The problem with fringes

Disclaimer: What follows is an article entirely about fringes. It features no political bent or biting satirical commentary, it does not address issues of technology, economy or environment, and it will not teach you anything. Except how ruddy hard it is having a fringe.

You may think the topic is irrelevant to you, because you do not have a fringe. But look around you! Look at your spouse or offspring, your colleague, the angry person next to you in Tesco. You're never more than three feet away from a fringe, and each day some 86% of people are affected by fringes, either directly or indirectly. Fringes are all around us.

Having a fringe is, and I am not exaggerating here, almost exactly like having a child. From the moment it enters your life it becomes a constant source of nagging worry - the taming, the training, the tears. Praying it will head in right direction, but knowing it will choose its own path irrespective of your wishes. When you can't see it, you convince yourself it's probably misbehaving, and on the rare occasion that it does exactly what you want it to, there's never anyone around to applaud.

Quite honestly, given my time again, I don't think I'd have one at all.

Image: cosmopolitan.co.uk

They always start off as such a good idea, too. "FRAME YOUR FACE," scream the magazines, and we obediently bedeck our forehead with little hair curtains like a Victorian four poster bed. We imagine we'll peer out winsomely from beneath it like Penelope Tree, or Wednesday Adams, and that it will fall endearingly into our eyes when we're feeling coy.

What we forget, in those crucial minutes in the salon chair, is that we're not in a book or a Woody Allen film, and we never peer winsomely at anything, and that at the slightest bit of rain or humidity our hair turns from a conventional, downward-facing mass of proteins into an extravagant, curling, topiary structure, the likes of which even the most delicate features can't set off. We forget all this. Thus is the deceitful power of the fringe.

Fringes refuse to work with weather. Rain = forehead spaghetti. Wind = Duran Duran bouffant. Heat = HIYA, sweat farm. They exist at their best inside a complete vacuum (which indeed is where I believe most of Zooey Deschanel's filming must take place). Likewise they don't like to cooperate with the rest of the hair, preferring to perch separately on the front of an up-do like a stroppy child at a party.

I have had my current fringe for seven years. Unlike many fringes, it was not the product of an over-zealous hairdresser - I actually cut it in myself, in a fit of teenage scissor stupidity. This means that in the subsequent years, every time I've cursed my fringe (we're talking hourly), I've had no one to blame but myself.

As a result, it's been a sadly abusive relationship. I've hacked it, bleached it, pinned it, moussed it, sprayed it and battered it into submission with straighteners. I've been known to pull out whole clumps as punishment for flicking at an odd angle. And now, I’m ending things once and for all. I’m growing it out.

As 'research' for this column, I asked my boyfriend what his views on my fringe were.

"That bit that goes across your forehead?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I like it."

“Shut up.”

In which things get Pinteresting

I would have written a column about Pinterest sooner, but for the past month I've been too busy staring blankly at an upload box, shouting, "What things do I like? What THINGS do I LIKE?"

Do I like that lamp? Sure, I like that lamp. But do I like-like it? Do I PINTEREST-like it? For the commitment-phobes among us, it has presented a whole new level of uncertainty.

In the way these things always do, Pinterest has turned up unannounced in a life I'd previously thought complete*, and immediately declared itself indispensable. Before Pinterest, what did we do when we had a nice image of a thing and wanted to show it to people? I mean, apart from posting it on all our other digital forums, or showing it the retro way with our hands and mouths? It also has a nifty pun in its name, which immediately endeared it to me (not to mention quickly spawning the flagrant and slightly sweaty-sounding imitation site 'Pinspire').

For the unacquainted, Pinterest.com is the virtual equivalent of covering your school jotter in pictures snipped out of More! magazine. If More! magazine had taken a sharp about-turn and started featuring mainly rural sunsets, trendy bookshelves and cake. Lots of cake.

Image: dressedtoat.wordpress.com

Sold as a (new favourite phrase alert) "curation platform", Pinterest lets you create online pinboards of images that you think are nice, for other people to agree are nice. It can be, in turn, a showroom of expensive things you can't afford, a source of soothing natural wonder and therapeutic uplift, a stellar collection of animals in comedy outfits, or the world's best buffet table. Sadly it can also be 27 pictures of wedding favours with :) written as a caption.

The absolute beauty of it, though, is that you're not being judged on your own photography skills, or cookery skills, or looking-attractive-in-a-cape skills. You're just riding on the back of other people's. It's genius. Those who can, do - those who can't, curate. "Can you cook?" we might ask each other soon on dates, to get the reply, "no, but I'm an excellent curator." Which I suppose, when you think about it, just means "I'm great at doing an M&S shop then hotting it up in a microwave." But anyway.

I'm also hugely in favour of Pinterest because it offers a break for people who aren't so much… how can I put this? 'With the words'. With the rise of Twitter and the continuing rule of Facebook serving to remind us which of our acquaintances can string together and properly punctuate a sentence, and which… well, can’t, it might be nice to let pictures do the talking for a change.

Plus, I like to think of it as a sort of crude window into someone’s brain. Inside your head, is it all cherry blossom and rainbows or sci-fi tattoos and chandeliers made from forks? Mine currently features three pictures of Dolly Parton, a plate of Guinness brownies and a dog wearing a superman cape. Which I’d say is fairly accurate.


*This is clearly a lie. Until someone invents an ‘office slanket’ and they bring back chocolate Pretzel Flipz, my life will never be complete.

Let's get quizzical

I love a good pub quiz. It's surprising, though, that I still enjoy them as a pastime given my appalling track record of success in them of late. I mean, as a general rule of thumb in life, I only like doing things I am moderately good at. This is why I allocate such a generous portion of my time to whistling television theme tunes and making stew, in the place of, say, playing team sports or doing heavy lifting. I'm not usually one for self-development. I'd rather do something I've done umpteen times before and congratulate myself than take up a new challenge and be crap, then a bit sad. You might call this limiting. I call it 'logical'.

But pub quizzes are the exception to my rule. I am blithely optimistic about pub quizzes, like a second-time mother being wheeled into the labour ward. "Maybe this time we'll win!" I say cheerily. Most of these people look a pretty dim, and I've been reading the Metro quite carefully this week. Plus, I had salmon for lunch! We're going to ride that Omega 3 wave all the way to the prize pot, baby." Then three hours later I'm sobbing over a glass of wasabi peas, having discovered I know bupkis about flags of the world, photosynthesis, former barmaids of the Rovers' Return or indeed anything that matters.

Image: burnham-on-sea.com

The pressure of the team name alone is too much. Team names are an opportunity to compensate for your poor performance before you've poorly performed. But over time it gets harder, as the hilarious quiz team names of yesteryear lapse into tedious cliche. 'Universally Challenged' probably got rapturous applause when it was first used by Og and Ug at the Cavemen Arms. Meanwhile, the in-joke that seemed so droll when you wrote it down will become less and less funny each time the quizmaster reads out 'Sorry Tim, Mum says We've Got No Broccoli - seventh place' to a roomful of bemused silence. For uninspiring but solid names, you can always fall back on the old chestnut of inserting 'quiz' into rhyming phrases. Quiz Akabusi. Quiz team-a Aguilera. Bucks Quiz. Quizzee Rascal, to be down with the kids.

At this week's quiz, as always, i really thought things might be different. With a modest team of two, my boyfriend and I perfectly tessellated our opposite areas of expertise (him: politics, geography, transport; me: adverts, confectionary, pop hits of the noughties) and amazingly managed to come in second on the first points recap. Then second again in the second points recap. As we whizz confidently through the picture round and the guess-the-common-theme round, I start silently believing we are somehow going to win. It would be a triumph. There are only two of us, with an average age of 25. We'd go down in history! They'd have to put a special plaque up!

We didn't win. We came seventh. Apparently the rest of Muswell Hill has an encyclopaedic knowledge of racing horses and Frank Carson catchphrases like it's normal. But of course, despite the humiliating defeat, I enjoyed it. We also had a good team name - but I'm not telling you in case you nick it.

In which we are woman, hear us roar

If you're reading this on Thursday - hurrah! It's International Women's Day! Are you wearing your I Love Ladies t-shirt and tooting your party blower? Have you turned to the nearest woman and told them they're incredibly wise/ their fringe looks great/ they've brightened your day through the power of pheromones alone? No? Well do it. Then get stuck into this lot:

Eight Empowering Things to Do Today

1. Get yourself a copy of The Sun* and some felt tips, and spend half an hour fashioning a lovely outfit for the Page Three girl. Give her some supportive underwear, then a nice warm jumper and a directional hairdo and some wellies. Maybe a lab coat. Go crazy.

