Robyn’s Nest

I am very much looking forward to August because by the first day of the month I will have handed over my latest stinky assignment and my fate will be in the hands of the public relations experts who mark it. So, this weekend will be a miserable one spent slaving over the laptop, but come next week I’ll be smiling again. Here’s why:

• Works social - beers and banter with my work buddies
• Hair cut and colour - much needed as I can barely get a brush through it at the mo and it looks like straw. Might be brave and do something different
• Girly weekend with LJ and a couple of the volleyball girls - this will involve wine, nice food, chilling out, hanging by the lake and arranging the volleyball club’s social diary for the year ahead, yay!
• The start of pre-season volleyball training after a couple of months off. Can’t wait to get back on the court, see my volleyball chums and wind the coaches up in my usual jovial way
• Lunch in very posh restaurant Firenze, Leicestershire, with my mate. We won it in a raffle and have £80 to spend on fine wine and dining and no doubt will continue the drinking in my pal’s local
• Best mate’s birthday bash in Brum - a gang of us will rocking in our chairs with laughter at the Glee Club before hitting a dancefloor somewhere
• Coast to coast bike ride in aid of Cancer Research. Now, I won’t actually be cycling (that would be madness) but am part of the support team and this means four days of taking the piss, putting up tents, having a laugh and…oh yes.. motivating the team of cyclists. Always forget that one
• Three days off work for which I have made no plans. That’s three days to do with as I please, freedom!
• Bloater’s hen weekend in… actually I can’t say where as she might read this and it’s a surprise, but it involves three nights in a cottage, a heart pumping activity, a chilled out activity and a night on the tiles
• Four-day CASE conference in Brighton for work. Me and work pal CK are gonna network, soak up some new knowledge and wear ball dresses to the gala dinner. All true, except that last bit
• Relay for Life 24-hour sponsored walk which will be done in nun outfits as our team is called the Peshwari Nuns. And we’re gonna run a stall selling curry. Cool or what!

Yep, I think that’s enough to be getting on with. Just need to get this last week of July out the way - and then the fun begins!

Have you ever asked yourself this question? If you were to drop down dead at home, how long would it take for people to realise something was wrong?

I’ve heard many a horror story about people lying undiscovered in death for weeks or even months and I have to say it saddens me. Most memorable is the son who discovered his dead mother around three months after she fell down the stairs and broke her neck. Sadly, he made the grim discovery by peering through his mother’s letterbox and seeing her body in a heap on the floor. What was most unfortunate was that her nightdress had ridden up above her waist and her rotten bits were on display. Nice.

Well, I live alone, so if something bad was to happen, how long would it be before someone raised the alarm? Like Bridget Jones says (see full quote here) us singletons could be left for weeks on end to be ravaged by wild dogs. Grim thought.

Anyway, onto the crux of my story. I recently moved house and still hold the lease to my old flat because I couldn’t get moving dates to match up. I’ve been in the new place for a month now and popped back to the old flat last night to do a spot of tidying up before final inspection.

What I found under my door first made me worry, then made me laugh, then made me think “how sweet” and then “how random”. It was a note from the local Police Community Support Officer asking me to contact them as soon as poossible as my neighbours were concerned for my welfare.

No, I haven’t dropped down dead, I just moved house. But I find it a little odd that my neighbours - who I perhaps bumped into once a fortnight on the stairwell - even noticed I wasn’t around. How do they know my name as we’ve certainly never said more than “hello” and didn’t they notice me moving my belongings out for about a month before I actually moved?

I don’t know what prompted them to raise the alarm - maybe because my car no longer frequented the car parka nd they missed it, or maybe I was a noisy neighbour and now it’s gone quiet? I have no idea.

However, the note from the PCSO was dated July 7 and there has been no follow up since then, so they can’t be that worried. I haven’t called the PCSO yet because a) I’m a bit embarrassed to have to say I’m alive and well, I just moved out, and b) I can’t pronounce this person’s surname.

But it’s nice to know someone cares!

