In which I won't be dressing to the max

Written last year, but sadly still applicable now.

For about the last five years or so, I have considered any skirt or dress that reaches as far as my knees to be deeply unflattering. Or at least, deeply unflattering on me. On other people they might be elegant, chic, sexy even. But on me, I instantly look like someone dressed as a mum for a school play.
Being top-heavy, my legs are my slimmest part and therefore the bit I want to get out at every opportunity. It deflects from my bulkier bits up top, like wearing a subtle sign that says, “Just so you know, I’m not built like a tank the whole way down.”

So I’ve spent a draughty five years pushing the boundaries of hemline decency. Every dress has been shortened, then shortened even more the next year. My tights have got more and more opaque to compensate, my heels lower and tops more voluminous to balance out the harlot potential. It has been a long work in progress, but finally I’ve found a look that works for me. Hurrah.

The snag, of course, is that saying you’ve “found a look that works for you” is waving a red flag to the fashion bull. It’s like when someone on Eastenders says, “this is going to be the best Christmas we’ve ever had.” As soon as the words leave your lips, a flashing alarm goes off somewhere thousands of miles away, in a big control room, where I like to picture Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld and Alexa Chung all sitting round in massive leather chairs. “Lauren Bravo’s found a look that works for her!” They cry. “Quick, make fashion do the opposite!” And so, summer 2010 became the summer of the maxi dress.

Maxis have been creeping up (or down) on us for years, but up to now I’ve been able to ignore it, dismiss it as a micro trend that will never catch on because Brit girls like to flash the flesh too much. But not so, it seems. Everywhere you look this season, women are flapping about in acres of fabric. And, more distressing, most of them look good. They’re elegant, chic, sexy even.

There is a crucial ‘most’ in the above sentence, though, and that is the deceptive secret of the maxi – it DOESN’T WORK ON EVERYONE. For starters, they cover up a significant portion of our bodies, leaving us only with arms and décolletage on show. Which is great if arms and décolletage happen to be your best bits, but how many of us claim that? And how many of us, alternatively, spend entire August afternoons sweating it out in inappropriate jackets so that nobody sees our bingo wings?
Then there’s the maxi’s lack of shape. This can be a blessing – skimming over your hips and thighs, providing ample coverage for a belly full of fried calamari – or a curse – making you look like someone of indeterminate gender hiding in a shower curtain.

And then there’s the lack of accommodation for, um, ample chests. The vast majority of maxis come in two styles – ruched bandeau or triangle halterneck. Neither are friends to any bosom bigger than a C-cup, with the former looking a bit like two puppies in a sack, and the latter presenting the age old dilemma of cavernous cleavage vs wearing a prudish camisole underneath. And I do not approve of clothes than necessitate extra things worn underneath just to protect your modesty.

There’s also the length issue to contend with. Maxi propaganda states that long, wafty dresses can only be worn by long, wafty people; one of those hideously unfair fashion diatribes like ‘only skinny people can wear skinny belts’ (you notice there are no trends named ‘stout and dumpy’). But it’s a rule made for breaking. The secret to pulling off maxi as a shorter lady is picking your shape wisely and being nifty with a needle and thread if need be. Make sure it covers your ankles, but isn’t sweeping the floor, and fits properly up top so you don’t look swamped. Try to find something relatively slim-fit so that you’re not wallowing around in a paisley marquee, and if all else fails, crank up the heels.

But body issues aside, the real key to maxxing it up is deciding on your style. Are you a Grecian goddess (draping, chiffon, upswept hair), a prairie girl (broderie anglais, denim waistcoat, belt), or an urban hippie (straight jersey t-shirt maxi, minimalist sandals, iPhone)? Or will you, like me, be keeping a firm grip on your minis until Anna, Karl and Alexa come round to prise them out of your hands?

Diary of a Domestic Disaster - in which we have a gas leak

To be printed 07/04/11.

Sunday, 2pm

"I can smell gas in the kitchen," I tell my boyfriend. And in an unusual twist of events, it isn't coming from him. But, as I'm prone to neurosis and hungry, I cook some bacon to cover it up.

Sunday, 4pm

I can smell gas again. This time I decide to take matters into my own hands and test it out - so I get the kitchen lighter, hold it at arms length in the direction of the boiler, and light it. Nothing explodes. So it's probably fine. It's fiiiine.

Sunday, 6pm

Flatmates #1 and #2 have both smelled gas in the kitchen too. One smelled it yesterday and one smelled it the day before. I have a headache, which might be the gas but might also be the afternoon I spent eating raw shortbread dough. "It's probably fine," says flatmate. "It's fiiiine."

Sunday, 7pm

I call the National Gas Emergency Helpline. Because I do love a bit of drama, and my headache has got worse, and although the boiler passed my cunning lighter test, it's still probably best that we can go to bed as sure as we ever can be that we won't be blown up in the night.

"We can smell gas," I tell the lady on the end of the phone.

"Turn all electric appliances and lights off. Turn the gas off at the meter. Open all windows and keep pets away," she briskly instructs.

"Oh, but we've been using the hob. And the lights. And the telly's on." I tell her. "So it's probably nothing. It's probably fiiine."

"Someone will be there within an hour," she says.

Sunday, 8pm

The door buzzer goes (now I come to think of it, another thing we're not meant to be using). "THE GAS MAN'S HERE!" I shout. "QUICK, turn the TV and lights off! It'll look like we're not taking it seriously!"

Gas Man charges in. "Where's the gas meter?" he asks. "Ummm," we say. "We don't know. In the cupboard? Or under the sink? Would you like some shortbread?"

Gas Man doesn't want shortbread, but he does want t know where the meter is. In the end it transpires that the meter is in the yard out the back, which must be accessed through the shop downstairs. So for half an hour we sit in front of River Cottage, occasionally shouting "Are you alright down there?" out of the window and muttering "it's probably fiiiine," to each other.

Sunday, 8.30pm

Well whaddya know, we have a gas leak! A bonafide domestic disaster! Everything is not, as previously suspected, fiiiine - our hob is leaking! Had we not called the emergency helpline, we could have ended up a cautionary tale on a safety advert. I have saved everyone's lives!

"I've had a headache all afternoon," I tell Gas Man, knowingly. "Not from this you won't have," he says. "Domestic gas hasn't been toxic for years." Oh.

Sunday, 9pm

Gas Man has turned the gas off. I may have saved everyone's lives, but as a tedious downside I've also left us with no cooker, heating or hot water. The landlord has been called, and told he will need to replace the hob - pronto, before we all freeze and have to resort to wallowing in our own dirt and licking our plates clean then using them again.

We spend several minutes bemoaning all the food that we won't be able to cook, before Gas Man points out that while our hob is gas, our oven is electric. And therefore fine. "Oh," we say. "Of course. We knew that."

Monday, 10am

Three cold showers and an experimental night with a portable hot plate later, the landlord comes to replace the hob. Except it turns out that the hob doesn't need replacing at all, because the leak is being caused by some old food stuck under one of the gas knobs.

"See?" says flatmate. "I knew it would be fiiiine."

In which the general consensus is that a little common census goes a long way

To be printed 31/03/11.

It was much glee that I sat down to fill in my census. I like writing about myself, could you tell? Admittedly I wasn't being paid the princely Herald rate of £15 a week for this one, but still I was relishing the chance for a little self-examination for the benefit of the state.

But here is the thing: I was disappointed that the census wan't MORE invasive. I wanted to be probed, goshdarnit. I wanted it to make me realise things about myself that I never knew I didn't know. Unfortunately, something I already knew I knew was how many bedrooms my flat has. It has three. Next question.

How are the residents of our house related to each other? "Well," I start. "We met in Freshers' Week - you thought I was a loser because I said 'hi' to you in a corridor in a bid to make friends, but then we bonded over a mutual hatred of Ministry of Sound and love of inappropriate footwear and Tottenham Court Road hot dogs. We've lived together ever since, apart from that year you went travelling, which I have largely blocked out of my memory anyway because it was also the year of the Mouse House. We have shared clothes, books, an organic veg box and numerous long nights under blankets watching sitcom boxsets."


"The options," says flatmate, "are husband or wife, same-sex civil partner, partner, son or daughter, step-child, brother or sister, step-brother or step-sister, mother or father, step-mother or step-father, grandchild, grandparent, other relation, or unrelated."

"Oh," I say. "Unrelated."

You see, the truth is that far from being a dazzling excavation of our importance in the intricate meshwork of our society, the census has just made our lives look a bit sad. We are no relation to each other. We have no dependents. We don't own any property, or any vans, or give anybody any care or support.  We've never been married or divorced or in a same-sex civil partnership, and, even for the sake of hilarity, none of us are practising Jedi.