2. Watch a film full of brilliant women, that doesn't feature Katherine Heigel or a makeover montage. For example: Little Women, where you can whoop enthusiastically at everything Marmee says ("I will not have my girls being silly about boys" WOOP YEAH HOLLERRR) and be inspired by hair-cutting, novel-writing proto feminist Jo, or Steel Magnolias, a film so brimming over with female spirit that Dolly Parton's the friendly neighbourhood hairdresser.

I’d advise against watching the 2008 remake of The Women, however, despite it being a supportive lady lovefest featuring no men whatsoever. It’s just a really shit film.

3. Make yourself an organic facemask using mashed banana and honey, then spread it on a crumpet and eat it instead. Repeat until full.

4. Burn something. You could go old school with a bra if you fancy (pick the scratchy lace one that digs in under the arms, and was clearly engineered by a sadist) or choose anything else debilitating from your wardrobe. Heels that make you do a knock-kneed Bambi walk; boned cocktail dress that you have to unzip in the toilet at hourly intervals so you can get some oxygen back to your extremities; anything that has ever drawn blood. Make a lovely bonfire (complying with local council regulations) then dance round it singing ‘down the patriarchy’ to the tune of your choice.

5. Phone your Mum and ask her to describe your birth in vivid detail, then gasp, sigh and applaud during each bit as appropriate. If you’re face-to-face, throw flowers at her feet and shout ‘Bravo!’ (This is more appropriate for my own mother, of course, but it works on a lesser level for yours).

6. Visit the magazine aisle in WH Smiths and cover each copy of Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Grazia or Nuts with a copy of National Geographic.

7. Compliment an older lady on her elegant, age-appropriate crow’s feet, and follow it up with “D’you know, there’s something of the Helen Mirren about you today?”

8. Learn all the lyrics and dance routine to Sister Suffragettes from Mary Poppins, and perform them in a public place.

*Don't buy it, of course - appropriate one on the bus or something

In which Monday night telly's really going places

(This was written for the good people of Worthing)

Who else is watching The Tube on BBC2?

Not right now, although that would be a mighty coincidence, but on Monday nights with the rest of us*? It's an unlikely contender for communal telly viewing, a ritual usually reserved for big hitters like X-Factor and Question Time, but with its wry look into the world under the underground and ample opportunities to guffaw at the idiocy of other humans, The Tube is almost my new favourite programme.

Of course, I wouldn't have watched it at all were it not for my colossal train geek of a boyfriend, a man for whom riding the length of the Metropolitan Line alone is a dream afternoon's activity. "Look how jolly the staff are!" he says as we watch. "They're so patient and cheerful. What heroes." I don't have the heart to point out that the patient, cheerful, jolly staff are probably the only ones they filmed. But anyway, it’s great.

There are lots of good bits to The Tube - seeing your local station, or even a station you frequent regularly, is exciting (you out-of-towners you just get to shout "Look Bev, Covent Garden - where you had your purse nicked" at 15 minute intervals); Learning mind-fuddling statistics like “every day, 60,000 journeys are made and not paid for”, which you can then recite at the coffee machine and sound knowledgeable; last week’s sequence of commuters who had fallen asleep being woken up at the end of the line and gently herded homewards.

But the best bit of all is seeing seeing fare-dodgers get caught. I, as I’m sure you all do too, love a good bit of comeuppance – especially for petty crimes like not blipping a travelcard. In a way it's our version of America's Cheaters, the show where adulterers are secretly filmed, then pounced on by a camera crew and their raging spouse during an opportune moment. We're as thrilled by an oyster fare evader being stopped and promptly fined as our cousins across the Atlantic are by a trouserless man from Milwaukee screaming "IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK SUE-ANNE" while she beats him over the head with a shoe.

But I know what you’re saying - ‘We don’t live in London, thanks Lauren. Can’t we just talk about Teville Gate some more?’ Well I urge you, watch it anyway. Make your kids watch it. For they, like me, might one day rely on this underground world to get around and earn a living. You don’t want them to turn into one of those tourists who gets the tube for all of 30 seconds between Charing Cross and Embankment, do you? As the late Whitney Houston once sang: teach them well, and let them lead the way. Or read the map.

Plus, after a 10-minute montage of weekend revellers vomiting on the Victoria line, Teville Gate will start to look rather homely.


*By ‘the rest of us’ I naturally mean Twitter, but you can replace as appropriate with your chosen medium of contact: telephone; carrier pigeon; shouting over garden fence.

So you've decided to join Twitter...

Welcome, follower. You might recognise me from such conversations as 'Bah, I don't see the appeal of Twitter at all' and 'Twitter's just people chatting about what they had for breakfast, isn't it?' Forget those now. They never happened.

Hang on, don't I know you IRL? By your blank-faced response to my acronym I'll assume you've not been here long… oh yes, look. Four followers and an egg for an avatar. You haven't.

So you've decided to join Twitter. Congratulations! What finally did it? The masochistic limitations of the character allowance? The way newspapers now just report tweets instead of real quotes? The chance to start over with new people who've never seen your Marbella '08 album? Stephen Fry?

If it's that last point, we'd better warn you now - it's not really *about* Stephen anymore. We've moved on. He has too - he's out of the broken-down lift and everything.

But wait, stay - it's still fun here! Look, here's your official welcome pack. It's got a framed picture of your family, a novelty wrist rest in the shape of that little blue bird, and a catheter, 'for luxury duvet days'. Oh and there were some complimentary biscuits too, but we ate them in 2009 while we were waiting.

Image from www.denverstreetfood.com

So anyway, where've you been? Oh that's right, Facebook. And at work, and spending time in the same room as people whose surname name you know. Well that's all going to change now. You don't need to go out, or do your hair nice. Your personal hygiene levels are about to become a little more theoretical too.

We're a little bit different here, you see - there are a few more semi-political gags, a few less photos of people you went to school with's infant offspring - but you'll adapt pretty quickly. Swap your exclamation marks for CAPITAL LETTERS, that's a good place to start. Oh, and don't waste your finger muscles tweeting at celebrities. You'd be better served screaming pithy replies into a vacuum.

A few things you should know before you begin: 1) contrary to popular opinion, you CAN tweet about what you're eating for breakfast. But only if it has some entertaining merit, and not if it involves wheatgrass. 2) Do not fear hashtags. Think of them as Twitter nutmeg - tasty when sprinkled in moderation, potentially fatal in high doses. 3) Don't brag. Don't even humble-brag. If you must tell someone about your career success/expensive new flat/dinner with the Middletons, try writing it on a napkin followed by lots of exclamation marks, then burning it and throwing the ashes out the window. 4) If you retweet a Follow Friday, somewhere a kitten dies.

What's that? You feel as if nobody's paying attention to anything you're tweeting? Don't worry - that's because they're not. You have four followers and three of them are pornbots. But stick at it! It's going to be a beautiful journey.

You should now be ready to start your life as a Tweeter. Good luck. And remember - if you cock it up, there's always Google +.

If you would like a fun Twitter factsheet featuring guidance from experts including Joey Barton and Tom Watson's intern, please send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to the address below.

Romantic things that aren't romantic at all

By the time you’re reading this, St Valentine will have been and gone again for another year, and you’ll be picking up rose petals, or little bits of your heart, from whence they were scattered before trying to remember how to make pancakes.

But as I’m writing this at the beginning of the week (coo-ee, future! How’s that milder weather treating you?) we’re going to have a look at a nice list of romantic things… that really aren’t romantic at all.

Teddies

This shouldn't need to be said, so I'm loath to waste too much page space on it. But if your Valentine is over the age of 14, any form of stuffed toy is tantamount to giving them a note that reads "secretly, I think you are an idiot," wrapped up in a polyester bow. Clintons have lied to you. Wise up.

Valentine's-specific novelty items

This includes World's Best Girlfriend plaques, heart-bedecked kitchenware and anything else with your current relationship status emblazoned across it. Now, we all know you're madly in love and will live happily after f'rever and ever and so this concern needn't bother you in the slightest, but still I ask you to consider: if you break up, will she still be able to get some use out of it?

She’d have to overcome a wave of emotion every time she wore it/drank from it, of course, but when you've spent the princely sum of £14.99 on a trinket, having it burnt in a sacrificial bonfire because it said STACY and GAZ 4EVA across it in glitter just seems like a waste.

Long walks

Get your fleece on! We're going for a long walk somewhere scenic, where we will hold hands and laugh at nothing in particular and kiss as the early evening light glints attractively through branches overhead!

