flossing the cat

ARE YOU BIKINI-SHY?

2013-06-06T13:38:00.001+01:00

(No, obviously not you Beyonce, ffs ... *rolls eyes*)

The summer holidays may be just around the corner, but for those suffering from a devastating, poorly understood condition called Bikini-Shyness, frolicking around on the beach in front of a gazillion dribbling strangers, won't be an option.

Although there are no precise figures available, it is estimated that this summer, the vast majority of women, including all those who are over size 6 and don't spend the entire day munching grapes, will avoid the itsy-bitsy teenie-weenie two-pieces available on today's high street, preferring to keep their nipples, aureoles, vaginas, and frankly, the whole region around their vulva to themselves. (Thanks. All. The. Fucking. Same.)

But according to fashion experts (whose views we should never dismiss as the unceasing prattle of a bunch of nonces and knobheads), sufferers of bikini-shyness are denying themselves crucial opportunities for self-expression and self-advancement.

“Bikini-shyness can have serious consequences for the emotional, social and professional lives of the lay-deez”, says Dr Hans Rudi, swimwear designer. “Wearing a bikini, like my very own favourite, the cheeky Peek-A-Boo bikini, which uses a length of fabric no wider than a string of dental floss to delicately screen off the asshole, makes a lay-dee feel more confident, more powerfully feminine.”

Listen, I know that some people say that the bikini is a ridiculous garment aimed at making most women feel like a huge hatful of assholes, but as you can see from my body language, I feel on top of the world!

Dr Rudi points to the example of Beyonce, whose latest photo-shoot for H&M sees her dressed in a variety of tiny two-piece numbers. “Beyonce shows other women, especially depressives and neurotics, that by being liberated from the shackles of ugly normal clothes, and giant knickers, they too can achieve their dreams", he says.

Beyonce, too, acknowledges the bikini's ability to communicate the complex reality of women's lives. Describing the bikini photo-shoot in an interview for The Daily Mail, she said,“I really loved the concept we collaborated on (during the shoot) to explore the different emotions of women represented by the four elements – fire, water, earth and wind.” (Wow. Slow down Beyonce. I know you is, like, a radical feminist n'all, but are you seriously telling us that women have, like, FOUR emotions?!!! Cos that is some crazy shit girl... )

But it's not just Beyonce and Dr Rudi who claim that the bikini is a modern-day powersuit. Kimberely Garner, from 'Made in Chelsea', has been totally spazzing out over the idea of designing bikinis since the age of nine and claims that her new collection of bikinis and monokinis will confer on the lucky wearer the power to inspire other women. "I wanted to make my designs wholesome but also sexy and cheeky, and provide an aspirational image for young girls", she said.

Critics, sourpusses, and the bitter, obese legions of the bikini-shy, however, point to scientific research from Princeton University that demonstrates that far from being an empowering garment, the bikini literally objectifies women.

Uh? Come again? Are you sure?

Well, yes, because as it turns out, when men are shown pictures of bikini-clad women, a region of the brain associated with tool use lights up. The same brain scans reveal ZERO activity in the part of the brain associated with assessing another person’s intentions, thoughts, or feelings. Scientists at Princeton have seen this “dehumanizing effect” only once before, in a study where people were shown off-putting photographs of homeless people and drug addicts.

Dr Hans Rudi is of course dismissive of the findings. "We shouldn't take these so-called scientists and their stupid boring facts too seriously", he said. "What do they know of fashion, or the feelings of the lay-deez?"

He may have a point. For many sufferers of bikini-shyness, the prospect of not being able to wear a playful scrunch-butt bikini, or a pubikini, or a monokini, or a microkini, or a peek-a-boo bikini, or one of those real hot and sexy cameltoe bikinis, is just too painful. "This summer, I'll probably have to wear normal underwear, and a normal T shirt, and probably a normal hat, cos I don't want to get cancer, which will make me look a total fucking plonker", said one bikini-shy mummy blogger.

Others are more philosophical. When told about the research on bikinis, one bikini-shy woman simply said,"I could have told you bikinis were shit."

PS: OK. I made up Dr Rudi. But there is a fashion historian called Oliver Saillard who claims that "the emancipation of swimwear has always been linked with the emancipation of women." But he is an utter cock.

PPS: Many old-school feminists argue that Beyonce forfeited her right to speak on behalf of other women when she wrote these lyrics:

"I know when you were little girls/

You dreamt of being in my world/

Don't forget it, don't forget it/

Bow down, bitches".

They might say she is a fraud who can Go Do One. Just saying.

S is for the Shit You Breathe In

2013-04-16T15:16:00.000+01:00

(from The Extremely Over-Protective Mummy's Handbook)

There was a time, not so long ago, when I didn’t give a fu@k about air quality; a time when I’d gad about the place, just breathing normally, like some reckless demi-god. But then, eight weeks after the birth of my Precious First Born, when an opportunity to sleep came my way, my mind suddenly landed on a single, terrifying idea.

Which was this:

What if there is a carbon monoxide leak in the house?

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

"Salad, darlings? I washed it in Milton's."

Now, I’m not normally the kind of gal to go into a Blind Fucking Panic for no reason, oh no no no!! *suppresses horrible facial twitches, puts on weirdly superficial grin*. Neither am I the type to worry myself into an early fucking grave about a gazillion things that are all statistically extremely unlikely to happen, whilst at the same time doing precisely NOTHING about any of them. But if I were, these are the kind of thoughts I would have had:

Thought 1: Maybe I should go and live in the shed for the night? Yeah, yeah, coolio. Look, I know it’s minus 22 Celsius outside, and the shed may as well be called The Museum of Fatal Asbestos or The Asbestos Mega-Store or whatever (but with added rats, and bubonic plague, and frickin Weil's disease), but, BUT ... (and this is a key point, kids), if I don’t move us there soon, we will DIE.

Thought 2: Alternatively, I could drive to my parents’ house, which is only 100 miles away? Yeah, perfect. Ok, I know I’ll have to drive there through a thick fog of Satanic darkness, and there’s also a motorway slip road, which together make up two of the worst things in the whole world, if not the entire known universe, but both of them are preferable to CERTAIN DEATH? Right? RIGHT?

Thought 3: Or, OR, OR … fuck, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before … I’m a fat dozy cow that’s why … I could just go and knock on the next door neighbour’s door and ask if we could stay the night there instead? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what I’ll do!! It’s only 2am, ffs, and surely some things in life, i.e STAYING ALIVE during a carbon monoxide outbreak, are more important than the risk of looking like a fucking lunatic, and being the talk of the village, and then having to move and uproot everyone. Surely?

Thought 4: Of course, whilst I’m weighing up the pros and cons of shed vs neighbours vs parents' house (which is an unbelievably complex and multi-faceted process, let me tell you), I should, at the very least, ventilate the fuck out of the house by opening all the windows, and probably the doors too. THIS IS THE VERY LEAST I SHOULD FUCKIN DO. Listen, I know the baby could contract a nasty chill that could then mutate into a hideous secondary infection, I know that, of course I do, but what choice do I have? Eh? EH, EH??

Etcetera etcetera until dawn (whilst not at any time moving from the bed or taking any kind of purposeful affirmative action.)

Since that night of course, I have been made aware of all sorts of other airborne hazards, which I feel duty-bound to share with you.

The Sun. Burny. Carcinogenic. Bastard.
Other people breathing over you, fucking outrageous – or worse still, other people breathing over you, whilst also being coated in a toxic layer of hormone-disrupting perfume, especially Impulse.
Secondhand smoke. (Look, I know you think you’re being considerate, smoking in the garden n’all, but unless you’re thinking of smoking directly into an extremely powerful north-easterly headwind, in other words, away from my baby, and unless you are also prepared to dump all of your clothes in that wheelie bin over there, and then blast off your epidermis with an industrial pressure washer, you are not touching my baby (or bump). Period.
Paint fumes. The woman at customer services at Farrow and Ball didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when I asked her whether any of their paints contained any known teratogens! Fucking hell, you’d think they know the basics.
Mould spores. Don’t get me started.
Exhaust fumes. To be honest, I found it fairly easy to avoid heavy concentrations of vehicle emissions, particularly whilst I was pregnant. All I’d do was run really quickly past moving cars, holding my breath in. It was no bother, honestly.

Like I said, this isn’t a particularly comprehensive list, and a great majority of you will now be screaming, “What about electricity pylons, and fungus, and pesticides, and particulates?” "And what about the clouds of formaldehyde almost definitely evaporating from my sofa cushions, and the giant plumes of invisible radon gas coming up through the gaps in my floorboards, and … grrrr ... the toxic mould spores in the bathroom that are playing merry hell with my orifices … and all the plastic shit … and ….."

Hey, it’s not that I’m not listening to you. I just don’t want to come over all loony tunes.

PS: Driving in the dark - Unless you have the spectral range of a frickin racoon, or you own one of those psycho night goggles donned by Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, I don’t see how it is possible to enjoy night driving. Yes, there is less traffic, which is a big plus, for sure, but on the downside - and I do apologise if I come across as a bit of nit-picker - You Can’t. Fucking. See.

PPS: As for motorway slip roads, they deserve a whole entry of their own. For now, suffice it to say that one minute you’re driving along a nice country lane singing nursery rhymes to your kids, the next minute, you have less than one septillionth of a second to accelerate to the absolute edge of The Speed-of-Light Barrier, whilst also still singing the nursery rhymes. BLOODY HELL. AS IF I HAVEN’T GOT ENOUGH ON MY PLATE.

F is for Formula Milk

2013-04-01T14:09:00.000+01:00

Hey, here's another extract from the Extremely Over-Protective Mummy's Handbook.

The world of food is full of strange unsettling facts, like the fact that Worcestershire sauce is made from dissolved fish guts, or that a jar of peanut butter contains a big bunch of rat hairs, or that infant formula milk (blow me down with a fucking feather ladies, you’re not gonna believe this one) is NOT, I repeat NOT, actually poisonous!!!

WHAAAA…..!

