...So what advice would you give to your 21 y/old self?

Having read a book recently all about a 32 y/old who bumps into her 21 year old self and DOESN'T give her any winning lottery tip-offs, I was wondering what advice I'd give my younger self at this tender and impressionable age...

1. Chuck away the Hawaiian Tropic sun oils (you idiotic pig-on-a-spit) and buy the strongest factor suncream you can find. You will worry constantly about moles and strangely enlarged freckles by the time you're thirty five.

2. Enjoy the music of Adam Ant, Boy George and Wham! but DO NOT try to emulate their style of dress and/or attempt to reproduce their make-up however many bottles of Blue Nun you have consumed. THIS is why everyone wants to befriend you, to have someone to laugh AT - not with.

3. Stop with the perms! You may feel the need to follow the sheep of the eighties and walk around looking like Best In (Poodle) Breed but if you give it six months and wait for something called a Diffuser to be invented, you'll realise you already have natural curly hair. Ta-da!
Oh, this will also help you save up enough money to do 6.

4. When you receive a letter from the nice people at Woman magazine telling you that although they enjoyed your short story it doesn't really suit their publication but that they like your style enough to meet with you and talk about future commisions, DO NOT listen to your parents who tell you you are NOT getting on a train alone because they didn't do things like this when they were your age and there's plenty of time to go "gallivanting around London when you're older" because this will never happen again. Ever. And you'll regret this for the rest of your life.

5. Find a way to get to college and start believing you can do things you truly believe and want to do - you DO NOT have to have approval from the world and his wife. There will be a magic way of finding out how well your school friends have done one day and they'll all be Doctors in Australia or Kyakking up the Himalayas and you'll have such a sore arse for kicking it so frequently.

6. Leave home. There's never a good time but do it now before the rot sets in.

7. Ask your best friend if he's Gay. And don't be all affronted that it's your fault he's 'turned out that way' just because you tried a snog and it didn't feel right. You'll still be friends at forty. Seriously!

8. Smile more. Scowl less. Life gets hairy whether you want it to or not. Give in to it. You will survive. In fact you'll do better than survive, you'll want to WRITE ABOUT IT!

9. Embrace your twenties. Love your curves. Love your freckles. Love your skin. Love the way your limbs move freely and without undue pain.

10. Oh, and if I ignore all the above, try these Lottery numbers...

Ooohhhh can't wait!

This is where we'll be in four weeks' time...
And the WHOLE family is going because it's a family wedding. The Bride and Groom have booked the entire place out for everyone for three nights (wedding on the Sat) and six of us have decided to stay on a further three nights to turn it into our annual holiday. It's going to be fabulous there's going to be hundreds of us* and we are all so excited!
It's even going to have a touch of 'Mama Mia' about it because the ceremony is taking place in a church on the hill in the grounds so we're walking up to it like they did in the film - aw, so gorgeous (must take box of plasters for blisters - or maybe go barefoot?!)
And not only will the village of Il Borro (that's in Tuscany don't ya know!) be overtaken by 'the family' but so will the flight over and there'll be a particularly interesting convoy from the airport to the villa what with all the drivers insisting they know the right route to take. After all, they're Italian, so they're bound to know ALL the short cuts in Italy, right?

* tiny exaggeration

Watch This Space!

Mice Pace!

