On Being Vanilla

Posted on April 20, 2014 by suzie81speaks

In the world of ice-cream, my friend is definitely Rocky Road with extra sauce. She’s striking. When she walks into a room, people don’t just notice, they stop what they are doing to stare, and some will even get up and walk over in an effort to speak to her.

The thing is, there isn’t anything specific about my friend that makes her stand out. She’s pretty, but couldn’t anywhere near be classed as model quality, she doesn’t go overboard with her clothes and make-up, she’s intelligent, but not a genius, she’s classy and well-spoken. She possesses that ‘something’ – that special X Factor quality that separates her from the pack. Even more frustratingly, she’s genuinely a very nice person and has no idea about the power that she holds. Her life, to me, seems exciting – she likes to travel and experience new things and isn’t scared of taking risks. She’s a natural leader without being bossy or rude.

I have always been, and always will be, vanilla. This isn’t said in an attempt to hunt for false compliments, it is simply fact – at the age of 32 I have had plenty of time to realise my own strengths and weaknesses. In a group of people I have never been the one to stand out from the crowd – I am that person that merges into the background, the one that blends in. I am not the risk taker – I’ve always been more of a follower than a leader.

Vanilla is used as a derogatory term to describe someone, or their lifestyle as unexciting and conventional. Boring. I used to feel that being thought of as vanilla was a negative thing. Indeed, I used to feel a little short-changed when I was offered ice-cream and then handed vanilla. However, vanilla surprised me. I discovered that:

Vanilla is the second-most expensive spice after saffron.
It is thought to have calming effects and reduce anxiety and stress.
Vanilla is used throughout the baking and cosmetics industry and is often placed in certain foods to eliminate acidity.
Despite its labour – intensive growth and expense, vanilla remains a popular spice in the western world.
From the thousands of ice-cream flavours that exist, vanilla is still consistently voted as the favourite.

As I have aged, I have grown to like being vanilla. It may be a standard flavour, a basic flavour, but to me it is a dependable one that doesn’t change, and yet can be incredibly versatile at the same time in that it compliments the flavours around it. Vanilla doesn’t pretend to be anything else, it is what it is. I like my life and it’s vanilla existence.

And besides, this means that us vanilla girls get to add a cheeky topping occasionally!

What about you? What flavour of ice-cream are you?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog

Regrets in Old Age

Posted on March 25, 2014 by suzie81speaks

One of my former students passed away at the end of last week. It was a sudden, tragic accident and unfortunately his heart gave out very soon after. He was just 18 years old. While I didn’t know him for very long, he was a good kid who had turned his life around and wanted to make something of himself, and once again I am reminded of how short life can be. It isn’t the first time that I have experienced this, but it doesn’t get any easier, and I can’t possibly imagine what his family and friends are going through.

I was feeling in quite a philosophical mood today, and this consequently led to the idea of opportunities and regrets that we may have in life. I’ve been lucky enough to achieve some of my goals and have had wonderful experiences, but there is still so much more that I want to do.

Here are the things that I don’t want to regret further in my (hopefully) old age

Working Too Much. I’ve mentioned before about the work/life imbalance that I have, and I’d like to be able to work to live, rather than the other way around.

Not travelling to places that I want to see. I’ve yet to see the Sydney Opera House, the Acropolis, the Hollywood Sign or Alcatraz. And that’s just to start…

Worrying about everything. I’m often told that worries become less as life goes on, but I’ve found the opposite. I need to start asking myself if my current problems will be worth worrying about in a week’s time.

Holding onto grudges. My sister and I don’t have the relationship that I would like. I’m still angry at a family member for what he did to the rest of us. It’s time to move on and let it go.

Not taking risks and being afraid. I can remember at least two incidents where I was afraid to do something and wished I had done it differently.

Taking life too seriously to enjoy it. As with worrying, I often forget to see the funny side of things. I need to laugh more.

Not taking care of my health. I have abused my body atrociously over the years, and have gone from being a fit, athletic sporty – type to someone who is a couch ~~potato~~ sack of potatoes. I think that it is time to sort it out.

