'I want to have a conversation about men': Wolverhampton's Caitlin Moran prepares for home show
You can take the girl out of Wolverhampton, but you can't take Wolverhampton out of the girl.
Caitlin Moran left the city when she was 18 in what she described as an action of rebellion, wanting to leave home and live London life, but as she got older she came to appreciate how "lucky" she was to come from Wolverhampton.
The author, journalist, columnist, presenter, film maker and feminist is set to return to the scene of some riotous times at the Wulfrun Hall for a night of talking about men and boys and the everyday issues they face, all tackled with love, and concern, and respect, but also joy, and fun, and humour.
Caitlin said it was amazing to be appearing at the University of Wolverhampton at the Wulfrun Hall on Saturday, June 1 at a place where she said she suffered her first "semi-permanent damage" as a music journalist.
She said: "It was at the Wulfrun Hall, watching Teenage Fan Club in 1992 and I went right down the front and got bruises all across my chest after being crushed against the barrier, then having a ringing sound in my ears for the next two weeks afterwards.
"I can guarantee to my audience that while my voice can be piercing sometimes, you're unlikely to sustain the kind of semi-permanent damage that I sustained the first time I went to the Wulfrun.
"I've never appeared there before, it has always been Birmingham, but I said that this time, I have to do Wolverhampton - we need to do it and it needs to be part of the tour, so we are playing here on my insistence."
Caitlin's love for Wolverhampton has grown back over the years since she moved to London and she still makes regular visits to the city, with one notable appearance being for her 49th birthday and involving trips to some unique landmarks.
She said: "We walked all around our old estate, then went off to St Bartholomew's Church off the Penn Road, as the village hall there used to do the best jumble sales, and there was a woman there who saw me and my brothers looking in and spoke to us.
"She asked if we had been to a party there or had been worshippers at the church, but we said we just loved a good jumble sale and asked if we could look around, which she let us do and it smelt exactly as I remembered it, that old village hall smell of dust and polish.
"We were really excited to be there because of the jumble sales, then we went to the Central Library, which I was pleased to see was still well stocked as my local at Warstones Library seemed to have been stripped out 10 years ago.
"We went to Wightwick Manor, which I had no idea what to expect as we could never afford to go there when I was a kid, but I've been to with my husband and it's just the most wonderful place, with so much history to see at it."
Her departure for London at 18 years old had been, as she puts it, "fuelled by rebellion" and came at the start of the Britpop era in the 1990s, but she said that it was only after talking to her sister how much she realised she was lucky to be from Wolverhampton.
She said: "Everyone goes through a period of thinking that their home town is a dump, and I thought I had to get out of Wolvo and it's all about London, but it was only a couple of years later when my sister pointed out how lucky we were to come from Wolverhampton.
"We lived in a council house where we paid pennies in rent, we had three very well-stocked libraries in our area, we could go swimming for 10p at Heath Town because they had the leisure cards and it really was a safe place.
