Ten reasons British people don’t make sense

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1. We will rarely tell you an outright no or explain we don’t want to do something. To do so would be considered impolite, so instead we might say ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’ or ‘we’ll see’. These are all British ways of saying ‘no’.

2. We will apologise for everything, even things that aren’t our fault like someone stepping on our foot. We will say ‘sorry’ but actually mean ‘die in hell you foot-stomping fiend!’

3. We have a deep-rooted superiority complex but it can be hard to tell because we spend so much time apologising for being British. We may be fiercely nationalistic but would never admit it, and if anyone does admit it the rest of us will assume that person is probably racist!

4. We get really upset by the idea that foreigners think British food is so terrible. We have great restaurants and culinary offerings in the UK. We introduced the world to sandwiches, pies, fish and chips and make awesome roast dinners. Not to mention deep-fried mars bars, actually we probably shouldn’t mention deep fried mars bars, I don’t think they help our image. Aside from these traditional offerings we have also some great culinary interpretations and fusions of other nations’ national dishes, the UK has some truly amazing restaurants. I will accept criticism from Italians (whose inventions make up about 80% of my regular diet) and the French (because they are so precious about food that although its hard to think of amazing French dishes off the top of your head, it’s probably not worth arguing about). I will not accept criticism from Americans (hamburgers, tasty but unvaried), Swiss (all national dishes are combinations of cheese and potatoes, again tasty but hardly inspiring) or any other European nation.

5. British people don’t like ‘z’s’ very much. I’d like to apologise to my American spellcheck for thinking I am misspelling ‘apologise’ by not using a ‘z’ but I won’t use a ‘z’ because my spellcheck is wrong and I’m right.

6. We pretend to be interested in things we aren’t. We may give the impression we are fascinated in your experiences at your model road sign club (no offence model road-signers) or on your latest pirate-spotting cruise off the coasts of Somalia. Our false enthusiasm my in fact be so convincing you could be forgiven for thinking we actually mean it and are not only interested but want to join the model road sign club or book our own pirate cruise. If we are genuine we will ask you point blank ‘can I join your road sign club?’ If we say, things like ‘wow, that sounds really interesting, how would I go about joining a model road-sign club?’, we don’t mean it. This is just politeness/a ruse to keep you talking so that we can zone out and think about more interesting things like the best way to create your own zombie make-up out of some toilet tissue and PVA glue.

7. We pretend to be interested in people we aren’t. For example we may meet someone briefly at a partner’s work event and they invite us to be their friend on Facebook, which we politely accept. They may send us the occasional message, we will politely respond to and this may provoke further conversation. They may suggest meeting for a coffee and we will reply ‘maybe’, meaning ‘no’. Mostly we are thinking, why is this person still talking to me? If I’d known they meant to establish a genuine connection I’d have pretended to have a seizure when they first asked me to pass the twiglets.

8. We aren’t great at expressing ourselves. The standard response to the question ‘how are you?’ will invariably be ‘I’m fine’. It will be the same reply if we happen to be on fire whilst fighting off a zombie hoard and suffering from a cold, which may or may not be the first symptom of something turning us into a flesh-eating virus. Similarly you’d get the same response if we have just opened the door to discover the entire apartment is filled with free chocolate and cash.

9. We aren’t great at small talk and have a tendency to talk about the weather far more than can ever be necessary. We say banal things like ‘it’s a bit grey outside’, which anyone with eyes has probably already noticed. It’s about as interesting and as easy to initiate a conversation as saying ‘I have a nose attached to my face’.

10. We are still rather attached to the archaic idea of our Monarchy, even if we are a bit embarrassed about this and can’t provide any logical reasons whatsoever as to why we should still have, and continue to encourage former colonies to have, a Queen. She does have a lovely sparkly crown though. Shiny.

 

Pretending I’m a runner

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About a month ago I completed my first half-marathon, which was one of my 2015 resolutions. I had wanted to run the half-marathon as part of the Geneva Marathon in May. This would have been a big event with thousands of participants and spectators to cheer me and all the other runners on.

