PR advice

Tom's of Maine deodorant. I can't recommend it highly enough. Especially the calendula one. Your 'pits smell divine in a subtle, organic, not too in yer face sort of a way.

And hey! It's aluminium-free!

It was one of those moments. Perusing the toiletries aisle of Waitrose, ripe for a change of deodorant and ooh! There's one without alumiunum. Bingo! But...but...so I've been smearing and spraying a metallic substance into my precious 'pits for the past few decades? Yikes.

Sort of like when you buy a pack of pork sausages adorned with a brightly coloured label professing excitedly: 'Now with minimum 47% pork!'.

And sort of like when Piers Morgan smugly announced that The Mirror was no longer going to allow slebs to vet the stories Mirror journalists wrote about them. Piers was all: 'See! We will NOT be beholden to slebs and their scary PRs! See that hill over there in the distance? Yeah? Well, that's the moral highground. See how I'M standing on top and all the scummy other tabloids are sitting at the bottom? Huh? Huh?'. And the rest of us were thinking: YOU USED TO LET SLEBS VET THE STUFF YOUR SUPPOSEDLY IMPARTIAL HACKS WRITE ABOUT THEM??

Sometimes it's best to stay schtum.

(That said, I'm happy no longer to be rubbing liquified tinfoil into my 'pits.)

My regal breakfasting habits

 

I tell ya, it's a real bugger to change the batteries in the Roberts radio the Queen and I both own.

I betcha Her Majesty has some lackey to change hers.

Clearly I need a butler. P'rhaps then I'd also have my cereal neatly dispensed into Tupperware containers.

Sacrifice your vanity for the sake of our planet

In Elizabethan times, it was cool to have skin as white as snow and people were forever dusting their faces with talcum powder or such like*. Cool because it meant you weren't a peasant and didn't have to work in the fields. Same goes for modern day China and India, where women prefer to paint their faces with cosmetic bleach. Mmmm!

Latterly, it was cool to have a tan. Cool because it meant you could afford to holiday in warmer climes.

More recently - and rather excitingly for those of us with Celtic skin tones - it is now (almost) cool to be pallid again. Cool because everyone knows there is no such thing as a healthy tan and only the stoopid would expose themselves to UV rays unprotected, risking a basal cell carcinoma or malignant melanoma.

But it seems that the social conditioning derived from years of gazing at orange-faced models on the front of wimmin's magazines is not so easy to shake off.

We therefore smear ourselves with tinted moisturisers (I am as guilty as the next woman) and in the process yet another planet-saving idea is thwarted. Consider all those hundreds of millions of white bodies (especially those belonging to the increasing numbers of clinically obese Caucasians - total surface area to die for!) and their immense potential to reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, thereby halting global warming.

So, guys and gals, please consider joining me in a whole new campaign: Stay Pale For The Planet. To clarify, let me give you a little list in the style of Observer Woman, because all good 'zine editors know that wimmin are too stoopid to absorb this kind of information unless it is reduced to bite-sized chunks using words of no more than two syllabubs:

In
Being pale
Having a body with an above average surface area
Robbing Procter and Gamble of a few million squid

Out
Looking orange
Size zero - too low on sunlight-reflection potential
Giving our hard-earned cash to large conglomerates**

(Once we can figure out the intellectual property issues, I shall be releasing a reworded version of Tom Robinson's 'Glad to be gay'. Sing along now, y'all: Sing if you're proud to be pale, sing if you're happy that way...hey!)

* they were also keen on not brushing their hair which meant that those Marie Antoinette style beehives became home to small birds and rodents - thankfully, this idea has never since been regarded as cool

** deep breaths, laydeez...practise with me: CON-GLOM-ER-ATES ('con' being the operative syllabub)

Plant-related ponderings

[A garden centre on the outskirts of Edinburgh.]

UC: Wotcha buying, honey?

Mr Chick: Some rocket seeds and a couple of plants for the raised beds.

UC: Oh. What are those two?

Mr Chick: That's a hebe and that one's a hosta.

UC: Right.

*******

UC: If we have more babies and it's twins again, how about we call them Hebe and Hosta?

Mr Chick: Eh?

UC: What d'you reckon? Hebe and Hosta Chickadee*.

Mr Chick: Um, I think they'd get bullied at school...

* not actually our surname (I know, this has probably come as a shock)

How to buff up your ego

Join an online community. Offer advice on every subject under the sun about which you have merest ounce of knowledge.

In the past thirty days, I have proferred what (little) wisdom I have on the following topics:

• Recipes that use asapargus and haloumi cheese
• Tourist destinations in Turkey
• Coping with regression in potty training
• Dress codes for funerals
• How to treat garden furniture*
• The unsuitability of parmesan cheese for vegetarians
• Film recommendations
• The prevalence of racial stereotyping of Gypsies
• Where to buy a cheap, reliable, second hand washer-dryer
• Treatment of recurrent urinary tract infections
• Planning legislation regarding the conversion of a garage into a bedroom

Really, I'm just one small step away from an agony aunt column in a tabloid newspaper or one of those one-word-titled women's weeklies, in which my advice will range from psycho-sexual counselling through to the best way to cook a kohlrabi.

* in our case: badly, so it warps whilst left outside during the winter months

Chicken and egg

Did chicklet #1 start talking like Lola ("I am not doing it...not ever...never...I am not doing it! Definitely!") because we've been reading and watching Charlie and Lola a lot lately or is the way Lola speaks an accurate reflection of the speech patterns of pre-schoolers?