Don't judge a woman by her dress size

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

I think I’m the last person you’d expect to be sticking up for models but I am and I believe quite rightly so. They may be in another universe from my plus sized figure but I’m happily going to put my head above the parapet on their behalf this time. I have a real problem with the term ‘real women’ and the connotation that if a woman is skinny she is therefore somehow not a real woman. It’s batted around a lot during campaigns for ‘real women’ to appear on the catwalks and in magazines and I’ve reached the stage where I am offended on behalf of women everywhere.

People don’t accept anti-fat propaganda and insults so why WHY do we denigrate a section of female society? When people don’t accept anti-fat propaganda why on earth should skinny women cop it? I find the insult ‘skinny bitch’ just as offensive as ‘fat bitch’. Can’t we all just agree, for the love of women everywhere, to move on from insulting someone’s size?

The customer is always right- at least when allowed an opinion.

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

Why hello Mr PC World man who was steadfastly ignoring me until you realised I was female and had a low cut top on. Yes, you can indeed see part of my cleavage -*gasp*- and yes I know I am the most devastatingly gorgeous woman you’ve seen in a very long time but here’s the deal – you can be a supermodel like I am and still not be a complete moron when it comes to buying a new laptop. To be fair to you I did look a little bit blank when you started prattling on about graphics cards and one of the questions towards the bottom of my list was going to be ‘does it come in any other colours’ but I’m still not an eejit.

You didn’t even give me a chance to explain what I wanted before you started trying pigeonhole me as a customer and then attempted to baffle me with your superior computer geek prowess. I’ve never worked in a computer shop before but I would have thought that a great jumping off point with a customer would be to ask what they were looking for rather than leaping in and recommending a machine which was the polar opposite to what they wanted.

Love, actually, is all-year-round

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

It’s not that I hate people being in love, and I’m not a bitter old spinster, but Valentine’s Day really gets on my wick. Quite apart from the shops going overboard with utter tat and radio stations filling endless airplay with sick-making ‘Snufflepuss loves Bunnywun’ messages, it’s the ungrateful and OTT nature of it all that makes me want to kill myself.

Expectations go through the roof and the greetings card companies rub their hands together in glee as they peddle crap to the masses, all under the banner of ‘being in love’. Of course it’s not just the blatant commercialism that does it for me; it’s the competitiveness of it all. If I have to hear another person – and let’s face it, it’s normally a woman – complaining about getting a crap present, I’ll scream and batter them to death with a heart-shaped box of chocolates.

Conversational Pet Hates: The Literal Meaning

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

No lady you didn’t literally write bullshit in your Politics exam paper because if you did the story would have been all over campus as soon as the papers reached the exams office and we would have spent the rest of the week laughing at your foolishness. Nor dear friend of mine did you literally wet yourself laughing at a joke you were told, because if you had you wouldn’t have dared tell me and would have been too busy stocking up on Tena Lady to recount the story. Man on the bus, you did not literally roll home from the pub because you were too drunk to walk normally, yes you will have been bouncing off walls all the way home but there was no literal rolling involved.

I don’t understand what the fascination is with the word but whenever I hear someone using it I want to slap them sharply across the face to make them realise how stupid they sound. Have our vocabularies shrunk so much that we are left with no other ways to express ourselves? Or are people just lazy? I’m sure there are people who have literally wet themselves laughing or literally told their boss to piss off before storming out of the office in a huff. However I will wager that those occurrences are few and far between whereas dropping the ‘L’ word into conversation is common parlance now.

It even annoys me more than people who use ‘txt spk’ or who go one step further and ‘rItE lYk DiS’ because I tend not to have dealings with people who do that. The literal zombie appears to have stolen several of my friends brains and infiltrates their conversations on a regular basis. I’d like to have a ‘Family Fortunes’ style buzzer hidden about my person so that whenever someone commits the crime of dropping the ‘L’ bomb I can stun them in to silence with a big fat ‘UHH ERRR’.

Capitalising on their stunned silence I would then gently, I promise not to use my fist, explain why they got buzzed before letting them go on their merry way safe in the knowledge that they have been schooled in the art of conversation. Read more by Alice.

The trouble with shoes

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

All I want is a pair of new shoes. A pair of black peep-toe shoes without too high a heel, so that I can still walk at the end of the evening and don’t have to be carried home. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? However, as a woman with size 12 feet, shoe shopping is never a walk in the park.

My choices are either old lady loafers that you could imagine Hyacinth Bucket wearing, or shoes designed for transvestites, made from perspex and PVC with 7” heels which would make me 6’9” and unable to walk. I don’t have any desire to look like my name is Chardonnay Love-Honey and I swing round a pole at night, nor do I want people to think that from Monday to Friday I live my life as Alan from Accounting.