Not taking time just to make the life of somebody else better. I keep saying that I am going to volunteer and yet never seem to get around to it.

Finally, not taking time just for me. Just to be happy.

What about you guys? Do you have any regrets?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog. To ‘like’ my brand new Facebook page, simply click on this link below:

http://www.facebook.com/Suzie81Speaks

Can Men and Women Be Just Friends?

Posted on February 27, 2014 by suzie81speaks

It’s a question that is the subject of debate amongst scientists, psychologists and sociologists the world over. When researching this post I discovered thousands of different articles on the Internet, all with conflicting arguments and conclusions. I don’t possess any of these scientific qualifications and therefore can only rely on my own thoughts and experiences, and therefore I apologise if this is one of many similar posts.

There is one thing that all of these articles have in common – the film ‘When Harry Met Sally’. In the opening sequence Billy Crystal declares that “no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive”. But is this statement actually true?

When examining cross-sex relationships in TV programmes we are given the impression that platonic friendships aren’t always possible. There are hundreds of examples of friendships that develop into romance – Luke and Lorelai in the ‘Gilmore Girls’, J.D. and Elliot in ‘Scrubs’, Pacey and Joey in ‘Dawson’s Creek’, Mulder and Scully in the ‘X – Files’… In ‘Friends’, four of the six end up falling in love – Rachel and Ross’s ‘will they, wont they’ relationship dominates the entire show, and Monica and Chandler get married. Even Rachel and Joey have a romantic liaison at one point, with the only platonic relationship being that of the friendship between Phoebe and Joey. Obviously the romantic element of a show is added to the plot to attract more viewers, but it left me wondering whether these sorts of friendships can actually exist in real life.

I am the worst possible example within the discussion of platonic cross – sex relationships as almost all of my long term relationships (not that there have been many) have resulted from a strong friendship first. My best friend is male. I’ve known him since I was nineteen and we see or speak to each other on the phone several times a week. We support each other, we’ve borrowed money from each other, we ask each other advice. We have no romantic feelings towards each other, we’ve both been in long term relationships over the years and have always liked each others partners. However, when we first met we instantly became very close, resulting in a quite intense (on my part anyway) relationship for several months. It didn’t last long, but I feel that because we got the intimate part of the relationship out of the way we have been able to simply relax and enjoy each others company without anything getting in the way. The Bloke and I have been together for a long time, but were friends for several years before we became romantically involved.

I have lots of male friends, but I have a much stronger friendships with my female friends. I don’t discuss certain things with most of my male friends and the majority of our activities are centred on exercise or drinking. It’s rare that I will meet them without somebody else present, with only two exceptions, my best friend and my fireman friend, who is happily engaged to a lovely woman.

However, in my life there are some examples where cross-sex relationships exist and work effectively. I’ve known MM and GB for years – we met as struggling students and have remained friends. MM is male, GB is female and as long as I’ve known them, I (and several others) have always had the notion that they would be absolutely perfect together – they have similar interests, they make each other laugh and they genuinely enjoy each others company. They, however, completely disagree and nothing has ever happened between them. Both are content in their own serious relationships and are happy for each other.

Two of our other university friends are similar in that they’ve always had a strong friendship and have never crossed the line. However, the male quite obviously is very attracted to the female, which isn’t reciprocated although she’s clearly aware of it.

I decided to create a scientific study on the subject (and by scientific, I mean that I asked my friends what they thought). I’ve compiled their responses in the list below.

1. One or both are gay.

2. One or both is in a committed relationship and is not willing to cross any boundaries.

3. One is not attracted to the other (although when my friend suggested this she also added that this eventually may have a negative effect on their friendship as one will inevitably want more).

