Being Me

I lost so much weight yesterday ... As I gazed around me at the floor of the hairdressing salon after my haircut, I thought, 'Surely that's at least a kilo.' My hairdresser went a bit crazy with the scissors, like a person with a lawnmower who can't find the off-switch. I think she may have been cross with me because I rang her in the morning and begged for an afternoon appointment. ('Please, please, please fit me in - I look as though I've been dragged through a hedg - no, scrub that - I AM that hedge.') Why would she be cross, you ask? Surely she wants the custom. The thing is, I only ever have a dry cut.  Unlike most other women I know, I hate being shampooed and frothed and dried and fluffed and puffed about in the salon - I want to get out of there and back home where people only touch me with my permission and ideally a warrant. So she sprays my head with a garden sprayer, cuts for about five minutes, takes a paltry amount of money from me, a

Words are so totally, like, last YEAR. In case you missed the news, Oxford Dictionaries announced a new Word of the Year yesterday, except that what they've chosen is to the world of words what I am to the world of Paris catwalks, little black dresses and getting through train station barriers without turning a smidgen to the side. The 'word' they have chosen is this. It's the graphic that's been chosen. Ignore the word 'emoji' underneath it. (Why not just go ahead and ignore all words, every word, from now until you die? Everybody's doing it.) The graphic is called the 'Face with Tears of Joy' emoji. Here's a news article all about the winner and reasons for its choice. The piece also lists some of the words deemed not to deserve the title of 'Word of the Year'. One of them is 'refugee' but, golly, who's heard THAT recently? Another candidate is 'they' as in the kind of they used instead of he and s

Things I have realised about five ten twenty  thirty years later than I should have.  1. That 'Frances can be verbose' wasn't a compliment. A Junior School teacher wrote it on my school report and until I was thirty-nine I thought it meant 'good with words'.* 2. That the secret of looking confident is usually just that. Looking it. And most people don't get past that stage, and still manage. 3. That other people don't always appreciate you singing along, so my Granny was right to clamp her hand over my mouth in 1972 when she took me to see 'The Sound of Music' and I was screeching 'Climb Every Mountain'. 4. That in the middle of the night, a classroom seating plan or a phone call to a difficult relative is a Massive Issue, but at nine in the morning, can be calmed with marmalade on toast. 5. That the friend's mother who said I had a 'silly little face' in the 1980s wasn't exactly an oil painting herself ... ....

I posted a 'letter to Santa' on a writers' blog today and the readers there seem to have enjoyed it. So I thought I'd inflict it on you, too. Followers who've been around for a while will know of my long history of communications with Santa . This is yet another addition to the saga. Dear Santa I'll get straight to the point. No good going through all that peace and goodwill to all men stuff when what I really want to do is make a complaint.  Do you remember last year I asked you for a publishing contract? No, don’t pretend. You can’t possibly have forgotten, because I wrote a long, long plea, with all the reasons why I deserve one, in green highlighter pen and letters an inch high. The man at the Post Office wasn’t happy that I’d tried to shoehorn forty-seven pages into a ‘large letter’ envelope and in the end we had to parcel them all up in a Jiffy bag the size of a North American prairie. I hope your elves managed to carry it in and didn’t get ba