My friend recently took the plunge and purchased her first pair of Christian Louboutins, which now take pride of place in her expansive shoe collection, revered above all other pairs. The joy of such a moment will never be mine, unless I take the route of the ugly sisters in ‘Cinderella’ by the Brothers Grimm and start lopping off bits of my feet to fit the shoes.

At 28 I should be over the age where throwing a tantrum is viable, but whenever I enter a shoe shop with a small-footed friend I have to fight hard to resist the urge to slam my handbag and body to the floor and go mad. Why is it so impossible to comprehend that just as people are expanding, so their feet are expanding, and therefore there is a large market for bigger shoes? If I had even a modicum of artistic talent or business nouse, I’d start my own shoe line and make a killing.

My shoe rage isn’t just confined to the fact that I can’t skip about in pretty little shoes and that if I need a new outfit I have to start with the shoes and then hope I can find clothing that matches. I feel the shoe-related rage bubbling up inside me when I hear the ‘schlump schlump’ noise of hordes of girls, and some fashion-confused guys, schlepping their way round campus in UGG boots. It makes me want to screech ‘Pick up your feet, you slovenly harlots!’ before bemoaning that back in my day girls had the ability to walk properly and not shuffle about like they’d stepped in gum and their feet were stuck to the pavement.

I thought that particular branch of my shoe rage would be limited to autumn and winter, when people tend to want to clad their feet in dead sheep and be toasty warm, however the rage is starting to rise due to the dawning of the ‘flip flop slide’ where, yet again, people demonstrate their complete inability to pick up their feet. It’s as if they actually want me to screech at them like a banshee.

I think my only solutions are lobbying the university and making it a footwear-free zone, or carrying round a roll of duct tape and sellotaping shoes to feet. I appreciate that picking your feet up enough to avoid the shuffle sound when wearing flip flops might make you look like you’re wading through treacle or strutting your stuff down the Milan catwalks, but rather that than me attacking you with the sticky stuff, hmm? Read more by Alice.

How hard is it to give up your seat?

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

If you’re the sort of person who studiously looks at their feet when an elderly or disabled person gets on the bus so you don’t have to shift your bum out of your seat then, to borrow a phrase from The Inbetweeners, you’re a ‘bus wanker’. In fact, I think you’re just a bit of a wanker, bus or not.

My local bus company started life as a student shuttle service running between the university and the halls of residence. Those days are gone and it now serves most of the city and carries a huge range of passengers. Some of the students can’t seem to get their cloth-eared little heads round the fact that not all the passengers are lazy students rolling in to 9am lectures. Many have been known to get territorial about letting the ‘wombles’ (the charming name given to the elderly passengers) onto the bus.

The students sit there gossiping loudly about who they want to pull and ‘like I’ve got so much work to do OMG’ and, as soon as someone who could actually do with sitting down gets on the bus, they either shut up and become engrossed in their phones or they talk even more loudly as if they’re deaf as well as blind.

When I offer my seat to someone more in need of it than me, nine times out of 10 they will politely decline, forcing me to engage in a battle of wits to get them to take my seat whether they like it or not. I can’t just sit there even if they decline the seat because I always imagine them to be thinking that I’m an ill-mannered lout. One thing is for certain, if my stepmother ever caught me not offering my seat to someone I’d get a clip round the ear, even if I am 28 and haven’t lived at home for 12 years.

The other thing that winds me up about bus travel is being stuck sitting next to men who feel compelled to sit with their legs as wide apart as is humanly possible. Are they trying to make the entire bus stare at their crotch? On the way home recently I sat next to an imbecile doing this, legs akimbo and a look on his face that said “Yeah? And?” His inability to sit properly left me clinging onto my seat with half my bottom and digging my heels into the floor to stop myself sliding down the aisle of the bus as it took a rather sharp corner. The temptation to elbow him straight in the gonads was overwhelming, but unfortunately, or fortunately for him, he left the bus before I got a chance.

It’s not difficult to exhibit a little common courtesy so, next time you’re on a bus, why not give it a try? Yes, students of Southampton University, I am talking to you! A slight word of warning, though: do be careful offering your seat to someone you think is pregnant without being absolutely sure it is a baby in there and not just a food baby. I was mortified when that happened to me in Rome; that’s the one time I did wish the lad had just stayed in his seat, staring at the floor. Read more by Alice.

Image: Journal of Public Transit in Ottawa.

Only the crumbliest, flakiest friends ...

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

I have a friend who, to put it bluntly, is a flake. He’s a lovely guy, a friend of mine for five years, but pinning him down for a social occasion is like trying to nail jelly to a moving wall. It’s bad enough when it’s me that has suggested a get-together and he flakes out at the last minute, but I’m starting to lose count of the number of times he has arranged something and then failed to turn up.