Question 17 is left intentionally blank. This one, obviously, has been thrown in to test us - to filter out the blank among us, if you know what I mean. So I circle it and write "ah, but has it?" in the margin.

How is my health in general? This is a hard one. Specifics I could do. I could fill pages with the intricacies of my dizzy spells, my stomach acid adventures, my neck twinge, my heart flutters, my jippy toe and my grotty tooth. I'd be thrilled to finally tell someone who would listen about how sometimes my kidneys pulsate and my nose goes numb whenever I eat radishes.

But in general? How is my health in general?

I tick 'good'.

In which I get something off my chest.

(I wrote this in 2009, but will continue to unearth it until busty ladies get their dues)

Fashion is fickle. We all know this. Styles flit in and out of favour on the merry-go-round, enjoying their moment of glory then laying low until they can work their way back into our wardrobes. But while most trends, however unlikely, will get dragged into the spotlight at some point or other (hello, jodhpurs), there are some things that will just never quite manage it. Fleeces. Double denim. Nude tights. And, my own particular burden – cleavage.

Cleavage will never be cool. Despite all of Vivienne Westwood’s sterling efforts, no matter how much burlesque devotees try to bring back corseting, however many times Scarlett Johansson bends over in a movie, cleavage will always be the embarrassing auntie of fashion.

Cleavage takes an LBD from a cocktail bar to the Rover’s Return. A couple of cup sizes can be the difference between sexy and slutty, between Carrie Bradshaw and Carry On.

Of course, cleavage has had its champions over the years. Think of Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It, sashaying her way across that restaurant, her bullet bra leading the way like two guided missiles. But Jayne was about gaudy sex appeal, not style. In an era of elegant icons like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, Mansfield’s extreme proportions were a guilty pleasure.

Likewise, modern day breasts have their celebrity cheerleaders. Of course they’re a varied lot – at the good end of the scale we have Salma Hayek, Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, and the aforementioned Scarlett.

Luscious women who make cleavage look as at home on the red carpet as it does in a Yates’ Wine Lodge. Then there’s the bad end of the spectrum, where we find Jordan, Chantelle Houghton, Victoria Beckham’s gravity-defying melons, and 98 per cent of everyone at the British Soap Awards.

But whether good, bad or ugly, these well-endowed celebs all have something in common: just like their rounded silhouettes, they lack edge. Glamorous, they may be. But trendy? Not really. Ever since Twiggy first found fame, that childlike figure has been synonymous with cool, an antidote to the sexually-charged images of women that ruled the commercial world.

Then what is a chesty gal to do? Dressing big breasts is a constant Hobson’s choice – high collars turn us frumpy, fashioning our assets into a big matronly bosom, while plunging necklines take us into trashy territory quicker that you can say ‘my face is up here’. We can do va-va-voom with our eyes shut, but how about gamine? Boyfriend chic? Layering? It’s a minefield of sartorial no-goes.

Take Holly Willoughby. She’s an exemplar model of how to dress a busty figure, with her Very.co.uk range a treasure chest of flattering deep Vs, sweetheart necks and sturdy tailoring.

But with her wardrobe, Willoughby has resigned herself to being cosy, not cutting edge. She’s settling into her place on the This Morning sofa while Fearne Cotton, her flatter-chested counterpart, gets to run round in the sixties shifts and cement her place in all the trend reports. It just isn’t fair.

The conclusion I’ve come to, after a decade of gaping blouses, straining bodices and getting perilously stuck inside dresses in shop changing rooms, is this: designers are scared of breasts.

They don’t know what to do with them. It isn’t even a skinny/curvy issue, though naturally that plays a part in it. But the truth is that, since the days when Thoroughly Modern Millie lamented the way that only flat-chested girls get their pearls to hang straight, fashion hasn’t catered for anything above a C-cup.

Maybe it’s because an impressive décolletage diverts attention away from the clothes. Cleavage is a scene-stealer, not a blank canvas. There is a glimmer of hope though, in the form of model Lara Stone, who graces the cover of this month’s Vogue.

While her (supposed) 32Ds are still a far cry from my own FFs, it’s the most cleavage the glossies have featured in a long time. As Cornershop once sang, everybody needs a bosom for a pillow. But whether they can reclaim their place in fashion remains to be seen.

In which the Crazy Frog starts signing on

To be printed 24/03/11.

This week, the Office for National Statistics released its inflation shopping basket for 2011. The yearly update is, really, an excellent large-scale version of snooping in other people's trolleys for fun. "Five cans of ready-made gin and tonic, a tube of primula, marigolds and a radish?" you think, picturing said customer comatose in a litter tray, with cheese goo in their hair.

But the difference is that with the nation's shopping basket, every item is a supposed reflection on YOU; not just the weirdos.

First, the good news: fleeces are out! Out of the basket and promptly out of our lives, one can only hope. If ever there was an item that epitomises the inversely proportional relationship between comfort and ugliness inherent in fashion, the fleece is it. Wearing one feels like being gently caressed by a million tiny winged angel sheep, but makes you look like you should be eating piccalilli sandwiches in a bus shelter with someone called Derek. Fleeces be-gone!

Reflecting the ever-expanding leisure pursuits of the nation, both craft kits and massive LCD TVs are in. We can only assume this is so Britain's womenfolk can make scrapbooks of kittens with doily frills round their heads, at the EXACT SAME TIME Kirstie Allsopp is doing it on the telly.

Next, the collective bowel of the nation will be thrilled (or moved?) to hear that dried fruit has been given its own category. As one of the millions of office workers across the country who spends their days woofing fistfuls of raisins and then pondering what would happen if I'd eaten that many grapes, I feel this is a perceptive addition. Potentially they should take it one step further and give 'apparently healthy desk snacks' its own category, including smoothies, rich tea biscuits and anything being sold in the foyer to raise money for charity (generosity negates calories, everyone knows that).

A slightly poignant swap has also taken place this year, as mobile ringtone and wallpaper downloads have been ousted, and replaced by apps. This is probably only poignant for me, as a Blackberry-rather-than-iPhone user, and an app-less one at that. But I will always fondly remember the short period when a musical ringtone was a conscious display of taste and personality, rather than the tinny bleetings of a moron. Back then my ringtone was Brown Eyed Girl and my flatmate had Bad Guys from Bugsy Malone. We were cool, and everybody on every train knew it.


But the basket addition that has pleased me the most is the one that reflects the true cost of romance in 2011: dating website subscriptions. As a proud beneficiary of the phenomenon (at weekends I can be seen at Speakers' Corner waving a flag and shouting "Six months on, he's STILL not robbed me or harvested any of my internal organs!"), I'm glad that the government is recognising its significance.

Currently the standard response when I tell people how I met my boyfriend is a cheery "Great, great. No stigma, no stigma!" but I hope that, with the hypothetical purchase now made on behalf of the whole country, it will also curb the private assumption that we probably both have unsightly boils and dead pets in our beds. We're just nice, average, normal people, using our apps and eating our raisins and crocheting in front of a 32" TV.

But if I discover he owns a fleece, I may have to reconsider his place in the basket.

In which we discover the garden of earthy delights

To be printed 17/03/11.

I get excited by a lot of mundane things in life. Museum gift shops. Rice pudding skin. When the bus pulls up with the doors aligned perfectly in front of me, as though I've personally summoned it. But until last week, I didn't realise I could get so excited by vegetables.

We've started getting an organic veg box.

A few weeks ago, we didn't even known we needed more veg. Or better veg, or veg we'd never heard of. Vegetables were for putting in stir fries, roasting into oblivion, and routinely throwing out once a month after they turned black and oozed liquid over the bottom of the crisper drawer.

The vegetables of studentdom are as follows:

1. Peppers. Cut chunky and plonked on pasta, with distinct bias towards yellow and red because the green ones taste too much of grass.

2. Courgette/aubergine/mushroom. For the hippies and vegetarians.

3. Butternut squash and sweet potato. Because they're a bit like pudding, but as a first course. You can put honey on them.

4. Onions. Shut up, of course they count.

But during the last year and a half, our ascent into proper adulthood has been marked by becoming fully fledged legume-fanciers. And for the true vegetable proficient, or at least one without the space or inclination to grow the ruddy things themselves, the holy grail is the organic veg box. Ours gets delivered by a man named Simon Bear. He wears a fleece. The whole set up couldn't be more rustic if it put on a hessian jerkin and sang Greensleeves.

"The carrots have mud on them!" I found myself squealing. "Look how filthy the potatoes are!" agreed Flatmate. "That's the dirt of deliciousness. Good, proper, expensive, dirt." "I can't believe we spent so long eating CLEAN carrots. Ugh, Tesco, put away your soulless sponge".

