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

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

The Mouse And Mrs Snootage

Today I tip my hat to anyone who practices the art of ‘Retail Envy Alleviation’, which is also known as ‘Fashion Generosity’.

If you think I’m talking total rubbish at this point, then there’s a small possibility that you may be right!  But bear with me and I’ll try to explain myself.

I was in yet another shop today (Don’t judge me, I like to see what I’ll be buying when I own a massive business empire) when I saw a timid little mouse of a girl in her early 20′s hovering behind a snooty looking lady with a snazzy handbag the size of a small country:

I’m not joking, this thing could have housed about 300 homeless people and given them shelter for the evening.  I bet it even had its own eco system with as-yet undiscovered plant life and an NHS that works perfectly!  Not sure I’d have liked to live right at the bottom though, in with all the crusty old mints covered in fluff, a bent out of shape hair pin and a squashed tuna sandwich left languishing and forgotten from yesterday’s non-existent lunch break….  I’d definitely want to be up with the posh purse and the full packet of smugly superior polo mints!

As I watched, The Mouse followed her round for another 5 minutes, then sighed and started to dejectedly walk away from Mrs Snootage towards the exit.  I was very intrigued as to why she felt the need to shadow the older woman, then give up without visibly completing any kind of mission.  Being my typically nosy self, I was just about to ask her for an explanation when she turned round, and with a grimly determined expression on her face scuttled up to Mrs Snootage and proceeded to catch her attention.

At this point The Mouse looked as though she was ready to expire with fear.  She was stuttering, breathing in big scared gulps of air and generally acting as though she was facing a giant snake-like creature of epic proportions!  When she finally managed to synchronize breathing and speaking, The Mouse shyly complimented Mrs Snootage on her handbag.

This went down like the proverbial lead balloon.  All Mrs Snootage did was look down her incredibly beaky nose at The Mouse and said the following words:  ‘Thankyou dear’.

Thankyou dear?  Huh!

Now every girly I know is under the impression that this sort of exchange is usually followed by the revealing of where the epic-proportioned homeless-shelter-ish handbag had been bought.  In my opinion it’s just courtesy:  If someone has admired something in your possession, you acknowledge their evident admiration and reward them with the information on its origins.

This is called Retail Envy Alleviation.

I felt so sorry for The Mouse, as she visibly crumpled under Mrs Snootage’s hard gaze.  What courage it had taken for her to approach her at all!  Of course what The Mouse should have said was ‘I like your handbag, would you mind telling me where you got it?’  But for a trembling little fainthearted thing like her to speak at all was something of a miracle!

I felt so sorry for The Mouse at this point, so I waited until Mrs Snootage had left the building (probably off to look down her nose at a few more unworthy citizens and ruin other people’s day with her hard basilisk’s stare) then approached her to give her the all important handbag maker’s name.

As I was being all conspiratorial and jovial, I leant in to impart some of my extensive handbag knowledge: It was then that I experienced a big happy feeling of ‘Fashion Generosity’…..I was helping another human being feel good about themselves rather Evil Mrs Snootage who preferred to crush them under her designer-clad foot!

With tears glistening in her eyes, The Mouse whispered her thanks then scampered off in the direction of the car park, most likely never to be seen in public again, bless her!

Now the following is how Retail Envy Alleviation and Fashion Generosity should go:

I was out with one of The Minions the other day and she spotted a very cool t-shirt on a girl stood over the road.  Now this particular Minion is very straightforward and no-nonsense, so she simply marched up to the girl and complimented her on her choice of top.  Before The Minion could even think about forming the words to ask where it was from, the lovely girl said ‘Thanks, Topshop!’ (Other shops selling tops are of course, available!)

Now that is the way to do it!  Everyone walked away from the exchange grinning and happy, and the day got just that little bit easier!

Boo to Mrs Snootage!  If you see her in the street (she’s hard to miss with that colossal handbag)  give her a kick in the shins from me!

Next time someone compliments you on something you own, spread a little love and be a Retail Envy Alleviation Specialist…..It’s even something impressively lofty to put on your CV!

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

To See Or Not To See

That is the question.

There’s three types of glasses-wearing female.

The first one is the lady of a certain age that hasn’t realised that it’s not still 1965, and still wears the mahoosive beauties that were so popular at the time. Even better if there’s some sort of pinkish tint on the lens to add to the look.

The second one is anyone who’s realised that wearing glasses can be a fashion statement and takes notice of the ‘should have gone to…’ adverts.  These are the average, everyday types.

Then there’s the third one.  This is the character in the movies that invariably sits behind a desk with severe black rims and her hair pulled into a classy up do.  She then whips off said glasses and shakes her hair whilst taking out the one improbable pin that was holding the whole lot together.  I call her the sexy secretary.

I of course, come under the third category.  Ha!

Now for the truth.  I have needed to wear glasses since the age of four,  so for as long as I can remember there has been some form of eyewear perched on my nose.  My Little Pony featured strongly in the formative years.  Well, I am an 80′s child!

I looked into laser eye surgery a few years back, and they were perfectly happy to relieve me of my hard-earned dosh the next day but for one slightly pertinent point:  They wouldn’t be able to correct the major flaw that has been plaguing my existence from the word go:  I see two of everything.

Double vision is no walk in the park you know….Yes, there are upsides to it:

Two George Clooneys.  Two ginger nut cupcakes.  Two ten pound notes.  (You can see how this works)… What’s not so fun is the fact that when I reach for the second tenner, there’s still only one in real life.

The disappointment is like finding a scratchcard that’s won twenty quid, then noticing out the expiry date was last week.  Or seeing a hot bloke the other side of the bar then watching him turn round and talk to his equally hot boyfriend.

So here I am, desperately wanting to rid myself of one of the biggest aspects of my appearance; shedding the speccy-four-eyes look forevermore, then being let down by my dubious ability to see the best (twice) in people!

Armed with this slightly depressing news, what course of action do I decide to take?  Yep, that’s right…going on nights out ‘sans spectacles’.  This can only lead to terrible errors in my normal powers of judgement.  Coupled with the addition of a drop or two of pink fizz, my pretty blind outlook on life is enhanced by everything in glorious, (if fuzzy) Technicolor x 2.

If your eyes are the windows to your soul, then glasses are the maximum security prison doors.  When wearing mine in bars and clubs, I’ve found I’m as good as invisible.  It seems people can overlook one part of an appearance, but whack two of them together then its Harry Potter’s Cloak for me.  If you haven’t read the books or at least seen the films, then shame on you!

I’ve no idea why this is the case; all I know is that the countless times I have performed this test, the results are continually startling.  I’ve been told it’s simply down to confidence and to a certain extent I’m sure they’re right, especially as these days my eyesight has deteriorated to the point where it’s almost impossible to go out without making a tit of myself at some point during the evening!

So I wish I was really in the sexy secretary catagory…then the world would see through the glass and perhaps I would move in slow motion when taking off my glasses and letting my hair down….(Even at night…just in case there was a camera crew hanging around!)  It would be cracking to actually see the yummy blokes in the bars, and to have a chance of knowing if one was trying to talk to me!

I’m sure that what will actually happen, is that I shall continue to stumble about in a myopic manner til I’m old enough to turn into the 60′s woman wearing gorgeously unfashionable specs….maybe even My Little Pony might make a comeback?  Or maybe not!

Love,

Fatty Blob Head