Bacon, Not Bacon (Part 1)

Well, what an eventful time we’ve had in Paris!

I’m composing this sitting in my seat in the Eurostar on the way home…..it’s only a whole 24hours late, and I’ve just finished coping with the dual stresses of French public transport ‘diabolique’, and The Family all getting their combined knickers in a big old twist (as in combined stresses, rather than they were wearing one gigantic pair of pants between them!)

But, as all good stories do, we should start at the beginning….

Ahhh, Paris! The city of love! Of shopping! Of glamouressness!

Sparkly Eiffel Tower!

Now because this is me, of course it was all those things…(ha!)……

I fell in love with a gorgeous Parisian man named Claude, bought a couple of Dior handbags and waltzed down the Champs-Élysées in my towering Louboutin heels whilst dragging a small rat-like yet highly fashionable dog-type creature behind me.

Humn, maybe it didn’t happen quite like that…

So, what really happened?

Well, we arrived at our hotel and all went swimmingly until the next morning when we went down for breakfast. We were shown in as usual, went to get our chosen food from the buffet and sat down to break our fast (sounds very dramatic when you put it like that doesn’t it?)

No sooner had we started than we get a bustling little French man pop up and start whittering on about us sitting in the wrong place and eating the wrong breakfast. ‘Wrong breakfast?’ I hear you say!

Apparently there was a swish option and a pleb option. We’d been allocated the pleb option (how very rude!), but had managed to find our way to the swish side.

There goes the bacon then!

The little waiter looked as though he’d very much like to take our laden plates away from us, but manners just about managed to win through.

On inspection of the ‘plebfast’ as we came to call it, we realised that the absence of any bacon was a permanent feature, and no amount of asking the smirking boy-waiters would bring forth any of the basic breakfast delicacy, however much we managed to convey any feelings of desperate bacon-related need! Tiny random sausages there were, but the best bits remained tantalisingly close on the other side, yet forever out of our reach.

Breakfast continued to be a shoddy affair each day, contributing to the hotel’s frankly undeserving 4 star rating, but we managed to make a joke of it, cram our cheeks full of pain au chocolat (apparently even plebs are allowed these) and get on with exploring the city.

And the city decided to explore me too. Well, one of its many pigeons did. In the form of a giant green poo. Directed cleverly into not only one of the pockets of my handbag, but onto my camera as well. Apparently it’s lucky. I just think it’s grim.

So there I was, travelling around one of the most beautiful cities man has ever built, snapping away with my poo-filled camera having a smashing time, when a young girl stopped in front of me, picked up a ‘gold’ ring from the floor and tried to give it back to me so she could claim a reward.

Now all I could think of at the time was if this seemingly useless rubbish con ever worked on anybody. You would have to be pretty thick to be taken in. (In my opinion-I apologise now if I have managed to inadvertently brand you brainless because you fell for this one!)

I have a brain, and am perfectly capable of keeping track of my rings. After all, they reside on my fingers, fit well and don’t look at all like the one she was offering me! I politely declined to enter into her game and walked on.

Suddenly though, it was if the whole of Paris was trying to re-unite us with countless pieces of recalcitrant digit adornments…We couldn’t take more than five steps without another ‘helpful citizen’ picking up yet another shining band of not-precious metal and insisting we take it from them.

What I couldn’t work out to start with though, is how they ever expected anybody to believe that the shiny object ‘on the floor’ in front of us would have been ours….I’m fairly certain that most people don’t go around flinging their possessions out in front of themselves in the hope that some helpful handily-situated layabout will see them and rush to their aid….They were retrieving rings left, right and centre….yet always from pieces of pavement I hadn’t yet walked on!

Ah well, maybe they got lucky once or twice a day, who knows? I can’t think of any other reason they would carry on day after day trying to be the scruffy French version of Ernest Jones!

Anyway, more on my travel nightmares later; but for now, I will leave you to check all of your rings…if you have lost any, pop out your front door to see if you can find a frenchman….They usually have a pocketfull!

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

Not All Doors Have Chocolate Behind Them.

Happy New Year old chaps!

After the deliciously perfect excuse of ‘It’s Christmas’ is now out of the way, one can no longer utter the immortal phrase ‘i’ll start after Christmas’ until the next November comes trundling round.

All the plans made after Christmas are invariably a bitter-sweet attempt to correct the simply huge amount of over-indulgence that seems to be classic of the festive period.

One of the main reasons for me embarking on the dreaded D-word activity for the 2457th time in my life, is perhaps because of a certain incident that happened to me on New Year’s Day…..

