toby last weekend and said that I always enjoy reading Julie Burchill's Opinion features for the Times. It's not that I always agree with her, but she always makes me think.

Today she's gone one better by making me laugh out loud with her rant against the suburban middle classes, and smug couples in particular. This line made me fall off my chair:

"... I find "straight people" - that is, respectable middle-class people, those with young children in particular - so profoundly, life-denyingly dull to be with that it actually feels like the nearest I'll come to knowing what death is like until I actually die."

She's got her working class chips on her shoulder, of course - the working classes can be every bit as mind numbing as the middle class - but I'll forgive her for that on this occasion.

The article goes on to champion the "bohemian" lifestyle. I've never really considered myself Bohemian. I'm not really arty, I go to the odd gallery but gave up my own artistic aspirations when completion of a 2 year design course confirmed I would never be as good as I wanted to be, so really what was the point? Bohemian also makes me think of slightly dirty looking people in nasty hippy clothes who smoke a lot of pot and sleep around.

For the record I bathe at least once a day, I don't do drugs, I don't do promiscuous sex and I'd rather die than be seen in a gypsy skirt. So what does that make me? An uptight bohemian? A bohemian with strong moral fibre?

Bohemian is far less offensive than some of the tags I've heard the media produce to describe my "oh so alternative" lifestyle in recent years. The term "quirkyalones" is too cunty for me to even go into its meaning. Last week I was reading about APGs - Aging Party Girls. This was slightly closer to the mark - these are women over 35 who like to have a laugh, like to make people laugh and are ambivalent to sex. However, the downside of the description is that, in the quest for perpetual hedonism, these women are apparently incapable of holding a serious thought in their head and would rather die than visit a gym. Oh dear.

Still, like a give a flying fuck about labels. I'd no sooner describe myself as bohemian than I would a "lipstick lesbian" - one of the stupidest phrases I've heard in my life. I'm just proud to have reached the point in my life where I don't give a damn.