It was like a scene from one of those dodgy seventies sit-coms. If you'd lined up Terry and June, thrown in a Sid James and a Hattie Jacques with a Rigsby and a Steptoe then you'd have been halfway there.
I put it down to the fact that I'd been off work most of last week with the Ear Infection from Hell and because my hearing hadn't fully returned, I was, shall we say, a little ...unbalanced. (No comments please).
So there I was Saturday afternoon, trying on the old faithfuls from my eclectic wardrobe in readiness for a Hen Night we'd been invited to - half of which clothes ended up in the charity basket, when we (MiniMe and I) had the mad notion that I should try wearing what she wore once to a 70's fancy dress party - viz: a pair of leggings, one of my longer-length tunic tops and some funky knee length laced up boots. Ah what the heck?!
No sooner had I flung on this fabulous ensemble - which in my head looked impressive but then I was remembering how gorgeous the 15yo had looked in it and not her half-deaf 40-something mother - and checked out my reflection, I COULD NOT WAIT to have it un-flung as far from my ridiculous frame as possible. And therein lay my mistake.
In my haste to rip off the leggings (leggings! Who the flip wears leggings these days? OK, skinny celebs and Twiggy type persons... but not people my age... come on! who was I kidding?!) I thought I'd torn them in half when I realised that the horrible splitting noise hadn't been the material but... my back.
And I couldn't move. Or even breathe.
I've never known a pain like it.
I'll leave the image entirely up to you - but you get the idea. And I'm delighted to report that MiniMe did the only thing I didn't expect when faced with a half-dressed mother who is in excrutiating agony and on all fours (the best position bar none for back pain and childbirth) trying to drag herself across the room and that was laugh so much she very nearly had first dibs on the loo herself.
Needless to say, Mr R had to cancel his evening's arrangements too and spent his time ordering edible deliveries, assisting me in beverage and toilet pursuits and frowning every time I so much as started a sentence with the words "Could you just..." or "would you mind..."
I'm sure I never used to have this much trouble getting into and out of leggings before... perhaps it's a sign I shouldn't ever try another pair on.
Oh, that and the advice my doctor gave me this morning:
"Bending is fine. Twisting is fine - but attempting both moves together can result in this kind of thing".
Al-righty then.

'Roos, Billabongs and the Wonderful Jackman of Aus!

Contrary to popular belief, I do like to stand corrected. Occasionally. So long as it's nothing incredibly embarrassing, obviously.
I had no desire to go to the cinema to watch "Australia".Every morning for six weeks I drove past a billboard big enough to have me believe I was actually on set with the fifty-foot Kidman/Jackman combo and that, for me, was enough. It looked like it would be a combination of Life on Earth without Mr Attenborough (a fifth cousin seven times removed or something - so I'm led to believe)and a vehicle for two stupidly attractive actors in which to get all sloppy at the merest hint of subdued Didgeridoo-song.
Left to my own devices the other night I went slightly silly and rented out:
'The Reader' (miserably brilliant. I didn't expect Kate Winslet to have such dark aureola and some things are best left unknown)
'Slumdog Millionaire' (watching tonight)
'He's just not that into you' (which MiniMe wants to see - tomorrow night)and
'Australia'. Even Mr R was rivitted. The cinematography was gorgeous and if you can just get past Nicole's ludicrous ("Ay em e Laydee") British Empire accent and let yourself be washed away on the tide of the story, then the whole thing is a delicious treat from start to finish. Seriously. No sooner did we think 'ahh, a lovely happy ending', than it continued to more drama and another happy ending... followed by more dramatic interludes and another ending. And the ending? Shan't tell you. You HAVE to see it. It's just lovely. It's cliched, it's romantic, it's eductional. (I never realised Hugh Jackman had such a body - watch out for the bucket over the head - generously slo-mo'd shower scene...you may need one afterwards yourself!)
Oh, and after seeing him all spruced up for another 'W.O.W' moment - Jackman just HAS to be the next James Bond. You'll see why.

Well... what would YOU do?

Okay, so picture yourself as this person. Let's call her a girl. Oh, alright then, a woman. And she's got a very important function to attend , let's call it a wedding. Okay then, it really IS a wedding. And it's a family BIGGIE and it's happening in Tuscany in five weeks' time. These points may be irrelevant. In fact they kinda are. But you get the idea. This woman is going to a wedding in Tuscany. So she has to find something nice to wear. Obviously.
She's a total spaz at knowing what styles suit her, what colours bring out her best features and pretty much everything else there is to know that any normal, sane woman would need to know when choosing a dress. Oh, and it HAS to be chosen during a time that she's not...let's say pre-menstrual or something.
The dress is found. It has taken weeks. No, let's say months of solid searching and husbands-in-waiting (and I MEAN Waiting) and daughters in attendance who'd pretty much want to be anywhere else than with this hair-brained, wild-eyed mother who simply HAS to find this elusive dress that hasn't ever been invented, much less imagined.
But found, it is - eventually and with much sighing and relieved clapping from two very happy co-shoppers.
There's a but. And here it comes...
A week later - today in fact, it is re-found hanging in a different store in her home town (oh yes, she had to drive MILES out of her way to find this dress. It cannot be stressed enough how far and wide this search has spread over the months)and THE DRESS is now proudly screaming 'SALE' at her and ONE HUNDRED POUNDS CHEAPER. (Where's the freaking underline function on this sodding thing?) It really cannot be highlighted, emboldened, italiced, superfonted quite strongly enough as to how much cheaper this dress is now being displayed for - ONE HUNDRED POUNDS!!! Did you get that?!!!
Jeez - what I could DO with a hundred pounds right now!!!!
Needless to say, this woman, let's call her... oh... ME, shall we? came home a shadow of her former self and has been tearing pretty much every available hair from its follicle ever since in search of the answer to the conundrum - "What do I do?"
DO I take it back from whence it came and ask for a refund, nicely? And then drive all the way back home hoping to still find a reduced one in my size?? (can you imagine the absolute nightmare situation if I did this only to find there wasn't one left? Can you? I'd still be looking for another dress come Christmas and I'd have missed the wedding...IT'S IN FIVE WEEKS - did I mention that?!!)
What would YOU DO??
(Oh, and store policy deems any refunds take place within fourteen days of purchase so I only have, like another six days left in which to decide what the f**k I'm going to do!)
Or should a girl just take it on the chin once in a while and just chalk it up to experience? (tra-la-la...)