It’s got to the stage where I don’t even leave the house to meet him until he’s sent a “Where are you?” text to chase me up; otherwise I end up sitting in the pub nursing a white wine on my own, looking shifty. My friends and I all let him get away with it because it’s been his behavioural pattern the entire time we’ve known him; however, finally the patience is starting to run out. It’s an understanding among my friends that we all lead busy lives and don’t get to meet up as often as we would like – which makes it an even bigger slap in the face when Flakey flakes out yet again.

In this technologically advanced world, I refuse to believe that people are unable to let others know if they have to cancel plans at the last minute. Between text messaging, emails, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and a good old-fashioned telephone call, there’s a multitude of ways to let the person you are meeting know that you’re not going to turn up, saving them the indignity of being stood up.

However, even after the years of missed engagements and flakey behaviour, my friend doesn’t even quite win the crown of ‘Flakiest Friend’. That dubious honour goes to the guy who stood up my friends at their wedding.

His RSVP was sent and he even emailed them the day before saying how excited he was to see them get married and to celebrate with them – and then, nothing. He simply failed to materialise. If that wasn’t bad enough, he then disappeared off the face of the earth and didn’t even try to explain his absence from their special day.

Is it too much to ask for a little courtesy and a few manners in this day and age? In the case of some of my own friends, it seems the answer is yes. Read more by Alice.

Britain, please stop licking the lid of life, ok?

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

I used to be one of those people who would lick the top of the yoghurt pot with relish, carefully wriggling my tongue across the foil to make sure I got every last drop. After all, I’d paid for it, right? That was until I moved in with my current housemate, the Physics Geek. We rubbed along together nicely for just short of five years before his actions one sunny afternoon altered the course of my dairy appreciation forever.

Picture the scene: PG sat in our living room noshing his way through a sandwich, with an apple and a yoghurt on the table in front of him. All fairly innocuous items, nothing that caused particular concern ...

Until he opened the yoghurt.

Something about the way he fondled and caressed the foil caught my attention. The way his tongue deftly and expertly licked all the creamy goodness and, oh my, was he groaning? I felt repulsed watching him lick that foil as if he was licking the lady parts of a very hot woman. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as his eyes closed slightly, caught up in the pleasure of the moment.

I had hoped that it was a momentary lapse in PG’s usually reserved nature, that perhaps he was having a flashback to some summer afternoon lovers’ tryst and got carried away. Sadly that hope was dashed over the coming weeks when he kept exhibiting the same oral pleasure over his Muller lights. I considered feigning a massive fatal allergy to yoghurt preventing it from crossing our threshold but he would have seen straight through that and so every time I am in the vicinity when the yoghurt comes out I scrunch up my eyes, put my fingers in my ears and sing “lalalalala” until it’s all over.

It’s not just damaged my relations with PG. I am unable to be around other yoghurt eaters without wanting to spit and curse at them, snarling like some she-beast as soon as their tongue starts venturing towards the lid. I dream of creating an advertising campaign to draw others to the cause of non yoghurty lid tongue action however I suspect, as with my unsuccessful campaign to outlaw pencils, I’ll be the only member and will end up sat at home alone forlornly scraping the yoghurt off the lid ... with a spoon. Read more by Alice.

Is pretty parking too much to ask?

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

I’m the first to confess I get a bit het up behind the wheel of my car and choose to release this tension by muttering darkly at anyone or thing that dares cross my path. In spite of this vehicular bile, though, I am actually quite a considerate driver.

I’m definitely considerate when it comes to parking my little silver chariot, making sure I leave any cars near mine enough room to manouevre and get out of their parking space rather than causing drivers to sit frustrated and unable to move, waiting to be released from their parking prison.

If the other people who park near my office were as considerate, my weekday mornings would be much less stress-inducing. It drives me to potty-mouthed distraction when I see how badly they park, inconsiderately dumping their cars before walking the two minutes into the office. It grinds my gears to such an extent that it regularly leaves me teetering on the brink of becoming one of those women who leave expletive-soaked notes written in eyeliner on people’s windscreens.

Adding insult to injury, it’s not even primarily the staff members where I work who park like imbeciles; it’s the students who can’t be bothered to walk the mile from the local student ghetto to their lectures and so jettison their shiny new cars and strut off in their ubiquitous Ugg boots and messy hair (male and female) to spend an hour asleep at the back of a lecture theatre.

There are, of course, other spaces to be had, spaces that are just as good as the ones closer, but sadly they lie a half an hour’s walk away from the office and, when it’s raining, freezing and pitch black, the last thing I want to do is schlep through the rain when, actually, if people were more thoughtful there would be room for everyone in the cushty spaces close to the office.