Having imbibed my not-inconsiderable weight’s worth of cocktails the night before, I was tiredly stumbling my way through the cold and empty local petrol station’s foodage area.  Now I am marvellously lucky and grotesquely cursed in equal measures that my local petrol station has not just a food shop attached to it, but a scrummy-I-would-eat-all-the-packets-too-if-you’d-let-me food shop.  If you don’t know which one I am on about, then here’s another clue:  It rhymes with ‘Ben and Cress’.  And has a very sexily-voiced tv advert in the form of Matthew Macfayden muttering things like ‘its not just cake, it’s cake dipped in chocolate and balanced on my chest cake’ (mmmm cake)

And

‘It’s not just stuffing and gravy, it’s a full beef roast fed to you on a fork by me, wearing nothing but a tablecloth’!!

So anyway, I’m walking round Matthew’s Shop of Dreams in a kidney hurting, head throbbing type-daze, wondering just when it was that I got old enough to regard the party to only just be worth the hangover… (we’re talking miniscule amounts of ‘only just’ here…!)…and I spot someone I used to go to school with.

Now, I made the supremely silly mistake of leaving school (hurrrumphlygh) years ago and then proceeding to work very hard to be less of a Fatty Blob Head.  I succeeded rather superbly to the extent of shedding 7.5 stone. Hurrah!

I made a point of forgoing the chocolate in favour of running around like a hyperactive sloth on red bull on the badminton court and generally did slimmer-people activities like sashaying when I walked!   ‘Twas a halcyon era, let me tell you!

One of my favourite activities whilst I had de-FBHed, was popping into the local wine bars when all the university people were on their ludicrously long summer holidays, and waltzing up to chat to people I has gone to school with to see if they recognised me.

(Bear in mind that since school, I had lost the weight equivalent of an average 10-year-old girl, learnt how to apply make-up, dyed my mousey brown hair to blonde and discovered my sociable side!)

I used to love freaking them out, and lots of times they couldn’t place me!

It is therefore officially A Bit Of A Shame that I put it all back on and more for good measure!

So, back story completed, let us now return to Ben and Cress.  I smile at the man I used to attend physics lessons with on a tri-weekly basis.  He does that funny little tentative smile that screams: ‘Crap, she’s just smiled at me in recognition, and I haven’t got the foggiest!’  And proceeds to scuttle round the corner into the scotch egg aisle.

So now it’s totally the opposite, and I am still not recognised by people who I have no trouble remembering….perhaps it’s because I kept the blonde hair and makeup, who knows!

Ah well, I think as I continue my slow amble round the shop and stand in the interminably long queue for what seems like far too much of my life. I am British, therefore genetically programmed to endure queues with aplomb of the highest standard, but even this queue gets me down, so much so that I do a little skip when I manage to make it to the front, pay for my goods and navigate my way out.

As I make for freedom, fresh air and the promise of an afternoon on the sofa watching repeats of the Vicar of Dibley scoffing too many sprouts, I near the exit.

Physics man is 20 seconds in front of me, which is apparently enough time for the automatic doors to open and shut for him, and to begin opening for me afterwards. I walk towards them, thinking about vicars jumping in ludicrously giant puddles, with a big grin on my face, which soon turns to alarm, then abject shame and humiliation….

The doors had chosen that particular moment to refuse to open fully, but by the time my brain had worked out this rather pertinent piece of information, my body had still valiantly tried to stuff itself through the foot-wide gap. All that had made it out happened to be my head, my boobs and one leg dangling uselessly in mid-air!

I was stuck blocking the entrance for what seemed like ages, but probably was only (a still uncomfortable) 15 seconds, all the while uttering startled phrases such as ‘ooof!’ and ‘man alive!’

All this is standard for me, dear readers, I know.  Except for one change in the by-now familiar script.  Normally, my humiliation is compounded by the supporting actors getting front row seats to watch the fun, yet maybe it was my day off for entertaining the masses…Physics man walked off entirely oblivious to the enfolding door-squishing drama behind him!  Thank heaven for small (well, not so small really) mercies!

And the moral of this particular story?  Apparently, there are doors out there that can crush people to almost-death, even if said person doesn’t have a clue of the physics of it!

Well that, and:

Never listen to Athos from The Three Musketeers tell you to buy the profiteroles. It always ends deliciously badly!

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

Belfast, My Boots and Blimey!

Hello chaps,

It’s been rather a while since I’ve managed to get round to writing a bit of a blog, and one of the main reasons for this is undeniable…I’ve simply been a bit boring!

