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

Hairminiscence

‘I’m not offended by the dumb-blonde jokes because I know that I’m not dumb.  I also know that I am not blonde’  Dolly Parton
Let’s just say, in my life I’ve had some giant corkers in the bad hairstyles stakes.

There was the time when I asked The Brother (older than me by 19 months and should have known better) to cut my fringe. We were about 6 years old and it wasn’t either of our finest hours.  Clumps of my Barnet fell in dramatic little piles all around us!  The Brother got a whack on the leg and a severe talking to, and I got an extremely short boy cut that I did not enjoy having to grow out of!  Moral of the story?  Dont hand a small boy a massive pair of scissors saying the six-year-old version of ‘short back and sides please’ and expect a good result!

Crimping.  Boy oh boy did I crimp my hair!  The key to crimping is to have a totally inappropriate hairstyle to start with, and by this stage I was sporting a cracking little twenties style short bob.  Add to that the joy that is the crimping irons (burns ear lobes, sides of heads, eyebrows….actually, it’s pretty indiscriminating as to which unfortunate part of your head it used to burn, including the hair!).  For those of you who are boys or just weren’t born in the right decade to have claimed the Crimping Queen title, it’s very hard to explain the sheer joy when you’ve crimped every last strand into a rigid waved mass of totally unnatural looking hair:

There was strutting up and down the room, turning at the end and glaring model-like into a mirror, noting the alien phenomenon of said hair not moving an inch even with the massive flip of the head that extended all the way to the shoulders.  Oh how cool we were, with our random burnt patches and channelling Worzel Gummidge!
Then there was my exam year at school when layering was making it big in England.
Whether the hairdresser girl was practicing her brand new skills on me or whether she was always that rubbish we’ll sadly never know, but what I came out of the salon with that day was a shaggy brownish head of hair very reminiscent of a mop. A beautifully conditioned and subtly highlighted mop, but a mop nonetheless!
From then on my new nickname was ‘Friendly Lion’, and boy did I live up to that name.  I soon came to work out that what the useless hairdresser had achieved was something close to a miracle of taming hairdo ability in comparison to how badly I myself could control this mane.

I’m sure I fully alarmed people when walking down the streets with this giant faux pas of a hair do.  I now understand all these years on that the hairdresser was trying to achieve the most requested hairstyle of all time ‘The Rachel’.  My ‘Rachel’ was more of a Raquel, or the hairstyle version of a cankle!

Then I was blonde for ten years.  How I loved my blonde locks!  Granted, over 67% of the time I looked somewhat chav-tastic due to the disastrous and ever-present root growth.  I have never bought into the feeling that roots are cool and trendy.  To me they simply scream ‘Hey look at the top of my head I have a badger attached to it!’  But being blonde was fun, and I’d never felt so confident and snazzy!

Then came the eventual point when my hair simply took its life into its own hands as if to say ‘If you don’t stop dyeing the pants off me I’m going to retaliate the only way I know how:  Demon Split Ends’

My split ends were magnificent.  My split ends had their own split ends. And those had some baby split ends of their own until I had whole family trees going on around my ears making it really rather foresty.

So here I am in the present day with a colour that can only be described as Boredom in Brown.  That’s the Dulux name for it obviously.  The hair dye packet will be something along the lines of ‘Chocolate on a summer Tuesday morning’ or ‘Molten Mocha Midnight’ or something equally as daft!

I’ll be doing something with it very soon…Answers on a postcard as to what please….Maybe ginger curlz? (See what I did there with the z?  I’m down with the kids!  Actually I hate all that rubbish but more on that another day)

Maybe Jet black?  Mohican?  We shall see!  All I hope for in life right now though, is to never see a comeback of the Clumps, The Crimping or the Cankle!  This would be a very sad day for mankind indeed.

Love,

Fatty Blob Head