In my head right now I am singing ‘here comes the bride’. Take a minute if you will to do the same and get into the right mood.

(Note that I am singing the ‘here comes the bride, all fat and wide’ version, because that’s the only version I know.)

(Another thought – does it even have words?)

Anyway, that’s the kind of mindset I need you in, as today I am sat at home waiting for the arrival of my eBay wedding dress. I have never bought a wedding dress from eBay before; in fact I don’t know if I have even bought a regular dress from eBay before. It’s jolly exciting anyway. I’ve never been big into anything on the marriage or wedding front but I’m all over it at the moment, from custom engagement rings from Kimberfire to personalised wedding favors, I can’t get enough.

I wish I could tell you all about it and post a picture, but that would rather spoil the whole ‘groom not seeing your dress’ thing wouldn’t it? I could ask him not to look, but what groom is really going to think ‘sure, I’ll let the whole of the internet look, but I’ll be sure to avoid that one blog post.’

I’ve never been into wedding dresses as a thing, so have no idea if it’s even going to suit me. I’ve never looked at wedding dresses for fun, never even tried one on before, even just to pretend. I am a complete wedding dress virgin. Today will be my actual first time. View Post

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I’m going to recount a short conversation I had with my boyfriend this weekend. He claims he didn’t say it but I am stating here for the record that he did. I didn’t mind him saying it, he tells me how beautiful I am all the time, it’s fine, but he did say it. Fact.

It went something like this:

Him: “What have you done to your eyebrows?”

Me: “Nothing. What do you mean?”

Him (laughing): “Yes, you have! What have you done? They look weird?”

Me (paranoid): “Nothing!!”

Him (looking more closely): “Oh, maybe you haven’t, I think it’s just that they’re going grey.” View Post

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I was having a browse in the Marks and Spencer lingerie section this afternoon. I don’t personally find that M&S bras fit me terribly well, but with Belle approaching those awkward teenage years I thought I would check out the training bra section, just to see what I was getting myself into.

What I was looking for was that next step up from the crop top – something that’s barely worth wearing but that makes the teenager wearing it feel like they’re not just wearing a vest. What I wasn’t expecting to find was padded, underwired bras in a size 28AA.

Padded and underwired??

28AA isn’t even a size, so why on earth does it need underwiring? What the hell would a child need padding for??

I kept looking, sure that I must be missing something, but absolutely every entry level bra they had was either padded or ‘moulded’. I’m not sure what the technical definition of moulded is but it basically seemed to be another word for padded. It certainly wasn’t the soft, flexible cotton I was hoping for.

I asked a member of staff, wondering if I was looking in the wrong section, and even they were confused.

“Hmmm,” she said, “it doesn’t look like we have anything without wire. You don’t really need underwiring at this age.”

No, you do not, so why make teeny tiny underwired bras at all??

“I was really looking for something a little less inappropriate,” I said, “something without padding.”

The sales assistant agreed.

“Absolutely,” she said, “you want something soft and without wires.”

We both looked at the racks of mini push-up bras sadly.

“We don’t have any of those,” she said.

Am I being unreasonable to be so outraged by this? At what point did a design team sit down and think “I know, let’s create a range of underwear for pre-teens, girls barely out of primary school, that completely sexualises them unnecessarily and is uncomfortable! Hoorah!”

Just awful.

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I know that I’m not always the best of parents – Belle eats more chocolate chip brioche than is probably good for her, and I’m not known for my consistency – but there are some things I just think of as wrong. Kids playing adult video games is one of these things.

children playing adult video games

Belle likes video games as much as the next 12 year old, but she plays games that involve her designing a stable for a pony and racing it to win rosettes, she isn’t on the streets of America, raping and shooting prostitutes – she is 12 years old.

I was appalled to read today that a shocking 30% of parents admit to buying adult video games for their children. Thirty percent?? Let’s think for a minute and put that into perspective – that’s nearly a third of parents happily letting their impressionable children arm themselves to the hilt, take on the best game booster and spend their spare time being violent and abusive. I know it’s not real life, but the whole point is that at that age, how easy is it for you to make that distinction? How can we possibly be sure that exposure to violence like this isn’t going to have an impact on our children’s growing minds?