What's that? You've got a blister and your nose is running, and we don't live near a heath or moor so we have to have a romantic walk round the block to Londis? And the couple in front is significantly more attractive and laughing far more at nothing in particular than we are? Oh. Let's go home and eat biscuits.


Slow dancing

Remember slow-dancing? If memory serves, I last did it to the Backstreet Boys at my year seven leavers’ disco. It was the special brand of slow dancing where you stand as far apart from each other as possible while maintaining physical contact – fingertips on shoulders, fingertips on hips – and twelve classmates gather round taking photos on disposable cameras and jeering.

I’m aware another type of slow dancing exists because I’ve seen it on telly, in rom-coms from the 80s and reality TV wedding shows, but so far in my six-odd years of adulthood (or six odd years of adulthood, if you prefer) I’ve never witnessed it with my eyes.


Oysters

We all know about the oyster's supposed aphrodisiac effects (they’re full of zinc, the ‘hey lady, let’s have babies’ mineral, and Casanova reportedly woofed a modest 50 for breakfast of a morning).

But aside from their phlegmy texture and the inevitable chorus of slurping that accompanies them, oysters fail on the romance-o-meter because you must spend the twelve hours afterwards continually assessing your stomach wellbeing in the faint fear you’ve had a dodgy one.

Which, let’s face it, you might already be doing with regards to your date.

In which I launch Operation Creep-be-Gone

I did a good deed the other week. On the scale between replacing the loo roll when you’ve finished it and pulling a child out of the way of a speeding bus shouting “Little Jimmy, nooooo!” then I’ll concede it’s closer to the Andrex end, but still, I felt proud.

My deed was this: I saw a woman, on a busy Euston Road at 6pm, being hounded by a man. He wasn’t being outwardly aggressive, but he was sliming round her like a slug in an overcoat, asking questions and ignoring all clear signals (headphones in, one-word answers, refusal to make eye contact) that she wasn’t interested.

I caught the girl’s eye and mouthed "are you ok?", to which she shook her head. So then I had a decision to make, quickly. To barge in like the Green Cross Code Man and say "STOP, letch! She doesn't want to talk to you. RETREAT," before blasting him with a sonic ray gun, or the alternative; pretend to be her mate.  "There you are!" I cried, launching myself on her (for if I'm going to do a good deed I may as well get a hug out of it). "Hi!" she faked, as I dragged her away. Then we stood together on the pavement miming friendly chat like a couple of am-dram actors, while Slug Man stared, lingered, and eventually slithered off back to his cabbage patch.

She was pretty grateful, or at least acted like she was. "I always attract the weirdos too," I told her, in what I thought at the time was a reassuring manner. Then I disappeared off into the night, swishing my imaginary cape and feeling proud.

Why don't more people do this? Seriously? There must have been 20 people within view and earshot standing nearby, yet nobody else paid the slightest attention. I assume for the same reasons more strangers don't tell you when you have food on your face - because we are all really hermit crabs, and unprecedented human contact is more often than not a big ol' faff.

There's the worry that you're going to get 'involved in something', of course, and I can appreciate that. But nobody's saying you have to leap in with your handbag swinging. Even a stern glance or a calm, disapproving presence could help. A well-timed 'tut' might still go some way to helping these lowlifes learn that harassing us for the simple crime of possessing ovaries is Not Ok.

This isn't necessarily about sisterhood, either. I stopped and rescued her because I've been in her place enough times to know it's awful, and because it makes my blood boil that street harassment is still so commonplace when it ought to have gone the way of the permed mullet. But a bloke could likewise have stopped and rescued her because he's a decent person, and it makes HIS blood boil that street harassment is still so commonplace it ought to have gone the way of the permed mullet.

So let's make this a new thing - street harassment crusaders! Operation Creep-Be-Gone! Bolshy builders, drunk leerers at bus stops, creepy guys who hang around asking you your name at train stations - all beware! For before you know it, a Fake Friend might leap out of the shadows and stop you in your tracks. Who's with me?

(Capes optional)

In which I've done some stuff, but not all of it

I turned 24 this week.

"Oh no!" you're thinking, "She's going to do another column on all the things she has or hasn't achieved in 24 years and how generally ill-informed she is as a barely functioning human adult!"

Well, I'll have you know I'm not. Relax.

I'm pretty relaxed about this birthday, as it happens, because 24 is a complete non-event of an age. It's merely another step on the gradual plodding progression towards my natural, internal age, which I've known for a while now is about 43. I'm far too old by now to be any sort of prodigy, or 'youngest ever' at anything, so that's a lot of pressure off (though the days I spent trying to be the youngest ever person to master Handel's Messiah on a kazoo is frankly time I'll never get back).


 Likewise I'm still far too young to need to have done anything as concrete as legally acquiring a building or other human. I think of this part of your twenties as 'The Meander'. It's nice. If you do something significant then hey, well done you! If not, don't worry - your Mum still sees you as a six year old in a tutu anyway.

Besides, the groaning list of Stuff You Should Have Done By Now can always be balanced out nicely by the Stuff You Didn't Expect To Have Done But Have, which is the more exciting collection by far. So, for 'accumulated some savings', I can swap 'saw Dolly Parton in concert and cried.'  In the place of 'reaching a moderate level of personal fitness', I have 'invented Toblerone porridge and its sequel, Christmas cake porridge'. I may not have married or produced offspring this year, but I did get up at 5am to watch the Royal Wedding in Hyde Park with a lavish picnic, a level of commitment to public cheer that I doubt I'll ever equal again. I didn't think that by the ripe age of 24 I'd have both appeared on and humiliated myself on a TV game show, or met Dave 'Voice of Come Dine With Me' Lamb and told him that his voice made me hungry. They were nice bonuses.

I hadn't banked on reaching my partying peak and progressing to a state of complete, feeble alcohol intolerance by my mid-20s either, and yet it is so. Despite its negative impact on my already-shaky street cred, I like to think that being teetotal so early has freed up a large part of my life that would otherwise be given to weeping into my handbag on Friday mornings while Barbara from accounts hands me a Berocca and tuts. I wouldn't be surprised if my youthful recklessness spontaneously manifests itself in some surprise way instead, like getting a giant tattoo on my face or paying my council tax bill a month late.

By this point the more astute among you will be going, "hang on, she's writing exactly what she said she wasn't going to write about!" And yes, I lied. But we can learn from this. We can learn that when you write a column for nine years, some ideas are going to end up being recycled. Thankfully, I've got exactly a year to think up a new one.

In which The Proclaimers have 487 miles on me.

I've just signed up to walk half a marathon with my friend Liz. For those of you familiar, it's The Moonwalk - not a mass exercise in walking backwards like Michael Jackson, before my father can make the joke, but a nighttime hike through London, wearing nattily decorated bras, to raise money for breast cancer.

I've wanted to do it for years - in equal parts to raise money for breast cancer and because lots of people I like to stalk on Twitter do it. But until I signed up, handed over my registration fee and thought up a hilarious team name (The Worthing Domes, if you'd like to reward us with a few rofls), I hadn't given much thought to the walking-13-miles part of the deal.

I know you're all terribly fit and virtuous people who jog to Eastbourne and back before breakfast, and so to you this won't seem much of a chore, but I'm apprehensive. Actually, my legs, feet and cardiovascular system are apprehensive. My head, meanwhile, is going "Pff, it's walking! How hard can walking possibly be?" while ordering a second slice of pie.

In theory, I can do walking pretty well. I can do it in heels, while holding several full Sainsbury's bags, texting and reading a book, and 85 per cent of the time still not walk into a lamp post. During my short but enthusiastic time as a gym-goer, walking on a treadmill was certainly the thing I was best at. Had walking been a PE subject at Davison, I might have been Games Captain*.


 But since I've had sufficient income to buy a weekly travelcard, walking has become a skill I don't use as standard, but regard as something impressive to be saved for special occasions  - like a Boxing Day stroll down the seafront, where I will repeatedly take deep breaths, do power arms, and sigh "I do LOVE a good walk" to anyone in earshot. The trouble with living in London is (and I'm sorry to anyone reading this in drizzle at a bus stop, having waited 40 minutes for a Stagecoach to High Salvington), we have a lot of transport. Loads. It's not always reliable, of course, but still there's scarcely a journey I make that doesn't have the option of a nice dry bus or tube to save me using my joints for half an hour.