In 2014 I ran the 10k as part of the Geneva Marathon events and really enjoyed myself, despite the physical challenge, so I assumed that the half-marathon in this setting would have been more of the same (more effort, more kilometers but also more spectators and more satisfaction). Alas, this event clashed with one of the many UK weddings we had this year so I had to give it a miss and my enthusiasm for running started to dry up without the motivation to put on my trainers, that is until I found another half-marathon in Geneva, the Demi-de-Jussy, taking place at night.

I thought a nighttime run sounded nice, it’d be cooler than running at daytime and perhaps a smaller event would be a better place to start. In hindsight, I’m pretty certain that running the smaller event as my first attempt was not a great idea. Or at least I think I might have enjoyed the half-marathon in a bigger setting for a little while longer before the intense misery associated to the physical pain kicked in. What I hadn’t reckoned on in tackling the smaller event was just how lonely it would be.

The loneliness in itself wouldn’t have been much of a problem, I usually run alone and often late at night, although always along well lit streets. However, I made the mistake many runners do and completely failed to pace myself. I was excited when the race began and was running kilometers in record times, not thinking that my body wasn’t prepared to be going at these unprecedented speeds. Perhaps I had hoped that hoards of spectators cheering away would have helped me keep up the pace but the few spectators that had been cheering us on for the first lap had clearly given up by the second, contributing to the growing sense of isolation I felt as the race progressed.

The course was two laps and it was dark. Runners had been advised to bring headlamps, and before the race I had wondered how essential this would be but was really glad the fiancé had managed to find me one the day before the race. As the course wound its way through mostly unlit country roads and sometimes wooded areas I was very grateful for the lamp, even if it wasn’t the most comfortable addition to my running gear!

For each lap there were about 3 or 4 themed stations along the way (which seemed to be based on seasons). At each station were people dressed up shouting encouragement, there was music and fun things to look at. On the first lap this was highly entertaining on the second lap these stations made me all the more conscious of how fast I wasn’t running and how alone I happened to be.

At the penultimate station, one man in drag tried to motivate me with falsetto words of encouragement and sympathy as he jogged beside me for a little while. If I had had the energy I would have punched him in the face, but he did at least encourage me to run a little faster to get away from him. I knew he meant well but by this point my mood had already plummeted from the optimistic high of ‘look at me I’m running a half-marathon’ to something much darker along the lines of ‘why am I doing this? Everything hurts. I haven’t seen anyone in a while and I’m probably going to get murdered in the woods any moment now.’ I was not in the mood for some light joshing from anyone who seemed remotely happy!

I had been prepared for the fact that a smaller event and tighter time limit (only 2.5 hours to complete) would have meant this event was likely to appeal to more serious runners than I could pretend to be. I expected to be somewhere near the back, but assumed I’d still be bumbling along with others in sight, but almost everyone had outstripped me by the 14k point. Although I wasn’t last, I was second from last.

I only managed to hobble, cramp had struck by this point, past the final person in the final kilometer, so for 5k or so I was actually last, with the constant annoyance of the sweeper car following behind me, which I resented for reminding me of my rubbish effort. (Although I appreciated the car whilst running through the woods with nothing but my little headlamp and all too many thought of how many horror stories start and end in dense woodland.

I managed to complete the course within the time limit and there were even a few stragglers at the end to applaud me, but my fiancé wasn’t among them. He’d agreed to meet me at the finish but the place wasn’t easy to access with one bus an hour so he only made it a few minutes after I finished. I had cramp, I was exhausted and I had thoroughly not enjoyed myself. When I finally saw him I promptly burst into tears and collapsed into his arms. It was a far cry from the euphoria I felt upon completing the 10k last year.

After the race, actually about 3/4 of the way through, I vowed I would never run again. But now the physical and psychological pain has faded, I am actually keen to put the running shoes back on and have signed up for the course d’escalade in Geneva this December to motivate me to get going again. I also want to run another half-marathon next year to try to put in a better effort than this performance. Memory loss is clearly a dangerous thing!

Ten reasons to give up and go back to bed

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1. Your cat decided that she would prefer to do her business in the shower than in the cat litter box and consequently you are forced to clean cat poop out of the bath before you have even properly woken up.

2. You drop the razor in the recently cleaned shower and although it doesn’t actually do you any damage it scares the bejebus out of you and shakes you up for the rest of the day wondering how long it would be before your cat discovered you naked in the shower and bleeding from inexplicable razor wounds to the knees and ankles. You would hope your cat would not have returned to do her business once again.

