Queen Morsh

Oh Robin :(

2014-08-12T12:33:00.001+01:00

I’ve come out of blogging retirement for one day only, just because I feel like I have to write this all down and get it out somewhere.

There aren’t many things that happen now days that make me feel like I just need to talk and talk and talk, or write and write and write. There are bad things going on in the world, things that I feel strongly about and things that I don’t, but sometimes it’s hard to convey into words how something makes you feel. Alas, there are certain times where the thoughts I have on a certain subject are so strong, I’m so sure of, that they are bubbling away inside me and I feel like if I don’t extract them from my head and put them into words onto a paper or a screen it’ll drive me mad. So this is what I am doing, and this post is purely for my own benefit.

I woke up this morning to the news that Robin Williams had died. I am ashamed to say that before this morning, I probably hadn’t thought about Robin for a longer than a few seconds at most, for years. It’s always hindsight that makes you wish you had watched his films and laughed at his stand up and in a way felt more connected to him at the time when something like this happens. It might sound like I am being dramatic, but Robin Williams was literally one of my childhood heroes and I didn’t realise how much of a loss I would feel for someone I didn’t know personally.

I grew up with his films, watching Ms Doubtfire continuously, LOVING the bit where he smushes his face into the cake so it looks like he’s wearing a face mask and secretly thinking it looked nice when the cream dropped into the coffee and wanting to eat the entire thing. I LOVED Hook, undoubtedly one of the all time greatest childhood films. I remember watching Jack the most, over and over again and even though I was young when it came out, the quality of his acting meant that I would sit there with tears in my eyes when Jack delivered his valedictorian speech, about how life is short and that you have to ‘make your life spectacular’. How correct he was, and it’s a testament to him that he can touch a 10 year old in that way, move them to tears, when normally the deep and meaningful aspects of films like that normally go over the child viewers head.

I think the circumstances of Robin’s death are particularly hard to take. Long battle with alcohol abuse and a history of severe depression. It’s unfathomable to me that someone that spent his life bringing such joy and happiness to others, someone so mad and full of laughter was unable to see it for himself. You could tell that Robin Williams was as wacky and zany in real life as he was in his films, and it’s wonderful to read all the stories that people are coming out with today about meeting him in real life and the funny things he did. There’s also a thousand stories about how kind he was, a ‘normal down to earth’ person described by his neighbours, someone who desperately wanted to make other people happy but just couldn’t make himself happy.

Part of me wishes that something had set this all off a week ago, something happy had caused us all to share our mutual love of Robin Williams on twitter, talk about all his amazing films, share personal experiences of him, photos, things that he did and will continue to do through his films that will continue to have us laughing for the rest of our lives. He wasn’t just a comedian, he was a joy to watch and every kid’s dream grown up. I remember watching him in films and wishing he was friends with my parents or something, just because it would be fascinating to watch and interact with him in real life. The thought of him dying alone and desperately sad in his house is heart breaking. I wish he could have seen the entire world discussing how much he was loved, like we’re doing today. Maybe it would have been different.

I truly feel like we're all suffering a loss today, so my thoughts go out to the family and friends who really knew him. For just his admirers and fans it's a kick in the gut, so the pain they must be going through, I can't bear thinking about.

The world is a worse place today.

RIP Genie. You’re free.

"but only in their dreams can men be truly free.. it was always thus and always thus will be"

Scaredy Morsh

2014-01-20T10:38:00.001+00:00

Following on from my blog post of last week regarding having strange random impulses to drive into oncoming traffic and throw myself in front of trains, I have another topic of discussion that has been interesting me of late... readers, let’s get weird.

Today’s topic is strange fears. Everyone is scared of standard things; the dark, spiders, serial killers, having to watch Mrs Brown’s Boys... I want to know if any of you have any weird, totally unfounded fears. I have 2 relatively normal and 1 random, as follows:

First up is Ornithophiba, the fear of the dirty rat winged bastards we all know as Pigeons. I know that most people are a bit wary of them, but if I am walking down the street and there is one standing in front of me I have an internal dilemma that only ceases when I am as far away from the pigeon as humanly possible or the pigeon has taken pity on me and flown away. Walking to work in the city I see a lot of pigeons and most of the time I manage to remain calm and just cross the street, like it’s some avian Mexican gang lord that is going to steal my purse if I go anywhere near it. I don’t really know what it is I am wary of, perhaps it’s the fact that pigeons in Central London are FERRAL and literally do not give a shit. Most pigeons or birds would fly away if you go near them, but the ones round here actually offer you out if you continue walking towards them. The amount of times I have seen men striding purposely up to one, refusing to be bullied by the flying rats only to be attacked by a low flying pigeon at the last minute, resulting in the bloke looking like he’s shat himself whilst break dancing in the middle of the street. They are dirty, intimidating and they must be eradicated. DEATH TO ALL PIGEONS.

My other ‘irrational but unfounded’ fear is Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns. I think I can remember how this started and it was in Macro of all places – you know that giant warehouse shop that sold everything wholesale? I remember they did bulk boxes of sherbet fountains which was literally the greatest thing ever. Anyway, I was young enough for all of the clothes stands to be taller than me, so when I ran off on my own I couldn’t see over the top of them to find my parents. This was initially a fun game as my parents couldn’t find me and it was like I was in a maze. This all instantly stopped being fun when for SOME FUCKING REASON, Macro decided to employ a clown ON STILTS to walk around the shop and scare the living shite out of all the kids. I remember seeing the clown, instantly browning my pants and trying to run away but everywhere I went I could still see the bloody thing because it was so tall. I ended up hiding behind a bulk box of crisps on a shelf in the food section, thus giving my parents a heart attack because they couldn’t find me for about 20 minutes. Ergo, my fear of clowns was born.

I decided to write about this subject because yesterday I encountered a clown at high speed. I was innocently driving down the M25, sunglasses on, S Club 7 blaring when I glanced to my left and my blood ran cold. Some masochistic pervert was DRESSED AS A CLOWN and driving along in the car next to me. I shouted fuck, dropped my cigarette on my lap and didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. I did the only thing I could do and floored the gas pedal, panting and whimpering while his red wig thankfully disappeared further and further into the distance, but not before I had given birth to approximately 1 million cows. He probably doesn’t know the horror he caused and was more than likely some kind old man who earns a living entertaining brave kids, but even so. He could have easily been a psycho serial killing NUTJOB couldn’t he? Yes, yes he could.

Look at this unhinged bastard

My last fear and probably the one that people understand the least is Globophobia, which translates to fear of balloons. First things first, I don’t mind helium balloons because if some bellend decides to pop one in your face, it just deflates like Meg Ryan after the Oscar nominations are announced. It’s the normal balloons, the ones that are full of peoples mouth breath and float around the place, antagonising you by throwing themselves into sharp bits of furniture and ‘accidentally’ landing on cutlery, and if popped, make you jump so much you attempt to punch your grandmother. I think it’s the bang that I am fearful of, but worst than this is the anticipation of waiting for it to bang. When you walk into a restaurant and you see a table full of idiots celebrating a birthday with extra long balloons tied to the back of their chairs, bouncing around precariously close to a hot light on the ceiling, I struggle to relax. Appetite is lost, conversation is strained, and I spend 95% of the night looking around to stare at the balloon, just willing it to hurry up and pop so I can go back to my evening. Balloons are forever banned on birthdays etc in my house and if anyone has one I cannot relax until they put it down. I remember going with my sister to ‘baby sensory’ once when my niece was small. The kids are all there, doing stupid shit like eating sponges and putting pegs up their nose when all of a sudden the lessons grand finale was announced and a shit load of balloons fall down from a folded up bed sheet and all the kids proceed to bite, lick, scratch, climb and sit on them. I panicked like Lionel Blair had walked into the room in his gimp mask and had to run out and spend the rest of the lesson waiting in the car, imagining the next 10 minutes to sound like I was in narm while the kids all take it in turns to burst the stupid balloons in their faces and not even bat an eyelid.

Anyway, I can’t write anymore because talking about all these fears is putting my nerves on edge. I am going to have an nice hot chocolate and a lie down and in the mean time I want you to tell me what your fears are please? After enquiring on twitter i’ve had the following responses and because I am nice, I am going to tell you the scientific phobia name so you can sound intelligent like me when you are talking about the stupid shit you are afraid of:

Cotton wool (Bambakomallophobia)

Dying alone (thantophobia or thanatophobia is a fear of dying in general – specifically for Michelle you morbid freak!)

Tissue (closest is papyrophobia – fear of paper)

Escalators (Escalaphobia)

Scorpions (arachnophobia)

Waxworks (automatonophobia)

Cucumber (closest is fear of vegetables, lachanophobia)

Stickers (Pittakionophobia)

To be honest I think I have a slight fear of escalators (getting worse as I am getting older weirdly), waxworks and standard things like scorpions, spiders etc. I am a particular type of pussy though and am basically scared of most things in life – I’m surprised I even leave the house sometimes. Anyway, if you would like to share please comment below, spread the world and let’s all huddle together in a warm cocoon of safety, while we shit eye the things that make us scared. I’m here for you all.

Weird little thoughts...

2014-01-15T13:07:00.000+00:00

Finally I am bored of forcing my opinions on you all, so I want you to read this post and tell me what YOU think in the comments. Before I even begin I want you to know neither I nor the other people I have referenced in this blog post are depressed, suicidal or on the brink of hurting anyone. We don’t need help, we don’t need to talk to someone and there is nothing wrong with us... We also mean no disrespect to anyone that has gone through or experienced any of the things we are referencing in this post – these are literally just our weird little thoughts...

So I was talking to a few friends the other day and we ended up getting onto the subject of weird things we think. Bear in mind I’m actually laughing as I am typing this because you are all going to think we are mental...

To make this easier to explain, I am going to start straight off the bat with an explanation merged with examples. One day I got into work and it had been very windy and a window panel had blown off the side of my building. I work in a tall building in Central London, so they had to shut the road and get fire-fighters out to replace it. All seemed like a bit palava at the time, but no one was injured and it was all sorted quickly, no bother. NOW every time I leave the station, walk down the road to work and spot my building, I get this horrible feeling that a window is going to fall out and land on me and cut my head off. That might seem like a normal, rational fear to you given the panel incident, but I actually imagine it happening and it makes me a bit panicky. I can imagine walking past the bakery and a big fucking panel smashes me to pulp on the floor like something out of Final Destination. Is that just a really weird, morbid thing to think of? I end up walking down the road looking up at all the buildings to make sure a big pane of glass isn’t hurtling towards me – just think about if that did happen, you wouldn’t even know it until it was too late? Scary.

I also get it when standing on train platforms, but this is more weird thoughts of the self harming variety. I have no desire to die by my own hands or anyone else’s so before you call the Samaritans just listen up. When I am standing on train platforms & the train is coming towards me I think “I could just jump in front of that train and be dead in 5 seconds" and it would literally be THAT EASY to kill yourself. Then I think it's really weird that you are that in control of your own life, and 9 times out of 10 the only thing that is stopping you from dying is... you?

I also think this when I am driving... “if I wanted to, I could just drive into that wall over there and kill myself”. I don’t know if I am still shocked at the level of responsibility each person has over their own life, but it is something I think about quite a bit. It still shocks me that in the morning, everyone I know trusts me to just wake up, get ready and go to work. The people I work with trust that I am going to do that. If my parents don’t hear from me throughout the day it doesn’t matter, because they just trust that I am at work – that to me is weird. I could literally leave the house and do ANYTHING, I could get a flight to Nepal, I could steal a donkey or go and get all my hair shaved off and my eyebrows dyed pink – but no one thinks I am going to do that, and I don’t. I do go to work, even though I have literally a thousand options of things I could do every day. That freaks me out too.

Before you try and commit me to a mental asylum I am not alone in this. The conversation that started this whole thought process threw up some interesting things that other people think about. One friend said that whenever they meet someone new and they are talking to them face to face, they kind of stop paying attention to the conversation and actually imagine punching them in the face – actually doing it, what they would look like as he was doing it, what it would be like, what the reaction would be etc. He said he has done it with virtually everyone he has ever met – he also admitted he’d done it with me on more than 1 occasion, but I think he’s not alone in that... This guy also admitted that his brother bought a cut throat razor, and upon holding it instantly felt like he wanted to slice his neck with it and told him he wanted it out of the house. He didn’t want to kill himself, he just couldn’t stop himself from imagining doing it and what it would be like. It’s not the actual act of wanting to hurt yourself as none of us want to, but it’s just the thoughts of what it would be like plus the responsibility that there’s literally no one there to stop us from doing it if we wanted to. It blows my mind really.

