Sleep On It

Knackered

I've just been employed in what should have been an enjoyable and fruitful task. Instead I felt like ripping out my womb, stamping on it and feeding it to the local pigeons. Why? Because finding a nightshirt or pyjamas that isn't emblazoned with a fucking cartoon character is almost as impossible as finding a Jeremy Kyle show participant with a full set of teeth.
What the frig is this national obsession with making grown women's nightwear look as if it came from Mothercare? In every way, women are able to buy clothes that are fitting for every age and situation, that is until they stumble into any given nightwear department. Then they get transported through some sort of Disney wormhole where they're expected to go to bed displaying anything from Tinkerbell and Minnie Mouse to cuddly sheep and even chomping dairy cows.
At best this is a crashing inability for shops to provide women with what they want. At worst it's some creepy attempt to rob women of their personalities, rendering them childlike and, presumably, vulnerable.Tell me. Which grown woman would want to go to bed looking as if they're still knocking around with Barbie dolls? 
That's when the search for something less childlike becomes a challenge. You can find it - of course you can - but that's when you start straying into the highly-flammable territory, all strappy slips and satin numbers. Which forces female shoppers into two distinct roles, both of them creepily suited to their menfolk.
Seriously, I've just had a trawl through a store for a new nightshirt and the selection was weirdly identical to that in the section for 2-6 year old girls. I'm amazed that Gary Glitter isn't part of its advertising campaign.
So, when it comes to getting into the sack, can we start treating women like women? No, not like kids and no, not like potential shags but simply like women who are completely fucking knackered. Sweet dreams? How about swapping that for shopping nightmares?

Cling-Ons

Blimey. Splashed all over today's news is a picture of the missing Madeleine McCann. It's a mock-up of how she would look today at the age of nine, five years after her disappearance from a hotel in Portugal while on holiday with her parents and twin siblings. Fuckadoodledo if this isn't most spine-chilling story for anyone who's experienced an exploded vagina, or at least witnessed one. I have one nagging problem with it though...

You know, even five years after the event and the thousand times I have envisaged how I would react if Kraken Junior disappeared (badly. Terminally badly), I still can't get my sweating brain over how Maddie and her siblings were left alone in the hotel room while their parents went out for dinner. Yes, yes, yes, I know that the restaurant was just across the pool from the room and that the parents checked on the kids every half an hour but, fuck me...is that really a risk worth taking?

Aye, it's easy to become dangerously obsessed with your kids to the point that you could accidentally become conjoined. I never quite rest unless I can see or at least hear Kraken Junior, hollering my location across the house at her if I so much as go for a shit. It's the same wherever we go and whatever bollocks we do. In the summer I love evenings in the garden but my creeping fear that KJ could need me while I'm casually flicking my snot into the grass keeps me in earshot and close to the back door. 

So it's utterly beyond me that I would ever leave her in an unlocked room hotel room while I dined with mates, even if said eaterie was so much as a burger van ten yards away. 

Ok, Ok, so this says way more about my insecurity than it could about the life-changing mess the McCanns have been pitched into, but isn't just the vague perception of danger enough to make a parent careful to the point of insanity? Isn't it the same cold fear that drives us to always put babies to sleep on their backs and makes us rush, screeching, to A&E when our firstborns develop strange rashes?

This is in no way a condemnation of the McCanns. Fuck knows if they haven't already turned themselves inside out and punished themselves daily for what has befallen them. It's an existence that I can't even imagine surviving. Yet I still find myself taken by the urge to shake them and ask, "What? What were you thinking?"

Tragedies can happen to anyone. Shit slops down onto the most virtuous of parents. But sometimes it pays to keep up an umbrella, even if this makes us laughably and embarrassingly cautious. I realise how nuts my motherly radar makes me look and how I could probably do with releasing the reins but, on the offchance - even the vaguest most absurd offchance - that something goes terribly and horrifically wrong, I'll keep clinging on, thanks. 