It’s hard to get into trouble, or do anything stupidly embarrassing when most of my day is filled with rolling around my lounge floor faffing with beads, pliers and tiger tail!

But, dear readers, you’ll be pleased to learn that I am writing this on the aeroplane coming back from a weekend away in Belfast. There was (unsurprisingly) a marked absence of the above jewellery making ingredients, which left me with plenty of time to make a complete tit of myself all weekend!

Lets just say, The Friend has had to put up with rather a lot this weekend. Not to say she hasn’t coped marvellously; she’s been a rock, a brick, and every other hard-sounding object that signifies her general legendary friendship status!

It started well – we got to the airport without mishap.  We might have started off at the highly unseemly hour of 6am, but we got there! Check-in was a doddle.  Even the slightly fraught moments where you hold your breath in the hope that the extra pair of shoes and the chocolate you shoved in your case at the last minute doesn’t tip it over the baggage allowances!  All went well and in no time at all, it was bye bye bags, see you at the other end…

I was through security with nary a glance ( I must have an innocent face?! ) and was collecting my bits when The Friend’s hand luggage was diverted in a highly dramatic manner and was picked up by a forbidding looking woman intent on being very thorough!

As it turns out, there were no fewer than three items of liquid casually rolling about the bottom of her handbag….  It was the one and only time of the whole trip that I actually felt a tiny bit smug, with my liquids in my little plastic bag!

Luckily, the scary lady was actually very understanding, and once she had correctly ascertained that The Friend wasn’t about to blow up the airport with nothing but some rescue remedy and glasses-lens cleaner, we were waved through, putting our boots back on as we went.

Next stop was a greasy fry up breakfast and a traditional pint of cider.  Yes, that’s right, I did say cider.  At 7.00am.   Nothing sets you up for a flight better…try it next time you find yourself in an airport at silly-o-clock!  (Unless you are a child, then you’re definitely not allowed to imbibe, obviously!)

Now The Friend can be somewhat of a nervous flyer.  For someone who travels an awful lot, she normally copes rather marvellously.  But she’d recently watched a tv channel deliberately crash a plane so they could analyse what happens. Not the best idea then, to be sat directly in front of a couple of plonker business types guffawing their way through the main events in the program, in voices loud enough for even the pilot to hear….

Well, we managed to survive the short journey without turning round and planting a fist in each of their insensitive faces, for which we were rather proud!

There follows a journey with a friendly taxi driver/tour guide, a concert for us to sing in, more pints of magners at the after show party and very little food…

As you may know, the above can be a bit of a danger area, as it’s most prudent to line the stomach with something stodgy before drinking…in this case though, not many mishaps befell us before reaching the house we were staying in….What we did have, was a crazy taxi driver who announced himself to be called Ricky, then proceeded to beep his horn at every passing car still on the road at 2am;  this included a police car, at which point we slunk down in our seats and prayed they wouldn’t start chasing us!  He delighted in getting the English-accented people in the in the car (So myself and The Friend then) to continually utter the phrase ‘I know your name’ in a Northern Irish accent.  (Phonetically written it would be something along the lines of: ‘Iiiee knaw yawr kneeaum’!)

Obviously we were highly amazeballs at this, which just delighted him further!

So after an extra long journey home (he was driving slowly to rack up the price…or it could have been our sparkling wit and marvellous company!) He dropped us off back at the house, asked us who this Ricky guy was, told us his real name and drove off.  Now it’s hard to convey here how hilarious this all was, but you’ll just have to trust me!

Cue friday lunchtime, and we’re off to lunch with the legend that is The Friend’s (the one we’re staying with) Nana.  Now this lady is a philanthropic marvel, an MBE no less.  She makes her own sausage rolls and tried to fatten me up further (I know, not needed!) even when I had stopped because I was full!  And apart from a slight mishap involving Nana swapping mine and The Friends names over, and us not quite realising until it’s too late and embarrassing to correct, it was a lovely meal!

Now it wouldn’t be a wee holiday without a spot of shopping would it?  I found two lovely tops, had a look round the handbags, and accidentally sprayed myself with the male version of my perfume.  For all of the rest of the day I was wafting about smelling eerily like The Brother.  It was not pleasant!

