A couple of new signs have appeared recently on my little stretch of the M5 – the bit between Taunton and Bristol. They are identical, at about a ten mile interval? They annoy me every time I drive past them, to the point where this weekend I made fiancé drive past extra slowly so that I could take a picture and rant about them.

This is it:

motorway petrol price sign M5

This sign tells me three things:

One – someone, somewhere, had a massively underspent motorway road sign budget. How else can you justify it? How much must it cost to have made this sign, connected it up with the petrol stations, get it set up, and then maintain it? And to what end?? (See points two and three.)

Two – petrol on the motorway is a complete rip off. If you have been foolish enough to leave your refuelling until you’re on the M5, (which is me obviously), this sign acts as a helpful reminder of what an idiot you are. 

Three – just in case you weren’t now depressed enough, it then goes on to let you know that there’s no point even hanging on a bit longer, as you will be ripped off by exactly the same amount for the next 39 miles. Haha! You feel really stupid now don’t you? View Post

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I thought I would jump on the EU referendum wagon today, for a short rant, not because I am hugely political, but because I saw this outside Wetherspoons on my way to work:

Wertherspoons EU referendum Brexit

Let’s take a minute shall we?

“Only Wetherspoon can gather the facts…”

Now I’m no expert, but instinctively, this doesn’t feel true. Surely there are people other than Wetherspoon, better qualified, more experienced perhaps, who might be in a slightly better position to gather the facts about the EU referendum for me? 

In response, someone on Twitter shared this picture with me, which I hadn’t seen, but is also very funny. This one is true. 

 

You could argue I suppose that when it comes down to it, Wetherspoon may be as well informed as anyone else who will be voting, and this is the bit that really annoys me – why is this even a referendum? Most of us, myself included, are just too stupid to be able to make an informed decision about this. This is an example of why we have an elected government – we have picked people to find out about stuff, and make these sort of decisions for us. The fact that we, the ignorant masses, have been put in charge of this terrifies me. It feels like a parent letting a toddler gorge themselves on Haribo, knowing they are going to be sick – someone needs to step in.

We can’t be trusted.

The majority of us will be voting based on fear, or misunderstanding, or because the newspaper we read tells us to, or because a celebrity we admire has said they are voting in a particular way. I have a economics degree, and yet I will be voting to stay in mainly because Boris Johnson wants out, and I feel like I have to disagree with everything he stands for on some kind of principle, the very foundations of which I’m not entirely sure about.

We are not informed enough to make these sorts of choices.

Have the government not taken a moment to look around them and realise this? We go out in flip flops the minute the sun pokes through the clouds, we eat ourselves to the point of obesity just because sugar is fun, we watch X Factor year after year even though it’s ridiculous, we eat in Wetherspoons for heaven’s sake.

We are not clever enough for this shit. 

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For about two months now, I’ve had a huge cardboard box in the middle of my living room. It originally had two large barstools in it, so it really is massive. Since having the barstools taken out though, it has been converted into a ‘den’. It has working lights, a welcome mat, and is covered by a blanket.

Now, I wouldn’t mind so much if Belle spent every evening sat in it, amusing herself with old-fashioned past times, stitching herself a little blanket or writing stories or something, but she has been in it perhaps once in the last three weeks.

“Do you think we could get rid of your cardboard box house now?” I ask, only vaguely hopeful that the answer will be yes.

“NO!’ says Belle, aghast. “I love it!”

“But you don’t play in it?”

“Yes I do! All the time!”

Then of course she will spend half an hour in it, just to make the point. 

You would think after 20 years of parenting that I would be past the stage of having to pretend to like things made out of old cardboard boxes, but apparently this particular avenue of pleasure is still well and truly open for me. You might think, if nothing else, that the cardboard box creations would at least have become more discreet, but no, this den is as big as an armchair. 

If it was a robot, made out of old egg boxes, I could far more easily hide it on top of the fridge to test to see if Belle would miss it. That’s always a good tactic – ‘Oh, that super cool space craft you made? Oh yes, I just popped that on top of the fridge to display it – I wanted to be able to see it from my height more easily.’ If they don’t notice – which they normally don’t – you can then move from stage 1 (top of fridge) to stage 2 (outside bin) after a couple of weeks.

What is the fascination?!? It’s a cardboard box for heaven’s sake. Why to kids always want to keep rubbish? Why can’t you just put the cereal box in the recycling like a normal person?

