The weather forecast for this week says snow. SNOW. And I know I hardly ever mention this here AT ALL, but I really don’t like the cold (did I mention I don’t like the cold?), so with the “snow in October” warning came a feeling that the last straw had been reached, the camel’s back had been broken, the metaphors well and truly mixed. In other words: I HAVE HAD ENOUGH. Enough.
And so it is that on December 7th, Terry and I will be flying here:
 Sunshine! Bring it! As predicted in this entry (just call me The Predictathon…) we’re going to Tenerife. Yes, I know, it’s not nearly as exciting as Cuba, or Australia, or Dubai, or all of those wonderful-but-expensive-and-very-far-away places we would have liked to have gone, but it’s a five hour flight from Glasgow, is still hot in December and, above all, is cheap. And really, when your main priority is to lie in the sun for a couple of weeks and remind yourself what it feels like to get dressed in the morning without having to involve every item of warm clothing you own, that sounds pretty good to us.
I’ve only been to Tenerife once, as a surly teenager, and Terry hasn’t been at all, so it should be something new for us. We’ve picked a quiet resort that gets good reviews and has lots of nice restaurants and shops, but isn’t party central (because we are old, obv) and we’re hoping to just, you know, relax. Which will be great, given that I’ll have to write eleventy-one blog posts before I go so I still get paid.
Right now, it just can’t come soon enough…
Tagged holiday, tenerife, the weather
So far, there isn’t a whole lot I haven’t shared on this here blawg in terms of the many ways in which I regularly manage to embarrass myself in public. I’ve faithfully documented all of the random acts of stupidity I’ve committed since this site launched and I’ve started to work my way through my early attempts at journaling , but this week it suddenly occurred to me that I have yet to tell you about my early career as a newspaper journalist. My early career as a newspaper journalist which regularly involved photos like this appearing on the front page of the paper I worked on:
Yes, that’s me in a football “strip” (hate that word. Why can they not just call it an “outfit”, like normal people? Why “strip”? Annoying!) Yes, that was the front page that week. I’d say it was a slow news week, but actually, football is a pretty big deal around here, and the team in question had got through to the final of… some competition or other… so even if World War Three had broken out, this would still have made the front page. Such is the world of the local newspaper.
I, of course, wrote the accompanying story, and I managed to write it in a strangely over-dramatic style (“NO!” I hear you cry in disbelief, but yes, it’s true…) which went on for several hundred words without really mentioning football much AT ALL, but which did make much of the fact that the teams colours were “claret and amber”. And my name is “Amber”. D’you see what I did there?
I have no idea if the team won. What I do know is that it took the editor and photographer about two hours to cajole me into wearing this outfit, persuading me that it would be for “the greater good”, and finally agreeing that yes, OK, I would get the front page if I just wore the damn “strip” already. And I would also get an inside page, in which I would talk some more about my wearing of the “strip” and not mention the team. Can you tell I’m not a football fan? Because everyone who read my story certainly could!
It’s a cut-throat world, the world of local journalism, I’m telling you. You have to be prepared to do almost anything for that front page. Remember this, oh young, aspiring reporters! Let this be a lesson to you. You know, like it was to me.
Note: Although the photo caption you can see here reads “Amber’s decked out from head to toe”, this was not in fact correct, as I was decked out from the waist-up only. I drew the line at those woolly knee socks footballers wear, or the shorts. Nevertheless, a small crowd gathered to laugh at me as this photo was taken. Yellow not my colour.
Tagged journalism
Well, I’ve kinda sucked at updating this blog this week, haven’t I? I’ve been busy. And OK, also lazy, but mostly busy, stock-piling blog posts like a demented thing so I can go on holiday in December and not, you know, totally lose my livelihood or anything.
Yes, this would be the winter holiday I first started talking about back in August. The one I’ve done nothing about booking yet, but which will hopefully be booked within the next couple of weeks because seriously people, I am done with winter already. And yes, I know it’s technically still “Autumn” (is it?) but it’s not like you’d notice here in the Land O’Amber, which is a cold, harsh land where any temperature below “boiling” is deemed unacceptable to me.
I. Hate. This. Time. Of. Year. Hate it. Even getting dressed becomes a problem at this time of year. I mean, take Monday, for instance. On Monday, I got up, showered, dressed, walked to my desk, sat down… and then twenty minutes later I got back up again, walked back to the bedroom, removed every single item of clothing from the wardrobe and proceeded to drape them about my person, in a bid to fight off the cold that was seeping into my bones. I had socks hanging off my ears, sweaters on my legs – you name it.
