Frumpy the Irish hen

June 12th, 2007

I AM going to be spending most of this weekend dressed as a dwarf, complete with grey beard, in the nightclubs of Belfast.
It’s a hen weekend. Which sounded like a great idea several months ago, but now I’m starting to worry about my capacity to keep up, keep awake and keep upright with all these much younger hens.
The bride-to-be reassured us that she wouldn’t be asking us to dress in the usual tacky hen party outfits.
Instead she decided on her dressing as Snow White and us as the 11 dwarves (in Ireland’s fair city, where the dwarves are so pretty), purely because the idea of us all going clubbing in beards makes her laugh so much.
She is having T-shirts printed with suitable name tags (Dumpy, Stumpy, Grumpy, Lumpy and Trumpy spring to mind). As I am the oldest hen by a good 10 years, I fear mine might be “Frumpy”, but she’s not letting on.
All we have to supply are our own shorts and boots. When I told my teenagers that their mother was going to a nightclub in a pair of shorts they were even more cruel and suggested my dwarf name tag should be “Cellulite-y”. Nice children.
I have never been on a hen weekend. Our generation didn’t do them. When I got married in 1983, even a hen night was fairly unusual. A small handful of friends and I went for a quiet drink to a harbourside pub a couple of nights before my wedding. There was no dressing up, no getting wrecked and no stripper.
All I wanted was to get home nice and early for my beauty sleep so I looked good on my big day (I was 24 and felt very old).
So when the invitation to a wild weekend away with a great group of girls came along, I jumped at the chance.
But now that it’s nearly here, I’m worried because we have to leave here at about 5am and will be out clubbing until about the same time the following morning.
My biggest concern is my feet. I only have two pairs of boots and neither is comfy enough for eight hours of partying. I still have a scar on my ankle from dancing all night in the black boots at the Herald Express Christmas party.
I may have to wear my green wellies. Which will make me hot and smelly, to add to the beardy and chubby combo.
I’ve decided that the only way I’m going to keep awake and anaesthetise the pain in my feet is to get fairly drunk. But I still haven’t really mastered the “fairly drunk” thing. I get tiddly after one, very silly after two and lose all inhibitions (including the one that stops me getting totally paralytic) after three or four.
I have asked the bride if she can also supply wrist identification bands in case I forget little details: like where we’re staying, or my real, non-dwarf name.
At least I know that I’m not likely to attract any unwanted male attention (except possibly from a Leprechaun), what with the beard, the smelly wellies and the wobbly thighs.
I hope you notice that I said “unwanted male attention”. That is because I have had three bits of feedback about my column this week.
First of all, a friend of mine pointed out that, no matter what the subject matter when I begin, I always end up talking about one thing: men. Or rather the lack of one and my sad singleton status.
I now I see that she’s right. I obviously just can’t help it. It must be on my mind more than I realise.
My editor also made a passing column about “it all getting a bit Bridget Jones” after I wrote about my excited attempts to log on to Sarah Beeny’s mysinglefriend dating website after finally finding one man in the county (albeit in Taunton) prepared to date a woman in my age group.
Imagine my excitement tonight when I find there are now two men in Devon.
Then imagine my frustration when it still won’t let me log on! Everything else is working fine. I am too embarrassed to call in my computer expert chap purely to help me get on to a dating website…
And I have also had a really nice email this week from a kind man who said that reading my column had given him the courage to finally sign up to a dating website (I have looked on mysinglefriend but can’t spot him, unless he’s using an assumed name and is  the new man from Torquay who’s appeared this week?).
When I told my editor about the email he got all excited and suggested that I should go on a “Would Like to Meet” style blind date, complete with a panel of experts in the background giving me relationship advice, flirting tips and a style makeover!
Well, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, and I know I’ve been a bit of a failure on the dating front, but I hadn’t realised people thought I was in need of quite so much technical support in getting back into the dating game.
And then there’s the small fact that my email writer didn’t exactly ask me out. He might be 22 for all I know.
Even if he had asked me out, I’d have no chance of  getting a second date with any man ever again if he’d turned up to find me, notebook poised, accompanied by a Herald Express cameraman and sexpert Tracey Cox hovering over my shoulder telling me to smile and make more eye contact!
And finally, there’s the fact that despite all my brave words, I’m totally terrified at the prospect of coming out from behind my laptop.
Maybe I’ll stick to the beard and hope to strike it lucky with a Leprechaun at the end of my Irish rainbow.
 

