Birthday Bulges

1 x large Double Chocolate Fudge cake, Sainsbury's £5.49 (purchased for Boyfriend and I to celebrate my special day; ate one slice and licked the plate of the remnants of icing)
4 x Green & Blacks’ Organic Dark Chocolate Flapjack biscuits, gift (devoured throughout the course of today)
1 x Raspberry Bake, Costa Café, gift (still wrapped up… the mere scent of sticky-sweet cake is giving me a headache)
1 x Chocolate Cupcake, Waitrose Patisserie, gift (all boxed-up… if I ignore it, maybe it will disappear!)

I feel bloated and sluggish and another year older – when exactly did birthdays lose their zing?

Waking to the sound of my two-year-old niece singing down the phone line, her own rendition of “Happy Birthday” complete with a “Pip, pip, hooray!” definitely put a smile on my face. And the steady stream of phone calls, Facebook messages from friends and birthday salutations from colleagues have each added to today’s general feeling of ‘specialness’… but really, is that it?

I remember when birthdays were the be-all-and-end-all. Parties would be planned, invites sent out, special outfits bought and innumerable lists written and rewritten to ensure parents and friends would buy exactly the right thing. But for me parties stopped at age twelve (when I developed an irrational fear that none of my invitees would show up!) and my teenage years saw ‘special outfits’ being purchased every other week for general nights out. Birthdays slowly became redundant.

The one thing I can rely on my birthday for is glutinous excess. Friends ‘treating' me to cakes and chocolates, drinks and dinners so The Day itself is spread over the course of a week. My jeans get noticeably tighter, my wallet lighter (I can’t let friends pay for everything, after all) and ultimately I start to feel every bit a year older.

Next week I’m going to detox. Not diet, just cleanse. Lots of green tea and vegetables and definitely no sweets!

Happy Birthday to Me...

Living A Lie

I am living a lie. Far from Living Out London the past few months have seen me living out work, the gym and… my couch. Following a week day of rush, rush, rushing, I collapse on my couch and open my laptop. Not to write (the shame!) or do anything constructive, but to ‘Facebook’ friends (they’ve taken Scrabulous away… I’m gutted) and scan eBay for the latest deals on Louboutins… I’m officially wasting away My London Life and it’s time to admit it.

The first six months of living in the UK saw me out and about most nights of the week, with at least two social gatherings each day at the weekend. Now I’m lucky to catch up with even one friend late on a Sunday afternoon and then rush home to watch Midsomer Murders at 8pm. I’m a sad and lonely specimen of an Aussie expat, and I’m sorry.

Sorry for my lack of London-antics to entertain committed readers and sorry for neglecting friends I once made such an effort to see. But I vow to make a change.

This Thursday will see me turn twenty-five. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m experiencing a quarter-life crisis, I am definitely struggling with motivation. I find myself in a job that simply pays the bills - a glorified secretary begrudging my colleagues when they ask me to book a cab, courier this, scan that – holding on to slim pickings of freelance work and everyday wishing I was back working on a magazine.

And then I tell myself that this is just for a year, to make some cash, and that when I return to Sydney I’ll be straight back into the Land of Gloss. I tell myself that all writing is about experience and living and working overseas is a feat in itself. I tell myself this as I sit on the couch dipping gingernut cookies into my mug of PG Tips.

The bank holiday weekend just past hosted both the annual Notting Hill Carnival and Clapham Common’s SW4 and Get Loaded in the Park – I attended 0 out of 3. Okay, so I started going out very young – at fifteen using my sister’s ID – but seriously, has my time for partying really come to an end? My girlfriend of twenty-eight went to SW4, with her thirty-year-old sister in tow, and yet I was quite happy passing up on last minute tickets in favour of my beloved sofa.

No more.

Thursday I’m off to engagement drinks, Friday it’s dinner with the Boyfriend, drinks with friends Saturday afternoon and a girly sleepover come Sunday. Who knows, I might even stay up past midnight…

Ready, steady go!