I, for one, am a little pissed off. You see, for three months prior to the birth of my first child, I was told that feeding my daughter any kind of formula milk - even as an emergency measure - was exactly the same as feeding her a ginormous bottle of raw sewage. Bottle-feeding, explained the NCT lady, would condemn my daughter to a life of constant shitting (caused by massive gastro-intestinal dysfunction) as well as (prepare to grow pale with fear at this next idea) turn her into a Totally. Fat. Fucking. Dufus.

So I breastfed.

Within a week or two, one of my nipples hung by a jellied nerve end from my aureole; the other was Missing Presumed Fucked (although, I did find traces of it in a hawked-up fur-ball next to the cat bowl.) My daughter lost close to 10% of her own bodyweight on a weekly basis, whilst I was forced to follow an emergency feeding regime that allowed me to sleep for 20-minute-bursts, day and night, for a month. (Ha ha ha ha ha … ha ha ha ha ha …. please help me…why are there so many talking snakes? please make the scary voices go away mummy, please, I think I’d like to sleep now … ) You know the kind of thing, right, RIGHT? Anyway, after four weeks of this hell, my partner gave our daughter a big fuck-off bottle of formula milk while I slept. When I woke, he fessed up.

My memory is hazy and unclear (and forever compromised by a further eight long years without sleep), so to this day I don’t know exactly what I said, or did. But I think I stood there, on the upstairs landing, with my patchy hair standing on end, and my huge milky tits bobbing up-and-down and from side-to-side, screaming about how the milk supply-and-demand thing was now fucked-up FOR-EV-A. I also mentioned, yeah, I’m sure I did, that the baby was mine as well as his … and how he didn’t have the right to give her formula milk a.k.a poison. I may have asked him what he intended to do about the beautiful nutritious milk now curdling in my tits … bespoke milk that my body had lovingly and painstakingly made for OUR baby and was now TOTALLY UNWANTED???? I may have also suggested, just in passing, that I loved our baby more than he did … and I may have asked other questions, too. Did he at least wash the bottle beforehand in hot soapy water and then sterilise it in the steam sterilizer for twenty minutes? Did he at least use the sterilised tweezers to insert the teat into the bottle? Was the milk at least organic formula milk with a unique blend of prebiotics, was it, WAS IT? And did he definitely use one of those BreastFlow double teats that simulated real nipples, because of the massively underrated but real and present danger of Nipple Confusion? And was the water he used to make up the formula fresh water that had been boiled, and then cooled down to not less than 70 degrees, and had he even considered the risk of constant shitting, or off-the scale cardiovascular disease, or worse still, the hideous neverending shame of our daughter, our precious firstborn, being a regular guest on the Jeremy Kyle show because she was now going to be obese and also mental?

You know how it is girls, right!

To which my partner calmly said, “Formula milk is not actually poisonous.”

Yeah, I know that. Smug motherfucker.

PS: None of this is to excuse Nestle, who aggressively market formula milk in the developing world, in places where there is not always access to clean water, and in spectacular breach of international marketing standards. They are, unequivocally, bastards.

The Extremely Over-Protective Mummy's Handbook

2013-01-29T10:44:00.000Z

When I was a little girl, I used to dream of writing an epic novel. The kind of novel that spans three generations of the same family, three continents, three tumultuous events in history; the kind of novel that addresses (with subtle eloquence) universal themes like the indomitable nature of the human spirit, or the enduring power of love, etcetera etcetera. But then, when I grew up, I realised I was much better suited to swearing, ranting, and writing a whole load of deranged hormonal drivel. Like 'The Extremely Over-Protective Mummy's Handbook: An A-Z of Neurotic Mummy Shit' . Ta dah!

Yes, this genre-bending debut of mine will probably hit the shelves in about, oh, let me see, a gazillion fucking lightyears, largely because I am unable to write during a) PMS episodes; b) whilst looking for keys or mobile phones; or c) whilst collapsed under the weight of adrenal fatigue, which leaves me with a writing 'window' of twenty minutes a month. In the meantime, I do have a few tentative little entries up my ~~wizard's~~ sleeve, which I'll be posting here over the next few weeks...(in hope of feedback..)

C is for Calpol

Calpol is an essential component of any paranoid mummy’s toolkit. Its primary aim is to reduce fever and pain in small children. But as a happy coincidence for mummies, it also tastes delicious; full-bodied, a good balance of sugars and pharmaceuticals, very morish.

Once, whilst staring through the window contemplating the atrophying of my aspirations and the utter fu$k!ng pointlessness of having treated myself to a higher education, I entered Calpol and gin head-to-head in a taste contest (with myself as the lonely adjudicator). Perhaps it was because the gin was a supermarket’s own brand, perhaps it was because the tonic was beyond its best-before date, but in my opinion, Calpol definitely had the edge.

There are two main problems however with administering Calpol:

The 5ml spoon. It doesn’t matter how many 5ml spoons you own, when you have a hot screaming infant in your arms, you WON’T be able to find a single one. Trust me. There is no point looking in the usual places, like the cutlery drawer, or the medicine cabinet, or anywhere in the kitchen or bathroom. In fact, the only places worth searching are a) the plastic play-house in the garden; b) the mythological realms of Camelot or Atlantis; or c) any one of the 26 space-time dimensions posited by string theory. Not only will you not be able to find a 5ml medicine spoon, you won't be able to find a normal teaspoon either. In the end you will have to resort to an approximation, using a shell, a tiny plastic ladle from your daughter’s play kitchen, or your bare cupped hand.

Dosage. The Calpol bottle features instructions on how much medicine you are allowed to give to your child, depending on age. The print is small, the label is busy, but really, it shouldn’t be a problem. But you read it; you forget it all; you read it again ... and again ... and again. Basically, it’s like you suddenly have a reading age of about five. Is it a 2.5ml dose, a 5ml dose, or a 7.5 ml dose, you ask yourself, and what if your child is bigger than average, sicker than average, or between ages? in the end, you give them a 5ml-ish dose, using the ladle, but quickly realise you should have give them a 2.5 ml-ish dose, using the shell. You google ‘Calpol overdose’, you phone NHS direct, you wait for a doctor to return your call. Three hours later, only slightly reassured, you finish off the spare Calpol bottle (and the vile own-brand gin) and try to sleep.

What fresh hell is this? Mwa ha ha ha ...

P.S: I was going to start at the beginning of the book, with 'A is for Assholes', which is a personal account of Perineal Lacerations Beyond Fucking Imagining, but my partner told me that I talk about assholes too much. As$ho$e.

P.P.S: My partner is not really an As$ho$e. He is very nice. And patient.

THINGS THAT AREN'T OBVIOUS TO ME. AT ALL.

2012-12-09T11:33:00.002Z

This week, I’ve been mostly asking the question, “Does anyone know how this fucking thing works?”

For instance:

i) The open and close buttons in lifts.

I mean. What the fuck? What's with the runes? I don’t know runes. I have never known runes. In short, I am utterly shit at runes and at any other kind of ancient alphabet system. So here's for a madcap hare-brained idea. Why not get someone to write OPEN and CLOSE on the lift buttons, eh, eh, EH ? That way, there would be no risk of anyone wringing the living shit out of anyone else whilst trying to enter a lift.

Ii) Also, what’s with those hot water catering urns you get at kids parties? Does anyone know how you get water out of those bastards? Anyone?

Cuppa anyone? Mwa ha ha ha mwa ha ha ha ha!!

I know it looks like the water should come out of the little tap thing at the bottom, but the problem is that the little tap thing at the bottom almost NEVER has a functioning lever, so that all you can really do is a) pull the lever up and down for a bit like a total lame-o and then pretend you didn’t really want a cup of tea in the first place, or b) wait for a supremely competent mother, who looks like Samantha Cameron on speed, to come rushing up to you in head-to-toe Boden and say, “Here, let me help. I’m totally brilliant.”

ii) And since I’m on a theme. How about the tea and coffee making apparatus in supermarket restaurants? Was there ever a machine more perfectly designed to FUCK.YOU.IN.THE. MIND?? Because, wait for it, turns out that if you actually want to retrieve boiling water from one of these machines, the correct button to press is NOT the red button at the front of the machine –you dyspraxic loser - but the tiny insignifant button with the faded print somewhere on the bottom left hand corner. Duh.

There are other things that aren’t obvious to me. Of course there are. A trillion and nine, to quote my son's favourite number. But for now, here is a short list I made earlier, divided into two easy-to-navigate categories under the headings 'Bastards' And 'Assholes'. It's an extremely nuanced list, as you will see, as it's pretty difficult to define the difference between bastards and assholes. I was toying with creating a third category under the heading 'Absolute Cunts', but then I thought, Starbucks, George Osborne, and News International don't really count as inanimate objects.

Assholes

Safety gates
Car washes
Petrol pumps with the long nozzles that stretch all the way over your car to your petrol hole (or whatever it's called), so that if you’d only frickin known, you could have stayed where you were, instead of reversing out of the space like a total loser, and waiting in the adjacent queue with everyone laughing at you ...

Bastards

All. Printers.Without. Exception.
Cling film and cling film dispensers - even the Lakeland one that every one on Mumsnet thinks is the dogs bollox
Automatic car washes
Those name badges you get given in conferences. How the f*$k do they work? The only way I can attach them to my body is to literally clamp them on to my nipple, which is difficult, as most of my nipple got chewed off during breastfeeding.
Curtain eyelets or anything to do with the act of hanging curtains. In fact I would go far as to say that any item of hardware connected with drapery is, unequivocally, a cunt.

Feel free to add to the list, of course.

KIDS SAY THE CUTEST THINGS ....

2012-11-20T12:28:00.002Z

Kids say the cutest things, don’t they? Only last week, my two-year-old daughter said, “Mami, has the moon got a mummy and daddy?” A few weeks earlier, my five year old son asked, “Do wasps eat cheese or people?”

At other times, of course, they're total bastards.

Take last week, on the school run, when my seven-year-old daughter said,

“My best friend Annie thinks you’re ugly.”

“That’s not very nice is it?” I said, lamely.

Now, everyone who knows me knows how much I hate the school run. Doing the school run is the psychological equivalent of trekking hundreds of miles without food or water across enemy terrain, on your knees, whilst hallucinating. (Even Bear Grylls and Ranulph Fiennes go fucking MENTAL if anyone asks them to do the school run. It's true.) So, as you can imagine, the absolute last thing I need to hear – when I’m up against the limits of my endurance – is that I look like a hatful of arseholes.