Then, half an hour later, I was back, removing all of the aforementioned items and donning my “dog walking outfit”, which consists of the kind of clothes you don’t mind getting utterly ruined by mud and squelchy horrible leaves and stuff. I looked absolutely ridiculous. Seriously, I looked like some kind down-on-her-luck Arctic explorer, and I will continue to look like this until about May next year, because I just cannot stand to be outside for the length of time it takes to walk the dog dressed in anything other than fifteen layers. I would seriously wear a balaclava if I thought no one would see me.
The problem with this, though? People do see me. At the end of our street, for instance, I encountered a young woman who looked like she was walking to work. She was wearing trousers, a fine-knit cardigan and court shoes with bare feet. No coat. No hat. No thermal long johns. As she passed me (me in my dog-walking outfit, and hardly able to move my arms because I was wearing so many layers), we both slowed down and stared openly at each other, each of us wondering if we had somehow slipped into another dimension in which the climate was totally different from the one we’d just left.
Then this morning, as Terry and I drove out of the street, on our way to the gym? We passed a young girl in jeans and a t-shirt. A T-SHIRT. WITH BARE ARMS. In OCTOBER. Aaaargh! The Others, they never cease to amaze me. And I meanwhile, am now on three outfits per day:
Gym clothes
“Normal” clothes
Dog Walking Clothes
And back to “Normal Clothes”, although sometimes with additional layers as required.
It’s exhausting just keeping up with the outfit changes, seriously. I was not meant for this climate.
And this is why I will be going on holiday this December, even if it kills me (and if the last plane journey I took is anything to go by, there’s a good chance it will…). Right now, that holiday cannot come quick enough…
Tagged holidays, the others, the weather, winter
Slightly against my better judgement, but because several of you asked to see it:
I decided to keep it in the end, after my mum showed me how to tie the neck properly (I had been doing it totally wrong. Yes, I know. And I’m sure my mum thought her days of dressing me were over, but apparently not…) and assured me that I will need that extra bit of room in it for all of the many layers I tend to wear in winter. This was true, so the tags have been removed, and the coat is officially mine.
Also, Rubin got a haircut:
Tagged coats, rubin
When Caroline, of Second Hand Shopper fame, nominated me for an Honest Blogger Award, requiring me to list ten honest things about myself, my first thought was, “Christ, is there anything I haven’t yet shared with the Internet?!” My tendency to over-share means that I have already revealed such fascinating stories as “that one time my granny’s dog farted so loudly he terrified himself,” and really, where do you go after that, I ask you?
So at first I wasn’t sure what I would possibly find to tell you about, but then I remembered that nothing is impossible when you have wine on your side, so I poured myself a large one and the following is what I came up with. I’m pretty sure I’ve already shared at least two of these before but hey, don’t blame me, blame my good friend, Lord Pinot of Grigio for that…
Ten Honest Things About Me. That don’t necessarily involve dogs farting.
1. I am totally maths phobic. Like, totally. I count on my fingers and don’t know my times tables (other than the 5 and 10, obviously, because d’uh, everyone knows those, even me.) One of my worst nightmares involves the use of the phrase “If one train leaves the station at 11am, travelling at 65mph….” and if ever I have to deal with numbers I freeze like a rabbit in the headlights and start trembling. So yeah, I really hate maths. Luckily this hasn’t had too much of an impact on my life to date, because so far no one has ever presented me with a triangle and required me to tell them the length of one of its sides, on pain of death. If that ever does happen, though, I’m SO dead…
2. I have trouble telling my left from my right. I mean, I DO know the difference, but if someone tells me to turn right, say, or to raise my left hand in the air, like I just don’t care, I will have to quickly pretend to be picking up a pen (I will do this surreptitiously, obviously. Like, I will put my hand behind my back and do it, I won’t just start picking up pretend pens out of thin air) to “remind” myself which hand is my right. I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but I guess you just have NO EXCUSE for ever forgetting it now, do you?
3. When I describe myself as a hypochondriac? I’m actually not joking.
4. I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that I will probably never write the novel I’ve wanted to write since I was a child. Some people “have books in them” – I’m starting to realise I probably only have blogs in me. Which is a pretty weird sentence to type, really.
5. I sometimes can’t remember what age I am. I have to think about it for a few seconds…
6. When I don’t get any comments on my posts, it makes me horribly insecure. I have considered deleting this blog several times this year because I was hardly getting any comments and came to the conclusion that there was no point in continuing if people weren’t reading. The fact that so many of the bloggers I read myself are able to generate 45 comments just by stating what they ate for breakfast or posting a photo of their kid just reinforces this feeling of inadequacy. High school, much?
