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. 

Beeny, Brits and sore bits

I started a blog post about the Brits, but then, because lady holes are too close together and I am stressed off my tits, I got a bladder infection. It’s hard to blog when you’re pissing razor blades. It’s hard to do anything when your brain is comprised mainly of mashed potatoes. And mine is... 

I have a project to extend and renovate my house that is already six months behind schedule. My house, in case you missed previous posts, is a shithole, made mainly from brightly coloured sanitary ware and broken 1980’s kitchen in dark oak, where the cupboards smell ominously of fish.

My luxus kitchen, where the best worktop is a box with a chopping board on top.

In my house, an old woman called Beryl was found not alive. In my bedroom, in fact. So now, I call the place Dead Beryl’s house, because it belonged to Beryl and she is dead. Admittedly, she is the best work colleague I’ve ever had (I work from home). Dead Beryl never argues or gives me the finger behind my back or pisses on the toilet seat. Although I suspect her life of muesli abuse has caused the toilets to growl when you flush.

See? Sarah Beeny looks cool in a hard hat. I just look a helmet.

But that’s OK, because I’m going to be extending and renovating the house imminently and the very awesome Sarah Beeny is going to document my nervous breakdown for posterity on her show, “Double Your House for Half the Money.” If only I could underpin my comparatively lacklustre boobies as well as the house foundations. Perhaps The Beeny will have some tips... Men: I said tiPs!
Pay attention!

Behold, the glory of my tower of soup! Eat your heart out, Bernard Black.

I’ve also gone partially deaf because of Dead Beryl and her dust-encrusted curtains, which look like a cross between a magic-eye poster from the early ‘90’s and an old lady’s floral underpant with extra large crusty flowers for the myopic and hygiene-challenged. Plus, I’m still writing and hotly pursuing literary stardom like a stalker with furtive words in my flasher-mac pocket instead of a gun or a schlong. This comes with its own challenges, like realising you’re sick of just being the person who washes the skanky undercrackers and makes nutritious food that only looks a bit like vomit and which everyone just consumes with no real appreciation of the effort that went into any of it. 

So, folks, there’s a storm raging in The Horrormoanal Woman’s head. Some call it a mid-life crisis. I call it an epiphany. 2014 will be a year of metamorphosis for me.  And yes, I’ve started liking the things young people like again. It can’t be long before I try to squeeze my sausage meat legs into hotpants or something similarly embarrassing for my family.

Aw, Katy Perry. You look reet bonny in that uniform.

Anyway, back to the Brits: After years of moaning that any new band to emerge in the last ten years is a bag of arse, I found myself enjoying about 40% of the music at the Brit Awards 2014. I already liked Arctic Monkeys, but this time, unlike when I watched Glastonbury last summer, I liked other things too. For instance, I enjoyed Bastille a bit, and it wasn’t just because I wanted to touch the singer’s head. And I enjoyed that band with the warbly, big-haired bird, Rudy Mental. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Katy Perry missed her opportunity to stack shelves in Asda.  To my jaded old eyes, One Direction looks like a bunch of idiotic little scrotes, gurning and churning out pop with more synthetic composition than orange squash from a pound shop. I still think, when Alex from Arctic Monkeys gave that rambling acceptance speech about rock and roll and sludge and glass ceilings, he sounded like my eight year old off his nuts on blue Smarties. Having said that, he did come up with better pissed-up sound bites than my stock Drunken-Lady-Viking witticisms of: “where’s the bucket?” and “get help”.

When I get drunk, I do this, rather than come up with quotable soundbites. That's why I write and am not a pop star.

But generally, the Brits was great. I actually got sweaty palms in a good way when Grimmy snogged James Corden. Beyoncé looked like a really nice bottle of Gordon’s gin in that sparkly dress.

So, I’m coming round to the idea of new things being okay. Maybe a new me could be okay too, then. Time to ditch the anorak and council estate hair? Maybe...

Christmas Parties - ho ho f*cking ho!

I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas parties. When I was in paid employment, works’ dos always filled me with consternation... 

Apparently, it is not de rigeur to piss oneself at the office party.

On the one hand: How and why should you endure hours of enforced frivolity, whilst sitting next to or opposite someone you fucking hate? Surely, everyone knows how it feels to look at the cheap, sweet cooking wine and think, if I don’t drink this, I am going to die to death of brain deflation. If I do drink this, I am going to tell Mr. Sweaty Knob Cheese and his over-inflated, ego-inflicted side kick, Miss Hoity Toity Pointy Tits exactly what I think of them. We’ve been there, many times, haven’t we? Looking down at your poorly cooked turkey and stuffing, pondering how you could be at home, snorting supermarket own brand gin; having farting competitions with your other half whilst watching Grand Designs and writhing with semi-sexual anorak envy at Kevin McCloud’s McMurdo parka. 

As you can see, I don't like to overdress at parties but I do shave.

On the other hand: This is the offer of a NIGHT OUT. Shoreleave from HMS Parenthood and Grand Designs. Of course you’re going to fucking go! For once, you can take off the thermal vest that is starting to get stiff under the armpits. Kick off those disintegrating slippers! Do your roots! Shave your cleavage! Take a chisel to the kid-puke stains on your favourite coat! So, you shoehorn yourself into something ill-fitting and sparkly, that looked good when you lost all that weight four years ago. You slide your crispy trotters into the fuck-me shoes that make your arches sting and require you to use the short arse in the office as a walking stick. You put on your best knickers and the bra that aren’t grey with perished elastic. 