“It’s ok because Annie thinks her mami is ugly too, and probably even more ugly than you”, continued my daughter, reassuringly.

Awww, shucks kids. You’re too kind. I’m gonna fucking MELT here.

(COURTESY OF PEN NAME JANE)

Later, at bath-time, the abuse continued, which again, wasn't nice. My five-year-old son, who was playing with his favourite Peppa Pig boat, was listening to a conversation I was having with my daughter, in which I was trying to reassure her about a blood test.

“Mummy?” he said, all of a sudden.

There was a blob of iridescent bubble bath foam on the end of his nose, and some cute tufts of the stuff on his head. For a second, he looked adorable, angelic.

“I hate you on the inside and on the outside“, he said.

“That’s very nasty”, I said, equally lamely. “Why do you hate me?”

“I just do”, he said, blithely. “I like daddy more”.

For fucksakes.

And then, finally, yesterday evening, as I was putting my two-and-a-half-year-old toddler to bed, she suddenly stopped half-way through kissing me and developed a worried, quizzical frown.

“Mami?” she said. “Why you got red eyes and yellow teeth?”

“Well, it's like this, you cheeky little monkey”, I said, a little hysterically by now. “I’ve got red eyes because you sleep horizontally across my bed every night - and you foot SHREDS my cornea to bits. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. And as for the yellow teeth, well, do you remember that time we were breastfeeding and you bit my nipple off, and I fed it to next door’s dog as a doggie treat because it was, like, so beyond fucking repair? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Well, same time as all that hilarious nipple shit was going on, you were also leaching calcium from me - and turning my teeth the colour of lion’s piss - you little cheeky little monkey you! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha etc etc... "

“Oh”, she said, touching my cheek with her finger, and then stroking my hair, very gently,“I want you come to bed mummy.”

“Allright”, I said. “But just for tonight.”

FLIES ARE BASTARDS

2012-09-11T12:21:00.001+01:00

Flies are total bastards.

On the spectrum of bastardry, flies sit somewhere between President Assad of Syria, Michael Gove (a perfect example of a cunt), those low low fuckers at News Corp, and Karren Brady. (Bring back Margaret!!)

But the absolute worst thing about flies is that they love my house. It’s almost as if there’s a gigantic neon-lit sign above my back door that says, “Hey, we’re shooting a remake of The Amityville Horror in THIS house. If you and your extended family of houseflies are looking for parts as extras, please do come on in, please, it's no bother”. In addition to the second neon-lit sign above my front door that says, "Now recruiting for the Fourth Plague of Egypt."

Which there isn't.

Oh, how I long for flies to become extinct. How I long for them to stop puking their guts up all over the banana cake or the brioche rolls I accidentally forgot to wrap in a million billion layers of super-thick anti-bacterial foil last night. How I long for them to stop hurling and spewing and upchucking all over the crumbs on my worktop and then sticking their long, germy, shit-stained little probosces where they’re not wanted, like total food rapists. If I could have one superpower, it would be the power to breathe out huge clouds of Raid, at whim.

LITTLE FUCKERS

And if you don’t agree, in some recent research, eight houseflies were allowed to come into contact with various types of germs before being allowed to settle and walk over food. Just half an hour later, the food was contaminated with 500,000 germs.

What total bastards.

My aversion to flies has nothing to do with fear however. In fact, here is a list of all the things that I find terrifying and you will see that flies is not amongst them:

Motorway slip roads

Mister Maker

Morning people

Wasps

Bin juice

Zetan Warlord –Do you actually mean to say that you never played Top Trumps in the Seventies?

Oh no. My hatred of flies has something to do with shame.

The truth is that flies love my house because I’m a slut. Because I’m a slattern. Because I lack domestic skills. Because I am not house-trained. Or house-broken. Flies know that right at the bottom of the kitchen bin - sliding around underneath the torn bin liner - are scraps of oozing carrion. They know the vegetable tray in the fridge is A World of Fermenting Vegetation. They know that the cat litter needs disinfecting and that the cat bowls need washing. They know about the filthy, secret corners of neglect multiplying across the house, the crusty kitchen tiles, the biohazardous Petit Filous spills underneath the sofa cushions, the damp piles of laundry that smell of wee-wee.

It's the same kind of shame you feel when your friend's dog gets high and crazy from the scent of your groin, when you can’t drag him away from there, when he flashes the whites of his eyes at you like a loon, and shudders all the way through to his tail, as though he’s never smelled anything quite like it. DEEP. PERSONAL. SHAME.

Fuck me, they’re embarrassing bastards.

SHAVING IS THE PITS

2012-08-16T10:11:00.000+01:00

Last week, my seven-year-old daughter seemed troubled.

“Mummy, why are you the only mummy on the street with fur sticking out of your arms?” she said.

She was looking at my armpits in a hurt, disgusted way, as if I had Tufty the Squirrel in a headlock.

I was too knackered to explain to her that contrary to public opinion, all sexually mature women grow hair on their bodies, and that many of them have more hair growing from their armpits and minges than Sasquatch. I was also too knackered to explain to her that the pressure on women to shave, pluck, tweeze, wax, and zap every single hair on their body until they look like pre-pubescent girls is just sinister sexist bullshit dreamed up in the 1920s by those absolute motherfuckers at Gilllete. But the main reason I didn’t challenge her was that I’m sensitive enough to realise that to a small hairless child, a thousand colossal tufts of armpit hair probably looks like the kind of place where witches meet.

“I’ll shave it off if it bothers you”, is all I said.

That night, I wiped the dust from my razor blade and began the process of revealing my inner ~~child~~ goddess. I fantasised about the prospect of social inclusion; about a future featuring Summer Essentials like strappy tops and pretty Boden dresses, cute bikinis and spray tans. I indulged the idea that my legs might even resemble the rock star pins of Gillette’s new 'global ambassador' for female empowerment (and the undisputed universal role model for all women) Jennifer Lopez. Obviously.

Afterwards, there was a brief bummer of a moment when I got pissed off thinking that my daughters might turn around when they’re eleven and demand that I buy them gigantic tubes of Veet, just so that they can depilate themselves ‘back to normal’ and so avoid a) being called gorilla or monkey trousers on the school bus or b) being chased around by people carrying nets and animal tranquilisers. I got even more pissed off at the idea that when they’re battling with issues around self-image and self-confidence, they’ll also have to contend with a whole load of creepy fascist shit about body hair. But that’s because I’m a total sourpuss and a hairy man-hating lesbo feminist, and I like to suck the fun out of life.

The following day, I showed my daughter my fuzz-free pits. I thought she’d be happy. Instead, she looked down at her own arms.

“I’ve don’t like the hair on my arms”, she said. “It’s too brown.”

Make that seven, not eleven.

BLOGGER'S BLOCK

2012-08-07T16:41:00.000+01:00

I haven’t blogged in a while. These are the reasons:

The Summer Holidays: We’re all going on a summer holiday, tra la la la la la la tra la la … Oh, hang on a minute, what I actually meant to say was we’re NOT going on a summer holiday. Duh! Thing is, my partner is working 12-hour days for the duration of the summer holidays, so I’m staying right here, in the house, for six and a half weeks, with a gazillion children. Yeah, don’t worry, I’ve got enough food in! Sure I’ll keep the windows open so that there’s enough air n’all! And best of all, my mum’s coming up for a couple of days so no worries! It’ll be nonstop fun I’m telling ya!!

Lack of stimuli: Hey, even if I did have a minute to write a blog in between all the crazy fun times, I wouldn’t know what to write. You see, during the summer holidays, the children operate Amish-style house rules that forbid me from consuming news or current affairs programmes, surfing the Internet, reading books, or exchanging views with other adults, unless it’s my mother. Weirdly, I am allowed to take phone calls from my mother. This is because the kids - the cheeky little rascals –they’re hoping my mum will provoke me into doing something super-funny like, oh I dunno, writing ‘I Know I’m Not Special’ in permanent red marker all the way down my legs! As if, kids! You crazy cats!

Technical shit: and to top it all, my computer died on me. The right thing would be to say that my computer has gone to computer heaven with all the other little computers and angels, but frankly, my computer was an utter cunt, so I doubt it. There was one brief moment of reconciliation when it saved something precious without Unexpectedly Quitting, which made me so emotional about the good times, I cried. But if I’m honest, there was already too much resentment in the mix, too much anger, and the idea that my desktop might now be bobbing away in an everlasting lake of hellfire, protesting about fatal errors and 'changes that have been made that affect the global template' is, in truth, not too difficult to bear.

Which brings me very neatly to the next reason…

PMS that won’t go away: For about three weeks now, I’ve been getting really bad PMS. Horrible nightmarish PMS. The kind of PMS that wouldn’t go away even if you took a billion grams of evening primrose oil, poured it into a biodegradable butt plug, shoved it up your asshole, and then left it there forever.

And, as you can imagine, blogging is not possible when you’re in the middle of a PMS episode of such severity. Neither is any kind of mental activity that requires focus. On a more positive note – and it’s important to count your blessings - there is a whole world of shit out there that I could be doing; activities that are perfectly suited to prolonged PMS episodes; such as drinking gin, eating like a pig, shouting like a total fuck, contemplating the atrophying of my aspirations, and putting all the furniture in the house into self-storage to reduce the clutter (and the smell).

Happy holidays campers!

HOME STINK HOME

2012-06-14T11:04:00.000+01:00

OK. Here’s the problem. Every time I come back from a holiday, the house stinks.

The porch and hallway smell like The Elephant House in high summer.

The rest of the house also smells like The Elephant House in high summer, except one of the elephants has VAG ROT, and all the other elephants have died.

The situation has gotten so bad I dread coming back.

“Please god let the cats not have shit everywhere”, I whisper to my partner on the journey home from our most recent holiday. “I don’t think I can take it.”

“Just relax”, says my partner. `’If they have, I’ll clear it up straightaway.”

