This weekend, something went bump in the night. Literally, I mean.
It was Sunday night/Monday morning. We’d been in bed for maybe half an hour – long enough to have completed the ritual of Rubin padding up to the bedroom door and being sent back to his own bed approximately eleventy-one times, anyway – when suddenly there was a loud BANG from downstairs.
The noise had definitely come from inside the house: there was no possibility of it having been something out in the street, say, and it was loud enough to send Rubin into a frenzy of barking, and make Terry and I sit bolt upright and stare at each other, each of us wondering who had left the front door open THIS time, and whether or not we were YET AGAIN in danger of being murdered in our beds.
Well, once again, Terry drew the short straw (because yeah, right, like I’d venture downstairs in the middle of the night to investigate a mysterious noise. I may like to THINK I’m Nancy Drew, but actually, I’m more like Scooby Doo in these situations, if I’m completely honest…) threw on his dressing gown and headed downstairs, and ONCE AGAIN I lay in bed, shivering slightly and imagining all kinds of horrible endings to this particular story.
Terry, meanwhile, got to the bottom of the stairs, stepped into the living room, and, as if on cue…
THE TV SUDDENLY SWITCHED ITSELF ON. YES, JUST LIKE IN THE RING!
I swear I’m not making this up.
Of course, Terry didn’t actually TELL me this had happened until the next morning. “I thought it might freak you out,” he said casually, as if it was totally no biggie, and TVs are just ALWAYS switching themselves on in the middle of the night, following a mysterious banging sound. And he was right about that, too: if I’d known that the mysterious BANG had been immediately followed by a mysterious switching-on-of-the-TV, I would instantly have deduced that, why, we were obviously in the middle of a horror movie! And I would have proceeded straight the basement, just like a good horror movie heroine who gets killed. OK, I wouldn’t have: and not just because we don’t got no basement. It’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have gotten much sleep, though, and the reason I know that is because I didn’t get much sleep the NEXT night, on account of how I was lying awake the whole time, listening for mysterious banging noises.
Oh, and about that: Terry didn’t find anything at all to explain the bang during his nighttime tour of the house. He obviously wasn’t looking very closely, though, because when I went down to make coffee the next morning, I walked into the kitchen, and saw the two canvas prints which are currently propped up against one of the walls, both lying face down on the worktop, as if they had offended some ghostly hand and been thrown down there. (Which I bet they did, seriously.) This, I can only assume, had been what we’d heard the night before.
We have no explanation for this occurrence, or the switching on of the TV, other than that there is totally a ghostly presence in our house now, and it REALLY dislikes those prints. And possibly wanted to catch up on its soap operas, or something.
My money is on it being the ghost of our old friend NIGEL. And folks? He’s ANGRY.
(Image has nothing to do with post. Is cute, though, no?)
Tagged International Man of Mystery
Remember Nigel, the International Man of Mystery next door?
No, of course you don’t: it’s now been almost six years (SIX! YEARS!) since Nigel was last sighted, and almost two since I last wrote speculatively about the possibility of him being either a spy or a serial killer, so I doubt I have any readers left from Those Days. (“This was all fields! And we had to walk uphill in the snow, both ways! And we could go to bed and leave our door open… oh, we still do that, don’t we?”) It’s OK, though, because here is the series of deeply exciting and not-at-all-hysterical posts I wrote on the subject, you’re welcome:
An Introduction to Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door
Nigel is Sighted
Nigel Update
Nigel, the International Man of Mystery in my Attic
Nigel Alert!
Here Come the Men in Black
It’s OK, I’ll wait here while you read them.
You’re done? You’re sure? I will ask questions, you know. OK, well, anyway…
Today, people, I bring you A NIGEL UPDATE. And, actually, I’ve just realised that it’s almost exactly the same as the LAST Nigel update I brought you, so now I feel kind of stupid. Here is a completely unrelated photo I took of the Magic Garden Centre yesterday to distract you from the fact that I’m about to tell you the same thing twice. I said, I’m about to tell you the same thing twice:
I thought it looked a bit like some weird, alien culture attacking earth, no?