Designer Vagina

I’m not the type of girl to shy away from talking about my punani. I’ve always been comfortable baring all, be it for a wax or smear test, because the way I see it I’ve nothing to hide. Little did I know that not all girls feel this way… and little did I know how different we all look down there.

On Sunday night my girlfriend begged and pleaded for me to watch Channel 4’s advertised TV-special The Perfect Vagina, a documentary presented by Welsh elfin-minx Lisa Rogers that focussed on Britain and America’s growing trend for ‘designer vaginas’. NHS stats show that vaginal cosmetic surgery or labiplasty, has doubled in the UK over the past five years with the private sector seeing a 300 per cent increase in these elective surgeries. The fashion (or madness) is being driven by commercial and media pressure that has broadened women’s insecurities from our boobs, bums, tums and faces and turned us against our insides as well.

Rogers follows the stories of five women ranging from nineteen to thirty-eight years, who have all considered some form of labiplasty and even one young Muslim girl desperate to undergo surgery to restore her hymen for fear of disgracing her family on her impending wedding night. To a modern, Western world her distress seems unwarranted and her suggestion that her parents would kill her and then themselves should they find out she is no longer a virgin seem archaic. But Rogers questions the benefit of our so-called ‘liberation’ if at the other extreme Western women are chopping off their flaps for fear they’re too big!

Not for the faint-hearted, graphic images of surgery on Rosie – a stunning twenty-one-year-old whose years of being bullied by her girlfriends and even her sister had kept her from having relationships with boys – showed her labia being snipped, sewn and later gushing blood (apparently this is normal as the body heals). Suddenly my biggest dilemma, “Hollywood or Brazilian?” seemed totally superficial… These girls are trimming their skin and all so their vaginas look like the ones in men’s mags and porn films, which resemble prepubescent girls and have likely been digitally retouched.

I remember when I was eighteen I went to see The Vagina Monologues an off-Broadway, Obie Award-winning play written by Eve Ensler and performed by a varied threesome of celebrity monologists. Based on true stories chronicled by Ensler as she travelled the world in search of ‘The Vagina’ each monologue expresses different experiences of a woman’s Mary. Be it through sex, love, rape, menstruation, mutilation, masturbation, birth, orgasm or simply as a physical aspect of the female body. Ensler empowers the vagina as the ultimate embodiment of individuality. And halfway through the play as we in the audience were calling out the variety of names for our punanis I truly did feel empowered. Me and my vagina could take on anything!

So maybe that’s why I’ve not squirmed or run away when faced with being naked in gym changerooms or going all-the-way with a boy – because I believe in the beauty of my own froufrou. Or maybe it’s because I think mine not too dissimilar to the ones I’ve glimpsed in the pages of Playboy.

To be honest, some of the coochies filmed certainly looked very different to those I’ve seen among family and friends. But is a bit of extra skin really as disconcerting to the average male as these girls seem to think? For some men, sadly yes. But mostly Rogers found that guys were shocked to think women worried about it that much. While the amount of hair down there was a point of concern, most men answered that they were happy when they were granted access at all!

The thought that there are girls as young at fourteen seeking surgery disturbs me. This Channel 4 documentary, that began as, “a wander through the wacky world of genital plastic surgery,” became a personal and passionate quest for Rogers to encourage women to love the skin they’re in…

So ladies… do you love your lips?

Babies on the brain

I have a confession to make. I can't keep mum when it comes to babies. Be it the excitement or simply my desire to feel 'part' of the occasion, I don't know... but I've been the outer of a fair few pregnancies in my time and I'm keen to reform. First step: Admission.

The first and second times I truly didn't mean to. What I thought was common knowledge, just happened not to be. The third time, I lay the blame with Boyfriend. In his typical fashion of zoning out to 65 per cent of our conversation he missed the part about my sister's first pregnancy being hush, hush... at only eight weeks she was playing it safe. Within a week, every man, woman and (even in utero) baby knew she was up the duff.

Fast-forward two years - two nieces and a nephew - later, and it appears I've done it again.

