I have a fancy dress party to go to this Friday night and because I’ve had a pretty hectic few weeks I haven’t had the chance to organize my costume yet. So I’ve spent the last couple of days wondering what the hell I can go as that I can style by fishing through the big bag of fancy dress goodies that I already own, because I don’t really have the time to go shopping between now and then either!

I suppose, on this occasion, I could be that person that ducks out of dressing up and just goes along to the party in their normal clothes, but that really isn’t me. You see I absolutely love fancy dress, every time me and my gang of crazy buddies organize a fancy dress party they are epic, everyone always seems to enjoy themselves that little bit more than normal! This week, whilst desperately wracking my brains to find something to go as on Friday, I got to thinking about just exactly why that is!

Sometimes I think we enjoy fancy dress so much because we really get into the character we are dressed as, doing little impressions which in turn make ourselves and those around us chuckle to no end! I’ll never forget a onesie party I went to last year when the majority of us came in animal suits, we were growling, meowing, neighing, and generally acting out, there were several points in the night where I was reduced to tears from laughing so damn much. One friend, who was dressed in a Lion onesie, would request ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ song at every pub we went to that night, and every time it came on, we would all surround him as he played out the actions described in the lyrics in the middle of the circle. It was pure hilarity!

Another time, a band that my brother plays guitar in were in the final of a Battle Of The Band’s competition, part of the criteria they were being judged on was the crowd’s reaction to their performance. So in order to ensure that our crew was really hyper, loud and excitable, I arranged for quite a few of us to go dressed as cheerleaders with the band’s name painted across our t-shirts. It was an entirely mammoth operation that took a good few weeks of preparation. We made banners, placards, hand painted the T-shirts, and we even made our own colour-coded pom-poms, which is not as easy as you might think! The plan worked, the costumes got the whole crowd charged and cheering at the top of their lungs, and the band responded to the crowd’s energy and put in the performance of their lives. Unfortunately, the band didn’t win the overall competition, coming a very close second. But they definitely got the crowd vote, and dozens of people went complaining to the judges about the result afterwards, even people that weren’t in our little cheerleading posse!

I think that one of the main reasons that fancy dress is so popular however, is the fact that we get to step out of our own skins for the evening. Sometimes, when stuff is pissing us off, it is hard to disassociate ourselves from whatever issues might be playing on our minds. In fancy dress, we get to forget about all the day to day problems that are weighing us down, donning the guise of someone else seems to allow us to disengage ourselves from the complications in our lives and just concentrate solely on the purpose of having some fun. Which, let’s face it, is what the weekend should really be all about!

For many people the idea of working from home sounds like a dream come true; you get your creature comforts around you, you don’t have to spend hours sitting in traffic or squished up next to some stinky guy on the tube in rush hour contorted in some awkward position in order to keep your nostrils as far away from his armpits as is humanly possible, you don’t have to spend ages picking out different outfits to wear to work, and quite frankly, if you want to you can sit there doing your work in your pajamas all day (that is of course if you don’t have clients coming to your house).

There are clearly a great many positive aspects to being able to work from inside the sanctity of your home, however, from someone who has recently made the transition from working as a manager in a busy pub to a based at home web journalist/blogger/content writer, there are still a number of pitfalls to try your best to avoid and it is not as easy or idyllic as you might think.

When I started telling my friends and family about the details of my new job, everyone’s eyes would widen when I told them that I would be working from home, they were totally chuffed for me. The fact that I could set my own hours was a massive bonus. The people who know me well know that I am completely nocturnal and that I don’t really live in the same time zone as the majority of society. I suppose that’s why after leaving my last writing job as a journalist for a weekly local newspaper, I ended up in bar management.

However, perfect as it may sound, I did find it pretty difficult at the beginning to get myself into the discipline of regulating the hours that I worked. Sometimes I would start too late and find myself struggling to catch up on myself. Another problem I had with the hours is the fact that I would often start work, twat about for a bit, either nipping into the television room and staying there rather too long, or taking too many short breaks. This basically meant that in order to complete my work load I spent the whole 16 hours I was awake flittering backwards and forwards between these silly little breaks and then being back at the computer.