After that, I thought it prudent to address the problem of my headache.  I am one of those stupid/unfortunate people who find themselves addicted to diet coke.  (Other addictive caffeine-based beverages are available)  Anything after about 8 hours of no diet coke will give me a headache, and right at this moment I was coming up to about 25 hours!  So whilst everyone went off into the next shop, I had spotted a generic supermarket, and quickly headed in to scout out some lovely fizzy brown stuff!  I picked up a wire basket, trotted quickly down the aisles, and selected two big 2litre bottles of the stuff, and a cheeky little bottle to drink there and then.  Unfortunately, the supermarket was absolutely choc-full of customers….I wonder if they thought it was christmas eve or something, but there were people everywhere!

Aware that I might be holding the others up, I decided to take a shortcut through the menswear section…I scuttled through the maze of trousers, socks and underpants, and managed to turn a corner at great speed….next thing I know, I’m skidding over on my silly slippy boots, the basket gets caught on a rack of Y-fronts, the bottles go whizzing off in all directions, and I end up half sprawled on the floor with one arm still threaded through the basket!

After having muttered the immortal phrase ‘Blimey O’Reilley’ to myself and the GIANT queue of sniggering 19 year old boys who witnessed the whole embarrassing event, I scrabbled about picking up the slippery, shaken up bottles and tried to slink off to a queue at the other end of the shop.  I even managed to scuff my boot and leave an attractive black leather ‘skid mark’ on the floor!

Lots of other little things happened the rest of the weekend, but I fear I have kept you lovely readers long enough…

I’ll leave you with the news that I managed to leave my coat at the house and bring an entirely different one to the airport with me, got thoroughly frisked in security by an overzealous woman (what happened to my innocent face?!) Found out we would be flying back on a toy plane with propellers (The Friend was not pleased at all!) and had to ask for a seat belt extension thingy for the first time in my life! (Silly stupid tiny toy plane!)

One thing though…Did they really have to make it orange? I felt like the flight attendant might have well been swinging it round his head and singing as he brought it to me!

FBH strikes again!

To hear the other side of the story, why not click on The Friend’s blog?

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

How To Train Your Delivery Driver

In my opinion, there are two types of delivery driver.

Unfortunately for the people populating the glamorous world of delivering parcels, they seem to be at entirely opposite ends of the Delivery Driver Spectrum. (This is of course a perfectly acceptable term for measuring delivery drivers, ask anyone you know).

The first type is a real treat, but is generally few and far between (as all the best treats seem to be)…Think winning anything more than a tenner on the lottery, or finding a fiver and a book of stamps in an old purse.  Or gleefully discovering an old twix (other yummy chocolate is available) stuffed down next to the crusty old box of boring cereal that is only there for when The Parent comes to stay, then finding out it’s still in date and only slightly crushed and mangled!

What is this real treat?  Well, of course it’s a delivery man so good looking that it’s positively criminal to keep him locked up in a van entertaining only the motorways of Britain for the majority of his day.  A guy who’s courteous and smiles when he hands over your parcel, and says thank you when you’ve signed. A guy who has to scrabble about in a dusty, grubby van hauling boxes about yet still manages to look artfully dishevelled and pulls off that perfect amount of ‘griminess’ before he reaches downright scruffbuckets dirtbag status where you wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole! Mmmmm, a real licky-neck type of guy!

Now I was lucky enough to know one such specimen in my old job…We had a beautiful man pop in every week or so and bestow upon us said smiles in joyful abundance.  He even used to place the boxes exactly where we asked for them…..This is hugely rare, I can assure you-they would normally get dumped in the doorway creating a HealthAndSafetyNightmare! (Quel Horreur)  We even knew his name, which again is a big thing in the delivery man game, as it means that they’ve managed not to piss off the shop owners enough to have polite chats and receive a christmas card every, er, well…Christmas!

So yes, we loved Dave muchly. (Names have been changed just in case he ever randomly and entirely manages to side-step all known laws of probability and read this post….I wouldn’t want him to be embarrassed if he found himself having to deliver anything to me again!)

What was even more spiffing is that I got to keep Dave when I started working from home!  He would knock on my door at silly-o-clock (early for me…I’d rather start at 10am and go on to 6pm.  I had to clarify this as all of The Friends would be in uproar if they thought I was telling you all that I was up and working by 7.30!)

Anyway, he’d knock on my door at 7.45 and I’d clumsily stumble down the stairs in random mismatched pjs and ‘bed head’ so fierce any innocent passer-by would think I’d just been tasered.  I’d then proceed to mumble through the usual greetings: ‘Hi, how are you?’  Fine thanks, you?’ (By the way, this might just be the most pointless thing to ever utter out loud….No one listens, and if you ever stray from the accepted script with something like  ’Actually I’m a bit ropey and my bunion is throbbing like a mo fo’  then the other person looks as though they’ve just been slapped in the face with a stinky haddock, and proceed to scurry off in the other direction whilst trying not to catch anything!)

