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I’ve always had fine hair.

As a teenager I would read hair tips in Just Seventeen magazine and spend ages lying on my bed with my head hung backwards over the age, trying to encourage blood to flow to my scalp. At the same time I’d be reading the problem pages and looking at the ‘Position of the Fortnight’ in More and wondering what it would be like to actually have sex with another person. Like how would you even go about it? You’d have to actually talk properly to a boy for a start. I couldn’t get my head around it, hung upside down or otherwise.

(Funnily enough, not long after I drafted this post I found myself talking to some women about More and Position of the Fortnight. How is that feature the only thing people ever remember from the whole magazine?)

Over 25 years later and I do less of the head dangling, although I do still wonder sometimes about how to talk to (now grown up) boys, and my hair is still just as fine. In fact, if anything I probably have even less of it now, what with the impending *whispers* menopause. Hopefully I have few years yet, but I’ve definitely noticed my hair getting dryer, so it’s probably only a matter of time before it starts thinning too.

(Yay! Life is so kind.)

Fortunately there may be something that can ease the thinning hair crisis at least, if not help with the men thing – a new naturally-derived haircare range called Thicker Fuller Hair™. Clue’s in the name with this one isn’t it? While I can’t afford a personal stylist waving products and a professional hair dryer at me every morning, this is the next best thing.

How to get thicker hair

If you have thin hair, or are worried about hair loss, you’re not alone. View Post

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I’m going to tell you an embarrassing secret – when I was younger, I used to count my friends.

When I say younger, I don’t mean like eight or anything, I mean into my early twenties. And when I say count I mean actually count, on my fingers.

I wasn’t what you’d really call a popular child. I was precocious and bossy and a bit of a know it all if I’m honest. Adults liked me, my peers, not so much. Even into my teens, if I knew the answer to something in class, I wanted the teacher and my classmates to know it.

As a result, I didn’t have a lot of friends. Basically two – one at school, one out of school.

Things did start to pick up when I was 15 and my mum inexplicably let me have an outrageous house party, (possibly pity?), and then I turned 16 and somehow, out of the blue, got a boyfriend. (He didn’t go to my school, which definitely worked in my favour. I met him quite literally sat on the street.) Then a few months later I was at college, and pregnant, and probably had a certain mid-90s teen pregnancy glamour about me, sat in the common room, my charity shop Bob Marley t-shirt stretched across my bump. View Post

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Advertisement in association with Smart Home Week

Can you believe it’s a whole year since I bombarded you on social media with a load of gadgets as part of Smart Home Week? It feels like only yesterday that I was showing you how I could switch the heating off from the middle of town, or make a thunderstorm with my lightbulbs.

It was a really interesting week to take part in actually as I’m not a natural when it comes to technology and I was curious to see how easy the various gadgets would be to set up and use and whether or not they would really add value to my life. As part of the week I had a go with a Ring video doorbell, a tadoo smart heating system, Philips Hue lightbulbs, a Yale Conexis L1 smart door lock, a Yale Smart Home Alarm, the Samsung SmartThings system and Google Home.

I know right? My house was officially smarter than I was.

Smart Home Week

It looks so innocent doesn’t it?

What I discovered though, which is kind of the whole point of Smart Home Week, is that smart home technology doesn’t have to be scary or difficult to use. In fact, most of the technologies I tested were incredibly simple – pretty much you switch them on and they install themselves. Some things, like the smart lock and the heating system, needed a bit of actual, physical installation, but once you’ve done that, you’re good to go.

(I actually really enjoyed installing the tadoo smart heating system myself. It involved doing a bit of wiring to take out the old thermostat and put in the new one, but the instructions were VERY clear and I felt a huge sense of achievement at the end.)

I wrote a pretty comprehensive introduction to each of the technologies at the time, so that’s probably a good place to start for an overview, but of course one year is a long time in the world of smart homes, so it’s worth having a quick look at what’s changed. Then I’m going to focus on a few of my favourite products, to tell you a bit more about how we’ve used them over the last year. Also, a quick side, I didn’t get to try a smart alarm clock but they’re worth a look too – check out the best ones here. If you’re thinking about indoor cameras, check out this Nest Cam Indoor Security Camera review. View Post

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It’s a couple of weeks now since Playgroups and Prosecco came out in paperback and whenever I see people I know they want to hear all about it.