I can’t see an end in sight because every morning I clamber out of my car and imagine a world in which I could get some little business cards printed up that say this: “Look, dickwad, park more prettily so we can fit more cars here.” And I’d slip one under the windscreen wiper of every offending car. I’ve got it all thought out, and would even leave one on my own car so that nobody would go postal and smash my windscreen with a bottle of de-icer, a Mika CD or some other car-based detritus.

Unfortunately I think that would tip me over from Grumpy Young Woman territory into the realm of Neighbourhood Mentalist and so, sadly, my little dickwad business cards will remain a fond product of my imagination. Read more by Alice.

Image: Kenneth Cratty / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Office etiquette stinks

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

I have few pleasures in my working day because I am a slave to dull administrative tasks and now, apparently, petty rules. The management team at my nameless, faceless place of employment has decided today that the best way to spread Christmas cheer and winter warmth through the office is to ban the consumption of hot food.

No longer can I spend my lunch hour supping homemade soup with a nice crusty roll while catching up on blogging or internet browsing at my desk. No longer can I walk the three steps from my desk to the office microwave to heat up delicious leftovers for sustenance. If I want hot food now, I either have to go out in the cold and battle against the hordes of students all craving hot lunches in the wintry climes or I have to schlep halfway round the building to find another microwave and then go and sit in some dark and poky little room entitled lovingly and creatively The Staff Room

Apparently there are people who work in my office who find the smell of hot food offensive. I am really struggling to get my head round this; that someone could be so pathetic as to be offended by their colleagues enjoying winter-suitable lunches. The other reason being bandied about by the management is that we’ve received complaints from students who come into our office for assistance – the very students who spend at most 10 minutes each at our front desk whilst we listen to them bleat on about their problems and then do our utmost to send them away happy and sorted. Surely that should be the crux of our interactions with them, not whether or not one of us has last night’s leftovers warmed in tupperware on our desk.

They haven’t banned hot drinks, though, so the managers who brew up cafetières of expensive and frankly stinky coffee are fine to continue. The lady who has Cup-A-Soup is also allowed to continue supping her warming liquid because it is in a cup and therefore a drink. On that principle, I am going to start drinking my homemade chunky soup from a cup. I might even go as far as blending my solid leftovers into a drinkable substance.

Frankly the whole thing stinks; as will the Camembert, Limburger and Stilton sandwiches that will replace my lovely warm lunches. Read more by Alice.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

Happy ... December

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

Someone said to me this morning “Happy First Day of Christmas” and, to be honest, it made me want to poke them in the face whilst shouting “BAH HUMBUG!”

Let’s all get one thing straight: it is only the first day of December, the 12th month of the year, not the first day of Christmas. The first day of Christmas is 24th December, aka Christmas Eve.

All these people who put their decorations up at the end of October and start listening to cheesy Christmas music and eating mince pies on 1st November really ruin the whole thing for me and run the risk every year of making me seem like a Grinch.

In my eyes, Christmas begins on 24th December and ends on the 26th; after all, those three days are the only ones in the calendar which are prefixed by any word to do with Christmas – the clue really is in the title.

As a child, our house would be totally bare until Christmas morning when we’d scamper downstairs to be told that, because we had been such wonderful children, Santa had taken a bit of extra time to turn our house into an outpost of his own grotto.

That is what made my childhood Christmases magical – not banging up some tacky decorations at the start of December and drawing out the festive season as long as is humanly possible, ending up on Christmas Day with a manky brown tree that died weeks before the actual day because it had been sat in your living room since November.

I’m not a Grinch; I do love Christmas, but only in its proper place – at the end of December. I love watching my nephews open their presents, and keeping the magic alive by convincing them that I heard Santa on the roof. I even love spending time with my family playing board games and eating chocs.

What I don’t love is walking into my local supermarket at the end of August to see them beginning to roll out their Christmas wares. I understand in this financial climate that people have to save and stock up throughout the year in order to survive the festive period financially, but I’m sure people are capable of quietly doing that of their own volition without Asda telling them to.

You might think, given my feelings on keeping Christmas in its proper place, that I’m one of those shoppers who leaves everything to the last minute and I’m pleased to tell you that you’d be wrong. My presents are all bought and wrapped, in a military operation last night which involved only spending half an hour in the shops.

I buy good presents but, with a bit of forward planning and the ability to weave through crowds at the pace of a champion power walker, I get it done in one fell swoop and can now avoid the Christmas madness in the shops where people dither over what to buy Great Aunty Mabel.

The ability to get my shopping out of the way and thus avoid the Christmas crush is the only redeeming quality about living in a country that has gone Christmas bonkers so early. Happy ... Nope, I can’t bring myself to say it yet! Read more by Alice.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk