How you know that you've been raised by a single mum...

The biggest clue to telling whether you were raised by a single mum is to use your own memory. Did you live in a house with just your mum? Yeah? There's your answer. It doesn't make for a humorous yet touching blog post though, so I thought I'd try and stretch this one out a bit.

My parents split up when I was eleven and my dad moved to a sad little bachelor flat about fifteen minutes away, so my mum became a bit of a single mum. Then, when I was fifteen, my dad went and died, which put up a bit of a barrier to the whole parenting thing, so my mum became a total single mum. During this time we've lived in three different houses and have gone from having a bit of money, to no money, to even less money and then back to a bit of money again, but we've had a WHOLE LOT OF FUN.
Not really, but it's mostly been fine. Here are the things that I've learned as a result of being raised by my brilliant mum.

-Spiders will die if you leave them under a Tupperware box for long enough.
It's a cliché, but it's true; we're a household of three girls and we all hate spiders. We used to have a cat who ate them, but now we don't and we have to improvise. Thanks to my mum, I can get rid of a spider using almost anything and without having to go anywhere near it.

-LOL at yourself.
You know at school when you're asked to bring in one of your dad's old shirts because you're going to do something that has the potential to be a bit messy, like use a pritt-stick or felt-tip pens? Well, we would always have to take our Grandad's shirts, because yeah, no dad. I love my Grandad; he's kind and generous and hilariously over-protective, but sartorially minded he ain't and as a result I really did look like I was wearing a 76 year old man's shirts.
Nowadays, this would be a look that I could totally rock, but at the time it was mortifying; everyone made a comment and it was impossible to look cute in front of my crush.
I appreciate that life gets shittier than this, but it was moments like these that allowed me to hone and perfect my greatest defence mechanism; humour. I'm now completely comfortable looking awful and stupid, as long as I get to make the first joke.

-Every diet, ever.
My mum has a great bod, but I can't remember a time in my life when she hasn't, at least, been 'cutting down'. Red and green days, points, juices, cayenne pepper, the 'hospital diet' (whatever the fuck that was. I remember my mum taking about 40 minutes to print it off.) and cabbage soup; my mum has been through them all.
I can only assume that had a man been around, there would have been someone to eye-roll all of this away, but there wasn't and as a result I can now tell you, without any doubt, the amount of weigh watchers points in a Mr Kipling apple pie.

-Watching Top Gear and Soccer AM is not how it has to be.
We had no big, growly man guarding our TV remote and consequently I have never had to sit through a full episode of Top Gear. Excluding watching England's 1998 World Cup matches at school, I have still never watched an entire football match.
When my friends at school were moaning about having to sit through 'the match' the night before or their dad's perving on this week's Soccerette, I could nochalantly drop into conversation that my mum, sister and I had watched a documentary about men who had previously been married coming out as gay, making me seem all cool and cosmopolitan.

-You CAN go out like that.
In the December of 2008, when there was snow on the ground, I attended a college party wearing a pair of tiny white shorts that I now wouldn't be able to get over my head, let alone my arse. I had fake tanned my legs to within an inch of the equator and I was ready to party.
Was I told “You're not going out in that”? No, because there was no dad there, thinking about hormone-filled boys trying to brush their hand against the exposed bum cheek (yeah, they were that short) of his precious first-born child. I only had a mum, who remembered what it was like to be seventeen and desperate for boys to fancy you.
And, thanks to my mum, I had a great time at parties, spending the whole night worried that boys would want to do stuff, that girls would call me a slag for looking like I wanted to do stuff and boys would call me frigid for being too scared to do stuff.
I never wore those shorts again, so well played mum, well bloody played.

- You can miss out on stuff and it will be fine.
Whether it was the year nine skiing trip, the year eleven cruise or a cinema trip that fell too close to the end of the month, there was lots of stuff that my sister and I missed out on. We knew that we couldn't afford it and we didn't want to upset our mum by asking. At the time, it felt rubbish and like we were missing out on THE MOST EXCITING EXPERIENCES EVER, but I soon learned that we weren't. Everyone got blisters on the ski trip, all of the girls fell out on the cruise (also, who the fuck wants to go on a cruise before the age of 63, anyway?) and I could watch Hitch when it came out on Sky Movies three months later.
You get over FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) pretty quickly, and now, if I get in from work late on a Friday and all I want to do is re-watch Wedneday night's TOWIE because I fell asleep halfway through, rather than doll myself up in fifteen minutes and jump back on a train to go on a night out, then I will and and I'm fine with it.