And as having a travelcard means that I've basically prepaid for ALL OF THE TRANSPORT in zones 1-3 for a month, it simply seems bad economy not to entrust my backside to TFL whenever possible. From Euston station, for example, there are two buses that can carry me one stop to the door of my office. It's a distance I could practically forward-roll if required, but still - the buses are there. Right there, calling to me. If anyone from work might see me, I naturally keep on walking out of shame; but if the coast is clear, I'm on that bus quicker than you can s - oop too slow, I've arrived!

So, you understand extent of my challenge. I won't be able to get a bus during the Moonwalk. Or a skateboard, or a piggy back - I know, I've checked the rules. It'll just be me, Liz and my bunions, for 13 miles. My best plan of action, I think, is to try to make it feel as much like Boxing Day as possible, so I'll eat an enormous turkey stuffing sandwich beforehand and sing Slade on the way.


*Provided all conventional sports on the syllabus were removed and replaced with 'sitty downy badminton', at-desk disco dancing and  high-impact backcombing.

In which I got the Bey-by Blues

So, after several false starts, one possibly prostethic bump and a whole lot of Kelly Rowlandisms later, Beyonce's had her baby. Her Bey-by. Her Destiny's Child. Jay-Z's done a song and everything!

And in true enigmatic megastar style, even the name was confusing to the last.

"She's called Ivy Blue!" "Ooh!"

"No, wait. She's called Blue Ivy."

"Ew."

Naturally it's not my place to cast judgement on someone's choice of name for their offspring - after all, if you've done something as astonishing as grow another human in your uterus then squeeze it through a frankly unaccommodating orifice, you've earned the right to call it whatever you please. You're probably so drugged-up and knackered that you think you love the first word you come across. "We'll call her Pot Plant," you sigh woozily. "Beautiful little Pot Plant Nightstand York Fruits Carter". Mine might end up being called HOORAH IT'S OUT Bravo, when I really think about it.


But all this aside… Beyonce, we really expected better of you. After all, you're one of the most dynamic creative forces of our time. You're the genius who bought us Crazy In Love. You moved booty-shaking into realms previously thought beyond the limits of human capability. You're Sasha Fierce, goshdarnit! And you've given your kid a name that sounds like a dismal affliction on Gardener's Question Time.

Ivy Blue we could have let her have without too much protest. Ivy, of course, fits unexpectedly but pleasantly into the current fad for Great Grandmother names; Ivy, Olive, Edith, Ethel, Ada, etc (Primary school registers in five years will read like a tea dance from the late 80s)*, while Blue as a middle name has just enough bonkers popstar kudos to mark her out from the Normals, and makes it sound a bit like a nursery rhyme character. Little Ivy Blue/ just didn't know what to do/ She wore some bling/ and learned to sing/ and had an album out by the age of two.

But Blue Ivy is wrong on so many counts. It's reminiscent of a comic book villain, or an unfortunate rash. It doesn't scan well,  which for parents who've made a career out of being rhythmic is a proper letdown - everyone knows the second name should have fewer syllables than the first. Blue is apparently Jay-Z's favourite colour, but that's hardly an excuse. My favourite biscuit is a custard cream, but I wouldn't call my daughter it.

Other key associations include Blu Cantrell (she sang that song you hated in 2003) and Blue Daba De Daba Di (that song you hated in 1999). Perhaps they've chosen it as an exercise in reverse psychology, hoping that Blue will go through life relentlessly chipper, while Sunshine Yellow Carter might have been a human version of Eyeore. Perhaps.

But I'll cease whinging now, because we all know that in a few months it'll sound completely normal to us. Like Harper Seven has managed to . Like Girls Aloud did, several months after we all declared it appalling. Like, frankly, 'Beyonce' does now. So I'll shut up and raise a glass to little baby Bue.

It's a WKD though, naturally.



*I must attribute this observation to my Mother, who has sensibly predicted that if name trends carry on at this rate, in ten years we'll have moved onto the Grandmother generation and be calling our kids Pamela, Doris and Joan.

In which 2012 is the year I'm stunningly original

This week, because I like to trailblaze with only truly unique and original column ideas, I am sharing with you my New Year's resolutions.

Stop saying 'amazing'

Far be it from me to whinge about the natural development of language - after all, I've embraced 'totes' with all the enthusiasm of a hungry puppy - but 2012 must be the year that everything stops being amazing.

Some things can still be amazing, of course; childbirth, views from tops of mountains, Katie Price's career trajectory. But it needs to stop being the default word we all reach for. "How's that sandwich, Bob?" "Amazing." "How was your holiday, Susan?" "Amazing." Was it? Was it REALLY? Or was it, in fact, a fairly standard beach vacation during which everybody had the runs? Was the sandwich TRULY awe-striking, or was it a moderately pleasant assembly of bread, cheese, and not-quite-enough-chutney?As well as becoming irksome through overuse, the word's a social error - people don't want to hear that everything you've done has been amazing. They want to hear that it was nice, but the toilet facilities/weather/company were a bit lacking, and then feel better about their own lives.

 

Instead, I shall reclaim other words. 'Teriffic' might get an outing. 'Brill', perhaps. Who knows, maybe 'rad' will make a comeback. The possibilities are endless, guys! Let's talk more words.

Save money, in a bank

'Investing' in my taxidermy collection does not count.

Go to the dentist

I haven't been to the dentist since the age of *cough*.  That means my teeth have gone unattended for a slightly shocking *cough* years, while I've carried merrily on dousing them in sugar and using them to cut sellotape like a set of invincible person-shears.

I'm not proud of this (I am slightly), but since I stopped being a student, it's taken me a while to get my head around having to pay for dental care. Partly because, in my ignorance, I had always thought 'NHS' meant 'free', but also because it's forking out cash for an experience I will find humiliating, and likely painful. I didn't visit a hairdresser for eight years for precisely the same reason.

However, for several months now one of my top molars has been giving me a bit of gip. Quite a lot of gip. And while I'm fully prepared to make chewing on only one side of my mouth my 'thing', I reckon I should probably get it checked before the whole thing turns black and falls out. If I don't take a sticker at the end, can I get a discount?

Spend my Christmas money on a mattress topper from John Lewis 

Because this is the kind of adult I will be now.

Be a better person

 
I would tell you in great detail how I plan to achieve this point, but sadly I've reached my word count. So I shall leave it to your imagination instead.

Dear Urban Outfitters...

Dear Urban Outfitters,

We've got a problem, you and I. You might not be aware of it, distracted as you are by the armies of spendy hipsters that march through your doors each week, but our relationship has been deteriorating for years. If indeed, it was ever truly a relationship to begin with. I've hankered after your nostalgic blouses, your vampy skirts and your little strappy dresses for yonks now, while you remain coolly oblivious.

Not to toot my own trumpet, but I'd like to think that on paper, I'm the kind of customer you'd like. I'm 23, I live in London, I work in the media. I throw more of my income than is sensible at the high street, and I'm a sucker for a whimsical trend. If you wanted, you could probably have quite a lot of my money. You'd like that, wouldn't you?

So what's standing between you, me and this beautiful cash-splashing coupledom, then? Well, a zip. Or a few zips. The zips on your clothes that I can't do up, despite wriggling, wrenching, partially dislocating joints and inhaling till I turn puce.

You see, while most high street stores stick to the conventional 8, 10, 12 sizing, up to 16 and beyond, you prefer to keep things rustic with XS, S, M and L. Which might be fine, if my 12-14 figure could fit into the 'M' that I'd expect it to. But it doesn't. Often it doesn't fit an L. Now, I made my peace with not being Alexa Chung many years ago, but I'm still moderately confident that if you saw me walking down the street you wouldn't think 'Hark! There thunders an EXTRA-LARGE woman.'

Have you ever heard of breasts, Urban Outfitters? Of course you have, I'm sorry for being patronising. But did you know that we can't conveniently detach them, or reposition them under our armpits, each time we'd like to wear a garment that isn't made of stretch jersey? It's just that, sometimes, when I'm trying on your clothes, it seems like you're not very familiar with the concept.

Then there are hips. These are like breasts, but lower down, on the sides, and not as squishy. It would be nice if we could contain these in our clothes too, as an alternative to, y'know, carrying them in our handbags or wearing them as a decorative headpiece. A little arse-coverage would be good too, though I realise that might be stretching it (boom boom).

You're not the only ones, of course. I've rarely exited a Zara changing room without tears in my eyes (and bruises on my ribs), or had an encounter with American Apparel that didn't leave me reaching for the gin bottle. Up and down the high street, stores are playing fast and loose with sizes and our gymnastic capabilities. I've been stuck in more impossibly-designed garments than you've had hot dinners.