Edited to Add: I honestly didn’t write this so that people would feel guilty and leave comments telling me not to delete the blog. I am not thinking of deleting the blog. This point refers to other times during the past year when the comments dried up and I felt like no one was reading. But I don’t feel like that now, so the blog isn’t going anywhere!
7. Speaking of high school: I was the weird one no one would talk to. I was always dressed funny, got good grades (except in maths, natch) and read books for pleasure. Everyone hated me. Point 6 suddenly makes a lot more sense now, no?
8. Going back to the blogging thing: I hate it when I click a link onto someone’s blog and it’s called something like, “Little Johnny’s Mom” or “Mom of Four” or “I’m a Mom Now So I’ve Totally Lost My Own Identity and Can Only Refer to Myself as ‘So-and-So’s Mom’!” Because, you know, I am totally in a position to judge other people’s blogs, being so popular myself and all….
9. Despite writing about fashion and beauty for a living, I look as rough as hell most of the time, and wear jeans every single day in life.
10. If I was American, I would vote for Obama, no question. I find this to be the scariest photo I’ve ever seen in my life, and not just because of my phobia of crustaceans:
 Three Scary Monsters Every time I see it, I imagine that she wrestled the bear and crab to death. You gotta fear someone like that, you know? Or maybe the crab is one of her minions, ready to do her bidding? Maybe this is a vision of the world if the Republicans win the election? OK, now I’m really freaking myself out here…
I’m supposed to tag lots of people now and make them do this too, but seriously, the picture of the crab is disturbing me to the point where I wish I hadn’t uploaded it now because I will totally have nightmares tonight, and will not be able to look at my blog again until this drops off the front page. So if you have a blog, consider yourself tagged…
Tagged I hate crabs, memes
So, a few weeks ago I became ever so slightly obsessed with a coat. As soon as I laid eyes on it I was all, “That coat will be mine!”, so what I did was, I did NOTHING. And it sold out. Everywhere. I know because I, er, emailed the manufacturer to beg them ask them if they’d be getting any more of them in.
“No coat!” said the manufacturer. “Cannot have! Sucks to be you! Ner-ner-ner-ner!”
Clearly, it was just not meant to be, so I decided to forget all about the coat, but before I did, I decided to search eBay obsessively for it, praying as I did so. And I found it! Only, not really, because the coat I found was one size bigger than the size I usually take.
“Will not buy,” I told myself firmly. “Stupid to even look at coat which will be too big. That way heartache lies. Will not even add to Watch List, so cannot be tempted!”
So I added The Coat to my Watch List.
A few days later, I checked up on it and lo! The Coat had now been bid up to an astronomical price – one that was, in fact, higher than it had sold for in the store. And sure, the coat was brand new with tags, but even so! Even so, people!
“Stupid!” I said smugly. “Idiots, bidding up Coat to crazy high price! Glad I’m having no part in that! Forgetting all about it now. Right now. Want, though!”
So I continued to watch the coat like a stalker.
“Buy coat,” said Terry. “I will give you difference between retail price and crazy inflated eBay price,” said Terry. “Then you will shut up about coat, OK?”
“Nooo!” said I. “Stupid to involve husband in buying of overpriced coat which, although crazy expensive is also investment, really. And actually, not that expensive, when you come to think of it. In fact, is still way less than most people pay for coats every day! OMG, is bargain!”
So, the coat arrived today. And yeah, it’s too big. And kind of completely different from how I was expecting it to look. I was thinking I could pad it out with jumpers, though, maybe carry Rubin around inside it in manner of kangaroo. Or I could just re-sell it. One thing is for sure, though: I am totally banning myself from buying things online now, because if I do decide to sell The Coat, it will be the eleventy-first thing I’ve had to return this week month alone on account of it not fitting right, and that? Is seriously starting to get on my nerves. I mean, I seem to spend all of my time trailing to the post office and I hate it at the post office.
[photo removed because I realised it's a full moon tonight and my skin is too thin to post photos of myself on the internet when there's a full moon - d'oh!]
Oh, and the “cautionary tale” referenced in the title? Avoid the internet when buying your clothes. Seriously.
Tagged coats, ebay, Outfits, Things I Bought
When I was a child, my parents would occasionally find themselves looking after two dogs. The dogs in question were brothers: Snoopy belonged to my mum’s parents and Rusty belonged to my dad’s parents, and if both sets of grandparents decided to take holidays at the same time, the dogs would come to us. This was, of course, a very great thrill for me, although not so much for my parents, who knew that every visit with the dogs would end with me writing this kind of thing in my News Book:
It didn’t scan too well, but the text reads:
Thursday 29th September
We are looking after to dogs for a week. One is called Snoppy and one is called Rusty. One day Rusty pumped. he go such a fright that he jumped up and ran away to the other side of the living room. When Rusty eats he gets his bowl all over the floor.