So basically I want to know what weird things you think about every day? Don’t worry about seeming mental, I think this blog post has proved that I am hardly the sanest person on the planet. I am just curious to know if this sort of thought process is pretty normal, or if I should maybe go and talk to someone about my issues... although I wonder what would happen if I just walked into the therapists office and slammed his head into the desk? Thoughts?

I'm baaaaaaaaaack

2014-01-10T10:21:00.001+00:00

Hola!

I am back, it’s 2014 and many things have changed... Since my last post I have got engaged, moved countries and got a new job!

Only joking, I am still as boring, single and mouthy as I always was. I’ve come back because after an extremely long bought of writers block, Celebrity Big Brother has inspired me to blog again and i’m telling you now it ain’t gonna be pretty...

I am sure previous readers of my blog will expect this post to be full of hate for Liz Jones, but surprisingly you are wrong. I still think she is an awful waste of air and having to look at her vile, misshapen head every night on tv isn’t doing my nerves any favours, but she is not the object of my hatred. Even though she smothers the whole bottom half of her face in Vaseline and walks around looking like she’s been jazzed on by a sperm whale, or says such frankly moron-ish things like (when asked if her mother was protective) said “yeah she really was, she just really didn’t want me to get run over or anything” (same as most mums out there I would have thought Liz?), I still have a special reserve of hatred for an alternative housemate. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Mr Lee Ryan.

Straight off the bat let me make 1 thing clear. How Lee has acted in the Big Brother house isn’t UNFORGIVABLE. It’s not as if he was married and cheated on someone on tv or anything like that, and frankly in the grand scheme of things it’s really not a big deal at all. The reason I despise him is because of how he has acted afterwards.

For those of you that aren’t in the know, Lee went into the house chained to a glamour model called Casey. Standard page 3 girl, big boobs, pretty face, hair extensions etc but she seemed alright. For the first few days Lee and Casey were chained together so obviously couldn’t leave each other’s side and got closer. Lee was ALL OVER Casey, hugging her and kissing her and telling her how much he liked her etc. It was a bit ridic. Next night, having finally been unchained, he waltz’s off (literally) with Jasmine Waltz, a home-wrecking nasty piece of work from LA with a skin to plastic ratio higher than Barbie’s. He snogs her and then spends the rest of his mundane existence all over Jasmine like a particularly annoying case of syphilis, and does it ALL IN FRONT of Casey. Then when Casey gets upset, proceeds to say she is mental and a bunny boiler and she’s making him look like the bad guy and he hasn’t done anything wrong, he doesn’t want to be a player.

For starters Lee, you aren’t a player. You are a little kid who’s not mature enough to interact with 2 girls at the same time without trying to get in their pants. You are an idiot. I can’t STAND boys like this. Fair enough Lee is single and can do what he wants, but you HAVE to understand why Casey is upset. If she starts developing feelings for a guy she THINKS likes her back, only for him to run off with American roadkill and flaunt it in front of her face she’s not going to be best pleased about it is she?

He’s doing the classic boy trick of trying to get himself off the hook by implying the girl is mad. Lee’s argument is that he hasn’t known Casey that long and wasn’t actually ‘with’ her, therefore she can’t be annoyed. We all know it’s not as black and white as that and Lee is losing fans (well I say fans, I actually mean people that previously tolerated him) by the bucket-load because of how disrespectful he is being to Casey.

For any boys reading this, this is not the way to act. Yeah fair enough sometimes you meet a girl and think you like her, then another girl walks in who’s prettier/skinnier/got bigger boobs etc and you decide you like her more. We KNOW you all think with your dicks, so these sorts of situations hardly come as a surprise to most of us. Just know that if this happens you should try and have enough respect for the first girl (especially if you are locked in a house with her for 3 weeks) to explain the situation to her, apologise and not flaunt the new relationship in front of her face. You don’t have to make her feel stupid and insane to make yourself feel better.

Frankly I think it’s amazing that Lee has 1 girl interested in him at all, let alone 2. This entire blog post isn’t about Lee Ryan specifically though, he’s just highlighted typical treatment of girls that happens in real life every day. I just think boys need to know that they don’t ALWAYS have to act like cocks if they do something wrong. Or even if they do something right. BASICALLY BOYS JUST STOP ACTING LIKE COCKS PLEASE.

Oh and I just want to throw this out there; if Lee Ryan is in a house with the racist, sexist neanderthal Jim Davidson, the world’s most obtuse, vile journo Liz Jones and horse playmate Dappy from N-Dubz and STILL manages to be the most hated person in there, he has got some major issues. ALL RISE!

and I thought the Daily Mail was bad...

2013-07-24T14:19:00.001+01:00

The Royal Baby is here and isn’t it bloody fucking lovely? Doesn’t it make London feel just like it did at the Royal Wedding, or when the Olympics was on? Isn’t everyone filled with sunshine and rainbows and in a constant state of perpetual happiness?

No? Ok, not quite, but it is cute. It’s cute from the Royal Prince’s little wave as he was bought out of the hospital, right down to the dress Kate wore to showcase the tot that matched Diana’s when she’d de-sprogged. It’s cute that most people are a bit bothered. It’s cute that William totally shat himself when he had to put the car seat into the car for the first time. It’s all cute, and most of London are embracing this cuteness.

It’s a shame then, that Ok! Magazine have decided to run a story THE DAY AFTER KATE GAVE BIRTH, about her fitness regime to get her back into shape. What sort of fucking story is that? Before the baby was born I was getting irritated with the news surrounding it. “Kate breaks down over pressure of being a mum”, “Kate can’t cope” “Kate is scared 7up will come out of her nipples instead of milk when she attempts to breastfeed” – Do any of these magazines expect us to think for 1 second that any of the content of these articles are true? I fully believe that we have more chance of the Royal Prince sprouting wings and flying to Africa to punch Nelson Mandela right in the death bed then we have of Kate disclosing any sort of personal information, thoughts or feelings to any part of the media.

So yeah, I thought the press BEFORE the birth were bad, but I had no idea. You would have thought the worst thing about this situation would be that there were so many press outside the hospital waiting to see the baby, that Wills and Kate got only 4 HOURS ALONE with their child before he became public property. 4 HOURS. Can you imagine giving birth, having a day of tests and hair appointments and this and that and then when any NORMAL couple would go home and bond with the kid, instead he’s yanked out of your arms and dangled in front of the worlds media so they can have an opinion of every aspect of his life, for the REST of his life? I mean, some of the press are moaning that we haven’t got a name yet – are they freaking serious? Give them a chance! They probably haven’t had time to think of a name because they have been surrounded by press officers, hairdressers, stylists and PR people trying to get them ready for the Prince’s debut into the media circus (which, coincidentally, the press were moaning about because they were told they’d come out at 6pm, and at 7.10 they were still waiting – get a grip).

That isn’t the worst thing about this situation though. The worst thing is that people are even speculating about how Kate is going to get back in shape after the birth, when she hadn’t even left the hospital? I liked that she came out with her deflated baby bump on show – it shows what a real woman looks like after she has given birth. She could have easily worn some fucking £10,000 designer tent and no one would have seen it, but she clearly didn’t give a fuck and I like that. That’s why I like Wills and Kate, because they do their bit but still want the press to back the fuck off – all you have to do is utter the name Diana to realise why Wills feels this way. I know they are both in the public eye, but Kate’s job isn’t to be skinny, it’s to be ROYAL. She’ll ditch that baby weight in her own time, but I can guarantee she probably has a million things that are more important to her at the moment – like trying to stop Camilla from eating the baby?

So to narrow it down, the press are vultures, Ok! can FuckOff! and Kate is a total MILF. The baby is cute, it’s made me feel all patriotic and now I am off to rub my ovaries while simultaneously waving a Union Jack and eating for 2 – no I am not pregnant but I might as well practice for when I am right?

P.S That baby is totes going to be called George. Or Alex. If it’s Nicholas I will fully spaz.

The hardest thing in the world everrrrrrrr

2013-07-19T12:13:00.000+01:00

So I am back blogging after suffering from really annoying writers block which consisted of me writing loads of blogs, getting 2 thirds of the way through and then deleting them as I had convinced myself I was talking a load of shit. This may still be the case, but I don’t feel as bad about it anymore, so deal with it!

To help me combat this writers block, and to give myself a bit of an exercise, I asked my twitter followers (my Twitter handle is @queenmorsh FYI) to all tweet me 1 word, and I would try and include them all in a blog post. I have written a short piece about LOVE with all words included and believe me now, it was HARD. My followers definitely weren’t easy on me & please bear in mind some of these words I had never even HEARD of and I found the explanations online - there is a list below detailing the words I was given and the meanings I found online...

LOVE

The subject of my blog today is LOVE. Good old fashioned love. It’s the one thing that differentiates humans from animals, the one thing that we all have in common. The ability to love overwhelms and consumes some of us, where for others it has a totally different meaning. It could be as simple as a fiduciary arrangement, nothing more than a matter of convenience, whereas for others it can be spontaneous, consuming, overwhelming and the thing that makes their lives have meaning. Love can be a peculiar thing.

Summer is a great time to be single, it’s the winter months where everyone wants to be in a relationship. In summer you can go out all day drinking with your friends in the sunshine, stay out till late indulging in acts of debauchery and it’s all perfectly acceptable. Summer is all sunshine and toes out, laying in parks and drinking bubbles after work in the heat. In the winter you don’t want to go out after work and run the risk of catching some sort of ridiculous winter ailment like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (cough). You want spend your nights chilling, stuffing your face with crumpets in front of the fire at home and just watch a film - if it’s October you need a companion to hide from the ultimate winter nemesis - little kids dressed as dinosaurs, dragons or a mutant princess while they are trick or treating – laying on the floor in a pitch black house giggling while little rascal kids whine through your letterbox is no fun on your own.

Being in a relationship is all well and good, but when a relationship ends it floors you. You walk around inconsolable, unable to hold conversations, unable to eat, drink. You almost feel floccinaucinihilipilification (I know, this is just ridiculous now), like you will never love again. The mere mention of weddings makes you want to encourage antidisestablishmentarianism (*clears throat*) just because you can’t bear to hear about rings or venues or cakes or HAPPINESS. SOD OFF EVERYONE. You let yourself go, eating cakes and fully embracing a lycanthropic state of mind, to the point of almost being moribund. Your friends gather around you in a state of phalanx, deflecting questions about the break up and protecting you from any potential upset (or seeing the beast your ex is now with). The entire messy relationship sporadically comes back to you and you can’t remember the bad times – to you it was amazing, nothing short of it. You’ve forgotten how much you wanted to punch his shrimpy little face in when he left the toilet seat up and invaded your personal space, and it’s because you have created a false ideology about him. You’re forgetting the frankly perpendicular decline your relationship entered into, and just remembering all those times he bought you tulips when you didn’t feel well and then sat next to you playing the xbox all night which at the time you thought was sweet, but now just realise it’s bullshit.

In short, we might all be getting older, and we might all think we want to settle down, but in reality relationships are nothing more than a pain in the frenulum (I have given up with that one).

List of words I was given:

Shrimpy

Spontaneous

Debauchery

Sunshine

Peculiar

Chilling

October

Crumpet

Princess

Nemesis

Dragon

Dinosaur

Rascal

Bubbles

Tulips

Toe

Sporadic – occasionally, irregular intervals

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis - type of lung disease

Floccinaucinihilipilification – valueless

Lycanthropic – the delusion in which one imagines oneself to be a wolf or other wild animal

antidisestablishmentarianism – withdrawal of state support from an established church

Phalanax – any body of troops in close array – military

Moribund – morose, near death

Perpendicular – straight up or down, steep

Fiduciary – legal or ethical relationship or trust between 2 or more parties

Frenulum – small fold underneath tongue

So there you go - would love some contrstuctive critiscism or any comments considering I am doing this for a reason (to try and improve my writing) but as a first task I don't thnk I did TOO badly *dies*

Samantha Brick for Christs sake

2013-04-18T14:24:00.004+01:00

Guess who’s back...

That’s right, I have come back out of blogging retirement and Samantha Brick is going DOWN.

Yep, she’s done it again – that selfish, irresponsible, self indulgent woman has rambled too far this time. She’s written an article about how if women want to stay beautiful (she’s even written ‘like me!’ in brackets after those words), then they have to constantly diet. Where do I even fucking begin?

