Detox is a Word

My life is all sorted: I’m starting a juice detox diet. Spell check just claimed that detox isn’t a real word, well how wrong is that? I’m going to do the Carol Vorderman one, because I bought the book a few years ago. It’s a great read and there are lots of   coloured pictures of drinks that make giving up food almost seem attractive. And Carol Vorderman is so good at Sudoku that she must know what she’s doing, even if I despise healthy sexy slim women in general.

The idea came to me last week when this friend of mine called over. We try to meet once a week and take time out to work on the novels that we are both not writing. This means a lot of sticky cream buns and café lattes are consumed. We spend an hour discussing how our week has been so incredibly busy that there’s no way we could have written even a page of our novels, we bitch about any mutual friends, saying what bitches they are and five minutes before she leaves we come up with a plan as to how we really will get writing this week.

She brings the buns, normally a big bag of them. I remind her that there are only the two of us not writing novels but she reminds me that I have a whole heap of kids who will eat them when they get back from school. I say things like ‘you’ll be popular in this house’, but actually she isn’t, as I always manage to finish off the buns in the time between her leaving and the kids getting home.

So I was asking her last week did she think that her bringing cake but never eating it and me eating too much of it had anything to do with the fact that she is a little slip of a thing, whilst I have become a fat person trapped in the body of an obese person. She thinks there actually is a link there, and that my weight could in some way be related to my diet. She told me that years ago she was quite a bit heavier (you know when skinny girls say they ‘had a lot of weight on’ they mean they went up to a size 8 once) and that she did this juice detox and that after that she started eating healthy and feeling great about herself and has never looked back.

So there you go. I’m all set. I was going to start last week, on that day actually, but I already had a stuffed chicken in the oven. The following day there were some overripe bananas in the fruit bowl and with the recession and all that, I decided to make a banana and walnut bread, which unfortunately, I had to eat the whole thing myself as one of my kids has a nut allergy and the others don’t like bananas. Then there were relatives’ home from America who I cooked for and I felt it would be rude if I didn’t go all out and make the apple pie, scones and all the trimmings. The stress of not being able to start my juice diet led me to drink, so the following night I downed a bottle of red. I thought it would be good to have it out of the house anyways before I begin.

Now it’s the weekend. You can’t detox on a weekend. There’s a garden fete I have to go to that will involve a cake stall, there are pizza delivery companies that need to be supported in times of recession and the sun is shining. You can’t detox on a hot day because if you did that you couldn’t have an ice cream.

So I’m starting Monday. Well no, hang on. Monday is the last parent committee meeting before the summer and that’s the night we all get invited by the school principal for a glass of wine and finger food, so no, Monday’s out. Tuesday. I’ll start Tuesday if I'm not meeting someone for lunch. 

I've looked it up in the dictionary. Detox is a word, maybe only a word...

I'm NOT With Stupid

 I love Paris. The cafes, the culture, the art, the romance, I could go on all day. But I don’t love Paris as in ‘I heart Paris’ on the front of a tacky t-shirt. Apparently, though, I’m alone in this sentiment if I’m to go by the rail of t-shirts I’ve just seen at in the local retail store. And it’s not just Paris, I’m also not a student at various colleges mostly on another continent, I’m not Superman or sexy chic and no, the Leprechauns didn’t make me do it. I’m not ‘with stupid’ and I don’t think you should ‘save the trees, eat a beaver.’ Not eating beavers isn't a vegetarian issue, it’s more that I’m really not convinced beavers have been all that instrumental in the demise of trees. But, oh of course, double meaning. I'm on the floor laughing. Not. 

Now why people go around wearing the most ridiculous things written on t-shirts is beyond me. I can’t say I’m not guilty myself. When I was ten years old the local cheapo clothes store were selling a range of t-shirts with slogans. I can only remember two of them: the one that I wanted and the one that I got. I wanted the one with the little kid beside a big shaggy dog that read ‘nobody loves me.’ I got the one with a precocious looking girl waving a tennis racket asking ‘anyone for tennis?’ I got into trouble for not wearing it after hounding my mother to buy me a slogan t-shirt. But even back then, I was loathe to sport a slogan I couldn’t relate to. To this day I’ve never played tennis, but as for ‘nobody loves me’, I still feel an affinity to that statement and am bitter that I wasn’t bought the t-shirt.

 The people I worry about most are those who wear t-shirts with funny slogans: Jesus is coming. Look busy!’ I mean, what are they getting at? Is it that they want to entertain others, or do they want others to find them entertaining? Perhaps they just want to read their own t-shirts all the time and make themselves laugh. Then there’s the political ‘stop whaling’ stuff, as if reading someone’s t-shirt is going to make me start thinking about the wrongs of whaling instead of what a wally they look like. I’ll leave out quotes from my favourite writers covered in other peoples sweat and we won’t mention all the variations of the word coca cola, which probably belong to the ‘oh, so hilarious’ category.