I digress.  Dave.  (Bless him!)  Anyway, I felt sorry for Dave having to be consistently subjected to my only-just-awake gorgeousness all the time, so I began anticipating which days he would deliver me my sparkly goodies.  Cue me bounding down the stairs in full regalia having gone to bed early at what The Parent calls  ‘A Reasonable Time’ the night before!

I even managed to make sure I didn’t have last night’s smudged mascara doing warpaint impressions, and spent the last five minutes before he rang the door bell chattering to myself so I could avoid that ‘I haven’t spoken today yet’ lurchy throat groan that always managed to rear its ugly head in the most inopportune of moments!

So Dave’s one of the extremely rare good ones.  He has, in the last few months stopped delivering stuff to me, and I miss him!  Yes, I know it is very silly of me to get attached to a man I barely know, but he cheered up my day with his alluring grubbiness and cheeky smile!

And so to the other sort.  Of which I have had the dubious pleasure of experiencing this very week.  This grouchy monosyllabic fiend can be found worldwide, and grows even when you don’t leave him in direct sunlight.  He is a weed and impossible to work with.  And as that’s probably one gardening metaphor too many I’ll stop there.

I ask you to picture the scene:  It’s tipping it down.  I’ve just got back home from a jewellery party and I do my usual trick of trampling dribbly footprints all over the post.  When I’ve picked it up and discarded all of the rubbish that gets shoved through my door, I come to a ‘Sorry I’ve missed you’ parcel card:

All this pathetic excuse for a human being could be bothered to write was ‘By gate’.  I then proceed to grumble about in the rain checking ‘by the gate’ for a parcel.  Nothing.  Nada.  By this point I’m getting soggy hair and the flip flops I’d stupidly shoved on whilst still wearing socks (I know, it’s a hot look!) were doing wonderful yet cold impressions of surf boards in high tide waves.  (I’m not even exaggerating-it was that day this week when the heavens opened and we all wished we had Steve Carell playing Evan Almighty as our benevolent, ark-building uncle)

Anyway, to cut a long story not very much shorter, the stupid oaf had flung, yes FLUNG my parcel OVER the gate and into my back garden where it landed with an unceremonious thud on some paving slabs.  In the rain.

To make matters worse, it was a glass photo frame I’d ordered with one of my birthday vouchers.  Yey, glass!  The substance that positively yearns to be manhandled and used as a basketball in a fence-post slam dunk.

To quote The Grandparent:  We are NOT amused!

Cue a strongly worded email that will no doubt never be answered and a tense phone call to replace the would-be gorgeous sparkly frame….

After all, I need it to go on my ‘feature wall’ (Lawrence Lewellyn-Bowen eat your heart out!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(I don’t have a bunion, in case you were wondering!)

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

How To Cook Your Washing Up.

Ever hidden last night’s washing up in the oven?

No?  Well done.  This means you are a sensible, well-rounded individual who clearly has a sane grip on time-keeping and general life skills.

I, on the other hand, have at least one of the above qualities…Yet being referred to as ‘well rounded’ is not necessarily a good thing in my book!

So as usual, I can almost hear you shouting ‘Why on earth did you put your washing up in the oven, you crazy fool?’  Well it makes perfect sense to me, and I now shall proceed to explain myself in what is most probably a misguided effort to claw back some semblance of regard from you all!

I have only put my washing up in the oven twice.  The first one was months ago, and I pulled off the manoeuver without a hitch.  The second time was at 8.57am yesterday morning, and let’s just say I wasn’t quite so lucky!

Being self-employed and working from home has its pros and cons:

Pros-working from home.

• Having a full day at the office working in fluffy pink slippers and a dressing gown.
• Taking your lunch break when ever you like.
• Getting too hot and stripping off to a grotty vest top I wouldn’t be seen dead in outside.
• Sneaking the tv on in the background to watch Team GB do wonderful things at the Olympics!

However, one of the cons most definitely has to be clients popping round to choose and commission jewellery.  Now don’t get me wrong, it’s lovely having visitors, and it’s easily the best way as the jewellery needs to be handled, tried on and generally flapped about a bit to get a good impression of just how gorgeous it is! (All modesty flies out the window when I’m in business mode!)