Once you know that “pumped” = “farted” you will perhaps be able to understand the trepidation with which my mum and dad approached each parents evening, knowing that this is the kind of thing I would’ve spent the term writing about.
Incidentally, Snoopy – sorry, “Snoppy” – wasn’t exactly Mr Perfectpants either:
Thursday 16th November
I went to my granns on Sunday my grann has got a dog cold snoopy he is funy he can oppen the living room door when I was at my granns he was bad he dun the toylet in the cichon I get my tea at my granns I have sanwiches and biscuts and we play with snoopy
What I don’t mention in the text, but what is painfully apparent from the accompanying image, is that Snoopy didn’t just do the toylet in the cichon, he clearly dun it on the washing machine. (Now we know where Rubin gets that from!) And that my mum apparently had to lie on her belly to clean it up. Also pictured: my “grann”, who, like me, had hair the approximate colour of a post box. She’s presumably cooking up the sanwiches and biscuts, while I just stand there thinking, “I’m SO going to write about this on the Internet one day!”
Here are the dogs in question, apparently being strangled by me, and both thinking, “Oh God, please don’t let her write about us in her News Book…”
 Rusty & Snoopy Rusty (he of the “pumping”) is on the left of the shot, with Snoopy (of “toylet” fame) on the right. What you can’t really see from this is that although Snoopy looks like the smaller of the two here, he was actually almost as tall as house, and could dance on his hind legs:
 Snoopy and me
And this was in addition to being able to “oppen” the living room door! God, I loved those dogs…
Also, I had three legs as a child. Deal with it.
Tagged childhood, Forever Amber: the early years, old diaries, rusty, snoopy
A couple of years ago, some cataclysmic event or other happened to my computer (clearly it was so cataclysmic all memory of it has been wiped from my mind, because I’m dammed if I can remember what it was) and I was forced to re-enter all of my Outlook contacts by hand.
Not long after this, I found out my mum was no longer receiving email from me. At all. Everyone else was receiving my messages just fine, and she was getting emails from everyone else but me (it was actually a pretty sweet deal for her, to be honest), so clearly we had a mystery on our hands.
And clearly I couldn’t be bothered investigating this mystery too deeply, or, indeed, at all, because rather than try to find out WHY this was happening, I chose to do absolutely nothing about it, and blithely continued firing off emails to my mother’s email address. This is why my childhood dream of being Nancy Drew when I grew up was never realised, obviously.
Now, my mum and I are close. I tell her things I probably wouldn’t tell other people. So it came as something of a horrible surprise when some guy in Nova Scotia contacted me to let me know he’d been receiving email from me for quite some now, and by the way, how was that rash coming along and had I ever located the source of that funny smell in the kitchen?
My mum’s name is Norma. My mystery correspondent was called Norman. You can see what I did there, can’t you?
Of course, after that, I totally learned my lesson and I was always really careful when sending email to make sure I was sending them to the right person, and not, say, sending them to be published on a national news website. Oh no, wait, my mistake: I didn’t learn my lesson at all, did I? Which is why, when my mum used the “send to a friend” function on the Sky News website last weekend to send me a link to a story, I just hit “reply”, without realising that my reply was going, not to my mum, but to the wesbite’s comment section.
Oops.
When I got a “Thank you for posting your comment on Sky News!” email a few minutes later I was, like, really confused and thought it must be some kind of mistake. And it was. But it was my mistake. D’oh.
I mean, it was an easy mistake to make. Anyone could’ve done it. Well, anyone with the brain of a gnat, obviously. And when I realised my mistake, I obviously learned my lesson for good this time, and made sure I never did the same thing ever again, didn’t I?
Er, no. Because Outlook automatically saves the email address of everyone I reply to into my address book (note to self: make it not do that any more), which now contains entries for ‘Mum’, ‘Mum – work’ and ‘Mum – Sky News’.
Guess which one I’ve been sending my emails to?
This is why, if you happen to have visited the Sky News website this week you may have noticed a long comment from me asking someone to pick me up a certain brand of face cream next time they happen to be in Tesco. You’d know it was me because, er, my full name would be on it, plus my email signature, containing links to all of my websites.
Um, sorry, Sky News! But if you could send me that face cream, that would be grand, thanks!