And what happens?

It’s a disaster, because your boss expects you to be nice to Hoity Toity and the Knob Cheese. You have to do Secret Santa and buy the bastards something witty, like a tartan scarf with a depressed cat ironically embroidered onto it instead of depleted Uranium and a Jaegermeister bottle full of Harpic 100% Limescale Remover. Then come the crackers. As if wearing a brightly coloured paper hat and reading out remedial jokes isn’t denigrating enough when you do it with your family. Now, you have to do it in front of the accounts manager, who hasn’t stopped looking at your saggy, lacklustre boobies for the last twenty minutes.

You CAN polish a turd! Treat spotty Gail to some of this.

Maybe....maybe you’re obliged to dance and you forget yourself. Twerking to Slade, because it reminds you of the time when you didn’t need gastro-resistant capsules or cod liver oil. And now your pile has come down and you’ve left a little trail of soggy arse-maltesers on the dancefloor because your pelvic floor collapsed in 2005. Maybe, you have to make a quick getaway before you have a complete prolapse into Goolie Julie’s clutchbag or you accidentally tell the boss that he/she is a humourless, tedious cock gobbler of epic proportions that even cooking wine or scribbling out his/her face with permanent magic marker won’t temper or repair.

So, my fine friends, the trouble with Christmas parties is not Noddy Holder or my Father-in-Law scratching his ear flakes at the dinner table. The trouble lies with me. When I had them, I hated them. Now that I’m self-employed and don’t get invited to any, everyone else’s seem to be wonderful, exotic functions. For yet another year, I shall therefore sit, festering in the shadow of my sticky laptop, festooned with ironing and peeling Dead Beryl wallpaper, wondering that invitations to glamorous events simply do not land on my door mat. But once they do start to come my way again, it will be good, for lo! They will be literary parties, where my modus operandi of getting horribly drunk really quickly, talking bollocks at a deafening volume and then mooning at people I’m not very fond of or flashing a tit at those I am will blend in seamlessly with the other quasi-alcoholic sociopaths. But for now, perhaps it’s better I stay at home this year. Again...

Remember! Beer goggles are an essential Christmas party accessory.

Dirty Scrubbers

The thing that’s really pissing me off this week is old people’s hygiene and washing up standards in particular. Remember the debacle last autumn with Stannah Stair, my father-in-law, falling bonce-first down the dancers? You know...that trip to the fragrant Vale of Croydon, where I got dysentery in return for daughter-in-lawly concern? Well, Stannah is still alive and he has been allowed to resume washing up. It’s just not fucking funny.

I have always known that old people can’t wash up. My mother seems to store lumps of gravy in the crevices of pretty much every receptacle in the house. She’s probably got Bisto-chunks lurking in her vest drawer, like meaty dangleberries she can savour secretly when Countdown is on. There is always a new variety of cheese in the dimples of her milk jug and handy egg chunks, clinging to the tines of forks: snack-barnacles for the terminally dirty and desperate. Laughably, my mother complains that my sofa smells of piss, because we haven’t had it recovered since the kids were potty trained. But Jesus could have used the baked bean souvenirs on her plates to feed the five thousand. This is mainly because my mother buys her washing up liquid in a large 5L container from somewhere like Billy's Bargain Busters. She also has shocking eyesight.

Washing up liquid does not come from a yak's fangita, OK?

Now, it dawns on me that there’s a recurring theme here. My mother-in-law, also mature in years, also uses Poundlessland yakpiss to wash up with. You have to use a cupful to get any froth at all. Worse still – and here’s the poke in the tiddies that gets me every time – she uses a brush. Who washes up with a brush? All she’s doing is scratching the dried on food a bit and then putting the plates and cups away. But the father-in-law really is the biggest offender. Reach for something to pour juice into for your child and you’re treated to a glass with week-old milk clinging to the inside, with lip gank plastered round the top and a nice greasy thumb print. Often there are bits of orange flesh from juice “with bits” welded to the foetid milk too. Tell me if I’m out line, but I don’t relish having my son wrap his childish chops around octogenarian gob-slobber in a bid to drink the strange orange cheese concoction. It just ain’t right. And are those glasses really just “discolouring with age”, or is it that they too are caked in two years’ worth of second hand mouth-ming and congealed red wine? Ooh, what a fucking surprise it was, when the discoloured, ageing glasses came up sparkling clean after a proper soak in hot water and scour with a genuine washy-up sponge! 

Use a brush and you might as well give your pots a wipe with your dentures....

And then, in my mind’s eye, I take a walk into the utility room and see the raw meat joint that has been left unrefrigerated on a sunny window sill for at least an entire day and night, ready for dinner time...right next to the lovely dairy based desert, happily fermenting in its anchovy egg barf-festooned dish. The 5/2 fasting diet has got nothing on this. Wanna shit your extra kilos off in a weekend? Go for lunch at an elderly relative’s house!

Don't leave old bloke mouth-ming on cups, thinking you can sneak in a snog by proxy with house guests this way.