Fake Christmas Greetings Cards

Last week whilst whiling away the day looking at the 'best of the Mumsnet talkboard' weekly round-up email and noticed the following thread had been highlighted as one of interest: http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/a1911919-Fake-Christmas-cards-Janet-and-Roy so I dived straight in and I'm so glad that I did.  Truly brilliant.  Basically it's a bit of a practical joke: sending a card pertaining to be from an unidentifiable couple called 'Janet and Roy' or maybe 'Pierre et Sylvie' if one has a continental background.  So I thought I'd join in by purchasing a set of 'three for £1' card from my local cheapo shop and penning the robin one to my parents (a round robin inserted into a card decorated with a robin: scary.) 

I shall ask one of my colleagues to post it from her home location tomorrow as Mother would smell a rat if it was postmarked London.  I can imagine Mother now, ruminating on who could have sent such a greeting and indeed if she's missed somebody important off of the Christmas Card list, which tends to diminish as every year goes by anyway.  I will also write something cryptic such as 'So nice to see you back in September, we must meet up again in March'.  God I'm evil at times, but I'll let you know what happens anyway.

There's a guy who works down my local BHS I swear is the actor Phil Davis

What a silly title for a post, yes I agree but quite frankly I haven't a clue who, if anyone, is reading this blog anyway.  Sometimes I think I'd love to know, but as it's piggybacked onto a porn site, it could be anyone on the internet who's in possession of wi-fi, fingers and a soggy raincoat.

Right, back to today's topic, which is the purchase of odd things from town centres.  I don't work on Mondays and Fridays and as a result I tend to take a wander around the shops after dropping my son off at school.  I bought the following things today:

So, why the hairbrushes?  Well, they were on special offer in Boots - buy one, get one half price, which presupposes that you'd have lot of hair to groom or indeed had a friend or relative who'd also appreciate such a gift.  Actually, I think if somebody gifted me a hairbrush, deodorant or shower gel I'd be annoyed - basically because they're inferring that you smell or your barnet's a complete state.  Talking of hair and I'm sure it's top of your conversation topics this rainy Friday, I'm trying to grow out my short cut back into a bob style and thus, it's a bit of a mess.  My hair is a bit of a nightmare anyway because it never looks tidy because of its flyaway nature.  I suppose if you work out the cost of two new hairbrushes (£13.45) as opposed to regular 8-week cycle cuts to maintain a short style (£40+) it's cheaper in the long run.

Finally (zzzzz) - cushions.  My house is now filling up with so many cushions (plus shoes) that I'll barely be able to circumnavigate the laminate flooring in the near future.  I am building my winter nest on my sofa though and quite frankly, often I feel like morphing into a state of hibernation because I've just about had enough of stuff at the moment.  Wake me up in May 2014 if you could please?

Exactly What About The Internet Makes People So Darn Nasty?

That's the question I'm debating today and as I've just Googled the subject in hand, it appears that it's a very common occurrence.  Further to my earlier post about being depressed, I truly believe that it's lifting now, but it has been a pretty awful few days.  I have made the decision to suspend my Facebook account for the foreseeable future and it's now my policy to only exchange emails with people I actually know in real life, I think that it's easier that way.

So, what makes people feel the need to write awful vitriolic forum posts or send horrible messages?  Speaking as somebody who would probably have engaged in a bit of keyboard sparring in the past I can kind of see how addictive it can be, but there are real people sitting there behind screens and it's not nice.  When I hear on the news or read in the papers or read about those teens who commit suicide because of cyber bullying my heart goes out to them and their stricken families.  Whilst growing up in suburban London during the 1980s I was subject to a fair amount of both physical and mental bullying and it's soul-destroying, literally, believe me.  Sometimes I wonder what's behind it all and what exactly to the bullies achieve in the long run?  Being a bit different and slightly (well, greatly) eccentric isn't a crime.