The research was conducted by My Voucher Codes and some of the other findings are just as scary – only 23% of parents would stop a child going to a friend’s house where they knew they would have access to adult video games and only 64% would stop a visiting child playing age inappropriate games in their own home; it seems our children aren’t safe anywhere.

These games have age ratings for a reason – they have been looked at by experts and deemed unsuitable for children. It’s not like these are the only games available on the market either – plenty of fun, creative, and sandbox games are available for children, so why let your child play more mature alternatives? You can even play chess, solitaire or Freecell Solitaire for free online! What parent would deliberately want to let their children immerse themselves in these worlds?

How do you feel about children playing adult video games?

Photo credit – video games from file404/shutterstock

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I heard a story on BBC Somerset last week that for some reason really wound me up. It was about three local cemeteries approving the use of QR codes on gravestones. After a little bit of research I discovered that this has been a thing for a while now, but it was the first I had heard of it and it made me inexplicably irate.

The idea is pretty harmless – scan the QR code and you can find out more about the person buried there. Nothing offensive in that is there? So why did it make me feel so uncomfortable?

Gravestones View Post

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I call myself a feminist.

I complain about the representation of women in politics and share my thoughts on pornography and the sex industry, but these are all big issues. I’m not saying they aren’t important, of course they are, but they are the bigger picture.

Recently though I’ve started noticing more everyday sexism than ever before. Partly I think it’s because I’m in a relatively new relationship and this always makes you look at the world in a new way, but it has also had a very tangible impact, not because of anything my boyfriend has said or done himself, (he is always thoughtful, courteous and kind), but because of how his presence impacts how people see me.

I’m used to doing things for myself and by myself. As a single mother I may not always be treated in the same way as a man, but I’ve not often found myself in situations where I am able to make exact comparisons. Now though, with a well spoken, 6′ 1″ man at my side, it has become very obvious indeed.

Here’s an example… View Post

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I watched The Voice last year for the very first time and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was let down only by the simpering Kylie, draping herself provocatively over every young man within a ten metre radius.

This season then I was looking forward to something different, so imagine my despair when it turned out that Rita Ora was even worse. Seriously, did you see her with the firefighter? It was pathetic.

It’s not just pathetic, it’s actually offensive. If she was a man behaving this way with women would we think it was acceptable? What would we have to say to a man who felt it appropriate to go up onto the stage and start touching one of the contestants in a bid to secure them for his team? View Post

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Last week I wrote about the Love Log.

If you haven’t read the post, you really should. It really is very funny and I’m not just saying that because I wrote it and want you to read it.*

In it I lay into the world of PR rather, and complain heartily about the number of shit press releases I receive every day. I had an email today though that I wanted to tell you about because it was absolutely the perfect antidote to my ranting and made me smile.

The email was from a PR person who had read my post about the log of love and who clearly didn’t want to piss me off. The release itself was pretty standard – certainly informative and clear if not a little irrelevant geographically – but I would probably not even have opened it if it hadn’t been for the title:

“Press release – hopefully not too shit”

Nice.

And just for that, I’m going to be a good blogger and tell you that if you work in Manchester, you should definitely sign up for the Manchester v Melanoma Challenge 2015 being run by Melanoma UK and raise money to fight skin cancer.

Manchester melanoma challenge

*I so am.

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*RANT ALERT*

I get a lot of shit press releases.

Here are some stats I made up to give you an idea of the sort of thing that lands in my inbox every day:

  • 63% are written in a font so small I couldn’t read it even if I wanted to
  • 92% are at least twice the length that any decent press release should be
  • 87% of release titles include a terrible pun
  • 74% think that a very original and never been done before angle is the fact that the product was designed at a kitchen table by someone who has given up a high paid job to follow their dreams. What those dreams are exactly we aren’t really sure – create an awful product that doesn’t sell and become penniless perhaps?
  • 54% tell me all about this wonderful thing I absolutely must try – my life will not be complete until I have it – and then they offer to send me high res pictures. Now I know this is the done thing for print journalism, but I write a blog and don’t even need high res images. I want the THING. Don’t tell me how my readers would love for me to share it with them and then only send me an image. I’m not a teenage boy collecting pictures to hide under my mattress.