But before you dismiss this as yet another chubby girl rant, let me assure you that it isn't. It's a piece of sage business advice. You're making money, I'm sure, given that you sell ironic pendants for the price of a weekly travelcard, but you could be making more. Oh, you could be making SO much more - if you weren't alienating a massive portion of your potential customer base.

And yes, I'm wishing I hadn't just used the words 'massive portion'. It was between them and 'huge chunk'. Pass me a biscuit.

We're all here, you see, Urban Outfitters. Look, over here! The ladies with the swinging handbags and great hair. We're not that scary. In fact we're a lot like your other customers, just slightly better insulated against the cold. Our demands are simple - we want clothes that do up properly, don't brand us gargantuan humans when we're patently not, and look foxy.

Are you ready for this jelly, Urban Outfitters? Are you?

Love,

Lauren (or 'XL' to you)

In which we'll have a blue Christmas, and love it

The Bravo family has a broken boiler.

They're soldiering bravely on, according to reports, with portable fan heaters and hot water bottles strapped in strategic places about their persons, but as things-to-happen-a-week-before-Christmas go, it's a fairly bleak one. "You might want to bring your slanket home with you," my Mother has advised, prompting mental images of us all shuffling softly round the house in our fleecy shrouds, like the multicoloured ghosts of Christmas past.

Having existed in a state of almost permanent shiver myself since mid-October (how long does it take to shake off the student notion that warmth is a luxury we can't afford, while organic goat's cheese is a basic right?), I should have been upset by the news. And I was, a bit. Nobody likes to think of their nearest and dearest awaking each morning nervous to see if their drippy nose has grown stalactites during the night. I don't want them having to fill baths with a kettle then all get in together to save water. Because, well, that would be weird.

But part of me, secretly, and please don't tell my parents this if you bump into them on the Morrisons parsnip run, is quite excited. What fabulous comedy material this will make! We'll have hilarious Christmas anecdotes coming out of our EARS! And we were due a refresh, what with The Great Giblet Disaster of '94 wearing slightly thin, having been trotted out every year since it happened.

Everybody loves a Christmas disaster, don't they? One of those moderately vexing but not life-altering incidents that gives everyone a chance to pull together, battle through, keep calm, carry on etc, and forever after remember it as being at least 40 per cent more humorous than it actually was. You'll look back in decades to come through sherry-tinted specs, and say, "Remember that Christmas the dog ate the trifle and sicked up over Aunt Maud's holiday slides? And Uncle Terry threatened to sue? REMEMBER? Those were the days." 

So far as a family, we've not had our fair dosage of potentially hilarious festive catastrophes. I mean, the hamster died on Christmas Eve one year, and Brother #2 went into hospital with pneumonia on Boxing Day another, but neither of those incidents were exactly high on LOLs. A broken boiler, however, has the makings of a proper 'remember the time?' story, so I'm determined to stay chipper.

We will all wear five jumpers like a family of festive Michelin men, and play highly energetic charades to keep our pulse rate up. We can take it in turns to put our underwear in the microwave for toasty-bottomed comfort. When frost forms on the insides of the windows, we'll write our names in it. Such larks! Indeed, if I arrive home tomorrow night to discover that they've fixed the ruddy boiler, I think I'll be faintly disappointed.

In which I'm bringing tacky back

On Sunday we had our annual faux-Christmas extravaganza in my flat. As usual, we bought our combined bodyweight in meat and trimmings, did a posh breakfast, put our friendships on the line with a round of aggressive parlour games, and fell asleep in front of the telly.

To kick off the festivities, I buy a tub of cheesy footballs. Christmas had begun! I proudly open them and set about the traditional method of biting off the wafer case in two complete pieces, leaving the cheesy centre to savour like a precious truffle. Everybody else gags in horror.

"They're revolting!" one declares. "They smell like cardboard," says another. "They taste like feet," a third. 

"But… but… they're Christmas! Cheesy footballs ARE Christmas!" I protest to a roomful of blank faces. Until this point I don't believe I'd ever paused to consider how cheesy footballs tasted, or whether it even mattered. They were novel, they were bite-sized, and they were as synonymous with my Christmases as the bumper Radio Times or fill-in-the-blanks thank you letters.

The problem isn't that I enjoy synthetic cheese-filled wafer snacks while my peers do not. It's that the cheesy footballs, I feel, symbolise a wider issue - the glorious naffness, or lack thereof, in the average modern Christmas.

When did it all get so tasteful? At some point during the 23 years I've been alive, good taste has crept into the tinsel pile and turned Christmas from a riotous assault of glitter and gaudiness into a refined affair, full of artisan produce and wooden decorations from Muji. I'm not excusing myself - I banished tinsel from the Bravo tree years ago, with such vigour that the law has been upheld even after I left home. Meanwhile my office is bedecked in geometric paper lanterns, the sort that say, 'hip young media agency' rather than 'SQUEE it's Christmas! Pass the cooking sherry'.  It's all just a bit… safe.

Maybe it's because, as a food writer, I spend the three months before Christmas in a mental fug, with organic stuffings and three-bird roasts and expensive bakeware and pine-infused sugar dancing round my head like cartoon tweety birds. Then when the big day arrives, I want nothing more than an Iceland king prawn ring and a tin of Quality Street to plunge my face into.

Or maybe, after a lifetime of Decembers spent trying to tone down and style up the festive season, I've realised that Christmas should be a holiday from taste.

Despite never having existed during them, I secretly yearn for the Christmases of the '70s. When it was all Advocaat this and Blue Nun that, and a trifle with angelica on top was the height of sophistication. So I'm bringing tacky back. I want my Christmas to wear a massive jumper and a cracker hat, win at charades, and hiccup its way through Mistletoe and Wine without irony. I want flashing reindeer earrings and musical ties. I want those plastic trays of differently shaped salty snacks and tiny sets of screwdrivers on every surface.

I WANT CHEESY FOOTBALLS AND I DON'T CARE WHO JUDGES ME.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Just don't mention the tea

The other day, on my literary travels, I came across an article on wikiHow called How to Avoid Looking Like an American tourist - for American tourists. Among its solemn pieces of advice were 'don't ask for ice', 'don't speak too loudly', and the ever-applicable 'don't wear a fanny-pack', all apparently dead giveaways for the tasteful American hoping to blend into a continental crowd. While I'm not one to join in the sport of American-bashing (whatever the New York equivalent of asking for Ly-cester Square is, you can bet Uncle Sam's corndog I'd be doing it), it still seemed prudent advice.

It also made food for thought on my romantic* trip to Paris this weekend. If there was a guide to avoiding looking like a British tourist, we considered, as we Franglais-ed around the capital like a pair of 'Allo 'Allo extras… what would it say?

1. Don't complain about the tea

You might think you need good strong PG Tips injected intravenously once every half hour to function, but so far no scientific evidence has been produced to prove the physical repercussions of drinking Bad Tea. Besides, if the rest of the world starting making proper cuppas, our international distinctions would be down to Marmite and Pippa Middleton's arse. The first cup of tea I asked for in Paris this weekend was served to me as a tea latte. Extravagantly foamed milk, with a tea bag in it. It was 187ft up the Eiffel tower to be fair, but still this seemed like a cheekily loose interpretation of a classic. Did I whinge, though? Did I harrumph and splutter over its fraudulent composition? No. I marvelled at its novelty. "A tea latte! Whatever next?"

2. Don't be a massive cheapskate

I don't want to make a huge sweeping generalisation about my kinsmen here (I do but we'll pretend I don't), but I'd wager if there was one nationality statistically more likely to walk into a café, sit down, look at the menu, then walk out again because the sandwiches were too expensive, it'll be us.

3. Don't use up all your GCSE French/German/Chinese on one expertly-pronounced sentence, then be surprised when they speak said language back at you and you don't understand a word.

If you really ne comprend pas, it's best to assume the hapless expression of the mute tourist from the off, I find. Then anything that does come out right will be a lovely bonus.

4. Don't take photos of yourself in front of 'hilarious' lost-in-translation shop titles

Except do, obviously. We all LOVE those back home.

5. Don't hold up mundane food products in the supermarket and shriek "Sue! Look! They're the same as back home!"

6. Don't start humming Jerusalem every time you pull out of the Channel tunnel/start to descend over Heathrow/disembark the ferry.

Or am I the only one who does that?


*For 'romantic', read: he got excited by trains, bridges and government buildings, I gorged myself giddy on Nutella crepes.

In which another F-word is inappropriate

Are you an awesome woman? Do you know any awesome women?