My partner doesn’t know me. If he did, he wouldn’t bandy around inflammatory words like ‘relax’. Conversely, I know him well enough to know that the very first thing he will do on arriving home will be to scroll through the list of recorded programmes on the Sky Plus Planner. He would do this even if he needed to pick the zapper out of a buzzing, twitching heap of cat shit as big as Ayers Rock.

I shouldn’t say anything but I do.

“I don’t mind clearing up cat shit”, I say. “I just hate the smell - the fact that I’ve just come back from holiday and as soon as I walk into my own home - it’s all totally over. It’s like a giant metaphor for real life.”

“Fucksakes”, says my partner, quite loudly now. “Can’t you ever just relax?”

"L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E”, I say. The kids are watching a DVD in the back of the car.

We arrive home half an hour later. The front door seems to be hovering in a cloud of queer neon-green gases. I walk into the porch; hold my breath. When I finally realize I can’t smell anything, I’m so relieved I could cry. My partner turns on the TV. He sighs contentedly. He prepares his corner of the sofa.

But it is as if the movement he makes disrupts something - makes something come alive - because all of a sudden there IS a smell: a wretched, abominable, fucking pong. It creeps up my nose and down my throat like some decomposing worm. It is Eau de Hell, no less.

“Oh my god”, I say. I can’t believe it. It’s totally foul. Worse than usual!”

My partner ignores me. He wanders off to the kitchen to make a snack.

“I’m making toast and hummus”, he says. “D’you want some?”

“Don’t touch the hummus”, I shriek. “It’s probably that.”

I imagine the hummus, bulging with gases; potatoes liquefying in the vegetable tray; an array of burst, weeping things. As I put the kids to bed, a number of other explanations are running through my head, primarily:

Toxic Mould
Poltergeist
Mice
And last but definitely not least, The Underfloor Void

Back down-stairs, my partner comes into the lounge, carrying more toast.

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way or anything”, he says. “But it says on my phone that you’re, um, that you’ve got PMT.”

I am outraged and impressed in equal measure. I can feel bits of my face going in opposite directions.

“I found this app called My Days”, he continues. “You put your dates in and it warns you about, you know, ha ha, incoming storms.”

“What the fuck has PMT got to do with the fact that the house stinks?” I say.

I don’t let on how weirdly flattered I am by his decision to download a phone app about MY menstrual cycle.

“You know what you get like”, is all he says.

He sits down in the same position on the sofa. Rearranges a cushion. And then farts. Within seconds, I get a hit of the same bestial pong as before.

“Oh.My.God”, I say. “Have you got some kind of exploding anal abscess or what?!!!”

He pulls out his phone, scrolls over something on his touch screen.

“Just two more days of it’, he sighs, and eats his toast.

WINKIEHEADS

2012-05-28T10:52:00.001+01:00

Yesterday afternoon, I walked with my toddler and four-year-old son to the school. We walked in single file in the deliciously cool shadows of some cypress trees. My toddler was asleep in the buggy, fiercely clutching a dandelion clock, the spoils from an earlier battle with her brother. My son was wearing his beloved blue snowboots, from which he won’t be parted, in spite of the heat.

‘Children get very tired walking”, he said. “Bumblebees get tired too, don’t they?”

I passed him his new red water bottle. He drank with both hands clasped seriously around the bottle, his eyes closed, and although we were late for school, everything was absolutely perfect.

Perfect, that is, until the driver of a massive fuck-off Eddie Stobart Heavy Goods Vehicle – which was already driving too close to the kerb – beeped his horn TWICE, long and hard.

“Nigel, mate”, he shouted, waving to a guy on the other side of the street.

He beeped it again, this time for longer. The ground vibrated. Shock waves circled the village. A woman drew back her curtains, probably thinking it was Jesus, bombing down to earth, blowing a big End-Times trumpet. Or, a bunch of archangels going apeshit. The toddler woke, dropped her dandelion clock, started screaming. My son was even crosser than me.

“Keep it down you … YOU”, he shouted. “You … WINKIEHEAD”.

Now I love all my children equally. But at that moment, my son was nothing less than a hero. Of course, I wasn’t best pleased with his use of the term ‘winkiehead’ so close to the school, and where he got it from is a total mystery. I also believe that the collective noun for people who use their horn with no consideration for other people, and in ways that don’t adhere to Rule 92 of The Highway Code, is, technically, KNOBHEADS. But this is nit-picking.

So, in honour of my small, supremely cross superhero, here is a list of total winkieheads I prepared earlier:

Taxi drivers: taxi drivers often beep the horn to let you know they’ve arrived. They are so committed to keeping a line of communication open with their customers that within minutes of arriving at your house, they will have beeped the horn three of four times, maybe more. This is particularly the case if they are early; in fact, the earlier they are, the more they beep. Once, I was unable to make it to the front door to acknowledge the beeping because, frankly, I was in the middle of pushing a gargantuan tampon into my vagina, and although there was a good five minutes left to go before my scheduled pick-up time, the driver drove away. But who can blame him? Can a taxi driver really be expected to conquer his crippling fear of doorbells, or risk entering an atmosphere not yet purified by the scent of Magic Tree, just because some flake is doing last-minute gynae shit?
Middle-management men from the banking or financial sectors: this group typically drives BMW Series 3 cars, or Audis (those cars with the LED day-lights and the cock-rings). These men believe that the one sextillionth of a second after the red light changes to amber is precisely the right time to beep the horn. But again, who can blame them. Right? After all, they are in a dreadful rush: quite unimaginable to the rest of us. In fact, anyone who thinks that a toddler wresting herself out of a child-seat, and/or climbing over the front seats towards the steering wheel, is good enough reason to proceed with caution at the traffic lights is a shilly-shallying over-sensitive chicken-shit loser who will never make it in the REAL world. And last but not least (no, definitely not LEAST), many men from the financial sector are also afflicted by large burdensome penises that do not easily fit into the confines of a normal cockpit, which means that they must either arrange matters so that a) their appendages rest on the gas pedal, as often happens, or b) on the horn.
HGV or white van drivers who recognize a mate called Nigel on the pavement and think it entirely appropriate to beep the horn to say hello, in spite of the fact that the afore-mentioned Nigel may be a matter of yards away from someone fitted with a pacemaker, a baby asleep in a pram, a shift worker asleep in their house, an elderly person of a nervous disposition, or a psychotic whose violent episodes are triggered by external auditory cues (it happens, OK!), not forgetting all other road users who will now spend the rest of their day wondering whether they have an urgent problem with their cars, or their driving …

WINKIEHEADS? KNOBHEADS? YOU DECIDE.

MORNING PEOPLE

2012-05-08T22:36:00.001+01:00

Everyone knows that the world is divided into two kinds of people: Larks and Owls.

Larks love the mornings. Every morning, at the ass crack of dawn, they pop out of bed like a bunch of smiley creepy jack-in-the-boxes, before going for a run around the village, or composing entire symphonies, or eating thousands of goji berries, or singing really chipper hymns of praise to the Sun Goddess, or whatever.

Unlike me, larks don’t wake up every morning to a spectacular shit-pile of negative thoughts, which in my case, looks something like this:

At least when I’m in a nursing home I won’t have to do THIS
I’m so tired I must have got M.E.
Would it be possible or practical to install an oxygen cylinder in the bedroom?
If I don’t get up NOW, or at the very latest before the alarm clock says 7:28, something awful will happen.
I could probably gain an extra half hour’s sleep if I home educated.
I wish I was three.
Why is this bedroom so cold?
and …
Is there a God?

ETCETERA.

My mother’s take on the problem is that I need to alleviate the stress of mornings by preparing my stuff in advance, i.e the night before - as she did. I long to tell her that it was easier for women in the Seventies, because, you know, they didn’t use up all their energy trying to be nice to their kids, or fretting over stupid shit like their kids’ emotional and psychological wellbeing, so they had loads more energy for chores in the evenings.

But I suppose she’s got a point.

Deep down, I know I should get the kids’ school uniforms ready the night before, and prepare their lunches, and pack their gym kits, and fill their homework bags. I know I should divide almost ALL my free time equally between finding the permission slip for my daughter’s school trip, and finding the one working biro to date and sign the permission slip, and that I should also devote at least another hour to a) rifling through all the coats in the hallway in order to find a fifty pence coin for the PTA raffle; b) writing a cheque for a million billion pounds for the single 6 by 4 school portrait from fucking Colorfoto; and c) packing a piece of fruit for playgroup (or ideally, a selection of homemade croutons or crudités because * playgroup leader rolls her eyes * they always get given fruit, and if they’re to win the Gold Standard Healthy Snack Award, they require variety, blah-dey fuckin blah.) Yes I know this, ALLRIGHT. But, the problem with this strategy of extreme forward planning is that it extends the misery of what is already a relentlessly repetitive morning routine into the previous evening. Or, in other words, IT SUCKS.

You see, once the kids have gone to bed, I don’t want to butter bread, mainly because I have already spent eight farking hours in the kitchen. Not that you could tell. Neither do I want to empty the entire contents of the recycling wheelie bin on the floor to look for the school permission slip, or dribble all over a biro until it works goddamit. I want to watch The Killing, or attend to my haemorrhoids.

And as for larks, they’re just cocksuckers.

Good night!

WHITES ONLY

2012-04-22T16:01:00.000+01:00

Most days, collecting the post is a dismal event. There is the usual avalanche of shit from the Inland Revenue, a flyer or ten from Graham the local Tory candidate, and reminders from the DVLA/bank. Quite frankly, the postman may as well vomit through the letterbox. But this morning was different. This morning, the hallway was filled with a transcendent white light. I shielded my eyes. I approached with caution, like Moses in front of the Burning Bush. There it was ... On MY mat ... In MY house ... The White Company catalogue.

Just to clarify, I have never bought anything from The White Company as I am not in the habit of paying £55 for a White T-shirt, or sleeping on crisp White 600-thread-count percale sheets. All I can think is that some kind, philanthropic soul from The White Company - intent on disseminating Happiness - hacked into NHS confidential records, traced the details of all those who have ever suffered from depression, and thought, “I know what would make these sad people feel better! The White Company catalogue!”

I made myself a mug of coffee. I flicked through the pages. I saw pictures of beautiful blonde women (exclusively White!!!), dressed head-to-toe in White, moving effortlessly from White sofa to White beach. But then, I remembered a couple of other things about White. So I listed them.