I love writing my blog and have become a bit of a blogging addict since creating Robyn’s Nest last October. But there’s one thing I love more than blogging (in an online sense, I mean) - and that’s checking what search terms people have used to find my blog. The random things people type into search engines amazes me. This is just a taster from the last couple of days:

Today

 Yesterday

Interesting stuff eh? Every day without fail someone, somwhere will search for info on Moroccan men and there’s a lot of ankle injuries out there too. But “peeing in her cycling shorts” - what’s that all about? Seriously random!

I would say that I am a big reader and that I read lots. However, my reading material is somewhat limited to crime fiction and I wouldn’t ever describe myself as well read. This little test thing, therefore, may prove a tad embarrassing and I’m doubtful I can beat CK’s score. Here goes:

Here’s what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicise those you intend to read.

3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I have watched the films)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I have watched the films)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (skimmed it at school)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 (Little Women) - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (read a few of them at school/college)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (I have watched the film)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I have watched the film)
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I have watched the film)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (I have watched the film)
51 MISSING
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (on my book club’s list!)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 (Bridget Jones’s Diary) - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens ((I have watched it on TV)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (I have watched the film/s)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (I have watched the film)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 [The Faraway Tree Collection] - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (I’ve watched the film)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Hmm, 14/100 is a bit poor, although this reading list isn’t really my bag. However, I have seen the film or TV adaptations of lots of these books or know enough about the stories not to have to turn every page. That’s good enough for me.

I have managed to pretty much waste the whole day today - all because I had a wee bit too much to drink at a party last night. Champers followed by Southern Comfort and coke is not a good combination. Ugh.

I had the best of intentions today: while back in the shire (Shrop-shire, that is) I wanted to raid mum’s fridge before visiting my bezzie mate’s (BM) new flat and heading back to MK to crack on with my diploma assignment. What actually happened was this: woken by ringing phone (BM checking if she had time for a shower before my arrival), clamber out of bed, wipe dried dribble from my chin, throw clothes on and (stupidly) jump in the car for five minute drive to mate’s new flat. I arrived at said flat at 11.30am, didn’t leave until 5pm and even then I didn’t feel well enough for the two hour drive home.

BM had a hangover too so we gave each other sympathy, drank endless cups of tea and made each other laugh hysterically over the most childish of things. We have decided to rename going to the toilet for a number two “emptying yourself”.

During our witty and intellectual conversations BM and I pondered over the evil that is the hangover. Why do they hurt so much these days? I actually feel bruised all over (in part due to manic dancing in nightclub no doubt, worsened by lack of sleep), dizzy, sick, headache, and just holding a mug of tea to my mouth seemed to require 100 per cent concentration. Trips to the toilet to empty yourself double when you’ve got a hangover - the hangover poo me and BM call it - and you feel like your body is being controlled by someone else.

I still don’t feel normal and even three incredibly unhealthy meals hasn’t made me feel better - bacon and egg sarnie for breakfast, MacDonalds for lunch and Indian takeaway for tea. Not a very healthy day diet wise but Maccy Ds usually do the trick for a hangover. Not today.

If someone could invent a pill that would instantly disolve a hangover they would be a very rich person. I would certainly invest in them!

I have just spent 15 minutes writing a blog post only to read it back and think “fuck me, that’s boring” so I have deleted it. I won’t get those 15 minutes back and I don’t see why you should waste five of yours reading a shower of shite.

So, here are the facts: I’m staying in on a Friday night to tackle this tricky scenario - the planning assignment part of my CIPR Diploma in Public Relations. I hate it, I am clueless, it’s making me miserable. It’s boring, it’s tough and not knowing what to write is making me cross. Part of me wants to jack it in, part of me just wants to get the damn thing out the way and scrape a pass.

So, if you’re interested in public relations and fancy helping me out, feel free to make suggestions on how to approach this hellish piece of work. If you’re not interested, enjoy your evening.

Over and out.