That was the question posed by Ashley Fryer (@ashleyfryer), who kept meeting great, funny, interesting women on Twitter and decided to do what few have attempted - transfer these friendships from the online realm and reproduce them IRL*. It's a notoriously tricky manoeuvre, like moving a cake from tin to cooling rack without it collapsing, but it was worth it. And so, Awesome Women of Twitter (#AWOT) was born.

It spread, too. The awesome women invited other awesome women, and the call of awesomeness echoed across the virtual plains like a hunting bugle. Except nice, and nothing to do with killing animals. Soon there was a potential pubful of witty women all waiting to meet up, so Ashley booked a central London venue that would house them, and lubricate their social cogs with gin.

But it was with a huge collective spluttering of tea over keyboards a day later that we discovered the bar had since decided to cancel the booking. Cancel it, because they decided it would be 'inappropriate' to have a 'feminist or women's lib group' in a bar where other people would be enjoying Christmas parties.

Let's break that down. 'Inappropriate', like a nipple before the watershed. 'Other people enjoying Christmas parties', as in the footloose merrymaking of those unhampered by tedious gender equality. God forbid a group of angry feminist Grinches should stomp in and steal Christmas!

It's understandable, of course. Our bra bonfire would have been a fire hazard for a start, and there was always the chance we'd get tiddly and decide to burn a sacrificial male. Germaine Greer might have turned up and instigated a menstrual blood tasting. We could have daubed feminist propaganda all over the walls, and insisted they play Sister Suffragettes from Mary Poppins on a loop all night or we'd bash them with our feminist mallets. It might have been MAYHEM.

The fact that we never claimed to be a 'feminist or women's lib group', just a loungeful of ladies who wanted to give them money in exchange for cocktails, was apparently irrelevant. Would they have had the same reaction if we'd been a hen party? Or a group called Awesome Wives of Twickenham? Or, to play the unavoidable card, men?

After the initial rage and venting passed (hell hath no fury like 75 lady-bloggers scorned), we were left simply sad, and baffled. It's depressing to realise that to many people, feminism is still a sort of niche hobby, like collecting Warhammer figurines.

To me, saying 'I'm a feminist' is as basic as saying 'I breathe oxygen' or 'I enjoy the work of Dolly Parton'. Of COURSE I do, and OF COURSE I am. How could I not be? But others, it seems, still mistranslate the F-word as 'I hate men' or 'I'm going to ruin your Christmas party.' It's ignorance, and it's frustrating.

But it's ok, because we'll change it - one awesome woman (and hopefully a few awesome men), at a time.

*That's In Real Life, for the uninitiated.

In which I get what I want, at least

I am not a reluctant crier. In fact I've often wondered if my tear ducts would be medically classed as overactive. I'll cry at songs; films; broken computers; dropped food; mouth ulcers; elderly couples holding hands in public; lonely-looking animals; memories of other times that I've cried. And adverts. Of course, adverts. Let's play guess-the-inevitable-direction-of-this-article, shall we?

Yes, when I first saw the John Lewis advert this week, I cried. I cried a little bit at my desk, then a little bit more when I described it to my boyfriend later in a Vietnamese restaurant, and then a whole lot more when I played it at home on my laptop, to see if it was as tear-jerking as I remembered.

It's fair to note, though, that the ad could have been a blank screen bearing the words 'BUY OUR STUFF' and I probably still would have cried, because I would be remembering their last ad. You know, the chin-wobbler with the woman in the red dress and Billy Joel's She's Always a Woman playing over the top. Never knowingly out-blubbed, John Lewis has established itself as the Bambi's Dead Mum of the high street.

There is room for cynicism, of course. Saturday's Guardian included a column moaning that The Smiths' Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, a song about the pain of unrequited love, should never be used to flog us stuff.

It's surprising, granted, that a band who stood for everything anti-consumerism and anti-establishment that Thatcher's 80s Britain inspired, would give the most middle class of department stores permission to hijack their music. But what writer can guarantee all people will react to their songs in the way they intended anyway? Plus, y'know, it's LOVELY.

While there are shops with stuff to flog, they will inevitably try to flog us stuff - if we can at least convince kids that the joy of giving someone a shoddily-wrapped present we've saved up our pocket money to buy outweighs the pleasure of unwrapping four XBoxes, while introducing them to some decent music at the same time, then that's no bad thing.

The cover version itself is a cause for gripe too, coming as it does from the Janet Devlin school of Pick a Good Song and Sing It Slowly in the Voice of a Wood-Nymph. I don't know if you've noticed, but this love of the twee-lady-cover has become the default approach for advertising agencies during the past year. I blame Ellie Goulding.

But the things is, I'm not enough of a Smiths fan to really care. I think it should be admired, frankly, as a piece of ruddy good advertising. When Twinings gave The Calling's Wherever You Will Go the twee-lady treatment, maybe there were hoards of Calling fans on a forum somewhere, furious that a song about beautiful geographic love should be used to flog us tea. But did the rest of us spare them a thought? Did we?

In a Christmas season where the other retailers are dishing up X-Factor finalists, Jamie Oliver and the Boots office girls (you know! The office ladies who get dolled up in the loos!), I think the John Lewis ad is a breath of real, albeit marzipan-scented, emotion. Although that present looks suspiciously like a big tin of Celebrations to me - if I were the John Lewis parents, I wouldn't get too excited.

In which we didn't start the fire

As a Sussex girl, I know it's shameful that I'd never been to Lewes Bonfire Night before this week.

Our region doesn't hold that many distinctions - there are the Downs, and that pudding with the whole lemon baked inside it, but generally we don't dish up eccentric traditions in that quantities that, say, Gloucestershire or Yorkshire do. We'll be waiting a long time for The Only Way is Sussex to hit UK screens.

Obviously Brighton's the coolest kid at the party by a mile, strutting around in a multicoloured poncho made from hemp, but otherwise we're a gentle region, not given to attention-seeking whimsy. Just be sure to file us under 'not Surrey', and we're happy.

So it's all the more pressing that I experience one of our few proper, newsworthy events with my own eyes - and ears, as it turns out. Because (and you'll know this, of course, Sussex stalwarts that you are, and be shouting 'should have got some earplugs you townie fool'), Bonfire Night in Lewes is LOUD.

I'm not completely unprepared - I know to expect big crowds, fire, colourfully-dressed locals and the threat of minor to moderate underage drinking-fuelled violence. The website warns that we shouldn't take small children, asthmatics or valuables, and that my attendance constitutes 'violent non fit injuria' (Latin for 'strap a pair on, it's only a bit of blood'). But there is still a part of me that thinks, it's lovely fireworks! How bad can it be?

On the train from Victoria to Lewes we meet a girl who thinks otherwise. "You're planning on getting back to London TONIGHT?" she barks. "It's not going to happen." Then with the knowing, mocking, eminently punchable manner of a proud local, she describes scenes of thousands of people queuing for days around the entire town, performing a Lion King-style hyena stampede towards the station and trading first-borns for a three inch square of standing room on the 22.40 via Haywards Heath. "What they hey, we'll just sleep on a bench!" we shrug, knowing there is no way we will ever sleep on a bench.

In the end, it is fun. We practice for the evening by queuing in Bill's for lunch ("see, this is fine! We like queuing!"), then tap my former local friend Liz for insider advice on the bonfires ("Don't pay for anything"), and secure our spot on the high street for the parade ("Are they… um, allowed to hold fire that close to a baby's face?"). We sing Sussex By the Sea heartily, despite only knowing the four words of the title, and flinch like woodland creatures every time an exploding banger is lobbed our way. Then our political correctness-ometer is given a workout by a round of blacked-up Zulu costumes. It's fine, apparently. It's tradition.

Then to round the evening off nicely we DO get back to London, without having to sell any internal organs or bribe a policeman. We manage this by leaving early, and not making a fuss. The Sussex way.

In which I turn on, tune in and all that

I was thinking about it the other day, and, on balance, I think "I don't really watch TV" is one of the worst things a new acquaintance could ever say to me.* "I voted for Boris," "dinosaurs didn't exist" or "I really love the recording catalogue of noughties indie outfit Keane, don't you?" would all throw a great big spanner into the works of our burgeoning friendship, but I daresay they could be worked through and forgiven in time. A non-TV watcher, however, may as well just stroll on by. We're not compatible. Does not compute.

It's not the lack of interest that bothers me per se - telly is, I'll grant you, at any given time at least 85 per cent cack - but the sweeping dismissiveness. "I don't really watch TV," they say. That's ALL of TV. The whole of it. Not "I don't watch BBC Three," or "I don't watch anything starring Martin Clunes," but the entire blooming, multi-billion pound, been-evolving-since-1925 genre.