(Note: although I did get another “Thanks for posting a comment on our website!” email, I can’t seem to find the comment in question, so presumably someone at Sky removed it. And probably banned me, into the bargain. Which would be fair enough, under the circumstances…)
Tagged email fun, OMG internet drama!, Random Acts of Stupidity
This weekend marks the one year anniversary of Terry and I joining the gym. We decided to celebrate the occasion by forgetting to renew our membership, so that when we turned up for Body Pump on Monday morning and tried to swipe our membership cards, the turnstiles wouldn’t open for us and a recorded message started blasting through the entire gym saying, “INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! GUESS WHO HASN’T PAID THEIR MEMBERSHIP FEES?!”
Ok, maybe not that last bit, but a small queue did form behind us as we resolutely tried to force our way through the barriers, completely oblivious to the fact that the gym had PUT A BLOCK ON OUR CARDS. Even although the membership technically doesn’t run out until Friday. GOD. Luckily, Terry had brought our bank details with him, so we were able to sort things out and gain access to Body Pump, but the experience had clearly put me off my stride, because when we finally made it into the studio I managed to select The Step That Always Falls Apart As Soon As You Touch it, and it clattered to the floor in three pieces, making so much noise that everyone stopped what they were doing to look at me.
Then I picked it up and immediately dropped it again.
Then I picked it up a third time, swung round and… barrelled straight into the punch bag that hangs from the ceiling.
The next morning, when we arrived for Body Combat, we discovered that our cards were STILL BLOCKED, and riot police were preventing us from entering the gym. I wonder why?
Anyway, despite the fact that I drop the equipment on a regular basis and haven’t been able to use the pool since January, I’m actually feeling pretty pleased with myself that I lasted out the entire year, because let’s face it, I really didn’t expect to. At all. I mean, I was really just humouring Terry when I agreed to join up, and my intention was to only use the sauna and spa, and to make sure I didn’t break a sweat, ever. But somehow I managed to keep going, and am now actually going even more regularly than I did to start with, when I was still in hot pursuit of that free towel. Yay me!
And now I’m going to go eat cake…
Tagged the gym
I’d imagine most of the people reading this probably think I’ve only been using the written word as a means of embarrassing myself in public for as long as I’ve had access to the Internet.
How I wish that were true.
Actually, I’ve been embarrassing myself in public since I learned to write, and as proof of that, today I present to you Forever Amber: The Early Years. Yes, way back in the mists of time my school required its young students to keep what they called a “News Book” but which was actually just a personal journal – an early “blog”, if you will. Every few days we would write an entry in our “News Book/Early Blog” detailing what had been happening in our lives, and every single time I would write something so toe-curlingly embarrassing my parents would have to call the school and make excuses for me. I’m not joking.
Witness, for instance, an entry I wrote when I was six, concerning a movie my parents had borrowed from a friend of theirs which turned out to have a little “surprise” on the end of the tape (in those days we used video cassettes, as well as writing things on “paper” rather than on the Internet. Quaint!) …
The full text reads:
“Monday 9th May
I have got a video and I have seen star wars four times and I have seen Bugsy malone twelve and a half times Jennifer has taped Bugsy Malone aswell one night when my mum and dad were watching a film on the video when it was finished a blue moovy came on my mum and dad did not like it and my mum was frightened to get another tape ancase there was another blue moovy on it”
Just in case my parents’ apparent porn consumption* required further clarification, of course, I provided a handy illustration of the events outlined above, so the school would know whether or not they should be calling social services about this:
Luckily when the teacher asked me what a “blue moovy” was, I was quickly able to explain that it is a “moovy” in which everything is coloured blue. Obviously. And when my parents visited the school for parents evening that term, they were able to further clarify (at their own insistence, I have to add – the teacher by this point thought it was hilarious) that this “blue movie” had been as much of a surprise to them as it probably had been to my teacher, and that although the illustration suggests that I had been present during the screening of the infamous moovy (it almost feels like you’re there now, doesn’t it, so masterful was my command of the blue crayon…), I had, in fact, only found out about it because I overheard my mum telling my gran the story. Which I faithfully committed to writing in what I now think of as the very first version of this here blog, a document I spent most of Saturday re-reading and laughing until I cried.
In the years that followed, you’ll be glad to know that I learned how to punctuate a little better. I never did learn to stop embarrassing myself in public, though…
* My mum says she will ground me if I don’t explain that they had borrowed a film someone had recorded from the TV, had watched it, and when it ended, had discovered that it had apparently been recorded over the top of something a little more adult than the film they had borrowed. She would also probably like me to clarify that my parents DID try to teach me that there are some things in life you just don’t share, but given that I’ve already told the Internet all about my knickers and how I keep on dyeing them grey, it doesn’t look like that lesson sunk in particularly well…
Tagged childhood, Forever Amber: the early years, old diaries
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