Okay, so the foreign object wasn’t in my tea exactly, it was on my mug. But that’s close enough because it was a black and curly. That’s slang for pubic hair in case you didn’t know. Now I’m keen to try new things and have a pretty “open to new flavours” palette, but pubic hair and sweet, hot tea just don’t go.

My buddy was peeing her pants and slightly red with embarrassment as she passed over my mug of tea at work. I was gasping for a brew and she ruined it with her observation of said foreign object - but was quick to point out the black and curly hadn’t come from her. Hmmm. What the hell was she stirring my tea with? A penis?

Anyway, the whole office became embroiled in pubic hair related banter and I was crying with laughter by the end of it. But still felt a bit sick… that pubic hair is setting up home somewhere around my desk now, after knocking it from my mug with a post-it note. It reminded me of the time a mate found what resembled a baked bean skin - or someone’s blister!!! - in her cuppa. Double yuk!

It’s all too gross. I think this highlights the uncleanly state of corporate kitchens and the need to make tea wearing rubber gloves, a face mask and possibly protective overalls. Maybe I should start drinking it through a straw as well, so nothing big or lumpy will make it to my mouth.

Okay, writing this blog is starting to make me gag. Need to stop now…

I must have reached the age where us girlies start fretting about our weight. Well, I think girls of any age fret about their weight but lately it seems like some kind of epidemic has taken hold. All I hear is “I’ve started a healthy eating regime”, “I’m on a diet”, “I need to lose weight” or ”I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been”. Bla bla bla bla.

Honestly, who cares? Yes, I would love to shed a stone but if it means starving myself, avoiding any kind of occasion where there might be cake and pretending to be satisfied after scoffing a rabbit food lunch, then I’m just not interested.

Maybe I’m unsympathetic to diets because they just don’t work for me. I’ve tried a few out, just like every other gal on the planet, but for me it’s more a scientific experiment than an attempt to shed poundage. I did the Carol Vorderman detox diet some years ago and wrote a weekly column for the newspaper I was working for. It was pure hell and the column inches were the only thing that got me through it. I felt shite, had a permanent headache and wanted to chew my own hand off at the end of the month. I did feel wonderful after four weeks, sleeping like a baby and bouncing around with energy. But I’d only lost a couple of pounds.

I did lose a bit when I did the five day tree syrup diet. Basically had to substitute food with a gloopy drink for five days and although I had a nice flat tummy at the end of it, I was utterly miserable. I like eating food, I like the taste of eating food and I want to carry on eating food. I don’t want to swap my size 12 for a size zero if it means no more rare steaks, chocolate brioche or cheesecake.

I understand some people want/need to lose weight but most of the people I know who say they’re going on diets actually don’t look any different afterwards. If I’m going to the effort to eat celery for a fortnight I want to look damn good by day 14!

Nope, diets are not for me. That said, if I didn’t play sport I would be the size of a house. For me, exercise is a fun way of ensuring I can eat like food it’s going out of fashion. Okay, so I can’t shake off the love handles, but if we all had figures like pencils life wouldn’t be very interesting would it?

Doughnut anyone?

This advert constantly appears on my Facebook pages and it’s starting to piss me off. I think it’s the use of the word “still”. Why don’t they just add the words “shelf”, “gathering dust” and “desperate” while they’re at it?!

28 and Still Single?

It’s my buddie CK’s 30th birthday bash tomorrow night and I’m very much looking forward to it. This is for several reasons:

• She’s older than me - I always like people who are older than me
• It’ll give me ideas on how to celebrate my own 30th next year. Late next year I hasten to add
• There will be cheesy dance music from the 80s and 90s. Rock on
• You can’t beat a good finger buffet
• There will be single men in attendance and CK has offered to play Cilla
• I’m going with some girl mates from work - always a good chance to gossip about the things that can’t be said in the office
• We’re starting the evening off with cocktails. Yum
• Chance to wear a dress, get my legs out and pretend I’m a lady (this depends on alcohol consumption though)

I always thought there’d be a time when I actually felt like a grown up but it hasn’t happened yet. Are we growing old gracefully? Er… kinda.