4. Neither are physically attracted to each other.

5. Both are attracted to each other, but have mutually agreed that they value their friendship more.

What do you think? Do you have a platonic relationship with a member of the opposite sex?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog

My Love/Hate Relationship With Facebook

Posted on February 26, 2014 by suzie81speaks

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When I logged onto my Facebook account this morning I saw that somebody in my friends list had ‘liked’ this:

I sighed and continued to scroll. This is my main annoyance with Facebook – silly groups and memes that are created to guilt teenagers into ‘liking’ a post. At the risk of sounding old, teenagers don’t realise how different life was before Facebook. If I wanted to contact my friends when I was a teenager there were only two ways of doing so: a phonecall to their landline or a handwritten letter. If they were out, I had to wait until they returned.

We got the Internet when I was 17. It was a new thing to my sisters and I – I had passed GCSE IT but the most complicated thing that I had to do was wait for five minutes while the dial-up connection worked and then send an e-mail. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in most aspects of computer based things and aside from attempting to use a few chat rooms, which I didn’t understand, I ignored it.

I’ve been on Facebook since 2007, along with half a billion others. In its original state it was unique in that it allowed us to connect with people from our past and we were able to do silly things like ‘poke’ each other or throw sheep. However, over the years it has changed dramatically and I think there is now a sense of distrust after many issues with privacy settings and advertising. The concept still remains the same though – tell everybody everything about everything and put up pictures to prove it.

When I first activated my account I added everybody that I’d ever met – people from primary school that I hadn’t seen in 20 years, people that I went to secondary school with, people that I used to see occasionally on nights out, people I worked with… At one point I had about 400 ‘friends’.

Eventually I came to my senses and embarked on a massive ‘cull’. I worked out that out of the 400 people, I actually only spoke to 30 of them regularly, and out of that 30, I only saw 15 socially. The people that disappeared over the years did so for a reason – we weren’t ‘friends’ to begin with and we never actually spoke after we’d added each other. However, this presented an issue I hadn’t previously needed to consider – offending somebody. It’s easy to remove a person that you’re unlikely to bump into, but it becomes more difficult when you have similar friendship circles and there is a chance that you may be expected to see them occasionally because of your mutual associations. For example, I have a ‘friend’ on Facebook because we once went away on a weekend together to celebrate our friend’s 30th birthday. She’s actually very nice and I don’t dislike her at all, but we haven’t spoken since we returned from the trip eighteen months ago. However, I don’t feel that I can remove her because there is a strong chance that we are going to see each other again in the future, and I don’t wish to offend, which seems a ridiculous notion for a 32 year old woman.

Facebook users can generally be put into different categories:

1. The Foodies– pictures of everything that they cook and/or eat. Always Instagrammed before posted, just to make their food look that little more special.

2. The Attention Seeker – status’s such as ‘well that’s that then’, obviously hoping to prompt someone to ask “what’s happened?”. Why can’t they just just state what the matter is in the first place?

3. The Pointless – usually consists of useless information: ‘it’s cold’, ‘waiting for a bus,’ ‘today I’m doing nothing’…

4. The ‘Honeymooners’ – recently in a relationship. Usually consists of ‘he’s so wonderful’, ‘just been out for a romantic meal’, ‘I love watching him sleep’. Always followed by pictures. This is made even worse if you know both parties as your news feed is then bombarded with double of everything.

5. The Wannabe Football Managers – comment on every move their team makes.

6. The Drunk – ‘I’m so p*ssed’, ‘off to the pub’, ‘it’s wine o’clock’. Fake drunken writing. Usually followed by ‘I’m never drinking again’ the next morning, and ‘in the pub’ in the afternoon.

7. The Drama Queens – these use Facebook to have a go at anyone that has ever offended them because they don’t have the nerve to say things to their face.

8. Too Much Information – ‘I just had a huge dump,’ ‘I’ve got a massive spot on my face,’ ‘My dog has just puked on the floor’…

9. The Troll – likes to write things to deliberately to wind people up.

10. The Animal Lover – endless pictures of their pets.

11. The Parent – endless pictures of their children. Little Billy smiling. Little Billy covered in chocolate. Little Billy dribbling.