She starts by saying that she was having a dinner party and told her friends not to bring any food with them. She then writes “when one friend arrived and thrust a hefty box of chocolates into my hands, I rewarded her with ice cold contempt rather than the grateful smile she was clearly expecting”. The reason Brick’s friend (I use this in the loosest possible terms, because I refuse to believe she has any real friends left) was expecting a smile, is because this is something a polite and friendly person would do. Whether she wanted the chocolates or not, treating someone with ‘ice-cold contempt’ because they have given you some is just rude and immature. She thinks being on a diet means you can ignore manners, social etiquette and politeness? If she had done that to me, I would have never stopped punching her. EVER. I would have quit my job and never washed again, just so I could keep punching her.

“Any self respecting woman wants to be thin”. For a writer she has used an extraordinary set of words there. So if you don’t want to be thin you don’t respect yourself? I am not what you would class as thin – someone like Samantha Brick would probably call me fat, but I feel in myself I am neither skinny nor fat. I am in some squashy, untoned place within these two labels. Regardless of this, I do respect myself and I for one, don’t care about labels. One of the million things that is wrong with this article is that Brick is labelling herself, other women, everyone else CONSTANTLY. As a woman in the media she should be encouraging women not to worry about how many biscuits they had at lunch, but to ignore the labels. Teach them that they are just themselves, and they should be comfortable this way. *belts out Born This Way by Gaga* *rest of office joins in for a spontaneous musical number*

“I don’t believe overweight is ever attractive”. One word here - Adele. Albeit overweight, I think Adele is ridiculously, STUNNINGLY beautiful. Being attractive isn’t about the size of your waist line, nine times out of ten it boils down to confidence, some good make up and a smile. Adele is more attractive then most people I know, and I bet most blokes would rather be in bed with Adele having a laugh then banging away at the cold dead eyes of Samantha ‘ironing board' Brick. But GOD FORBID we should say someone else in this universe was more attractive then this stupid blonde hemorrhoid.

She then goes on to say that Joan Collins has confirmed that the only way to maintain an hourglass figure into your 70s is to spend every day of your life on a diet. Food, eating and meals are a very social thing, and I would hate to spend the rest of my life not wanting to participate in said meals because all I could eat was a fucking breadstick. Fuck that for a month, let alone for the rest of my life! Some of us have better things to do then stay at home alone being thin.

“I was glad to see the back of Easter this month, as it seems to have been hijacked by the greedy masses who regard it as a free pass to gorge on chocolate” – this response is short and sweet; Don’t take any notice about what other people are doing at Easter, you stupid bitch.

“My husband of 5 years frequently tells me that if I put on weight he will divorce me” – surely by now Pascal (the horrifically long suffering OR equally as self indulgent, arrogant and vile husband) has worked out that Brick getting fat is the least of his problems whilst she still has a voice box and the ability to communicate? She’s lucky he hasn’t disposed of her rake like body in the River Seine by now.

It’s now got to that inevitable point where I can barely be bothered to read any more. She says to lose her puppy fat when she was 14 she spent the best part of a year only eating marmite on toast with no butter and when she was at college she lived on 1 packet of polos for breakfast and 1 for lunch, only stopping when her dentist told her about the damage she was doing to her teeth. I guess Brick would rather have breath like a tramps armpit then be SHOCK HORROR, a size 12 or something?! God damn she’s irritating.

She finishes off the article nicely with the most incredible statement from the entire article. She says once every quarter she embarks on a low calorie diet that ensures a weight loss of half a stone, but coincidentally means she doesn’t have “the mental or physical fortitude to work”. Is this woman on crack?!

I know she does this for the headlines, and I know people like me feed her (ha) sense of self worth and bank account, but this needs to be said. Does she really think what she is saying is welcomed by other women, and a responsible way to live? Surely being happy and trying to cut out a bit of the junk (but not too much, effectively eating whatever you want) is the healthiest way to live. I would rather be out having a laugh at a meal with Brick sneering at me in the background, then laid up in bed too tired to move, but a size 6? God I can’t believe the Daily Mail actually let this woman write on their website. I know they are all for controversy but this entire article is self-deprecating to women, irresponsible and a disastrous move from a woman who other girls could look up to. As much as the thought of her being a role model for anyone is inconceivable, i’m sure she is and due to this I have this one final comment: she needs to learn to watch her mouth more than her waist line.

*eats gigantic cookie*.

Laqa & Co Nail Pens

2013-01-14T10:14:00.001+00:00

Haven’t done one of these posts for a while...

A few months ago the wonderful, amazing, extremely patient Soraya from Powder Rooms sent me one of these Laqa and Co polish pens to trial, and I have finally got around to posting about it. I was extremely excited to receive one of these pens as they seem like such a good idea and make the prospect of applying nail polish on the go seem more manageable.

First attempt, 1 coat

I picked the colour Blurple as I am sure you all know that if there’s one thing I cannot resist, it’s a bright purple nail polish. The pens are almost like a felt tip but with more of a ‘brush’ nib instead of a thick one. The colour is shown at the end of the ‘pen’ and you click this to push the colour out of the tube into the brush, which is how you apply it onto your nails. I found this a bit tricky, as the colour would always come out towards the neck of the tube and not push further into the brush, so I would have to scrape the colour onto my nail and then use the brush to spread it out.

Entire hand, 1 coat

The colour is amazing, but the brush makes it quite tricky to apply and not very even. It’s very ‘liney’ as you can see from the above picture, and although it dries quickly, it almost dries to a matte effect? This is fine, but was just something that I wasn’t expecting. It takes a good 4 coats for this polish to be distributed evenly over the entire nail with no streaks and although I liked the finished result, this could be achieved much more easily with a normal nail polish with a decent brush.

Entire hand, 4 coats (finished)

I have used a picture of my nails before the tidy up as I want you to see how easy it was to apply without getting it all over your tips – obviously I tried not to do this, but the more polish you use the more ‘gloopy’ the brush gets making it harder to spread out over the nail – you do kind of end up with just a brush lump covered in polish that you have to keep wiping onto your nail...

Pen 'nib'

All in all I am not too excited about this product after use. It has it’s good points, being that it’s extremely travel friendly in size and if you have a bit of time to spend taking care and doing your nails slowly and waiting for each layer to dry etc, it would be fine. There bad points are that I was excited that this would be a product I could use ‘on the go’ when really this isn’t the case at all, and the texture of the polish is very thick and sticky, making it quite hard to paint it on evenly and without streaks.

Lovely idea, amazing packaging, beautiful colours but I just find the good old bottle & brush way slightly easier.

Have you ever tried Laqa & Co pens? If so i’d love to hear your thoughts and see if it’s just me that can’t get on with them that well...

I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack

2013-01-02T14:01:00.001+00:00

Did you miss me? Yes? No? Oh.

I have taken a bit of a hiatus from the blogging world recently for a number of reasons. I hate it when bloggers are all like “sorry for not posting” blah blah because 1) I am sure no one even noticed that i’d fucked off for a bit and 2) I can blog whenever I want SO GET OFF MY BACK OK *stare face*. Anyway, the most important thing is that I am back now so quit your whingeing. MORSH IS HERE.

Christmas is done and to me it just feels like a blur of mental nights, too much food and FAR too much alcohol. It was bitter sweet for me, happy because it’s Christmas and I could literally do whatver I wanted every day without WORK getting in the way (by do whatever I want I just mean wake up, have a bath and start drinking – do I have an alcohol problem? Hopefully) but sad because 2 of my best friends went travelling on the 30^th. They bit the bullet and went and now while I am at work typing this and trying to stuff a turkey sandwich in my mouth (yep, still not over Turkey yet) they are out to dinner at a Thai beach front gaff with an Irishman called Dylan. Jealous! Anyway, I am not entirely sure what January and the rest of the year are going to hold for me, but if I run out of material I will be sure to update you on Charlie and Jo’s travels, might as well live my life through them if my own is boring.

I don’t have any new years resolutions, I honestly think they are the biggest waste of time ever. I am not going to not drink as much this year, I am not going to be more responsible, be more careful with my money or stop getting involved with the wrong men, so I am not even going to bother saying it. Whatever will be will be, and me banging on to everyone about all the amazing things I think I am going to do but totally sack off by the 15^th Jan is just pointless.

Lots of lovely things happened at the end of the last year while I was away. I was bridesmaid along with 9 of my other friends (yes 9!) for my beautiful friend Julie who got married to the love of her life. The highlight of that day was losing my absolute shit to the Dirty Dancing Megamix on the dancefloor. One of my oldest friends had beautiful baby boy, who we have all instantly fell in love with and can’t stop fussing over. The girls went travelling. Throughout all of these activies undertaken by my friends, I just sat back, drank some wine and observed. This year maybe it will be me actually partaking in an activity more interesting than having a punch up on the train?! Who knows.

Anyway, MUSIC: I might be late to the party with some of these, I might not, but I don’t care. This is the music I am loving at the moment as I discovered some amazing songs over the Christmas period and re-discovered some old favourites.

Check these links out honkeys:

P.S my sister got me tickets to see one of the loves of my life in April – Derren Brown! What a legend eh? I might try and convince Derren to make us both disappear to a carribean island.

Happy New Year to you and yours xx

SPOILER ALERT 2.8 Hours Later in full

2012-11-06T11:34:00.003+00:00

Before I even begin this post, I have detailed exactly what happened to us when we played 2.8 Hours Later, from start to finish and everything in between. If you are yet to play in London and don't want the surprise to be ruined for yourself, then DO NOT READ THIS POST. I am not responsible for ruining it for you if you haven't taken my advice!

I am sure if you follow me on Twitter you will know that lately I have gone a bit mental over the whole Halloween/scary stuff/zombie apocalypse thing, what with Derren Brown getting his mind fuck on and the fact I did 2.8 HOURS LATER AT THE WEEKEND. Monday morning was slightly more intolerabe than usual, for the sheer fact that after running from zombies for 2 hours on Saturday night I now need to be carried up stairs and cannot cross my legs without yelping in pain and going a bit light headed. Perhaps I should head to the gym more.

Anyway, if you DON’T know what 2.8 Hours Later is then crawl out from underneath your tiny wet rock and sit down here – i’m about to tell you a story.

2.8 Hours Later is the brain child of a company called Slingshot, who have obviously been so inspired by the brilliant zombie films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later that they decided to create their own zombie apocalypse re-enactment. It’s basically a big zombie chase game beginning at a random start location where you are handed a map and a grid reference. You then have to get from checkpoint to checkpoint picking up grid references at each one to get you to the next zone. Trying to read a map while outwitting zombies that are trying to ‘infect’ you along the way is HARD – if you make it, you wind up at the zombie disco where you either celebrate as a survivor having not been ‘bitten’ by a zombie, or covered in fake blood and transformed into one of the brain dead flesh eaters themselves. All sounds ace doesn’t it? Here’s a rundown of the night...

All smiles before we set off....

Our start location was a car park next to Blackwall station. We signed disclaimers, were briefed on what to do, reminded of the health and safety issues and handed our maps. Amidst lots of nervous giggling we were sent on our way and ran straight into a woman who gave us the first grid location for the next checkpoint and pointed us down to a subway... Once inside we were confronted with 3 zombies and instantly the adrenaline kicked in - we all legged it through and luckily enough made it out alive...

Next up we went to one of the scariest locations throughout the entire game, an empty shipping yard with the big shipping containers piled up roughly 3 / 4 stories high. We had to walk through the yard to a container at the end and it was SO DARK. Inside there was an actor who scared us by acting mental and generally just being badass and I personally was terrified that zombies were going to run into this tiny container and EAT US ALIVE. Luckily for us he just gave us the reference, sniffed my friends hair and told us to leave - we all ran out screaming like massive girls, but he didn't set any zombies on us and we were SAFE.