What was I talking about? Oh yeah: Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door.
So, anyway, this morning there was a knock on the door (which was closed AND locked at the time, go us!), and for once it wasn’t the police. (Yeah, still not over that, obviously…) In fact, it was a Mysterious Stranger in a suit, with a long black overcoat and a leather folio thing full of official looking papers. I mean, I’m assuming they were official looking papers, here: I witnessed this man from behind the closed blinds in the bedroom window, so I didn’t actually get a close look at the papers. They could’ve been photos of shoes, for all I know. That’s what I would carry around in a posh folio thing, anyway. Let’s pretend they were official papers, though. And that the man was from MI5. Trust me, it will make this post much more interesting.
(Let’s also pretend I was wearing this dress at the time:
Dress of My Dreams
It won’t make the story any more interesting, unfortunately, but it WILL give me an excuse to post a photo of that dress, and God knows, I’ve been looking for one.)
Terry answered the door.
“The eagle flies at midnight!” said the man. OK, he didn’t. But he did start asking Terry a whole lot of questions about Nigel. Where is he? When was he last seen? Where does he work? Who is he REALLY? That kind of thing. All of the questions we ask ourselves about Nigel, really.
“Look,” said Terry, “If I knew all of this, I’d be a happy man, because then my wife would stop bugging me about this.” Yeah, no, he didn’t. Terry did, however, ask the man who HE was, and what he needed to know all of this for, at which point the mysterious stranger deftly changed the subject, and, without actually answering Terry, started repeating his “Where is he, have you seen him?” questions. Probably to see if he could catch Terry out, I would imagine. They do that.
(WHO ARE THEY?)
After that, the man went outside and had a good look around the property, looking exactly like a spy. Like, EXACTLY. And afterwards, Terry came upstairs and said to me, “Did you get a photo of him?” And I said, “GOOD GOD, MAN, WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR? It’s not like I’m going to Instagram the Mysterious Stranger at the door, am I? They’d probably cut off my hands for that, or something!”
(NO, SERIOUSLY, WHO ARE THEY?)
And then Terry looked at me, like, “Well, you Instagram everything else, so…”
Conclusion: er, there isn’t one, really. It’ll be six years this summer since we last saw him. The mystery continues…
Tagged International Man of Mystery
(Coat, H&M; skirt, Topshop; sweater, Primark (c/o my parents); boots, Sam Edelman; watch Michael Kors (both c/o Shopbop))
On Friday 13th, I was woken in the early hours of the morning by the sound of Rubin barking.
I opened one eye and looked around the room. Yup – pitch dark. It was either very, very late, or very, very early, and neither one of those times was one I wanted to be awake in, so I closed my eyes again and hoped Terry would get up to deal with whatever it was that was going down. And Terry obviously thought the same thing, so we both lay there for a few seconds in the dark, playing “Rubin Chicken”: the game in which we both pretend to be asleep and wait to see who will break first and get up.
(I am THE CHAMPION of Rubin Chicken, by the way. UNDEFEATED.)
Rubin barked again.
“SHUT UP RUBIN!” Terry and I yelled, almost simultaneously. (Whoops: cover blown!)
But Rubin did not shut up. In fact, he took the hysterical barking up a notch, and as I lay there and listened to him, I realised that this was not his usual, tentative, “Oh, hai! I can come into your bed, plz?” bark. It wasn’t even his slightly sheepish, “Dudes, I need to gooooo…” bark. Nope, this was his “OMFG, SOMEONE IS BREAKING INTO THE HOUSE AND WE ARE ALL ABOUT TO BE MURDERED IN OUR BEDS, EXCEPT NOT ME, BECAUSE I’M UP, BARKING!” bark. Oh, crap.
Terry realised this at the same time I did, so he threw back the covers and dashed out of the room, and as he opened the bedroom door, a second realisation hit me: Rubin was not barking from his usual night-time location, which is, for reasons too complex and yet boring to go into here, the hall outside our room. No, Rubin was barking from DOWNSTAIRS somewhere.
