—–Original Message—–
From: Someone who doesn’t know the difference between Amber and Joan Rivers 
Sent: 01 September 2010 02:20
To: Magic Amber
Subject: The fashion bullishit show 

I am whatching the Fashion Police “show”  I think you don’t have people have a knoledge, mrs plastic Surgery, Miss I was fat forever, and I don’t know Who’s the gay guy… What they talk and the criticism is sooo poor and low,I am sorry but can you get better people on you show?

Thank you ,

 Person Who Thinks Amber is Joan Rivers

I did have to laugh at “the criticism is sooo poor and low”, though, especially with THIS person’s piece of criticism being of such a high standard, and not at all “bullishit” (which is totally going to be my Word of the Week)! Oh, kettle, you’re sooo “poor and low”! Looks like kettle doesn’t have a “knoledge” of who is Magic Amber and who is Mrs Plastic Surgery and Miss I-Was-Fat-Forever. (Is it just me, or do these sound like characters you’d find at the top of a more adult version of The Faraway Tree?*)

(At least she said thank you, though. That was polite.)

Here is a handy clue for my correspondent, and all the other people who have been contacting me this week to complain about the plastic surgery etc:

NOT ME

Seriously, people.

(*There totally should be a version of The Faraway Tree for adults. Maybe I will write it, once I’m done with presenting US cable TV shows. Whoops…)

P.S. Speaking of weird email, Darika Aherns of Grapevine Consulting is currently running an excellent series on blogger outreach on her site: I answered a few questions about how PRs interact with bloggers here.

If you’ve been reading this blog since God was a teenager, however, you’ll know that I don’t tend to have much luck with running outdoors. Or even just being outdoors. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say my last experiment in this area was a complete and utter failure. You see, I was afeared. I was scared in that way that I think most women are when they find themselves out in the middle of nowhere, on their own and with no-one to hear them scream should something bad happen. “What if someone tries to kill me?” I would think, as I plodded up some lonely woodland trail or other. “I bet they wouldn’t find my body for YEARS out here!” And so the fear drove me away from those pretty woodland trails and towards the streets near my house, around which I would circle endlessly, passing the same, suburban scenes over and over and over again, seeing the same people multiple times, and getting the same looks of shocked disbelief from them every single time. (If someone’s running in this town, it normally means the police are after them…)

This got very boring, very quickly. Eventually, it got SO boring that I headed back to the gym, and the treadmill. At least people don’t stop what they’re doing to stare at you on the treadmill, you know? Well, not ALL the time, anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the treadmill. It’s my “thinking” time. And sometimes it’s my “not thinking” time, where I just put on some good music and let my mind go blank. Or blanker than usual. Other times, though, it’s my “Damn, but this is BORING!” time, and when that started to be the case more often than not, my mind once again turned towards the idea of running outdoors.

This time would be different, I thought. This time I would not be afraid. I would run where I wanted to run, and I would ignore the incredulous stares. It would be ace!

So, one fine day in July (it was literally the ONE fine day in July, seriously), I pulled on my running shoes and headed out into the great outdoors. What could go wrong, I thought? I had a phone with GPS on it. If I got lost, all I had to do was pull up a map, and I’d be found. (Also, it’s a PHONE. That you can use to speak to people on). And if someone tried to kill me, why, I was a RUNNER! I would RUN AWAY. Fast. Or I would poke them in the eye with my keys. It would be fine!

And actually, it was fine. Our town didn’t really exist before the 1960s. It was one of the “new towns” that were built in Scotland around then, and it has a very 1960s look to it: lots of concrete, buildings like boxes, strange bits of “street art” that have long-since become so thickly coated with graffiti that they’ve actually started to look better than they originally did, in that grim, urban kind of way. There is, however, also a river, and the area around the river is rather lovely. Lots of woodland trails that make you feel like you’re out in the country, even although you’re smack-dab in the centre of town, water rushing, birds chirping, flowers, er, flowering… I even saw a group of bunnies, people, and what could be better than that? (Oh, and every now and then, dotted in amongst the foliage, will be some graffiti-coated concrete edifice from the 60s. It’s awesome, seriously.)

