Thursday 22 November 2012

The Killer China Doll

I have always loved dolls. I had them all as a child, Baby Born (the one that was meant to poo but didn't), Tiny Tears (the one that cried...if you squeezed it's arm really hard*), Barbie (the thin one), Sindy (the fat one), Shelley (Barbie's under-age little sister) and these little tiny things called "Quince" (eight little babies with matching Victorian style outfits and shoes).

The best and worst, however, was Emily. My china doll.

I must explain:

When I was a very little girl I shared a room with my older sister. When I couldn't sleep at night, she would tell me stories about "Joggy Bear" to help me get to sleep. I loved these stories, they were like gentle lullabies aiding me to restful slumber.

Until I got a little bit older and wiser (and probably a lot more irritating). This was when my sister began mentally torturing me on a night.
There were stories about ghosts and vampires, but the worst, and most memorable, was the story of the evil china doll.

It went like this:
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Sarah. Sarah loved dollies soooo much that her mummy decided to buy her the most special doll she could, made out of delicate china. Sarah loved her china doll, and she kept her on the dressing table in her room.
One morning, when Sarah woke up, her dolly was sat at the end of her bed, instead of on the dressing table. Sarah was confused, and asked her Mummy whether she had moved the doll, to which she told her she hadn't. The same thing happened for the next three mornings. A little frightened, Sarah decided to leave her dolly downstairs. That night, she heard a voice.
"I'm coming up the stairs, I'm coming up the stairs...."
Sarah sat up and called her mummy.
"I'm walking to your door, I'm walking to your door..." the voice continued.
"I'm reaching for the handle...I'm opening the door..."
The door opened...
The next day, Sarahs mummy found her dead in her bed, and the doll had gone forever.

As you can imagine, I was terrified  so I begged my mum to let me keep Emily in the conservatory with the door locked. I checked every night that my mum hadn't let her out and had nightmares about being slaughtered in my bed by a china doll with a grudge. These were made worse by my sisters whispered chantings in the night.

Eventually, my mum made me get rid of the doll, probably because I'd barely slept in weeks and was petrified of her.

I imagine this when it's dark and I can't sleep at night:



Yep, now you can't sleep either.

Tuesday 20 November 2012

Zumba!

Taking a break from running, my sister and I decided to go to our "Zumba!" class this evening. "Zumba!" is basically aerobics to latin/salsa music, and an attempt at making women feel desirable and sexy again.

It has no such effect on me.

 I find myself throwing my body around the room like a sex crazed lunatic, shaking my hips and signing along in Spanglish like one of those kids you see on "My big fat gypsy wedding". The only difference is those little gypsy girls look about 15 times more sophisticated than me, and they are a hell of a lot more co-ordinated.

I found a great meme to illustrate this:


Although Napoleon Dynamite's dance was effing awesome

In fact, I think I owe him an apology now...



Monday 19 November 2012

Pointless Post

Look-me in a onesie dancing to Queen!



UPDATE

I realise there is a saw behind me in this picture. I'm not mental, my boyfriend has been attempting to improve our home.

Sunday 18 November 2012

Run Rabbit, Run Rabbit, Run, Run, Run

I love running.

I mean, I actually love running. I feel like a superhero or something similar whenever I put my trainers on. I imagine that I am training for some life threatening task or that I am running from a monster or something similar and off I go.

Tonight I went with my sister and I kept finding reasons to carry on running. It literally took me getting a cramp in my calf to admit defeat, when usually I get a bit peckish and think I'd better run home for a sandwich.

I occasionally get these odd bouts of relentless energy and find myself running up and down the stairs at home, cleaning the entire house or dancing like an idiot to Queen songs in my pants, and I've never been quite sure where they come from. My sister's theory is that we, as humans, are all made up of different ancestry, so whereas my boyfriend and her husband are sedentary and like to chill and enjoy their time in a more stoic fashion, sister, myself and our brother prefer to be moving all the time. She decided that because I enjoy mornings watching entire series' of Gavin and Stacey, or Secret Diary of a Call Girl, I must remedy that stillness with excessive movement.

She probably has a point, given that my job is reasonably active and sitting takes up approximately 10% of my waking day. (I just worked this out- if I'm up 15 hours a day, that's 900 minutes, so 90 minutes sitting time on an evening.)

The result of this is that I like to run. I like to watch people run. I enjoy reading about running, and, despite my disinterest in fashion generally, I love to buy running gear (e.g. shoes, hats, socks, base layers, pedometers, apps for my mobile phone).

I even have a favourite running blog!

 www.fatgirlrunning.co.uk (not to be confused with my favourite blog written by a runner www.hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com)

I don't really know where I was going with this, other than waffling on about running, so here's a picture of me doing Race for Life:



I'm not sure what I'm looking at, but I appear to be fascinated by my boobs.

