Where NOT to go to pass the time

A collective sigh of relief goes up across the world this week, as, after several weeks of captivity, parents are finally being set free. Yes, school holidays have once again come to an end, and children everywhere are gathering up their pencil cases and musty lunch bags and being packed off back to their classrooms.

Of course lots of parent do relish these special weeks spent at home, re-bonding over the craft box and cooking up a cupcake storm. Other parents however, particularly those who aren’t naturally programmed to moulding papier-mâché and making their own play dough, sometimes find these long periods of time a little bit tricky to fill.

Once the novelty of an alarm clock free morning and a sandwich-making free evening has worn off, and you’ve spent several days watching your creative child stick tissue paper and glitter directly onto the dining table and build a cubby in every single room, it’s likely you might start thinking of other places to spend the day.

‘Other places’ that aren’t at home, to be more precise. Places that won’t involve you having to vacuum up afterwards, and require the odd bit of plastering and repainting when the playing goes wrong.

If and when the weather doesn’t cooperate and rain pours down day after day, soft play centres – the sort with swinging ladders, tunnels, slides and multi-coloured balls – are a tempting refuge. It’s true that spending a day at such a place is likely to knock at least a year off your lifespan and leave you with a nasty chest infection, but at least you are safe in the knowledge that, short of the odd friction burn and heat exhaustion, your children can knock themselves out without actually coming to any real harm.

The downside of these play centres is of course the entry fee. It’s generally on par with a central London mortgage repayment. And to add insult to overpriced injury, the parent is also charged just for the privilege of sitting, watching and breathing in the rancid air.

After you’ve set foot through the door and all shoes have been removed and stored in a pile under the counter, you will of course remember that the obligatory socks are still sitting at home in your child’s drawer. So your wallet is forced to come back out again and a new neon-coloured nylon pair (Easyjet style, Harrods prices) are passed over the counter to your child’s outstretched little paw. They of course will claim to love these new socks more than life itself. You will consider them hideous, and likely deposit them in the bin on the way out.

Finally the door (or gateway to hell, depending how you look at it) is opened, and your newly socked child is set free, static sparks flying in all direction as they run across the matching nylon carpeted floor. Reluctantly you follow suit and enter the room. Your ears are met with the thunderous sound of a hundred children all screaming, yelping and hollering in delight.

Just audible beneath this din, is a distinctive white noise. The low-level humming of a gaggle of mothers, all rocking backwards and forwards on their plastic seating in a desperate, shared pain.

Moving forward into hell, you spot the only beacon of hope in the entire place – a café at the end of the room. As you draw closer, the ‘café’ takes the form of a scratched up old counter and a chiller cabinet stocked full of last weeks’ salmonella and botulism experiments. Located somewhere beyond the coffee maker and the enormous display of food colouring and MSG is the kitchen, with it’s impressive line up of deep fat fryers spitting out grease all over the floor.

Unsure about which of the food would kill you and which would just make you sick, you settle on a hot chocolate and a purple coloured muffin. How wrong can you go with hot chocolate? It’s made inside the machine and spat out into the mug below. The muffin, which admittedly does look slightly solid around the edges, at least claims to contain a type of fruit.

The unwashed looking child behind the cash register takes the remainder of your money and hands you a numbered baton. You’d much rather just stand and wait for your order, but apparently loitering around the counter is not allowed. You must go to your table and wait to vibrate.

Not particularly keen to strike up a conversation with anyone in sight, you are forced to walk the length of the room in search of a table free of rubbish and off-putting inhabitants. You hurry past mothers dressed head-to-toe in stone washed denim and others dressed head-to-toe in fleece. You rush past those on day release from the local young offenders institute, and scuttle past those who obviously favour hemp on a stick to soap on a rope.

Eventually, several trips past scattered prams and regurgitating babies later, and you are finally settled into your plastic seat. You’re sitting just about near enough to the rope cage to see your child fly past, but not so close you can smell the feet. You finally have your ‘refreshments’ and enough dog-eared celebrity magazines to help pass the time, while you wait for your child’s colour-coded wristband to expire.

An hour passes and your child shows no signs of tiredness or even the slightest willingness to leave. The litre bottle of water you’ve just washed down the muffin with leaves you with little choice. You must leave the safety of your seat and brave the bathrooms.