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Belgians, Virgins and Mysinglefriend online dating site

June 12th, 2007

 

MY youngest had us in fits of laughter again this week, when he started talking about “the Belgian Mary”.
We had no idea what he was talking about, so he explained that he’d been learning about the Belgian Mary at school, when the vicar came to talk to his class.
It wasn’t until he said: “You know, Jesus and the Belgian Mary” that it clicked, and we all fell around laughing.
His sisters and I told him that it was the Virgin Mary, but he carried on insisting that Jesus’ mother was the Belgian Mary (I worry about his hearing sometimes) and that it was the rest of us who’d got it wrong. He’s only six (bless!)
From now on, in our house at least, the mother of Jesus will, I’m afraid, always be known as the Belgian Mary.
And his sisters were quite happy to leave him with this much funnier misapprehension.
But I felt it was my duty to put him straight.
In my efforts to convince him that she really was the Virgin Mary, and not from Belgium at all , I found myself trying to explain both the Virgin birth and what a virgin is.
I’ve always tried to be completely open on the subject of sex, and had a policy of “blind them with science” when my older two daughteres asked me anything biological.
This approach seemed to work better with his big sisters though. Maybe it was because there were two of them, with just a two year age gap. From about the age of five they were constantly bombarding me with questions on the subject.
We had an illustrated children’s book called “The Body”, which they found hysterically funny and fascinating in equal measure. This was their main reference book for three or four years and they rapidly had enough information to choose it as their specialist subject should they ever get on to Mastermind.
In contrast, my little boy seems totally disinterested. And because he’s never asked any questions, I now realise he is blissfully ignorant on the subject. Which is either really good or really bad. I’ve not made my mind up yet.
So to explain what a virgin was, I had to tell him what sex was. I expected a stream of questions, or giggles. But he just listened in a disinterested sort of way.
I don’t think I did a very good job though. Because when I finished he asked: “Does that mean you’re a virgin mummy?”
As good as, I told him.
 

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THIS week I have made a major technological break-through. I have gone wireless. And  it’s a disaster!
Just in case you are even more of an old fuddy-duddy technophobe than me, and think wireless is something to do with listening to Radio 3, I must explain that we are talking here about using the internet without wires.
It works – brilliantly! I can now open my laptop anywhere in the house and log on to the internet! Lots of exclamation marks!! To me, this kind of thing is practically science fiction. If I’m not careful Capt James T.Kirk will be beaming down into the bedroom.
So tonight I get my little one off to bed, fall asleep with him for 10 minutes (it’s a bad habit, I know, but he’s just so cuddly) and then get into my own bed, with the laptop, to write this column.
But now, instead of getting cracking on the actual writing, I convince myself I am doing “research” on the internet.
Fatal! Before I know it, it’s midnight and I haven’t written a word. Aargh!
We’ve had the internet for years, but until now it’s been plugged into the wall, in one of the girls’ rooms.
But tonight, with nobody looking over my shoulder, I was well and truly ensnared by the world wide web for the first time.
It started out like a dawdle thru’ all the trashier Sunday papers. Somehow I found myself clicking into the internet’s biggest current obsession: Paris Hilton and her possible forthcoming 45 day jail term for DUI (that’s driving under the influence, apparently).
There was advice to Paris from Candy Spelling (if you don’t already know who she is, you don’t need to. Don’t ask). Boring, boring, boring.
But I did find one fact that left me totally mesmerised. Candy Spelling, apparently, has one whole room in her mansion dedicated to gift wrapping… hard to take in, isn’t it?
I thought I had hit the heights of organisation when I dedicated a box in the utility room to gift wrapping. You know how you get all those nice gift bags nowadays. They’re so environmentally friendly because you just change the tag and recycle them. All you need is a new bit of tissue. Way quicker than faffing about with sellotape and scissors.
So, I cannot help but admire Candy Spelling. Maybe one day all of us will have whole rooms dedicated to gift wrapping? We’ll need mansions first, so it’s definitely something to look forward to.
After browsing the gossip columns, I discovered some funny video clips. Most impressive was the sunglasses trick. One young man throws a pair of sunglasses and his mate catches them perfectly every time on his nose (even when he’s driving past in a car with the window open). You probably have to see it to get it, but again, I was impressed.
However, from then on it all went downhill. Before I realised that I’d been the victim of clever marketing, I let myself get dragged off at a tangent and found myself stupidly filling in my name and details on all sorts of weird and wonderful websites offering me freebies: Tesco giftcards, laptops, iPods and holidays.
It is all, of course, a giant con.
I also wasted countless minutes on Sarah Beeny’s mysinglefriend online dating site. I’ve never actually signed up to online dating because so far, whenever I enter my age to see if there are any single men in my age group, I find there are none at all in Devon.
I’m not joking. There are always plenty of nice younger men, and a smattering of older gentlemen. But there are never any my sort of age looking for women of the same age. I’ve decided single men in their 40s are all going through mid-life crises and remain convinced the woman of their dreams is 20-something.
But this time there was one! I should keep quiet, because I don’t want to cause a stampede. But ladies, there is one perfectly nice looking single 52-year-old man living in Taunton, willing to consider a relationship with a 48-year-old like me. Who’d have thought it?
Instantly all thoughts of writing this column, and getting any sleep at all tonight, went out the window. I was desperate to log on and join Sarah Beeny’s dating service.
But despite going through all the tickbox rigmarole three times, the internet kept logging me off.
I suspect it was the high volume of internet traffic from all the thousands of other single women in Devon trying to get a date with the county’s only available older man. I gave up. It’s late and I have a column to write
But if you do happen to be reading this, Kevin from Taunton, drop me a line.
 

