Women over 40 - improving like strong cheese.

There was a thing going round on Facebook this week. You know...one of those quotes from someone I’ve never heard of that rang true and everyone I know ticked “Like”. It was about women over forty, but the wisdom had been espoused by a man. Though I agreed with it all, I think it should have come from a shouty woman, who is actually 42 AND HAS FUCKING PMT THAT COULD TAKE OUT HALF OF CENTRAL ASIA.

So, here are the facts, in no particular order, on behalf of women like me. I know there are lots of us out there. And if you don’t agree with us, we don’t give a flying fuck, because they’re OUR facts, not YOUR facts:

1. Most of us have shat children out of our foofs. Don’t mistake this for weakness. We gave life. We are God’s emissaries on earth. 

Think carefully before you say whether it looks big in this or not

2. If we say our arses are fat, it’s because our arses are currently fat. We do not have self esteem issues. We just like wine and crisps and sit on our arses a lot doing clever things. But please note, just because we say it, doesn’t mean you are allowed to agree with us.

3. Many of us work. Some of us have been self-employed for years. We are successful, ruling entire families like benevolent dictators. We are used to being our own bosses, so don’t think we’re hoping you’ll help/participate/let us out in traffic. We are expecting you to do our bidding. Our cars are bigger than yours. Fucking move it!

4. We don’t play mind games because we don’t have to. We ask for the things we want, praise the things we love, drop the shutters fast on people who disappoint us and God help anyone who really gets on our tits. 

5. We don’t need to be told how intelligent or impressive we are, because we have a raft of qualifications that prove how intelligent and impressive we are. That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy being told how intelligent and impressive we are, so SAY IT, MOTHERFUCKER! 

6. We don’t need to be told that we’re attractive. We’re very comfortable in our own skin. But we do enjoy being told. Follow the previous instruction.

Seriously? Fatal Attraction was not a documentary.

7. We have love, energy and enthusiasm in abundance. If you are nice, we will share them with you. See point number four. This does not mean that we are going to eat you/boil bunnies/start crying at 4am, clutching an empty bottle of gin. Although if you are not nice, we might well eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

8. We are human. We have piles and fart and belch after meals. We like to talk about ailments. We don’t care if you find this unpleasant. We like to talk about masturbation and our enjoyment of sex, which should raise the roof if you’re doing your bit properly. We make no apologies when we forget to shave our legs and armpits. We have 1970’s lustrous pant-shrubbery. Deal with it.

If we wanna rock a Brian Blessed on the beach, we will.

9. We’re not domestic drudges. If you’ve been treating us like that, we’re angry now, so get some fucking life insurance.

10. We are not your mother. You already have a mother. Never confuse us with her. 

Wash, dry, repeat...

I’m taking the liberty of composing a blog post today about something that affects us all.  Personal hygiene.  And bottomly stink.  Over the past month, I have suffered all kinds of bum-flavoured intimate guff, none of which was mine.  It’s now time to share...

The most up-to-date vulvular violation happened earlier today, when I met a friend in a cafe in Chorley and used the cafe’s toilet.  I stared down at the toilet seat and there it was, grinning back at me: someone’s secret smile; a labia lithograph, etched on the plastic like sinister photocopied genitals.  Except there was no photocopier involved and the ink was actual fanny batter.  Yes, I’m taking about the beastly phenomenon of a fangita print on the toilet seat.  Eeuw.  To make matters worse, the mean age in the cafe was about 82.

I know you’re weeping with sympathy for me here, but it is not the first time I have experienced this.  My former place of employment specialised in hoopla, goolie and bum prints on the one toilet that was shared by about fifty people.  Not to mention, the occasional turd dressing with a side-order of wee.  

Several questions spring to mind here. 

A: how can people’s eye/arse co-ordination be so bad that they can’t manoeuvre themselves accurately onto a seat that is designed to allow the bottom bits to hover comfortably over a hole, without hitting the seat?  

B: What have the people done to have dangleage so dirty, that they leave a greasy mark? 

C:  How can they stand up and walk away from arse inspired toilet-seat-decoration that is as eyecatching and distinctive and NOTICEABLE as Warhol’s tins of Campbell’s soup? 

See, the Japanese have got it spot on.