Well, I finished my run, and I LOVED it. I actually don’t know this town very well, or not on foot, anyway. In the car, I could take you anywhere, but I’ve never really walked around it, which is a shame, because there are so many little interesting footpaths and trails that it was like a little adventure. I was converted. I was going to be running outside ALL THE TIME from now on, I decided. It would be my “thing”. I would be Fearless Adventurer Amber! I couldn’t wait!

A couple of days later, then, I set out again, with the adventuring. Once again, I headed to the river, and I was having a fine old time. So I ran on. And on. And on. It was great. The trees! The river! More bunnies! And then, in the middle of nowhere, under a random bridge… a tramp! Um, OK. I stopped at this point. The Fear returned. It seemed obvious to me that this man would try and kill me. I mean, why else would you be hanging out under a bridge in the middle of nowhere, if not to kill the next random runner girl that went past? Well, no problem, I thought, I would just double back a bit, and pick up the trail further along the river.

You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? And I’m glad YOU can, because I certainly couldn’t see where I going. Leaving my country trail, you see, I found myself in a network of streets. This town is full of such networks. You get into them, and you can wander around for weeks, until someone stumbles across your poor, emaciated form and takes you in. Ironically enough, I knew exactly where I was. It was a part of town I’ve been to many times in the car, and a couple of times on foot, although on those occasions I was with Terry, who is a native of the town and knows its many secrets.

So I knew where I was: I just didn’t know how to get from there to where I wanted to be. Not on foot, anyway. If I’d had my car there, I could have driven straight home. That route, however, would take me along busy main roads, and wasn’t one I really wanted to take on foot, so I turned and plunged back into the woods, determined to work it out. Well, I ran and I ran. I ran for about a mile, and then the path I was on returned me abruptly to the same street I’d started from, having apparently taken me in a large loop. I turned around and set off again, this time taking a different route… which took me to slightly further along the same street I started from. Hmm.

Once again, I set off into the woods. There are lots of different routes through these woods, I discovered. You set off down one track, only to find it splitting into three more tracks a little way along it, with no clue where each of them leads. If only I’d been prepared, like the Famous Five, and brought a ball of string to unwind as I went, I might have had even the slightest clue where I was going, but alas, no.  I knew I’d gone wrong again, when I encountered these:

What was disturbing about this was that I took this photo with my phone camera, which means I was just as close to those sheep as it looks. I was in a field with sheep! Sheep were in a field with me! This was ALL KINDS OF WRONG, and by now I was starting to get a little annoyed, mostly because it was getting close to lunchtime, and if I didn’t get home soon, I’d miss Neighbours. That right there tells you all you need to know, really, doesn’t it?

Well, I turned round and I retraced my weary steps. Arriving back, once again, at the street I’d started from, I encountered a woman in a car, who slowed down and asked me directions to the mall. “If I knew where I was, I might be able to tell you,” I said, which was actually a total LIE, because I am absolutely useless when it comes to giving people directions. I couldn’t direct you from my front door to the bottom of the driveway. I can’t read maps, either, which was why I now realised that when I’d come up with the whole “I can’t possibly get lost because I have Google maps on my phone” thing, I’d obviously been smoking crack:

The map, then, was no good to me, and time was a-wastin’, so I decided to admit defeat, call Terry and ask him to come and get me. This would be humiliating, sure: I mean, I was “lost” in a place I knew well, and which I could have driven home from in a matter of minutes, but I figured walking back along that route would be a) dangerous and b) time-consuming, so I sucked it up, got my phone back out…

… and it had no credit on it. OF COURSE NOT.

This has long been a bone of contention between Terry and I. When I got my iPhone, you see, Terry insisted we go for a Pay-as-You-Go tariff, his reasoning being that as I never, ever phone anyone anyway, it would be a waste of money to pay a monthly fee for it. “You could put £10 worth of credit on the phone and it would last you all year,” said Terry, little knowing that I would burn through three times that amount in the space of ten minutes at Gran Canaria airport just a few short months later.

We argued about this for a while. My fear was that, with Pay-as-You-Go, I would always run out of credit at the exact moment I most needed it. It was inevitable, I said. AND WHO WAS RIGHT ABOUT THAT, TERRY, HUH? HUH?

So I had no credit. I couldn’t phone Terry, or, indeed anyone else. And I had no money. Of COURSE NOT. Because when you go running in the middle of nowhere, you don’t take anything with you that could conceivably be of any use, do you?

