Surface tension

Last night I went to see Martha Wainwright sing songs by Edith Piaf at the Barbican. I've been a fan of Martha for a few years, having discovered her through my love of her brother, Rufus. Like her brother, she is classically trained, Canadian and pretty much bilingual. She's also had a pretty rocky time of it, albeit in a fairly privileged way, and where Rufus is openly gay and has written a lot about that, Martha is straight but has struggled with relationships, writing songs like Bloody Motherfucking Asshole and I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too. I think she is clever and hilarious and in possession of an incredibly strong and sensual voice; I was extremely excited about last night.

And then she walked on stage, and I gasped: she was pregnant. Very pregnant. Last I'd heard, she was singing about being a mistress, and now she was having someone's baby and wearing a wedding ring. I was thrilled for her, genuinely thrilled, but then, through all the beautiful Piaf songs, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to focus on the music, I wanted her pregnancy and marriage to be irrelevant, but the mental image I'd had of her had always been of a battler, and now she was happy. I think I'd feel the same if I'd seen Gordon Brown with a suntan or Jesus doing a 100m sprint - it was incongrous and, shame on me, I found it distracting. Her clothes got me as well. Her leggings in the first half were too tight, her top was unflattering. And after the interval, she came back on stage wearing a black silk dress over a strapless bra that squashed her boobs into a flat plank, making them look like a little shelf. The dress needed to be ironed and the hem was irregular but not in a way that made me think it was a deliberate design choice.

And so this gorgeous, hair-raisingly beautiful music is being performed by fantastically talented singers and players, including a seriously hot pianist, and all I can think about is the fact that Martha's going to have a baby but her bra is a disaster, and whether they have ironing facilities in the dressing rooms at the Barbican. What is wrong with me?! Why can't I pierce the outermost layer and get stuck in to what's really important? I'm like the worst bits of Trinny, Suzannah and a magpie, distracted by anything sparkly, or, in my case, helplessly drawn to unsightly bulges.

It doesn't matter who's talking or what extraordinary life changing information they're imparting - a stray facial hair or a sweat patch will render me entirely unable to hear anything other than the voice in my head that's going 'Should I tell them? I probably should. I'd want someone to tell me. But then, what can they do about it? Maybe I should tell that other person to tell them...' and on to infinity. Some people just don't even see these things. They are the people who walk around with unplucked eyebrows and VPLs, the hanger loops dangling out of their waistlines, labels sticking out of their neck, whose dyed hair looks perfect from the front but a wreck from the back, who are happily talking to a boy they fancy with red wine encrusted into the cracks on their lips, and they don't give a damn. They're blissfully ignorant and god they're lucky. I want to be like them. Maybe if I stopped wearing glasses I wouldn't see as many flaws, but my new frames are too cool for school. Hmmm.