We walked for about 5 mins before we came across the next location, which was a multi storey car park. A group had gone in just before us so we had to wait for a few minutes which totally didn’t help my nerves as we could hear the zombie moans and screams from the players while we were waiting – squeaky bum time. We then walked up the stairs to level 9 (knackered) where we met a man who told us we had to go down to level 7 to get him some sweets as his blood sugar level was low. I tried the whole “ok let’s take the stairs” trick but was DENIED. The zombies were on the level below and were eyeing us up as we were talking, so we knew this was going to be carnage. There were 4 zombies in green scrubs (normal) and then 1 special super zombie in purple scrubs who was literally the FASTEST ZOMBIE ON THE PLANET. We took a deep breath, crossed our fingers and all ploughed down the ramp and for a second I thought I might actually be quite good at this. I was ducking and diving and outwitting the walking dead – I was practically Jill from Resident Evil. This was short-lived though, because literally 3 seconds later I followed Rik down what we thought was a ramp, only for it to be a dead end. I turned around and a zombie grabbed me and dargged me into the corner, marking my hand and getting zombie blood all over my nice Primark t shirt. I managed to get away and sprinted faster than Usain Bolt up the ramp to safety. I totally forgot about the sweets but luckily another member of my team managed to grab them, so we handed them to the bloke and made a swift exit out the opposite set of stairs, flying down them 5 at a time in case the zombies burst through the door and chased us down the stairwell. We made it out onto the street intact, but this set me up on a massive freak out session that this was going to be the scariest thing I had ever done and I would actually have a heart attack before the night was through...

Car Park zombies - eeek!

The zombie that caught me!

We continued walking and came across a short flight of stairs down into a subway, which housed a woman tramp (dressed like one, not just my opinion) who told us that we had to climb the stairs at the other end and find her a ‘glowing leaf’. We were all a bit apprehensive so sent Jamie, the only member of our team who hadn’t been bitten in the car park up first (logic?). We found the leaf and were clear of any zombies, so proceeded back to the woman to give it to her. She then gave us our next grid reference and we were on our way.

Cue the scariest point of the night, the most shit-inducing checkpoint of them all... We saw the warden, noticed the park behind him and we were all instantly on edge. I noticed there was a concrete path running around the park and my heart rate increased by about 10,000 beats per second when I looked onto the (pitch black) grass and could make out the silhouettes of zombies waiting to eat our brains. As we edged reluctantly away from the marshall, a girl and a boy near us asked if they could join our group as their group had just run and left them and they didn’t fancy tackling the entire park on their own. We agreed and as we huddled together to discuss tactics, the boy suddenly lifted his sleeve up revealing a big zombie bit mark and started twitching, groaning and changing into a zombie – I honestly came close to having a prolapse. I ran full pelt like a headless chicken in the wrong direction, straight into a marshall who was manically shouting at me to run INTO THE PITCH BLACK DARK PARK. I edged my way around the grass sticking to the path (where I seemed to be safe), half jogging half crying until I caught up with the others who were standing around a woman behind a gate who would give us our next grid reference. We all stopped for a second to take a breather, before she started screaming that we in fact WEREN’T safe on the path and we had to head for a white tent in the middle of the grass which the zombies couldn’t enter. I turned, in slow motion (unintentionally) just in time to see 3 zombies hurtling towards us faster than Felix Baumgartner on a skydive. We ran for the white tent and once inside I am not ashamed to say that I actually started full on freaking out, wondering if i’d be able to let off a flare and charter a helicopter to swoop in and save me from the walking dead. NO such luck. In the end we all ran and I (somehow) managed to get out of the park without being caught, but definitely taking at least 2 months off my life in the process...

Next we recovered slightly and ran headlong into a guy who was distraught that he’d spilt his tic tacs all over the floor. Apparently his friend up ahead was convinced the answer to infection lied in tic tac form, so we had to collect these and take them to him. The tics tacs were scattered over the road, and as we made our way we encountered zombies jumping out of bushes and hiding behind bus stops (but we weren’t chased, thank the LORD – I would have run head first into a bus for sure). Finally, the end was in sight. Just 1 more checkpoint and then we were free. The last one consisted of a game of zombie bulldog, running to retrieve ‘the cure’ through a hoard of zombies and bringing it back safe and sound. The guy who wanted the tic tacs rewarded us with playing the harmonica while we ran through the zombies – once the harmonica stopped playing, the zombies came to life, trying to stop us from getting the cure back. Everyone that ran got the cure (I sat this one out as I didn’t want the cure, I wanted the zombie make up – not because I was scared or anything).

Please excuse the poor picture, this was zombie bulldog!

We then made our way into the safe zone where we were scanned for infection and dealt with accordingly. One of our team, Jamie, managed to get through the entire thing without being caught. Andrea was also clear of infection thanks to using the cure. The rest of us were infected and had our zombie make up done, before heading towards the bar for a much needed cigarette and cider. The zombie disco ensued, they had a Wii set up where you could play House of the Dead, an eclectic playlist comprising of the best scary songs (think the Psycho theme tune, ghostbusters theme tune, thriller etc) and lots of alcohol on tap. My sister and I also participated in a “Best Zombie Competition” which involved screaming the words “brains” like a zombie, and being paired up with a survivor and trying to bite them. I was the only zombie to successfully bite my survivor, but I didn’t hear the instruction for the screaming part, so just shouted down the microphone instead of screaming “brains”. Oops.

Post infection

Zombie DJ!

All in all it was a brilliant night. I have a fear of people chasing me anyway, even people I know so it was always going to be terrifying for me. The rest of my team are slightly braver so didn’t find it as distressing but agreed it was well put together and they had a great time doing it. It was a shame that in between zones there were no zombies jumping out or chasing you down the street etc, but we understood that the Isle of Dogs is a busy place and this would have been an epic breech of healthy and safety. The best part was the park because it was bloody dark and utterly terrifying – so dark that you couldn’t make out who was zombie and who was survivor, who was your team and who wasn’t - I came close to a mental breakdown in the tent. I wanted to film some of it but every time I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket I shit myself too much to actually stand still long enough to take a picture, so ended up just spazzing around the checkpoints half sobbing and clutching my phone for dear life.

All in all a brilliant night and next year we want to come back and actually be the zombies – it looked like brilliant fun and is perfect for me as there will be nothing for me to poo my pants over!

Big thanks to Slingshot, all the volunteers, zombies, health and safety wardens and actors on the night – you were all brilliant!

Survivors vs Zombies

Movember: Anything other than bad

2012-11-02T13:08:00.000+00:00

Today marks the start of Movember, and those of you that know me will know how pleased I am about this.

I have had a moustache obsession for quite some time. I have moustaches hats, rings, necklaces, a clock, a jumper, a t shirt – my friends sometimes even label it a Morshtache, because I love them so. I love them on ANYTHING, but especially men. Men with moustaches and beards, yes please. You can imagine my delight when Movember then came along and suddenly the world became a brighter place. Men were actively trying to grow moustaches, and not just for fun – for a worthy cause. Fair enough by the end of the month the office looked like a criminal’s version of Guess Who, but people got sponsored and raised money for charity. It doesn’t harm anyone, quite the opposite.

So you can imagine my surprise when I came across THIS douche worthy article from the Happiest Person in the World, Brendan O’Neill (who writes for the Telegraph). After I had got over the initial shock of realising this controversial piece of drivel wasn’t taking pride of place on the Daily Mail homepage, I just tried to work out what Brendan’s aim was with this article. I still haven’t worked it out 2 hours later.

There are a few lines Brendan has written that have just confused the actual fuck out of me. Here are some of my favourites:

“God I hate Movember. Not only because growing a ‘tache for cancer encourages men to make a big, hairy, public display of their caring, charitable side”

OH GOD FORBID BRENDAN, GOD FORBID MEN SHOULD PUT DOWN THEIR CLUBS AND STOP BEATING THEIR CHESTS LONG ENOUGH TO DO SOMETHING WORTH WHILE. I have never heard of a men’s charitable, caring side being used as something negative. How is it in any way shape or form negative?

“Movember has ruined the moustache. In the past, men grew moustaches to demonstrate their masculinity, but now we are growing them to show we are “in touch” with our bodies and feelings and that we are “health aware”

I don’t get this at all. First things first, last time I checked woman didn’t grow full on handlebar moustaches. It’s not possible. SO, growing a moustache is still showing your masculinity, as it’s something a male can do and a woman, physically and socially, cannot. Next, I can’t see why it’s a problem to show that men are in touch with their bodies, feelings and being health aware. Movember isn’t asking you to cellotape your nuts to your gooch and wear a pink tutu whilst crying over the Strictly Come Dancing eviction show. It’s just trying to create awareness for men’s cancers, and hopefully raise a bit of cash towards it. IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL.

“apparently blokes have a problematic “it’ll be alright” attitude which leads to a “reluctance” to openly discuss “health issues”

It’s not really what Brendan said at this point, it’s the way he said it. All the quotation marks show that he is saying this in a sarcastic way, like he doesn’t believe this is the case at all, like it’s just something some vegetarian tree hugging woman came up with as a way to discredit men. I would say 90% of males I have come across definitely have this attitude towards health problems, and do think things will be ok and just go away on their own. Most men I know refuse to even take a bloody paracetamol when they have a headache, as it’s not manly to require assistance from medicines or doctors when feeling unwell. So now, you are saying that Movember is taking away men’s masculinity, but also saying it’s a stereotype that men are too masculine to ask for help when ill. Make your mind up please.

I am going to stop with the list here as I have just come across probably the most damaging sentence of the entire article, and one that I can’t believe he put in after everything he had written above it. He actually wrote...

“What this uber-patronising campaign overlooks is that if young men really do have an “it’ll be alright” attitude, that’s because it probably will be alright”.

Wow. Let’s hope Brendan never comes across anyone with any symptoms of anything more deadly than a cold, because his “it’ll be alright” attitude might just enable them to meet their end a lot quicker than nature intended. You can’t go through life thinking “oh I have a massive lump in my balls, but you know what, it’ll be alright” or “oh this feels weird and I don’t know what it is, but I think it’ll be alright”. Sorry, Movember isn’t patronising, it isn’t saying “OH HI LOOK AT YOU, YOU ARE SO CUTE COME AND GROW A LITTLE FURRY MOUSTACHE AND LET’S ALL TALK ABOUT IT AND THEN CARESS EACH OTHER’S NUT SACKS BECAUSE WE ARE ALL HAPPY WITH BEING FEMININE”. Movember is saying let’s all have fun, let’s all do something easy and let’s all be more aware about men’s health. There are women specific charities and fundraisers (the entire breast cancer awareness campaign is mostly aimed at women, even though this is something men can suffer from), but this is the only men centred charity. I cannot fathom how this is a bad thing.

My final parting advice is to ignore Brendan. If you want to participate in Movember, then do it. If you don’t want to participate, then don’t. It’s not the crime of the century if you aren’t interested, but don’t belittle other people that are actively raising money and awareness about men’s health. I’d be interested to know if Brendan ever found himself in the midst of a situation where he does find a weird lump, or feel a bit like something’s not right, if he’ll just ignore it to save his masculinity.

Remember Brendan, you might think this is all a load of stupid rubbish, but there’s no masculinity in death.

To learn more about Movember, check out their website here: http://uk.movember.com/about/

If you are actively supporting Movember and would like to donate some money, a few of my lovely Twitter followers are participating. Sponsor them here: http://uk.movember.com/team/556349

Blogger Block

2012-10-26T10:00:00.000+01:00

Bonjour friends!

God, I haven’t blogged for 10 days! I have had such bad bloggers block, I don’t even know what to write about anymore :( I have decided to tell you what i’ve been up to in the last week just to get myself back into the swing of writing and hoping this will kick start some other super awesome blog posts that I hopefully have lurking away...

Last Thursday I got invited to an awesome event at my favourite boutique in Essex, I Am So Fly... I had been looking forward to this as they always have such dribble worthy clothes. I arrived with my friends Charlie and Jo and we were greeted with a glass of champagne and a miniature cupcake from Loughton Cupcakes (absolutely AMAZING, I must have sneakily had about 8 of them, oops!) We browsed the shop and checked out the clothes they were showcasing. They had a few lovely girls from Space NK doing makeovers with Lauren Mercier products which I had never used before so Charlie and I both had our make up done. I went for a evening smokey eye while Charlie’s was more understated for a fashionable day time look.

Cosy DKNY sleepwear // Studding AMAZINGNESS // Jo's hat // FOOD

Charlie getting her makeover // me having my eyes done // PRODUCTS // final verdict?

The store looked amazing, and you could see the amount of effort the girls at So Fly had put in to make the event a success. If you ever need clothes for a special occasion or just want to treat yourself to a beautiful dress, get yourself down to this shop - I honestly could not recommend it highly enough! Check out their website HERE to see all the beautiful clothes and accessories you can get you hands on. Thanks to Emma and the girls for looking after us!