Funny Friday Foto...

Just hung out a whites wash and when I turned to come back in, thought something had dropped off the line...
Looks like the cat's got a far better idea as to what's more fun to do on a beautiful Summer's afternoon. It IS Summer, right?

SadHappy

This is me.
There are very few days when I wake up in a Pollyanna state of mind. I once worked with someone who DID ascribe to the Pollyanna school of smiles and who I totally admired and wished for the world I could be half as enthusiastic about the most mundane things as she was. And probably still is. She moved on to bigger, better and brighter things.

She was the type of person who actually relished waking up in the mornings. Before the alarm had gone off even. She was woken by birdsong and not by some monotoned drill assaulting her eardrums. She said she woke up appreciating the fact she wasn't disabled or senile and that she had life enough to enjoy another day. She wasn't even religious. In the past I'd have hooted inwardly but I actually envied her this passion and wished I could have some of it please.
Just a milligramme.
Occasionally.
Today was a Good Day. A better than usual day. I didn't wake up with a headache from not having a decent night's sleep through want of trying (or the irritation of snores beside me) and I actually felt refreshed. I even woke up ten minutes before the alarm. A pigeon may have cooed.

Constantly happy people annoy me. The way they can always see the positive in any situation. They're the Cornflake Ad people. The ones who throw off their duvet at cock crow, find their slippers in an instant and get the right one on the right foot, spring gailey down the stairs to their beautiful kitchen/breakfast room and join their equally annoyingly cheerful brethren around a chequered gingham tablecloth whilst whistling a happy tune and eagerly expect happy things to befall them for the remainder of their day.
Sheesh.
I absolutely KNOW that if I were to try and recreate this charmingly insanely optimistic lifestyle I would end up chewing the rough bits off the soles of my feet by lunchtime. I couldn't do it. I would be too expectant of the axe of discontent dropping to counteract the unexpected Goodness I'd experienced. The Ying Yang principle. The Good-v-Bad syndrome. The X-Y conundrum.
Is it just me?
Did Freud miss out on a whole case study here?

OMG! WTF! Am Writing!

As regulars will have gleaned, recently I have been experiencing what I can only describe as a slump of near-catastrophic proportions. I compare it with gamely attempting to scale the north side of the highest mountain of treacle whilst wearing welly-boots and not a whole lot else. And without the Kendal mint cake.
But this evening, after a good old fashioned but very gently aimed arse-kick from my lovely fellow-writer Michele (everyone home should have one) and great advice from Fionnuala I have sat at the scary box and drummed out 1087 words. Which is good for recently. In fact recently I've been deleting more than adding. Which is pants, frankly.
If I want to die unpublished and unfulfilled then I know what (not) to do. But I don't.
There are probably morals, quotes I should be trying to find to illustrate precisely what I'm trying to say, but at 74,000 words and finding everything getting thrillier (see - I can still make words up!) by the second, I am on that helter-skelter of prose that means my fingers can't cope with the amount of literary sh*t that's trying to escape my overwrought brain with every misplaced apostrophe (sorry, Bege).
Don't stop me now - I'm having such a good time!
Of course this won't stop the hideous procrastination, I bet.