Saturday 17 November 2012

I wrote this when I was drunk, hence the subject.


A box of wine.
Pros-

1.A box of wine is usually bigger. This means that you can drink ALL THE WINE.

2.Unlike most bottles of wine, a box is opaque. This means NOT SEE-THROUGH. Nobody knows that you have drunk ALL THE WINE until the deed is done.

3.A box of wine is easier to carry than a bottle. If the box has a handle.

4.If you covered a box of wine in gift wrap you could (probably) sneak it into a child's birthday party. Then the kids can drink the wine too!

5.Boxes have corners. Yeah I don't really get where I'm going with that either.

6.The wine in a box of wine is in a foil bag. This means that if you decided to save the wine then it won't go off. Although I don't know this for certain. I've never saved wine.

7.Something about cooking....


Bottles are stupid. Whoever decided that wine in something that BREAKS was a good idea has obviously never drunk ALL THE WINE. Although you can buy it in cartons now too, which are handy for those times you want to pretend your wine is UHT milk and DRINK ALL THE WINE. And those stupid plastic "glasses" they sell at high end supermarkets. Don't put them in the dishwasher thinking that you are "getting one over" on Ikea and reusing your plastic sainsburys glass forever. They melt.

I really don't know where I'm going with this.

Enjoy your wine.

Why I'm a grown-up

Sometimes I randomly realise that I'm a fully fledged grown-up, and it frightens me a little bit.

A list of my grown-up behaviours-


  • I bleach the toilet every day. Sometimes so much that the bleach will burn the throats of people nearby.
  • I have a mortgage-this terrifies me. Most people my age are still going to Ibiza 3 times a year and drinking Jaeger Bombs on a Tuesday  night.
  • I buy fruit and vegetables and consume them. Because I know I should. I also frequently force my boyfriend to eat them too. I pretty much chase him round the house with a bag of apples. My brother describes me as a "Jewish mother", but with fruit.
  • I change our bed sheets once a week, and wash them on a hot wash to kill any germs. I know people who only wash their sheets twice a year.
  • People that only wash their sheets twice a year disgust me. 
  • I empty the lint filter on our tumble dryer every time I use it. In case there's a fire. Or my mum comes to check.
  • I have worked in the same job for 7 years. 7!!!
  • I look back at things I do when I was a teenager and shudder at how I took so many risks, then think, "When I have children I'll never allow them to..."
  • I worry about the fact that I don't have a pension.
So, not a lengthy list, but a pretty extensive one considering my age. Most people would see these as positives, I just view them as proof that I am getting old. 

Friday 16 November 2012

I used to be a vegetarian...of sorts.

When I was younger I had a babysitter named Elaine. Elaine was a vegetarian and, because I thought she was wonderful, I decided that her way of thinking was surely the right way, and gave up meat. I say gave up meat, but really, as a fussy child, all I was giving up hot dogs, burgers, sausages and lasagne, but still it was massive decision for an attention seeker such as myself.

I told everybody about my new found vegetarianism-strangers on the street included, and felt as if, having made the decision to boycott eating animals, everyone else I knew should also. I don't remember anyone choosing to go veggie. This did not stop me, the little activist. I forced my mother to pay for my "Vegetarian Society" membership, buy me "Quorn" and therefore cook entirely separate meals for me. To this day I admire her patience.

This went on for around 4 years, until my first hangover. I don't remember how much I drunk (I suspect it was roughly 3 alcopops), but I remember the agony of being hungover. I felt lousy. That is the day I asked my mum to make me something, anything with meat in it. I'm unsure if I felt that I needed this to cure my sickness, or because earlier in the day I'd been to McDonalds with my friends and watched them devour cheeseburgers whilst I ate a Fillet 'o' Fish (vile slabs of processed white fish with a disgusting tartre sauce style dressing. I know one person who eats them. And he's incredibly strange.)

For the next few years I ate meat until I stopped smoking. I went through one of those "self improvement" phases and alongside stopping smoking decided I was going to lose a shit load of weight as well. I perused Amazon for about 30 seconds then purchased a book called "Skinny Bitch".

 Do not buy this book. Ever. Ever. It turns people into activist psycho vegans. It uses scare tactics to force you to give up everything delicious and lovely, tells you processed food is evil, diet "soda" is evil, then advocates a diet of processed tofu and raw veggies. Safe to say veganism does not suit me, most wine isn't considered vegan so you can rule that out as an option for me.