I had a big one last weekend as it was my friend Julie’s hen party!!! She’s getting married on 30^th November and she is having all 11 of us as Bridesmaids (yes, she must be totally crazy!). We went to Alton Towers for the weekend and it was really great. We met up at Kayley’s house at 11.30am on Saturday morning (feeling slightly jaded from Rejam on Friday night but the excitement soon took over). We had breakfast and then in true classy Essex girl style, all piled into a minibus to get to ALTON TOWERS! We arrived about 3pm, chucked our gowns on and headed straight to the spa for a nice pamper. A few of the girls had ‘mini treatments’ which were mini 15 minute massages for £10 each, and then we had full use of the pool, Jacuzzi, sauna, steam, foot spa, relaxation room and chill out area. It was lovely and relaxing and just what we needed after a 4 hour journey! We then headed back to the room to get ready for dinner, which was a lovely buffet based in the Splash Landings hotel next door.

Cockcakes // me and the hen // dressing the hen up (oblig) // Bano and I enjoying the cock straws on the minibus

Inapproprite spa footwear // being classy ladies at the meal // ALL OF US! // Late night corridor bants

After the meal we went back to the bar for drinks and banter. By 1am the hen and a few of the girls wanted to go to bed but the idiots of the group (me included) decided to stay up and try to crash a conference going on in one part of the hotel. We recruited a random man dressed as the Childcatcher (but we decided to call him Clopin), but decided after a while it would be more fun to try and run away from him (for absolutely no reason at all might I add). This resulted in a full scale sprint from one side of the hotel to another, fully running in heels down emergency exits and back to our normal hotel. We then went and got changed into more comfortable clothes and decided to wreak havoc and run around the gardens outside. We managed to find a weird corridor in the hotel that looked like a hospital corridor (or the sort of thing you would see at the end of your life) and dared each other to go down it, but none of us had the balls to apart from our friend Chloe.

Spooky Alton Towers Hotel // the horrific hospital corridor

Easily looking like the living dead // appropriate scare fest weather? // OBLIVION // my hen party goodybag

We then finally got to sleep at 3am and then woke up bright an early for breakfast the next morning. We were going into the park that day and were dressing Julie up as a Corpse Bride, so the rest of us donned some face paint and tried to make ourselves look like the undead. We had an awesome day in the park and I took some brave pills and managed to get myself on some rides. RITA nearly broke my actual neck, it is horrifically fast! A few of the girls went into the Tower of Terror and said it was the most horrific thing they had ever been in so i’m glad I swerved that one!

Having a relatively chilled one this weekend, looking forward to watching Derren Brown Apocalypse tonight (it looks amazing and I LOVE Derren!). I got paid yesterday so have been trying my hardest to refrain from buying lots of beauty bits that I don’t need. I did buy a new heated brush from Tresemme though, as now I have a fringe it’s so much easier to style using one of them... I’ll defo put a review up of it shortly! Oh yeah, I NOW HAVE A FRINGE! I did it, I was agonising over it for so long in the end my hairdresser just cut it anyway! What do you guys think?

I have a guest post going up on the lovely Charlotte’s blog at 12.30, so click the link HERE to check that out too. I have followed Charlotte's blog for a while and love it, she does such awesome product reviews so it's a real privilege to have a guest blog on her account - thanks again Charlotte!

Oh one last thing, the scarefest weekend and the fact it is Halloween on Wednesday totally inspired me to create my own Halloween nails! What do you think? They look like they took me ages to do and were really time consuming but they totally weren't, the longest thing was waiting for the nail polish to dry! If anyone wants to know how I did them or would like a tutorial for any of the nails let me know and i'll post one :)

Hope you all have a lovely weekend and hopefully i’ll be out of my blogging rut and back to my best shortly! x

Midnight City

2012-10-16T11:02:00.000+01:00

Winter is here and it’s just as depressing as I thought it was going to be...

I am always torn between winter and summer. Summer is FUN, hot, skimpy, outside and breezy and tanned. Winter is cold and fatter, inside, full of FAT AND MUSHROOMS AND STEW. I love the fashion in winter (thick leggings, fur stoles, big chunky boots and wooly hats) but can’t stand the weather. It’s the exact opposite for Summer. Spray tans are necessary, as are crash diets so you don’t look like a hippo in denim shorts. The potential for a fashion disaster is far greater in summer.

I use this transition in seasons to change my hair style more often than not. In summer I like hair off my face, so it doesn’t get stuck to my head like some sort of sweat blanket on the tube. In winter I prefer a forehead carpet, a thick fringe covering my head up and stopping my eyebrows from getting frostbite. This year I am torn.

I had a thick fringe last year and loved it. I used to get compliments on it, to which I would reply “thanks, I grew it myself” like some retarded David Brent wannabe. It was a bit of a nightmare for the first few weeks, refusing to sit correctly and parting like the red sea the minute Moses gives it the nod but it grew to do as it was told and I’d stroll around London with a warm forehead and the most hideously overgrown eyebrows (the fringe covered them up so plucking and waxing just became unnecessary, even though it really really WAS necessary). I decided to grow my fringe out just as spring showed it’s face, deciding that I didn’t want a fringe when I went to Vegas in May as the thought of being in that heat with a load of hair stuck to my face made me want to VOM. It grew and I have had a spam ever since.

I have now decided that after approx 9 years of having black hair, it’s time for a change. I have spoken to my trusted hairdresser, who has confirmed that I can change my hair colour to a lighter brown (and therefore have my much longed for ombre) WITHOUT stripping, but I need to grow my roots to a disgustingly long length. My natural hair colour is a browny (gingery), blondey (gingery) light-ish (gingery) colour, so when my roots grow my hair looks horrific and I am pretty sure Ian Beale in tramp mode would have more chance of pulling than I do. I cannot BEAR the roots, so my way of thinking is if I had my fringe cut, the roots would be confined to the middle of my head and not visible from the front, therefore saving my dignity for the next 3 months. m. I had pretty much decided to go down this route, but stupidly thought I would ask everyone’s opinion. Cue every male I know telling me they prefer my hair without the fringe as it makes me look prettier. So now I have 2 options:

1. Do not have a fringe and have the same colour for the rest of my life, OR have the most horrific roots known to man - teamed with a really boring haircut.

2. Have the fringe, change the hair colour and end up having the hair I really want, but in the mean time deal with not being remotely attractive to any man in the world AND having a total fit when the fringe takes longer than a month to grow out.

I am in a serious dilemma and I don’t know what to do. To fringe or not to fringe, that is the question...

SPAM

FRINGE

Anyway, while I suffer with my inner turmoil, I have something to show you that almost made me wet my Victoria’s Secret pants on the train home on Friday night. I sat on the train, so excited about the fact it was Friday that I fell asleep for 90% of the way, probably with my mouth open and dribbling everywhere. When I woke up I had a text from my friend Jo that said “LOOK WHAT I’VE GOT (ONE FOR YOU!)” and the picture that appeared before me almost bought me to tears. She’d only gone and got me a bottle of bladdy THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN OPI SKYFALL JAMES BOND SPESH EXTRAVAGANZA HADN’T SHE! I spent the next 2 hours in an absolute frenzy, counting down the minutes till I could leave mine to go to our friends house and get it off her with my mucky grabby hands. It didn’t disappoint and I rushed home and painted my nails with in INSTANTLY.

(In case you have been in a cave somewhere and don’t know what this polish is, it’s limited edition, 18 CARAT GOLD LEAF TOP COAT. Yes, that’s right, 18 carat gold nails. Yes.)

As you can see from the pictures it is AMAZINGGGGG! Am I said because I probably would have paid £10 for the empty bottle alone? The packaging is lovely, although it's hard to take a decent picture of it when you can see yourself in the bottle!

Anyway when I got down to painting the nails I was a bit dubious about using it for no reason because at £19 a bottle (wholesale price) it’s not the sort of polish i’d be using every day, but I just had to try it. The pay off with the gold to the actual top coat was relatively good, although I found I had to paint on one layer and then dab extra bits into the gaps that hadn’t filled as much. It dried relatively quickly and you didn’t have any of the annoying standy up bits of gold that you sometimes get with glitter – it lays perfectly smooth.

I love it, it’s amazing and I feel like a bit of a spaz telling people what it is when they ask – they might be thinking “you paid £20 for some gold to put on your nails? Are you high?” BUT Jo understood that it’s just one of those things I had to own. Have you tried OPI TMWTGG before? Would you, or would you buy it? Love to hear your thoughts!

Just before I go, I have discovered a lovely awesome brilliant album called Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming by M83 and I think you should listen to this song and love it as much as I do. NOW.

OH YEAH AND SOMEONE JUST TELL ME IF I SHOULD HAVE A FRINGE OR NOT, I’M BORED OF THINKING ABOUT IT.

xxx

Morsh in Pictures

2012-10-12T14:44:00.000+01:00

Happy Friday ladies (and gentlemen, if there are any that read this!)

I have been AWOL this week, partly because I have been busy and partly because I have just been plugging my giveaway! To make up for this I have decided to do a little picture post (I know everyone loves being nosy about people’s lives, me included) to show you what I have been up to :)

1. Me trying to distract myself from smoking by blowing bubbles instead :/
2. MUA Lipstick
3. Nails Inc Belgrave Place
4. My Beauty Box Giveaway :)

1 & 2. Baby Shower presents for my friends little bump - just under 4 weeks to go!
3. Showcasing my new Primark boots in the beautiful English winter weather :(
4. My LUNCH rules!

1 & 2. Stupid antics pre Hoxton for Toast Underground's 2nd Birthday
3. Sweeties and keepsakes from the baby shower!
4. Mushroom nailssss biatch

1. Early AM in Numptyville
2. Oops, didn't mean to purchase these... actually yes I did
3. The elastic band ball of GREATNESS that I inherited when I started working here
4. Friday nails, Barry M Gelly Hi Shine in Watermelon with Gold shizzle top coat accent

1. EmmaK_25 - Winner!
2. My lovely necklace :)
3. Modelling the necklace - I bet Kate Moss is bricking it!
4. Friday lunchtime amazingness

As you can see from the pictures, the lovely Emma of www.glossyboutique.blogspot.co.uk won my giveaway! I was really pleased with how many people entered and a bit sad I didn’t have something to give to each and every one of you! All the blogs that followed me on GTC have been followed back and I am loving that I have some new reading material and friends! Congratulations Emma, please let me know what you think of the box when you receive it!

I also received a really nice gift in the post today! The lovely people at Nifty Necklaces sent me a voucher code to get a free necklace thanks to a giveaway. My friend had bought me a ‘Morsh’ necklace at Christmas which I loved but accidentally broke one awesome drunken night in Vegas. I replaced it but shortly afterwards that one broke too :( As soon as I saw I had won this I was overly chuffed because I knew I would be able to replace my Morsh necklace – the voucher code they gave me even meant I got the delivery free, and the time spent waiting between ordering and delivery was quick (although because I was excited and being super impatient it felt like FOREVER!). As you can see from the pictures it is really nice and quite big which I like, as the one I had before was slightly harder to read as it was quite small. I’ll be sure to crack this out at very available opportunity, thanks again Nifty Necklaces! If you want your own one, check them out on the website here – to be honest now I have seen one in real life I would definitely pay for it, it’s cheap for what you get!

Have a lovely weekend, i’ll be back to my blogging best on Monday (I hope!) xxx

Morsh's First Giveaway!

2012-10-04T09:56:00.001+01:00

Hi ladies!

Today is a very special day for me – yes, it’s the day of my first giveaway! I wanted to give something back to all the lovely bloggers that read my blog and bother to comment etc. I have been doing my blog for just over a year now and have loved every minute of it! I wanted to save the giveaway for something special, but I joined in my first #bbloggers chat on Twitter last night and met lots of interesting new bloggers. I wanted advice on what I should put in my beauty box and the bloggers I gave a sneak preview to really liked it, so I thought i’d start it today!

I think it’s lovely when people do giveaways on blogs for no reason, just to give something back. As obsessed as I am with make up and nail polish, I actually had a fun time putting the box together and getting all the bits for it! I wanted to include some of my favourite items (W7 nail polish, Bare Minerals Eye shadow, face mask, nail art decals), some bits that are popular at the moment (Benefit The Pore-fessional, MUA Nail Constellation) and also just some other bits that always come in handy (nail guides, Models Own eyeshadow brush, MUA cream blusher). I am pleased with this box and thought i’d add a few rings for good measure as they were so pretty!