By taking too many mini pit-stops you can be left with the feeling that you haven’t actually accomplished anything with your spare time, and that you spent all your waking moments working and watching pointless snippets of ‘Friends’ that sneakily manage to draw your attention when you are making a cup of tea! It is really important to stop this habit taking a hold of you when you first start working from home. I’d recommend that you should try to ensure that you do your 8 or 9 hours a day in solid chunks so that you can actually go to the movies or go visit mates when you’ve finished your tasks. That way you are more inclined to feel like you have managed to do something constructive with your ‘me’ time.

Another massive problem for me was the fact that I miss people. This might be somewhat specific to my own circumstances, because I have basically gone from what is one of the most social jobs in the world to what is one of the most anti-social. I was always surrounded by people, live music, colourful events, generally a party atmosphere. A big part of my job was to engage the customers in conversation, make them feel welcome and ensure they enjoyed their visit, and I thoroughly enjoyed this side of the work because I have always been a very sociable person. Now though, my only connection to real live people in my workplace is the internet. Whilst chatting to my other nocturnal buddies on Facebook in the middle of the night when I need five minutes downtime is great, I do miss the fact that I got to interact with numerous different people face-to-face on a daily basis. It is very easy to undervalue the effect just 5 minutes chatting aimlessly to your work colleague over a coffee can have on your stress levels, until you don’t have that option anymore!

In saying all this, I totally love my new job, I just need to spend some time working out the kinks in my routine and adapt it to best suit me and the intricacies of my personality. It’s only been a couple of months and I’m sure it will all work out for the best in the end. The pros definitely outweigh the cons in my situation, but if you are thinking about making the transition to work from home yourself, then it is definitely worth considering some of these aforementioned issues before you make the jump!

I’m going to share a little secret here. Women are much more vulgar than men are.

I know you guys are all shaking your head, but it’s true.

When we talk to our girlfriends about our sexual encounters, we are unabashed and embarrassingly detailed and specific.

Ladies, you know it’s true.

We talk about size, shape, girth – often with vivid descriptions, with nary an afterthought. We discuss what he does that we like, and what he does that we don’t like at all. Us women will not only talk about how he did it, but we’ll do it with enough details to put a Harlequin romance novel author to shame.

My friends let me know what nights they got lucky, and when they didn’t.

If he tried something weird, you better bet our best friend knows about it the next day.

If he underperformed? She probably knows that too.

Two-pump chump? She’s heard. All night tantric master? There’s a reason she’s grinning coyly when she sees you.

We talk about how long it lasted (or didn’t last), if it was satisfying (or ho hum), how many time we reached peak (or not at all), even if we faked it or not.

For example, I prefer girth to length. Not to say I want it short and fat like a sausage, but long and skinny just doesn’t do it for me either. I prefer a mid-range length with a bit of width, it’s the most satisfying. Most of my friends agree with me. Not only do they agree, I know which of their husbands or boyfriends would fit the bill or not, because they’ve told me. I even know who’s circumcised (yea!) and who isn’t (boo!).

Think the above paragraph is a little too personal? That it shares too much information for your taste? It’s tame by female gossiping standards!

I know how often several of my friends perform oral sex on their partners, as well as how often they do (or don’t) reciprocate in turn. I can tell you if she spit or swallowed, and sometimes even what she said it tasted like.

We share all of this, and much more. In fact, we’re so graphic and detailed in the amount of information we share about our sexual life with our friends, that I can pretty confidently assert that we’re much more vulgar in our sex talk than men are.

When a guy talks about “the chick he nailed last night” he might mention how hot it was, or how she moaned, but I very much doubt he tells his buddies in detail what her labia were shaped like. If it’s his girlfriend or wife, he’s even less likely to share with his mates details about his girl’s anatomy, kinky fetishes, or sexual preferences.

So guys, just a heads up… Next time we all stop talking when you enter a room, yes, we were probably talking about you. And no, you probably don’t want to know.

(Warning this article contains plotlines from Episode 15, Season 8 of Grey’s Anatomy)

The other day I was sat watching the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy on the television and it really got me thinking about children and why certain people disapprove so much when you tell them that you don’t want them. The scene that particularly hit a nerve was when surgeons Cristina Yang and Owen Hunt are having marriage counseling and are discussing a fundamental problem in their relationship – the fact that Yang does not want children and Hunt does. Their conversation went like this;

Yang: “There is no deeper reason.”
Hunt: “There has to be.”
Yang: “There IS NO deeper reason. I wasn’t abused, I don’t have a dark secret, I wasn’t mugged by a baby. I just don’t want kids.”
Hunt: “Nobody doesn’t want kids.”
Yang: “People can NOT want kids, it’s a thing.”
Hunt: “That is not a thing.”
Yang: “Well it’s MY thing.”
Hunt: “You’re going to change your mind, you’re going to change your mind in 3 years or 5, you’re going to change your mind about having a baby and then it’s going to be too late and you’re going to regret it.”
Yang: “Then I will know and understand that I made a choice. I choose medicine, I choose me. I choose that over the remote possibility that I might one day regret not having a child…And by the way, it’s alright to never want kids, some people don’t ever want kids!”
Hunt: “Well I don’t know why! WHY???”