Wipe the fucking toilet seat if you can’t be bothered to wash your genitals, people!  And don’t piss all over the seat and leave it!  You’re not a cat and it isn’t a litter tray.

 

For defacating-age adults

Only the other week, on holiday, I visited the swimming pool toilet after a very expensively groomed and bikini clad older woman came out of the cubicle, having dropped her intestines and a guff bomb that would take out Rochdale.  She never warned me.  I nearly choked to death.  Could she not have said in a range of languages, “Give it five minutes.”?  If I were teaching languages in school, this would be one of the first things I would teach children.

My other gripe is personal stink.  If I, sitting next to you, can smell your intimate savoury twang, why can’t you?  Everyone has occasion to go to the toilet and think, fuck, I’m a bit ripe.  Time for a go on the bidet.  Even the girl in Homeland wipes her kebab with a soapy flannel when she has to go to a meeting but hasn’t had time to shower.  That Billingsgate/chocolatey tagnuts smell, people, is a prompt to get out the soap and water BEFORE people sitting near you start to smell you through your jeans.  Same goes for armpits.  Nobody needs to choke on oniony ones.  Get 'em washed.

There is a school of thought that says human intimate smells are natural and full of pheromones and arouse the interest of the opposite sex, even while driving a Fiat Multipla, wearing orange polyester.  But I say, we’ve come further than that.  Let Vivienne Westwood put fanny batter in her perfume.  I don’t need to pay £50 for a bottle of Eau de Boeuf.  And neither should you!

I agree in principle, but men aren't always the culprits.

Horrormoanal Twelve Days of Christmas Humbug

On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some bobbly long johns from Marks and wynciette pyjamas from Primark wot have faded in the wash and lost a button.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some Nectar points for paying the gas bill, a new pack of anusol for the piles and a bic razor for the thorny Kevin Keegan legs.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Iboprufen for the back that I pulled out whilst removing a shoe and corsodyl to gargle away a furry tongue.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A bottle of Jolt so I can stay awake for ten minutes past water-shed: long enough for a festive fumble.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Six mystery dented tins from Asda, a pile of yellow stickered veg and a tub of on-the-cusp-of-going-fizzy yoghurt, hold the fois gras.

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A fifteen year old Christmas tree from Woolworths and a load of plastic baubles from Asda that are too shit to fit on the tree properly and spend a fortnight falling off and rolling round the back of the radiator.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A failing metabolism that deposits five tonnes of lard on my inner thighs just from looking at Morrisons’ mince pies and a load of ensuing wind that makes me smell of forgotten sprouts.

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

An argument with my mother about how snotty the veg should be on Christmas Day and how the in-laws’ presents for the kids are WAY shitter than hers.  Aren’t they?  AREN’T THEY?  And when I don’t answer because I wish to be diplomatic, I’m a disloyal bastard, naturally.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some slightly undercooked meat at my in-laws that gives me the trots, some crap Swedish card games that make my brains pickle themselves in their own despair, monster back ache from sleeping in a bed that hasn’t had a new mattress since 1964 and hayfever from sleeping in a room with carpet that has never ever been replaced, since the time when carpets were first woven out of man nasal hair.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A pile of Christmas presents that demonstrate clearly that despite my being a tight arse, everyone else has actually spent a lot less on me, three non-matching pillow cases and four hours of competitive old person Scrabble.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Two bickering children, pretending they’re actually wild cats in the back of the car during a five hour journey back up north, scratching each other, dropping crumbs from bad bendy peanut butter sandwiches that have started to smell of plastic bag and a bladder that can’t decide if it does or doesn’t want a wee.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A load of shitty repeats on telly, no Uncle Buck with John Candy, yet another New Year’s Eve spent in the company of that dorky tit, Jools Holland n pals, the sense that there’s nothing to look forward to until the cherry blossom is out and the spectre of yet another January spent water-skiing through horizontal rain to work in a basement office where people regularly and mysteriously leave perfect arse-shaped prints on the toilet seat.