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Tyra Banks is Gorgeous

March 6th, 2007

ALL is not lost – I now weigh less than a supermodel.

Admittedly that supermodel is Tyra Banks, who at 33 is now retired, and she is currently being called Tyra Pork Chops after photos of her appeared on a website titled, “Tyra Banks is Fat.”

But I was confused by all the controversy because Tyra still looked totally gorgeous on America’s Next Top Model this week (yes, my television is tuned to wall-to-wall trash. It comes with having teenage daughters). None of the skinny young striplings fighting for the next top model title were a patch on Tyra’s luminous, full-bodied, bootylicious good looks.

So I went on-line to see this so-called fat picture. And there it was. Poor Tyra, snapped by an intrusive paparazzi as she emerged from the sea on holiday in Australia in her swimsuit. And yes, she looked more my shape than the stunning TV presenter I’d seen the night before – big bum, chunky thighs, rounded tum.

Had she ballooned since the show was filmed? Or had somebody maliciously added some digital pounds to the picture?

I typed “Tyra Banks” and “Fat” into Google and was shocked by what came up. One website alone had over 750,000 people logging in, mostly to write insults about Tyra’s new curvier figure.

By far the oddest response came from “supermodel agent Dino Mistello” who seems to be under the misapprehension that models should not eat at all. He is quoted as saying: “As soon as ugly rumours of eating start circulating about a supermodel like Tyra, people will turn against her, especially those in the supermodel community.”

Notice he doesn’t say over-eating, or eating problems…just eating! Mistello goes on: “She says it’s a fat suit, but people I know say she has been spotted eating animal crackers, which is food. They say she ate at least two giraffes and one seal. So sad.”

At least two giraffes! How could she?

I next found a video clip of Tyra on her American chat show. Now here she is, bravely wearing the same swimsuit, but looking noticeably smaller than in the infamous beach pic, raging against the media’s obsession with weight, and against all the mean and nasty insults being thrown at her.

In that one minute clip Tyra showed that the camera can lie. She breathed in. She lifted her arms above her head, stretched and twisted like a cat and did the whole model pose in her high heels, explaining: “Y’all are used to seeing me look like this. Nobody complains about this Tyra.”

But then she turned sideways, breathed out, relaxed her stomach, neck and shoulders and sank down into her hip joints. Slumping like the relaxed Tyra strolling out of the surf. The change was miraculous. Suddenly she was, a dumpy, ordinary girl with a pretty face and fabulous hair. Still not fat exactly, but her bottom half looked reassuringly more like my own reflection in the mirror.

Then she wiped away a tear as she railed against criticism of her fuller figure: “If I had lower self-esteem, I would probably be starving myself right now.
“To all of you who have something nasty to say about me or other women who are built like me, I have one thing to say to you,” she said, slapping her behind and shouting defiantly: “Kiss my fat ass.”
 

Tyra is 5ft 10in and weighs 11st 5lbs and is a British size 14 jeans size. Yes, she admits she’s gained two stone since she was a young lingerie model, but she looks just as gorgeous and surely that’s the point.

I would give anything for a figure like that. I may have the bum, but I don’t have Tyra’s big boobs and lovely long legs to go with it. Why aren’t we all admiring her as a model of perfection?

She said: “I get so much mail from young girls who say, ‘I look up to you, you’re not as skinny as everyone else, I think you’re beautiful.’ So when they say that my body is ‘ugly’ and ‘disgusting’ what does that make those girls feel like?”

“I still feel hot, but every day is different. It’s when I put on the jeans that used to fit a year ago and don’t fit now and give me the muffin top, that’s when I say, ‘Damn!’ I feel more comfortable when I’m lighter.”

And there we have every woman’s daily dilemma. Settle for a bit of muffin top, or worry about every bite we take.

This is not just about an American celebrity.

At work this week I have been writing about issues affecting local people… a new unit has just opened, one of a handful in the country, which will treat young women from South Devon with eating disorders; a new obesity strategy is being drawn up for Torbay, and the Go For It campaign has been launched in a desperate attempt to get our couch potato population out of our front doors and exercising at least three times a week.

None of it makes sense. We know more than ever before about nutrition, exercise and optimum health. Yet the more inundated we are by this knowledge,  the less willing we seem to be to follow good advice.

Personally speaking I have been just about sticking to my new year’s resolutions on more exercise. But as a single mum I was feeling guilty about not having time to get “proper” meals on the table every evening.

So I hit on a solution. Using my new cooker I can time the oven to come on an hour before we all pile back home from school and work. I did all the preparation the night before, set the timer and got home to the lovely welcoming smells of home-cooked food.

I loved it. Dinner time was more relaxed. But there was a big downside. The children ate their usual mini-sized portions, but I was hungrily finishing off platefuls of hearty stews, baked potatoes, risotto or casseroles every night.

The result? Let’s just say I’m glad the paparazzi don’t follow me around and stick pictures of me on the internet.

 

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