I had one press release this morning though that really wound me up, not because it was especially badly written, but simply because the product it was trying to sell was, as far as I could see, a complete rip off.

It was basically one small log, but for £25.

You heard me, £25. View Post

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I have opened up WordPress this morning ready to complain.

Not in a witty and charming way about something like car air fresheners, I mean properly rant about something, anything at all really. I can feel the tension across my shoulders, drawing them up closer and closer to my ears. I can sense that my jaw is set in a mildly scary way. If anyone was to get my order wrong in a restaurant right now, unlikely as that is at 8.59am, they would not feel good about themselves afterwards.

But as I mull over what vitriol to spew over the pages, sighing and snorting impatiently all the while, I stop myself. How helpful would that actually be? Would working myself up into a literary rage about something really do anything to solve my angst?

I doubt it. The act of writing is cathartic of course, but aside from that, wouldn’t it be better to channel things in a more positive way?

I agree with myself, although I am still full of stress and rage so in my head it comes out as cutting sarcasm. ‘Oh Josephine, aren’t you so very wise? People are definitely going to be reading this and commenting to themselves on how you are the first person ever to discover the power of positive thinking.’ View Post

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I know that it’s part of your job description if you work in PR to be as annoying and over friendly as possible, and mostly I am tolerant of this, but today I just couldn’t be doing with it. Seriously, if you send me an email today that begins ‘Hello lovely!’ please don’t expect me to respond with anything other than a punch to the face.

The email that sent me over the edge this morning went like this:

“Hi there,

I hope all is well with you! I’m already one flat white down this morning. Might go for a second coffee but I fear the jitters!

I wanted to share a lovely bit o’ content with you from the weekend…”

Ha ha! Coffee jokes! Now we are best chums right? Oh no, hang on, we’re not, because I don’t know who you are and you haven’t even used my name.

And ‘a lovely bit o’ content’?? What even is that??

I literally had no words, so as a reply I just sent this:

Annoying PRsSometimes people just need to be told.

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I mean actual fudge. Sweet enough, but sticky, soft and soporific.

Like this:

FudgeI have always been notoriously forgetful, not even able to recall whole conversations from only days previously, but I had thought it was an adorable sort of absent-mindedness – the sort you could laugh fondly about. Lately though it feels more like the worrying sort of slowness and makes you glad you don’t have a baby, for fear of leaving it behind in a supermarket trolley.

The irony of course is that I can’t remember whether this feeling is really new, or I’ve just forgotten that I felt the same this time last year.

It feels sometimes like there are vital connections not quite right in my brain. I can see things happening, but they are distant, like I am watching myself do them, laughing silently at my own ineptitude. I feel a little disconnected – both from things happening around me and internally – and it is quite disconcerting.

Aside from the usual things like not being able to remember the words for simple things like ‘bread’ and ‘cat’, two things happened this week that added further weight to my brain into fudge concerns. Firstly, I tried to buy a drink from a vending machine. A simple enough task you might think for a woman educated to degree level.

It looked like this one:

Vending machine

After figuring out how to put the coins in, I spent some time touching the picture of the bottle of Diet Coke, trying to work out why the drink wasn’t appearing anywhere, before realising I was literally just pawing at a picture like a not terribly well trained chimp and actually had to press one of the buttons at the side.

Thankfully no one was watching. For the second incident I wasn’t so fortunate.

I was driving through McDonald’s. (I don’t spend my entire life buying fast food and fizzy drinks, I promise.) I had placed my order and driven to the next window to pay.

I paid. So far so good. ‘Excellent,’ I thought to myself, ‘that’s that done,’ and I drove off. I was turning the corner back out into the main car park before I realised I hadn’t actually collected my food. I reversed awkwardly all the way back round to the final window, where a teenage boy with questionable skin was holding out a brown paper bag, looking confused.

“Oh silly me!” I said, trying to sound casual about the fact that I was clearly on the verge of dementia, grabbed the bag and drove off for a second time.

Seriously, what is the matter with me? Does this sort of thing ever happen to you or should I be making some sort of appointment??

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