‘How’s the book going?’ They ask. ‘How are sales?’

‘I don’t know,’ I tell them, and they look confused, as though I should be getting hourly updates from supermarkets up and down the country.

‘Oh right,’ they say, ‘how do you find out then? Haven’t you asked?’

‘No. I haven’t.’

And that’s that.

To be honest, I don’t think I want to know. But then also I REALLY want to know. Only if I know ONCE then I can’t go back and NOT know, and what if no one likes me? I’d want to not know that. It’s so stressful.

It feels very much like getting a new boyfriend.

For the record, I am BAD at having new boyfriends. I’m an absolute sucker for it mind – the thrill of a new relationship, falling in love, cups of tea in bed, the excitement and newness – and I think I’m a decent girlfriend – thoughtful and fun and kind and what not – but I also find it quite difficult. I’m normally very laid back and relaxed about stuff, definitely not a worrier or an over-thinker, but relationships trigger a vulnerability in me and can feel quite overwhelming.

I swing wildly between desperately wanting to know how someone feels about me EVERY MINUTE, and then ignoring them because who cares, I don’t need them anyway. (I’m a CATCH.) In fact, when I was at the Swindon Spring Festival last week, I met the lovely Laura Mucha, who has written a book about love called Love Factually* and she sent me a copy afterwards so that I could read up about my potentially ‘disorganised attachment style.’

(‘Don’t Google it,’ she told me, which sounded ominous.)

Jo Middleton

‘Haha! No of course I don’t care that it took you 2 hours and 37 minutes to reply to me, even though we were in the middle of a conversation.’

Where was I going with this?

Oh yes.

My point is that while in most aspects of my life I am very secure and confident and generally awesome, love is not always one, and it seems that publishing might be the other.

It’s weird, because I’ve been writing here for 10 years and never particularly been bothered about who reads it, but there is something about the fact of the physical book, being in real life shops, that makes it different. You can’t change it – you can’t go back and edit it once it’s on a shelf – and that can be unsettling, even when you try your best to be super cool and professional.

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This week I went to Swindon.

I know, I’m so glam.

I actually went to speak at the Swindon Spring Festival – my first literary engagement since publication day – and it was very exciting because I had a dressing room with my name on, with lights around the mirror, and I stood on a STAGE and showed off with my book.

It was a lot of fun.

Playgroups and Prosecco Jo Middleton

Image by Fernando Bagué, via Swindon Spring Festival

One of the questions I was asked though, the first question in fact, kind of threw me for a minute.

‘I’m interested to know,’ said Matt, who was hosting the session, ‘why you write?’

Well. That’s a big question isn’t it? View Post

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I’m not honestly sure why I added ‘read a Mills and Boon’ to my list of 50 things to do before 50. I guess because I would consider myself a wide reader, and yet here was a massive chunk of writing that I had completely ignored. I may as well admit that it was pure snobbery – I imagined they’d be bad, and I didn’t want to waste my time with them.

I didn’t want to be that person though, dismissing something without even giving it a try, so I did a bit of research, (i.e. spent three minutes Googling ‘best Mills and Boon writers’), and settled on this second hand Regency Christmas trilogy. (I love Christmas.)

Mills and Boon reviews

As you may have deduced from the title, these are historical romances, which I’m imagining basically means a lot less sex that the modern ones. In one of these stories the hero has to marry the heroine simply because he’s caught touching her leg in a medical, if unorthodox, capacity.

I was okay with this though, as I’m not massively into reading erotic fiction. I think it’s REALLY hard, (pun intended), to make sex sound sexy when you’re describing the nuts (again, intended) and bolts of it. I’d much rather something a bit subtler – sexiness implied – and use my imagination. I do think too that there can be just as much erotic charge in a meaningful exchange of looks as in a throbbing member being thrust vigorously anywhere – in real life as well as in writing.

So there I was, Regency Mills and Boon trilogy in hand, ready to be unimpressed. View Post

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As you may have noticed, but probably haven’t because, let’s face it, you have more important things to think about, I’ve been pretty quiet on the old blog front over the last few weeks.