I’m not bitter that none of the slogan t-shirts came in my size; they only went up as far as XL. I ended up buying a very fetching tent like smock and the only writing it offers is a little label on the inside with the unmentionable size written on it. No, I’m not bitter; I just think that slogans are meant for car bumper stickers and fridge magnets. Nowhere else. Not even the slogan that I saw while on holidays in Spain. It was written on a scroll and read: ‘the only woman I’ve ever loved was another man’s wife, my mum.’ Unfortunately it wasn’t a t-shirt; it was tattooed onto a man’s lower arm. I just don’t get it…

Best Thing About Marriage

I have the best thing you can ever get from marriage: a divorce. My ex lives a good two hours plane journey away which means that the child sharing is done by going on holidays together or the kids going to stay with him during the summer, leaving me with a few weeks of having the opportunity to live the way I think I’d like to live but actually wouldn’t. He comes here sometimes and stays in my house where we organise various family days out and in. We reminisce about old times. I bring up things like ‘wasn’t it a trip of a lifetime when we travelled overland to China?’ But I never say things like ‘wasn’t it a hoot when you had the affair with the lap dancer and got beaten up by that pimp guy?’ He says things like ‘I’ll always remember how you awakened my interest in the arts.’ But he won’t say ‘I wish you hadn’t sold the family car that time to buy a polytunnel.’

We pussyfoot around all the issues and find a space where we can still be a family in our own right, a weird kind of family but c’mon, we were always going to be that anyway. True, it has not been easy to get to this place where we can all be friends, but lots of happy endings begin with a fight. Giving birth, for example, was way worse, and I’m still not sure if that was a happy ending.

This year we went on a skiing holiday together and I realised why it’s so easy to get on brilliantly with your ex-husband. First of all, he was in charge of the budget, so there weren’t any arguments about ‘no, that’s too expensive’ or ‘let’s go to the supermarket and buy cheap stuff and make dinner’. And because he probably feels guilty about not having paid maintenance until I chased him across Europe with some commission or other for the recovery of unpaid child maintenance (we wouldn’t really have chats about that over dinner either), he likes to be generous and demonstrate what a nice person he is.

 Then there are all the annoying things that I remember from being married. Things like hearing the same story over and over. Because I no longer live with this man, I only have to hear the same stories for the duration of the holiday, which makes it bearable.

If I think he looks like a total nerd wearing his jeans too high up his waist, if he still makes that loud chewy noise when he eats, if he arranges to do something for a day trip but then changes it to another and then back to the original arrangement all within an hour. Whatever he does, it’s not going to faze me; he’s my ex. I’ve already escaped. Of course it does make other people uncomfortable. They probably think that one or the other of us would secretly like a reunion, but mostly I’d say they’re just jealous. There were some days on that ski holiday when I looked around at the other families and thought ‘jeez, it looks like we’re the only grown ups here who are actually on speaking terms.’

But there is that one drawback when you’re on holiday with your ex-husband. You’re not going to get much sex. People assume that we are a couple, not that it ever stopped various advances in the married years. But a family hotel full of Dutch ski enthusiasts who wear slippers in the hotel foyer, is not really the place for adventure.

Recently, things have been going so well with my ex and so bad with romance that I’ve had a great idea: we could meet up now and then for sex. We did do it for years when we were married, so we could just go for it, we wouldn’t need to drag things out with foreplay or promise on things that we can’t deliver, like happy ever after and all that.

Thing is though, it would never work, because I already know I’d end up geting turned off by the chewy noise when he eats, and the repeated stories, and the changing arrangements back and forth,  and the reason for the divorce in the first place, the horrible nerdy trousers…

Sexy Quips

   I can never really work out what it is you are meant to do with your life in order to qualify as a worthwhile woman. If you are into things like fashion and glamour you will be deemed as weak and pandering to men as their playthings. If you have a career you will hear about how bad it is for your children and how women are difficult to work for, worse than men and more ambitious. Chose to stay at home with your kids and you’ve lost it all together, because that means you have become an unpaid skivvy pandering to the needs of little people who will grow up to hate you. A homemaker is also a dead loss. It means you cook and clean for free and also take orders and abuse for doing so. Getting married is not cool either, nor is staying single. Married women have sold themselves to the enemy, while singles are self obsessed old maids.