It was a heated debate between a couple that are quite clearly in a great deal of pain over their different opinions on the matter. For many, having children, bringing life into the world is the reason they feel they were put upon the earth. For others, it is not so black and white, and women especially who do not want children are often frowned upon and considered dysfunctional or ‘faulty’ by large portion of society.

I am one of those women who has never wanted children. I’m not saying that I NEVER will – I don’t pretend to know what the future will hold, but I’m 32 years of age at the moment and I have never wanted one up to this day.

Many of my friends and family think this lack of a desire to procreate is very weird. When I would discuss the subject in my early or late twenties, people I spoke to were often adamant that I would change my mind in a few years time or ‘when the time was right’. But I haven’t…Not yet anyway!

When I was listening to Cristina Yang trying wholeheartedly to get her point across to her husband who desperately wants children in their future, I really felt for her. I greatly pitied her because I know how it feels to have to try and explain something like that to people and the way in which you are judged because of it.

While I completely understand her point of view, I am a completely different character to Cristina Yang, she is painted as furiously career-driven, often selfish and cold when it comes to getting what she wants and really not very maternal.

My reasons for not wanting children are similar in some ways; I enjoy my freedom too much and have never wanted to be tied down to the responsibility of having a child to take care of. I want to travel as much as I can, have as many insane adventures and experiences as I can and I don’t think they can be done with children!

But I can be quite maternal with my friends and family; I’m usually the one who makes sure that friend we all have who gets drunk too quickly gets home safely, I always took care of my staff when I worked in management in the hospitality industry – the first one to defend them if they were badly treated by customers or other management members, I always try to provide a sensitive ear if a friend in trouble needs to talk and it is these character traits in particular that have many of my friends baffled as to why I don’t want my own children. They think these traits would transfer well into motherhood.

Quite a few of my friends have had children in the last year or so and while I am really happy for them, I often find myself switching off somewhat when the conversation revolves around dirty diapers or sterilizing milk bottles.

Whilst I love my family and friends children, I don’t get all gooey whenever a newborn comes into the room. I can see why they are fascinating to many others but I don’t turn into an emotional mushball whenever I see a baby. I can appreciate the miracle of life and all that, but I much prefer children once they get to the age when they can hold a conversation…when they are at the pooing and milk-drinking stage I must admit that I find them a little bit boring.

Like most people, I have a strong hatred for the kind of person who brings a child into the world and then neglects it and because I would never want to be one of those people, I definitely don’t feel ready to have my own children. I’m not yet willing to sacrifice the kind of time and dedication that I believe are essential if you are going to bring a child into this crazy world and really love it.

Another factor that is brought up when discussing the subject is the lack of a significant long relationship in my life. Many people, with whom I have discussed the subject, are adamant that once I get into a steady relationship and ‘settle down’ then it will be a natural progression to want to have children with that person.

Maybe they are right about that one…I can’t be sure, as I am yet to test that theory. My only ‘long’ relationship, (that lasted just under 2 years) ended 4 years ago, and since then there hasn’t really been a ‘significant other’ in my life. I’ll have to wait and see if that happens, but I’m not entirely convinced, because I know so many people who have wanted children all their lives regardless of whether they have a partner or not. Some of these women experienced one failed relationship after another, but wanted children so badly that they opted for artificial insemination. That is definitely not something that appeals to me, especially not at this moment in time.

I am so grateful that I have never been in the position that Yang and Hunt were in that episode, while I can understand Hunt’s side of the story, I do believe that women should be entitled to choose whether they want children or not.

We should not be judged if we decide we want to put our careers, the desire to travel, our education, our preferred living habits or our social lives ahead of the urge to bring children into the world. It is our right to choose and I don’t think it is wrong or unreasonable to NOT want to have children. Motherhood is not something you can be forced or guilted into doing, it is something that shouldn’t be undertaken unless really want to do it and embrace it with every ounce of your being!