I found this picture, showing a mum smiling fondly in the background – this is clearly a mum who is new to parenting, for whom the novelty of having a house full of crap has yet to wear off. ‘It’s so sweet,’ she says lovingly to friends, ‘he unwraps his gifts and is always more interested in the box!’
child in a cardboard box

The one thing that Belle’s den has in its favour at least is that it is well put together. (You’d hope though, to be fair, that by the age of 13 you could build a decent box den.) With smaller children, the added frustration is that most of what they make is actually just rubbish. They have no skill, no flair. Yeah, yeah, it’s all about the creativity and having fun, sure, but come on kids, get it together – it’s really hard to gush enthusiastically when you’ve literally just stuck together a few toilet rolls. 

If, when they built a robot, it looked something like this, or could actually do something useful, like the hoovering, then perhaps as parents we’d feel less like driving it immediately to the tip or crying into a chocolate cake quietly in our bedrooms, wondering when our homes stopped being things of beauty, filled with flowers and books and hopes and dreams, and turned into a giant recycling truck.

Or perhaps that’s just me?

cardboard robot

Images – Evgeny Atamanenko and Sunny studio from shutterstock.

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I have an issue with lip balms. 

I don’t object to the concept – a lip balm is a very useful thing, especially at this time of the year – it’s more the reality of lip balms.

Yesterday I took Belle to Sainsbury’s. I was encouraging a bit of interaction/exercise by trying to get her to run and find ten different items before I got to the checkout, but by item seven, (chicken gravy granules), she had lost interest.

“I’m going to look at the make-up,” she said. “I need a lip balm.”

I know for a fact* that there are already 127 lip balms in her bedroom, so why does she need another one? Think about it for a moment, have you ever actually got to the end of a lip balm and thought ‘Oh look, my lip balm has run out, I need to buy another one?’

No, of course you haven’t, because they are deliberately designed to get lost about three weeks after you buy one, giving you the impression that you really need to buy another one. Or you will be out, and the lip balm you always keep in your bag will have purposefully jumped out at home, so that you have to buy it a chum as you pass through Boots.

Here are a few facts I have made up about lip balms, which I feel must be true:

  • If you put together all the lip balms I have ever bought for myself and my daughters, they would take up an area the size of Wales. (It’s always Wales isn’t it? Why Wales?!)
  • If I had put all the money I’ve spent on lip balms over the years into a savings account, I would now have enough money to buy a small three bedroom house in Leicester.
  • If you piled all of the lip balms I have bought on top of each other, (you might need glue), they would reach to the moon and back two and a half times.

I just don’t understand them. Where do they go?! Why am I always buying them?! Why is my house not literally full of lip balm?

Does anyone else feel like this about lip balm?!

lip balms

*Not an actual fact, but it feels like it.

Image – images72/shutterstock

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I had a grey hair incident a month or so ago. I was meeting a friend for lunch, and I hadn’t seen her for about 18 months. I arrived at the restaurant first, and sat upstairs. When my friend arrived, I could hear her downstairs, talking to the waiter.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m meeting a friend, long dark hair, is she here yet?”

“I’m not sure,” said the waiter, “there’s a woman upstairs with long grey hair, might that be her?”

Hmmm.

I had a similar grey hair themed happening a few months ago after I’d met one of the young women fiancé worked with.

“Your girlfriend is really cool isn’t she?” she apparently said to him afterwards.

“Is she?” he said. (I can understand his confusion.)

“Yes,” she said. “I know a lot of celebrities are doing that grey hair thing, but you have to be really brave to dye your own hair grey.”

I laughed a lot at that one.

So, back to the question, should I dye my grey hair?

No. 

That’s my simple answer.

If you’re wondering why I wouldn’t dye my hair if it’s grey at 37, answer me this – why should I dye it? Why on earth would I spend time and money, and probably damage my hair in the process, just to change its colour artificially? Seriously, give me one good reason.

Apart from anything else, I quite like the confusion on people’s faces when they see my grey hair against my smooth, chubby baby face. When I drop in that my oldest daughter is graduating this year, they really don’t know what to do. It’s like I’ve told them I make a career as an international ballet dancer. (That would be less believable.)

Plus, I want to look like this when I grow up, I think it’s an ace colour:

should I dye my grey hair?

Sure, some people are going to say that it’s about how you feel about yourself, and that dying your hair makes you feel younger and more confident, but I tend to think that if your confidence comes down to the colour of your hair, that there are bigger issues at stake.

What do you think? Should I dye my grey hair?

Image – Volt Collection/shutterstock

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cough medicine

I’m going to give you a little summary of what I’ve been doing over the last few days.

COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH.

And then a little cup of tea.

COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH.

Are you getting the idea? View Post

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I’m not having a good day.

It started like this:

You can see where this is going can’t you? I’m talking about the kind of hormones that mean you spend the whole night tossing and turning, wondering if you are secretly a failure and everyone is laughing quietly about you somewhere, and your boyfriend is with you only because he feels a bit sorry for you and isn’t sure how to tell you.