12. The Cause Campaigners – posts and shares every heartbreaking news story that they can find, often including pictures of abused children and animals.

I’m guilty of lots of these, particularly number three and number ten. However, I’m lucky to have rather amusing friends who often post interesting or witty status’s that make me smile. For example, a small selection from yesterday was:

‘Tonight sees Mr Dynamic falling asleep on the sofa again.’

‘It feels like I’m still wearing a hat.’

‘Popcorn… Perfect food for a drummer’.

‘Eww, probably best I don’t wear flip flops next time my son needs an emergency wee wee in the car park.’

I’ve thought about deleting my account on more than one occasion. I’ve seen the very worst that Facebook has to offer – pictures of dead children, animal slaughter and embarrassing images of drunken people in compromising positions. However, despite the huge amount of negative press it receives I am finding it difficult to move away from social networking. It has allowed me to maintain friendships, re-start old friendships and I have the opportunity to see more of my friends lives than I usually would, particularly when they share photographs of their day. I have also been brave and shared a few posts from my blog with them, which has surprised some of them as most weren’t even aware that I had a blog to begin with. They’ve been very supportive and complimentary, and my number of views has increased dramatically because they’ve been kind enough to share my ramblings with their friends.

Regardless of your view on the subject, it’s difficult to ignore the impact that Facebook has had on modern culture and lifestyle. Love it or hate it, it’s not going anywhere soon…

What about you guys? What’s your relationship with Facebook? Do you share any of your posts with your friends?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog

Recovery

Posted on February 25, 2014 by suzie81speaks

After the last few weeks I have been left feeling, quite honestly, hugely depressed. I would normally consider myself to be quite a strong person – I’ve had tougher times than this in the last and have managed to support myself through it, but after the recent news about the house I crumbled a little, threw myself an enormous pity party and have spent the last few days wallowing. I’m still weak from the hospitalisation that I had two weeks ago and the doctor has given me a note for the rest of this week, so I have been grateful to have the time to attempt to process everything. I’ve questioned my karma lots over the last few days – why me? I’m a good person, I work hard… Why do I have to constantly feel I have to battle with everyone?

However, while I don’t feel that there is anything wrong with occasionally focusing on the negative, there were several things yesterday that slapped me in the face and told me to get over myself.

Before I continue, I’d like to remind you again about a fellow WordPress blogger’s struggles with fibromyalgia and the fact that she is at the point of losing her home. I was hugely inspired by this post, which links to a donation site to help her out. I hadn’t met Merbear until yesterday, but I was inspired by her story and the outpouring of love and support that she received from the amazing blogging community, and I implore you to check out this post, reblog and get her story out there.

http://notapunkrocker.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/important-please-help-save-more-than-a-house/

So, after the metaphorical face slapping I gave myself I woke up today and decided to simply move on. I know I have to move out, we’re lucky to have found somewhere new in such a short space of time that suits our needs, and the quicker I get my arse into gear the more organised and less stressed I will be about the situation. I can’t do a large amount of packing in one go, but I can do a little at a time and I’ll get there.

What about you guys? How do you deal with difficult times?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog

A Fat Disney Princess

Posted on February 8, 2014 by suzie81speaks

I have a little confession. I’m thirty-two years old and I’m still in love with Disney. There’s nothing nicer than curling up on a Sunday afternoon with The Bloke, the cats and a bar of Dairy Milk Oreo ‘the size of my face’ to watch a Disney film.

Last year I posted a blog entitled ‘Why Carrie Bradshaw Needs A Slap’, which focused on Carrie’s lack of self-respect in SATC. I received a comment in reply to this post from Anna Allen Chappell, from the site ‘Pretty in Dixie’ about her dislike of Disney films for exactly the same reasons. Continue reading →

Some People Need To Learn Some Manners

Posted on February 8, 2014 by suzie81speaks

izquotes.com

This morning I decided to treat myself and went to Subway for breakfast. The person working behind the counter was really young and had obviously only started there a few days ago. He was nervous, took ages to get my order together, apologising the entire time and when I had paid I thanked him, I went back to my seat and enjoyed my breakfast.