Every woman should be given that choice and feel she can make it without being judged by those around her.

I must admit that I’m not really what you would call a ‘girly-girl’, I’d watch a football match over a rom-com any day and getting manicures, facials or general pampering treatments holds little to no interest for me, usually…

I don’t know why I am like this, I guess it comes from growing up around predominately male cousins who I greatly admired and looked up to. This admiration saw me quickly turn into what you would call a tom-boy, when most other girls were playing with dolls and barbies, I was climbing trees, making bow-and-arrows and destroying my grandad’s flowerbeds with my football!

As I grew up I did get gradually more girly, trading my baggy boyish clothes for more feminine alternatives and swapping my bow-and-arrow for a make-up kit, but elements of that tom-boy remain and make up big part of my personality.

A little while ago my mother organized an evening at The Beauty Lodge in North London as a catch-up session between us and our cousins. If I was organizing something like that, I probably would have opted to arrange the meeting at a pub, preferably somewhere with a live band in the background. But that’s me and the kind of thing that my social life revolves around – the cousins we were meeting with aren’t really pub people, so I wound my head in and went along with the plan.

I can honestly say that I really surprised at how much I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. The Beauty Lodge is an absolutely fantastic place, with beautiful décor, an utterly serene vibe and ambience, excellent facilities and reasonably priced to boot! We bought along our favourite snacks, some drinks and had an absolutely fantastic evening, going from Jacuzzi to sauna, chatting and giggling the whole evening through. Part of the package that we chose for the evening included a massage or a facial that went along with our use of the spa.

I chose to have a massage because I used to do a lot of manual labour back then when I was managing a bar. Trying to move around 22gallon kegs can leave you with quite a few knots and kinks in your back, let me tell you! My massage was wickedly relaxing and she really knew her stuff, asking me if I did a lot of heavy lifting at work moments after she had laid her hands on my back! Afterwards I felt more relaxed and limber than I had in ages and would recommend it to anyone!

It is not a chain, but a family run business started by two sisters who are beauty therapists and this is one of the reasons that it is wonderfully unique. Lots of places like this can feel cold, generic and totally lacking in any kind of atmosphere, but not this place, it completely captures the right vibe and is a perfect place to relax and unwind.

They offer a range of treatments including facials, massages, manicures, pedicures, waxing, eyebrow threading, gel nails and the like. The Lodge also has a sauna, Jacuzzi (I flipping love the Jacuzzi) and a chocolate fountain should you so desire it! You can book party packages for hen nights, birthdays or just to have a really relaxing catch up with your friends and family like we did!

It is a women only spa, run by women for women, and the two sisters who run the place do an excellent job. They are warm, friendly and professional and I enjoyed my evening there so much that I booked another evening there not long after as a treat for my best friend for her birthday and had a great night then too.

If you are interested in booking yourself a wonderfully relaxing day at The Beauty Lodge check out http://www.thebeautylodge.co.uk/ or call 02088882664

For some strange reason my lovelife seems predestined to involve one epic fail after another, if I’m not having my heart broken by some guy that I am hopelessly in love with, I am in a futile chase after the unobtainable ‘one that got away’, or I am breaking up with someone who is hopelessly devoted to me, just because ‘it doesn’t feel right’. After which, I often rue my decision, and wonder why it is that I can’t, just for once, be in love with someone who is also in love with me!

When I am bemoaning my misfortune in my diary, I have the tendency to feel like it is just me, that I am alone in my suffering and that I am possibly one of the most unlucky people in the world when it comes to love, relationships and affairs of the heart. I often wonder if I am being punished for some wrongdoing I committed in a former life, or paying the karmic punishment for a heart that I unintentionally happened to break many moons ago.

But the unsettling truth is, is that I am not alone, many of the people I talk to about my lovelife when specific problems arise, are also in the same boat. So many of my friends, family and acquaintances seem to suffer the same terrible fate, they are either single and struggling to meet someone to commit to, in love with someone who doesn’t feel the same way about them, or in a relationship that is making their lives a misery.

Can I just say, for the record, and for any of my friends reading this who are in happy committed relationships, I am not saying that this applies to all of you. I know a great many people who are happily in love, and have built great relationships on the admirable qualities of trust, friendship, communication as well as physical attraction and lust! The same goes for those of you out there who are single and happy about it. Good on you guys, I’m glad you are happy!