This is where yesterday morning comes in to the situation.  I woke up and checked my emails.  I had one from a client who wanted to pop over to commission a full set to go with a particular top.  Hurrrah!  This is exactly how I like my day to start…..But not when I find out that she wanted to come at 9am, and suddenly I’m sorely regretting my rash decision to leave the night before’s culinary efforts lying around the kitchen waiting to be washed up!

There’s also a fair amount of dusting and hoooooovering to be done, all in the very small window of half an hour….Arrgh!  Of course being me, I am hopelessly useless at staying on top of the housework.  Couple that with the fact that I hosted a fairly messy 30th birthday party at the weekend ( I know.  I’m 30.  It’s still shocking me!) and I’m still finding sticky patches of unidentifiable alcohol and birthday cake (mmmmm, cake!) artfully strewn in the most random of places….

So there I am: Running about my kitchen and lounge in a bit of a flap, wearing the aforementioned grotty vest top and a very past it pair of pj bottoms.

Task one: Fling open curtains to let in some light!  Task two: Hastily close said curtains in an effort to relieve both the poor woman innocently walking her dog-type-creature and myself from any further crushing embarrassment.  No one should ever be subjected to an outfit that can only be good for the incinerator….(Let’s just say the vest openly showcases some ghastly wings as if every highly annoying bingo advert on tv got together and had little bingo babies who then proceeded to populate bingo world and they all lived happily ever after, just south of my shoulders!)

Task three: Jump in the bath.  Unfortunately the boiler had chosen this very morning to have a strop for the first time since we moved in over three years ago.  It’s always provided us with beautifully hot water every time we asked for it, so I have no idea why this morning should have been any different! (Ask The Brother: he washed his (currently massive) mop-head of hair in freezing cold water and has proceeded to be slightly disgruntled all day as a direct result!)

So I abandoned the bath idea for 15 minutes whilst the water heated up. Cue lots of frantic slapdash tidying: Flinging random items everywhere….Such as a pile of birthday presents into the drinks cabinet and an orange squash bottle into my handbag! (I’m vaguely ashamed that my handbag is big enough to comfortably fit a squash bottle in it, but let’s gloss over that reasonably quickly….)

Back to the bath: The next bath I draw is far, far too bubbly…In my haste I’ve added enough bubbles for five baths and now the bath and its bubbles seem to be taking over.  I dunk myself in and out whilst trying to keep my head above water in a bubble free zone, only to clamber out looking like a soggy disgruntled version of the Michelin man….Have you ever tried to get a ridiculously large number of bubbles off you in a hurry?  Thank god no-one was witnessing this particular one-woman foam party!

Next came what was supposed to be a cursory nod to a bit of make up.  What it actually ended up being, was far far, far too much concealer; leading to me looking like the half-crazed yet supremely un-scary Ghost of Makeup Past!  Add hairspray liberally applied to both armpits instead of deodorant ( I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried), and I was ‘ready’ to tackle the kitchen!

Time is a cruel, cruel mistress and waits for no man….  (Or makeup ghost!).  With roughly 2.7 minutes to spare, I still had an unsightly mound of washing up leering at me from the kitchen sink.  There was nothing for it than to go with my previously successful plan of action: Bundle it all into the oven and cover up the glass front with an artfully placed tea-towel!  Hurrah!  As plans go, it was fairly brainy, and I distinctly remember feeling rather smug as I relaxed and helped my client choose the best necklace, bracelet and earrings for her style!

Alas, ‘smug’ was the last emotion I was feeling that evening as I came to put the tea in the oven.  The preheated oven.  With a lot of washing up stuffed in it.  With the plastic sieve which had unhelpfully melted itself to my favourite saucepan whilst the spoons and forks looked on in glee….

The moral of the story?  It probably should be: Keep a whole cupboard free and empty ready for washing up hiding emergencies (preferably one that doesn’t heat up and melt poor unsuspecting kitchen items to each other)

Yet I rather think The Parent would say something along the lines of  ‘Wouldn’t it just be easier to do the washing up as you went along?’

Yes.  I rather think it would.  That, or get that butler I’ve been promising myself…..

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

A phone, a phone! My Kingdom for a phone!

Greetings friends, family and the odd yet entirely welcome new person who has randomly stumbled across my silly rambling witterings!

It’s monday, and I’ve just done a very Monday-ish thing.  I wrote a complaining email to a company that needed complaining to.  The only thing is, it ended up turning into one of my crazy blog posts whilst I was writing it!  So I thought I should copy and paste it almost verbatim, (names and amounts have been changed or ****ed so I don’t get told off!) so you could all read it and tell me I’m a nutjob for sending such a sarcastic email with almost no hope of a reply….!