Now, it’s not totally unknown for Rubin to be downstairs when he’s not supposed to be. A few years ago, Terry constructed a low barrier (We refer to it as “The Perimeter”, as in “Quick: set up a perimeter - they’re not going anywhere!”) to keep him confined to the hallway when we’re out, but Rubin has recently learned that he can push the perimeter over if he really wants to, so occasionally we will return from wherever we’ve been and he’ll meet us at the front door, all, “Hai! Come on in, take your coats off, let me show you around!” He doesn’t normally do this during the night, though, because, well, he’s asleep, so for him to be barking his “INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!” bark, downstairs, in the wee small hours, made me wonder if there actually WAS an intruder, as opposed to, you know, someone sneezing in the next street, or a bird landing on the lawn, or one of the other non-events that tend to make Rubin lose his mind.
This suspicion seemed to be confirmed when, even after Terry had thundered downstairs to join him, Rubin’s barking continued at the same, hysterical pitch. What the hell was going on down there, I wondered? Why hadn’t Terry done something to shut Rubin up? Was he just standing there, watching him bark crazily, or… or had he run downstairs, been instantly killed by the INTRUDER, and now Rubin was barking at Terry’s prone body, while said INTRUDER crept slowly up the stairs towards me?
This seemed like the only possible explanation for Terry’s silence and Rubin’s continued barking, so I got shakily out of bed, and as I did so, I happened to find myself facing the bedroom window. The bedroom window which looks out onto our driveway. Our driveway which now had a POLICE CAR sitting at the bottom of it.
OH. MY. GOD.
You know how people say, “My legs turned to jelly?” Turns out that’s actually a THING. My legs almost gave way under me as I realised that this was IT: this was that moment I’ve been expecting all my life – the one where there’s a knock on the door on the middle of the night, and the police are standing there looking solemn, and saying, “You might want to sit down, ma’am, I’m afraid we have some bad news…” And in that instant, your whole life shatters, and nothing is ever the same again. It happens in the early hours of the morning of Friday the 13th, 2012, and even as you make your way along the hall, on legs that feel like they don’t belong to you anymore, somehow remembering to grab your dressing gown from the bedroom floor as you pass, because you figure you’ll want to be at least semi-clothed for whatever you’re about to be faced with, your mind is screaming REWIND, REWIND, and you’re thinking, “NONONO, I don’t want to do this. I was just lying there, sleeping. I was going to get up and go for a run, and do my work, and later maybe watch a movie and have a glass of wine. I don’t want to do THIS instead,” and you don’t even know what THIS is, but you know it’s going to be horrendously, unspeakably awful, because the police don’t knock on your door in the middle of the night for nothing, do they?
Halfway down the stairs, I paused. The living room was empty. Rubin was still barking at the door, and from the porch I could hear the low murmur of voices as Terry spoke to the police. I could just sit here, on the stairs, I thought. I could just sit here and wait, and delay the inevitable. And I thought, who is it? What has happened, and to who? And then I didn’t think any more, I just got up and I walked into the living room, picking up Rubin, and hearing Terry give a small laugh in the porch, and…
WAIT, WHAT?
A laugh? He’s laughing at something? The world isn’t ending?
And then I sank down onto the rug, and I sat there and I waited.
A few seconds later, the door opened and Terry walked into the living room. “Oh, hi!” he said brightly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for us to be meeting in the darkened living room at this time of the morning, him fresh from a brief doorstep interview with the police.
“WELL?” I hissed. ”What THE HELL?”
“Oh, that,” said Terry nonchalantly. “Someone called them, apparently. It seems that our front door was wide open, so they had to come round and check everything was OK.”
And that, my friends, is why I began Friday the thirteenth, 2012, with one of the biggest frights of my life. Because Terry didn’t close the front door when he took the rubbish out last night, and our neighbour noticed and called the police, worried that we’d been murdered in our beds or something. And… let’s just say there wasn’t any sleep for either of us after that. I may actually never sleep again, because ever since that moment when I saw the police car parked at the end of the drive, my mind has kept circling back to What if? What if they really HAD been knocking on the door with some unthinkably awful news? And then I wouldn’t be sitting here, drinking coffee and looking at shoes on the internet, while I think about maybe taking a walk later with the dog.