Totally Funny!

Very nearly needed Tena Lady during this!
Be warned.

Memories of Mum

Following my lovely interweb friend Keris's post on her blog today, I got to thinking about my own mum - and all the things that used to annoy her... here's just a taster:

1. It was raining. And ‘He’ (in that great Upstairs in the Sky) had Done It On Purpose to upset her. No, honestly. I even caught her once when I about ten and it had been raining ferociously (as it always did in the Seventies…?) and she’d been standing at the kitchen sink. One of her hands was gripping the side of the worktop so angrily that her knuckles were white and the other hand brandished a meat cleaver which she weilded dangerously towards the kitchen window at the rain-rivuletted pane. I heard her giving the Almighty a few choice words as to what she thought of His idea of weather for that Monday morning. How could I remember it had been a Monday? Easy. That was her Wash Day. And He knew that, didn’t He? He did it to spite her….

Of course she could very probably have been going through the Menopause or been pre-menstrual or something but at six years old, you kinda (I kinda) thought I’d done something horribly wrong to upset mummy and steered well away for the rest of the day, maybe even week… month. Can’t remember. Don’t want to.

Anyway. Next one.

2. It was raining. And ‘He’ had Done It Again because it was Wednesday and He Knew Wednesdays were shopping days and because it was also half-day closing (now those were the days) she had to get it all done in the morning. Why couldn’t she have done it on a Thursday? Don’t know the answer to that one. Yes I do now, it was the only day that Grumps could drive my Mum and Nan into town. Only on a Wendesday, ok? It must have been his half day off work or something but it just had to be a Wednesday, and that was also market day which meant cheaper produce… so that was it. Ah, it’s all becoming a lot clearer now. I think.

Right. Next.

3. It was raining. And …… yes, you can guess the rest… only this time she’d just had her hair permed and set and He had done It on Purpose to make her look foolish and dampen her hair so that it resembled more tiny white mouse tails than loosely teased curls. All because He hated her. He did. And, as usual it was ‘Typical’… she didn’t know what she’d done ‘to deserve this’ and God was ‘punishing her’. I never found out what for.

And lastly,

4. It was raining. And we’d just driven a million miles to Burton Bradstock to stay in some god-forsaken Caravan park for a fortnight in the summer holidays and because the grass was soaked we couldn’t put the awning up. Why we couldn’t wait and put the awning up tomorrow I could never understand but again, He had Done this to upset her and to punish her. And still none the wiser as to what she had ever done to deserve being punished in this (always wet) manner.

You get the picture.

Writer's Block? Nar.. more like Writer's "Meh"...

My WIP - tentatively titled "Clowns to the Left" - has amassed 72,000 words. Something I started on 12th February this year, has used up 9,774 minutes of my life and has undergone 77 revisions. (love the 'properties' icon - great tool for any slightly OCD tendencies and of course a great procrastinatory tool). Now I've got through the heady beginnings and lain my foundations, shot headlong into the cut and thrust of the whole shebang and peered about at the carnage that my idea has wreaked... I am now either bored with the whole thing or scared of it all ending.
I just can't seem to whip up any enthusiasm for it any longer.
I read back and still love my characters even though one is a spineless arrogant user who's sleeping with his wife's best friend (not my usual fluffy chicklit thang). But all I seem to want to do is start a new one. And I've already written the first 600 words of it, too.
All I can see in my mind is my mother waggling her finger of disappointment at me and saying "you always start something and never see it through, young lady, that's your trouble." Gulp.
Mind you, she'd never have believed I'd already written two novels. But then she wouldn't have thought they 'counted' as they're not proper, published books. Pleasing my mother was always the most difficult thing in the world to get right. So why should I care now she's no longer around?
It's that still, small voice of dejection, isn't it? The one that says 'you're just wasting time you could otherwise be spending in more useful pursuits, like gardening, housekeeping, wife-ing, mother-ing, working...' things that were important to her.
Writing is important to me. And were it not for the fact that I thankfully belong to porbably the best writer's group in the universe, I would cheerfully be following Susan Boyle into the nearest Hotel for the Marginally Misunderstood clutching my not-the-full-ticket as I go.
I'll get over it. I always do. It's the getting through it that's the toughie.