-Periods are not a big deal.
With three women in one house, the topic of periods comes up regularly. Or irregularly. There's no man there to sport a grimace whilst mentally going to his happy place. There was no 'ick' factor about periods in our house,;no one looking horrified when they came down in a morning to find you clutching a hot water bottle to your abdomen. All aspects of the menstrual cycle become appropriate dinner-table conversation topics, thus ensuring that you definitely won't be the girl that faints during the year nine period talk. In fact, the whole thing seems quite tame and you look at the nurse all “Yeah? Is that all you got?”
Our house is basically that scene in Harry Potter, where they break into the bank and everything they touch keeps multiplying, only with tampons.


My mum has obviously taught me other stuff, like how to make great Yorkshire puddings and how to hold your shit together whilst everything is crumbling and you're probably going to lose your house, but I think the aforementioned are pretty much the 'take home' points.

Love to ya mothers.

Lynx have the answer to world peace...it's Lynx.

You've got to love the guys over at Lynx, they're real triers aren't they?
Despite it almost becoming a cliché to make the smell of Lynx/smell of desperation joke, Lynx HQ are still persisting with the 'Lynx will get you laid' story arch. Why fix it if it ain't broke, eh Lynx? Except it is broke. Really fucking broke.

Lynx's latest offering is Lynx Peace. I don't know what it smells of, I'm assuming that it smells the same as EVERY OTHER LYNX FRAGRANCE EVER RELEASED. EVER. I've never thought of Lynx as a particularly 'peaceful' scent; something about the way my head screams “ABORT. ABORT.” whenever I get a whiff of it on a packed tube carriage, or the way the scent makes me eyes squeak when I'm rubbing the tears from them.
The Lynx ads have always irked me, to say the least, but I think they've really outdone themselves with their 'Make Love. Not War' campaign.

The ad starts with a shot of a child's doll, which for all intents and purposes might as well be an actual child if we're talking about war, being squashed by a tank. It's fucking eye pops out, for gods sakes. Meanwhile, somewhere in Asia, a communist army has a assembled and are addressing their dictator, who has most likely killed a few mill in his time. In a helicopter, somewhere else, a soldier is looking clammy and anxious, most likely terrified about being IN A WAR. Then there's another foreign bad guy; he's getting ready to push The Button.
Lastly, we see a young woman, all red-lipped up, carrying her shopping home; I'm guessing a tasty war-time dinner of beef toes and a potato that has those root things growing out of it. She comes face to face with a tank, but rather than running, she looks at it all sexy and smouldery.
The music is building, something is about to happen. Of course, we all know what's about to happen because we all realised that it was a Lynx ad as soon as we saw the rep-lipped beauty and her “I smell man. I want to sex man” expression.
A soldier sticks his head out of the top of the tank and alas, she knows him. She's climbed up to the top of the tank, rather deftly in red court shoes (I have a hard enough time negotiating a steep driveway at times. Or a curb.), and she's on his face before you can say “He was about to obliterate your entire town.”
We then see the helicopter guy, and he's landed straight into the mouth of a Korean (indicated by the hat) beauty, so he's not doing any killing either.
Dictator guy? Don't worry, he wasn't up to anything sinister, he'd just arranged for his army to hold up coloured cards in order to create a huge portrait of him and his lady, because yeah, romance.
And phew, the foreign baddy wasn't going to hit go on the end of the world, he was actually just setting off some fireworks as a little treat for his significant other.
We're then fed the tag line “Make love. Not war.” Apparently, Lynx have tried to legitimise the whole thing by teaming up with Peace One Day, which should be good; I like peace, but it just seems a little half-arsed.

Couple. Of. Things.
I don't know much about war, thankfully, but I do know that usually women don't fair too well in times of unrest. We've all read harrowing stories about soldiers running rampant through towns and villages doing whatever the hell they like, usually with women and I feel like telling guys to drop their gun and grab the nearest woman in order to keep their hands busy is a little too in-keeping with the whole 'rape and pillage' thing.
And no, I'm not saying that Lynx are encouraging men to rape women. Of course they're not, but I think the assumption that sex is a peaceful act is quite dangerous.
Also, Lynx guys, have you ever heard of timing? You can make flippant statements about peace when the world is kind of peaceful, but suggesting that a weird Zorro-shaped spray of Lynx and the inevitable quick bang that follows will just calm everything down at a time when lots of people around the world are trying to hold their lives together whilst their homes descend into chaos is a little...gross.