3. You tried to get dressed for work opting for the nice skirt suit you had laid out the night before but, after putting on not one, not two but three pairs of tights that either already had holes or quickly gained some, you concede defeat and wear trousers.

4. Cycling to work, one of your comfortable shoes, that you specifically chose for being easy to ride in, falls off in the middle of the road and your pedal then viciously attacks the back of your ankle and makes it bleed.

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5. On arriving at work you remember that the document you have been furiously working on and took home to work on the previous night, remains lodged in the memory stick… at the back of the laptop…on your desk… at home.

6. You go to make a cup of tea at work and are upset that of the ten boxes of tea in the cupboard, these all turn out to be various herbal offerings including fennel and chamomile but all you want is just a normal cup of tea. You are forced to settle for an unsatisfactory green tea.

7. You manage to knock your unsatisfactory cup of green tea and it spills all over your phone, you are forced to spend some ten minutes frantically drying the device on your scarf as the nearest thing to hand and praying to the gods of technology that the essential device will survive the experience.

8. Your scarf, which was white, is now covered in unsatisfactory green tea and it’s cold in the office and you want to wear it rather than leaving it to soak in the work bathroom’s sink.

9. You realise you absolutely do not have time to attend the interesting work-related but not wholly essential meeting taking place that afternoon that you have been looking forward to for a week.

10. You heat up your homemade leftover-for-a-while soup at lunch to discover that contrary to previously held beliefs, yes, vegetable soup can go off after a week and taste very very bad. You try to eat it anyway.

A tale of tea in three parts

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I love tea!

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But sadly in Switzerland tea bags and water don’t seem to like each other very much…

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So I force them together for some time until they hate each other less and I can have a nice cuppa!

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The end!

 

Rome wasn’t built in a day

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The common phrase ‘Rome wasn’t built in day’ is usually understood as saying great achievements don’t happen immediately. However, I wonder if maybe the phrase could be commandeered by people, all over the globe, afflicted by what can only scientifically be known as ‘night-person-afflictio’. Maybe ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, because it was actually built at night time by us under acknowledged night people.*

In case you were unclear the world is divided into two types of people: night people and morning people.

I fall into the latter category and feel that as a consequence I’ve been discriminated against all my life. Yes, that’s right almost since birth I have been subjected to night-personism and discriminated for my nocturnal-favouring tendencies.

When society was drawn up it was drawn up on the terms of morning-people, probably because they got to discussions first before night-people had woken up and made all the decisions before everyone was fairly represented.

Anyway, morning-people decided that society should operate on a timetable that suits their morning-loving proclivities and from the get-go we are forced to conform to the AM-people’s world, regardless of how well this is adapted to us unfairly persecuted night-persons. School, work, shop opening hours are all fixed in accordance with those pesky morning-persons who deiced that the day should generally start at 9am.

These morning persons cheerily start their days from 9am and by the time they reach mid-afternoon can start to doze off, confident that the best part of their day is already over. Us night-people, on the other hand are forced to garble through those horrible early hours, when all these important day-people’s meetings are taking place, and then by the time we are really raring to go, most early-risers have already mentally clocked off for the day.

I am all too enthusiastic when a weekend or public holiday approaches not for excitedly relishing a day of non-workingness but because I am pleased that I can stay up late completing whatever activity I’m trying to get done, without fear of being rudely awakened by a 7am alarm after not nearly enough hours of sleep. The early bird may catch the worm but the night owl catches the mouse.

Undeniably I am at my most productive between the hours of 10pm and 2am. During these four hours I am focused and can achieve so much more than I can during the entire 9-5 normal working period. It’s great to know at what time I will be at my most efficient. It is incredibly frustrating that my productive hours do not fit in with the morning-person shaped society I’m confined to live in.

The exception to the 9-5 schedulers, the lucky night people who escape such working sanctions are those that undertake shift work: the nurses, policemen, 24-hour opening grocery employees and so on. However night people shouldn’t be forced into certain careers because of their penchant for the hours of darkness.

Arguing that night people are catered for with employment opportunities because they can work in a limited number of professions is like saying women aren’t discriminated against because they can work as telephone operators or cleaners and they don’t need to take on any troublesome male dominated work such as managing banks or building bridges.