It does seem however, that more people are unhappy, than are happy with their lot, when it comes to love and relationships these days and I’m trying to pinpoint exactly why this is! I think back to my grandparents generation, people were married usually by their 20s at the latest, and the majority of them seemed happy, marriages lasted the distance, the words ‘till death do us part’ really did hold some sort of meaning.

While I am not naive enough to believe that all of these marriages lasted because the people in them were content and in love, that of course the fact that divorce was a taboo and frowned upon also was a reason why many marriages survived back then, that would not have today, but it still seems like it was easier.

As I am writing this article, I take the odd break and flick onto Facebook, where I have just seen one of my friends post the status, ‘Amazed at how much my mum and dad still find to talk about after 27 years! Cute.’ For me it sums up the argument I was making in the last two paragraphs perfectly, and its timing was so perfect, that I felt it was fated to be shared with you.

So why is it that today we struggle to replicate the longevity and contentment of the past?

One of the reasons I think that people struggle to find relationships that they are happy in, is because of an over-idealized vision of love and romance in the media, movies and internet. We see and read about people meeting their soul mates and engaging in these epic, all-conquering relationships, and feel disheartened if we don’t feel the same dizzy heights about our own affairs.

I know love and romance novels, and indeed films that explore subjects like this have always been around, but I just think our exposure to material of this nature has increased.

Combined with the fact that in this day and age, the role of a woman on the earth can mean much more than to bear life to children and be a mother to them, and this in turn means that people are more likely to hold out until they find something that compares to movie-love. Well, they hold out until they get fed up of being alone and settle for the next best thing to come along! I’m not suggesting that procreation isn’t important, just that nowadays (in most places anyhow), women are not treated like it is the only reason they were put upon the earth!

Couples are having children much later in life than they used to, opting to establish their careers or live a little first, so if you’re not desperate to have kids, then it kind of makes sense to hang on a little bit, in the hope that you might actually meet your soul mate!

I’m not saying that this is definitely the reason for the failure of many modern day relationships, I’m just musing that it could be a factor that plays a part.

There is just too much that could be written on this subject to keep it in the confines of one blog post, so ‘love and woe’ and all things relating to it, will be one of the regular themes I explore on this site. If you have any theories of your own about the subject, please post a comment and let me know.

I have just finished writing an article about the brutal stonings of numerous teenagers in Iraq who were killed because they were ‘emo’s’, for the news website that I write for and I can’t seem to get it out of my head. Whilst definitive information about the murders remains unclear at this moment in time, it is believed that these children were targeted by religious extremists who did not approve of their affiliation to the western sub-culture.

I realize that because I was born and brought up in a liberal family in London, I do not necessarily have the right to judge other countries and their cultures; however I just can’t seem to get over what has happened to these poor kids. Killed because of the way they dressed, they never got the chance to grow up or live their lives, and for what? Because of some people’s misguided faith…It is both tragic and mortifying and for me a gross overreaction.

I wonder if the people who murdered these poor children thought about the fact that teenagers go through a multitude of different phases whilst they are growing up and discovering themselves.
I’m not saying that if these kids decided to stay emo’s, that it gives others the right to kill them for it, I’m just pointing out that teenagers change as they grow up, but these unfortunate victims were not given the chance.

While I passionately believe that people everywhere should have the freedom and the right to choose how they style their appearance, who they worship and their sexuality, I could, if pushed to the very depths of my understanding, accept that certain nations and cultures will be inclined to persuade or even force the youth into dressing a certain way and believing in certain ideals. While I would be angered if I read an article about children in Iraq being banned from dressing emo in public places or schools, I would understand it.

It’s not right, but it’s almost acceptable, if you get what I’m saying. But to kill them, like they were guilty of some sort of heinous crime and condemn them to their deaths in this disgusting and horrific manner is too much.

Unfortunately it is part and parcel of human nature to judge people on appearance, we all do it, and I would find it difficult to believe anyone who tried to claim that they had never judged another human being on appearance. Many of us do it without even realizing it, often we don’t do anything about it, we just see a person and form a brief evaluation of them in our minds because of the way they look.