According to the Lynx blog (yeah, that's a thing), the world is a better place when people “focus their attention on love and attraction.”
Maybs.
I was under the impression that the world would be a better place if we focused on securing equality for all people and stuff, but maybe we should try it the Lynx way?
So, guys- shag, don't shoot.

“I beat depression and was able to go outside again, brush my hair, be funny and re-establish an extensive skin care routine.”

I don't read magazines.
Except for Stylist, because it's, you know free. And quite good.

Around two years ago I was probably blowing thirty quid a month on perfume-scented pages of bullshit, but I discovered blogs and online mags and found a load of content that was funnier, more relevant and more inspiring that anything that I'd ever read in Glamour (I'd been, worryingly, reading it since I was about 15, so I think it had had more than enough time to prove itself).
The only time, in the last year, that I've relapsed in my magazine abstinence was when I was depressed. It feels quite weird typing that. Weird and embarrassing; I'll probably have to walk around pretending to scratch my forehead for the next six weeks. People kept buying me magazines because that's what you do when people are ill, and I kept reading them because anything that distracted me from my own thoughts seemed like a good idea. They didn't help, of course, and just made me feel uglier and more ashamed that I hadn't been outside for three days.

I'm currently living with my mum and sister, so occasionally a girly mag does find its way into the house. I like to think that it wanders in, like the little milk carton from Blur's Coffee and TV video, rather than accept that someone has actually bought it. When I do find one, sometimes I nudge it along the floor with my foot until it's underneath the sofa or the rug, but at other times, when I'm feeling particularly passive aggressive, I decide to flick through it- just to 'check in'.
I found myself doing this on Thursday evening, half searching for the one article that I was desperate to see nine months ago; an article about me, because at the time I was completely unable to separate myself from depression. I was depression and depression was me. I wanted to know that depression was something that attractive, shiny-haired, successful ladies got and wasn't just something that I'd let happen to myself because I'm rubbish.
So, I flicked through, but, after being told all of the exciting things that I can do with an ice cube (what if I have sensitive teeth, Cosmo, what then? HUH?), I came to no avail. None of them gave me The D.

I don't know why, women's magazines are supposed to be all ballsy now, aren't they? They will happily give us unrealistic advice on how to negotiate a pay rise or incredibly detailed, yet ultimately unhelpful, instructions for how to find the G Spot, but a meaningful, uncomfortable exploration into mental illness?
Nope.
I have noticed though, that post-natal depression seems to make it through the net. This is good, don't get me wrong. I think that this is because it can be quite neatly explained; it's the baby's fault. Your hormones went nuts, from the baby, and that's why you're depressed. Done. Plain, old, original depression can be a bit more tricky. Sometimes it isn't triggered by an unexpected redundancy, or the end of a marriage; sometimes you just wake up one day and feel indifferent, or disappointed, about the fact that you did.

Obviously, women's magazines should do more mental health pieces. One in five of us will have to deal with some sort of depression in our lives; so that right there is the reason why they should. I'm more curious as to why they're not featuring them, like, now.

Maybe it's because, when it comes to mental health, you really can't make any sweeping generalisations. Sweeping generalisations like all women are looking to climb the career ladder, or that we're all after dewy skin. Although, I find that duvets often crop up in most depression stories, so maybe that would be a good place to start?
No one's story is the same, and whilst I'm sure that it would be helpful for people who are suffering with depression to read about an experience that mirrors their own, that says all of the things that get stuck in your throat when someone says “So, how are you doing now?”, I don't think it's a necessity. At times, just seeing the word, all be it in an obnoxious pink typeface, would help, acting as a reminder that it's an actual thing, and isn't just you.

The fact that mental health can't really be generalised means that creating neat little 'Top Ten Tips For Dealing With Depression' would be a real bitch. Girl mags really like stuff like that; Top 69 Sex Positions (ooh-er, I see what you did there...), Top Five Cleansers, Top 10 Things It's Ok To Say (thanks for the sign off, guys).
Mental illness isn't really a 'top ten' kinda thing, it's more of a 'Just Give Me One Little Thing That Will Make Today Slightly Better Than Yesterday' kinda thing. Catchy.

And finally, more often than not, there's no 'big wow' headline when it comes to mental illness. The 'I Beat ____ And Found The Man/Job Of My Dreams' formula is a little redundant. I'm sure that some people do have 'big wow' stories, I hope so, but unfortunately for some there's no real finality to mental illness. It's not the chicken pox; you don't get it once and then go on to enjoy a life of immunity.
Mental illness also changes your perspective of what constitutes a 'big wow'. Finding your ideal man or your dream job seem completely remote, whereas doing 'normal' stuff again, like going to Wagamamas or laughing, is just the best.