So I sent Terry an email. The phone allowed me to do this, luckily. (Actually, the more I think about it, the more grateful I am that emergency calls are free on these things. Because if they weren’t, and I got into an ACTUAL emergency, I’d have to send the police an email saying, “Help! Am being attacked!” And, knowing me, because I really detest text speak, and can never bring myself to use it, I would type it all out totally correctly, and then spell-check it before hitting send.) Unluckily, however, Terry is not like me, and doesn’t spend all day hovering over his email like a giant bat. So it took him ten minutes to read my message, during which I had decided to embark upon the long road home, using the only route I knew would definitely take me there, and not send me back to the sheep.

Now, imagine you get an email from your wife saying that she is lost, and needs your help. What do you do? Do you call her, say? OF COURSE NOT. You simply send her an email in response, and you do this because YOU DO NOT KNOW HER PHONE NUMBER.

No, Terry and I do not know each other’s phone numbers. In fairness, we don’t really need to, because we have them programmed into our phones. This is of no use to Terry whatsoever, though, because when he got my email, his phone battery was dead. OF COURSE IT was. Terry’s phone is almost always dead, and when it’s not dead? It’s lost. He’s not big on the whole cellphone thing, either, you see.

Just to recap, then: my phone has no credit, his has no battery life. He doesn’t have my phone number, I don’t have a brain. WE FAIL. At everything. GOD.

To bring this lengthy story to an end, though, I emailed Terry my number, he called me, and a few minutes later, came to my rescue. And all the way home, he pointed out the routes I COULD have taken. Which is really the story of my life.

(I now take spare change with me when I go running. Terry keeps his phone charged, and I always have credit on my phone. Not all of these statements are true…)

When I stopped updating this site, back in June, I had actually intended the break to be a permanent one, for reasons that are too long, boring and painfully introspective to go into here.  And I will be honest: many of those reasons are still relevant, so I’m not sure how long this return to personal blogging  is going to last. I’m going to give it another go, though, mostly because my parents said they missed this site, and I have to keep them sweet or I’ll have absolutely no chance of finally getting that pony. So here I am, with a shiny new site design and everything. A fresh start!

I was going to make this post all about the various things I got up to during my summer of Not Blogging. But then I cast my mind back over the past few weeks and… well, I got nothing, folks. It’s been the rainiest, and most uneventful summer I can remember in years, and actually, it’s a good job I didn’t bother to blog about it, because that really wouldn’t have been fun for any of us. Let’s hope I lose something soon, or have my photo stolen by an Amber-impersonator or something, hmm?

Anyway, despite the uneventfulness of the summer, I seem to have lots and lots of posts lined up, so I hope you’ll stick around to read them – or at least to nod and smile, and pretend that you’ve been reading them.

Now, what have I missed?

(P.S. I do know that it’s not quite September yet, despite what it says on the banner. Like the boy scouts, I like to be prepared…)

We’re totally not going to tell you what it was though. Sorry.

Today I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I would start up a Tumblr. Well, all the cool kids were doing it, and you know, me, if there’s a bandwagon in town, I’ll… well, I’ll probably wait a year or so and then I’ll jump right on it. Slowly. (Also, it bothered me that there was a blogging platform I hadn’t used. )

So I got me a Tumblr. Five minutes after I published my first post, I got my first spam comment.

Seven minutes after I published my first post, I got my first piece of personal abuse, from someone telling me I “look so much better when I don’t show my face.”

I deleted the Tumblr. I figure people have enough ways to abuse me on the Internet already.

(Seriously, though, maybe I was just unlucky, but worst blogging experience ever. I’d been wondering for ages why it was so popular and… I’m still wondering. Anyone?)

p.s. Nominate  TheFashionPolice.net in the Cosmo Blog Awards? Or Shoeperwoman.com? Or hey-dollface.com? Pretty please?

Yes, folks, it’s true! The least popular section of my blog ever is back by… well. I was going to say “by popular demand”, but that would be an exaggeration too far, even for me. But! It is true to say that some a few two of you requested to see some more of my holiday photos, so the Friday Photo limps from the ashes! (“GOOD GRIEF, don’t encourage her!” I hear the rest of you cry. “Or she’ll still be talking about this freaking holiday at Christmas.” And you know what? I probably will.)