I still feel like that moment is coming for me. But not today.
(And I’ll be checking the door myself from now on. Also: WINE. Bring it.)
P.S. I have to admit that, once I realised nothing awful had happened, I got a bit excited thinking it might be something to do with Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door (Now into Year 5 of his unexplained absence). Alas, that particular mystery remains unsolved…
(Dress, River Island; shoes, Ted Baker, c/o Sarenza)
Happy New Year, everyone!
I know I’m a little late to the party with my New Year post, but that’s actually quite fitting, as I was almost late to the ACTUAL party, too, having:
a) Managed to use rollers in such a way that my fringe ended up perpendicular to my head, and had to be held down with bobby pins.
b) Realised that I’d forgotten my phone, and that we would have to return to the house for it, because, OMG, how would the Internet manage without me tweeting on it, and posting Instagram photos of my shoes all night?
c) Sent Terry back into the house for said phone, only to realise after he’d been searching the house for it for five minutes that, whoops, it had been in my handbag all along! Sorry, Terry! (And then I didn’t tweet or Instagram once, all night. Huh.)
(Somehow in all of this, I managed to persuade the long-suffering Terry to snap these photos, too, although he had to take them in about 30-seconds flat, in a process which felt a lot like having a mugshot taken, not that I would know. If I ever DO have my mugshot taken, though, I fully expect I will try to put my hand on my hip and give a big smile…)
We spent the evening with both of our families, and a couple of friends, at a local restaurant which was hosting a New Yea’rs eve dinner/party. As some of you may recall, I absolutely loathe New Year, as I loathe any kind of reminder that hey, time’s a-wastin’! Not getting any younger! Or, as my mother-in-law would say, “You never know when you’re a-gonna go!” But if there is a good way to celebrate such a mournful (to me) occasion, then I guess surrounded by the people you love is the way to do it. And it definitely beats all of those years spent at home, watching the Edinburgh castle piper play his sad lament as the clock strikes midnight. It also beats all of those years spent looking at the clock and going, “Is that it? Has it happened yet? Do you think we’ve missed it?” In other words: a good time was had by all. Even me.
As for 2012, I know it’s customary for bloggers at this point to provide a perky list of resolutions, but because I don’t like to set myself up for failure, I haven’t made any, other than my usual two:
1. Remain alive
2. Buy shoes
I will definitely manage at least one of these.
(Dress, Closet; shoes, Kurt Geiger)
Happy Christmas, everyone! War is over! Oh no, wait, wrong song…
This year I was dreaming of a White Christmas, and by that I mean “a white dress”. Well, I wouldn’t have been talking about snow, would I?
They say you should never wear white after Labor Day, but I generally just ignore Them, and this was no exception. My choice of attire did cause some consternation amongst my parents and Terry, who couldn’t understand why I would choose to wear something I had absolutely NO CHANCE of not spilling red wine/ketchup/coffee/anything else I touched on, but actually, I surprised everyone (including myself) by managing to keep the dress clean all day, partly because when we sat down to dinner, Terry and my mum draped me in lots of different aprons and tea towels and various other garments, so the dress stayed white. It’s probably going to be my biggest achievement of 2011, to be honest: the family were all so proud!
Anyway, we had a fabulous Christmas, and here’s what it looked like:
I didn’t photograph the food other than the sorbet and, well, the wine, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it existed, although not for long, because my mum and dad really excelled themselves this year and Terry and I lost no time in clearing our plates.