What would my 'big wow' headline have been?
It's up there.

Dare To Ba-PISS OFF

And the award for the Most Annoying Phrase of the week goes to… “Dare to bare”.
To be honest, I’ve had this bolt in the chamber for a while now, but Wednesday’s belligerent bare-faced extravaganza tipped me over the edge and made me pull the trigger remorselessly.
Often used as the go-to phrase by women’s magazines and The DM whenever a female celebrity shows any skin that isn’t her wrists, elbows or forehead, “dare to bare” is a fun way (IT RHYMES) to instruct us readers to remove a layer. Sometimes it’s a layer of clothing, sometimes it’s a layer of makeup and sometimes it’s a layer of hair; never knowing what it’ll be next is part of the fun.

“Dare to bare” has irked me a while now, and I’ve built up quite a lot of resentment, but let’s just try to go through this in a systematic fashion, shall we?

Has anyone ever extended the challenge to men?
No. No they haven’t. In fact, when men want to raise money for a cancer charity, they’re actually encouraged to cover their face with more hair, rather than rip it out at the root at fortnightly intervals.
When flicking through GQ and stumbling upon an interesting piece on shorts, are men told to “dare to bare [their] legs”? No. No they’re not.  They’re just encouraged to wear the damn shorts if they want to get laid.

I think the ‘dare’ element possibly comes from the fact that choosing to bare yourself at the wrong moment can lead to all sorts of strife. If I “dare to bare” my legs when out in a club then I’m asking for that neon-print-Topman-tee-wearing arsehole to put his hand up my dress as I attempt to get near the bar; that would be the WRONG time to bare.
But, if magazine editorials are to be believed (and really, what is there to suggest that they aren’t?), then when I’m strolling along a St Barths beach, or heading for a light lunch with my gal-pals; that’s RIGHT time to bare.
Don’t get it wrong ladies.

I’m confused. What am I supposed to be baring again?
Is it my perfect pins ready for the summer sunshine? Is it my tarted-up tootsies ready for flip-flop weather? Is it my toned torso ready to rock this season’s crop-top trend? Is it my face to allow my natural beauty to show through? Is it my jaded, withered and rapidly cooling soul?
Apparently, it’s all of the above.

At this rate, I’ll be doing my morning commute wearing nothing but re-useable coffee cup, an open copy of the Metro and a grimace.


And what an image to end on.

Bare faces...

So. We all know what this is going to be about, don’t we? Faces. Bare, naked faces. Women’s faces, everywhere.

For the benefit of those of you who have proper jobs that don’t allow a sneaky social media check or for those who actually do something meaningful on their commute home, like read a book or talk to those around you to find out about their lives, today saw Facebook become a literal book of faces as a shit-tonne of women uploaded a #nomakeupselfie or a #barefacedselfie, or whatever the hastily created Hashtag was, in a bid to raise awareness, and in some cases money, for Cancer Research.
Of course, as with any flurry of social media activity, there was a bit of a backlash and the selfie snappers became the butt of the repetitive, un-imaginative joke.

My attitude to the whole thing can be summed up in two carefully chosen, and I think you’ll agree, powerful words.

Allow it.

Seriously, just allow it yeah?

  I am quite a cynical person and am quite intolerant of the quirky personal habits that weave together in order to create the rich tapestry of life (applications to date me can be sent to @BuckinghamAlice), so that’s why, when it comes to charity, I generally try to assume that people are doing it with good intentions.
In fact, scrap that. I don’t care whether people are trying to do it with good intentions; if some charity gets done, then that’s fine with me. I’m on board.
  So that’s why I’m struggling to take any swipes at those who’ve uploaded a picture of their makeup-less face today; they’re trying to do something nice and good and can anyone really be annoyed about that? It’s like watching someone put their 3p change into the collection boxes at McDonalds and thinking “Dick.”
  I don’t care whether the person has rolled straight out of bed, complete with eye-goop, or whether they’ve spent three hours contouring in cheekbones. Awareness of the cause is not dependent on how little makeup the person is wearing. “I’ve just seen a picture of Sharon with no makeup on, I feel very aware of Cancer Research. Ooh, a picure of Jane…is she wearing mascara? I am now less aware of Cancer Research.”