White is not flattering. Unless you are a size zero, wearing White will make you look like a humongous maggot.
Unless you also have a sun-kissed complexion acquired whilst a) quaffing Pimms besides a freshwater infinity pool on the Seychelles, or b) power-boating around Richard Branson’s Necker Isle, wearing White will not cut it. If, like me, your skin has the ghastly washed-out appearance of a prole, a White linen tunic will make look neither gorgeous nor Grecian; instead, you will lose all definition and appear as though you have a) no edges, b) no nipples, and c) no genitals.
White gets filthy. This is obvious to most of us, except for Chrissie, the founder of White Company, who claims that White is an easy and practical colour. (Initially you feel sorry for Chrissie. She might be a big posh freak NOW, but on the White Company’s website, she tells the poignant story of her early struggle to overcome injustice, social exclusion, and worst of all, mediocrity. “It all began in 1993 … At the time, the few white items I could find and afford were somehow all such cheap designs and of average or poor quality ... and all the gorgeous, high quality ones I loved were only to be found in the designer departments...” How could anyone go through such a dehumanising experience day-in day-out and come out the other end unscathed, you ask yourself? Huh? Huh? And if there’s a God, how could he allow such things? “Chrisse”, you wanna say, “Are you sure you’re allright now daaarling?”) Of course, later, when you’ve had a chance to read the catalogue, your attitude will harden, and you’ll find yourself thinking, “Take me off your fucking database, you fetishistic horse-faced maniac.”
Wearing White means that you need to invest in a new bra and new knickers.
Gwyneth Paltrow wears White.

PS: You will notice that, throughout this list, I have capitalised White. This is not because I don’t understand the difference between nouns and proper names. I do. This is because The White Company capitalises the word White, presumably as an acknowledgment of the fact that White is less a colour, more a religion, a philosophy, a Way of Life...

Fascist twats.

TECHNICAL MELTDOWN

2012-04-09T10:57:00.001+01:00

Or. When Machines Turn Against You

I can’t be bothered to introduce this lot. They are all vile.

Printers – somewhere in California, there’s a place called The Museum Of Shit That Never Works. A whole wing of the museum is dedicated to printers and houses a model of every single printer ever made. This is because all printers are bastards. All they do is sit there, blocking out sunlight because they’re so farkin outsized, and whining on and on in a totally uptight way about being jammed, or out of paper, or out of ink, or toner, and then flashing their green asshole of a light at you. But the absolute worst thing about printers is when they pretend to be working. At least when they’re not working you can just paper tray them in the face and move on. But when they fuck about with your emotions, when they peddle Hope, when they start churning out paper, and your hand is outstretched pitifully, only then do you realise how treacherous they truly are. Because even before your touch the rim of the ‘printed’ page, in your guts you know it will be blank. You know, too, with even more certainty, that the second page will be concertinaed into a fan, that the third page will comprise three lines of satanic runes masquerading as HTML, and that the fourth, fifth, and sixth pages will be something you wrote when you were fifteen, on an Amstrad computer that no longer even exists. In desperation, you will phone your other half for technical advice, you will sob a little out of sheer frustration, and then, within a few seconds, you won’t be able to help yourself, you big, pathetic cow, you will be weeping into the receiver and blubbering about wanting to do something else with your life, anything but THIS, and he will finish with you because, quite frankly, it’s the last straw. And then you will lose your job because you failed to deliver the papers. And all because of the printer. The cunt.

Catchas – What could be easier than typing out two little words on a spotty grey and white background in order to prove you’re not a robot? Huh? Huh? Huh? Well, let me tell you. Smashing the atom. That’s what. Or, sequencing the entire human genome. Or, unravelling the mysteries of the universe. Or, understanding the mind of God. Or, harnessing the sun’s power to meet the energy requirements of humanity for the rest of eternity. Or, getting Little Miss Gwyneth Paltrow’s perfect offspring to drink a mug of motherfucking Cup-A-Soup. That’s what. The other day, after about a billion attempts at typing the words - and having to suck out the insides of a whole Cadbury’s crème egg between each attempt just to stay calm and focused - I tried the audio version. Except, of course, nobody told me that the audio version is a download from Hell. This is what I got: “Oh please, mother, make it stop, it’s hurting. I’m gonna die up here. No. Keep away!” Well, something like that except it was backwards, and double-speed. *urinates on the carpet, traumatised *

Passwords – Passwords are okay if you’re allowed to choose anything. But some sites dictate that you must choose a password that contains exactly 8.5 characters of enigmatic but highly personalised letters, numbers, exclamation marks, hieroglyphics, animal drawings, juvenilia, and rare punctuation marks not used since Chaucerian times, all of which must be memorable, and case sensitive. Not only this, but if you forget your password - or if you forgot to keep a record of it in Excel, or whatever, you geriatric left-brained imbecile - you will only be resent a password to your email inbox if you complete a catcha test to prove you’re not a robot. Mwahahaha … mwahahaha… mwahahahahahaha…

Welcome to the dark side of Progress.

PS: OK. Those are some lines from the Exorcist and weren’t in the catcha audio version. But I still maintain that there was a strong demonic influence. Either that or I was high on crème egg.

PPS: I managed to get myself nominated for The Mads Awards thingies. If you feel like nominating me, I'll let you suck out one of my eggs. I've got loads left, and they're in pretty good nick. Apparently. Ta.

NO POO PLEASE

2012-03-30T10:56:00.000+01:00

This week’s been a helluva week. It all started last Sunday with a burst eardrum. I was resting in bed, recuperating from a nasty bout of flu, when this immensely horrible squealing noise erupted from inside my middle ear, as if there were a bunch of hedgehogs, fucking, right there, IN MY EAR. After that came an uncanny popping sensation, followed by an explosion of blood, pus, and assorted bits of ear percussion, all of which landed on my pillow. On Monday morning, the GP diagnosed a burst eardrum and told me I couldn’t a) go swimming, or b) wash my hair for six weeks.

Now as far as I’m concerned, going swimming with three kids in tow is probably third in the League Table of Stress after divorce, and moving house, so I’m not bothered on that count. But not wash my hair for six weeks? Are you kidding me? I will smell and look like Satan. My hairline will be festooned with boiling pustules of acne. There will be mange all over my scalp and rivers of excess sebum coursing down my forehead. People will start throwing rocks at me.

Not that I’m the kind of person who washes my hair every day, or even every other day, in case you’re wondering. I’m a big believer in the idea that natural oils are good for the hair. Even to this day, I’m still wound up by that blond-haired streak of piss The Timotei Girl, and her disturbing addiction to keeping her mane clean. Listen, love, I want to say, I don’t give a shit that your shampoo is so frickin mild that you can wash your hair as often as you wish, or that it contains ~~cheap detergent~~ natural herb extracts, really I don’t. All I ask is that you DO. IT. INDOORS. AND. NOT. IN. A. BLOODY. PADDOCK. And please, don’t even get me started on those Wash and Go adverts. “Spend time on shampoo and conditioner? Take two bottles into the shower? Not me! I just want to wash my hair and go, so I use Vidal Sassoon Wash & Go.” Do you? Do you really? Is that because you’re a young thrusting go-getter with a UNIQUELY important and hectic schedule? Or is it because you’re a massive twat? Hmmm.

But, but … six weeks is a long time. Even for me.

On the bright side, my greasy bangs will be bang on trend. I’m told that the environmentally-motivated no-poo (no-shampoo) movement is gaining a steady following, with Mathew Paris of The Times, Prince Harry, Jessica Simpson, and Julianne Moore, all advocating that we wash our hair using only water and/or a mixture of baking powder and lemons. I only wish someone would tell this to those sulfate-peddling assholes Unilever, who are planning another Timotei advert.

POOPED

2012-03-14T10:24:00.000Z

This week I am knackered. Red Bull doesn’t touch it. Touché Eclat doesn’t hide it.

Everyone has started asking me whether I’m okay.

It seems my face is the main cause for concern. I look like a bloodhound on chemo. More specifically, I look like a bloodhound on chemo might look IF he were forced to shuffle around, say, Asda, for the rest of his life. My body, too, is exhibiting signs. I walk at a pace that would embarrass a sloth. I sigh and whimper and make grotesque mewling noises. In the evenings, when I haul my sorry ass upstairs, my posture is so spectacularly humped I cast a shadow that looks exactly like a FAT Nosferatu.

There are many reasons for my exhaustion:

1. My partner has taken up a job in London, leaving me to care for three small children, two incontinent cats, and a house, single-handedly. When I say single-handedly, I’m not being literal. (I don’t know how that woman off CBeebies does it, to be honest.)

2. I need loads of sleep – but I don’t get it. Mutants like Mrs Thatcher and Martha Stewart might only need 4 hours sleep a night, probably less, the fucking freaks, but I need 10. I love sleeping. I love sleeping so much I have dreams about sleeping. You could put a million billion genetically-modified peas THIS BIG under my mattress, and I wouldn’t give a shit.

3. Finally, there is the accumulation of six school runs a day, overseeing school creative writing workshops, blogging, the demands of a start-up PR business, and just generally trying to get my shit together after being at home with the kids, all on ONE day’s childcare a week.

Of course, it doesn’t help that we live in a country that has opted out of the European Time Directive - a country that has the longest working hours in western Europe – a country that can’t be bothered to provide adequate childcare or paternity leave but still expects you to be working 24 hours a day. *wipes rabid drool from chin, burns bra.* These days, if I happen to answer the door in my pyjamas, I have to pretend I’m a new mother, or a nurse who works shifts, or that I’ve been up since 5am, baking bread, writing reports for the UN Security Council, and ironing my children's fucking homework, and that I haven’t had time to get changed. Actually, fuck that for an excuse … I am tempted to say that I’ve been SO ridiculously busy that I got changed to GO to bed about six hours ago, but got so distracted by my important schedule - by the trillion things that just couldn’t wait – that I didn’t have time to sleep at all!! Anything is better than someone thinking I might be mental, or idle, or on incapacity benefit, or, in other words, not earning money, not fuelling the retail economy, not buying shit I don’t need …

Meanwhile, I’m not sure whether there are any solutions for the outward signs of my exhaustion. I could try facial yoga, like Gwyneth Paltrow, but then I’d have to hire a contract killer to take myself out. A less extreme solution would be to inject 50g of pure caffeine straight into my face. Or move to Denmark. Where it’s civilised!

