The other day, I told my stepdaughter that something was an Old Wives Tale and she looked at me blankly. What are they teaching kids these days? Surely they should know that if you pull out a grey hair that ten will grow in its place? Or that chocolate will give you spots? Or that if you go swimming after eating ANYTHING, you will undoubtedly get stomach cramps and drown?
My late grandmother was a genuine Old Wife. She would often give my sister and I an apple each instead of getting us to brush our teeth, feed us bread crusts to make our hair curly and refuse to cut our fingernails on a Friday – much to my mother’s horror.
It’s time for another instalment of Product Placement’s series of spa reviews, Preferential Treatments. But this one is a bit different, so move forward to the edge of your seat while I tell you about our exciting new reviewer. Ready? OK. It’s a man. Yes, it’s true, while my other half assumes that a ‘spa’ is one of a small chain of convenience stores, there are other men out there that like a bit of pampering. And they don’t all look like Niles Crane, either.
Oh how I miss those heady days of having a newborn. DVD Box Sets, endless cups of tea, sacks of Minstrels justified by breastfeeding. But then something very sinister happens to these little bundles of flailing limbs. They start to crawl. Which is frightening enough, but not as frightening as the latest development in my offspring. Yup. He can walk. Chaos is now two feet tall and shouts ‘POSTMAN PAT’ a lot. (Well, PA-MA-PA. Christ, he’s fifteen months, what d’you want from him, a thesis?)
Apparently, according to our beloved experts, what’s on your desk says a lot about you. In fact a ‘study’ (yes, I read stuff) claimed it could reveal the true personality, habits and ambitions of the desk’s owner. So cast your eye around your own workspace (as IKEA would call it), and take a minute to become your own ‘expert’. I’m going to do it too, don’t worry.
In my other life (you know, the one in my head where I actually have the time/money/childcare to do the things I want) I read a lot of books. A mixture of modern literature, a few classics, with some chunkier ‘airport’ blockbusters thrown in as a kind of cranial irrigation. I chat confidently about the Booker prize, and my friends see me as a kind of human lending library for all the must-read volumes that the literary world is talking about.
Who do you actually do? That’s a question I hear quite regularly about my other, undisclosed, day job. (You’d think that writing Product Placement would fulfil me, but no, I feel the need to do other things. Like make money.) In this day and age, it’s no longer possible to just be a Bricklayer or a Sales Manager. There is a ‘trend’ (don’t you just love a trend?) to make jobs sound more inspiring. Whether or not a painter and decorator’s self-esteem would soar once he became known as a Colour Distribution Technician is questionable. And would a barman feel extra-motivated once he could describe himself as a ‘Beverage Dissemination Officer’? Doubtful.
Call me old-fashioned. That’s it – just call me old-fashioned, because I really am. There’s nothing I like more than a glass of sherry, a copy of People’s Friend and some reruns of Dad’s Army. OK, this could be an exaggeration, but wasn’t there something much more appealing about times past? I’m talking pre-seventies of course. Pre-sixties even. An era when the boot scraper outside your front door wasn’t from Dwell, your Coronation tea towels weren’t ironic, and your blouse could comfortably be described as ‘gay’. Simpler times.
Stealing from children is great fun. Oh shut up, I don’t mean in a cruel way. No, I’m talking about products, of course. And also food. In fact, let’s talk about food first. If you’ve got young kids, you’ll know that what they eat these days is a vast improvement on the minced mutton and marmite type carry-on we were all forced to eat in the seventies. No wonder I’ll try (almost) anything – it’s called hope.
Just when you’d recovered from National Badger Weekend, another celebration begins. This time, it’s a bit more up our street – it’s National Spa Week, which starts tomorrow (19th September). And what better way to celebrate it than with another instalment of Product Placement’s series of spa reviews, Preferential Treatments.
I’m no Gok, so I’m not going to try and persuade you to prance about with nowt on at all. But there are times in our lives when you just want to feel like you’re pretty damn hot when you’re wearing next to nothing. Admittedly that’s more likely to happen in the summer, but hell, you have to put the work in for the rest of the year so I’m not going to apologise for an untimely post.
My other half and I have been known to go out for a sherry or two together. These days, thanks to Offspring, it’s a rarer treat. But when it does happen, I find that during the evening, our tastes are remarkably similar. We both like a reassuringly expensive lager or two. Tops, if you don’t mind. And neither of us would say no to a famous bourbon with an equally famous cola-flavoured mixer, if you know where I’m coming from. All, obviously, in strict moderation, and never – ok, rarely – descending into any kind of consumption of the mutually venerated aniseed flavour liquor that’s usually drunk from small shot glasses.