This is probably my favourite photo of the whole trip. It’s Clearwater beach at sunset, photographed by Terry, using our swish new camera, which was purchased shortly before we left. Did I mention we purchased a swish new camera shortly before we left? Well, we did. It is technically “my” camera, and was really bought for “me” to take blog photos with (not for this blog! Don’t worry!), but I think I took maybe five shots with it in three weeks, because Terry guarded it like a jealous lover, carrying it with him at all times, and barking instructions at the rest of us, like a Nikon-wielding Sergeant Major. In most of the photos that resulted from the holiday, we may look like we’re smiling, but our faces are actually just frozen in fear as we stand there with Terry shouting, “AMBER! Take that look off your face! NORMA! Hold your leg at a 32 degree angle to your body! NO! That’s thirty ONE degrees! That’s spoiled it completely, we’ll have to start again: PLACES, EVERYONE!”

I swear I’m not exaggerating about this. On one particularly memorable occasion, we were having dinner when Terry, attempting to take a photo of all four of us, turned to me and barked, “AMBER! Put your head in the middle of the table!” And he couldn’t understand why my parents and I thought that was funny. I mean, I know it might seem like my head screws right off, but it obviously doesn’t. Because if it did, I’d probably have left it at Sanford airport by now, or on top of the car roof, or some such place.

You know what? I’ve come this far, so I may as well just show you the photo of my head in the middle of the table, no? Here it is:

Terry was NOT happy with this, let me tell you. For, in attempting to follow his instructions and place my head in the middle of the table, I succeeded only in making myself look like a giant growth sprouting out of the side of his head. Athena and Zeus, or just Terry and his Terrible Twin? You decide.

I can’t even BEGIN to tell you the grief my dad got over this attempt at a self-timed shot, which he failed to take his designated place for at the allotted time:

You can tell by my mum’s face and Terry’s fixed grin that we all knew what was going to happen here, can’t you? As punishment, Terry made my dad stand a little away from the rest of us for the remainder of the night:

He had to sit on the Naughty Step when he got home, too. He won’t be making that mistake again in a hurry.

But I digress. I was going to talk about Clearwater and its beautiful sunset, which is the subject of the first photo (and also my desktop wallpaper, replacing Microsoft’s seminal ‘Gigantic Green Leaf’). It was gorgeous. The light had this amazing quality to it, which made everything look so soft and dreamlike. The huge pink building you can see is the hotel we had dinner in that night, and the photo was taken from the pier, which we walked to the end of to watch the sun sink into the sea. Not long after this had happened (and mighty fine it was, too), I was watching the man next to me fishing from the end of the pier, when he reeled in his line, and do you know what was on the end of it?

A GIANT CRAB WAS ON THE END OF IT.

Yes, I came face to face with my old nemesis on Clearwater Pier. Or at least, I would have come face to face with my old nemesis if it wasn’t for the fact that as soon as I saw its evil and grotesque form break the surface of the water and come swinging towards land, I got the hell outta dodge, as fast as my little legs could carry me.

It didn’t spoil the sunset. But I was glad I’d seen it after I’d been in the water rather than before…

(I am never so happy as I am when I’m on holiday…)

Whoops, by going on holiday, I’ve gone and lost all my readers again. For those of you still grimly hanging on in there a) thank you! and b) I’m just popping in to say that I took pity on you, sucked it up and coughed up the money to renew my Flickr Pro account, so I could post all one million and twelvty of my holiday photos over there, rather than forcing you all to sit through them here, like one of those boring relatives who drinks all your tea and talks for hours about their awesome! vacation! I would never do that, obviously. I’d drink all of your wine instead…

Anyway, since I’ve been home, absolutely nothing has happened. Seriously, nothing. I HATE being home. On Sunday night, I woke up in an absolute panic, totally unable to work out where I was, and convinced that the mirrored wardrobe doors (I HATE mirrored wardrobe doors) in front of me were actually windows. I was terrified. And then, when I finally realised that I was, in fact, in my own bed, in my own home? I was gutted.

(Then last night? Last night Terry woke up to find me standing at the bottom of the bed, absolutely hysterical, and screaming at him to GET OUT OF BED NOW BECAUSE OMG THERE IS TOTALLY A CRAB IN THERE!” The calmer he remained, the more hysterical I became (I mean, for God’s sake, CRAB! In the BED!), until he finally had to force me to sit down (me making “crab eyes” at the corner of the bed the whole time, and repeat veeeerrryyy sssllooowwwllly that there was. no. crab. in. the. bed. And I didn’t believe him, so I went to take refuge in the bathroom, and it was only once I got there, with the light switched on, that I started to think that hey, maybe that crab I saw wasn’t actually real. I still checked for it when I got back to bed though.)

Anyway, the photos are here. If you make it through them all, congratulations, you have better stamina than me. I’m pretty sure there are shots there that I even I couldn’t be bothered looking at. Also, someone found my blog today after searching for “Forever Amber’s shoes” so rather than disappoint that person and risk turning away a potential reader (HI! Come in! Pull up a chair! Would you like to see my holiday snaps?), here are the shoes I bought on my second-last day in Florida:

Vivienne Westwood for Melissa. On sale. Want them in every colour now.

(I’ve just realised that that person may have been searching for shoes belonging to the heroine of the BOOK Forever Amber. In which case, this will have been a crushing disappointment, for sure…)

P.S. My cold is a little better, but the coughing would be keeping me awake at night if I wasn’t still on American time, and lying awake all night anyway, watching for CRABS.

P.P.S. Sanford Airport never replied to my email about my jacket. Curses.

Also lost: almost all of the video Terry took of our vacation, which he downloaded onto my laptop, and which my laptop proceeded to EAT FOR DINNER. Yeah. (Yes, we’ve tried every bit of recovery software known to man. No, it didn’t really work, although we did manage to recover about 60% of the footage, which I shall no doubt bore you with later.)

So, I’m home. I haven’t slept since Friday night, but I don’t feel remotely tired so I’ve just been outside and weeded the garden, which had returned to the wild during our absence, while Terry mowed the lawn. As I sat there, tugging up weeds (or possibly flowers: you never really know with me) with my bare hands, a plane crossed the sky above us, and I sat back and watched it. “Isn’t it strange to think,” I said to Terry, “that just a few hours ago we were up there in the sky, and a few hours before that we were all the way across the Atlantic? And now here we are, pulling up weeds in our excuse for a garden.”

It IS weird. Every time I take a flight, in fact, it reminds me of how small the world really is. It’s just not small enough, though, unfortunately, and sadly for me, the post-holiday blues have kicked in with a vengeance. From the moment I got up on Saturday morning and started systematically erasing all evidence of my existence from our rented house, to the sad opening of my suitcase on the wrong side of the Atlantic, every unpacked item provoking a new memory (“Last time I wore this, we went…” “Oh, this is what I wore that time we…”), I have felt like crying. God, aren’t first world problems a bitch?

Anyway. I should go and take some cold remedy and get some sleep. Hopefully I’ll be feeling much better in the morning…

I’ve actually already posted some of these over at Shoeperwoman, but on the off-chance that there’s anyone still reading over here, too, here are some photos from our High Tea at the Grand Floridian, which is something I highly recommend doing if you ever find yourself in this part of the world…

Uh-oh.

Minutes after buying these, I tried to buy a cheap dress in Forever 21, and … my debit card got rejected. Turns out my bank now require me to let them know where I am at all times, and if I don’t, they will block my card when I try to buy something. (It’s either that or Terry has paid them to just block the card anyway…) They hadn’t bothered to tell me this, though, and in order for me to find out about it I had to:

1. Drive 5 miles up the highway, because there’s no cellphone reception in the house, and the phone there doesn’t allow you to make international calls, so you have to drive around until you can get a signal.

2. Drive back again to collect Terry’s phone, because my phone burned through 15 minutes worth of credit in the space of a 3 minute phone call. Value for money!

3. Discover that Terry’s phone isn’t working. Borrow my mum’s phone instead.

4. Drive back up the highway to a random parking lot.

5. Spend a further £7 in phonecalls.

6. Hope that the block has been lifted.

7. Whine a lot.

In conclusion: I can shop at Neiman Marcus, but get rejected in F21. Also, never use an iPhone to make international calls, kids…

In better news, we’re still having an amazing time, and now I’m going to bombard you with photos of it. You’re welcome!

