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Katie walks – well, dresses – like an Egyptian, and doesn’t like it one bit

It took two clicks, three jabs and 400 quid to organise a holiday to Egypt with my new best friend Jess.

It would be sunny and cultured. The antiquities were stunning and the fags were cheap. The hotel had an infinity pool and I had plans to ride a camel past the pyramids. It was a dream holiday. In a Muslim country.

“Do you know what that means?”, asked my globe-trotting mum, who knows the custom everywhere from Ankara to the Andes. “It means you will have to dress modestly.”

Scene two: Jess and I standing surrounded by mountains of clothes, looking despairingly into two empty suitcases. Having dissected the contents of both our wardrobes we have made an unnerving discovery: we do not own a single item of modest clothing between us.

Everything, um, yes, EVERYTHING, is too short, too low, too see-through, too tight, or just too much. Slapper-chic may have successfully seen us through the party scene of Brighton, but in a country where uncovered ankles are considered risqué, we were going to have problems.

Our only solution was layering – leggings under minis, shirts over crop-tops, shorts under skirts, and giant Pashminas swamping the whole lot. But if the problem of our holiday wardrobe was quickly resolved, my irritation was less easily appeased.

I’ve always thought respectfully about Muslim women’s right to dress as their religion prefers, and I’ve championed the embracing of other cultures and their traditions. But now I found my own appearance under attack, suddenly things weren’t so cut and dry.

As I marched through the heat of an Egyptian autumn, my blood started to boil beneath my swathes of newly-modest clothes. And as I dreamed of getting my shoulders out into the sunshine and swinging my legs in the cool air, I started to wonder if any woman would really choose to dress like this at all.

“I wanted my look back, I wanted my life back, and what I wanted most of all was the scope to be treated like a grown-up”

If I was struggling with the heat in flowing skirts and cotton scarves, then the locals looked like they were having even less fun – weighed down by full-length, darkly coloured garments, with black scarves covering their heads.

In the day I fussed over the heat under my outfit and then at night Jess and I bitched that we couldn’t glam up: pretty dresses had to be hidden, so shoulders were covered. Heels had to be ditched – lest we attract even more attention from the local men. And noticeable make-up was out of the question – at least judging by the looks we got the one night we dared to doll up our sad-rags with a splash of red lippy.

By the end of the week, I was feeling depressed, distressed and degraded (ironically, more so than I had ever felt in a mini-skirt on West Street). I wanted my look back, I wanted my life back, and what I wanted most of all was the scope to be treated like a grown up and allowed to dress however the hell I wanted.

Of course, at the end of the day, I could. It was my choice to dress modestly in Egypt, as a means of showing respect and avoiding hassle. At any moment I could have – theoretically – thrown my Pashmina to the wind and donned a boob-tube on the high street (although actually the attention would have made it a nightmare). After a week, I was back at home and proudly showing off my tan (subtly gained from the depths of the pool). But I thought how irksome it must be for the women who never knew that escape.

After a week of being swaddled, I was losing my mind. After a lifetime of such oppression, I would have lost the will to live.

Ultimately, what my week made me realise is that women’s right to dress as they wish – no matter how modest or immodest – has more significance than their desire to follow fashion. Freedom of dress isn’t just a matter of freedom of expression, it is the freedom to breathe, to desire, to choose and to think. More importantly still, it is the freedom to be. And that’s a right that we all deserve.

Katie unashamedly uses her column to score her next literary fix

This is not a column. It is a cry for help. I have run out of books to read – and the situation’s getting serious.

It’s fair to say I’m a pretty obsessive reader. In fact I’m one of those stupidly obsessive readers, so romanticised by words that I’ll start scanning the back of a box of Sugar Puffs just to get my fix.

I may have cut down my fags to five per day, but if I don’t get 20 chapters I can’t function.

When I did my degree and was forced to borrow £15,000 so I could spend three years sitting on the beach reading a list of recommended novels, I was in heaven. But since then I’ve been living off the morsels of friends’ bookshelves and the odd tip from Waterstones’ staff. And as I tear through pages like a Rottweiler on heat, I’m finding it harder and harder to get the same kick that I used to.

Like a sixties stoner I find myself wondering where all the good stuff’s gone? And why the buzz isn’t what it used to be.