KJ is the same age that Maddie was when she disappeared. I don't want to have to imagine her from her on in. I'd rather see her in all her snotty glory and for that I'll never, ever understand what the McCanns are thinking now, and most of all, when they were thinking then.

Slag

That's more like it

There's not much about being Welsh that I hate but, by fuck, if I go to one more local art show and see one more painting of a pit head, deep seam, slag heap or terraced row I'll be shoving lumps of anthracite up the nearest artist I can find.
Christ, you'd think that Welsh artists had been kept in some sort of coal-based captivity, that they'd never seen a blue sky, a funfair, a book or a live chicken, such is their obsession with the region's history of the coal industry. 
Just days ago I went to the Rhondda Heritage Park to see the latest art show - it's a venue for all sorts of art, not just heritage-drenched nostalgia - and it was so achingly predictable that I would have witnessed more imaginative visuals in a lift shaft. It's not that execution was fat-handed but that none of the artists had raised their eyes or imaginations above the usual, parochial, stereotypical images of South frigging Wales.
What is going on with these people? It's not that there's a problem with them enjoying the rich history of the area, just that aren't they bored to fuck with depicting it? I mean, what's wrong with attempting to create images of a more modern Wales, even if that means recreating girls chucking up on a Saturday night, blokes scoring in alleyways, and the endless sprouting of call centres. 
Perhaps these images just aren't as giddily romantic as that of tin baths and sooty fathers. Yet they're one hell of a lot more honest and I'd be chuffed to shit to see one in a local art show even if it were to replace just one more lithograph or collage of a fucking dram.
So, as someone who has been known to knock out the odd portrait herself, I'm going to start painting pissed women stumbling through Merthyr Tydfil and dogs shitting on the Taff Trail. It won't be pretty but it will be bang up to date and that's more than you could say for Dai Jones' Slag Heap at Sunset No 1. Oh and No 2. And No 3.... 

Loony Tunes

Sick buckets at the ready

Being a woman is pretty fucking fabulous but do you know what occasionally makes it just that bit shit? No, it's not the crimson tide or building site yawps. It's bollocks like this: a compilation CD I've just spied called 100 Hits: Woman. Yes, it is this that makes me want to grow my own knackersack and furiously twang it.
Christ, how I hate stuff like this. The CD contains 100 songs by wimmin singers and is squarely aimed at wimmin listeners, whoever the fuck they are. It's a vile beast that has been knocked out by some crass music company execs where it is assumed that the nation's female population wants to holler along, misty-eyed, to songs that celebrate femininity/ decry men/ rage against relationships/ promise world domination. It's like a management speak for women who still wear hair scrunchies.
For fuck's sake, save me will you? Exactly how patronising does a product need to get? And at what point did the difference between women and men become so completely gulf-like that the gender groups now demand diametrically opposing music? More than that, the assumption that women want to hear music that's only being sung by women makes me want to spew through my nose. It's meaningless muff-gazing at its worst. It makes me want to lie in wait for any female who buys this hideous blarting just so I can point them in the direction of the 21st Century.
Look, it's the same patronising arse-fodder as the likes of the pink n cuddly Run for Life  campaign or the stunningly disheartening TV show Loose Women. They also make me want to rip off my bra and strangle someone with it. Why in the giddy name of shit do women need their own races or their own talk shows? Can't runners just be runners and viewers just be viewers? I'm assuming that women are as capable of knocking out 10K or understanding intellectual chat as anyone else on the planet.
Problem is that some women think that these steaming bowls of wrong are all about equality. However, my fellow fanny-scratchers, they're not. In fact they're about segregation. That's right, giving the lovely little laydees somewhere to go and play while the rest of the world gets on with the serious topic of living its life.
So if I want to take up running I'll do it with the rest of the runners out there and if I want stimulating discussion I'll jostle with the rest of the population over Radio 4. Oh and if I want to listen to music I'll listen to it according to my own musical taste. Aye, and not according to whether my love tunnel has seen the business end of a cold speculum. 100 Hits? 100 Shits more like.

