A Secret Skill Borne from Great Boredom

Here’s a skill you never knew I had: playing dead. And we’re not just talking about “holding your breath” here, either. Amateurs. This is the type of playing dead where there is nary an eye twitch nor muscle tremor: we’re talking about the sort of stillness that makes people believe that your soul has actually left your body. It’s a proper talent.

I haven’t played dead recently, because it doesn’t tend to go down too well when you have kids, but when I was a fashion model I was absurdly good at pretending I’d expired. Totally convincing.

You may be wondering how I discovered that I had this talent and I will tell you: boredom. Many of the world’s most important talents, I imagine, were borne from the sort of intense boredom experienced on (some) fashion shoots - the kind of boredom that makes you want to eat your own fists just to feel something. There’s only so much utter drivel the mind can absorb, there are only so many minutes you can listen to a conversation about which boot looks better with an un-hemmed Celine trouser; there’s a finite amount of time you can bear to watch a photographer trying to connect his early version of a digital camera to the whirring, ten tonne dinosaur of a 2006 Macbook Pro.

And so I was able to become completely dormant, when I was a model, to escape the tedium of an ineptly-executed photoshoot - and I could go dormant for quite impressive lengths of time too. I was able to mentally and spiritually leave the physical body behind. Exit the proverbial building. No mean feat when you’re standing in five inch heels.

Chose this photo because of the hilarious look of boredom on my face: the shoot was actually anything but boring, I remember it clearly.

I would sometimes stay so very still on set that people in the studio would forget I was even there and then, if I spoke, they would scream. (It must have been like a doll coming to life - Childsplay Chucky still haunting the mind of every Gen X-er.) I could stay perfectly still and in position for an entire lunch break if they forgot about me; I could hold still even when my neck began to ache and my muscles began to tremble, I could push past the screaming pain stage, brush off the short period of numbness that would follow, silently suffer the pins and needles era and then, finally, settle in for a limitless time of absolute stillness.

It was not just a skill or a talent, now that I think upon it: it was a gift.

And I am never one to blow my own trumpet, but I would have made an excellent dead person on Silent Witness. You know the deceased crime victim undergoing the post-mortem in each episode? Inert on the mortuary slab? I don’t often stick my head above the parapet to proclaim my own talents, but I’d have nailed a part like that, had I ever been given the chance to play one.

There would have been no sudden twitches or emergency intakes of breath from me whilst on Dr Ryan’s mortuary slab, I’ll tell you that for free. Not like some of the - frankly inferior - actors I’ve seen take the corpse roles. I’d be totally, convincingly lifeless.

‘Here we have a young white female,’ Sam Ryan would say, as I lay there naked. (Totally unperturbed by that, by the way, because I was used to batting away feelings of humiliation.)

‘Her age?’ Dr Ryan would muse. ‘It’s actually hard to tell,’ she’d say, lifting up my eyelids with a cotton bud. ‘She could either be forty four years old or…or twenty - I’ve never seen a physical specimen like it…’

(Obviously I’d have had a hand in the script.)

‘Time of death approximately…I’d say…nine hours ago...,’ Dr Ryan would declare, after lifting up one of my feet and then letting it drop back onto the slab, possibly shattering my heel into forty pieces. (Not a peep from me! I was used to this level of dehumanisation and sheer indifference!)

She’d have a poke about with her rubber gloves on, turn my hands over and – because I would have volunteered to do this particular performance with eyes open – she would gently close my eyelids.

‘She’s of exceptionally fine build,’ Sam Ryan would say, because it would have been true, ‘well-nourished, taller than average and with absolutely magnificent breasts.’

All the while I’d have been completely stock still. Even my pulse would have slowed – I would have been in such a catatonic state, because I was so well-practised at it, that when the scene cut and I swung my legs over the edge of the gurney Amanda Burton would have screamed.

‘Jesus!’ she’d have said, ‘I thought you were a dummy or some sort of wax prop they’d brought in!’

‘I’m just good at going within myself Amanda,’ I’d have replied, not at all self-conscious about the fact I was entirely naked and painted with a thin coat of blueish tint to make my skin look dead. ‘Shall we grab a sausage sandwich from the catering truck?’

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I need to think of more secret skills that not many people know I have. One used to be “playing solo swingball with a Slazenger racket whilst bouncing on a pogo ball for over an hour at a time” but I haven’t done that in over thirty years. It can’t count. I’ll get my thinking cap on…

In other news my book, How Not to be a Supermodel, has been at number one in the Kindle charts for almost two weeks. I can’t believe it, I feel like how I imagine Bryan Adams felt when Everything I Do stayed at the top of the charts for weeks on end. It was unbelievable. (Also I bloody loved Robin Hood Price of Thieves so I was in my element, seeing the little clips every week and watching Kevin Costner shoot his arrow right into the target from miles away. Good God, my teen hormones were a-raging.)

Anyway, if you haven’t read it yet (my book) then get the hell on with it, what are you waiting for! If you read this posts and like them then you will love the book way more, I promise. It’s like a year’s worth of posts, basically, but all of them about the ridiculous, catastrophic and downright dreadful things that happened to me when I was a full-time model.

It’s currently in a promotion and is 99p - LESS THAN A POUND - on Kindle, here, or you can listen instantly on Audible here or Spotify here, or you can be traditional and buy the book HERE! Blimey. Something for everyone.