ARMPIT SEX AND OTHER SECRETS

2012-03-03T14:10:00.001Z

Once upon a time, my mother told me never to wash my dirty linen in public.

Luckily, my laundry has almost always been a private affair. These days, I am blessed with a new-fangled labour-saving device called a washing machine, which means that my smalls (which, naturally, reek of fornication and menstruation and other vile secretions) never have to make the journey to the village watercourse.

Of course, there is the possibility that my mother was using A Metaphor. In my childhood home, metaphors were powerful tools, used for moulding our young impressionable minds into dark abnormal shapes. Take this one:

ME: What’s the big deal with pre-marital sex?

MY MOTHER: You wouldn’t go to a greengrocer’s and take a bite from an apple before paying for it, would you?

Now I’m the first to admit that sex is a fruity business. But not that fruity.

But anyway, if the advice about the dirty linen was a metaphor, I am about to disappoint mother (once again). You see, a month ago, I was tagged by one of my favourite bloggers, Adventures of a Middle Aged Matron, to write a blog for a meme called 7 + 7, which requires me to divulge seven secrets, as well as seven blog posts I admire.

So here goes:

I once stole mascara from Boots. In my defence, it was a lash-thickening electric-blue affair that promised to make me look like Ziggy Stardust. Instead, it made each eye look like a mandrill’s asshole.
I was once involved in a relationship with a Trainee Apostle at a Pentecostal church, which consisted of bouts of vigorous ARMPIT SEX. Armpit sex was so off God’s sexual radar that it hardly qualified as sex at all, or so I was told. Also, being entirely non-penetrative, it didn’t intrude on The Holy Spirit, who lived inside my body, in a temple-thingy, and who didn’t like getting a whole load of penis in his face when he was simply trying to go about his daily business. I have since discovered that the nasty old World Wide Web has whole pages devoted to Axillary Intercourse, or, as aficionados of coarse sexual terminology like to call it, ‘pit-wanking’, which I’m glad I didn’t know. Because, you know, if I had, I wouldn’t have felt quite so special.
I love snails. I love their coiled shells. I love the shy way they retract their antennae if you touch them. In a world that’s getting faster and crazier and more in-your-face by the day, I love their fat juicy slowness.
I don’t get the fuss about tigers. I quite like The Tiger Who Came To Tea - although his table manners are truly shocking - and I really like Tigger, mostly because he mispronounces words, and does a stupid amount of bouncing, both of which remind my of my son, but if any REAL tiger comes anywhere near me or my family, I will shoot its stripy furry endangered ass dead
I want a tattoo. When I was younger, I thought about getting the words Quod Me Nutrit Me Destruit tattoed across my lower back, but then Angelina Jolie went and got it, and I didn’t want people going up to her, poor cow, and saying “You so copied that Flossing the Cat, didn’t you?”
I don’t know how to operate an unattended/automatic car wash. I will never know how to operate an unattended/automatic car wash, same as I will never know how to play any card games (except Snap and Happy Families), or be able to drive on the motorway. What kind of over-achieving fucker knows how to operate an unattended/automatic car wash anyway? (I’m not obsessed, it’s just that I was confronted with one of these monstrosities in a petrol station forecourt last Tuesday, and the pain of it is still fresh and raw.) As you can imagine.
I’m not telling you my seventh secret, except that it involves an accountant in a bad wig, a butch haulier from Carmarthenshire, in a tutu, and an episode of weeping not seen since the days of the prophet Jeremiah. I’m saving the details of it for another one of these infernal memes!

And now for the blog posts I admire, all for different reasons:

A Beginner’s Guide to Middle Age – Adventures of a Middle Aged Matron

The Eagle Has Landed – Motherventing

Dear Beloved Friend - Older Mum (in a Muddle)

Living in Cloud Cuckoo Land – Mammasaurus

Watch you back 2012, I’m Coming For You - Up Yours Gina Ford

Newspapers, Poospapers – Maid in Yorkshire

Signing A Life Away – Stay At Home Dad

NITS

2012-02-21T09:06:00.000Z

I have nits. All day, it feels as though the four horsemen of the apocalypse have been galloping freestyle across my scalp. I have scratched my head so much I look like the Medusa. When I told my partner about my condition, he looked so disgusted, so well and truly turned-off, I may as well have said, “Hey darling, I just love eating shit.” Or, “Honey, I seem to have acquired an infestation of pubic crabs, but not to worry, they’re as happy as larry playing in the moist, thrushy rock pools of my groin.”

I should explain. My partner is the Nits Nemesis. He hates nits more than anyone else on the planet. I would go as far as to say that his hatred of nits is so off-the-scale that he now has a fully-blown Hedrin habit. Every time he goes shopping, he buys another bottle of the stuff. I say things like, “Look love, it’s not as if you’re stocking up on bottles of water, which, you know, in the event of the Mayan Apocalypse, might be really useful. It’s only Hedrin. And we’ve got six bottles already.” But then, to be fair to him, Hedrin is always bringing out newer, better versions (lotions, mousses, spray gels, overnight gels, one-hour gels), and it’s pretty hard to keep up. Hedrin is worse than that other motherfucking asshole, Adobe Reader, which needs about 40 updates a week just to stand still, each of which requires downloading and installing programmes, and shutting down and rebooting your computer, which eats up at least twenty minutes of your ONE AND ONLY life, every day, and all of this when you only have half and hour of childcare every week, the fucking assholes.

But anyway, before I go on, let me give you a ‘flavour’ of the kind of conversations we have about nits:

ME: I think I might have got nits.

PARTNER: Go and sort it then, for fucksakes.

ME: Yeah, I will in a minute love, just give me a minute will you?

PARTNER: There’s plenty of Hedrin up there. GO.SORT.IT.NOW.

ME: Yeah, I will love, IN.A.MINUTE. Can’t you see that I’m just trying to put this kitchen FIRE out!?

I freely admit I procrastinate. For a start, applying Hedrin to your hair makes you look like one of those tragic sea otters caught up in the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster. (Or Bob Geldof.) Also, if you do happen to drip even the tiniest droplet of Hedrin on your bathroom floor, please don’t EVER try to clean it up, please. If you do try to clean it up, this is what will happen: you will die. You will slip on the tiny Droplet of Oleaginous Doom and skid, in some horrible parody of figure skating, through your bathroom window, to your death. Instead seek out the assistance of someone who can build a suspended floor.

But the absolute worst thing about head lice is this: even when you’ve applied a whole bottle of Hedrin to your hair, and sectioned it, and scraped a nit comb through it for half a day, and there’s a stink of genocide in the air, and the evil teeth of the nitty gritty comb are dripping with blood and human skin tissue and drowned louse carcasses, and you’ve also managed to get a bit of Hedrin in your eye, and you are standing half-blind, gorgon-like, in front of your bathroom mirror, you just know that there’s still one left. One survivor. In the night, you can feel her, The Alpha Louse Mummy, The Immortal Grey Queen, running triumphantly between the strands of your hair, high on blood and human shame and Hedrin. And you know that she’s heavy with child. God bless her.

I LOVE AN AFTERNOON STROLL IN THE COUNTRYSIDE ...

2012-02-08T11:13:00.000Z

Last summer, I spent a couple of days at a life-coaching retreat in the countryside. For the most part, it was a happy, constructive experience, with lots of time for reflection, a heavenly reflexology session, and sound nuggets of advice from the life-coach, such as YOU CAN’T EAT AN ELEPHANT ALL AT ONCE, which is a metaphor. I think.

On the downside, I flipped.

It happened on the second afternoon, during a stroll to the village shop to buy a Twirl. Afterwards, when I was supposed to be listing practical strategies to manage my time and emotions, I wrote an alternative list, a kind of memo to self.

This is just an extract:

In future, when you leave the retreat for the recommended afternoon stroll, don’t assume - as you turn on to the High Street - that the posh middle-aged woman tending her garden is ALMOST DEFINITELY thinking “Look, another one of those mentalists from that retreat.”
Do not immediately greet the woman with an overdone, exaggerated ‘Hi’ to reassure her that you are not a mentalist. Do not further assume – when the ‘Hi’ gets stuck in your throat and then comes out wrong – that she will immediately think, “Not just a mentalist, but a sheep-shagging cottage-burning mentalist”, just because you have a Welsh accent.
Once the crisis with the posh middle-aged woman is over and you’re passing a creepy narrow lane, try not to dwell on the idea that you are about to be gang-raped, and that this will be made all the more hideous because you are wearing a MAXI sanitary towel the size of a cruise liner. Try not to worry that the distinctive outline of the sanitary towel is ALMOST DEFINITELY visible through your jeans. Instead, thank god that you are still a fully-functioning woman capable of producing menstrual blood, and that you are not yet lugging around a bunch of dead rancid organs in your body.
As you pass a young couple with a baby, consider the (admittedly remote) possibility that they may NOT be thinking, “Look at that poor childless woman who has probably been staying in that retreat because her life is so lonely and tragic.” Ignore the fact you are exhibiting signs of agoraphobia. FOR FUCKSAKES JUST RELAX.
On arriving at the Co-op, don’t freak out over the realization that you have forgotten your PIN number and every single piece of information relating to your PIN number, and that you only have about 80p left in your childishly bohemian purse. Furthermore as you are counting coins outside the shop, do not assume that all the passers-by are WITHOUT EXCEPTION ALMOST DEFINITELY thinking, “I’ve not seen her around here before. She must be one of those mentalists staying at the retreat. Look at the nutty OCD way she’s counting those infinitesimally small pieces of currency.”
On your way back to the retreat, try not to worry yourself sick over the fact that the life-coach (whose house overlooks the retreat) will see you returning so soon after you left and conclude that you cannot possibly have had time to engage in reflection, and that you can’t be taking the retreat and life-coaching process seriously. Do not, I repeat, do not carry on walking down the High Street for at least another fifteen minutes just so that you can give the life-coach the impression of having been on a long reflective walk.
As you’re walking around, wide-eyed, drooling now, with your stupid empty purse just hanging weirdly from your hand, pointlessly killing time for some imaginary reason to do with your own paranoia, feel free to wonder why, when you’re with the kids, when you’re hiding behind the big green Phil and Ted double buggy, you feel less paranoid, almost normal.
Don’t start crying as you realize that when you’re with the kids, you are in love with humanity; when you’re with the kids, you see everyone around you as someone’s son, someone’s daughter; someone who is loved and cherished; someone who someone else would die for... But whatever you do, don’t start crying … don’t start crying … oh for fucksakes …

P.S: Since then, I’ve been told that reflexology, massage, too much time for reflection, and an over-stimulating afternoon stroll, can make you go gaga. Personally, I blame all that shit about trying to eat an elephant in one sitting, which is a very fucked-up image to give to someone who suffers from a general anxiety disorder. On the other hand, it might just be me.