(Should’ve asked him to sort out the cellphone coverage in our area…)

Who knew Obama had such a large head? Or looked so much like the George Bush statue they USED to have here? This was outside the Hall of Presidents. We didn’t go in, because we’ve seen it before, and there’s only so many times you can look at a bunch of animatronic presidents. Last time, of course, I didn’t actually realise they WERE animatronics until Bill Clinton suddenly winked at me. True story…

I did have my photo taken with Fake Rushmore, though:

We were there to climb the Citrus Tower next door, and by “climb”, I mean, “take the elevator”, obviously:

Here’s the thing about that, though: I’m terrified of heights. I discovered this fact many years ago, when I went to the top of the Eiffel Tower, strode confidently out onto the landing, and then ran screaming back to the centre of the tower, convinced it was about to fall over, and that the only thing that would stop that happening would be me pressing all of my weight against the middle of the structure. I spent the next terrifying 20 minutes alternating between worrying that I was going to pass out and HOPING I’d pass out, so they could carry me down without me knowing about it. And I had almost exactly the same experience at the Citrus Tower, only not quite as bad, because it’s not as tall:

You think I’m just posing here, don’t you? I’m not: I’m HOLDING IT UP. Every time I stepped away from the centre, I felt dizzy. Fun times!

In this one, Terry is both holding ME up, and forcibly restraining me from running back to the safety of my pillar.

Phew.

Next we went to Mount Dora, which, despite the name, has no mountains. After the Citrus Tower, this was a Very Good Thing.

Totally not my bicycle.

OMG, TRAIN!

“I won’t mention the size of your head if you don’t tell anyone about how I flashed everyone on the beach at Sarasota yesterday after the strap of my bikini snapped, deal?”

So, yesterday, as you’ll have gathered, we spent the day in Palm Beach, with a short visit to Boca Raton. For some reason, every time I go to south Florida, it pours with rain, and this was no exception. Here’s what I wore:

OMG NO PANTS!

(I was actually wearing shorts, by the way. I just look like I wasn’t, which possibly accounts for the weird looks I kept getting.)

That woman you can see coming up behind me? Was super-stylish, and kept following me around, purely to make me look like even more of a fool, I’m sure. Actually, ALL of the women in Palm Beach were super-stylish, and, interetsingly enough, were all dressed in black, with spindly high heels. This amused me, because last year when I was here I posted a photo of myself in a navy dress, and someone left a snarky comment saying “OMG, BLACK? In FLORIDA? How shocking.” And now every time I come out of my room dressed in black or navy, my family all chorus “BLACK? In FLORIDA?” (Even when we’re in Scotland.) Black was pretty much de rigeur down in Boca and Palm Beach, though, so I’m glad Terry let me borrow his classy black poncho thing.

We’d booked onto a Palm Beach tour, on an amphibious bus, which takes you through the town then plunges into the water of the intracoastal and takes you past the homes of people like Celine Dion and the guy who owns Walgreens, etc. I was almost sick with envy over the side of the bus/boat (Buboat?). As I say, it POURED relentlessly the whole time we were doing this, and great waves of water kept rolling off the roof and onto the people at the back of the boat (luckily we were at the front), but hey, it was all strangely atmospheric, and we still managed to have an amazing time. Plus, we have a great excuse to go back and see it in the sunshine.

Afterwards, we visited Worth Avenue, which is basically Palm Beach’s version of Rodeo Drive. Naturally, I continued to wear a black plastic bag, just to freak out all the shop assistants:

I also returned to the Mother Ship:

Yes, they had a sale. No, I didn’t buy anything, despite being sorely tempted. I suspect I will rectify that soon, though…

Aaaand, looking back at my camera, that seems to be pretty much all I have from Palm Beach, so here’s what we did for the rest of the week:

I bought shoes.

I bought more shoes.

Um, yeah.

I wore NAVY. In FLORIDA. I mean, can you EVEN?

I wrote my name in lights…

…and pretended to be in The Beatles, except with one member missing.

Here’s the missing Beatle:

And now the sun is shining again, so I’m off to do this:

Only with less posing and more, well, snoring probably. See you all soon!