Just as I was getting ready to leave a young woman walked in. She was smartly dressed in a suit, had obviously just been to the hairdressers and was carrying an expensive handbag. This was the conversation that followed:

Woman: “I want a 6″ sausage sub on Italian Herb and Cheese.”

Employee: “I’m sorry, we don’t have any of that bread ready yet.”

“How about you just choose the bread then, seeing as there’s no point in me choosing it. I don’t know why you bother putting the list there if you aren’t going to provide me with all the options.”

“Sorry about that. Would you like it with cheese and toasted.”

“No.”

“Can I offer you any salad or sauce?”

“Why would I want salad on a breakfast sub? I want tomato sauce. And can you hurry up i’m in a rush.”

The employee made her order, she paid without saying a word and promptly turned and stormed out of the store without so much as a ‘thank you’ or ‘have a nice day.’

How rude. I don’t know how the poor lad didn’t resist the urge to shove her sub up her arse.

thethingswesay.com

From the age of 16 I worked in several service jobs until I qualified as a teacher. My first was at a fast food chain and I was there for 18 months. It was one of the most depressing jobs that I ever had. Why? I was treated like I was a piece of dirt by the majority of customers that I served, who assumed that I was as thick as two short planks because of my place of employment. I was patronised, verbally abused and even threatened on a few occasions, all for the princely sum of £3.23 an hour. After this I worked at a cinema and then at a nightclub where I experienced similar issues, although I actually loved working at the nightclub because of the staff and the music. At university I worked in my local bar, sometimes doing up to 30 hours a week.

Here are some of the things that I learned:

1. Most service jobs are physically and mentally demanding. I was expected to run around for up to nine/ten hours straight without a proper break. While there are laws in place to prevent this, on extremely busy days almost every manager I have ever worked for ignored these.

2. Some people are never happy with anything. Regardless of the effort you make to please your customers, some will always find a reason to complain. The customer is certainly not always right.

3. Being paid the minimum wage does not entitle the general public to treat employees with minimum respect. If I had been given just 50p every time one of my customers had been rude, disrespectful or had left their manners at home I could have happily retired at the age of 25.

4. The policies of a company are not decided by the shop floor employees. If there is an issue with a policy, these should be taken to the management, not the 16 year old behind the till. They are simply following instructions set by their employers.

5. A job is a job and everybody lucky enough to be working should be applauded that they are doing so in such an unstable economy.

Of course, if an employee is deliberately rude or doesn’t provide you with the product you have paid for then you have every right to complain. However, you should only do so if you genuinely know you have justification to, not just because you are in a bad mood and should speak to the management.

Consequently, I go out of my way to be nice to all employees in the service industry. I’ve been there and I remember that a simple ‘thank you,’ a smile and a ‘have a lovely day’ made those shifts better. So, the next time you are having a bad day, remember your manners!

Have you ever had a job where you were treated badly by the customers?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog

Motivation Needed

Posted on January 12, 2014 by suzie81speaks

I saw this quote from Karen Lamb and it really resonated with me this morning.

Currently, it is 1.00pm. I got out of bed at 8.30am, went to the shop to buy bacon, cooked The Bloke some bacon sandwiches, took them to him so he could have breakfast in bed, and ever since then I have been sat in bed, blogging. I started to write a post about one thing, I got bored and saved it for later, and then repeated the process with something else.

This would be fine, except for the fact that I have a monumental amount of marking and planning to do for next week and three major things in particular need to be finished off and emailed to my line manager by the end of today. I have several loads of washing to do, I have to put away my clean clothes and the upstairs part of the house needs vacuuming.