By a Nose

Such an underrated bodypart

What in the giddy shit is this? Today's paper dragged my kicking, screaming and frantically resisting attention to an article about the most heinous of new bridal preparations: the K-E Diet, a crash diet that means being fed through a nose tube for an entire week. And no, I'm not making this shit up. Really. I'm not. By all accounts this diet is being snapped up by brides who want to look emaciated, sorry, lose 20 lbs in time for their wedding day.
Fuck me if there aren't so many things wrong with this cultural development that this one blog post won't possibly cover it all. I'm going to have to build it its own website.
How badly do you want to be skinny for your wedding shots that you'll shove a tube up your left nostril only to be fed with the sort of goop that's usually reserved for people on life support machines? Jesus, I won't stick more than a finger up my nose. I sure as shit wouldn't want a three course meal passing through it.
In my wedding pics I look anything but emaciated. In fact my frock was straining at the seams. Thanks to some medical treatment I'd put on an unmoveable 6lbs overnight exactly a fortnight before the wedding. Can you imagine the state I'd have been in if I were the nose-fed variety of bride?
Laughably the side effects of this astounding diet include dizziness, constipation and fetid breath. I bet that makes for a memorable wedding day demeanour. You could waddle down the aisle, bulging with seven days' worth of turds, only to repel your new husband with the stench of your breath before collapsing across the altar and bouncing off the pews like a pinball.
And all of this is preferable to what? No, what exactly? Looking like the normal woman your groom fell in love with? Having a bit of a wiggle? Or not being able to play Camptown Races on your ribs?
And what the fuck happens on the honeymoon, if your groom hasn't already legged it because his bride looked like she was in last stages of a terminal illness? One ice-cream into that Antuigan trip and you'd inflate like a life raft.
This isn't really about the diet though, is it? It's about women who seem determined to erase themselves from society by making themselves so hideously thin that they all but disappear. What these women need is counselling, not 500 less calories. Anyone who, pardon the pun, puts so much weight on losing weight that they'll shove a tube up their nose needs a very special type of therapy. That and possibly a hard slap.
Of course, I would be happy to administer said slap and for free too. Yeah, it'd make my bingo wings flutter and possibly send ripples through my arse-cheeks but, fuck me, it'd be worth it. Someone has to stop common sense from going down the tubes and quickly, before these bananas brides find another use for the things.

Got Mail?

Fake, but who'd guess?

Don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not but I hate the Daily Mail. No, hate isn’t a strong enough word. I utterly fucking despise it. As a freelance journalist it was the only newspaper I refused to write for and, frankly, if I were so desperate for a shit that I was turtling and a copy of the DM was the only available toilet paper I’d wipe with my own clothes instead.

Apart from the fact that it displays the insight and intelligence of a pissed-up lunatic in a bus station, what with its panicky headlines about immigrants/ mothers/ homosexuality/ Europe/ immigrants, it’s got this weird Sutcliffe-like obsession with taking down every woman it meets.

Jesus, look at the features it runs in the paper and the daily spewing of girl-hating insanity that purports to be its website. If it’s not tearing a new arsehole for fifty per cent of the population by deriding working mothers/ non-working mothers/ happy mothers/ depressed mothers/ mothers just daring to take a shit every 24 hours it’s bitterly haranguing female celebs for getting fatter or thinner or older or scruffy or wrinkled or cellulite-y or any other variable between alive and dead.

Even fucking worse is the way that it presents these features, by using women to bully women. Women may write the gasp-worthy features in their bid to get printed but these 1000-word spoutings are always barbed and written or edited to incite ragingly bitter debates about the worthiness of said women. It’s the national equivalent of watching two arseholed girls tugging at each others’ hair in the street on a Saturday night.