Professor Brian Cox: thinking woman's crumpet

I think it’s a fairly commonly held view that Professor Brian Cox is every thinking-woman’s DILF.  (Dad I'd Like to...you get the drift)  He has hair.  Lustrous brown hair like a nice pony or a wig.  It’s thick and stuck to his head, unlike most men of 40+, where the hair has migrated downwards and reappears in the nostrils, ears and foothills of their burgeoning bellies.  And he has teeth.  What teeth!  Truly a Wonder of the Molar System, like glistening giant windows on the world.  And he has legs.  Well, you know, I could go on but the main thing about Brian Cox is that he talks like an ordinary bloke and he saunters around like a bit of a dick and he comes out with bonkersly clever stuff in a really accessible way.  We love him in my house.  My 9 year old daughter, in particular, puts him on a pedestal and announced when Wonders of the Solar System first shone out of our telly that she was going to be an astro-physicist and go to Cambridge University.  Ahhhh, what a child!  

I think her aspirations are brilliaaaant, as Brian Cox would say.  Why?  Well, because her parents are a pair of over educated duffers who chose utterly useless subjects to study at university and consequently ended up in the most random and boring careers known to humanity.  Who the fuck needs to be fluent in medieval Dutch epic poetry and slightly conversant in Kafka?  Anyone?

If ONLY I’d paid attention in maths.  If ONLY I hadn’t sat through physics trying to sniff the Bunsen burners when I should have been listening.  If I’d scored more than 2/40 in maths, I could be generating the Higgs boson now by chasing very fat people on their mobility scooters round and round the crisps aisle in Lidl and forcing them to smash into each other underneath the rack of “Imperial Spirit” and eggnog-flavoured drink.  I could have been in Cern, creating quantum Black Forest Hole gateaux that bends time and is only 14 calories per slice.  

Sadly this was not a requirement for GCSE algebra

But I didn’t.  At school I had a physics teacher who gave the term “fart-faced old wassock” new meaning.  You had only to say the word “God” by accident and she would expel you from the lab for blasphemy.  She was one boring bastard.  I should have tried jumpstarting her during the classes on circuits and electricity.  Then the chemistry teacher had no chin.  Say no more.  Add to this the fact that I am fundamentally stupid and my only grasp of maths involves spelling rude words upside down on the calculator, and you’ve got...well, you’ve got an arts student, haven’t you?  On a career path to nowhere.

So feeling like I wanted to encourage my brainiac daughter all the way to Cambridge, I queued in Waterstones in Manchester to get my daughter’s copy of Wonders of the Solar System (the book) signed by Professor Bri.  I fancied a good gawp at the Sublime Overlord of all Dorks – yes, that includes me.  I’m a dork too - and even put my lipstick on to give the impression that there is more to me than my anorak.  But then I had to buy his new bloody book on quantum physics which, no doubt, I’ll end up wedging the bathroom door open with because it has hardly any pictures in and the words are in small print.  

When I got to the front of the queue, Lord Bri was charming and obliging.  But you know what?  I felt like Borat trying to put the marriage sack on Pamela Anderson in a book shop.  Click on the link if you don’t know what I’m talking about.  I couldn’t stop grinning and gabbling.  What a complete tit!  Really, I shouldn’t be allowed near celebrities.  So now I’m waiting for the restraining order to come through the post.  Waterstones are surely going to ban me from book signings, unless they’re my own.

But the point of this is not that I went to letch at old Bri (well, I sort of did).  I went because I want to encourage my daughter to do science because I don’t want her to fritter away the first twenty years of her working life, as I have, hating her bullshit accidental career and waiting for a vocation to happen to her.  If Brain and his soporific Oldham twang can chivvy her down the path to her own scientific discovery, then it’s worth feeling like Borat.  Wa wa wee wa.

Make up: You can't polish a turd

The Horrormoanal Woman is guesting today on up-and-coming film director, Vicki Psarias-Broadbent's blog, Honest Mum  Please do pop over and have a read if you fancy a giggle.  It's got a picture of Angelos Epithemiou on it, so well worth a gander.

Normal service will resume on The Horromoanal Woman's blog later this week, so stay tuned.
Love Marnie
x

Buckling under the guilt

This week saw me punching the air triumphantly in a style normally only seen in schmaltzy 1980’s films like Top Gun.  No, in fact, I didn’t just punch the air.  I whooped like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (except in that film, Julia Roberts said her legs were 44inches long and I look more like a celebrating hobbit.  Also, I’m not a prozzy unless you count the time I gave my husband a Popozogolou to get him to fix the shower door).  