So here it is…..I can’t decide whether I should be saying ‘ooops’ right now….

 

Dear mobile phone provider,

Firstly, I would like to point out that I have been with *** since I first got a mobile phone around 12 years ago.  I have always been impressed with the level of customer service I have received over these years, and I have enjoyed being loyal to ***.  Every time I needed an upgrade etc, the question of whether to even look at a different provider never even came up.  I am an *** girl through and through.

Now, over a decade of a wonderful relationship with you guys notwithstanding, the confusion and depression that has been with me for the past couple of months every time I even think about trying to sort out my phone has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth and an extremely strong urge to throw my existing phone at the wall in anger.

It was April when I reached my upgrade allowance after a 24 month contract with an iPhone 3G S.  I was excited as my phone had been steadily getting worse in terms of battery life, and storage room etc.

At the same time, I have recently opened a new business, and it made sense to move over to a business tariff, as I will be using the majority of calls for the business.

I found it extremely difficult to get a straight answer from anyone about how to do this…I tried online, speaking to a few of your people over the phone, and eventually went into my local store, where I felt that actually having a real-life human in my sights would be the best way to sort me out.  All I wanted was to start a business contract with a new phone, and keep the old number.  How hard could that possibly be?  Well, very as it turned out!  Apparently, they ‘Can’t do that in-store’.

I am not a very technologically minded person.  I like the iPhone as it’s easy to use.  I am, after all just a simple female.  I am intelligent in many ways, but understanding all the different tariffs, bolt ons and extra bits is not my forte.

So they couldn’t even provide me with the right form in the shop.  I had to go onto the internet to find it.  Then it was impossible to download.  I finally managed to get hold of one of your chaps on the phone who turned out to be very helpful and said he would post it to me.  I wish I remembered his name as he deserves a medal, for calming me down that day as all I wanted to do was burst into tears!

So it came in the post.  Again, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to understand; but I got through it and sent it off.  Lo and behold my change of ownership was complete!

And so we come to today.  I phoned up a very helpful chap called Fahquard.  Who told me that I wouldn’t be able to have the tariff I wanted which was quoted on the internet with the phone I wanted at that price.  That was for ‘new customers only.’

And here I was thinking that being a new business customer would make me eligible for the price on the internet!  Warren then quickly grasped that I was getting flustered and spoke very kindly to me.  Unfortunately his only fault was that he kept quoting more options at me, at a rather fast pace…As I mentioned earlier, my hapless female brain can’t cope with making decisions on the spot.

I had a wonderful friend who worked for your good company, which meant I have been on a friends and family contract that cost me on average £** a month.  This was simply perfect, and if it wasn’t for my iPhone needing to be charged twice a day and running out of storage, I literally would have been happy for life.

Now I know that you’re a business, and you can’t yourselves help the fact that there are people out there in the world like me who just are crap at knowing how to navigate the complicated world of mobiles, but I have come to the end of my tether.

I’d really like to pay £** a month for *** minutes, unlimited texts and ***MB of data, on a 32GB white iPhone 4 S.    I’d really like to pay £*** for the phone.  I’d really like to get on with my business and my life, and stop stressing out about wanting to be loyal to you guys, but wondering if it’s easier somewhere else….?

Please help me!

Thankyou very much in anticipation,

Jennifer

www.jenniferwesley.com

 

(Other fruit-based mobiles are available!)

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

Family Olympics Slightly Less Glam Than London 2012

What ho Chums,

Hope everyone’s having a spiffing August? Those of you who are lucky enough to still be young and learning…Hope you’re enjoying your summer holidays? And those of you who are nowhere near young enough to be at school except in the teaching capacity….How is your time off going?  I have many teacher friends who (bless them) get very excited as the summer holibob looms, then as soon as they’re in it start grumbling about how fast it’s going!

Then there’s the rest of us who only just remember what six weeks of freedom feels like!  Gone are the long, gorgeous days where we used to spend all day outside making up games in our street: I remember one lovely summer, one of The Friends and I used to create a whole ‘house’ from the one solitary street sign! Yep, a thin piece of metal hammered into the ground was the focus of our attention for at least three afternoons…Ah, the imagination of children!

Of course, playing with a street sign might make me sound as if I didn’t have one toy or real game to my name.  I did, I had many lovely toys (very 1980′s themed such as sylvanian families, trolls with massive pink Jedward-stylee hair and a pair of in-line roller blades that hardly got used as I was totally pants at skating in them and feared for the life of both my ankles!) Yet even with all these cracking toys, sometimes the most simple things are the best: For example, give a child a big cardboard box and they’ll be happy for days, creating many different worlds with just their imagination!