Actually, I tell a lie: I did photograph the dessert, which was lovingly made by my mum, who also put together the “heart” theme on the table:
My mum needs to go into party planning, seriously. Both of myselves agree:
Instead of a Christmas tree, this year my mum created a “Random Tree”: a branch from the garden painted white, hung with fairy lights, and then festooned with little “random” messages which we all wrote in the run up to Christmas and read out on Christmas Day. (It was going to be a wishing tree, but we thought it might be more amusing to allow people to just write whatever took their fancy, and also, I don’t think anyone wanted to listen to me read out what would essentially be the entire Christian Louboutin back catalogue…). It was a really cool idea, so we’re going to do it next year, too…
As for Rubin:
Don’t be fooled (by the dogs that he got/he’s still, he’s still Rubin from the block…): he is posing here only very grudgingly. He was much more interested in the (edible) contents of the Christmas stockings my parents and his Auntie Lila provided, so Sam the Dog was all but forgotten. Poor Sam.
And that was Christmas day! At some point in the food fest, we managed to fit in a visit to Terry’s family, who we’ve also been spending time with over the past couple of days: two of Terry’s brothers and their families are in town, so it’s been great to catch up with everyone, and we still have lots more planned, so there may be large gaps between blog posts. Then again, there might not be, so don’t go getting your hopes up.
Hope everyone’s having a great holiday!
(P.S. My blog is taking comments hostage again, and we’ve no idea why… if yours doesn’t appear right away, don’t worry, you haven’t been blacklisted or anything – it’s just the blog behaving badly, and your comment will be published as soon as I’m online!)
(Skirt, ASOS; Shoes, Giuseppe Zanotti c/o Shopbop; top, ancient, no idea)
Wow, ever since I realised I have nothing to post about here any more, I’ve been posting a LOT, huh? I bet you’re all thinking, “God, I hope Amber’s going somewhere without Internet access for Christmas, because that’s probably the only thing that will shut her up now…”
Well, I AM heading to my parents’ place for Christmas (they DO have Internet access, of course, but I promise not to abuse it), so this is my official “Goodbye, farewell, have a Happy Christmas!” message. To help me spread tidings of comfort and joy, here is a photo of Rubin in a holiday sweater:
Don’t worry, he only had to wear it for long enough to get the photo. And he was almost hysterically excited by it, for some reason. Maybe he secretly wishes he was a personal style blogger?
Or, you know, maybe not.
(He’s been bathed and groomed since this was taken, by the way. Winter is a hard time for him – and by “him” I mean “us” – because every time he goes outside, he returns looking like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. Sometimes I think he probably HAS…)
Here is what he’s getting for Christmas, and seriously, you guys, DON’T TELL HIM:
It was labelled “Sam the Dog”, so it will be one of the few toys Rubin owns which has a REAL name, and isn’t called something like “Ponky” or “Bluddy” or whatever. I cannot WAIT to see his face when he opens this on Christmas day. He’ll either be SUPER DUPER EXCITED by it, or he’ll completely ignore it in favour of ripping the wrapping paper it came in to shreds. Maybe both, actually.
Anyway, that’s more than enough from me for now: I hope you all have a very happy holiday, and that you, too, get something as exciting as a SAMTHEDOG under your tree!
Happy Christmas!
DRESSEMBER, Day 7
Dress, Zara; scarf, River Island; cardigan, Topshop; bag, Marc by Marc Jacobs (c/o Shopbop); shoes, New Look
OK, so, after the blatant cheatiness of my first Dressember post, and the lateness of my second, you will no doubt be pleased – and by “pleased” I mean “completely indifferent” – to know that I AM actually wearing this dress today. Right now, in fact, as I type this. Yes, I am liveblogging my outfit. It’s almost like you’re right here with me, isn’t it? It doesn’t get more thrilling than this, folks, let me tell you.
(No, really, I’m being serious: it LITERALLY doesn’t get any more thrilling. Some days I wear green dresses, some days I wear black ones. That’s it. GOD.)
This dress is from Zara, which is also known in my family as “Amber’s Wardrobe”.
“I wish I had a walk-in closet,” I whined to my mum, earlier this year.
“You do,” she said. “It’s called ‘Zara’”. And it kind of is. Let’s just say that every night when Terry goes to bed, he says a small prayer of thanks that there isn’t a Zara in our town. And he isn’t even religious.