I was celebrating because my agent decided that my manuscript, Zeeba Marple, which is for children aged 9+, was finally ready to go off into the blue yonder into publisher land.  I have been working on that bloody novel since last November, so it’s almost a year’s labour.  It has been lovingly crafted with as much fun and imagination as possible.  It has been written and rewritten and rewritten until it’s so polished, you can see your chins in it.  It has had feedback from the savviest minds you can imagine and I’m proud of it.  I’m proud that I managed to pull my ravaged mind through the dark pureed-Weetabix years of drooling with my children in front of Teletubbies and Mr. Fucking Tumble back into the sunlit lands of intelligible adult conversation and hummus.  I am a creator.  I am an author.  I am more than my empty holdall of a belly and bingo wings.  More than just Mummy.

 

But there lies the rub.  I am WRACKED with guilt.  I am CONVINCED I am a slightly shit mother.  Why?  Well, I think there’s some kind of evolutionary burden of guilt for women who try to juggle quality parenting with professional success and without the luxury of hired childcare.  If you’ve tried to burn this candle at both ends, you’ll know that I’m telling the truth.  This is how it happened to me:

 

Four years ago, my writing passion was reignited, after more than a decade on the shelf.  I had been renovating two houses – a great career if you’ve got kids who see the fun in playing in building sand at Jewsons - but work had finished.  The housing market had collapsed and so had my intentions of being Sarah Beeny Mk II with more disappointing boobs and a rubbish accent.   Feeling at a loose end and not yet ready to go back to working in an office, I wrote a simple fairy story for my daughter.  She loved it and so did I.  I became quickly addicted to the creative fix that writing offered.  It was like hobnobs in crack cocaine form.  Better than that.  My brain was thawing out and it had survived its cryogenic-hibernation-through-having-babies intact.  Cue Julia Roberts whooping.

 

But I was skint.  So I went back into an office part-time, reluctantly resurrecting my fundraising career, which I thought I had successfully killed dead and replaced with power tools and the ability to talk Plasterer fluently.  Suddenly, I was balancing a three year old, a five year old, a part time job WHICH I LOATHED and my new obsession.  I was DEFINITELY going to be a published children’s writer.  This was it.  Definitely me.  I was going to show my children that with hard work, you can achieve anything.

 

But gradually, the more into writing novels I got, the less I could pay attention to my children as they clambered all over me, talking gibberish and smearing marmite on my dreams.  I was in the room physically  – perhaps more “there” than most parents but my mind was travelling through the Frankish Empire and flying with big bat wings through fantasy landscapes.  I was in the tunnel.  If Sid on CBeebies wanted me to pay attention, he was going to have to get his man-meat out on national TV for me to notice.

 

And so it has continued, this sub-standard parenting.  I must be doing something right, of course, because my children haven’t got nits.  They’re loved and can walk and eat vegetables.  But they still talk shit at me at high velocity and volume.  Now, more than ever, as my writing career really steps up by several notches, I am forced to triple-glaze over when they try to zap through to my tunnel with their laser-attack of spoken bollocks bullets.  And the guilt: it’s getting far worse.  Soon there will be book tours and possibly trips all over the world.  I will have to leave them to eat Daddy’s poisonous cooking overnight or longer.   He may not check that they’ve wiped their bums properly.  But it’s kind of...tough shit.  I have to relinquish control just for a while and the very fact that I think that kills me too.

 

I have no solution to this common problem of juggling.  I am going to keep writing as well as I can.  It’s who I’ve become.  And of course, I’m going to keep trying my best at mothering.  My children are still at the centre of my world, even if I do wish they’d shut it when I’m editing.  I would rather shoulder this burden of guilt and be an excellent writer with mildly neglected children than be an excellent mother with neglected dreams and a heart full of regret.

Sh*tting gold bricks

Normally, I avoid news. I have a tendency to overreact to it. When a chicken farmer got bird flu in Thailand, I banned poultry in our house for two years. During the swine flu epidemic, I went to Asda and stockpiled beans and dried chickpeas in the hope that my family would fart its way through Armageddon and come out the other side unscathed, if a bit soiled. You can see the theme here already. I’m a hypochondriac with an overactive imagination.