Bee replied with an excellent point, and I couldn’t help but feel that if men were crippled by self-doubt, spots, bloating, sugar cravings, actual bleeding from their bodies, not to mention the uncontrollable urge to cry in the middle of a shop because you hear a sad story about a cat, that we might have come up with some sort of solution.

You know what I mean? View Post

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It’s almost Valentine’s Day again, although I’m sure it was only Christmas yesterday.

I know that some people really go in for the whole heart shaped box of chocolates/singing teddy bear aspect of the occasion but I’ve never really been that fussed about it. I’m usually grateful for anything I get, unless it’s something hideously tacky that they should know I would hate, like a bunch of £2 flowers from Morrisons, (the amount of effort clearly put in with that sort of gift is actually just a bit embarrassing. I would rather just have nothing.) Or, heaven forbid, the infamous “Love Log”.

One of my favourite bits about the day though is seeing just how vile the array of Valentine’s gifts becomes every year, as shops desperately try and attract attention with cringey window displays and even buy-one-get-one-free deals on cards. (Suspicious.) I’ve looked through the internet to try and find the tackiest gift ever made, and I think I’ve come pretty close.

This monster mug

Really, nothing about it is okay. It sort of makes me want to smash it on the ground a little bit. I feel a bit bad for Simon, because someone obviously thinks that he is their love monster. I don’t think so.

horrible tacky valentine's gifts View Post

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Exciting news guys!!

I had an email this morning from a bingo company. Apparently, “from a short analysis our team has done your website audience is matching our custodemographic which means there is a great business potential for a partnership between our brands.”

How cool is that!? 

So cool in fact, that it prompted me to analysis my own custodemographic, which I assume must be something to do with custard. According to my research, my custodemographic shows that my blog is generally well suited to tarts.

custodemographic, egg custard View Post

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We were sat having dinner this week, doing the usual thing of ‘let’s spend quality time together as a family and try to sound interested about each other’s days.’

“What did you do at school today?” I asked Belle, (obviously. My fiancé is too old for school.)

“PE,” she said. “It was fine, I got a lollipop.”

“A lollipop?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes,” she said, “because I did well in the stretching exercises and sit ups.”

lollipops View Post

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Regular readers may remember that last summer I went through a bit of a bad patch emotionally.

I sort of whispered that, to be ironic about the fact that we aren’t meant to talk about mental health difficulties, but let’s be honest, we all know I was a bit of a wreck. It’s one thing to feel a bit down in the dumps, another to get as far as the kitchen, shaking, only to burst into tears and run back to bed, feeling completely unable to put a teabag in the cup.

That’s life though isn’t it? We all go through shitty times, just like we go through ace times, and none of it lasts, even the good stuff.

While I was feeling iffy, I tried a lot of things to perk myself up – I read a lot about fear and positive thinking, I played relaxation CDs and uplifting music and I listened to podcasts from an overly optimistic American man who repeatedly told me how awesome I was, and how, if I ever felt down, I should hold a pencil between my teeth and look around me at the glory of nature.

(I did do the pencil thing on many an occasion – it changes your expression and tricks your brain into thinking you’re smiling. It’s pretty effective as a short term measure, just like sitting up straight and lifting your eyes. Your brain is easily fooled.)

mindfulness View Post

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I shared a photo on my Facebook blog page this morning that seemed to strike a chord. It was something I found on Instagram that pretty much sums up how I feel every morning.

 

A photo posted by @kay14722 on

For my breakfast this morning I ate some cold pasta out of a bowl from the fridge with my fingers, and a Jaffa cake I found, (in the box), on the floor in the living room.

There was nothing photogenic about any element of that. I didn’t have a casually placed, single large bloom in a glass jar in the background, my carefully painted toe nails were not visible in the edge of the photo, peeking out of my shiny red sandals. There was not a single quirky, vintage, floral table cloth in sight.

I ate though. Calories were consumed. I chewed. I swallowed. 

I know that my job is social media, blah blah, but it pisses me off sometimes that there’s this constant pressure to be beautiful and stylish in everything that you do. The fact is that I’m just not a stylish person. I’m not a very good photographer, I have no real sense of colour, and often I resent the niggling feeling that if my dinner doesn’t get at least two dozen likes then somehow it’s not worth eating.

Of course we all like to look at nice pictures and pretty things, but Instagram often feels to me like an extension of that hideous pressure we put on ourselves to look beautiful. Except that now it’s worse, because not only do we feel the pressure to make ourselves look personally beautiful, but now everything around us has to be too – our breakfast must be styled, our homes chic at all times, our cups of coffee perfectly arranged on a white desk next to a self-help paperback about embracing life and a pencil holder in the shape of a polaroid camera.

Enough already.

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