Even if those night-timers have happily chosen these professions that fit in with their ways they are still discriminated against by everything else being geared around morning-people’s schedules. If they have kids they need to get them to school at day time hours, if they need a dentist appointment they will have to schedule this for a time they should be sleeping. The whole system continues to be prejudiced against us creatures of the night, regardless of what time of day we work!

However, there is hope, a recent study concluded that students would learn better and employees would be more productive if the school and working day started an hour later. They are actually going to experiment in the near future on some sleepy students in Oxford to proved these theories night-timers have known as facts for many years. An extra hour in bed doesn’t go far enough but Rome wasn’t built in a day. This could be the start of a flexible working revolution that fits work to people and not the other way around.

 

*If you actually want to know where the phrase came from, this site seems fairly good: http://www.italiannotebook.com/local-interest/origin-rome-wasnt-built-in-a-day/ and in the 23.4 seconds it took me to find and peruse I can unequivocally and quite uncertainly say it looks fairly reliable so may or may not in fact be true.

Ten reasons to live in Switzerland

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1. Chocolate. Yes there is rivalry between Belgium and Switzerland when it comes to the world’s best chocolate and personally I think Belgian truffles tip the scales slightly, although Genevan Pave’s (little chocolate truffley square thingies) are delicious and Switzerland gets credit for inventing the chocolate bar, which is easier to have kicking around your handbag than a box of truffles.

2. There is no need to constantly descale your kettle or endlessly clean your shower head. Water here is just so clean and simply isn’t full of all the crap that clogs your watery appliances in the UK.

3. It’s so expensive to live her. This might not sounds like a good thing when you are forced to spend most of the year living as a vegetarian not for commendable moral reasons but because meat is just too darn expensive. However, whenever you go anywhere else (not including Scandinavia) everything  is so much cheaper. Even London is cheap to me now. £5 a pint you say? So much more reasonable than Geneva.

4. Clean air. A colleague in my office told me that she thought Geneva was a dirty city and I laughed at her. When I came to Geneva from London the difference in air quality was palpably noticeable. Whilst I live here I don’t always remember to appreciate this but every now and then I am still impressed at just how good it feels to fill my lungs with air here.

5. Cheese. It is no exaggeration to unequivocally state that the Swiss like cheese. I have so far discovered three traditional Swiss dishes, which are all variations of cheese and potatoes: Fondue, melted cheese you dip potatoes into; raclette, you melt cheese under a grill and pour it over potatoes; and tartiflette, potatoes and cheese sort of baked together.

6. The hills really are alive with the sound of music. Cows here, do in fact, wear cowbells. These aren’t purely novelty items for sale in souvenir shops and at the airport. Everytime I’m out for a walk and hear a cowbell or two it fills me with a Swiss induced glee.

7. Yodelling is the Swiss equivalent of Morris Dancers. Your everyday Swiss person can’t just summon these vocal vibrating skills as a party trick for any occasion. I imagine most Swiss people would be a bit embarrassed to be associated with yodeling, but the thought of this specialized cultural practice dying out would fill them with sadness.

8. You don’t really need language skills to assimilate. Swiss have three (or perhaps even four?) official languages and whilst some people know them all most people tend to speak just one of French, German or Italian (and then probably English as a second language). You could go to any part of Switzerland and master a couple of sentences in one of the non spoken official languages and still pretend to be Swiss. For example you could pretend to be a Swiss French speaker living in the Swiss Italian part. Your shame at not being able to speak other languages may never be found out.

9. Their flag is a big plus (badum tsss!). If you are from a country with a pretty distinctive flag it’s great to be able to easily pick out your adopted country’s flag in a line up without having to remember which order the colours go. (Tip: If it looks like a sign for a hospital then you need to switch the red and the white around).

10. There is something about Switzerland that is inherently cool in a “let’s not talk about it” kind of way. If I was to have any European(ish) passport in addition to my UK one, I’d want a Swiss passport. Maybe it’s their neutrality, maybe its that owning a Swiss bank account makes you feel like a villain in a bond movie, maybe its the fact you know the country is awash with guns and money but no-one really wave these things in your face, maybe it’s their determined non-Europeaness (in the heart of Europe) attitude, who knows, but whatever the reason I wouldn’t mind being Swiss.