For TV is, whether you like it or not, one of the most wide-reaching and accessible art forms we have today. And would Team Smug dismiss another medium in the same way? "I don't really read books"; "I don't really watch films"; "I don't really look at pictures or vases or decorative cushions."  Would they stand on John Logie Baird's grave and say "nah mate, not for me"? Let's ponder that.

And before you say it, watching stuff on DVD boxsets or 4oD DOES count. You're being a discerning viewer, yes, but you're still watching the stuff.

As with many divides in human life, though, I've got to admit this is partly down to lack of understanding. I just find it hard to fathom what a TV-less person would do with their time. What do they do on a Sunday night, or when they've got flu, or while they're waiting for their pasta to cook? Also, as Joey Tribbiani so brilliantly put it, what's all their furniture pointed at?

The smuggery is usually accompanied with a dollop of condescension, and the suggestion that while you're slack-jawed, watching Don't Tell The Bride repeats with one hand in a bag of cheese Doritos, they're reading Baudelaire and serving soup to the homeless. But are they? I ask you, are they? Or are they, in fact, down the pub, with slightly less to discuss than normal people because none of them saw The Apprentice last night?

Then we come to the obvious, overriding argument: TV is brilliant. Not all of the time, but sometimes. Often, even. Take Frozen Planet, the David Attenborough spectacular that had us all gasping over glaciers and sobbing about dead baby seals last week.  It was the most beautiful hour of programming I've seen in a long time, even including Russell Grant's Foxtrot. And Team Smug would have missed it.


*Actually the very worst would be "I don't own a TV", but I'd have realised this out on first seeing the mix of smugness and wanton despair in their eyes, and been prepared.

In which X marks the spot

You can consider this to be last week's column part two, if you want (what do you MEAN you didn't ready last week's column?) because I intended to cover it in the first one then got so riled up that I ran out of space. So while last week I mused on the tricky intricacies of physical greetings, in a piece I mentally subheaded 'Get your mouth off my face, stranger', today I'd like to turn your attention towards written communication.

It's on my mind at the moment, because this week I received a disturbing email. From a PR I'd never communicated with before, it was a standard 'Hello arbitrary journalist, please plug my product' email. But it ended with three kisses. THREE KISSES. It's virtually tongues. There are people I've known for years, people I've shared houses, bedrooms and ice lollies with, for whom three kisses would still seem gushingly forward. Three kisses basically leaves a trace of saliva on your inbox. I was affronted.

But worse than the three kisses (after I'd wiped my screen down several times with an antibac wipe I felt ready to let go and move on) is the problem of replying. What do you send back to three kisses? No kisses is a virtual blank. It's pulling away with a begrudging shoulder-pat when your date goes in for a doorstep snog. One kiss is worse, almost mocking, while two puts you into dangerous reciprocation territory. What if they reply with four? Then you with five? And before you know it, you've living together in a cottage in Dorset with a cat called Mr Whiskerson.

The trouble is, as with so many facets of modern life, there are no established rules. We need a 21st century Emily Post figure, guiding us firmly in the dos and don'ts of emoticon usage, exclamation mark application and 'reply all' politics. 'Emily Email', we could call her for the sake of accuracy. "Think carefully before you LMAO," she would instruct. "When often a ROFL will suffice."

Back in the midst of Threekissgate, and I'm still reeling. I'm used to over-familiarity at work, of course - maintaining a job in the media being the merry-go-round of mutual bottom-licking that it is - but this is excessive. Besides, journalistic integrity means my affections cannot be bought. Except with food, complimentary holidays or free electrical equipment.

By far the best thing to do, every time you're tempted to pop a little x on the bottom of a work email, is to test it out by doing the kiss out loud. Go on. If you can read "Hi Barry, It is imperative that you send the contract over before the end of the day so that we can secure client approval. MWAH" and feel completely comfortable, then by all means go ahead. If "Maud, you have consistently failed to top up the photocopier toner and been caught stealing post-it notes from the stationery cupboard. Therefore I am afraid we have no choice but to terminate your contract. Hugs 'n' snuggles." seems to fit the bill, then knock yourself out.

But just remember, kisses on a screen can quickly translate into real-life kisses, and then you've got a whole new trauma on your hands. For details: see last week's column.

In which I do not turn the other cheek

You’re meeting someone. Not a close friend, but an acquaintance. Look, there they are! They’re coming towards you.

You have two seconds to assess the situation and decide your plan of attack. They have an outstretched arm. You prepare for arm-on-back contact. But what’s this? Face! Face is heading towards yours at an alarming rate. Where is it going? Shoulder? Ear? Cheek? Left or right? QUICK, manouevre appropriately. BAM, you’ve got lip-on-cheek action. Ok. A kiss.

But while the residue is still wet on your face, you’ve got another judgement call to make. Are they going in for the other? Can you pull away or are they cannoning off to the other side of your head like a puckered guided missile? Is there any danger of nose-brushing? Or worse, have you gone in for a second cheek while they’ve started to pull away? Are you doing the dreaded this-way-that-way face dance? Are you wishing you’d never turned up?

Of all the social minefields we gingerly traverse in every day life, this is a pretty old one. I reckon there were Medieval serfs groaning into glasses of mead, going, "and then I thought she were goeth in for other cheek and I landeth smacketh on her lips." In more formal times the handshake was king - what a man does standing up, a lady does sitting down and a dog does on three legs, as the joke goes - but in our touchy-feely-gropey age, even with perfect strangers you can expect anything on a scale from curt nod to tongues.

Personally, I'm a fan of the one cheek kiss, with optional hug. One cheek is sincere. It can be as brief or as lingering as you wish, and removes all need to spend any time nose-to-nose, the point of a greeting when experts confirm your insides are most likely to shrivel up and die. With one cheek you've got more margin for error - if you make it to shoulderville without any clear statement you can make a vague smacking noise near their ear and hope for the best.

Meaning no offence to our continental cousins, Brits doing the two-cheek thing just looks affected. It screams, 'I saw this once in a film'. We don't do it well. We dither, we hesitate, and can't avoid adding an onomatopoeic flourish every time. You don't have to SAY 'mwah', you just DO a 'mwah' - it's a concept we've still not grasped.

But whatever the outcome of the greeting and however horrifying the mishaps on getting there, one rule stands firm. You must never acknowledge awkwardness. For to cheerily say, "oop, you were going in for another one there, weren't you?" is to destroy your companion with the Sword of Social Discomfort. You have knocked them down when they're most vulnerable. They may not recover confidence for several weeks, reliving the horror every time they encounter a human.

No, you must make the most of whatever dithering, air-smacking, ear, nuzzling, back-patting routine you manage to improvise between the two of you, then swiftly move on. You can always send them flowers later to apologise, if necessary.

In which Mum is not the word

I worry that the world is getting sillier. You might not think so, given that we no longer ride penny farthings or believe manure cures baldness, but then every so often a story comes along to confirm the theory. One came along last week. The word "Mumpreneur" has just been added to the Collins English Dictionary.

I'll just give you a moment there, to gather yourself, read the word again, say it out loud, and snort tea through your nose. Now mop it up. No, not with your slee- ah well, too late. Are we settled? Good, then I'll go on.

There are several reasons that the news made me do a full-body shudder and a sherbet lemon face. Firstly, as the more astute among you might have noticed, the word simply doesn't work as a pun. It's a syllable short. It doesn't rhyme with the original word. "Mum-tre-preneur" is a slight improvement but still, frankly, stupid.

This pains me greatly, as I'm a big fan of punning - so much so that I've almost managed to build a career on it. The day I used the headline 'Better the Breville you know' on a selection of toasted sandwich recipes was one of my proudest life moments to date. But puns deserve respect, not this whimsical mangling. If we continue casually jamming words onto the front of other words with no regard for true pun power, we'll end up living inside the worst newspaper in the world. What if 'Ladyecutive' becomes a term? Or 'womeeting'? When will people learn that being female doesn't mean we need our own set of special, rose-scented terms to dress up life's more serious facets? The original words will do just fine.


Which brings us neatly to the second reason. It is a pointless word. It means 'a woman who combines running a business with looking after children' - and there is a word for that. It's entrepreneur. Y'know, that word we already have, which makes no specification on gender or parental status in the first place. Not only does labelling women with a twee pretend-title belittle their achievements (both in boardrooms and delivery rooms), but it's also a rough deal for the bog standard entrepreneurs without Mummy-caches to their names.

Why are there no Dadpreneurs? Those businessmen in American movies who walk out of the Big Meeting to race across town to their kid's oboe recital, they never got a special name. Except Chip or Brad or something, I guess.