OK, so you want examples do you?  Fine, as it's anonymous then I'll share.  Right, picture the scene: a suburban girls secondary modern school in the fashion-conscious 1980s and it's non-uniform day and we've all paid the princely sum of 20p for the privilege of not wearing the navy blue and red hues of our daily grind.  So, I'm stuck - my clothes have never been the height of fashion at the best of times and this is one of the worst times of the year for me because I just can't keep up with the Tinas or the Donnas who rule the playground (I think we can tell that we're not talking about grammar school girls here, can't we?).  So what do I do?  I had a best friend at the time, let's call her Caroline for reasons of anonymity and we'd recently been shopping at the local mall and I'd purchased a Betty Boop nightshirt from M&S and she suggested that I may like to wear that, actually looking back I'm not sure if she was setting me up from the start and her report did state that she had and I quote: 'a bitchy streak'.  Anyway, I wore it and it didn't look unlike an oversized t-shirt which were fashionable at the time, it was grey, but slightly resembled the image below:

Somebody discovered that it was indeed a nightshirt and I received ribbing about it thoroughout the day until I removed it.  You see, I really should have begged my mother to purchase an expensive Naf Naf suit from her limited funds, which I believe retailed at a whopping £40 circa 1988.  They were the 'in thing' then and every Nicola, Shelley and Angie was sporting them then. 

Yes, horrible isn't it and this is one of the only images I could find online.  I seem to recall that many were acid shades of pink, purple and green and some even had a dice print, which made them even more clownesque in my opinion.  Nice.  Such a shame that I still live in this borough isn't it?  However I did reside elsewhere for a great number of years but family ties plus low property prices made me return.  Sigh.

Life Is Difficult But You Have To Embrace It Anyway....

What choice is there?  Well, we're aware of the alternative aren't we, but that just isn't acceptable - surely one suicide in the family is enough to bear?

I'll start by saying that depression's a terrible thing, a really nasty condition which creeps up on you when you least expect it, but I'll tell my story as best as I can.  There's a history of it in my family, so I've inherited a tendency towards it; the first time I ever recall experiencing it was one Christmas when I was about nine or ten - I'd contracted bronchitis and it laid me low, both physically and mentally.  I kept on thinking that my mother would die and as she was my only surviving parent, that was pretty awful.  From then on I've suffered from fairly regular bouts of it, it's improved as I've got older but it still creeps up on me.  I have cripplingly low self-esteem which is hard to deal with; in the 1990s when I dated I tried to make myself feel better by dating a selection of totally unsuitable emotional fuckwitty men.  Casual sex is awful: it tears out my soul.  One prime example of this is when my brother died in 1995, I was so depressed that I could barely function and the emotionally stunted tool of a bloke I was seeing at the time wanted to take advantage of that situation - how pleasant of him, I hope karma has come and bitten you firmly on the bottom.

I've never really taken much medication for clinical depression, often with a combination of exercise and a light box in the winter, it clears itself.  I have had counselling though, two tranches of it to be exact and like in a Woody Allen film, it's really addictive - just talking about yourself and your feelings for ninety minutes a week is really cathartic, albeit slightly neurotic.  I'm actually going to study psychology at City Lit - the course begins in a couple of weeks.  I think it'll be illuminating in so many ways.

So here's the thing, we all get sad at times, but sometimes it's worse.  What I really would like to underline is: don't use people - they have feelings too you know and it's never easy.  I keep on finding that people aren't particularly interested in the characters which surround them - it's seemingly getting much more uncaring out there.  Perhaps this is written from the perspective from a woman who has finally let all the tears out she's been hiding away for so long, but it feels good to be able to express it in words anyway.

No Running, No Bombing and No Petting

I took my son swimming today in the local pool and it cost me the princely sum of £8.60 (pah!)  I rarely swim in pools as my favourite place to take a dip is the sea as regular readers of my various ramblings will undoubtedly already be aware.  This is of course, despite the possibility of being nipped on the bottom by a crustacean. 

The pool to which I refer is located in the council's sports centre and boasts two pools, a teaching one and a much bigger one for lengths and stuff like that.  I'd forgotten how warm the former was because, quite frankly, I don't think I've taken him since he had lessons as a six-month-old baby.  Why not, you may ask?  Well, I don't really enjoy it and today's experience only stood to underline exactly why this is - crowds - being unable to use the floats in the pool - pushy parents and most importantly, hairy tattooed men and whalesque women.  Yes, this is unfair and I'm hardly svelte myself, but honestly!

I did laugh though as they still have those signs from the past which we all used to snigger at, which I've reproduced above.  My son, being the strange autistic soul that he is, wanted to read the various rules over and over again, but me, being myopic, couldn't really make them out, which was nice.  Actually, recently he has become obsessed by the colour and design of the upholstery on the various different train franchises - yes, really.  Also, he likes watching YouTube videos which have been uploaded from EuroSport and pertain to a German language version of ten pin bowling.  Hmm.

Bank Holiday Monday, Tenpin Bowling and An Audience With Kenneth Williams

It's officially the last Bank Holiday of the year and I'm sitting here typing away whilst listening to Whitney Houston's I Have Nothing for some bizarre reason, maybe it's because it was used as a warm-up exercise at choir a few weeks ago?*  It's very ballady that's for sure and if the neighbours continue to vex me then it's definitely something I could belt out at an intolerable volume near the party wall. 

Anyway, as ever, I digress and maybe it's the scent of next door's creosote making my head go a bit odd, but there you go.  The Earl's obsessed with watching tenpin bowling videos on YouTube and literally cannot wait to visit the bowling alley with his father this week (I tend to avoid such trips as I'm not a huge fan of the sport, detest wearing other people's shoes and worst of all, displaying my shoe size on the back of my heel...)  Pure comedy gold is undoubtedly Mark from Peep Show's prowess of bowling the contents of his weekly shopping along the megabowl lanes in series one.  Comedy geek: yes, of course.

Earlier on I was watching An Audience with Kenneth Williams http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=an+audience+with+kenneth+williams&oq=an+audience+with+kenn&gs_l=youtube.1.0.0.988997.992394.0.994447.21.11.0.10.10.0.177.934.10j1.11.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.youtube.0U_TunGcepMon the pad and it was a huge treat.  I am getting rather obsessed with the concept of raconteurs and how great they are and wish that there were more in showbiz these days.  What I really adore is trying to work out from the audience is who's dead and who isn't and spotting really obscure faces such as Shaw Taylor of Police 5 and Gordon Jackson, although being a huge fan of Upstairs, Downstairs** he remains a deity in my eyes.

* Regular readers will be more than aware that I quit choir at the end of July, return date currently unknown.
**That's the original London Weekend Television show from the 1970s, not the cruddy BBC re-imagining.

My Parents' Bizarre Garden

My parents reside about two miles away from my house in a house which they've lived in since 1973 and ergo, where I grew up.  It's a strange place, but I won't elaborate too much and hopefully admitting that it was built on the same ground where once occurred one of the worst Stone Age massacres in living history won't affect the resale price in the long run, not even in these times of suburban property shortages. 

What my folks really like doing is gardening, but no, not in the traditional trug-wielding way that spiritedly sixtysomethings enjoy, oh no - it's much stranger than that.  Take for example, their Model Village:

Actually, I am quite impressed by it, especially as they bought the concrete models from Whelan's which is a stoneware superstore based on The Isle of Sheppey which they bought plain and painted up themselves.  My favourite thing is their nod to David Icke's theory about the existence of lizard deities, which takes pride of place in the centre of their creation:

Of course, no garden would be complete without a pond and here's a snap of their home for all things piscine and amphibian.  There's a bit of a funny story derived from this, recently their new young male neighbour knocked on the door at 10pm stating that there asking whether the frog in their garden had escaped over the fence from my parents' pond and if so, could they remove it as it was and I quote 'freaking him out by hopping at him' - Mother went to investigate and there was no sign of the small Baron Silas Greenbackesque creature.

They also appreciate Easter Island Moai Statues whom Charlie Brooker once wittily quipped that they closely resembled the former Doctor, Matt Smith:

Of course, it wouldn't be a garden without other random statues scattered around - my personal fave is the enormous squirrel.

My parents also have two cats named Fluffy and Pamela - here's a picture of the former, who is of course, kind of hairy - fluffy even.  Mother and Father didn't name him, they adopted him from a woman who later died of cancer.  Pamela was rescued from a mental patient who threatened to drown her when she was only a tiny kitten and my very own moggie, Tilly was a Cats' Protection League adoption after she was rendered homeless after her owners abandoned her.  I would like to state categorically at this stage that I only own have one cat and a solitary gerbil (named Monica - her tank mates Rachel and Phoebe have both ascended to the great gerbilarium in the sky) as having too many animals around the house is a bit odd and would suit me well if I decided to give up on life completely, thus donning a fleece and hanging around the tramps' benches in town swigging a can of White Lightning and talking gibberish to passers by.  Regular readers will be aware that I don't aspire to such behaviourial traits for another decade at least.