But news does fight its way through the cake-thoughts into my brain thus: My husband has a dadly Sunday routine. First, he leaves his undercrackers on the floor NEXT to the washing basket. Then he goes for a poo, which involves leaving the toilet door open so we can all enjoy the aroma. And like all men, he sits on his throne, reading the Sunday papers. It took me a good ten years to work out that reading the paper in this way is a form of silent protest for him because when he’s obsessing over the sport section, I am usually stood in his wake, holding my hand over my nose, shouting “CLEAN THE FUCKING WINDOWS!” repeatedly. I’m guessing he thinks that having a large paper barrier between us means that he is immune to my domestic demands. So that is how I absorb news. From a safe distance and vicariously through my crapping husband.

Now, financial meltdown has been in the news a lot this week and I made the mistake of watching this smug turd on YouTube. If you are of a paranoid disposition, look away now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqN3amj6AcE&feature=share

For those of you who can’t be bothered watching his utterly compelling, two minute doom-fest, this independent trader looks like a contemporary Gordon the Gecko and talks about the collapse of the Eurozone and how we should all be investing in treasury bonds and gold and frankincense and a lifetime’s supply of incontinence knickers. I thought to myself, That’s all very nice, Gordon, but what the hell is a treasury bond and apart from stealing and melting down my family’s Elizabeth Duke jewellery, which is possibly only about 0.3% precious metal, where can I get my hands on gold?
 

I’m already thrifty you see. Everything in my house is second hand crap, ex-display or salvaged from junk yards. I buy food out of the going-off cabinet in Asda. I rugby tackle old ladies to get to the dented tins first. I even buy the really mashed up shitty bananas that they bag separately and sell for -30p a tonne. They make great banana loaf. I would call this thrift rather than greed. Don’t get me wrong: I do admit to having a BMW but I grew up on a council estate and have chav needs. It is also ageing and second hand. By dint of the fact that it contains a fine layer of kid compost, a plastic bag of mystery, rotted thing in the glove box and the obligatory birdshit paint job, this officially relegates the car to the status of a 1986 Lada Riva. And I still don’t have enough spare to invest in gold, even from Argos.

I worried about this for some days. I was literally shitting a brick about my family’s future. I was eyeing up local pets as emergency food sources. Then some existential maths occurred to me: In the event of fiscal meltdown, tinned pulses=hard currency and ensuing farts=renewable energy. Good. I was thinking outside the box. Then I realised that maybe I’m being thrifty in the wrong way. Maybe I should speculate to accumulate; upgrade and aspire to more. And then I had the perfect equation and I’m going to share it with you: Waitrose free range sirloin lobster + organic diamond dusted bran flakes + fair trade saffron infused prunes = shitting gold bricks. Eat posh: get rich. Da daaaaa! Problem solved. And you can take that advice to the bank.

Sunday shitty Sunday

So, the kids are in the shower, screaming like fiends as my husband cajoles them to wash their hair. My seven year old daughter has started singing straight down her nose, like one of those R&B singers, except she sounds tone deaf with collapsed nasal cartilage. My almost five year old son is just shrieking because he can. I am down here, ensconsed in mess and trainers and magic markers, knowing that I can only put off cleaning up the kitchen for so long.


I have been writing this weekend. I've written a novel for 8-12 year olds. So the kids have dirty undercrackers and the fridge is badly stocked. The carpets are looking hairy and there is tumble weed in the corners of rooms with hard flooring. Sod it. Us mummies spread ourselves too thinly and on top of that, I'm 38. When the horrormoans come each month, they are rampaging. Today is Sunday. I have about a week until I'm on. So this week, everyone had better watch out. I make my monthly transition from sanguine and maternal to homicidal maniac.


Sunday, shitty Sunday. Work in the morning. I have the pleasure of working in basement offices in a grim, windowless corner of a damp, old building. Lucky me. There is only one toilet and everyone manages to miss the hole and pee on the seat. Yummy. But that's OK because it's not Monday yet and I've begun the 20 day count-down to my holiday. I've bought an extra big suitcase. For once, I will do more than just well-scrub and throw anything on. I will coiff and groom myself into perfectly co-ordinated splendour. I will wear an ill-fitting bikini and flash my puckered, stretchy-marked bits and I will willingly let fat German men check out my varicose veined legs.

I am beginning this blog in the hope that it will resonate with other down-trodden souls who have hopes, dreams, ambitions, kids, partners and slightly furry food in the back of the fridge. Let's see what Moaning Monday brings...