 

Spamtastic? Get the spam out of here!

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When I was younger Spam meant to me a disgusting processed meat product that came out of a tin and would occasionally, much to my disgust. find it’s way into our sandwiches. (Spam was clearly disgusting and a world apart from corned beef, which was a delicious processed meat product that come out of a tin and was best enjoyed with cheese in a toasted sandwich) Spam! It not only sounded like someone just threw it up but it was also very close to the commonly used, if wholly politically incorrect, insult kids would throw at each other on the playground (Spaz).

So spam never had great connotations and maybe that’s why the name applied to junk mail you used to get through your post but now more commonly and in greater quantities get through the inbox or in your blog comments.

When I first started blogging I didn’t get much spam and I would carefully sift through the comments WordPress decided were better off in Spam hoping to find some dedicated followers that inadvertently got rejected by the electronic bouncers of the blog platform entrance. Maybe I’d find some gems hidden in the junk.

I’m partly proud of the fact I now get more spam because I assume it means that my blog is featuring a bit more prominently on search engines or my readership now makes spammers think there may be some merit in targeting my blog or whatever. (If the actual reason is simply about getting their website links on as many sites as possible and has nothing to do with my slightly increasing blog popularity then please don’t ruin the illusion for me!)

Spam for me seems to fall into four categories: obvious junk, delusional confidence-boosters, soliciting advice and downright insulting.

Obvious junk

This is the easiest to deal with, it’s the spam that doesn’t really pretend to be anything other than what it is, pushing you to buy miracle cures from dodgy websites, etc. It might include long comments about weight loss miracles or a generic ‘site is good’ with a not overly well hidden link to a website selling dodgy weight loss miracle pills.

 Delusional confidence-boosters

These are the spam comments that are more craftily put together hoping you’ll accept the comment and publish the links hidden behind some ego stoking sentences about how marvelous your website is and how your blog definitely deserves global recognition. These, you might find yourself nodding along in agreement ‘why, yes, my blog is marvelous, how kind of you to notice’ before you realize that something is a little off.

It might be the link to the website selling the weight loss miracle pills or it might be the fact the comment is telling you how useful our advice was and how it’s saved their marriage and you realize the comment is attached to a post about your cat being chased by a dog and try as you might you can’t find any subconscious, reading-between-the-lines, advice you have inadvertently given anywhere that might help repair someone’s marriage.

Soliciting advice

The cleverer spam posts are ones that ask a plausible looking question to try to get you to respond, they might ask for your help with something or raise a technical question about the website. This taps into the psychology that if you want to get someone on side ask them a favour, this appeals to a person’s ego by acknowledging their expertise in something.

Whilst I find the uncovering of these ‘potential fan’ comments as ‘spam’ invariably disappointing, I can’t help but admire the tactics that have gone into these and I almost want to accept the comments in recognition of their attempts at clever game play.

Downright insulting

The final category of spam is undoubtedly the most insidious and most likely to work (on me anyway). It’s put together well, it includes references in the comment to the actual post and on first glance appears genuine. What really hooks you into these kind of posts, though, are the insults. Again, it’s clever psychology of combining compliments with comedowns to shake the insecurity of the author and elicit a desire to engage.

Here’s an example:

Everything published made a great deal of sense.
But, consider this, what if you composed a catchier plst title?
I am not saying your content isn’t solid, however suppose you added something that grabbed a person’s attention? I mean L’escalade part 2 | Fear of the reaper is
a little boring. You could glance at Yahoo’s front page and note how they creae post headlines to get viewers to click.
You might add a video or a pic or two to grab people interested about everything’ve written. In my
opinion, it would bring your posts a little bit more interesting.

It starts off well, first sentence is a solid ego boost (everything made sense) and then it comes with a confidence wobble (suggesting room for improvement), followed by a quick blow to the head (your title is boring), what looks like a hand being offered to pick you up (maybe look at Yahoo or try this) followed by a knockout punch (your post is currently boring).

I’m going to be honest this spam really bothers me. And even though I know it’s spam and not actually targeting me personally, most notably because I already have pictures and things on my website so the advice doesn’t match my content, nonetheless I can’t help but feel offended to be told my blog is boring and it puts me in defensive mode. I want to approve it so I can comment and point out the error of the spammers ways, but I know this would just be playing into their hands and giving their weblinks (yup those miracle weight loss pills again!) the prominence they are seeking.