 (Weird photo, included just to try to show the sparkliness of the cardigan…)
Anyway, I bought this dress while we were on holiday in California this year. Some people like to bring back real souvenirs from their trips, like, seashells, and local produce and… I have no idea, actually. Cheese? Wine? Wine and cheese? Er, tea towels? (We sometimes bring back tea towels emblazoned with a crappy picture of the place we’ve visited, for our parents. It’s a kind of running joke. We like watching their faces as they struggle to look thrilled by a tea towel which we bought as part of a “five for three euros” deal or something.)
Me, though, I like to treat clothes and shoes as my souvenirs. They’re better than seashells and stuff, because:
a) You can’t actually wear seashells. Unless you are Lady Gaga, in which case you probably can. And will.
and
b) They are just as evocative.
Every time I wear this dress, for instance, I remember the day I bought it, in Santa Monica. In fact, here I am, just a few minutes after the purchase was made, with the Zara bag right beside me, and an expression of pure bliss, which has nothing to do with the mojito in front of me, and is ALL ABOUT THE DRESS.
(Photo by my dad, who has a rare talent of capturing me in really awkward moments.)
(And yes, I wore a GREEN DRESS that day, GOD. You can already see how this Dressember business is going to pan out, can’t you?)
So now, as well as getting to be here with me while I wear it, it’s like you were also there when I bought it, no? It’s all getting a bit creepy now, to be honest, isn’t it? And it’s an awful lot of information about what is, let’s face it, a really boring black dress. Look, here are some shoes:
There comes a time in every blogger’s life when she suddenly feels the need to take a photo of a cupcake and put it on the internet. Apparently that time has now come for me: I am so sorry.
And the reason for this sudden descent into fashion-blogger cliché? Well, a few weeks ago, I was contacted by the people at Groupon (which, for those of you who’ve never heard of it, is a website which allows you to buy discount vouchers for local businesses and services), who asked me if I’d like to choose one of the offers on the site to try out. Now, as it happens, Terry and I are big Groupon fans – in fact, we rarely seem to do anything these days without printing out a Groupon first – so of course I said yes.
As those of you who’ve used Groupon will know, you can find deals for almost anything on there. We use it a lot for restaurants, but Terry has also used the site to get discounts on the action-adventure things he liked to do (snowboarding, white-water rafting: that kind of thing), and we used it for a couple of the things we did on holiday this year, too, like the whale-watching trip we took, for instance. This time, though, we decided to spend it on cupcakes. We found an offer for afternoon tea for two at a place called The Birdcage, which is in Mussleburgh, just outside Edinburgh, and looked pretty nice. By “afternoon tea”, we discovered they meant “cocktails and Prosecco”, and that was good enough for us, so the deal was purchased, the Groupon was printed, and we were good to go. Except we weren’t, because in a strange twist of fate, we suddenly acquired a social life, and found ourselves booked solid for the next few weeks. Huh.
We finally got round to making our booking this weekend, though, and I took some blurry iPhone photos to show you what it was like. I’m all heart!
The interior of the place was really impressive: it was once a Victorian cotton mill, but it’s been painstakingly restored, and is totally modern inside. We were there late on Sunday afternoon, when it was really quiet, which was probably a good thing, because, minutes after the photo below was taken, Terry spilled half his cocktail over our table, much to my delight: I mean, it’s not often I get to see someone else be a complete klutz, is it? Seriously, every time we go out now, Terry warns me not to set anything on fire…
For £18, we each got a glass of Prosecco, a cocktail (or half a cocktail, in Terry’s case) from the menu, and this to share:
I know I make fun of the whole “cupcakes n’ macarons” thing, but damn, that was a good cupcake, it really was. And the rest of the food was pretty good, too: in fact, it was so good that once we’d scoffed that lot, we decided to pay a bit extra and order some savoury snacks from the bar so we could stay a little longer, and continue stuffing ourselves silly. Which is a pretty good way to spend a Sunday afternoon, if you ask me…
[Disclosure: our meal was partly financed by a voucher code supplied by Groupon. If you want to visit The Birdcage, you'll find their website here. Just try NOT to throw your cocktail over your date, though...]