PS I’m dedicating this blog to the Black Dog Tribe blogging network.

SUSPECTED PERI-MENOPAUSE

2012-01-26T22:17:00.001Z

This week, I’ve been mostly battling the symptoms of Suspected Peri-Menopause.

It all starts on Monday with an evil backache. In less than no time, I have turned from being a loving mother, partner, and daughter, into Quasimodo.

So my partner drives me to the local pharmacy.

Now, the local pharmacist is a healthy young specimen. He isn’t sexy. He doesn’t smoulder. But he is handsome, and symmetrical, and if he were the last person on earth, you probably would. (To be honest, the criteria wouldn’t need to be that rigid.) So the last thing I want to discuss with the local pharmacist is my spine. The very last thing I want to say is: Please, kind sir, I think I may have turned into a wretched hunchback. Could you please throw some rocks at me?)

This is not what I want.

I want to be able to giggle furiously as I ask for a multi-pack of ribbed condoms. I want to blush like a teenager as I ask for the morning-after pill. I want to follow the local pharmacist into a private consulting room and have him warn me about the dangers of unbridled promiscuity.

But instead we have a conversation like this:

“I’ve got a really bad back. It absolutely kills. It’s my lower back.”

“Do you do any sports?” he asks, smiling. “Did you bruise it?”

“No” I say. “I just woke up with it.”

I note that he says ‘sports’, and not ‘exercise’, or ‘gentle exercise’. I am pleased. But then, after a brief pause, the conversation seems to take a nosedive.

“How old are you?” he asks suddenly. “Whereabouts are you in your cycle?”

I am forced to tell him my age. I note that he doesn’t flinch, or look surprised.

“Somewhere in the middle”, I say. “I’m not so sure.”

“It might be your ovaries going a bit hay-wire”, he says. ‘You’re still a BIT young for it, but sometimes, around YOUR age, too many eggs pop out and your lower back can get a little bit tender...”

I am wondering when it became acceptable for medical professionals to use the words ‘hay-wire’ and ‘pop’ to describe biological processes. I am starting to think that the local pharmacist’s features are not quite as symmetrical as I thought. I am starting to think that the local pharmacist is a fucking amateur.

“It’s like when you get a cluster of zits on your face, and they hurt because of all the pressure, it’s like that with the eggs, and the ovaries…” he continues.

“Do you mean peri-menopause?’ I say, interrupting. “Is it something to do with the peri-menopause?”

I am putting words straight into the local pharmacist’s mouth. But in my fevered paranoid brain, I’m thinking, I’d rather say it before he does. If he says it - I’ll have to kill him. Also, I don’t like The Zit Metaphor. I like The Zit Metaphor even less than The Popping Ovaries Metaphor. I have zits on my cheek. A small crescent of zits that now appears every time I ovulate. My mother has the same thing happening to her - except that her zits are Angry Zits. Pissed-Off Zits. Zits that are like Eyes, Scanning the Environment for Snubs, and Slurs, and Perceived Slights.

“I suppose it might be”, says the local pharmacist. “But don’t worry about it. Just take some Nurofen.”

I buy the Nurofen. I fetch some Ibuprofen gel from one of the lower shelves. I examine a range of other potent-looking ointments. I look like Igor the hunchbacked lab-assistant from Young Frankenstein. I don’t bother to correct the stoop when I get up to pay.

My partner is waiting for me in the car.

“Suspected Peri-Menopause”, I say.

“Fucking hell, could you please be a little bit more dramatic,” he says.

INANIMATE OBJECTS ARE ASSHOLES

2012-01-17T17:50:00.001Z

Inanimate objects suck. With a few notable exceptions - such as books, a special companion of mine called Lelo who lives in a velvet pouch in my bedside cabinet, and my iPhone - inanimate objects are all assholes.

Take this lot:

Sellotape.

Don’t buy sellotape. You will lose it immediately. When you lose it, there is absolutely no point looking for it in desks, cupboards, ‘odds and ends’ drawers, or any other place normally associated with stationery. Instead, save yourself some time and check the following places: the cat litter tray, the fireplace, the park, the mythological realms of Camelot and Atlantis, or any of the 26 space-time dimensions posited by string theory.

Curtain hooks etc

The other day I was trying to hang some curtains. I quickly came to the conclusion that any item of hardware connected with drapery is, unequivocally, a cunt.

Keys

Keys are despicable objects that live deep inside the lining of your coat. Nobody knows how they got there, or when, as your coat pockets have no discernible holes. Sometimes, the only way of retrieving your keys is to take a massive, jagged swiss army knife, and stab at the beautiful, spotty red lining of your favourite coat until a huge ugly gaping hole appears. When you’ve done that, you will discover that the retrieved keys are actually a set of IKEA Allen keys, that your housekeys are in your bag, and that you are as mad as snakes.

Ring pulls on tuna cans.

Is there anything worse than being splashed in the mouth by fishy brine juice or fishy sunflower oil? Well, as it happens, there is. You see, it doesn’t matter how vigorously you wash your mouth after being splashed – plunge your face into boiling water or the cleansing fires of hell for all the difference it makes - you will still smell as though you have spent the whole of your life grinding your face into people’s genitals.

Superkingsize duvet covers

Superkingsize duvet covers are designed to fuck with your mind. At first glance they appear to have four corners, like a square or a rectangle ...mwahahaha ... mwahahaha... mwahahahahahaaaaaaa... But a superkingsize duvet cover is not a square, or a rectangle, or even a quadrilateral, numbskull. It is this: enneakaidecagon. Or sometimes this: pentakaidecagon. On really bad days, when you have PMT, it is this: hexakaideCUNTagon. To be honest, you can only be sure you're installing a superkingsize duvet cover correctly if you know how to apply the following equations:

Otherwise, burn the duvet, along with your coat, and your curtains, and your dreams, on a massive bonfire, and just walk out into the infinite night.

With your Lelo.

PS: I have just discovered that Lelo is also the name for a high-end female pleasure object. What a weird coincidence!!

HOW I LOVE A GOOD VALETING

2012-01-07T12:00:00.001Z

Not so long ago I took my car for a Gold Valet at a national car-wash chain. Usually I don’t go anywhere near car-washes or anything car-wash related. Whilst I’m not the kind of nutter who imagines that the giant foam brushes will crash through my windscreen or make me feel like I’m in a coffin, oh no no no, I’m still nervous of all those instructions about engaging certain gears, and stopping when certain lights flash, and how, if you’re not following the instructions, you might be KILLED or MAIMED in an unimaginably freakish way. But a valet sounds manageable. Even nice! I went as far as hoping it would mark the start of brand-new more organised me.

Yeah, right.

You see, I didn’t notice the small print, the invisible print, the print that should have been there:

Do not bring your car for a valet here unless you like ritual humiliation.

Do not bring your car for a valet here unless you like having shame heaped upon you.

Definitely do not bring your car for a valet here IF criticism triggers inexplicable feelings of rage and frustration, and/or can tip you over The Edge, into an abyss of despair and depression. Motherfucker.

All I saw was a cheerful blue and yellow sign that said something like:

BRING YOUR CAR FOR A VALET HERE

I had a bad feeling as soon as I arrived to pick up the car, which was sitting in the middle of an empty, creepy parking lot, in a pool of dark waters. The doors were thrown open and there were weird drying machines everywhere, making the chassis creak and rock. Suddenly, a woman emerged from the car’s interior, like Jack Nicholson sticking his face through the door in ‘The Shining’, her face damp, her eye make-up everywhere, tufts of hair sticking out at deranged angles from her head.

“Still damp luv. Shoulda told me about it shouldn’t ya?” she said.

“What d’you mean?” I said.

“Back seat luv. Covered in vomit. Took ages scrubbing it.”

“It’s Frubes” I said. “I don’t think it’s vomit. It’s definitely Frubes.”

“Nope. Definitely vomit luv. Loads of it. Behind the kids seat too. Took me ages. I’ll leave the blowers on another ten minutes, it’s still damp. Never seen nothing like it.”

Now I’ll be honest. My car has seen some things. (Although not Dogging. Definitely not Dogging.) A few years ago, after the birth of my son, I didn’t drive for a couple of weeks. When I finally opened the car door, the upholstery seemed to twitch and swell and change colour; a black cloud rose from everywhere at the same time. For a moment, I had no idea what I was looking at. Then I realised. The cloud was an infestation of fruit flies - thousands – all coming at me through the open door, with everyone on the street, staring. But only once has there been an episode of vomiting. Once ever, I’m telling you. And I cleaned it up thoroughly.

Even if there had been vomit, surely it wasn’t the valet’s job to inform me? (Imagine going for a colonic irrigation, and then, halfway through the procedure, the practitioner freaking out like a proper mentalist and yelling about there being shit everywhere.) If nothing else, dear valet, think of my poor mother. If everyone else goes around undermining the fuck out of me, what’s there left for her to do?

As it happens, my car is once again in need of a good valet. There’s a lollipop fused to the dashboard; it smells like Satan’s lair. But this time, I’m waiting for one of the kids to throw up. Or better still, all of us.

Then I’m taking it.