 So I gave up meat again. I gained weight, and pissed off pretty much everybody I knew with my fussy eating. I'm surprised my lovely boyfriend put up with it to be totally honest. It can't have been pleasant to sit down with your juicy steak and look up to your other half wrinkling their nose and projecting "murderer" mentally across the dinner table! Our freezer was full of cardboard burgers and plastic sausages and I was constantly hungry. If I tore a muscle running it would take me about 4 weeks to recover because of the lack of protein I was consuming and I was basically a weak, chunky little mess surviving on carbohydrates and baked beans.

I was by no means a perfect vegetarian. Believe it or not, most sweets are not suitable for vegetarians, and one of my favourite past times was stopping at Tesco on the way home from work and buying 3 bags of marshmallows and a bag of wine gums and eating the lot in the car like one of those secret eaters on dieting programmes that hide Pringles in the cistern and eat them whilst continuously flushing the toilet. (I don't actually know if they do this but I imagine its a bit like alcoholism, and I read somewhere that alcoholics hide vodka in the toilet cistern.)

 I had visions of myself eventually stopping at the farm shop and buying a veal sandwich to eat on the way home just to get my naughty fix, a bit like those thieves that begin by stealing a packet of gummy bears and escalate to stuffing 40" tellies up there tops and legging it out of Currys or Comet or wherever it is you buy televisions.

So you could say I wasn't a proper vegetarian the second time round. Alongside all the sweetie eating I regularly refused to check ingredients lists because I decided that if I hadn't read that there was meat in something then there wasn't meat in it. I started eating fish again (which, lets face it, is meat really), and I wore my Ugg boots to pretty much every casual social occasion I could. I bought leather shoes regularly and at Christmas ate the goose fat smothered roast potatoes.

After three more years of meat deprivation, I started to get tired. Not just a bit tired, exhausted. I struggled to drag myself out of bed, gave up running, ate a lot more to try and muster some energy up, panicked that I might be pregnant and went to the doctor. To my relief, we were not about to be blessed with a child, but I was to be put through the torture (to me, it is) of a blood test.

I am NOT afraid of needles. I don't mind them a bit. At school, I was the first to volunteer to go up for my TB jab. I say this a lot and people look at me as if I'm some sort of junkie, but the fact is I just don't see needles as a legitimate fear. Moths are a legitimate fear, heights make me feel a bit poorly and I'm not a fan of horses, but needles, bring it on. What I am afraid of however, is fainting. And I do when I have blood tests. I've been told this is something to do with low blood pressure, so it's unavoidable.

So of course, I dragged myself reluctantly to the doctors to have holes poked in me and blood sucked out of me, I left a pale, dribbling mess, but hopeful that they would get to the bottom of my weak state.

My results showed that I have low haemagoblins (I know that's wrong, I just like the idea of little lonely goblins running around my veins) and that I needed iron tablets and further tests. I started taking the tablets, which tasted like little pound coins and turned my poo black and my stomach into a scrunchy, achy ball of pain. I decided after three days of feeling shit that enough was enough.

 That night I ate chicken. Then beef. The next day I ate lamb. Ever since then I've been pretty much a carnivore.


Sunday 28 October 2012

I am so lazy

I wrote this earlier and published it on "tumblr" and then I thought, "fuck tumblr! I don't want a bunch of yolo spouting kids reblogging my awesome* thoughts!" 
So here it is, obviously copied and pasted:


Realising the extent of my laziness is a little (lottle) disturbing if I am quite honest. I spend vast amounts of time trying to work out ways in which I can save time.

Using copy and paste to very email addresses or one click purchasing on Amazon may only save me seconds but I genuinely believe that this time-saving will eventually add up to weeks of extra time that can be spent sleeping/eating/singing/biting my nails/ browsing the web for funny blogs or pictures I can post on facebook or tumblr so I appear funny. Invariably this time will be spent watching Gavin and Stacey or daydreaming but its the potential that appeals to me.

Another timesaver:


  1. Recieves text
  2. Views text
  3. Starts to reply
  4. Can’t be bothered typing
  5. Calling sender
  6. Hour long conversation about a static caravan/trip to London/chicken dinner
  7. Although obviously this one is counter-productive and means I have to make awkward “hmmm” noises and agree to things I actually don’t want to do because I’m not listening I’m actually watching the spider on the window and we’re doing what next Saturday??! 


List of short cuts I use daily:

  • Dry Shampoo
  • Painting over chipped nail polish with more polish
  • Hairydryer held over clothes instead of ironing
  • Biting nails instead of filing nails
  • Cold wash clothes so I don’t need to seperate
  • Energy drinks for lunch because I can’t be bothered to make lunch
  • Pour instant coffee into mug, add 2 sugar cubes and hot water, gently shake mug. Add milk, drink.
  • There are more, but I can’t be bothered to remember them right now.


My brother once told me that his idea of a productive day at work is one where he gets everything done effectively with the least amount of effort exerted. I think this must be a family trait.

* I don't actually think I'm awesome.