This is how my week is shaping up so far.
Yeah, I got Man Flu, a.k.a. “a really heavy cold, but I will dramatise it to the extent that it will totally seem like I’ve had flu”. And I will liveblog it, too. Because I do that.
(Um, I don’t have a chesty cough, by the way. This was just the only cold remedy I had in the house. This is the most fascinating post I’ve written in a while, huh?)
As always when I get ill, I I find myself face-to-face with one of the very few downsides of self-employment. You see, my bed is RIGHT THERE. I can actually see it from my desk. I bet it would be really comfy and cosy in there right now. I could curl up with a good book, and maybe some really unhealthy snack food (because, as we all know, food you eat while ill totally doesn’t count. Feed a cold, folks!) and a giant mug of coffee. It would be almost like a holiday, but with added Lemsip and sneezing. It would be ace, actually.
But it is not to be. Because if I were to give in to this impulse, and retire to bed to nurse my Man Flu, my laptop would taunt me from just across the hall. “Hey, Amber!” it would say. “While you’re languishing in bed, like a Jane Austen heroine with a touch of the vapours, no one is doing your work! Your readers are all unsubscribing in droves. They will NEVER come back, and you will go out of business, and have to go and work down the pit or something. Have a nice day!” And even although my laptop is actually talking rubbish here, I believe it, and so I bravely soldier on, even although I think my nose just fell off and rolled under my desk.
Instead of taking the day off and going back to bed, then, I’m just going to whine a lot instead. I apologise in advance to those of you who follow me on Twitter…
Tagged lurgy
When I was a little girl I was a big fan of The Worst Witch books by Jill Murphy. Anyone else read those? They were about a young girl called Mildred Hubble, who went to a school for witches (which was totally a thing, even before Hogwarts) where she was, well, the worst. All of Mildred’s spells went wrong. She couldn’t fly her broomstick without falling off or crashing into something. Her bootlaces were always undone, and her hair was always messy. When the time came for the young witches to be given animal companions, all of the other witches got sleek black cats, while Mildred was left with a scruffy little tabby which couldn’t stay on her broom.
I totally identified with these books. My spells never really worked either, you see. And while I was good at my lessons, I was bad at EVERYTHING else. I was always wearing the wrong clothes, listening to the wrong music, saying the wrong thing. None of the other witches girls in my class liked me, either. Mildred and I would have been BFFs, for sure.
None of this has anything to do with my costume for Saturday night’s party, though. I wasn’t The Worst Witch as a tribute to Mildred Hubble: I was just the worst witch in that I bought a hat, slapped on some eye makeup, and called it a “costume”. Happy Half-Assed Halloween, everyone!
In my defence, I had actually planned a completely different costume for this party. I just needed to buy one thing, which I found on eBay… and then got totally outbid on. And I couldn’t find a replacement in time, so this was my “oh, crap, I don’t have a costume now: I’ll just go as a wich!” effort. Still, at least I have great idea for next year!
In preparation for my transformation into a witch, I went to the supermarket last weekend to buy a broomstick. And, you know, at this time of year, the supermarkets ALWAYS have lots of witch-related fancy-dress stuff, so I thought there was no chance of me not being able to find one. Of course, I was wrong: not a broom was to be found, so instead I bought this crappy black rose:
It really has nothing to do with anything: it just looked a bit creepy. I already had the wand, though. Doesn’t everyone have a wand tucked away for these occasions?
 “I put a spell on shoe…”
Even witches like to pose. Shut up, they totally do.
I’m, like, SOSCARY, no?
What do you mean, “no”? Here’s what happened to the last person who crossed me:
 Yes, Terry’s slack-jawed yokel of last week met with an unfortunate accident. That’s the last time he’ll try to stop ME buying shoes.
It’s OK, though, he still loves me:
See?
I’ll get you, my pretties.
 Yes, and your little dog, too.
 Thanks to Steven and Lindsay for another great party: can’t wait for next year!
Tagged halloween
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