My London: Caitlin Moran

Home is…

Crouch End, with my husband, two teenage daughters and a one-year-old dog we all kind of worship like a sweet, dumb dog-god.

Favourite club?

Duckie at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. The first gay club to play all kinds of music, from every genre, the most giddily welcoming crowd and the best ever DJs — Readers Wifes. Their David Bowie tribute night, the week he died, was one of the most extraordinary events I’ve ever been to.

Bus, taxi or Tube?

Tube. It’s just faster. Also, I am the uncrowned queen of emotively mouthing along to whatever music I’m playing on my iPhone — I think many people must have been very moved, over time, by my ‘Purple Rain’ on the Victoria line.

Who is your hero?

I think Kate Moss’s ‘Never complain, never explain’ is the motto for our times. I aspire to one day staggering out of the Thames in a green sequinned dress, smoking a fag and holding a glass of champagne saying, ‘Where’s the party?’ I feel that is one of the pivotal images of the 21st century.

What was the last play you saw in London?

Hamilton. I bought tickets the day they went on sale - good job I’d recently sawn off and sold a leg, as they were expensive. But it was everything I thought it would be and more - a supremely clever energy-bomb that totally sets the bar for any artistic ambition anyone might have in the next fifty years. I’ve listened to the soundtrack compulsively after. My rap skills are becoming mighty. Although I did come up with a musical twist at the end I thought would have worked better. Lin-Manuel Miranda can hit me up any time if he wants me to polish his 16-Tony-Awards-winning masterpiece. I’m around.

Where do you work out in London?

When it’s not frigging Siberia, I swim at the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath, or the Lido in Crouch End. And I walk the dog endlessly. “Working out” consists of doing yoga in the front room whilst watching Jeremy Kyle. “That’s obviously not the father of your baby!” I shout, in a head-stand. “He has the ears of your shifty cousin!” Very Zen.

Which five London shops/outlets do you rely on?

Uniqlo, Zara, &OtherStories, Liberty and Beyond Retro. All the clothes stores because they make clothes with SLEEVES for women with BIG BUMS, and Uniqlo because their thermal polo-necks are essentially survival gear in Britain for ten months of the year. And Liberty to buy perfume from their perfume hall, because a) they have the best range and b) they allow dogs. The dog loves helping me buy perfume (falls asleep under a table).

If you could buy any building in London and live there which would it be?

There’s a 1930’s cottage in Fitzroy Park, right next to Hampstead Heath, on a private road, that looks like it’s in the middle of Devon. You could climb over the back fence in your garden and be in the Ladies’ Pond in less than a minute. I would essentially become half-mermaid at that point. To have that house would be to be Laurie Lee in Cider With Rosie, right in the middle of a city. The dream.

Best meal you’ve had?

There’s a baked savoury cheesecake that Nopi does that I have taken everyone I know to eat. It comes in a little copper pan and, if the world were slightly differently arranged, I would die from eating one 19 feet across.

What would you do if you were Mayor for the day?

I’d introduce a parking protected bike lane system — where parked cars separate the bike lane from traffic; draft legislation to offer preferential treatment to companies based in London who do pay their tax; plant thousands of trees in Hyde Park, because it looks like a s***, spookily empty field. And, following in the footsteps of Caroline Criado Perez’s brilliant campaign to have a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, commission dozens more statues of women, and people of colour, across the city.