About a month ago two things happened: my eldest sister found out she was pregnant with baby number three (in as many years!) and my cousin got engaged. Said-cousin's brother Facebook-ed me exclaiming about "all the exciting things happening back in Sydney" by which I immediately assumed he was referring to the Ring... and the Baby. Before I could compute the information properly and realise that Big Sis was unlikely to be at the announcement stage - again, at only eight weeks - I'd acknowledged my excitement for both Cousin and Sister, hit 'send' and thereby outed yet another baby.

As it turns out both my sisters are pregnant, due only a day apart. Middle Sis quite rightly kept this information from me until she was ready for her first scan and will likely keep her baby's sex tightly under wraps, if indeed she finds out. Not because she doesn't love me... they both do, I'm sure... but because they know my weakness. When it comes to babies, my brain goes to mush.

Flowers and Friendship

On Wednesday I met a friend at The Commercial Tavern in Shoreditch – a funky little establishment just up from Spitalfield’s Markets with baby blue and fairy painted shutters, papier-mâchéd walls (celebrating old covers of Interview magazine) and an eclectic mix of floral-printed, wooden chairs and tables and a chaise lounge for good measure! My cider was flat, and warm, but the company was great. Mag-friend bought me roses.

Just because, she wanted to.

I think, with the exception of flower days back in high school, I could count the number of times I have received flowers on one hand. This is by no means a woe-is-me statement, I hold myself largely responsible. For some reason – unbeknownst even to myself – I feel the need to tell my boyfriends that I don’t like flowers… But, the truth is, I’m sure I really do.

When I left Bazaar my editor handed over a bunch of flowers (that she’d been given by some-designer-or-another) as a ‘thank you’ for my nine months of hard labour… also because she was to be away that weekend and didn’t fancy arriving home to rotting vegetation. They were lovely, and likely expensive, but I couldn’t get out of my head that I wasn’t their intended.

Fast-forward, a week after starting my new job, the recruitment company sent to my office a gorgeous bunch of chrysanthemums and lilies to congratulate me on my first week. And to be brutally honest, it felt great to be singled out. To be seen to be special. Unfortunately, that day coincided with the weekend I was moving apartment, so said-flowers were accidentally left at Boyfriend’s old flat. They didn’t even get the chance to wilt.

But Wednesday’s roses were all mine and there’d be no leaving them at the bar, passing on to a friend or letting Boyfriend ‘accidentally’ throw them out with the garbage. I cradled them all the way home, carefully trimmed their drying ends, pruned their leaves and placed them in the nicest vase we had – a mucky glass one with a chipped lip! Then I set them upon our window sill, with ample sunlight and the view of our garden behind. Picture perfect.

Mag-friend’s Marks & Spencer baby pink roses, bought on a whim and sprinkled with kindness made not only my day, but my week.

I’ll have to let Boyfriend know about my change of heart!

Epilate-me

While I have always Waxed Lyrical about my favourite waxing hotspots, the past month of London’s intermittent sunshine has forced me bring back the (Lady) Bic… The result? Stubbly, horrid legs.

So last week, following rave reviews from my ex-flatmate – the girl, not the guy! – I found myself on Amazon purchasing the Epilady Legend.


According to their publicity I was about to experience ‘the ultimate’ and most thorough hair removal. At full speed, the Legend’s 40 tweezer discs, creates 32,000 tweezes per minute!

Apprehensive at first, I plugged in my Legend and gingerly glided the gyrating tweezers-head along my now masculine-looking legs. Ouch, freakin’ ouch! I’ve been a waxer for years but truly, madly deeply, it doesn’t come close to the sustained pinching that you get with epilating. If I shut my eyes the pain and the buzz would make me swear that far from undergoing hair removal, I was actually the next victim of Miami Ink! But, it worked.

Out of ten, I give the Legend a sturdy eight. It may take the better side of an hour to complete a full-leg treatment, but sure enough three days later, my legs are still silky smooth.

It’s limitation – the bikini area. Because I’ll be damned if I’m letting those little pinchers near my nether region!