Of course I’m secretly hoping this post will invite some dedicated spam comments telling me how great/boring I am and how this information is exactly the information they were looking for on this subject (albeit without enough pictures). I shall wrangle my hands in glee at the irony and do my level best not to engage with the spam further than that.

Ten reasons to tidy the house

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1. Your parents are arriving soon and you would like to convince them that you are now mature enough to live in a clean and tidy house and that you have moved on from your messy teenage clothes-discarding, teacup mould-growing, chocolate-wrapper-strewing ways.

2. When you remember that you have wooden floors and the soft squishy ‘carpet’ you have been enjoying is, in fact, moulted cat hair.

3. You politely allowed an ant or two to pop in and make their acquaintance but now they have overstayed their welcome and rudely invited all their friends. It’s time for that colony to take the hint and leave already.

4. You are constantly late for work because it takes you at least an hour every morning to locate the second shoe that seems to have been subsumed into the general disarray (like a stapler dropped into a dish of jelly).

5. The laundry that you did and dried and then put in a pile to put away later, but later became too late once the cats decided to nest in your freshly laundered undies and now everything is covered in cat hair once again and you have to start the whole process from the beginning.

6. You remember that at the age of 30 you are supposed to at least be able to pretend to be a grown up and grown ups are supposed to be able to remember to tidy on a regular basis. You don’t want to be the one to dispel that particular delusion.

7. You have run out of clean plates and cutlery and are now eating your pasta straight from the saucepan with a wooden spoon. Soon you will run out of clean saucepans and wooden spoons.

8. Whilst there are undoubted benefits to practicing your contortionist, gymnastic skills as you navigate your abode, pirouetting around a trainer here and a box of recycling there, you shouldn’t have mistaken this for actual exercise.

9. You have run out of money from constantly replacing items (such as bike lights, batteries, matching shoes) you considered lost forever in the general melee.

10. You recall that your apartment was once a spacious cavern of roominess with room for swinging as many proverbial cats as you liked, but now resembles a squalid den of teeny-tininess and even the cats can touch both sides of the room from a sitting position.

Dear 15 Year Old Me

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As I happen to be in Johannesburg for South African Women’s Day I thought I’d post something in keeping with the day. So I’m posting today to raise awareness of a campaign a friend of mine has set up to combat depression amongst teenagers. Her idea is to invite no-longer teenagers to offer a bit of advice to their younger selves, so that teenagers of today can read through some of the issues the seemingly confident adults around them experienced at their age, and feel a little bit less alone.

This is not an exclusively women’s related problem but I think it’s appropriate for the day as I am a woman and I was a young female once upon a time. But I’d invite anyone who wants to take part to do so, you’ll find no gender discrimination here!

If like me you think this is a great idea and would like to get involved you can add your own advice to the Tumblr page http://selfesteemat15.tumblr.com/, where the words of advice to many a younger self are swelling the archives on a daily basis, or you could create your own blog entry and link to the twitter feed #SelfEsteemAt15‬. If you want to see what other people are posting follow @SelfEsteemAt15.

If you’d like to share your words of wisdom or a link to your entry here too, I’d love to know what 15 year old you and 15 year old me might have had in common.

Below is the advice I quickly scribbled out to younger me.

Dear 15 year old me

I will give you a quick piece of advice because I am currently taking a quick break from a job I am passionate about. So it is possible to make a difference in the world and to ‘be the change you want to see’, even if you currently have no clue what to do with yourself. I can’t remember who said that but even at 15 you had the internet so you can google it.

There are two pieces of advice I would like to give to you. Firstly, be true to what you know is right. Sometimes we all get led astray and it’s easier to join in with the crowd mocking others than to be the one who is mocked but you know this is wrong so if you aren’t yet brave enough to defend those lone rangers at least don’t add to their misery and maybe throw them a little bit of kindness now and again. It will help them and it will help you more than you can realise.

Secondly, don’t be afraid of failure. Yes you have always been pretty good with the smarts and I know you embarrass easily and are currently afraid to try new things, unless everyone else is already on board, but don’t be afraid to take risks. Sometimes they will work out amazingly well and you’ll wonder why you were so worried in the first place, sometimes you’ll fail a couple of times before you get it right and sometimes you’ll just fail. But there is nothing wrong with that.