Regardless of who did donate and didn’t donate, who is wearing makeup and who isn’t wearing makeup, the whole thing got everybody talking; so in that sense, it really did raise awareness.
Constant awareness.
Incessant awareness.
And this is the problem. Ish. Long gone are the days when one person in your town would sit in a bath full of beans and you’d find out in the paper the next day just how long they sat there for. To be honest, I’m not sure I was even born in ‘those days’, but I know that things like that happened, I’ve seen it in books.
Social media means that you can see the person getting into the bath of beans and receive constant updates to let you know that they’re still sitting there. In the beans. Still. For hours. All day. Constantly.
We only found the pink, hopeful faces of distant relatives and acquaintances so irritating today because social media collects them all together for us and interrupts our mindless scrolling with them.
If social media had a day off, and women had decided to go into work wearing no makeup two things would happen-
1) People would constantly tell them that they “look tired”.
2) No one would care. They could say that they were doing it to raise awareness for Cancer Research, but no one would know about it and no one would care.

So, if there’s one thing that we’ve learned today, it’s that the best way to raise awareness of something is to annoy the shit out of everyone.

Daddy Issues.

This week I had two different men tell me that they feel paternal towards me. Granted, I've had much worse said to me by men in any given week, but their comments did set me off into a week-long brood, during which I've displayed all of the characteristics that I normally manage to repress quite well; neediness, loneliness, all of those super attractive and alluring ones.
It made me wonder whether I give something off; a father-less hormone or a half-orphan scent that only men can pick up on? I mean, I'm not wandering around introducing potential boyfriends to male passers-by (and yes, I am aware that there are currently no potential boyfriends, thank you), nor am I going up to men that I don't know any asking to borrow twenty quid for 'lunch'. I think that, in general, I look and act like a normal person. What would make two men, that I don't really know, feel paternal towards me?

I haven't seen or heard my dad for eight years. It feels like forever, when in actual fact, it's nothing compared to how much time there is left to go in my life. In eight years I've completely forgotten his phone number, the last thing he said to me, how old he would have been, what brand of cigarettes he smoked and I can only remember his voice when I imagine him saying “I've just put the heating on.” I'm completely terrified of what I'll forget over the next eight years.
So, even though the one line that you're constantly offered as condolence when someone dies is “It'll get easier in time”, it really just gets a bit worse, because the more time that passes is just more time since you last saw the person.
As I get older, and more adult 'life stuff' comes up; graduation, house renting, serious relationships, contracts, ends of serious relationships, council tax, buying fridges, weddings, driving, gardening, I find myself increasingly wanting the one thing that, as a self-proclaimed (as if there is any other type?) feminist, I'm not supposed to admit to wanting.
Sometimes, I really want a man around to look after me.

On Friday night I was followed and accosted by some normal-looking, Next-wearing arsehole. Despite my common sense screaming at me, I walked around the back-streets of Birmingham in a blind panic looking for a man to help me. I eventually remembered how to get home and sat brooding for the entire train journey. The only thing that I felt would comfort me was for a big strong man to pat me on the head and tell me that he would sort out the bad guy, and I was very disappointed in myself; even Disney have their heroines slaying dragons now.

A couple of years ago I told someone my dirty little secret, that I occasionally wanted a man to be around and look after me, and was told “Well, that's not a very feminist thing to say.”
It probably isn't.
Without getting all 00's R'n'B, I know that I don't need a man to look after me. I'm happy with my own financially insolvent state, I'll watch a film on my own, I can kind of change a plug and I secretly enjoy putting cheaply-made flat pack furniture together, so I'm pretty sure Beyonce will be writing a song about me any day now.
But I don't have some kind of feminist Britta Filter to run all of my thoughts and feelings through. In fact, the only process I use to check my feminist credentials in moments of doubt is this one-
“Do you think that women are equal to men and should be treated as such?”
-Yes
“Any exceptions?”
-Nope

I feel like losing my dad has, eight years on, left me with a lot of feminist guilt.

I'm not looking for a dad and boyfriend to be rolled into one icky package, but seeing as my life is not a Film4 production and I probably won't meet a Bill Nighy-esque character on a morning train who will begin to see me as the daughter that he'd never had whilst helping to heal the pain left behind by my father's premature death, I will probably continue to make inappropriate dating choices.
However, seeing as this blog post post will have plummeted the likelihood of me ever having a date again so low that Paddy Power are building their next promotional campaign around me, I'll probably have to figure out another way to work out my Daddy Issues. Quick whip-round for therapy?