tom gay motorway

It is a little known fact that if you google 'tom gay motorway', the first listing is the wikipedia page of Tom Robinson, 1970s punk rocker. Well done, google. Tom was responsible for that penetrative track 2-4-6-8 Motorway, when Robinson drove his truck midway to the motorway station. It is lucky that I wasn't aware of this when I met him last night as I might have thought less of him; it's a very silly song.

I was at a fundraiser for the Patients Association in memory of the late Claire Rayner, agony aunt and broadcaster. Claire clearly had an extraordinary life; Jay Rayner, Stephen Fry, Jo Brand and Giles Brandreth all paid tribute to it. Highlights include her persuading Sandi Toksvig to give up wearing small pants for her 50th birthday and bringing sanitary towels into common parlance with a controversial TV advertisement for Vesprey Silhouette Plus in 1992.

Not to be outdone by Robinson, Toksvig shared with the audience her own painful account of a recent visit to a motorway service station. "The moment you enter them, you feel you start swimming in a fantastically shallow gene pool", she said. On this particular occasion, she was confronted at a cash point by a woman in a pack-a-mac. "Now there's an early warning sound if you ever need one. 'I like you Sandy', the woman said. 'You're very funny. But that's not why I like you. I like you because you're not a specific shape.'"

But I digress. Tom Robinson had some advice for me. "Keep a blog for 90 days. For the first 30 days it'll be fun. Then after 50 or 60 days you'll be wracking your brains for what to write. By 90, you'll have found your voice."

To clarify, we're talking about my personal voice, as opposed to journalistic or creative writing.

Now to return to an earlier point Tom Robinson is a successful presenter and music journalist, and he salvaged this career from that truck-truffing motorway song and another song about being proud to be gay; and I'm too young to understand the punk movement but from what I heard last night, Tom can't sing all that well. Basically, he's done well for himself; I'll take advice.

So here goes.

My personal highlight of the night was after awkwardly confusing Jo Brand and Ruby Wax (it's technically my mother's fault, but this excuse falls down for the same reason that you can't blame your mum for making a mistake if she's doing your homework for you), I wiped a lipstick mark from her (Jo Brand's) cheek by licking my finger and scrobbing her cheek with it; sometimes a girl just needs a helping hand.