I still have to work out my own role as a woman. Unfortunately I love cooking and hate cleaning which leaves me fat and living in a dump. I love having kids, am even enjoying them as teens, but have to conceal my bohemian lifestyle from them just in case they grow up wild and free, and who in all fairness wants to end up like their parents? I fear the worst for my children. The oldest has expressed an interest in accountancy. I worry about bringing up children who might get mixed up in corporate lifestyles and wear suits. Next thing it’ll be banking, or politics and we all know that this sort of thing can land you in prison.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Whatever you do is likely to be either praised or frowned upon. What if women in business were not tough and ambitious? Well then they’d be criticised for not being up for the challenge. And what if there was nobody to make dinner? I totally agree that it’s not just the woman’s job to do all these things, but where does the divide between the genders start and finish?

There must be something I don’t get about feminism, and just to clarify that, I do consider myself a feminist, but I also like the ad for Hunky Dory’s with the rugby girl flashing her tits. She looks tough and up for a wrestle, and she really doesn’t make women look like all they’re good for is sex. In fact, the ad kind of challenges that if you ask me. And let’s face it, if you do have to generalise about women, the one thing they all seem to have in common is the ability to multi-task, so this girl is just as likely to be a PhD student out to earn some extra cash and a few free boxes of crisps. But apparently, no, there have been thousands of complaints to say it’s in bad taste, vulgar and all that.

Tell you one thing for nothing, if I had that girls body I’d probably go round in a very low cut t-shirt with the words ‘in case you hadn’t noticed, I am (amongst other things)  a babe’ written on it. (And when you're as big as I am, you can fit a lot of words onto a t-shirt.)

I wonder if the poster had been of a man in a sexy pose would there have been as many complaints? More than that though, I wonder how many of the complaints about the distasteful ad came from men?

Irish Burglar Alarms

Once upon a time when I was a newly returned ex-pat, I decided it would be a great idea to live in the back of beyond, in a place where it’s so country that you had to go out and look for beauty with a metal detector. The place was mostly bog and stone and other than my good self and a handful of blow-ins, most of the locals were cousins of some kind or other. There was one sad pub where the local men sported various themes on the same check shirt while the ladies wore knee length skirts and raised a leg on a Friday night for the Set Dancing session. This village had one tourist attraction, and it did earn the name village as there was a petrol pump that doubled up into a post office where you could also buy groceries. You wouldn’t know it was a tourist attraction considering that from outside it looked like the ruins of a big old house, and it was pretty much deserted. What made it a tourist attraction was that above the hole that was once an entrance, there was a carving of a very ugly naked woman holding open her genatalia for the entire world to see. There are only a few such carvings left in Ireland and they are called ‘Sheela-na-Gigs.’ There is, of course, plenty of controversy as to what a Sheela-na-Gigs is all about. Some will claim she is a pagan goddess, others will say she is a warning against lust. Personally, my favourite interpretation is that she was there to scare people away: a sort of warning that a mad woman with a huge fanny is inside and that if you dare come any closer she is going to get you.

Not long after moving into this shambles of a house we were broken into. It served me right. It was stupid to think that living in the Irish countryside meant you would be safe. I had moved into a very exposed house on a country road, and really I should have just put a sign up saying ‘pull in, rob the place and leave’. After the break in I began to feel uncomfortable at night. I feared that someone would break in when we were at home, attacking myself or the kids. So I decided to do a Sheela-na-Gigs on it. I bought a cement plaque with a picture of a very nasty Sheela and hung it outside the door.

I used to sleep naked anyway, so I came up with a safety plan. The house was a bungalow, so if anyone broke in I would hear them come up the hall. All I’d have to do would be to run up the hall naked, holding my fanny open and screaming in an earth mother voice. I was delighted with myself. It was cheap and I didn’t have to remember some code or other. A few months went by and I began to forget about burglars. Until, that is, I heard my front door rattle one morning at about 3am. I could also hear my car being pulled and tampered with, so that was it.

He probably heard my cave woman howls first, but when I came running up the hall naked and flashing my fanny at my next door neighbour I can only say that yes, it did work indeed.

He was at my door to say that the bull had escaped from Kelly’s field and was now endangering my car. Sadly, the bull wasn’t scared off by my tactics, so I did the walk of shame back down the hall, put on some clothes and helped my neighbour to get the bull out.

All the same though, I still think it’s a great alternative to forking out money for fancy burglar alarms, and when it comes to humans, it definitely does work.  I’ve since moved from that village for reasons best left unsaid. Here in the suburbs though, they say that crime is on the increase, so luckily for my family, we are all safe. Safe as houses. 