Thing is, the DM even manages to make the female writers victims. Clever, eh? Yeah, they may seem in control by sticking their names at the business end of however many column inches but the fact is that the Daily Mail then throws this fodder (however well intentionally written) to the baying crowds of its pitchfork-waving readers who take it upon themselves to decree whether said woman should be sent back to the kitchen fucking sink.

It’s not just the deeply confessional nature of its features that does women such a staggering disservice but it’s the equally staggering bitterness with which they are received which makes me want to weep. In fact I don’t know why the DM bothers offering space to its female writers. It could save time and effort by rigging a set of stocks outside DM Towers and slapping women in them instead.

And yeah, this rage of mine has been given a sound prod by the recent Samantha Brick debacle but that’s the frigging least of it. Female writers have been spilling their most intimate of guts for the delight, delectation and judgement of the DM’s readers for one fuck of a long time. Thanks girls. Thanks a bleedin' lot.

But what the fuck do I know? While the DM has enraged readers on one side and female writers willing to spill and run on the other the paper will keep weaving its vile magic over the Great British public. Me? I’ll stick to taking more notice of my toilet paper. At least it’ll keep my hands clean.

Domestic Blis(ster)

Boo!

Spare me, you desperado advertising execs. I've just witnessed a telly ad for Harpic Plus, something that you shove in your toilet to keep it clean, by all accounts. And you know what the ridiculous fucking blurb said? That your toilet may not be as clean as you'd like it to be and what about the germs lurking, God forbid, in the U-bend?
The U-bend? Really, the U-bend? What the fuck does it matter if there are germs in the U-bend? It's not as if you're drinking from the bloody thing. No one's attempting to rinse their dentures in the sodding bog water. As far as I'm concerned my U-bend could be home to new strains of deep-sea plankton and I wouldn't give a shit, pardon the po-loving pun.
The only time I've had a brush with my U-bend was when I got my right foot wedged in it. I'd attempted to stand on the toilet but, alas, the lid was up and before I realised I was knee deep in the porcelain. Anyhoo, when I pulled out my foot, replete with what looked like five burst and blackened sausages parading as toes, the hygienic state of the U-bend was the last fucking thing on my mind. The severe bruising was an issue, yes, as was the fact that the triage nurse at my local A & E could barely speak for snorting. But the germs harbouring in the arse-end of my toilet? No, I can't much say that I gave even the most remote of flying fucks.
So, Harpic Plus, if you want to flog me your latest brew you'll have to think of something snappier than the state of my remote plumbing. I dunno, make my wee glow in the dark or turn my poo into gold. Otherwise, would you be so kind as to just put a lid on it.

Hot Shots

Britney? Is there a Britney?

Could someone tell me why most of the world has a problem with Starbucks asking customers' names when they order coffee? You'd think that the corporate coffee-splashers had announced that it was going to force babies into its blenders, such has been the bloody fuss. 
Look, having your name scrawled across your coffee cup has got to be easier than the previous system which depended on little more than the balance of frigging probabilities to get orders right. You get more than one customer demanding a grande skinny macchiato and you are, technically speaking, fucked. As the parched hoards cluster around the Starbucks counter all it takes is for two of them to expect the same brew and it's all out chaos. At least if you've got your monika written all over the cup you're not going to have to kick to death the bloke who's wrongly lunged for your lungo.
And what's with the bleating about this name business being patronising? For fuck's sake, hardly. It's only patronising if you really do believe that Starbucks gives a shit about your name. Thankfully, intelligent beings will not only understand that this is just an easier way of buying a coffee but that it'd take one fuck of a lot more than this little 'ploy' to create brand loyalty. 
Anyway, what a great excuse to try out a few name changes on the Starbucks foam-fondlers. Seymour Butts. Ivor Longhorn. Barry van Hire. Max E. Pad....
And there are people who want to go back to having the word cappuccino hollered at them? For fuck's sake, spare me.