DEAR BOSS

2011-12-31T14:37:00.003Z

My partner excels at romantic gestures. This year he bought me a book, wrapped in the prettiest red paper, with the magical word ‘Love’ in the title. Now I know what you’re thinking. Is it ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Is it ‘Love’ by Toni Morrison? Well no, it isn’t either of these. Great works of literary fiction only claim to change your life; my partner has bigger ambitions. His gift was a self-help book that will change my life for real. A book called ‘How to Get A Job You’ll Love’.

Thanks baby.

You see, for a long time now, I’ve been worrying that all this pissing about raising my kids is below me. How I’ve longed for a book that will help me get off my fat lazy stay-at-home-mummy ass (covered as it is in great oozing bedsores from sitting down reading stories to my kids) into the world of REAL work.

Even as I write, there are tears of gratitude welling up in my eyes, blurring my vision. I'm so moved by his gesture that I feel compelled to share with you the list I’ve compiled in response to one of the book’s first exercises; a ‘cathartic’ list of all the things I have disliked about work in the past, which is meant to help me move forwards.

So here goes:

1. I don't like meetings. For a start, no one listens to me. My partner reckons it’s because I speak at a pitch that is audible only to whales, elephants, or supernatural beings blessed with powers of super-hearing, i.e Superman/ Wolverine/God. I’m not so sure. On the rare occasion I do say something interesting, it’s really odd and funny how one or other of my colleagues (usually a male) will make EXACTLY the same observation a few minutes later. As if by magic. Lately, I’ve been secretly thinking (although it’s not in the book) that the only way forward for me is to attend any meetings equipped with a massive strap-on cock and shout my ideas really loudly into a fucking megaphone. See if that works.

Alternatively I could get my tits out. Which brings me to the second point…

2. Recently I have read reviews of a very bad and naughty book by sociologist Catherine Hakim called ‘Erotic Capital’, in which she argues that women should be using sex appeal to get ahead in the boardroom. My feeling is that Catherine Hakim’s strategies might work fine until you’re 30. Taken to extremes, you might even find that fellating your (married) boss on the boardroom table gets you a mini-promotion (although never ever his job). By the time you reach 40, however, you will have realised that wearing a short skirt into the office is more likely to provoke violent gag reflexes. Suddenly you realise you’ve been misled. Suddenly you have to man up, draw on other skills, like the ability to assert yourself. And it’s bloody hard. So Catherine Hakim. Listen with mother. I know I sound a little crazy, a little emotional, a little irrational, even hormonal - but what I think I’m trying to say is this: shut the fuck up, you tedious reactionary.

3. I don’t like inflexibility in the workplace. For instance, I drop my kids off at school at nine o’clock in the morning. This is what I do. I like to give them a kiss and a cuddle, and see them off into the world. I'm such a wet. Just because YOU want me to be in the office by nine o'clock in the morning for no other reason than because someone in the US in the 1950s said that business hours constituted 9 a.m until 5 p.m (rather than 9.15 until 5.15, or 10.00 until 6.00), it doesn’t mean it should automatically be that way forever and ever. Does it? Listen, I would be there if there were a meeting, or something important, but I just don’t get why I have to be there at 9.00am just so that I don’t miss the critical life-or-death moment when the kettle boils and everyone makes their morning tea and stands around for absolutely aeons discussing what they did the previous evening. PS: I’m not lazy. I never take a lunch hour. Look, boss, if we could just talk about it for a minute in the boardroom, ALONE, I’m sure we could come to some agreement…*brings out Catherine Hakim’s book*…

4. I don’t like leaving my kids in the care of other people for longer than a few hours. Something to do with me giving birth to them and feeling responsible for them. Fucking crazy stuff.

Anyway, as you can plainly see, I’m making progress. I’m thinking positively. I’m talking myself into a good place. I’m all psyched up. I’m supposed to write approximately ten points before I move on to the second exercise in the book, then I’m supposed to read the whole book, but hell, I think I’m ready! I’m growing huge balls as I write. I’m manning up. I’m crushing up all the maternal bones in my body and making cocaine from them. I’m even thinking I should share this blog post with my contacts on Linkedin? What do’ya think? What d'ya think! Fuck, I’m even thinking I’m going to burn that soppy po-faced Oliver James’s book ‘How Not to F**k Them Up' this very minute, and phone a childminder, or preferably, the child-catcher in 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang', see if he's got spaces...

It’s gonna be great.

SEX IN A COLD CLIMATE

2011-12-19T12:55:00.000Z

Normally I’m a fun-loving kind of gal. I like playing mummies and daddies. I like doing the matrimonial polka. I like taking a turn on the hobbyhorse.

I say normally, because there are three exceptions to this rule. These are a) during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy; b) during any episode of d&v but especially when it's that motherfucker Norovirus; c) when it’s cold.

There is NO WAY I’m lifting up my petticoats and/or traditional cotton winceyette full-length long-sleeved nightdress* in this weather. I like my body the way it is, thanks very much, not all blue and puffy and lifeless. As it happens, I think my partner feels the same way. Yesterday he bought a Dreamland luxury super-king-size heated mattress cover, which has five settings, including a super-fast pre-heat option, a dual control unit that allows each side of the bed to be set at different temperatures, an all-night timer, an elasticated skirt, and an extra foot warmth section. Which says it all.

You see, there was a time when an electric blanket that you could leave-on-all-night would have been a diabolical health and safety hazard, if you know what I mean.

It helps neither of us that my personal hygiene takes a nosedive in the cold.

Take a shower? Are you crazy? Why not water-board myself in the face with jugs of liquid nitrogen? Why not drill myself a bathing hole in the eastern Antarctica ice mass? Listen, I can't even extend a bare arm into the shower cubicle to turn the water on. I say water, but it's not water, not really. It is the Icy Ejaculate of the Antichrist. (Sometimes I try disassociating myself from my arm. No no no, I say to myself, it doesn’t matter that there are horizontal jets of satanic spume pounding against your skin, because it isn’t your arm!! It is a joke arm, a prosthetic limb. Just look at it dangling there, white and pimply, with shameful little brown hairs standing on end, ha ha ha, ha ha ha!!!)

I will concede, of course, that things are momentarily better once you’re in the shower, once the violent shivering and the mental confusion abates. But then, I have to step out again. Like Captain Oates.

I find the bath less distressing, but only marginally. You still have to get out, goddamit. You still have about 30 seconds to acclimatize before you experience total cellular and metabolic shut down. And of course, the towel heater is never on, is it?

It is an absolute nightmare. So I stay dirty. And not in that way. Not til spring...

* I forgot to say that the winceyette nightdress of which I speak also features a delicate and very flattering pink floral print. (Oh, god, no! Get a friggin tissue for godsakes!)

PS: My partner has just pointed out that he bought the Dreamland luxury heated mattress cover for me - and me only. There is never any diminishment of his sex drive in the cold, he says. He has never even heated his side of the mattress. Like Bear Grylls, he would probably prefer to spend the night suspended from a bivoucac on an ice shelf in the south pole. What a guy.

An A-Z of Christmas Humbug: C is for Christmas Concert

2011-12-13T16:13:00.002Z

Today I have a dead ass. A bum so numb I might as well have a) scooped out a load of silicon gel from one of my baby daughter’s sodden nappies, blended it up with porridge, and PVA glue, and hairy chunks of Lego from under the sofa, and injected the whole bloody lot of it straight into my ass cleft, or b) tattoo’d a detailed Technicolor picture of a Stage 4 Bedsore on each of my ass cheeks with a spectacularly dirty needle and then waited for Life to mimic Art.

That’s how fucked-up my bottom is.

It’s all the fault of the school Christmas concert. Of course.

I should have known something was up as soon as I saw one of the other mummies carrying a pair of PINK MATCHING CUSHIONS into the school hall a whole half an hour before the concert goddammit. But I was already misty-eyed at the thought of my little ones, singing their hearts out, solemnly saying their one line, looking for their mummy and their daddy in the audience, and I didn’t register.

In fact, I didn’t really register until I was queuing right up alongside the school hall windows and saw hundreds of TINY CHAIRS arranged in neat rows inside the hall. My first thought was that the tiny chairs might be props. Perhaps we were about to see something different - not the usual nativity play - but a more subversive production, like, oh, I don’t know, a blackly comic play entitled something like Goldilocks Goes Fuckin Ape-Shit*. That kind of thing. Or, perhaps we were expecting a coach-load of Oompa-Loompas, or munchkins, or hobbits.

Of course, I doubt I would have brought a pair of pink matching cushions to the school Christmas concert even if I had known about the size and hardness of the chairs. For a start, I don’t like looking like a total TIT. And I like looking like a TWONK even less. (Even though I almost always do). Secondly, I only own one pair of matching cushions, and one of the pair features a picture of a giant, with a willy, drawn by one of my children in indelible permanent marker. And I don’t want to be sitting on a giant’s willy in my children’s Christmas concert. (Giant willy, maybe; giant’s willy, no.) To be honest though, I doubt I would have brought a pair of matching pink cushions to the school Christmas concert even if I had to sit on a 6ft cactus, or on one of those medieval Judas chairs, or an electric chair, or a spike, or a friggin Bumbo, or if they were the only things between myself, and a nail bomber. OK, I’ve crossed the line now. I know I have. I’m very sorry.

But this is how I feel about matching pink cushions.

I enjoyed the concert, of course I did. I had to swallow down hard as my little boy, in his ‘carol singer’ costume, sang a word-perfect rendition of a Christmas carol, and dutifully wore his multi-coloured scarf and gloves set, in spite of the centrally-heated school hall. I did the same when my beautiful daughter, in her wings and sparkly pink tights, danced with the other fairies, and said her line, and kept her cool, in spite of the fact that she was bricking it.

And if my ass dies, as it will, it will have been worth it.

* If anybody wants to commission me to write ‘Goldilocks goes Fuckin Ape-Shit’, I’m available. ‘Goldilocks Goes Fuckin Mental’ would work just as well as a title. The play would of course be a critique of society’s fetishistic attachment to possessions and property, and of our inability to share, a position represented by The Three Bears…

P.S: If you are the person who took the pink cushions to the school production, I’m only jealous.

P.P.S: This is probably the last in my A-Z of Christmas Humbug installments. From now on, this series of blogs will be retrospectively known as An ABC of Christmas Humbug. I'm bloody knackered okay.