Copulative Complications

One of the great things about the internet is that borderline alcoholic lone parents, who are forced to stay home at night, can now go online once they have reached the edge of maudlin with their lonely lone parent bottle of wine. I am one of those people. Online, to define it properly, means searching up old flames. That’s because old flames are safe. They remember you from way back when you didn’t buy your clothes in the fatty shop, you don’t need to do a police check on them because you know they were always mad but not in a weirdo way and they are also likely to be the kind of married and living on another continent safe.

Recently I found an old flame on Facebook. There was a touch of all of the above. He sent me an email to say he still thinks I’m beautiful (he last saw me in 1987). Luckily, he’s been living in New York for the past 25 years, so I won’t have to do my roots, put on my favourite tent and disappoint him over a coffee. The dangerous part is that he is currently single and other than some grey stubble looks pretty much the same as he did the last time I kicked him out of my apartment in Bray leaving him to walk the 20 mile journey back to his place in Fairview. Possibly that walk or one of the other journeys I put upon the poor guy has been key to the fact that he has spent the past twenty years actively climbing mountains, bouldering and hiking.

He promised that he’d always held a place for me in his heart despite his two marriages and numerous love affairs. He told me he still paints, plays guitar and writes poetry despite the time constraints brought on by a successful career.

Then there was the phone call: “gee, it’s been so long.”  When I asked him how he was doing he said “I’m good.”I had not asked him about his behaviour, I had asked him how he was. Then he reminisced on old times and how we “laughed so hard.” It wasn’t just the Noo Yawk twang that got to me, but the fact that he was changing his words. This I’m good carry on gets to me big time. I already knew he was good: bloody brilliant. Why else would I go looking for him after 25 years and a bottle of cheap wine, but let’s face it, well is an adverb and good is an adjective.

Adverbs describe verbs and adjectives describe nouns, which means that saying ‘I am good’ is wrong, as good cannot mean how you are, rather what kind of person you are. Complicated, I know, and as for laughing so hard, we never laughed hard, we laughed ourselves sick, or silly, or laughed our heads off: all much more unrealistic descriptions of laughing, but at least they conjure up an image whereas laughing hard doesn’t.

So I decided that even if this handsome, fit, wealthy ex of mine really does send me the promised ticket to America, I really couldn’t take him up on it. It just wouldn’t be right to meet up with somebody who’d developed bad grammar habits over the years. I did some research into the usage of I’m good and I’m well  in order to have some incriminating evidence,only to discover that it’s actually not wrong to say I’m good. Apparently it’s got something to do with what’s called linking verbs and action verbs, and seemingly the verb to be is the quintessential action verb, making it perfectly legal to respond I’m good to the question how are you? It went on to explain that linking verbs are also called copulative verbs. Well there you go, I thought. Isn’t that where all the trouble began in the first place.

So I’ve just sent him an email to say I won’t be coming to visit. It’s just because of some copulative complications…

Sex and Haircuts

To me hairdressers are like lovers. I get all excited about trying them out; especially the ones with a bit of a name for being quirky. This morning I dished out top dollar for a guy with a great reputation, but paying hairdressers can be on par to using a prostitute: the cost doesn’t guarantee the quality, does it? Today’s session was totally sexy – a lot of foreplay involving the male in question telling me how great he was, how great it would be and how much success he’s had with other women. The act itself was over before I’d noticed, he patted my shoulder and called me love, and like a lot of sex, I left telling myself I could probably get a better job somewhere else.

As with lovers, the good thing is that you can move on to the next one soon after the anti-climax, and in between times you can mope around and blame yourself.

So most of lunchtime I’ve been coming up with reasons as to why it is my fault that I’ve just paid almost half my weekly income on having some guy do a ballet dance around my head whilst giving me a short back and sides which makes me look like a proper dyke. Well that’s reason number one: perhaps top hairdressers like to give you a haircut to suit your personality. Then there’s the fact that there’s not much you can do with a short haired person looking for a haircut, and there’s also my face. He needed to hide as much of it as possible. Another possibility is that it might be some new sort of fashion that came into style in the past twenty five years, and I wouldn’t have a clue about what’s kosher these days, now would I?

I’m probably being as selfish about this haircut as I am about sex: I expect to emerge from the experience looking at least ten years younger and 30lbs lighter. Somehow, I believe there should be a transformation somehow.

But no, here I sit with a short haircut that makes me look like a little boy, and that’s not as in skinny and thin little boy, it’s little as in pesky and irritating little boy.

So I’ve decided to make up for the bad hair with liposuction and a facelift. But what if the liposuctionist is like the hairdresser and I end up with a botch job, let’s say some lopsided fat removal or something? And people die getting facelifts done.  

Maybe I’ll give the facelift and lipo a miss and just buy those elastic knickers that go up to your neck. And shoes, there’s always shoes, because shoes are like lovers…