It's worth noting, though, that just as there is always more a little more toothpaste in the tube, you will never quite finish all of the veg you buy. The initial rush of "yay veg!" on day one is slowly replaced by "mm, veg" on days two and three, then "sigh, veg" on days four-six and "bah, takeaway" on day seven. Then you throw away the wilting remains with a heavy heart, and the feeling that you're throwing away a tiny bit of forest and some critters. As well as roughly £4.56.

And of course, it's just another phase in the great middle class mission to hijack everything rustic and muddy that the wholesome, ruddy-cheeked salt-of-the-earth poor have been doing forever, like calling their kids after parlourmaids and dipping their chips in some runny egg.

Back in the olden days (yore, yesteryear, days gone hence), as far as I've learned from books and films and The Good Life, vegetables were organic as standard. That was just how they came. But hey, if reverse aspiration is responsible for bringing Swiss chard, so tenderly steamed and buttered, into our lives, then sign me up now and call me Gertrude.

In which I straighten up and fly right

To be printed 10/03/11.

As you read this, I will be two days into a Lent without hair straighteners.

"Ye gads!" you're thinking, "the abstinence! The suffering!"  As frequent followers of this column* will know, I take Lent pretty seriously as an opportunity for self improvement, reflection, and lording it over the weaker individuals who crack and break out the secret fag/cake/Gilbert and Sullivan soundtrack stash on day three.

After years of culinary challenges like chocolate, bread, booze and crisps (the infamous Great Mini Cheddar Debate rattles on to this day), this year I'm turning my attention upwards to my barnet. So 40 days in a metaphorical style desert may not sound like that huge a sacrifice - and in many ways it isn't, being that it will actually give me more time for faffing around of a morning and lessen my chances of third degree ear burns. But it will be a trial, believe me.

My straighteners have been a loyal part of my life since the bleak mire of adolescence. They make my hair bend the right way, rather than flicking the wrong. They calm the daily hints of Flock of Seagulls just dying to burst through. They double up as an iron for the creased lady in a hurry. And there's always the reassuring thought that, if necessity dictated, you could probably use them to cook a steak and chips too.

I can pinpoint the exact moment that straighteners took over our hair - it was autumn 2003. I know this because I can make a flickbook of photos documenting my transition from a schoolgirl wearing a hay bale on her head to a girl wearing a shower curtain on her head. We went on a French residential holiday around the time GHD ceramics were launched (for the uninitiated, they're the Bentley of the straightening world), and one girl in our group was in possession. She was more popular than the girl who snuck in a bottle of peach Archers.

In every photo from that holiday, and every subsequent one until the ceramic started to lose its effect and my split ends started to occupy multiple postcodes, I have the swishiest, shiniest curtain of hair imaginable. I look like a chubbier Penelope Tree. After the initial few months of ceramic magic, straightening becomes like any other addiction - something you just do, without thinking, because not doing it feels wrong.

The crucial thing to understand about hair straightening, you see, is that it is not about making hair straight. Pff, no. Plenty of girls who sport curly or wavy or boofy hair will still rely on them daily. It is about changing your hair from something flicky, fuzzy or generally misguided, in short something that looks like it has spewed forth from the human body, into something that looks like it has been spun on a loom by nymphs.

If we look back to the 80s and 90s, hair wasn't required to perform as hard. True, it had to be enormous, permed, possibly sporting a pink visor or distracting from Tom Selleck's moustache - but it was allowed to be hair, not some sort of follicle fantasy by the Haus of Aniston. For the last decade we've been under a straightening spell, and it's only now that we're finally breaking free. So I put down my straighteners with a heavy mane but a light heart, and hope that by Easter I will be stronger.

Or my ends will be, anyway.



*And I'd like to take this chance to say a grateful "how-doody?" to all three of you.

In which I reveal my man-ifesto

To be printed 23/02/11.

Men of Britain! You're quite lucky to get the following column, because were it not for a few intervening factors (lack of interested publisher, lack of ideas, lack of being arsed) I would almost certainly turn it into a book. But as it is, the following concise little offering is small enough to slip, almost unnoticed, into your life, where it will better it significantly for you and those around you. Put it on your fridge, keep it in your wallet, sleep with it under your pillow. You're welcome.

THINGS EVERY MAN NEEDS TO KNOW

1. Telling a woman that you see in the street to "smile" does not make her want to smile. It makes her want to punch you in the kidneys.

2. Your shoes are more important than you think. However important you think they are, they're more important than that.

3. You cannot buy Nuts magazine ironically.

4. Sex and the City by no means represents what women actually think. But when asked, you must always say your favourite is Carrie. Lie. And don't mention horses.

5. Unless you are called Julio or are attending a fancy dress party as Marti Pellow, you may not have a ponytail. Ever. No exceptions.

6. Definitely is spelled 'definitely'. Not 'definately'. Actually everybody needs to know this one, but now seems as good a time as any to say it.

7. However well meaning your intentions, telling a woman she has a ladder in her tights will never be well received. She probably knows. And even if she doesn't, she isn't about to run home and change. Just keep schtum

8. Do you own a large, short-sleeved shirt? Is it useful for work and breezy in the summer? Do you wear it with jeans to 'smart' clubs? Burn it.

9. The man who dances will earn more points than the man who doesn't, no matter how David Brent the moves are. Girls like dancing with dodgy dancers. It reminds us of our Dads.

10. If you live in Britain, you are only permitted to remove your shirt in public during the months of July and August. And only then if unseasonably warm.

11. No man in the history of the world has ever pulled by calling a girl he doesn't know "gorgeous" in a leery fashion at a bus stop at 11 o'clock in the morning. Your life will be significantly easier once you realise this.

12. Never underestimate the power of a good scarf.

13. Growing your nails long makes you look like a terrifying child catcher from a fairytale. I don't care if it helps you play guitar like Hendrix.

14. The girls you think look great without make up are almost invariably wearing make up.

15. No gift bought in Clintons will ever please anyone. If it does, you are dating an idiot.

16. Put. The hair gel. Down.

17. Periods may not be as painful as being kicked in the crotch. Ok. But you aren't kicked in the crotch once a month for several days for 40-odd years of your life.

18. We are never going to wear stockings on a day to day basis. They chafe. So stop asking.

19. Look at your estate agent. Then wear and do the opposite.

20. If you are a  genuinely nice person, then none of the above matters*.


*This is a massive lie. Learn to recognise those.

In which the postcode always shoots twice

To be printed 17/02/11.

It's the been the funnest online game for grown-ups since Google Street View was launched. Indeed, the next logical step is surely to combine the two, and allow us to find our own house on the map and discover someone robbing it.

Yes, I refer this week to the launch of police.uk, the new online crime map service - otherwise known as shitletsmove.com. A neurotic's gift, the site lets you type in your postcode and find out how many crimes were reported in your area in December. It also breaks them down into different categories, which is helpful, because then you can play your neighbourhood off against your friends' like Top Trumps. "45 burglaries? I've got 135 on Violent Crime, BOO-YA…"


The trick they're missing is having a little pop-up of Kirsty Allsopp, in a guise not unlike the Word paperclip, to say "It looks like you live in a crack den. Why not move to a plusher neighbourhood with not so much murdering?"

But if it doesn't cause you to sleep with a hefty frying pan under your bed (or a Le Creuset casserole, depending on your postcode), the site will do the opposite and provide some nice reassurance. Or, even better, an opportunity for gloating.

My postcode in Muswell Hill, for example, had 499 crimes. Is that a lot? It's more than you'd want, I guess, but then part of me is glad it's a substantial number. Nobody wants to live in a wussy neighbourhood, after all. Live somewhere with no crime and one day everyone might snap and rise up in mutiny. You just know Balamory is ripe for some bloodshed.

So it's not until you start comparing with other people's postcodes that you really get any perspective. It's comforting, for example, to know that as I have moved further out of London during the last five years, I have also significantly decreased my chance of being hacked to pieces with a crowbar round the back of Budgens. In Camden Town, where I was nestled safe in the halls of residence bosom for my first year in the city, the number is an eye-watering 1665. Of which 526 are the vaguely unnerving "other crime" - knowing Camden I imagine these are largely the crime of dying one's hair pink and wearing an ironic 'iPod' t-shirt while sucking a cannabis lollipop, but it's chilling all the same.

From there I more than halved my crime threat in one swift move by shipping out to Highgate (681), and then on to my current road, cotton-woolly by comparison. But the real surprise was that my family's postcode in Tarring, Worthing, had 358. That's only 141 more than my street in Big Bad London, where the streets are paved with syringes and a stranger's just a rapist you haven't met yet. My flatmate's village in the Cotswolds, just to bring a little more perspective, had 1.

So what have we learned, kids? That you can't tell what crime might be just around the corner. That the Costwolds are safer than Camden. And that maybe my hometown isn't quite as wussy as I might lead people to believe.