Maybe part of the reason I found these killings so mortifying is because I put myself in the same position as these children. While I am not an emo, I have a couple of eyebrow piercings, wear dark eye make-up and dress in what many would describe as an alternative fashion. Throughout my early twenties my hair was various different colours including fluorescent pink and electric blue just to name a few. I have often been judged on my appearance, and I think if you dress alternative to the norm, you are always going to get a reaction.

People will stare if you have bright colours in your hair, loud clothing or unusual tattoos and piercings. It’s not being judged that bothers me per se, sometimes it’s humorous, sometimes it’s annoying, other times I don’t even notice that it’s happening.

It is when this ‘judgment’ turns into bullying or victimization that I feel it is a problem, and one that society definitely needs to address. Thankfully I have managed to get through life, without having too much of a problem with this, yes of course there has been the odd instance where someone has made fun of me because of the way I look, or the odd security guard has followed me around the make-up department because they thought I was going to shoplift – but they are minor incidents, many other people are not so lucky.

The atrocious killings in Iraq are an extreme example of this, but it doesn’t just happen overseas; in the UK in 2007, Sophie Lancaster and her boyfriend Robert Maltby were ferociously attacked by a gang of teenagers as they walked home after a night out just because of their alternative look. Sophie was murdered after she tried to protect Robert, while he was being viciously attacked and was turned on. The thugs stamped on her head and face so many times she was almost unrecognizable after the attack.

Sophie’s murder really shocked and scared me. I kept thinking of how it could have been one of my friends who suffered that way, or even me, after all, I had piercings and had had my hair in a very similar style to Sophie’s when her life was so cruelly taken from her.

We could have been friends, I thought, as I read about the kind of person her mother described her as. After Sophie’s death, her mother set up the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, a charity designated to stopping the victimization of people who have alternative appearances, you can find more information about the charity and the work they do on www.sophielancasterfoundation.com

We need to teach our children to celebrate each other’s differences and make sure that they grow up knowing that it is wrong to persecute people who are different to ourselves. To be able to dress and style our appearance how we want t, is a fundamental human right and we need to do everything in our power to protect it.

For more about the killings in Iraq, read Iraqi Teens Stoned to Death For Being Emo on my Geek Blog.

When doing the research for my blog this week, I decided I wanted to get a few ideas about what sort of things mums these days use the internet to find out about, so I would be able to cover the most relevant subjects as the weeks go by.

This week, I felt the urge to get this information from real people, so rather than going on the hunt for Google statistics on the subject; I went into one of the clandestine Facebook groups I belong to in my quest for knowledge. It is a closed group and is a place where about 40 odd friends gather together to say the kind of things that we really want to get off our chests, but do not want to get criticized for.

Whether the posts are about the complete lack of wine in their lives since having their children, ex-partners being absolutely useless when it comes to helping raise their child, or their bosses at work driving them absolutely insane, anything goes, and we enter the group on the underlying principle that no one is to be judged on their rantings!

So I asked the members of this group, the majority of whom are mothers, about the sorts of things they look up on the internet, and I made a few interesting discoveries.

One friend, who is currently in the process of trying to house-swap through the council scheme in order to move back to London, is exasperated as she explains that she is currently in the process of doing this whilst her 4 –year old picks up a biro and draws hard circular patterns on her back as sits hunched over the laptop, declaring, ‘You’re getting another tattoo mummy’ as she does so!

She also somewhat embarrassingly admits that when you have a child, you become ‘obsessed’ with their faeces. I can’t see her now, as we are engaged in conversation over Facebook, but I know she is shuddering as she explains how many times she has looked up The Bristol Scale on the internet (The Bristol Stool Scale is a medical aid that classifies human faeces into seven categories).

The topic of sleep deprivation is also prevalent, and it is quite clear to me that many of my mummy friends are really feeling this lack in their lives. A few other ‘important’ subjects are bantered around regarding healthcare, benefits, tax credits, schooling etc… then the conversation-stream starts to take on a humorous tone.

How to get more wine into your life comes up – more than once, and one mother tells me that she just used Google to find out whether ducks have teeth, as somehow this also managed to come up in the chat. The same woman also said “contrary to popular belief – we don’t look up potty-training with much gusto, we much prefer looking at pictures of fit younger men and sleeping!”

Of course I know they don’t mean all their brusque jokey comments, these women, my friends, are actually all excellent mothers, I hear their concern and feel the compassion they have for their children in the majority of their Facebook posts and comments. The post became a joke stream – rather than anything because these women are funny, intelligent, confident people with their own personalities and would like people to see them that way, rather than just another mum looking up what kind of powdered milk to give their child on Google!

This is something I feel is a predominant concern amongst today’s mothers, amongst the women, who although love their children as much as the next person, want to hold on to a little bit of the personality they were before they had a child and had to focus every ounce of their being and self into caring for him/her.

They don’t want to become ‘that parent’ who bores the living daylights out of their childless friends by talking about the procedures they use to sterilize their babies bottle or how they manage to stay on top of the extraordinary amount of laundry they have to do in order to keep their child in clean clothes! Of course, they use the net to search the aforementioned ‘important’ things too, but holding onto a sense of self is also important if you ask me, especially if you don’t fancy a breakdown!

The internet is one way through which this ‘hanging onto the old me’ can be facilitated, the social media websites help people keep in touch with their former selves, and the friends who are still going out and partying all the time. So you can’t go to the pub as often as you’d like, but you can still see the pictures of all your other mates there and comment on them, helping to feel like you haven’t been wholly ostracized from your group of single childless mates.

If you used to love going to gigs and live music, and now can’t go so often, having access to the internet, at least means you still have some idea what’s going on in the areas you are interested in. So, I guess what I’m saying is, as important as the internet is as a tool for finding out useful information, it is also essential in helping mothers hang onto a sense of self.

A new study by BPA expert Angel Nadal from the Miguel Hernandez University in Spain, has uncovered some alarming new discoveries that all mothers will want to know about. We are constantly being warned by the media that obesity in children is on the rapid increase and is very dangerous.

We have always been led to believe that this rise in childhood obesity is primarily due to unhealthy diets, not enough physical activity and a fondness for fast food, there is now another factor we need to consider that could have a significant impact and that is Bisphenol A or BPA as it is better known. BPA is used to make polycarbonate polymers and epoxy resins along with other materials to make plastics.

Though we known that many of the chemicals we are exposed to in our everyday lives can have hidden dangers or side effects that we do not know enough about, stories about their dangers normally get spread around outside the school gates between parents for a short while, before they are eventually forgotten about, and we are all talking about the next dangerous chemical in the news. Certain groups of people still campaign for their removal from the products or foodstuffs in our lives, but it is very rare that you hear of a modern chemical or substance actually getting banned!

Well that might just happen with BPA as it is not often we get such compelling evidence as Nadal’s study, into the effects of BPA on obesity and diabetes, which was recently published in PL0s ONE.

BPA is a synthesized substance, often called an endocrine disruptor and is a common ingredient in plastics and the lining of food cans. Coming into even small amounts of it can scramble our hormone signals and say deceive fat cells into taking in more fat or lead the pancreas to secrete excess insulin. In an article about Nadal’s study in The Huffington Post, he says that eating something containing BPA is like “telling your organs that you are eating more than you are really eating”.

Nadal’s study shows that BPA triggers the release of nearly double the amount of insulin that is required to break down food by convincing the receptor into believing it is the natural hormone estrogen which is an insulin regulator. High insulin levels can lead to weight gain and Type 2 Diabetes. This effect vanished once Nadal’s researchers took the said receptors from the study mice being tested, thus showing BPA’s chemical mechanism which had until that time been unknown to scientists.

Many other experts in the field agree with the findings of Nadal’s study and it is believed that approximately 90% of people living in developed countries have a higher level of BPA in their systems than the level causing hormone disruption in Nadal’s study.

The study also highlighted the dangers of BPA to pregnant women because the foetus is exposed to both the BPA and higher insulin levels from the mother.

To conclude, the Huffington Post article states:

“Overall, half of the developed world is now overweight and one in six is obese — about double the numbers of 30 years ago. Approximately 250 million people suffer from diabetes worldwide.

Sure, our lifestyle has changed over the decades in parallel with the increased use of BPA. Yet scientists have noticed the same fattening trend in newborns, lab rodents, pets and wildlife that live in close proximity to humans. Have babies or mice really changed how much they eat or exercise? Experts highlight this as further evidence that more than just caloric intake is driving the current epidemics of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.”

It will come as absolutely no surprise that the chemical industry disagrees with the findings of Nadal’s study, stating that BPA has been thoroughly tested and has a safety track record of many years.

One thing is for sure, unless BPA is banned by the governing bodies, it will be pretty darn hard to avoid, as it is used in almost everything!