This is a nasty habit that I have developed over the last few years – my life has become procrastination central. The main issue isn’t that the marking and planning doesn’t interest me – once I’ve begun and ‘in the zone’ so to speak, I find that I can get quite absorbed with what I’m doing and feel a sense of satisfaction when it is completed – it’s getting the motivation to start doing it in the first place. This morning I had a thought:

If I had started this work yesterday I would have been finished by now…

If I do nothing else this year, this is the thing that I would like to change the most over 2014. So much so, in fact, that I am going to now put down my laptop, pick up my school laptop, do the work and then reward myself tomorrow with an uninterrupted blog fest in a tidy house, guilt free.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/daily-prompt-barriers/

What about you guys? Does procrastination work for you?

Don’t forget to check out the winners of my Week 4 New Year Competition – their buttons are in my sidebar.

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @Suzie81blog

I wrote this earlier, but it applies to the current Daily Prompt so I thought that I would link it in…

Queen of the Imposters

Posted on January 11, 2014 by suzie81speaks

palpak.org

Yesterday, as I was just about to leave work, my boss asked me to have a look through some of the learning objectives he had planned for one of the lessons that he is going to deliver next week. I read through what he had written, and offered some suggestions.

He wrote my suggestions down.

This isn’t the first time this has happened since I started teaching at my current school nearly two years ago. To most people, it wouldn’t mean anything. However, I was (yet again) taken aback by the fact that he actually valued my opinion. He’s an experienced and excellent practitioner and I have an enormous amount of respect for him, so why would he want to know what I think?

This is something that has plagued my working life since I graduated in 2006. I’ve been incredibly fortunate in that I’ve been in full-time employment ever since, while some of my friends have experienced various struggles when obtaining jobs over the years. I’ve always felt that this was predominantly down to luck and being in the right place at the right time.

images.com/corbis

Job 1: Two weeks after I had received my degree results, I saw an advert for a Learning Mentor at a school on the other side of the city. I didn’t fully know what a Learning Mentor was, but after doing some research I thought that it sounded interesting and I decided to apply for it anyway. I got the job. (It turned out to be the best job I’ve ever had).

Job 2: The funding was being cut for the Learning Mentoring posts, and I was worried that I was going to be made redundant. A random conversation with a Deputy Headteacher, in which he learned that I had an honours degree in music, led to him suggesting that I apply for a Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP) course, which the school would support. I applied at the end of May and by the beginning of June I had been accepted. GTP courses are now notoriously difficult to get onto and the competition to be allowed onto them are enormous, with application being submitted months in advance.

Job 3: As my GTP was nearly finished, the school informed me that they couldn’t offer me a teaching position after I had qualified and so I needed to find another job. I saw an advert for a school that was situated not far from where I lived and applied. I heard nothing back from them, so assumed that I hadn’t been granted an interview. Unfortunately, at the same time, my mother (who lives 100 miles away) was taken into hospital and so I rushed to catch a train. Two days later, my mother was recovering and we knew that she was going to be fine. At 6.00am I checked my phone answer machine messages to discover that I had an interview for 9.00am that day at the school I had applied for. My sister raced over to look after my mum, I jumped on a train, informed the school of the situation and that I was on my way. I turned up nearly two hours late, with no lesson plan and no resources (aside from a few CD’s that I happened to have in my bag). I got the job.

Family Guy

After this I had a few interviews at two different schools that I didn’t get and at the time I was crushed. However, I managed to get a job at my current school, which I love, and have since found out that the places that I applied for and was turned down are places that I would have really struggled in – the education system is a small world – everybody seems to be related to each other – and I have heard horror stories and thanked my lucky stars that they turned me down as I know that I would have gone from the proverbial frying pan into the fire…

There’s that word again… Luck.

My problem is that I feel like an imposter. I have been given lots of praise and encouragement at work – my last few sets of lesson observations have been awarded with ‘Outsanding,’ trainee teachers are sent to my room to observe my teaching, I have trained other members of staff that have been in the profession twice as long as I have and I have been grateful for every opportunity that has been offered. However, I can’t shake the feeling that at some point I am going to be found out for the fraud that I feel that I am. My faculty is filled with hard-working, lovely, high achieving adults who seem to spend their entire lives marking and planning and be able to do everything better than I do. I hate having to attend meetings as I feel that my opinion is going to be viewed as irrelevent and so I often feel that it is best to keep quiet unless I am absolutely sure that what I am going to say makes sense. When something good happens, instead of feeling proud of myself I often find myself thinking that I’ve managed to fool them this time and have got away with it. What I find most ridiculous about it is that I haven’t experienced any negativity from my colleagues, I have enough evidence to prove that I shouldn’t feel like this and yet the thoughts still won’t leave.