Now I am a grown up (sort of, I think I will always be 22 in my head!) August means very different things to me….As the 24th looms with alarming and relentless inevitability, I find myself thinking back over the last 30 years…..

…….Which is a bit of a nutty thing to say really, because I can only really remember stuff starting from age 5, but no-one ever says that do they?

One thing that stands out from all in my memories is the continual and (usually) healthy family rivalry that has always existed, and will always I should think!  Obviously, The Brother and I have always made everything we possibly could into a competition:

One of our favourite games (which I am ashamed to say we’ve really only just grown out of!) was strangely named ‘You are the Liebfraumilch!’ I have no idea why we called it this, as it involved trying to push, overbalance or pull the other onto the sofa before you yourself hit the cushions!  Now obviously, being a bit of a Fatty Blob Head from quite an early age, lets just say I had the weight advantage in this game!  I used to hold my own quite successfully, until about the age of 14.  It was about this time that The Brother got really quite ridiculously strong, and he’s never looked back since! I very rarely get to crow ‘You are the Liebfraumilch’ these days…..The only time I manage it is if he’s not expecting it, in fact not even realising we’re playing the game (Cue evil laugh: Mwahahahahaaaaaaaa!)

So all this family competitiveness was bound to get rather more serious and official as we grew up….(Not that we’re Olympic standard or anything!) The Parent spotted a chart in a shop last year, and presented us with the perfect item to keep us amused for a whole year:

This simple piece of printed cardboard has kept us busy all year.  We’ve got til new year’s eve to complete as many of the 72 different tasks as possible! Hurrah for the Family Olympics!

Now, some of the tasks have been simply made for me:

• Stay in your pjs all day.  Easy Peasy! Next!
• Laugh til you cry.  Done. One of The Friends sent me a big long list of iBone autocorrects that had me rolling about in a very unladylike manner, with tears streaming down my very red face.  Unfortunately I was sat in a cafe at the time, and was making a bit of a tit of myself….I felt the need to read one out to the bloke sat next to me as he was looking to see why I was almost wetting my bridgets….I think he enjoyed it but the same can’t be said for the little old lady who was on my other side…She looked at me as though she wanted to call the men in white jackets!
• Build a snowman.
• Build a sandcastle. Behold both below!

The Brother’s was just too cool!

Now obviously I wish there was a lovely, rose-tinted story to go with the above sandcastle…A halcyon day full of fabulously remembered childhood times that included eating sand-filled sandwiches whilst sat on the fabulously hot sand watching the world go by…..Unfortunately (just for a change) this was not to be……

Picture the scene: Me fully clothed with just the bottom 5 inches of my jeans rolled up to keep the sea and sand off them, brandishing a hastily purchased spade and ‘bucket’ for the occasion.  Now as I’ve grown up, I’ve got a bit funny about sand…You’d never catch me rolling about in it these days, as I just don’t like it when it creeps everywhere and you’re still finding it days later!

So there I am, having a sandcastle competition with The Parents, and I’m trying to do it all from a standing position with a tiny spade that can only have been made for borrowers to dig their vegetable patches with!  I was so busy trying to avoid the demon sand (silly really, as I was attempting to create a pinnacle of building excellence with the stuff!) that I got one foot stuck in a particularly squelchy bit, tried to step back, failed miserably and landed on my (admittedly comfortably padded) bottom with a squeak followed by an ‘oompfh!’

Add The Parents crying with helpless laughter (well done them, they got a sticker for that!) and not helping me in the slightest, things could only have got more horrifyingly embarrassing if there had been any other witnesses to this shameful display of clumsy athletics…….Oh good, yes…That family over there will do….With the hot dad….Brilliant!

My shame was compounded further by the cutiepie four-year old poppet who asked said hot dad: ‘What is that lady doing lying in the sand?’ in a loud voice only a four-year old can achieve!

To top all that off, The Parent won the sandcastle competition (Though I’m wondering if he didn’t bribe the judges with wine…) and I went away from the whole sorry experience with a pulled leg muscle!

So there’s just a few of the stickers I’ve already got…..I’m going to find some of the others slightly more tricky: No tv for a week? Humnnn…..Turn your mobile phone off for 48 hours? Arrgh! I’d rather chew my own arm off!

Guess which one was my very first achieved sticker?  Yep, that’s right….Bake a cake! (Mmmmmmmmmm Cake!)

Love,

Fatty Blob Head