I’m not going to make you run to the end of the earth and back to be in with a chance of winning. All I need you to do is follow the steps below and enter on the Rafflecopter widget:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

And that’s it! I will contact you within 24 hours of the competition closing to let you know you have won. The cut off point will be midnight on Friday 12th October for entires, if you have any questions feel free to comment below and ask. Please remember to use the hashtag #morshsbeautygiveaway if you are going to tweet about it, and also remember you can follow my blog account on Twitter, @queenmorsh_blog -get involved and good luck!

Contents of the Beauty Box in full:

1x Leighton Denny Nail Polish in Sex Kitten

1x 17 Fast Finish nail polish in Knockout Red

1x Barry M Limited Edition Silver Sparkle glitter polish

1x W7 Metallic Saturn nail polish

1x MUA Nail Constellation in Leo

1x MUA Blush Perfection Cream Blusher in Yummy

1x Bare Minerals Eye shadow in Water Lily

1x MUA Matte Eye Shadow, Shade 20

1x Benefit The Pore Fessional

1x Cina Neon Nail Art Pen in Shocking Pink

1x GOSH Cosmetics Intense Eyeliner Pen in Dark Green

1x Models Own Eyeshadow Brush

1x Mudd Deep Cleansing Face Mask

1x Hail the Nails nail necal (leopard print crosses)

1x Penny Sage Nail Guides

1x Large silver armour ring with cut out cross

1x Large silver ring with black stone

Miserable Monday :(

2012-10-01T12:20:00.000+01:00

This weather is rubbish! Rubbish Monday!

Aside form thatI am so excited, look what's arrived look what's arrived! My business cards! I have been umming and ahhing about getting some for a while but I finally took the plunge and I am glad I did! I am so happy with them! I know you are probably wondering why I need business cards (I don't want it to seem totally pretentious), believe me it’s not like that. I have been invited to a few beauty shows and events in the past and when I have spoken to PRs etc, they have have asked about my blog and asked for my business card. It’s a bit awkward when I don’t have one to give them as it can make me seem quite unprofessional and like my blog isn’t something I am particularly bothered about so I figured i’d bite the bullet and get some. I only ordered 50 and I doubt I will be dishing them out often, but it’s nice to know I have a stash if I get invited somewhere I am going to meet people in the business and would like to contact them about my blog. I think I am a bit weirded out by it because it’s not as if my blog is remotely important – I just talk about what I did at the weekend and what colour I have painted my nails so hardly putting a stop to poverty, but there are people in the industry that like recruiting bloggers for their brands and they do want business cards. So I did it!

What do you think of my cards? They do actually have my real name on them as this is quite important for people that want to contact me, but I airbrushed this out as I like to stay I wanted to incorporate the look of my blog by adding my logo, but also to show what my blog is about (ultimately me, make up and nail polish) and I think that’s pretty obvious. I also like that everything on the front is a picture of my own work – I did the nail art and painted my nails, I did my own make up, I took my own pictures and I went to the events featured too. I ordered these cards from Moo and I am really pleased with the quality and the print of them – thanks Moo!

Today is a stressful day for me because I am trying to participate in Stoptober, basically not smoking from today until the end of the month. Right at this very moment I have normally had 2, if not 3 cigarettes by now so I am dying for one, but I am chewing lots of chewing gum and trying to be good. I have decided if I REALLY REALLY need one then I will allow myself because the more I can’t have one the more I want one – even if I manage to cut out 4 of the ‘habit’ cigarettes I have a day that’s something. I don’t know if i’ll be able to go cold turkey, but for now I am proud of myself – I know it’s only one morning but it’s one more than I thought I could do!

To any other fellow Stoptobers, good luck and if you need encouraging words or someone to freak out with, you know where I am!

I ordered some MUA cosmetics the other day, as everyone on the blogs always talks about the quality of the products and how good they are for the price and i’ve never tried them before. I’ll snap some pictures tonight but am going to keep a few things back for my blog giveaway I think, just putting the finishing touches to the beauty box over the next couple of days and then i’ll start banging on about it! Are there any particular types of products you like to see in a giveaway? I am trying to include products I like and use, but also want to give the winner something they would want – suggestions welcome! x

Olympia Beauty

2012-09-28T09:52:00.001+01:00

So finally, as requested, here is my post about the Olymipa Beauty show I attended on Sunday. I described it in my previous posts (one of them) but for those of you that aren’t aware, Olympia Beauty is a trade beauty wholesale show held at Olympia London. I managed to wangle a ticket through my friend Jo who is a beautician, and I was massively excited to attend because everything there was sold at trade price, meaning CHEAP NAIL VARNISH FOR ME!

Like a total spaz I could barely sleep on Saturday night as I was so excited. Jo and I go up early, grabbed our oyster cards and managed (somehow) to get to the show by 11.30am. It opened at 11 and it was MANIC when we first turned up, we couldn’t believe it! It was worth the queue for the ticket printing machine though, because when I walked through the big open doors and saw the biggest OPI stand I have ever seen in my life I nearly cried!

LOOK AT ALL THE BOTTLES

I was hoping OPI were going to be showcasing the new Skyfall collection and hopefully letting us pre-order it – you can imagine how much of a total meltdown I had when I saw it was THERE TO BUY, 10 days before it’s official UK release date! I spent about 30 minutes browsing the extensive nail vanish collections and picked up The Living Daylights, The World is Not Enough and Casino Royale from the Skyfall collection. I also grabbed I Just Spotted The Lizard from the Spiderman collection, because I don’t own any polishes like that and I thought it was lovely. It’s one of those colours that looks a bit like oil, where it’s blue but when you tilt the bottle it goes a greeny yellow colour? Heart! I then went and had a look at the back of the stall that housed all the other beauty bits you would need. All the manicure and pedicure creams, tools etc. I grabbed myself some OPI toe separators (they were like 60p a pack?) and an awesome product called Correct & Clean Up. Basically a pen that is flat on one edge, so if like me you are rubbish at painting your nails without getting it all over your fingers, this tool is the right shape to remove the polish from around your nail, and not accidentally rubbing it off the nail too! (P.S please excuse the picture of the nail polish, I know it’s like a 5 year old took it with a disposable camera BUT I took that at 1am this morning as it’s the only time I had to do it! Forgive mee!)

Casino Royale, Just Spotted The Lizard, The World is Not Enough & The Living Daylights

I got a few other bits and bobs from a random wholesale nail polish store. I grabbed a job lot of orange sticks as you can never have too many, a few decent buffers and nail files and some triangular nail polish guides (These come in SO useful for nail art it’s ridiculous!) I also grabbed some nail decorations which were so cheap. They came in a little box containing 4 designs; stars, balls, bigger but flat circles and small strips – they had these in silver and gold but I went with gold as I prefer that colour so much more on nail art! I also got a little tub of brush on nail glue as that always comes in handy!

As Jo is in the trade she needed to get some bits, so next we went to an awesome stall called Roo Beauty. It sells Beauty trolleys, bags, cases and tool belts for makeup brushes, nail polishes etc. Jo LOVES leopard print and saw they had an entire leopard print range so definitely wanted to go and buy a new beauty case. I wasn’t even looking but the nail polish cases were so cute and were massively discounted for the show so were only £10! I bought one as I figured if I am travelling somewhere and need to take a selection of nail polish with me (for those indecisive moments) it’s a really handy case to have – look how cute it is!

Next we hit up Louella Belle, which is the UK distributor for Essie & Seche. I got massively excited by the sheer size of the Essie section but when I actually looked at each colour I thought “I already own a colour like that” about pretty much everything, so left empty handed L Sad times for me, good times for my credit card company! I then went and had a look at Seche, the creators of Seche Vite, probably the best top coat I have ever used in my life! It’s thick, it dries SO QUICKLY, it makes nails super shiny and it also makes my polish last for days without chipping. Seche have produced a line of nail polish that is supposed to be every bit as good as the top coat. That is a strong claim to make as the top coat is so so so brilliant, but if it’s true then Seche will soon be one of the top contenders for popular professional nail polish, mark my words!

After having a walk around and looking at all the other stalls (I ummed and ahhed over Konad for ages but decided against it – so expensive and the designs aren’t even that nice?) I came across China Glaze. This polish is all over the blogs and people rave about it, but I had never used it before. They had some acid bright tropical colours that I fell in love with so I decided to pop my china glaze cherry and buy these two. Haven’t tried them out yet, but i’ll do swatches of them soon J The names are Beach Cruise-r (the purple) and Love’s a Beach (the pink).

Lastly, I went back to Louella Belle and grabbed some Ardell lashes. I have used these lashes before and I liked them but the glue that came in the packet was rubbish! For a start it was in a little paper tube that you ripped the top off and it went everywhere! I preferred the glue with Eyelure so always stuck to them (excuse the pun). When I saw they were selling the Lash Adhesive in black I decided to get some of that to tackle the glue problem – my friend Jo swears by this and admittedly it’s so much easier applying black glue to your lashes instead of the white glue and waiting for the colour to fade. I LOVE the lashes I got and can’t wait to use them - I know they are all pretty similar but I love big, wispy fluttery eyelashes – easier to bat your lashes at the lads ;)

Did any of you attend the Beauty show? If so what bargains did you pick up? x

Swatch What You're Doing

2012-09-24T13:23:00.001+01:00

What a bloody miserable Monday this is turning out to be!

Not sure where all my readers are based but in London it hasn’t stopped raining since I woke up this morning – as if Monday’s weren’t bad enough!

This weekend I was at the Beauty Show as described in my previous post. I had a really good time, the stands were brilliant and I spent a hefty amount of time at my beloved OPI! I will do a full post on the Beauty show tonight as I need to snap the bits I bought there etc... This will probably be up tomorrow so sit tight until then! Just to let you know they had the Skyfall collection available to BUY, so I nabbed myself a few - you'll see in the swatches below!

I have been meaning to do this post for a while now, so when I grabbed some new nail wheels at Olympia Beauty it was the perfect opportunity to add my most recent polishes to them and then post swatches of all the colours i’ve got. I often get asked how many polishes I actually own, if there is a colour I don’t have/like etc. The answer to that question is probably no! I have a rack in my room that is my pride and joy (saddo) and I also have boxes full of polishes that are either duplicates or won’t fit on the rack. Today I have swatched the rack polishes as these are my favourites – they are also sectioned into brands and are all the polishes I have from this brand. The spares in my boxes are other brands that I am not as keen on or don’t have room for etc.

As you can see from the rack, my favourite polish brands are Nails Inc, Models Own, W7, OPI and Essie. I also have a few randoms on the top shelf, one off polishes that are my favourites (such as Jo’mina by Illamasqua, Barry M, Seche Vite and a couple of 17 Magnetic polishes). I haven’t swatched the top rack, just the ones I have a decent amount of, but here’s a list of the top shelf colours - I haven’t written these down so this will all be done from memory... oops!

Random gold glitter from wholesalers // GOSH Silver Star // Illamasqua Jo’mina // Topshop Green Room // 17 Magnetized Gun Metal // 17 Magnetized Lilac // 17 Magnetized Teal // Seche Vite // Sephora for OPI Multi Glitter // Sephora for OPI Traffic Stopper Copper // Barry M Pink // Barry M Coral // Barry M Yellow // Barry M Orange // Barry M Raspberry // Barry M Chameleon in Purple // Barry M Grey // Barry M Pink Shatter // Barry M Black

I tried my hardest to show the true colours of each polish on the below nail wheels, but I had to take these pictures last night in my room in the dark when it was raining, so the lighting wasn’t the best – one of the problems of trying to snap nails in the winter when I spend most of the day light hours at work :(

Essie:

Models Own:

Nails Inc:

OPI:

W7:

I love looking at my nail wheels, I could literally sit on my bed and paint them all day. I would probably need about 10,000 for me to be able to paint all my favourite combinations. I think my favourite mix at the moment is OPI Lady in Black with Models Own Mirrorball Dancing Queen, the swatch of it is just UNREAL! I've attached a picture of that below just because I love it!

What do you think?

Beauty is in the eye of the card holder...

2012-09-21T12:12:00.003+01:00

This Sunday I am heading to The Beauty Shop at Olympia with my friend Jo (and potentially Charlie) and I am so fricking excited I just HAD to blog about it! I LOVE having friends that are in the beauty trade as this means Jo can take me to all the places I can’t go on my own because I don’t have a trade card (hello birthday present trip to the wholesalers – I am easily pleased). The Beauty Show is strictly for professionals but as I am going with Jo and listed under her salon I get to go too! I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures, there will probably be a few of me having actual panic attacks next to the nail polish stalls too! I feel sorry for my credit card, but this is classed as an emergency right?

