The Cows: The bold, brilliant and hilarious Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller. Dawn O’Porter
and was there until he retired four years ago. He never enjoyed it; it was uncreative, hard and demanding. But he stuck with it, because he’s a great dad, and that’s the kind of sacrifice people make when they have kids.
‘I always told you that success is just being happy, didn’t I?’ he says. ‘People put too much emphasis on it being about money. I was never rich, but you guys were all healthy and happy and no matter what I ended up having to do during the day, coming home to that made me feel like the wealthiest man alive.’
‘Yup, you always said that,’ Cam says. She knows he doesn’t really mean it. If it had been down to him, he’d have carried on promoting comedy and they’d all have made do. But Cam’s mum wanted stability, and her dad is a good enough guy not to argue with that. ‘But I fucking love being rich,’ she says, giving him a gentle dig in the ribs.
They both laugh.
‘Don’t let your mum hear you use that language,’ he says, and of course she never would. Cam and her dad have always shared the same sense of humour and a mutual understanding. He’s the only person in her family who doesn’t question her choices, and she’s desperately in love with him because of that.
‘You were always different from the others, Camilla. You stuck to your guns, never tried to be what people expected of you. I’m proud of you, kid.’
‘Jesus, Dad! Will you stop. I’ve just moved in, no tears are allowed in this flat, even happy ones.’ They hug again. Before she pulls away she whispers in his ear, ‘Thank you.’
‘What are you thanking me for? You did this all by yourself.’
‘I did, yes. But because you always encouraged me to be myself. I’m not like the other girls, and you let me work out how to be happy my own way.’
‘I had no choice. There was no other way you could be,’ he says, as he leaves their embrace and heads for the door. ‘Call me if you need anything else doing, OK?’
‘I will.’
‘And don’t have any boys round.’
‘Oh, Dad! OK, go. Mum will shout at you for being late for dinner. I love you. Bye.’
Cam pushes him out of the door. ‘Careful on the stairs,’ she says as she closes it, and leans back against it when it’s shut. Looking around her flat, she lets a huge smile creep across her face. A 1.2 million, two-bedroom, Victorian flat in Highgate, with views across London. She’s sourced furniture from the period the house was built, and she’s mixing that with huge pieces of bold, modern art. It’s bright, beautiful and all hers. It’s in an area of London people only dream of living in. She can’t believe it.
Falling back onto the pea green, Victorian-style chaise longue, she reaches for her laptop and rests it on her thighs. Opening HowItIs.com, she gloats at what it has become. It not only earns her in the region of £20,000 a month in advertising revenue, but it also earns her notoriety, an audience. It gives her a voice. Cam was never great with people, but she always had a lot to say. This unfortunate mix made school tough going; someone with a head full of thoughts but no outlet for them tends to think too much and say too little. In her case, this personified itself as social awkwardness that other kids saw no fun in, so she inevitably became a bit of a loner. Until the Internet burst onto the scene in her early twenties and she finally had a way to show the world who she really was, a chance to express herself without the pressure of social interaction. It completely changed her life.
There are boxes stacked up along the walls, and the TV is still in the box on the floor. Her Internet won’t be connected for a few days, so she’s using a dongle, meaning she’ll never be anywhere she can’t blog from. This commitment to her output is what’s made her what she is.
As one of the first successful lifestyle bloggers, she has held her place as the ‘go-to destination for straight-talking women’. Or so said The Times in their list of ‘what’s hot for the year ahead’. ‘The Cam Stacey seal of approval is what every woman wants …’ (Guardian, Jan 2016). With nearly two million subscribers and eight major advertisers signed up, she is raking in the pennies and clawing in the love. But that isn’t to say she doesn’t have to be careful. Blogging is a dangerous game, especially if you’re talking about women and being as outspoken as Cam so often is. Women want role models; they get behind high-profile females who pave the way for forward thinkers and they hail them as heroes, but if they drop the ball, say the wrong thing or talk a little too controversially, they get thrown to the lions.
It happened to a friend of hers last year. A lovely woman, Kate Squires. She wrote about being a working mum, with a high-powered job in a PR firm, and became a real inspiration, with nearly 50,000 Twitter followers. Working mums everywhere looked to Kate for positive inspiration on how to ‘juggle’ the work–life balance, but then one day she fucked it all up with one little tweet. One silly little tweet that changed the course of her life.
Women without kids, u just don’t understand how hard it is to get home & have to look after something other than yourself. #NeedMeTime
The infertile population of the planet came out in their droves. Kate had personally offended every woman with reproductive issues on Twitter and beyond. What she had said was so hurtful that The Times covered a story of one woman who, after three miscarriages, tried to commit suicide after reading Kate’s tweet. ‘It just struck me when I was so, so down,’ she’d said. ‘I felt like society was telling me I have no value as a woman because I can’t have kids.’
People were right to be offended – it was an insensitive thing to say, but did she deserve an online hate campaign and the succession of terrible things that happened next? Cam followed the case with sympathy but a sharper eye on what she could learn. That tightrope between leading the social commentary and following it is hard to walk. It takes focus, planning and careful attention to detail not to fall off when you live in a world where 140 characters could ruin your life.
Kate wrote the customary, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, I just had a really hard day,’ tweet, but it didn’t do any good. She went on Loose Women and made some heartfelt but slightly pathetic apology wearing a floral dress and batting her best Princess Diana eyes. On leaving the studio, she was confronted by campaigners with placards saying ‘NON-MOTHERS HAVE FEELINGS TOO’. This was televised on almost every news channel and Kate’s image was branded as the face of society’s issues with childless women. She appealed to be forgiven, but social media just couldn’t do it. Within weeks, she was offline and out of sight. Her PR firm sacked her, saying it was impossible to have someone with a public image like Kate’s representing them. She’s now out of work and struggling to get a job, her husband left her because she went so nuts, and she lives in a small flat in south London as opposed to her big house in Penge. Kate barely answers the phone; Cam hasn’t spoken to her for months. Her whole life turned upside down because of one sleepy little tweet.
Cam watched and learned.
She’s managed to find that careful balance of pushing boundaries, being brave, but not offending. Of course she gets the occasional knob who hates her, but she’s generally strong enough to ignore those. She’s often the target of more conservative feminists who seem to think her attitude to sex is why so many men sexually abuse women, but Cam’s aim is to promote the many facets of modern feminism, and pissing off ‘The Traditionalists’ is just a part of that. Even the rape threats she got after writing quite a punchy piece about Bill Cosby didn’t knock her down. It would take a lot more for someone to turn up at her door and physically assault her than it does for them to tweet, ‘I’d bend you over a car and make you sorry for saying that.’
Most people online are full of shit. Part of survival in the digital age is to fully appreciate that, and Cam’s down with it. But women’s rights are a delicate subject. There is one fight – feminism – but there are many different types of woman, and pleasing them all is impossible.
Just as her eyes are falling closed, she gets a text.