It’s because last week – Thursday to be precise – was the paperback launch of my novel, Playgroups and Prosecco. For a month or so beforehand I’d been feeling a bit weird, kind of unmotivated and despondent and like I wasn’t really sure what I was doing with my life. I was spending quite a bit of time imagining myself dying alone, surrounded by cats, and was worrying that I didn’t have a LIFE PLAN.

It turns out that this was just pre-book launch stress, because as soon as that was done, suddenly I didn’t care any more that I didn’t have a 5 year plan or an investment portfolio or anything – it was enough again just to have pretty hanging plants in the garden and nice shaped mugs. (I am quite particular about the shape of my mugs, but I take a lot of pleasure in that, so it’s fine.)

You’d have thought really that the book launch anxiety dreams would have given it away, but I am rubbish as REALISING things, even when they seem obvious. I’m like it every month with my period – ‘oh THAT’S why I wanted to kill somebody yesterday’ – and have even been surprised in the past a couple of times by people telling me they loved me, like I was apparently meant to know we were anything but friends.

Anyway, basically I’m kind of slow on the uptake, and I was worried, but then loads of people turned up to the book launch event and Waterstones sold out and had to dismantle the window display to get more copies, and everything was okay again.

Hooray!

So, I just wanted to say thank you really. Thank you to everyone who came along and made me realise that I probably won’t end up actually getting eaten by my cats after my death, and thank you to everyone who has bought Playgroups and Prosecco or posted pictures of it spotted in supermarkets and bookshops, or said nice things on Amazon. Or any things at all actually, because I don’t expect everyone to think it’s amazing, and I appreciate people just taking a chance on it, and the time to share their thoughts.

Thank you to Mandy and Keiran at Waterstones in Taunton for hosting us and making it such an enjoyable occasion, even though we overwhelmed them slightly with the amount of prosecco we were able to get through in such a short amount of time. Thank you to I Heart Wines for the prosecco, thanks to Ebury for publishing me.

Thanks for coming guys!

(That was basically the full extent of my ‘speech’ in case you were worrying that you’d missed some kind of Olivia Colman style extravaganza.)

Here are some photos so that even if you couldn’t make it, you can imagine me mingling, clutching a glass nervously, trying to look glamorous.

And no, no sponsorship deal with McVities, but believe me it’s not for want of trying.

Playgroups and Prosecco Jo Middleton View Post

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I have a love hate relationship with Tinder.

A lot of the time I don’t use it at all, because of all the skydive pictures, and then other times I have vulnerable moments like this where I worry briefly that I might die alone, surrounded by cats, and Tinder is my only way out:

Tinder bingo

While I’ve never had any truly horrible dating experiences on Tinder, I’ve also never had any amazing ones. I’ve had a LOT of perfectly pleasant first dates, but very rarely a second one. I was fiendishly seduced by one man who played a game where he pretended to interview me for Desert Island Discs, only to say ‘by the way I should probably tell you I’m not looking for a relationship’,* but most of the time it’s just me swiping left past endless pictures of men who look so sad that you wonder if they have set up a Tinder profile as an alternative to suicide.

I have been doing a bit of swiping lately, to pass the time, and have become increasingly aware of just how similar everyone is in terms of the frankly bizarre pictures they post and the tedious things they say in their profiles. It astounds me that a grown man can decide he wants to impress a woman, and think that a selfie in the mirror of a public toilet, complete with background urinal, is going to be the money shot.

‘When she’s sees this she’s going to be putty in my hands,’ he thinks to himself, content with the fact that you can’t really see his face but CAN see a large toilet cistern.

And the fish! So many fish!

To make the process of finding a match on Tinder slightly less hideous, I have made you a Tinder bingo. It should help to pass the time at least – a distraction from the thought the only men left in the world are permanently sat astride motorbikes, wearing helmets. Why not share it with your single friends, or invite people round for dinner and play competitively? Perhaps do shots every time you complete a row? The toilet selfies might seem more appealing by the time you’ve completed your card.

I would also be interested in particularly on brand screenshots.

Tinder bingo

And yes, I know this is cynical and bitchy and all these men are PEOPLE blah blah blah, but come on guys, make an effort.

Are you a Tinder user? What would you petition to have added to the bingo card? Perhaps you’re a man and are sick of women hiding behind Snapchat filters?

Leave a comment and let me know!