Olympia Beauty is running on Sunday 23^rd September and Monday 24^th September. Brands that are exhibiting are:

Bourjois, China Glaze, Shellac, Cuccio, Dermalogica, Elemis, Essie, Fake Bake, Gelish, HD Brows, Konad, Loud Lips, Minx, Nouveau Lashes, Nubar, OPI, Orly, Seche, Tigi

Plus loads more that I haven't ever heard of... The London College of Beauty Therapy also has a stand and I am going to talk tot hem about doing a Beauty Therapy course with them. I think I would like to do it as a job, considering most of my personal free time is filled up with it, but finding the funds for this course is a bit of a problem at the moment. I want to have a word with them and see if they have financing options or anything like that which might be able to help me..

Anyway, the reason I am MOST excited today is because I got a glimpse of the new OPI James Bond collection last night and it looks AH-MAZING! They have 12 new colours coming out, 2 standard full glitters, a few shimmers and then some block colours. Pictures below...

(L-R) The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Live and Let Die, The World is Not Enough, You Only Live Twice and Moonraker

(L-R) Skyfall, Casino Royale, Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day, Goldeneye and The Living Daylights

I LOVE the look of Live and Let Die, You Only Live Twice, Casino Royale and The Living Daylights. You can now imagine I am googling away trying to find a swatch of each of them to satisfy my OPI craving until Sunday (they'll have this as a preview at Beauty Olympia, squeak!). OPI also have a special polish coming out in honour of this collection and I nearly wet my pants when I woke up to a message from Jo this morning telling me to look at it. It’s called The Man With The Golden Gun, and it’s a GOLD LEAF TOPCOAT! It looks awesome on AND OFF nails and it’s made with real flecks of 18 carat gold. The bottle nearly made me cry because of the sheer beauty of it and once I saw the finished outcome of the nails I knew this was something I had to get my mitts on. The gold leaf will obviously be more expensive than the others (I estimate around £25 a bottle) but it’s genuine gold on your nails so can’t really complain.

I WANT 18 CARAT GOLD NAILS!

The lovely Michelle of labmuffin has swatched a few of the collection, click the link to see her thoughts. I am a sucker for glitter polish anyway so was already beside myself when I saw The Living Daylights, but then once I saw Michelle had matified it? *DIES*

What do you think of the James Bond collection? Are any of you heading to the Olympia Beauty show this weekend?

Just as a little FYI, MeMeMe Cosmetics are currently running a Groupon deal – buy a voucher for £18 and that gives you a whopping £45 to spend online!!! I haven’t ever tried MeMeMe Cosmetics but I have heard they are apparently quite good, so now might be the time to get involved! Click HERE for the link...

Living for the Weekend...

2012-09-19T16:42:00.002+01:00

I’m back!!!! If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll know that I was away at my last festival of the year this weekend (sob). I went to The Zoo Project Festival, held at Port Lymphne Safari and Wildlife Park in Kent and I had THE MOST AWESOME TIME.

I went with Charlie and Jo, but met all of the Rejam crew there for 3 days of raving and bantering. I couldn’t wait to get messy in a field with some of my all time favourite people and it certainly didn’t disappoint. We decided that between us we would book a Pod Pad as it’s so much easier for us girls. None of us owned a tent or a blow up bed so we would have had to buy one, pack it and take it with us, put the tent up and then take it down and carry it back and then someone would be tasked with having it cluttering up their house. Instead we paid £300 for a pod and when we arrived at the campsite it was all ready and waiting for us, complete with 3 camp beds inside! Perfect!

We chilled when we got there on the Friday and cooked ourselves some burgers (Jo, the mum of the group bought an epic camping stove so we had burgers, bacon sandwiches, hot water for hot drinks and pot noodles etc – everyone else on the campsite was seriously jel). We went and met up with the Rejam boys in the festival about 5ish and spent the whole night dancing and bantering. The festival had 3 different tents with different acts as well as lots of shops, food places and a Shisha tent. Friday night was the night I first encountered Shisha Bob, literally the fittest guy ever who looked like Russell Brand and worked in the Shisha place. We went back to our tents that night ready to sleep but unfortunately had a group of annoying northerners were next to us with a really loud boom box therefore we slept for about an hour total :/ Saturday we woke up and decided to go to the Safari park, as free entry was included in the festival ticket. The safari was epic, we got on little trucks and got driven to the top of a massive hill and on the way we saw all the usual animals; giraffes, rhinos, buffalos, weird ginger deer things. It was ace. Once at the top I totally fell in love with the view up there. Although it was in Kent, when looking out over the safari park all you could see were fields for miles and miles until you spotted sea (well, the Channel) in the distance and it really gave the impression that you were actually in Africa looking out over the plains. You could hire out a tent/room thing called an Elephant Lodge which was basically a tent with a wooden decking floor but kitted out with a proper doubled bed etc. When you woke up in the morning and pulled the tent wall back you were basically faced with the sunrise over the amazing view. I can only imagine how beautiful it would be to sit on the balcony of an Elephant Lodge while the sun is setting and that has totally made me determined to stay there one day!

The festival once again was ace on the Saturday night, very messy. I decided to stay sober on the Sunday and drive us home that night instead of staying a third night in the Pod. Although it’s classed as VIP luxury camping (or that hateful word glamping) it still wasn’t the most comfortable of places to sleep. Sunday ended up being my most favourite day – the music in the Secret Sundayz tent totally smashed it and we had such a laugh. Ended up leaving around 11ish and arrived home about 1am. I spent all of Monday either sleeping or throwing up (always signs of a good weekend) before going out for a massive Chinese and DVD session with Dutch in the evening. I spent quality time with some of my favourite people and met some lovely new friends too. It really was an amazing weekend and the perfect way to finish off festival season. If Carlsberg did weekends, they would have done this one...

Highlights have to be the following:

Accusing Dan of having PILLY WILLY, and then having to tell Charlie and Ellie what it meant
Wearing my cow onsie on the Saturday night and no one batting an eyelid
Playing pot noddle bowling with a super size box of cigarettes
Being part of the Famous Five <3
Having it so much all weekend that I ended up vomming my guts up all day on Monday
Saying “to be fair” ALL THE FUCKING TIME
Seeing Shisha Bob and imagining what our babies would look like
Drinking Panda Punch, the strongest cocktail I have ever had (god knows what was in it)
Having a red lipstick moustache while sitting on NPD’s back while he is dressed as a horse
Finding, opening, locking and indulging in the contents of The Chest with Jo

Here are some of my favourite pictures from the weekend

Pod Pads! Before the Northerners happened

Our little Pod for the weekend

Me being drunk and eaten by a lion while Eden observes

The view!

The Famous Five! xxx

NPD doing his best David Beckham impression

Caine and I rocking our animal hats - they had PAWS and everything!

Loving life in my cow onsie and a moustache (clearly)

Me, Jo and Charlie xxx

The Rejam Family <3

Thanks to my awesome friends, old and new, for making this weekend one to remember. I love every single one of you xx

Models Own Mirrorball Collection

2012-09-13T15:38:00.002+01:00

It's finally hereeeeeeeeee!

I ordered the Mirrorball Collection from Models Own on Monday and have been eagerly awaiting it’s arrival all week. You’ll have to excuse the rushed pictures in this post, but as of 5pm this evening I will be in festival mode and will not have any other time to post this, plus I wanted to show you how amazing and awesome the polishes are before every other blogger in the entire world does!

The polishes come in 5 different colours and if you buy the set for £20 (as I did) you get the standard free top coat with it. You can never have too many top coats! The colours are as follows:

Boogie Nights
Clear top coat with pink, purple, blue and red hexagonal
and round glitter pieces - Predominantly purple effect

Dancing Queen
Clear top coat with green, blue, gold & yellow diamond
and round glitter pieces - Predominantly green effect

Disco Inferno
Clear top coat with gold, green, red and bronze round
and triangular glitter pieces - Predominantly gold effect

Hayleys Comet aka Freak Out!
Clear top coat with blue, pink, red and mint green triangular
straight and round glitter pieces - Predominantly blue effect

Hot Stuff
Clear top coat with red, pink, yellow and orange triangular,
round and square glitter pieces - Predominantly pink effect

I love glitter nail polish anyway, but this is the first glitter I have come across that is similar to my beloved OPI Rainbow Connection in that the glitter is all different shapes and sizes. I love the effect this gives and love that each of these polishes has different shapes, they aren’t all the same but different colours! As you can see from the description some have triangular shapes, others hexagonal etc. Overall this gives the impression that you haven’t just bought 5 of the same polishes in different colours, but you have truly bought 5 different polishes.

I haven’t had a chance to swatch on my nails as the festival nails got done last night (leopard print FYI) but I did a bit on the box the polishes came in so you can get a general idea of how they apply. I think each of them will take a few coats to really achieve a decent look, but they aren’t bad as a topping or a subsection with additional nail art. I cannot wait to try these out when I get home!

From left to right:
Boogie Nights, Disco Inferno, Hayleys Comet, Hot Stuff, Dancing Queen

The Mirrorball Collection is available from the Bottleshop in London Westfield or online at www.modelsownit.com. They will also be sold in Boots nationwide from October 3rd. £5 per polish or £20 for the set including top coat - get it while you can!

From tomorrow till Monday i’ll be at The Zoo Project Festival in Port Lymphe Wildlife Park in Kent, so will pretty much be out of action until at least Tuesday (hopefully otherwise it’s a weekend wasted!) Hope you like the polishes and I hope you all have an awesome weekend! x

UPDATE: I spoke to my sister on the phone this morning who worked out that I had been sent a differnet nail polish colour with my Mirrorball Collection - turns out that Hayley's Comet isn't a Mirrorball colour, I should have received Freak Out instead! I've spoken to Models Own about this who have advised that the labelling on some of the bottles was incorrect - Hayley's Comet is a unreleased colour as of yet, so although the label on my bottle is wrong, the colour of the polish is actually Freak Out - just in case you wondered why I was calling my polish something different to yours!

Let's Do The Time Warp Challenge - Day 1

2012-09-11T12:14:00.001+01:00

Let’s Do the Time Warp Challenge – Day 1

I stupidly didn’t think about this yesterday, but I am going to be posting these challenges a day behind. I have to work for ma monies and therefore cannot spend my entire day doing my nails, so will have to do the challenges of an evening and then put them on the blog the following day (home laptop broken - meh). I have also just realised that this competition runs for 8 days, taking me to next Tuesday BUT on Friday, Saturday and Sunday I am going to be at a festival where I have to camp – I will not even be able to wash let alone do my nails, so this challenge is a write off for me really – nice planning Morsh! Still i’m going to do the exciting ones as and when I can, just to ease myself into my first nail challenge slowly... now I know that I can’t actually complete it on time I feel slightly less pressure so perhaps i’ll have more of a steady hand tonight!

So, Day 1 (or yesterdays) theme was I Should Have Been Born In... and I picked the 60’s. I wanted to do the whole neon colours, flower power thing so first up I picked my brightest colours and then set about trying to get some inspiration for the actual nail art. This is the result....

Thumb: Illamasqua Jo’mina for base, Barry M Fuschia for the petals and Barry M yellow for the middle of the flowers. Relatively easy to do but if you look closely my flowers are square – random Morsh flowers!

Index finger: Models Own Hed Kandi Collection in Beach Party for the base. Barry M Fuschia, Models Own Hed Kandi Collection in Balearic Cool and OPI Who The Shrek Are You? For the stripes, using a standard stripping brush. I initially wanted the lines to be dead straight but you know what, who cares if they are a bit wiggly - it's the 60's man!

Middle Finger: OPI Who The Shrek Are You for the base, with Models Own Hed Kandi Collection Ibiza Mix on top. I didn’t want the glitter to be too perfect on this nail as I wanted to reflect the ‘don’t give a shit’ attitude of the 60’s...

Ring Finger: Models Own Hed Kandi Collection Balearic Cool for the base and a peace transfer on top – easiest nail!

Little finger: Barry M Yellow for the base and OPI Onyx used with a stripping brush to do the smiley face.

I like the way these nails turned out – the nail art isn’t perfect, but considering this is truly my first proper stab at freehand nail art I think it could be a lot worse!