Lastly, the most immediate of all reasons - it's naff. Use the word Mumpreneur and you have instantly reduced the subject to a Boden-clad mimsy selling organic jams at a farmers' market. It has no dignity, no clout. It suggests you might deliver quarterly reports written in glitter glue, with an unidentified stain in the corner.

Let's just be clear - being a mother is one of the most admirable things to be in the world. Mums can locate a lost PE kit, pay a gas bill and wipe a spitty hanky over your face with one hand while making a fully authentic Roman battle helmet out of papier mache with the other. Mums are terrific. But I'm no more likely to invest in your business because you've given the miracle of life to multiple miniature people. Stop ovary-boasting. It's irrelevant.

Think up a good pun, on the other hand, and we might have a deal.

In which I'll just Thwazock that

Last week, Google turned 13. It's a strange thought, that the Grandaddy of the internet, that bottomless source of wisdom and answers, is actually nothing more than a fledgling teenager. It will soon, we can only assume, start sprouting blackheads, drinking White Lightning behind a hedge and mooning over the boy down the road in poetry written in the back of our exercise books (who would this boy be? Yahoo? Surely not Jeeves?).

But as all parents force themselves to believe during the door-slamming, sebum-secreting phase, we wouldn't be without them for the world. God bless Google. God bless it for many reasons, but mainly for taking a truly ridiculous word and making it a verb that we all use daily. Imagine if that word had been 'splobble' or 'thwazock'. "Hang on, I'll just Thwazock that." Bonkers.

But the question this milestone really prompts is of course, what did we do before Google? I've come up with some theories:

1. Knew stuff

There's certainly room for an argument that we knew less before Google, not more. It may well be true. I didn't know all the states of the USA or how to properly truss a chicken before Google, though to be fair I was 10 and as such poorly informed in general. But there must be many other things that, before we could search them afresh every time we went on a computer, we just remembered instead. Things like how the Keeping Up Appearances theme tune went, or where Cheshire is. How to spell recommend. Your own postcode. Faced with one of these tricky questions in contemporary times, rather than setting cerebral cogs whirring, it is natural for one's fingers to start itching for a keyboard.

2. Encarta

When the Bravo family first got a computer, it came with one CD Rom. That CD Rom was Encarta. It wasn't the complete version, mind you, just a free limited trial version that probably caused significant gaps in my knowledge every time a search stopped short of the paid-for section. But still, I loved it. It was the source of endless, completely uncensored information, and also my main source of entertainment on the computer after I'd got bored of minesweeper and used up our printer ink on pictures of dolphins for my bedroom wall.

3. Teletext

If you were born after 1994 you may skip this section - it doesn't concern you. For everyone older, the word invokes both a rush of joy and some involuntary finger cramp, in memory of all those hours flicking though pages of yellow text to find out what the weather was going to be, or how much we could get a package deal to Lanzarote for. Teletext taught us patience. It taught us that knowledge is always out there, but sometimes you have to work hard to find it. And it doesn't always load properly, so sometimes you have to translate it from jagged half-words that look like Space Invaders. But once you have that knowledge, oh boy did you appreciate it.

In which I spurn the Great Indoors

I've never really got on with shopping centres. I know it's hard to believe, slave to consumerism that I am, sitting here in my pink velour tracksuit with diamante dollar signs across the arse, but I would almost rather not shop at all than shop in a  shopping centre. Even Brighton's Churchill Square, which is essentially the village post office of shopping centres, gets me a bit twitchy and flustered. If it wasn't for the soothing scent of Millie's Cookies being pumped out through the vents, I'd barely get past Whittards.

Reasons I don't enjoy shopping centres are largely concentrated on the following:

1. Dehydration. I don't think I have ever maintained a comfortable level of bodily water content whilst inside a shopping centre. They make you moderately sweaty, thirsty, and needing of the loo all at once. This is so that you buy carbonated beverages from any one of their numerous outlets, which we all know make you giddy to the point of wanting to spend £39.99 on a boxset of Rowan Atkinson classics in HMV. It's a scam. Carry your own bottle of weak lemon squash and beat the system. 

2. Temperature confusion. The simple rule to remember is that if it is cold outside the shopping centre, it will be boiling hot inside and you will end up carrying your coat round like a cumbersome child. If it is hot outside, the shopping centre will be air conditioned into oblivion and necessitate the buying of jumpers.

3. Everything's a bit worse in a shopping centre. Nice restaurants suddenly look soulless and bland, overlooked by fake designer handbags and people getting fish pedicures. Hairdressers look like fluoro-lit hellmouths. Even Topshop loses its lustre. Without a breeze in your hair to remind you of the outside world, it just becomes so hard to know what you actually want. Lycra bodycon and heeled trainers might start to look appealing. You lose all sense of self.

But of course, the shopping centre that's got me thinking about how much I dislike shopping centres is the jaw-achingly massive new Westfield in Stratford, East London. Its opening a fortnight ago was the first big hoorah in the Olympic regeneration process (if we can't all be champion athletes, we can at least get our cardio wrestling for the last pleather satchel in a Primark the size of Rutland), and looks set to bring plenty of welcome jobs and pedestrian traffic to the area.


Aside from being baffled that it isn't called Eastfield, I haven't done a mad sprint over to its shiny, hallowed walls. I'm assuming it's probably very similar to the other, deservedly-named Westfield, which I went to for the first time only a couple of months ago. "I don't like shopping centres," I told people as they harped on about it. "You'll like this one!" they trilled. "No, really," I'd say. "They're hot and loud and often make me hate myself." "Not this one!" they'd cheerfully reply. "It's so big that you don't even know you're inside. It almost feels like… outside. But with shops."


So I went. And it is, I will grant you, very shiny. And very, very big. But I only got twitchy and flustered in proportion to its vastness, which means too twitchy and flustered to buy anything other than chilled drinks. And that Rowan Atkinson boxset.

In which everyone gets married

You'll have to forgive the slight streak of cynicism that might ripple through this column, like a bitter coulis in a fluffy sponge pudding. I am watching Bride Wars, you see, a movie that determinedly undoes all feminist progress over the last 50 years in a sweep of frothy white tulle. "You have been dead until now," the wedding planner tells the newly-engaged brides. It's a great message.

But even ignoring influence of Kate Hudson's perfectly groomed idiocy, I think I'm reasonably clear-headed when I say that if one more person on my Facebook news feed gets engaged or married, I will do something terrible with a Tiffany cake slice.

Growing up you always hear about people in this phase of life, where everyone they know is tying the knot in giddy succession and every weekend is spent throwing cash at John Lewis weddings lists and sleeping off hangovers in Welcome Break service stations, wearing a crumpled fascinator. But you think it will hit when you're, ooh, 30.

Never did I think that at the ripe age of 23, half of my also-23-year-old acquaintances would be getting married or popping out babies. We're not old enough to hire a car in most countries, yet these people know who they want to share a toilet with for the rest of their lives. The rest of their LIVES. It hurts my mind.

Perhaps these girls are all far more emotionally evolved than me, or perhaps it is just that no one has taken the time to pin them down and say 'THE REST OF YOUR LIFE' over and over again in a doom-filled voice. Either way, they're doing it. The ring, the hen do, the dress, the cake, the honeymoon, the endless reams of professionally airbrushed photos. They're doing it, only a handful of years since we officially became grown-ups. I still can't commit to a shampoo brand, and they're happily signing up for a lifelong three-legged race. It's amazing.

But aside from humming Another One Bites the Dust each time the squealy engagement status goes up and arranging a small divorce sweepstake (what? who said that? not me), I'm grateful for the diversion that it creates. I am. I love it. I've become fascinated by weddings in the same way an elderly obese man might be fascinated by Olympic gymnastics. I await wedding pictures on Facebook with an embarrassing hunger, overlooking the fact I've only met the lucky lady once, briefly, when we were 15*.

Will the dress be massive/shiny/in danger of falling down? Hair down, up, or curled like crisp fusilli? What's the colour scheme? Hotel, marquee or barn conversion? Will they, the most terrifying bridal trend I've witnessed so far, pose for official photos in their pants**?

And on, and on. It should be noted that so far none of these have been people close enough to actually invite me (I'm pleading closeness as the reason, rather than the chance I might loudly criticise everything then eat all the sugared almonds). But it's only a matter of time before I'm aisle-side, with popcorn. And if Bride Wars is anything to go by, it'll be a hoot.

*Around which time said bride was probably drawing up table plans and beginning on table favours.
** This is a real thing. Two real people I know have actually done it.