*I mention him because we are still friends and it might make him feel important.

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If you’ve ever been to a festival you might recognise this scenario:

It’s a month before the festival and you get an email. ‘We’ve announced the dressing up theme!’ the festival organisers tell you. ‘This year it’s post-apocalypse Alice in Wonderland/1970s disco mermaid/pansexual party pirates!’ (Delete as appropriate.)

Excellent.

You set to work on your costume – gluing scales to your sparkly tights, fashioning a hat made entirely from cucumbers, whatever. You’re proud of your look, you’ve nailed it, you’re ready to go and FESTIVALISE.

Nozstock festival

Image courtesy of Nozstock festival

Then you get there and it pisses down with rain and no one sees your hand-sequinned pirate blouse because you have to spend the whole time in a large waterproof mac.

Sad face. View Post

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I’ve been banging on about Playgroups and Prosecco, my debut novel, for ages now, so I thought it was only fair that I gave you something back – a thank you for putting up with all my ‘buy it on Kindle for only 99p!’ tweets.

In case you’re not up to speed, Playgroups and Prosecco is a ‘laugh out loud debut’ (my words) about the realities of single-parenting a toddler and a teen in a world of Instagram and Tinder. It’s a diary format, easy to read, but also GOOD, even if I do say so myself. If you want a taster, the first week is available to preview through the ‘look inside!’ feature on Amazon.

It looks like this, for when you want to find it in a bookshop from May 2nd, and take a picture to send me, saying ‘look I saw your book!’

(Please do that.)

Playgroups and Prosecco View Post

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I visited Elements Boutique Spa free of charge for the purposes of this review. All opinions my own.

Do you ever have those fantasies where you’re so rich and your house is so massive that you have a private cinema in the basement, with a selection of velvet sofas, and a private gym with a lycra-clad personal trainer standing by for whenever you fancy doing a few guided squats?

God, it would be lush wouldn’t it? I’d probably have a chef too to cook me complicated, delicious vegan meals, and perhaps a fully equipped bar with a cocktail waiter. (You had better buy Playgroups & Prosecco so that I can become a millionaire.) In the meantime, I basically recreated the ‘private spa in the grounds of my mansion’ vibe last week by taking a mid-week trip to Elements Boutique Spa.

Now I have to confess that even though it’s only about half an hour away from me, in the middle of the Somerset Levels, I hadn’t heard of it before. Not surprising I guess as it only opened last year. Depsite being new, Elements Boutique Spa has managed to pull off looking like it has always been there, nestled in the countryside, a beacon of relaxation and tranquility with views over the levels to Burrow Mump.

Burrow Mump

Because it’s still relatively new, and because I was there by myself on a Wednesday morning, I managed to time it so that for over an hour I had the entire thermal spa area to myself, thus creating the illusion of being a hugely successful authoress, Barbara Cartland style. I steamed, I saunaed, I took experiential showers (ooer) and I floated about in the pool pretending to be a mermaid – it was blissful. I also discovered that by taking deep breaths in and out I could make myself float and sink on command. I’m not sure if this is normal or not, but it was quite fun. View Post

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Can you even believe it?? Playgroups and Prosecco, my debut novel, is out on Kindle on Friday March 1st, which is this week. THIS WEEK!

Hooray!

It’s a bit weird really to think about people reading it. When I wrote it I just imagined it as a really LONG blog post, and once it was done, that was sort of IT. Doh! It’s not it at all is it? In a couple of weeks I’m going up to London to watch some of the audiobook being recorded, and then come May 2nd, when the paperback is released, I’ll be driving around the country visiting bookshops and rearranging displays to put Playgroups and Prosecco to the front.

(I’ve also heard that if you go into any Waterstones with a pen and say you’re an author they will let you just sign copies, so maybe I’ll do that too. Or maybe I’ll pretend to be someone else and sign THEIR books.)

To celebrate the publication of the ebook on Friday, I’m having a bit of a virtual blog tour. Every day for the next two weeks a different blogger is going to be posting their review of my book, and I’ll then be sharing these (if they’re good obviously), so that you can read what people think and decide whether or not it’s worth you investing the mighty sum of £7.03 in pre-ordering the paperback.

Playgroups and Prosecco Jo Middleton View Post

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