Finally, I know that sometimes you will reach points when everything seems so terrible and you want to curl up into a ball and disappear, but trust me, these hurts and pains you experience they will heal and you will be a stronger person and know yourself better because of it. So don’t be so hard on yourself and when everything really seems so terrible then just trust me and just keep putting one foot in front of the other because these times will pass.

Oh and very quickly, as for what you look like, give yourself a break and stop comparing yourself to others, you are you and that’s damn awesome.

Love 30 year old me xxx

p.s. life doesn’t get boring as you grow up, I’m excited to meet 45 and 60 year old me, I think we are going to be great 😉

A cultural croissant crisis

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For the last week or so I have been in southern Africa for work. Yes, my job is awesome but trust me this is no jolly trip to another continent. I am working, working and then working some more, evenings and weekends are not exempt. Add to this some very temperamental internet connections and there’s my excuse for not having posted for a couple of weeks (for those of you who noticed my absence and thought my standards slipping).

I was in Swaziland for the first four days and have been in Johannesburg, South Africa since then and I’m out here for just over two weeks in total. In case you think I am exaggerating about the amount of work, it is true, I did fib a bit because I did have Sunday afternoon off and a colleague took me to the zoo and then to the cinema where we saw Women in Gold.

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I picked the film on the basis that Meryl Streep was in it but other than that knew absolutely nothing about the film. Incidentally, it’s a very strange experience to sit down at the cinema with no idea what you are about to see. Anyway, it was about a famous Klimt painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer, also known as the woman in gold but I’m giving the full title too for reasons that are obvious if you watch the film, and the restitution of art stolen by Nazis from Jewish families during the Second World War. Meryl didn’t let me down, it’s a very good film and I’m happy to recommend it to all of you.

Anyway, back to the point I’m trying to make, which is, obviously, about croissants. I am currently staying in a very nice hotel in Johannesburg and, as in all hotels, you can tell if it’s a decent choice because of the breakfast. Whenever I stay anywhere with breakfast included, particularly where there’s a buffet, I try to eat as much as possible to, one, get my money’s worth and, two, potentially avoid the need for lunch enabling extra dosh for dinner time.

The buffet at the Capital Moloko is excellent and I have been approaching it in the strategic way that I approach all buffets. For starters I’ll go for a bowl of muesli, yoghurt and fresh fruit salad with pumpkin seeds scattered on top. Round two and I’m digging into the cooked breakfast items, particularly relishing the bacon which Switzerland deprives me of. Finally, I will conclude with some toast and jam, perhaps a Danish or both. Yes, I do have a three course breakfast and yes, I am aware that I am probably eating my entire daily recommended allowance of calories in one go but I’ve already explained my reasoning.

Yesterday, on my final round of breakfast I selected a lovely fresh looking croissant. I then spied a collection of breakfast accompaniments in little white dishes. One of these was obviously peanut butter, the other was something dark and red I didn’t recognize and the third was a dark brown syrupy liquid that my immersion in Swiss culture taught me must be chocolate.

I had a lightbulb moment and thought I could upgrade my normal croissant to a chocolate supreme version by thickly drizzling, but artistically you understand, the sticky brown liquid all over my croissant. I felt so smug that I’d combined the two in this genius manner and even caught a couple of my fellow diners giving me what I could only assume to be envious glances. I took my croissant creation back to my desk, sat down to bite into this sweet breakfast delight only to discover that the ‘chocolate’ was in fact marmite.

Now don’t get me wrong I like marmite but I also like it thinly spread over buttery toast not dripping in thick clumps off a croissant. Perhaps with full appreciation of what I was eating a croissant and marmite could be a nice savoury option on this French breakfast treat but I cannot begin to explain the shock as I chomped into the pastry expecting a sugary sensation only to be hit by the bitter saltiness of marmite. I understood my fellow diners glances had not been envy so much as incredulity.

I never would have imagined that marmite might actually be popular in some places outside of the UK, so much so that it is easily offered without labeling as though all diners will automatically know exactly what it is. Should I be ashamed that as a British person I didn’t automatically recognise marmite? Has my time in Geneva turned me into a real European?