I’m frantically chasing the literary dragon. And that, dear reader, is why I really need your help.

I’ve told you the symptoms and now I need your prescriptions, but first let me tell you a bit about this patient’s past history.

I’ve rinsed the beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Cassidy. The bits with the drugs were fun, some of it was a bit too surreal, then too much of it got boring…

If everyone’s heard of it I’ve probably read it. But I loved Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, 1984, Of Mice And Men,Catcher in the Rye, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, The Wasp Factory, The Colour Purple, Lolita, American Psycho, Doors Of Perception and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

I went through a modernist phase. Joyce, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Eliot, Forster. And Jean Rhys is still my favourite writer.

On holiday I read crap: from Liz Jones’s diary to Jilly Cooper. I’m a massive Ian Rankin fan and Irvine Welsh too. Bukowski was good til I burnt out the best bits. And I’ve dabbled in Hollenbeck, Borges and Henry Miller.

I hated Catch 22 and can’t finish a Kurt Vonnegut. Hemmingway makes me want to fall asleep and anything pre 20th century makes me scared.

The last six books I read were, Choke (which I hated), The Gorse Trilogy (Patrick Hamilton), Lullaby (Chuck Palahniuk), A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainia by Marina Lewycka and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe.

Now, obviously that list’s not exhaustive but it might give you an idea of where I’m at. And now I’m begging you – please help! I’m desperate for something new that’s gonna make it as good as it was the first time.

Is this column indulgent? Yes, but us addicts are a selfish breed. But if you hit me back with your best bet I’m planning to pay handsomely. I’ll owe you for life. I’m willing to do anything. But as a starting shot, whoever recommends the writer I love the best, I’m willing to send an entire shelf of my back catalogue to to say thanks.

Not good enough? Then just tell me what you’re craving instead… My contact address, as always, is letters@thelatest.co.uk.

Katie wonders if anyone in Britain was surprised by revelations of TV dishonesty

‘A crisis of confidence’ may be what the papers are calling it, but what the British public are really feeling about the revelation that television is less truthful than it appeared to be, is closer to a combination of amusement, ambivalence and apathy.

The case against telly has been mounting for some time, stacking up in black and white on the news-stands.

It started somewhere with the row over Celebrity Big Brother – and the charge that Endemol’s editing and Channel 4’s attitude underestimated the severity of the race row situation that was breaking. But once the tide had turned on telly and the trickle of doubt had started, it was only a matter of time before the floodwaters broke.

After CBB it all just went from bad to worse. The next tirades on trust were the phone-in scandals. When we discovered that not just Blue Peter but even Richard And Judy – our own adopted TV parents – had been lying to scam money out of us.

After that came the revelations that Gordon Ramsay didn’t really catch his own effing fish, that Bear Grylls had been staying in five star hotel rooms while pretending to camp in the wilderness and that even the Queen had been stung by a bit of bad editing that made her look less than majestic.

But, while it was natural for the papers to get over-excited about all the gaffs that Auntie et al were making – especially in silly season – was it really all that important? Frankly, did we give a damn?

“Whatever next? The revelation that Nigella doesn’t really want to shag us for dessert?”

I made up my mind where I stood on the debate when the pneumatic Nigella was finally dragged into it, with the accusation that her recipes were hard to cook and her new cookery series hadn’t really been filmed at her home at all – as the set suggested – but in a studio mock up.

My God! Now the (oven) gloves really were off! Whatever next? The revelation that Nigella doesn’t really want to shag us for dessert?

As the accusations poured off the newsprint one-by-one, I started to wonder what decade we were living in. Surely not since the 1950s – the golden age of the box – have we fallen for the fallacy that what we’re watching on television is real.

I use my own insight to ascertain that not everyone who lives on a farm is as hot as Caine Dingle, that Gillian McKeith doesn’t actually give a damn about my health, that Blue Peter presenters are not really angels and that the blondes that read the weather may not be meteorologists.

The discovery that TV is conning me has not shattered my confidence in it, actually it’s only confirmed the suspicions l enjoyed about it all along.

In fact, the shocking thing about all this is not the ‘unmasking’ of TV as the evil uncle of our times, but just how gullible the newspapers assumed we all were in the first place.