I’ve often been told that I have a tendency to overthink things. I must admit, I feel silly writing about it, and haven’t done so to prompt further praise or fish for compliments, but it has been troubling me for a while. Is it luck? Fate? I’m not sure what initially caused these thoughts – it could be a lack of confidence or bad experiences that I have had in the past, but it is beginning to affect the way I think about myself and my job.

Does anybody else feel like this?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @Suzie81blog

Sisterhood of the Massive Knickers

Posted on January 10, 2014 by suzie81speaks

I’ve had a rather crappy week.

Gorgeous

It’s Friday evening, I’ve just indulged in a large portion fish & chips (I’m English – no stereotypes there obviously), I’m watching ‘Footloose’ and I’m wearing an sweater that is too big for me and a pair of pyjama bottoms. My hair is tied back, I’ve got very little make-up on and I’m sporting a very fetching pair of socks, which for once actually match. I’m not unhygienic – what I’m wearing is clean and I had a bath this morning before work, but a quick glance in the mirror reveals that I am certainly not going to win ‘Miss World’ anytime soon. At this moment in time, I think I’d have trouble running for ‘Miss Waynetta Slob’ (and for those of you who have no idea who this character was from the 90’s, check out ‘Harry Enfield and Chums’ on YouTube). I have been joined on the couch by two sleepy cats and The Bloke.

Gorgeous.

In the years that I’ve been with The Bloke I’ve put on weight. Not enough to make me feel grotesque, but enough to change my body shape. My cute little thongs have morphed over time into ENORMOUS knickers, and I spend most of my evenings and weekends in baggy clothing that is designed for comfort. At best, I dress like a teenage boy. I’m not at the stage where I consider that I have ‘let myself go’, but I certainly make far less effort to look good than I used to when I’m at home.

But is there anything wrong with this? Should the female population permanently feel the need to be glamorous at all times?

An article from ‘Oprah’s website in 2005 offers some interesting insight into why women let themselves go. A prominent message was that women put their families needs ahead of their own, wearing their exhaustion almost as a ‘badge of honour’. Mothers in particular have little time to themselves and find it almost impossible to muster any enthusiasm for beauty regimes or losing weight that they may have retained after giving birth.

So what excuse do I have? I don’t have children, I’m not married and aside from three cats and The Bloke I don’t have any family responsibilities. My excuse is simple: I just can’t be bothered.

I saw this quote from the ever immaculate Dita Von Teese:

‘I advocate glamour. Every day. Every minute.’

Dita Von Teese

While I admire Miss Von Teese’s message, I’ve found that life often gets in the way. I’m not lazy -my job is stressful, I work long hours both in and out of school, I deal with hundreds of grumpy teenagers all week and when I’ve finished all I want to do is have a hot bath, get my feet rubbed and go to sleep. The last thing I need (or want) to be thinking about is how attractive I look. Similarly, I certainly don’t expect The Bloke to be perfectly groomed all the time… A quick glance over at him reveals that he’s wearing an old white T-Shirt, a fleece and a pair of trousers that were made at the dawn of time, but I still find him extremely handsome.

If I’m going out for an evening, regardless of who it’s with, I’ll put on a beautiful dress and enjoy taking the time to do my extensive beauty regime in the process. However, on a day-to-day basis I’m more than happy to lay like broccoli and veg in front of the TV in my massive knickers and pyjamas.

The Bloke’s a lucky man.

What about you? Do you make the effort to look good all the time? Do you like your partner to make the most of themselves when just relaxing at home?

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Image 2: Dita Von Teese