In which my fitness career is in the bag

It was all going fine until they gave me the rucksack.

"I can be a gym person," I had told myself. "I can wear a trainers in public. I can get up early at the weekends to go to classes with words like "pump" and "crunch" in the title. I can consider a banana 'a snack', without the addition of toffee, whipped cream and buttery biscuit base. I definitely can."

It started two weeks ago, when I walked past tracksuited men handing out fliers on Muswell Hill Broadway Just before I could whip out the standard "not today thank you" response for leafleters, clipboard-bearers and those people who want you ask you a few questions about your hair (to which I like to reply "a lady never tells," with a knowing smirk), they threw me with a piece of genuinely useful information.

"Did you know there's an LA Fitness round the corner?" they said. I did not know. "That's near your house. Near enough that you might actually manage to go there sometimes. It's the same distance as Whistles and you make it there often enough, don't you?"

The trouble is, am a health club marketer's dream. I begin every Monday full of muesli and good intentions, and end every Friday face down in a tub of brownie bites. I have had two exercisey spurts in the last five years - one during my finals, when I realised that swimming was the ultimate form of procrastination because kudos for the exercise cancel out guilt for the not revising, and the other last summer, when I started getting up an hour early to go jogging before work. I'm pretty sure this second phase did really happen (I have the sodden ball of workout gear in the bottom of my wardrobe to prove it) but from where I'm sitting it seems like the giddy behaviour of a sun-soaked moron.

"So what do you want to achieve from joining?" asks the tracksuited man when I go for my tour.

Um. To lose the permanent indentation round my stomach where my control pants dig in? To not get out of breath singing in the shower? To learn to view sweat as a badge of honour rather than a reason not to use my hairdryer in summer?

"Just to improve my general fitness," I say.

Then a quick chat and a whizz around with my bank details later, he presents me with The Rucksack. Up till now, when he's mentioned "your bag" I was picturing a purple plastic number with drawstring. But no, it turns out "my bag" is a hardcore, padded-straps-gortex-panels-clippy-bit-to-do-up-round-your-middle-whilst-climbing-a-mountain rucksack. Which isn't my bag at all. I've spent my whole life ensuring that I never have need for a rucksack, and now I've actively bought myself a rucksack for the princely sum of £49 a month plus a £25 joining fee.

So here we go, exercisey spurt number three. I am going to find my swimming costume, fill up my water bottle, grab a banana and crunch and pump for all I'm worth.

But if all else fails and I never go, at least I can recoup a little by selling the rucksack.

In which I'm free

Printed 03/02/11.

You know you're getting  to A Certain Age* when you stop 'going shopping' and just start 'going to Debenhams'. When the terrifying urban jungle that is the high street starts overwhelming you, when you've done one this-way-that-way pavement dance too many with pedestrians as you charge from shop to shop, when you need the reassurance of knowing there's a cafe where you can have a nice cup of tea and a sit down just an escalator ride away. That's when the department store comes beckoning from the shadows.

"Come to me!" it whispers in your ear like a slightly seedy Auntie, as you lie supine on the floor of the River Island changing room with a taffeta playlist stuck halfway over your head. "I have everything you need. Don't waste your precious energy gadding about like a fool - within my doors you can buy a pillowcase, some pants and a teacake in 20 minutes."

Until now, I'd never fully understood the appeal of the department store. Much in the same way that those massive buffet restaurants who serve every cuisine are basically always delivering quantity at the expense of quality ("Lasagne and pad thai on the same plate, mmmm a taste sensation"), I'd assumed department stores always just covered every base, weakly, instead of selling one thing really damned well.


Guarded by their army of terrifying make-up ladies (original skin tone unknown) department stores felt to me as a teenager like somewhere you would always leave having purchased a towelling dressing gown, no matter what you originally went in to buy.

But no longer. Now, I get it. The Are You Being Served fantasy suddenly makes sense to me. Department Stores are like tiny, complete little worlds. Their appeal lies in the idea that if you got locked in for the night, everything would be perfectly fine! You'd eat all the toasted teacakes in the cafe, sleep in the beds, and spend the rest of the time trying on beachwear in a hilarious filmic montage. When those people got stranded in the snow last year and were invited to spend the night in a nearby John Lewis, my Mum rang me up in the throws of absolute jealousy and wonderment - and it was then I realised the truth. We would all, really, just like to live in a department store.

Which one, though? In Worthing you basically have Debenhams or Beales, with the slightly depressing lesser option of BHS if needed. Debenhams is the shinier of the two, more in touch with the outside world, but Beales has a homespun charm that can't be matched.

In London, meanwhile, the department store provides a invaluable port in the Oxford Street storm. There's Debenhams and John Lewis for sales shopping that starts on cocktail dresses and will always inevitably end up at control pants, House of Fraser for pretending to be a young urbanite who goes to drinks functions (instead of a young luddite who goes to Nandos for a treat) and then, the Grandaddy of them all - Selfridges.

For years, I was as intimidated by Selfridges as everyone else. It's posh! It has Fendi handbags! It has people who can afford to buy Fendi handbags! Am I even allowed in here wearing jeans? But then I uncovered its secret. The great equaliser.

Here it is: it has a Topshop. And I can afford Topshop! It's right at the back and you have to walk through a load of mortgage-defying stationery to get to it, but it has one, and thus, I have as much right to shop in Selfridges as every Arab Sheikh and his wife. "Don't mind me," I silently say, as I trot past the Cartier and through the millionaire's bedding section. "I am just a simple gal, on my way to Topshop."

"But if we happen to get stranded here for the night, don't think I'm not going to town on the Chanel."


*For many people, that Certain Age is somewhere in the midst of mortgage repayments, parents' evenings and menopause. In my head, however, it's about 26.

In which the buff boys had better beware

To be printed 27/01/11.

We're at the end of what was really a very newsy week. Just as the papers were cracking their knuckles and sitting down for a session of prime punning on their 'Johnson-out-balls-in'-style headlines, the world decided to throw a  bit more (decidedly less punnable) news at them. Then a bit more. Then a bit more, then some more after that.

But amid all the resignations and stepping downs and bowing outs, there was one demise that I'm afraid will go sadly unnoticed. Except by a clutch of under-informed thirteen year old girls looking for torso pictures of One Direction to put in their lockers. Yes, Sugar magazine is going to that great wastepaper basket* in the sky.

A large proportion of you won't appreciate what a sad loss that is. Because, obviously, nobody reads magazines anymore! Do they? Not the yoof, anyway, who we all know get all their information from weekly podcasts transmitted directly into their brains from speakers in the Topshop changing rooms, at a frequency only the under-18s can hear. But for any female alive before 1992, or any male who has ever had  a young female ask him anything about female functioning that they really rather wouldn't answer, the loss of teen mags is a cause for lamentation.
 
Coming from a family of averagely strict principals (yes to the hair dye, no to the Faliraki holiday), I graduated through  a well-worn chronology of girls' mags. I started on Girl Talk, but wasn't allowed Shout! because it talked about training bras. Then I moved onto Shout! but wasn't allowed Mizz, because it talked about periods. Then I was allowed Mizz, but wasn't allowed Sugar because it talked about kissing boys. By the time I was allowed Sugar, I had realised that far juicier titbits could be got out of my Mum's Woman's Weekly, albeit with a side portion of menopause and hair thinning.

There was one gloriously libertine phase where a dog-eared copy of More found its way into the waiting room magazine pile at my dancing school, leading us all to race to ballet early for a sacred ten minutes poring, goggle-eyed, over the pages. I still consider More a bit too racy for me now if I'm honest. There's no pets corner, for one.

But the joy of girls' magazines wasn't just down to their information, it was also about the participation. I spent a significant portion of my tweens staging humiliating accidents in front of boys (in girl-mag-speak, "lush lads", "gorge guys" or "fit fellas", always alliterative) outside McDonald's, just so I could sell the story to the Cringe page for a £10 Tammy voucher. Aside from flavoured lipgloss, embarrassment was essentially the currency of these publications. If your parents weren't humiliating you, it was your teachers. Or your friends. Or your little sister, who just happens to have a snot attack over new hoodie as a buff boy walks past outside Morrisons.

Then, of course, there was the crowning glory of the girls' mag - the problem page. This was where we learned to outwardly say "eww, what a freak," while inwardly going "phew, glad that's normal." Where practising snogging on the back of your hand was a sane, sensible thing to do. Where the answer to everything, every single thing, was "just be yourself! And maybe phone this helpline." Aunt Sally in the Sunday Times has definitely got the wrong idea.

But the saddest thing of all about Sugar folding? I'll never work there now. And I had a whole folder of Cringe stories saved up, just in case.

*Recycling box, I mean. Sorry, sorry.

In which 2011 is the year of a thousand stars

To be printed 20/01/2011.

"Just got wished a happy new year by Billy Mitchell. 2011 will be the year of my induction into celebrity circles."

I tweeted this at 1am on New Year's Day. Clearly I had my priorities right - after singing an interpretation of auld lang sine composed entirely of the words "schmurrh durr, der dur," and avoiding the advances of the Octogenerian who claims to want a new years' cheek peck but WILL go for the lips at the last minute (I like to call him Old Man Syne), everyone knows that new year is for bettering oneself. And as everyone also knows, thanks to our culture's relentless veneration of flash in the pan notoriety, the best way to better oneself is to make friends with famous people! Hoorah!

I haven't just started, of course - encountering underwhelming celebrities has been a hobby of mine for years, but it's only now I'm going pro. It helps to be living in an area of London almost entirely populated with ageing soapstars. Minty in the corner shop, Michelle Collins in Caffe Nero, Craig Charles helping a drunk lady onto the bus. It's like C-list safari. With Billy, or Perry as I will call him once we're invited to pie and Pictionary parties at his house, we're aiming to slide gradually into a warm but casual friendship based on doing the same pub quiz and breathing the same oxygen for a significant part of the day.

It isn't borne out of a tragic urge to climb the social ladder, you understand (it might be but we'll pretend it's not). Conversely, I actually have a theory that lame celebrity encounters, administered regularly, can be good for the self esteem. It makes us feel better to know that just because someone is on Eastenders, or DIY SOS, or was once the body double for the man in The Brittas Empire, it doesn't mean they don't go to the shop and buy their own Twiglets. When you've seen Tracey Thorn from Everything but the Girl dribble a bit of beer down her chin, you get an overwhelming sense that somehow it's OK To Be You.


But I'm not just sending you off into the world, yelling "Go forth! Rub shoulders, and anything else you want to, with the famous!" Oh no. A self-bettering activity like this needs some structure, and a healthy element of competition to keep it interesting. And so, I proudly unveil the Lame to Fame points system:

2 points -

Anyone you have queued, or paid substantial amounts of money, to meet.
Anyone you have camped out behind railings to scream at for three fleeting seconds.
Anyone so famous that it won't just be your anecdote, but a large-scale anecdote covering an extensive group of people. Like if you ever witnessed Prince Charles ride a bike into the Thames, or something.
Boris Johnson*.

5 points -

Anyone famous who has a conversation longer than 30 seconds with you.
Anyone who has been in both The Bill AND one of our three major soaps (Eastenders, Corrie, Emmerdale).
Anyone famous internationally.
A member of Girls Aloud.

10 points -

Anyone who gets you excited enough to do a little squeal, but whom nobody you're with has ever heard of.
Anyone you recognise purely by voice, or isolated body part.
Any celebrity in a situation that would be considered embarrassing to a normal human. Bonus points if you actually help the celeb, like picking food off their face or pointing out the loo roll trailing from their shoe.

*Everyone has seen Boris Johnson.

In which we enter the age of austerity

I've always had an issue with people hating January. It may be a month entirely given over to grey skies, DFS adverts and images of lycra-clad celebrities next to cut-outs of their flabbier selves, exhaling, but it is also my birthday month, and as such I won't hear a word against it. So while you're supping on your cabbage soup and signing your first-born over to David Lloyd, you can always remember that somewhere, I'm sticking my face in a cake while other people clap. Isn't that a comfort?

And besides my personal felicitations (I can see why this might not be good news enough to redeem the entire month - after all, finding me the perfect present is a chore akin to fighting fat with Kerry Katona), there are plenty of other reasons to love January. Rather than see it as the drill master of months, demanding you better yourself with the help of screechy whistle, you should look at it as a kind of half-hearted warm-up for the year ahead.

Nothing in January has to be done with any real gumption, because anything a bit substandard can be shrugged off with a simple "meh, it's January". January is a dress rehearsal month, where you almost intentionally fail at things, knowing that nobody expected much anyway. And like dress rehearsals, if you actually do the thing brilliantly then it's bad, because the real event will then inevitably be a letdown. The real event in this case being February, and the letdown being pancakes that won't flip, a lenten vow that lasts 40 minutes and a Valentine's Day spent alone in a slanket eating a SaraLee gateau.

Take your lead from the world of fashion magazines (always a trusted source for a real grasp on reality). The September issue of Vogue is always a weighty tome, because that is the true New Year. September is about whipping yourself back into shape, evolving a new look and buying a new pencil case from WH Smith. It always has been. Meanwhile, January's Vogue is always a pitiful slip of a thing, barely enough to wedge a draft out from the bottom of the door. This month's issue has Victoria Beckham on the cover, and even she's wearing a Granny jumper. The jig is up. January operates at half-mast. It's on dial-up, not broadband. Relax, your gluts are never going to look any different.

I only wish that more people could be enlightened on this viewpoint. Because while my new year's resolutions reflect the real pace of the month - "take rubbish out", "tweeze eyebrows sometime before April", etc - everyone else in my life seems to be psyching up for the self-renovation of the century.
New Boyfriend has declared an Age of Austerity and compiled a spreadsheet of all his monthly outgoings (£120 on beer, £8 on Weetabix). 

My mate Pete, formerly the man for whom a hamper of Sainsbury's Basics noodles was a decadent Christmas present, is potentially buying a third of a flat. Just as I've vowed to party more and care less, all of my nearest and dearest are climbing mountains then going to bed at 11 with a copy National Geographic. It's wrong.

And what's more, it's no fun. For me. So with just two weeks to go until my birthday, I'm selflessly devoting my month to helping those less fortunate than myself… to give up and wait till February. Cake for everybody!

In which I am retching even as I write

To be printed 06/01/10.

It's been a weird weekend. Of course, the Christmas period is always a time of general topsy-turviness, what with everybody eating Lindor for breakfast, buying half-price bikinis and having no idea what day it is, but that last weekend was a proper mind-confuddler. Given that New Year's Day always feels like a Sunday, and Bank Holidays always feel like a Sunday, and then there was an actual Sunday sandwiched in the middle that didn't feel as much like a Sunday as the fake Sundays either side.

But my confusing Christmas started two weeks earlier, when I got home and discovered that in my absence, my family have started wearing slippers.

As an adult child moving out of home, there are many things you worry about. You worry that they'll forget your name or give your bedroom to the guinea pigs. You worry that they'll suddenly develop a taste for DFS pleather sofas and start buying ornaments from QVC. You worry that they'll decide Worthing is too cosmopolitan and exciting for them, and move to Bognor. But you never think you'll have to worry about them suddenly taking up a habit as dangerous and perverse as slipper-wearing.

We have never been a slipper family. I'd like to think it's because the Bravos are free spirits, trekking bravely through life on the bare (or sock-clad) feet that God gave them. But more likely it's because we're lazy, and because taking one pair of shoes off, only to put another, slightly softer, pair of shoes on, feels like quite an effort compared to just taking them off and being done with it.

But if I'm honest it's more than just laziness. I genuinely don't get the point of slippers. Maybe it's something that I'll start to understand with age, like slips or valance sheets. If your feet are cold, you want to warm them - this I understand. But surely, that's what big socks are for. Big socks are great, I am a cheerleader for big socks. They offer insulation for your tootsies without losing the feeling of freedom you get from being shoeless. In fact, on the right kind of flooring socks give you MORE freedom. Remember Risky Business? I think you see my point.

Why you'd want to surrender to another shoe instead of the freeing sock is beyond me. Ladies - imagine you come home at night and take your bra off (sheer, comfortable, free-hanging bliss), only to immediately put on something basically the same as a bra, but with a different name and a fleecy lining. You're just cheating yourself.

Plus, there's just something so poncey about slippers. Those proper, towelling mule ones. They produce the same stomach-clenching reflex in me as flip-flops. They instantly render even the most dignified and impressive of persons a powerless, shuffling twerp.

It doesn't mean I love my family any less, of course. But somehow I feel it's driven a wall between us. I'm finding it harder to look at them and see myself reflected back. And in the spirit of family loyalty, I'd like it to be heard: when I find out who has done this to them, there will be hell to pay.

In which it never happened anyway

Printed 23/12/10.

I'm writing this on Saturday, so I have a five-day buffer zone from which to wonder what I'm about to wonder without having to believe it might actually come true. What if I get stranded in London for Christmas?

When Bing Crosby sang about a White Christmas, I don't think he ever took the issue into consideration. Why would he, he had all the natty jumpers and roaring fires and fur-trimmed ladies that he needed right there at the Holiday Inn*. His days would be merry and bright (partly because he was in a film studio).

But for where I'm sitting now - in the window of Muswell Hill Caffe Nero with a hot chocolate the size of my head - it's looking like a distinct possibility. The snow has reached the mid-level milestone of on my gauge of Bad Snowness: when you can no longer see where the pavement ends and the road begins, basically you're in trouble. And the country's rail services being as wussy as they are (I always like to picture Southern as a wheebly girl who doesn't want to get her hair wet), I'm already anticipating an Arctic hell mission to get back to Worthing on the 23rd.

You always assume that in these situations, everything will miraculously work out ok. Your Dad will somehow commandeer a husky-drawn sleigh to zip you down the A24. You'll hitch a lift in a van with a polka band, like in Home Alone. You don't let yourself entertain the idea that you might have to spend Christmas with an M&S stuffing sandwich playing Guess Who against yourself**.

I'm one of the lucky ones, though, as by finishing work on the 23rd I have a whole 30 hours in which to hike, bike and possibly kayak back to my parents' house. But for my friends who are working on Christmas Eve, with every snowflake that falls they edge closer to the possibility of a lonely yule. So they're forming pre-emptive survival plans in case the worst happens, where all the snow victims gather to pool their food stocks and residual body heat, play charades and wrap up things they've found in the flat for each other as poignant makeshift presents.

"My own toilet brush! Used! Aw Billy, you shouldn't have. Pass the turkey twizzlers." Then when the snow finally thaws, they will find that their hearts have melted a little too, and realise that wherever there is love, you can create your own Christmas. 

So I'm praying that the snow will hold off long enough for not just me, but everyone to make it safely home. Partly in the spirit of goodwill to all mankind, and partly because I just know that if they have the DIY lonely London Christmas without me, I'm going to be properly jealous.



*Incidentally, I always picture the Holiday Inn like a lovely version of a Premier Inn, with more seasonal charm and less Lenny Henry. Instead of the little tray of tea bags and biscuits, there might be mulled wine and a tiny gingerbread house. And shampoo actually worth pocketing when you leave. It is also worth saying, I have never watched Holiday Inn.

** Actually I play a mean game of solo charades. So long and elaborate are my mimes that by the end, I've forgotten what the original answer was.

In which An Evening at Alfie's glamorised the truth

To be printed 16/12/10.

I've just had my first grown-up domestic disaster. It's amazing, really, after four years of living in properties that can only be described as "squat chic" (all the rodent problems and peeling paint one could ever want, but for £500 a month instead of free), that I haven't had one before. All my pipes have remained miraculously unburst, all my precariously-creviced ceilings intact. I've never been able to call my office with the sound of gushing water and explosions in the background, to say I can't come in because my house might disintegrate. Not once.

Until Saturday, when we get up to find the boiler has leaked a puddle all over the kitchen floor. It takes me by surprise, not least because I've never really thought of boilers as being full of water before. In my head, boilers have always been full of gas. Great, swollen, noxious boxes just waiting to give us all carbon monoxide poisoning like Rita in Coronation Street. But no, it turns out mine has decided to furnish us with a DIY pool instead, the generous thing.

The trouble is that when you have no experience of your own domestic disasters, all your ideas of how to deal with them are based on things you've seen in films. And in films, most likely, I would end up riding a tidal wave through a window, screaming, “TELL BILLY JOE I ALWAYS LOVED HIM”, before a mutant crawls out of the plughole and tries for world domination.

 So I flap. "Find a knob!" I shriek, "there must be a knob! Look for one with 'Water Be-Gone' embossed on it."  Boyfriend, meanwhile, is relishing the opportunity to prove his handyman credentials. He locates the knob, and triumphantly turns it. The wrong way.

So then the leak becomes a gushing waterfall, the puddle becomes a lake and the flap becomes a full-blown flail. We start a comedy receptacle-swapping routine with the fruit bowl and the top bit of the food processor, chanting, "one, two, three, GO" as we slosh the river across the kitchen into the sink. It feel a bit like a challenge from the Crystal Maze, but without the natty jumpsuits, prize money, or fun. Still, I'm quite pleased with our conveyor belt system - it's great teamwork, not to mention the most action the food processor has seen in ages.

But it soon transpires that we can't keep it up indefinitely. Our arms are tired, for one, and water is probably starting to seep through the ceiling into the flat below. So I phone the landlord while Boyfriend attempts to redeem himself with another go at the knob. This time the water stops.

Several hours, many towels and a visit from some plumbers (“Never fiddle with the boiler,” they tut. “You might get a shock.” “Well QUITE,” says I), the kitchen is habitable again, and we’re fairly smug at our flat-saving, knob-turning achievements.

“You do realise,” says my flatmate when she gets home and we’ve re-enacted the whole receptacle-swapping performance for her, “that there’s a massive bucket right there in the corner?”

In which we're not sure if they do know it's Christmas, actually

Printed 09/12/10.

The Most Underrated Christmas Songs Ever

The Waitresses, Christmas Wrapping

Everyone loves a song that tells a story. Two Little Boys. Copa Cobana. We feel a far closer affinity with a song when we properly listen to the lyrics for the first time and realise, oh my days, Tony gets shot! Patti Smith's Redondo Beach is about a girl drowning, but it has such a jaunty tune that you might just never realise.

So Christmas Wrapping, while also earning points for 80s new wave, winkle picker-wearing credibility, is wonderful because of its stirring narrative. The ups! The downs! It's been a hectic year… she missed lots of dates through various arbitrary mishaps…she's spending Christmas by herself… she's even got a tiny turkey. But then a last-minute trip to the grocery store leaves her face-to-face with the object of her desire, and you get to chorus in with the killer line, "You mean you forgot cranberries too?!" It's understated magic.

East 17, Stay Another Day

This is my earliest Top of the Pops memory ever. Brian and the boys swathed in white furry jackets, snow falling on their bristly little heads. Despite no mention of Santa, elves or drunk Grannies, Stay Another Day is a crucial Christmas track because it's perfect slow-dance fodder. It is ripe for school discos, office parties and particularly dismal pub lock-ins. It's the one time of the year where even gristly tough guys who will later run themselves over with their own cars, can open up and cry a little. And that is very, very special.

The Ramones, Merry Christmas (I don't wanna fight tonight)

If ever there was an antidote to a bejumpered Cliff Richard, it's a beleathered Ramone. Merry Christmas (I don't wanna fight tonight) is a yuletide anthem for people who would rather watch Eastenders than the Vicar of Dibley. And like all yuletide anthems, it includes a meaningful message, but this one doesn't stretch itself too far. It's not peace on earth, for everyone, for ever, but merely peace in our living room, for tonight. It sets us a goal that we can all strive for. And as Bob Geldof knows, start small and sometime you can create something big.

It also has a pretty kickin' beat.

 

The Pretenders, 2000 Miles

This song suffers in two ways – firstly by being very easily confused with The Proclaimers' 1000 Miles, which, let's face it, is not only a more rousing song but also only demands a journey of half the length (and these things matter to everyone forced to take a bracing post-dinner walk on Christmas day).

And secondly, by not really sounding much like a Christmas song at all, except for featuring the word Christmas sporadically in the lyrics. Which makes it the perfect track for Scrooges, slipping a little festive cheer into their ears without them realising. You might want to try the same with their drinks.

Slade, Merry Xmas Everybody

Only joking.

In which Oscar Wilde must have had his reasons

To be printed.

It's always interesting to see your hometown through the eyes of a tourist. It's particularly interesting when the tourist in question is your New Boyfriend, on a giddy whirlwind trip that involves meeting your parents, Grandma, schoolfriends and Teville Gate in one day.

There are numerous telltale signs of potential lunacy that people look for when they start dating someone – hidden Michael Buble albums, teddy bears, hairs on the palms of their hands. But when the suggestion "let's go to Brighton for the day" is met with the response "no, I'd rather see Worthing" from your new beau, you might feel you have legitimate cause to worry.

I could have talked him out of it. I could have pointed out that while a day trip to Brighton would provide an actual day's worth of things to do - buying hemp, eating goat's cheese, getting spontaneous piercings - a day trip to Worthing would have been over in the time it would take me to say, "um, there's the pier." I could have explained that visiting a seaside town in the bleak midwinter tends to infuse one with a lingering melancholy for weeks to come, as though one's soul has been given a good once-over with a cold, wet flannel.

But I didn't. Being the patriotic bundle of Sussex pride that I am, I said, "yes! Let's do it! It's been MONTHS since I spent an afternoon doing battle with a 2p machine." So off we trundled to Worthing, on the 9.17 from Victoria, burdened with one hangover, one caffeine headache, one Cornish pasty and one weighty copy of the Observer. Mistake number one, naturally, was not remembering that an eye-wateringly early start wouldn't mean All the More Time for Grade-A Fun, but actually just that nothing would be open yet.

"There's the law courts," I said, before running through a brief history of the town's more newsworthy trials of late. He took a photo. "There's some council buildings," I said. He took a photo. "Here's Worthing library, where I briefly worked before finding the pressures of town-centre book borrowing too much and moving to the altogether less 'urban' Goring branch," I said. Photo. "We still have a Wimpy." Photo.

And while I tried my best to do justice to Worthing's lovely art deco architecture, our literary history, budding artistic community and slightly bigger than average H&M, it was always the less remarkable elements of the town that NB was drawn to. Places I hadn't been since I was 12, having been too busy standing on the A259 with a sign saying "anywhere with a Pret." Because in the same way Parisians never go up the Eiffel tower, the charm of the English seaside town, with its tearooms and slot machines and non-ironic visits from Canon and Ball, is often lost on us residents.

Sometimes you just need an outsider to come along and say "hey, the Guildbourne Centre looks interesting - let's go in there."

In which he liked it, so he put a ring on it

Printed 25/11/10.

The trouble with writing columns a few days in advance is that I'm basically the last journalist to say "Royal Wedding, rah rah rah." But here goes anyway. Ahem. Royal wedding! Rah rah rah! The love, the smiles, the laughter, the beautiful, shiny hair. And the TELLY. Sometimes we need events like this to remind us of two things 1) we are capable, as a nation, of producing spectacularly bad telly. And 2) we are even more capable of watching it.

So now we can look forward to nine months of the sort of programming that makes T4 Movie Specials look insightful and well-informed. Programmes that take one basic, three-second fact and eek it out into an hour of televisual fluff* by inviting people who may have been in the same room as the happy couple, once, to speculate on what they may, or may not, be thinking or planning.

"Having been seen on numerous occasions wearing dresses, the bride may well choose to sport one for the big day," Jenni Bond will ponder. "The couple enjoy food, as proved by this one blurry photo of them eating chips in a St Andrews bus shelter," TV chef James Martin will say. "Maybe there will be chips at the wedding breakfast!" Maybe.

My favourite news nugget so far has been that the stag do, to be arranged in ominous fashion by Prince Harry, will be held "in either Gloucestershire or Botswana." I imagine this was in a similar style to my 16th birthday party, which was going to be held in either Worthing, or Kuala Lumpur. In the end it was held in Worthing.

But it seems to me that there's one big televisual trick everyone is missing. We don't want polite, carefully-lit interviews where they guffaw over how droll each other is. We want to see a wailing bride puffing on a fag and blowing her nose on a bit of tulle petticoat. We want to see a groom whose idea of a romantic reception is hiring three bikini-clad Vegas dancers and a blackjack table. I want to see a beautiful, catastrophic collision between the royal wedding and BBC Three's Don't Tell The Bride.

For the uninitiated among you, this is the genius concept: a couple love each other very very much and want to be joined together in holy matrimony, but what with her fake tan budget and his new hubcaps, they can't afford it. So generous Auntie Beeb gives them £12,000 to spend on the big day – but on the condition that every single thing is picked and planned by the groom.

Each episode is always full of shots where you can practically feel the director off-camera, rubbing his hands with glee. "I don't care which colour he picks for the bridesmaid's dresses, as long as it isn't orange," says Bride. Cut to shot of groom in bridal shop saying "Hmm, orange. I reckon she'd love that, I do." You get the idea.

Is there any aspect of the royal wedding that would not be more glorious in this format? I'd even concede to them stretching the budget slightly – 15 grand, say – if it meant we could watch Katie trying on a dress three sizes too big that Wills got on sale in TK Maxx after spending half his budget on the Botswanan stag do. We could watch Camilla and Carol go head to head after financial restrictions mean that the Middletons have to watch the ceremony on a big screen outside a barn conversion.

And at the end, when the happy couple are swaying gently to Take That's Rule the World as Harry necks a bridesmaid in a hay bale, we'll all believe it's true love. "You done me proud, babe," she'll hiccup. "You done me proud."


*I like to call this phenomenon 'the X-Factor Results Show approach'.

In which a child by any other name would smell as posh

Printed 18/11/10.
 
Ok, respect to Ed Miliband for calling his baby something normal. To have resisted the urge to christen his second child Le Creuset, Agamemnon or Thor is a feat we should all applaud, I suppose. But honestly, wasn't it the outcome we all expected - Ed using his Family Man Moment to be as un-Cameronish as possible. And basically the only more Joe-Public name than Sam is Dave, understandably vetoed despite hilarity value, he's basically dished up predictable move no.1.

As a Samuel, he joins noble but unglamorous ranks. Dr Samuel Johnson, famous lexicographer. Samuel Pepys, diarist and wig-sporter. Samuel Smith, of the excellent pub chain. One of my ex-boyfriends. I could go on (just).

Plus, you have to wonder. For decades we've reproached parents for giving their children fantastical names under the assumption that the kids will stand out from their classmates, and subsequently be bullied. In my own youth, certainly, this was true. When everyone on the entire register was called Emma, Gemma, Lee and Luke, a Gerronimo or Bodicea would have been prime fodder for a hockey cupboard 'incident'. My own parents' naming decisions were doubly difficult, give that our comedy surname was already going to earn us a monthly kicking. If they'd slipped up and called one of my brothers Johnny, I believe he may have had to be home-schooled. 

But are we really in the same position now? As far as I can tell, one of the greatest human rights advancements of the 21st century has been that we can now title our offspring with reference to the Geldof Dictionary of Modern Ridiculousness, and nobody is allowed to judge. Nowadays people name their kids the way they used to paint their own mugs, as an expression of how creative and interesting they are. Of course, over time mugs will become chipped and tea-stained and eventually be replaced, whereas children will grow up and sue you - but that's by the by.

What's more, while a sturdy, salt-of-the-earth name might serve you well in a sturdy, salt-of-the-earth town, let's remember that baby Miliband is going to grow up in North London. Which is more flimsy, salt-of-the-Waitrose-premium-range. As a resident for the last four years, I'll tell you now - you can't do a morning Starbucks run without falling over a million infants called Tarquin, Simba or Chive. So I can't help but worry that actually, little baby Samuel risks standing out among his friends and being bullied on merit of having a name that doesn't sound like a crockery design in The Conran Shop.

It doesn't have enough vintage panache to count as one of the Victoriana crew - the Arthurs and Ediths and Winstons and what-have-you - but nor is it enigmatically 'foreign', or one of those names invented by jamming together bits of other names – Jashella or Kennethiqua or something. He might try to seek refuge amid the Biblical kids, but frankly, a Samuel is never going to be able to hold his own against a load of Silases and Tituses and Delilahs.

So I wish you well, baby Miliband. May your everyman moniker simultaneously anchor you to the ground and propel you to the stars. But if you want to change your name to Schubert Soya IV, it's ok. We understand.

In which nobody dies

Printed 11/11/10.
 
The trouble with being a meed-yah professional is that nothing you do will ever sound that serious. Or at least, it won't for the ample percentage of us who aren't Jon Snow or Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Obviously, I hear you cry, writing for the Herald is about as serious a job as they come - but in my day job at the Channel 4 Food site, I am rarely likely to be quizzing a war criminal or clamping a crucial artery.

No one will accept "I have to work late, it's all kicking off on the Come Dine With Me Facbook page" as a legitimate cancellation excuse. Likewise, "I have to go to a cake tasting," or "the background on our twitter feed needs changing and no one can decide on a colour palette." The other day I arrived at the office to hear a colleague earnestly trying to explain the term 'facepalm' to a client down the phone. It's hardly the square mile.

But the upside of being whipped cream on the vocational landscape is that we can accurately and enjoyably use the mantra: no one will die." If these recipes don't get uploaded, no one will die*. If we misspell pestle and mortar, no one will die. If Jamie Oliver's face gets smooshed up by some erroneous photoshopping, no one will die.


Meanwhile my doctor friends, lawyer friends, even to a lesser extent depending on the level of knife crime or tricksy gymnastic equipment in their schools, teacher friends, can't really say that with confidence. I hadn't realised it until now, but 'would prefer to have icing sugar, not blood, on hands' may just have been my top job-seeking criteria.

Being a year out of uni, my pals and I are at a notable stage of what-have-you-done?ness. In order to earn top kudos at the one-year mark, you have to either: have travelled somewhere exotic to do something worthy (supported by multiple pictures of you hugging orphans), got an important job (or at least one that can be suitably dressed to sound important when confronted with the worthy traveller), or become significantly more attractive than you were when you graduated.

Lower points are awarded for moving home to save money (sensible but depressing) or contracting an exciting illness (worthy travellers often score an unfair double on this count). Harshly, post graduate studying endeavours don't really count, as those people have prolonged their time in the cosy bosom of education and must wait to be judged on their eventual transferral to the Real World - by which point, the theory is, they'll have got some colour back in their cheeks and learned not to bring Sainsbury's Basics table wine to dinner parties.

So while my meed-yah endeavours might not garner medals or get me a spread in an alumni magazine, I can take comfort in two things: someone might eat some marvellous cake one day because of me, and if not, at least no one will die.


*This is temporarily ignoring the recent mishap in a Swedish magazine where 'grams' was omitted from an ingredients listing, meaning the recipe contained a potentially fatal dosage of nutmeg.

In which I say thank you for the music

To be printed 04/11/10.

Karaoke. In these times of puyrotechnic, lycra-clad X-Factor domination, in a land where Kate Weasel's roots are the only ones we're going back to, there is something so pure and uncorrupted about a good old sing song. No judgement, no public vote, just the chance to bawl your brains out in a padded room until everything seems better again. But just like boybands, not all karaoke tracks are created equal. Here's what your karaoke choice says about you:

Gangsta's Paradise

Falling into the 'soulful rap' category (as opposed to 'sexy rap', 'booty-shaking rap' and 'shooting everybody then getting a hot tub rap'), men feel that a song like Gangsta's Paradise gives them a chance to showcase both their badass urban credentials and their softer, sensitive side - the side that might teach kids to read good in an inner city comprehensive. In reality, it showcases the alarming number of adolescent hours spent in their bedrooms memorising lyrics they don't understand, and fawning over pictures of Michelle Pfeiffer.

All By Myself

See also: I Will Always Love You, I Will Survive, I Can't Live (If Living Is Without You)

For the vast majority of their day to day lives, many women are forced to hide a part of their true selves. We fight an ongoing battle to suppress certain urges, for fear of judgement, ridicule and repelling menfolk. As a feminist and general disciple of Good Taste, I'd like to pretend I don't even possess them. But play the opening twangs of Eric Carmen's sobalong classic and, like a melancholy moth to a vodka-fuelled flame, we rise up like a tribe of pyjamaed Bridget Jonesbots, ready to wail our way through three minutes of musical spinsterhood. I like to think of it as queen of the Ovary Anthems.

My Way

Frank Sinatra is karaoke ketchup. He blankets all matters of taste with the same sweet, generic charm. One for the rookies, more experiences 'okers should forgo Frank in favour of something less obvious. Like side one of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. With dance routine.

Islands in the Stream

Country and western is a left-field choice, often plumped for by people wanting to deliver a little obligatory naff factor without resorting to a power fist. The trouble is, without a mullet or bucking bronchi to complete the scene, C&W karaoke is in most cases exceptionally boring. Roger Miller's King of the Road is the hip kids' croon du jour, but Islands in the Stream earns more points - though only when sung as Nessa and Uncle Bryn from Gavin and Stacey. Sorry Dolly.

Born to Run

See: All By Myself. But replace 'Ovary Anthems' with the appropriate alternate reproductive organs.

Wuthering Heights

Ladies undertaking this track will do so in the name of lolz, under the guise that it'll sound so ridiculous they couldn't possibly be taking themselves seriously. Do not be fooled. They secretly believe they are going to be ethereal in the extreme, channelling Kate Bush's wide-eyed mad lady insouciance with their wafty arm movements and dog-decibel wailing. Sadly their efforts will be such that Heathcliffe won't let them in the window. However cold it is.

In which I fly, my pretties, fly!

Printed 28/10/10.

As I write this, I am about to embark on my first ever long-haul flight. Ever. In my life.

How one gets to the ripe age of 22 without ever crossing an ocean I'm still not sure, but know it has something to do with a combination of: believing a gap year would require me to wear leather bracelets and have diarrhea on a mountain top, coming from a family that considers Pizza Express a cultural experience, and having friends doomed to spend each year planning riotous expeditions in full knowledge that we will never even attempt to go on them. Instead we will go to the pub and get
our kicks by shredding some beer mats into oblivion.

So today, I am like a wide-eyed child in a montage from a 90s movie. I'm giddy on the novelty. Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me is playing alternately on a loop in my head. I'm flashing my passport indiscriminately at everybody - the lady in WH Smith, the toilet attendant, the man who nicely asked me to take his bag through customs for him - just to make sure nobody can accuse me of pulling an international fast one. I'm already excited about telling the flight attendant that I'm "in it for the long-haul", then doing some hilarious finger-guns.

As with most of my Johnny-come-lately experiences ( mobile phones, crispy duck pancakes, season 4 of Mad Men), it's inevitably going to be a disappointment. After all, my expectations of flying are mainly based on Airplane, the first episode of Miami 7, and anytime they flew anywhere on Friends, when the plane basically looked like a fairly plush dentists' waiting room. If I’m honest, I’m half expecting a smiling stewardess to ask if I want to come and meet the pilot (and I do).

Never a minimalist packer, I am struggling with the hand luggage restrictions. Liquids I can identify, but what constitutes a ‘paste’? Do I have any pastes? Does the melted peanut butter cup moulded to the inside pocket of my handbag count as a paste? And if so, should I declare it? Or eat it? Confused will also lead me to keep my personal items in their clear plastic bag not just for the flight but for my entire holiday, just in case Canada is funny about liquids in general. Perhaps, as a nation, they are not tolerant of spillage.

I will in all likelihood be the only person who watches the safety video (as we plunge to our death above the Atlantic, I feel it would reassure me to have tied my lifejacket in the correct double bow, and be able to quickly locate my whistle. “Bleep bleep!” I would toot, and the rescue operatives would say ‘gee, there’s a passenger who paid attention to the demonstration.- let’s save her life FIRST”). I will take my in-flight leg exercises very seriously, and I will aim to use every item in my little complimentary pouch of comfort – the eye mask, the socks, the blanket, the pen.

I will also, I am pretty sure now, enjoy the plane food. I just know I will. All those individual containers will feel a bit like the kind of packed lunches I was never allowed to have. BA could essentially serve me a Dairylea Lunchables with a Pepperami on the side and I would be happy as a clam.

And if all else fails to entertain me, I know I could spend an absorbing six hours trying to work out exactly what it is that’s holding the plane up. Or, let’s face it, just nap.

In which it's just the drugs talking

Printed 21/10/10.

There is nothing worse than waiting for a cold to come out*. It's like walking around with a cartoon anvil above your head, ready to drop. As son as that scratchy warning niggle at the back of your throat announces itself, you're a ticking slime bomb - you know you only have minimal days in which to get everything done as a functioning human, before you're reduced to a clammy, tissue-strewn corpse who can only say "blargggh".

If properly planned and furnished with the right pharmaceuticals, I believe having a cold can be a positive experience. You get to catch up on your ITV2 viewing, not wear a bra for a couple of days, and uncover a whole fresh new layer of skin on your nose.  So when I felt the warning niggle a couple of days ago, I said "ahoy! What have we here? A cold on the horizon?" and set about battening down my hatches with all the stoicism of a wizened sea captain (who doesn't quite know what battening means).



I even allowed myself a specific window of time in which to be ill. I pencilled it in my mental diary and faxed it over to my white blood cells - a whole weekend in which I had nothing to do but be a snivelling invalid. I did some prep, by binge drinking Berocca for three days in advance and digging out my slipper socks. It was going to be a congestion carnival. A little paracetamol party for one. And best of all, I got to go and spend a stupid amount of money in Boots.

I can probably blame the fact that I've never taken drugs recreationally for the way I feast on pharmaceuticals every time I have an excuse. This doesn't count as recreational, of course; there is nothing leisurely about my attitude to flu treatments. It is a full time job, and I approach it like an Apprentice contestant approaches a weekly task - with minimum knowledge, maximum confidence and a little whiney voice.

And oh, there have been such advancements in the world of lurgy-treatment since my last bout! Strepsils with added vitamin C, Olbas Oil-infused tissues, supplements with guarana so that you can fight germs and go to a rave at the same time. Unfortunately Lemsip still only comes in two flavours, bile and purple bile, but you can now pay an extra quid for a super duper shiny-boxed version which I can only assume, as it claims only to treat the exact same symptoms as the regular version, gives you perfect pitch or something at the same time.

So I embarked on my Designated Weekend of Ill swimming in advantage points, gathered my blanket pile, positioned my tissue bin, made sure I was within easy reach of fluids and the remote control. And waited. And waited some more. When, by Saturday evening, I still felt pretty chipper, I started getting anxious. Either I had managed to bypass the cold altogether, or it was working on its own agenda.

Two days on, I have learned the following things – recovery speed is not directly proportional to the amount you spend on drugs, antibodies do not conform to schedules, and it is far less fun  being a clammy, tissue-strewn corpse who can only say "blargggh" in the office.


*This is a lie. There are plenty of things worse, of course - waiting for a donor organ, waiting for a delivery man to call between 9 and 5, waiting for a night bus in the rain. Waiting for Godot. But being ill gives me an inflated sense of self-importance as well as swollen glands.