For ONCE I am staying in tonight and doing nothing, and the Day 2 theme is “It’s Vintage Darling”, basically have to recreate a look from the past that has inspired me – I have a brilliant idea for tonights one, so can’t wait to get involved in that and show you all tomorrow!

Check out Neverland Nail Blog to see Lindsey’s latest offering and the other participants designs!

Front Cover Cosmetics: Autumn/Winter Preview

2012-09-11T11:22:00.000+01:00

Last night I went along to the Front Cover Cosmetics preview of their new Autumn/Winter collection – muchos excited!

I have previously been bought Front Cover sets for Christmas and one thing I loved about their makeup was just how pigmented each product is – It’s not often you come across strong eye shadow colours that actually apply to your eye the same colour they look in the package, but these ones do! I went to the event with my lovely friend Jamie and we were greeted with champagne and cupcakes (yummy) and got to have a good look around the new offerings. The event was held at Karine Jackson Hair and Beauty salon just off Leicester Sq, so they had each different make up set displayed in front of a hair station, so you could sit down and have a good look at all the different products within the set and try them on using the mirrors. They had a makeup artist using the sets to apply different looks using the shadows and lipsticks etc, and then at the back they had a lady using the ‘Dark Arts’ nail art set to create lovely nail art using the sequins, diamantes and wraps included in the set.

One aspect of Front Cover I really like is the packaging. Each set comes in a hard box that you flip open like a book, which helps to protect the make up inside and keep it all contained in an easy to store format. The ‘front cover’ of each box is set out like a magazine and shows a different range of looks you can achieve using the products inside. On the inside front cover they tend to have techniques to use to achieve specific looks and a lovely man called Simon explained that underneath the products inside the box they are now going to be including a step by step guide showing you how to use each and every item included in the set.

The colours were AMAZING. Normally when you come across autumn/winter collections they are very focused around the standard black, silver, purple and grey shadows but Front Cover have branched out slightly and as well as using these colours they have amazing jewel greens, bright purples, really pigmented coppery rust colours, faded yellows and browns. Teaming these bright colours with the usual dark and seeing how pigmented they are would make it really easy to achieve an easy, quick statement eye colour. The shimmery shadows (such as the silvers, bronze, whites) almost look reflective once applied to the skin.

Another nice touch with FC Cosmetics is that they include everything in the kit you would need to achieve these looks. They don’t just provide you with the shadows – they give you the brushes too. The nail kit doesn’t just come with the wraps, it comes with glue and a small pair of scissors to cut them down to your size. The sequins and diamantes for the eyewear aren’t just in a pot, they are next to a pair of miniature tweezers so you can pick each speck up easily. I like this as there is nothing more annoying than buying a set and realising that you have to fumble around using your fingers to do things as you don’t have the correct equipment to apply it properly.

I liked 3 sets in particular, and I’ve detailed each set below:

Front Cover Desk to Date - £16.00

This set is a small compact eye shadow kit, including 10 Highly Iridescent Super Pearl Baked Powder shadows in jewel colours, and 8 Satin Pressed Powder shadows along the bottom. The kit comes with 2 separate brushes and quite a large mirror to make applying on the go easy. The colours in this set are beautiful in real life and again SO SO SO pigmented. This set is perfect to whack in your bag the day of your Christmas party and because the colours are so strong and the brushes are included, it’s all you need to transform your look from desk to date – perfect!

Front Cover Kissogram - £22.00

This set is all centred around lips. It comes complete with 16 mini lipsticks, a nude lip liner, a retractable lip brush (which is BRILLIANT), a highly pigmented gold lip pencil and a pot of edible lip glitter. I loved all of the lipsticks, they ranged in colour from deep berry to sheer pink, with corals, oranges, pinks, reds and purples in between. One swipe on the lips showed the true colour so you didn’t have to layer it on thick, and they feel smooth and conditioning on the lips. The lip pencils were equally as awesome and the edible lip glitter was a nice touch although I kept biting it off my lips as I could feel it on there – a bonus to this is that it’s edible, doesn’t taste horrible and I have it on good authority that it actually makes your wee glittery – I don’t know if it makes me weird but I was excited about that! Not the sort of thing I would show off though...

Front Cover Party Queen - £35.00

My favourite set of all, this has a lovely mixture of eye shadows, glitter, nail polish, pencils, lip gloss and the tools needed to apply. The Glitter Ball Baked Dome eye shadows were similar beautiful jewel colours as seen in the Desk to Date set but this set also included 6 wet/dry eye shadows. Dry they are pigmented and bright, but wet they are truly outstanding – creamy, thick and very noticeable. The glitter powder and the glue is a nice touch but my favourite part of this set is the Melted Metal Cream Eye shadows. The colours are AMAZING, a lovely jade and bright purple, they have just the right amount of cream vs powder in the formula but once applied do not feel thick or tacky. I can imagine creating a look with this set would be super easy and super rewarding in terms of the different avenues you can go down just using this one item – the possibilities are endless!

The new collection with be available from the end of September to either buy online at www.frontcovercosmetics.com or QVC. FC will no longer be selling in Boots as Boots were big meanies and tried to make FC compromise on the quality of their products – judging by last night’s offerings, I am really glad Boots didn’t win.

Well done Front Cover, can’t wait to get my mits on these!

Rush Hour

2012-09-10T16:31:00.000+01:00

Today I have managed to find a lovely new nail challenge that I think I am going to try and get involved in...

I find a lot of nail challenges on some of the blogs I read but find that I never have time to do them! I barely had time to write this post today! I am going to try and get involved with this one as I like the themes, but to be honest I don’t know if i’ll be able to change my polish every day, but I will try my hardest...

This one is from the lovely Lindsey at Neverland Nail Blog and is sponsored by Nail Polish Canada – see the picture for details on each day! I am already inspired (albeit indecisive) for my day 1 nails!

This evening after work I have been invited to the a sneak preview of the autumn/winter range for Front Cover Cosmetics by the lovely Lucy at Gloss Communications. I am looking forward to seeing their new range, Front Cover was a staple Christmas present for me for the last few years running, the sets they did in Boots were awesome! Can’t wait to see what they have to offer! Then I have to run home, jump in the bath and wash my hair with fairy liquid (long story, booked in for a strip and colour change on the 29^th October so have to make my hair fade as much as possible between now and then, eek!) and then i’ll settle down to try and do this. I can’t decide what decade I should pick for my nails out of the following:

1920’s – Flapper chic

1950’s – Full skirts and poodles, ala Grease

1960’s – flower power!

1970’s – platforms, perms and Saturday Night Fever!

I feel like I am swaying more towards the 60’s (just because I think that nail art would be the easier to do, is that bad?) Also because one of my all time favourite films ‘Mermaids’ (yes the one starring Cher, Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci) is set in 1963 so I could totally draw inspiration from that. On the other hand I do love Grease and could easily conjure up some Grease inspired nail art with my lovely new nail art brushes! More about them tomorrow...

Let me know if you decide to participate in the challenge too, it’s my first one so don’t worry if you think you’ll be rubbish – I’m pretty much certain I will be too!

I'll be sure to do a proper post on my new nail art brushes and the Front Cover event tomorrow too - I'll try and get some decent pictures too although I forgot my camera to have to rely on the iPhone! Nightmare day! :(

Overnight Celebrity

2012-09-06T15:36:00.002+01:00

Well I have had an exciting couple of days!

After the mess of the weekend, I thought this week was going to be one of the worlds worst. We went out on Saturday night with a few of the boys we met in Vegas and it ended up being an extremely drunken night - I spent the entire day suffering on Sunday :( I went to sleep at 7.30am on Sunday morning and woke up at 10am so wasn’t functioning properly anyway, and then didn’t get to sleep till 1.15am on Monday morning, alarm going off at 5.30am. It’s safe to say on Monday afternoon at work I was basically a walking zombie!

I was perked up a bit when Charlie reminded me we were going on an awesome celebrity stalking mission on Tuesday night. Charlie works in Covent Garden, right next to the Royal Opera House which was hosting the GQ Men of the Year Awards. Charlie, her workmates and I all went out for dinner from work and then went and stood outside the barrier like little screaming fan girls waiting to meet celebrities. I didn’t know what to expect, I knew we’d have a laugh but didn’t have a clue what sort of celebrities would turn up. Charlie raised my hopes by saying Bradley Cooper and Jonny Depp were there the year before, so I had high expections...

Unfortunately neither of those absolute hotties turned up! Tom Hardy, Dave Grohl, Jensen Button and David Beckham all stayed away too (our absolute faves) but we did get to meet some decent celebs! We saw Ronan Keating, David Gandy, Tom Jones, Jamie & Louise Redknapp, Katherine Jenkins, Tinie Tempah, Bradley Wiggins, Jessie J, Victoria Pendleton, Robbie Williams, Dermot O’Leary, Stella McCartney, Chris Hemsworth and Liam Gallagher. Our favourites of the night were Greg Rutherford (Team GB Long Jump Gold medallist), Louis Smith (Team GB Gymnastics Legend), Llana Del Ray and GARY BARLOW! Greg Rutherford was absolutely lovely and chatted to us for a little bit and had pictures taken, as did Louis Smith! I missed Gary Barlow as a group of Spanish girls decided to try and sit on my head so I moved backwards just as his car turned up L The other girls got really close and managed to get pictures of him though so that was cool! All in all a very exciting night, and it took me back to being 15 years old again! Check out the pictures of us doing our best Avid Merrion impersonations... I FUCKING LOVE CELEBRITIES! (please excuse my poor photo taking skills but when you are surrounded by screaming children who are attempting to throw you over a barrier, it's not easy to take a decent picture on a phone)

Ronan Keating

Tinie Tempah

J J J J Jessie J

Llama Del Ray

GREG RUTHERFORD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Louis Smith!

Kylie Minogue

This was the point where Greg and I were discussing
how much we loved eachother

Yesterday as I still hadn’t caught up on my sleep I wanted an early night, but then I found out I had won tickets to see Emeli Sande at the iTunes festival. My friend Jo loves her and had a day off work yesterday so I asked her if she wanted to come. Jo met me up at Oxford Circus and we walked down to our beloved Victoria’s Secret at New Bond Street – neither of us had been in this one yet as we had just stuck to the Westfield Stratford one as it’s nearer home. IT IS AMAZING! It is 4 floors hight! The lower level is dedicated to the PINK range, with tote bags, tracksuits, gym wear, bikinis etc. The middle 2 levels are for the standard underwear and make up and the top floor seemed to be a private dressing room behind closed doors, probably in case any super celebrities or Angels decide to pay a visit! A lovely touch in this shop is they have genuine outfits from the world famous VS Fashion Shows on display, actual wings and underwear worn by the Angels themselves! The New Bond St store doesn’t sell the vast range of body sprays like the Westfield Stratford one does, which is really annoying, but it’s worth going for the tracksuits! The Bond St branch is participating in the Vogue’s Fashion Night Out event tonight. You can turn up and get free champagne, a free bra measuring service and they are giving away freebies if you spend over £70 (which i’ve heard is a VS tote bag and/or a VS iPhone case). I was going to buy a tracksuit last night but I am holding out and running down there after work so I can get the freebies. I did buy 5 pants for £20 last night so have no plans to get more tonight but you never know – would be rude not to! Credit Card!

Me and Jo, Wonky Wednesday!

Nice Hat

I don't even know why this happened to me

Me, Dutch and Emil the Hippo

Emeli Sandeeeeeeeee

The Roundhouse

In other news, I am SUPER excited about the Models Own Mirrorball collection coming out soon! It actual debuts in the bottle shop at Westfield London (NOT the Stratford one) today, an then they go on sale on the website on the 10^th and general sale in Boots etc from the 15^th September. Models Own are also currently running a deal where if they manage to get 100,000 likes in September they’ll do their amazing 50% off sale for all customers! This is bloody awesome as their nail polishes are worth paying £5 for anyway, but if you get the 50% off that makes them £2.50 each – that’s enough to give me heart palpatations! Hopefully we’ll crack the likes quickly so I can get the entire Mirrorball collection 50% off (yes I do want every colour and no there is nothing wrong with that). What do you think of the Mirrorball collection? Any specific colours you want?

If you want to check out what the Mirrorball polishes look like on, check out the lovely Fee's site Make Up Savvy to see some awesome swatches! x

*UPDATE* Fragrance Direct are currently offering Essie polish for £2! Get involved HERE