The smell hits before you’ve even pushed open the door. The floor is swimming with something and none of the cubicles have locks, let alone anything resembling a loo roll. Hopping from dry patch to dry patch, you mentally calculate if you’re still covered by the tetanus jab you had for your holidays last year. Emerging from your cubicle you find a small crying child stood opposite your door. His trousers are around his ankles and his Thomas pants are full of something they shouldn’t be.

You briefly cast your eyes back to the liquid matter on the floor.

Now you’re faced with something of a social dilemma. Do you make a hasty escape and hope the soggy child’s mother is about to appear, or do you take possession of the said soggy child and go off in hunt of the careless owner? It’s not that you’re necessarily an uncaring cow with a heart of stone, but clearing up your own child’s accidents is one thing – sorting out the mess of a child with a shaved head and a cubic zirconia in one ear is quite another.

Luckily for you, the mother of ‘mini thug’ swoops in on him and drags him back out into the room, his Thomas pants still dripping across the floor.

Emerging back into the fresh air (the word ‘fresh’ becomes relative in a place like this), you decide that your senses have taken enough of a beating for one day. You spot your fuchsia-coloured child refuelling at the table and seize the opportunity to grab them and make a beeline for the door.

On the way home your exhausted child in the backseat tells you that it was worth all the pain. But it’s only taken 2 hours up of the day, and now you’re emotionally drained and financially crippled. To cap it off, the bottom of your jeans look slightly damp and the car now smells suspiciously of wee.

 

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PA in our Pocket or Marketing Tool?

As technology surges forward, mobiles shrink and mankind busies itself getting connected, the world continues to grow smaller with every passing day. Now, wherever we turn, we see people talking, texting or completely oblivious to their surroundings, engrossed by the latest download.

Of course it’s good to talk – or so they say. Everyone and their brother are now happy to be ‘friends’. They post, comment, and tweet, happy to share their life and divulge their souls. Yet should they one day pass in the street, they’d probably just walk on by.

Yes, the world may be talking, but what, if any, conversations are actually taking place?

Not long ago mobiles were such a simple tool; used to catch up with family or make a quick call. Today, in many ways, they help to run the world. They are our lifeline and motherboard rolled into one.

We rely on them to bank, shop, travel, and date. To track down, meet up, and break up. They tell us what time to wake up and where we need to go. They can be our secretary and our salvation. For the foolish, who use them to cheat and deceive, they can also be our downfall.

As this market grows and mobile advertising looks set to explode, you have to ask yourself this – are phones really designed to help us manage our everyday lives, or are they just a marketing dream – a tool designed to sell, and therefore, in turn, control us?

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For richer for poorer, till death do us part

With the winter now behind us and my muffin top threatening to morph into a Brioche, this morning I took myself off to a spin class.

It’s been over a month since I last graced the gym with my presence – a chest infection and school holidays have kept me at home, and in a distinctly weakened state. It’s hard to say what caused my state to weaken more, the chest infection or the school holidays, but either way I haven’t been able to get within sniffing distance of my trainers for a while.

So there I was, back in the darkened room and safely impaled on the ‘cushioned’ seat. I have to say it took me a while to remember how high the seat should even be and which way the peddles were supposed to turn. As is always the case at the start of a class the room was completely silent, except that is for two women near me who were in the middle of a deeply depressing conversation. Seeing as I was already strapped on the bike and had nowhere to go, I naturally tuned in my ears to listen.

One of the women was recounting the tale of an incredibly unlucky friend whose husband had recently suffered a heart attack, and dropped down dead in front of her. To make matters worse, he had no insurance, and as a result, the family home now had to be sold.

With this new and rather unsettling information sinking into my mind, and wishing I’d tuned my ears in the opposite direction, the class began.

For the next 45 minutes, as I sweated away like a beast and used all of my powers of self control to stop myself throwing up over the woman in front, part of me kept wondering why I had ever thought it a good idea to come to the gym this morning. The other part of me – the more dominant bit, that tends to mess around with my concentration – couldn’t stop thinking about this man. Or rather the widow that he’d left behind.

Like most people I suspect, the two things that I fear the most are the loss of my children and my husband – losing either would turn my world upside down. The very idea of some terrible happening to my family is something that doesn’t even bear thinking about. Yet I do. Probably far more than is considered rational or even remotely healthy.

For some unknown reason I have a tendency to keep living out these worse case scenarios in my head, and in doing so, making myself feel sick to the core. I wish I wouldn’t do it, but when my paranoia is triggered by distressing headlines or other people’s bad news, I can be like a woman possessed.

So as I’m peddling away, climbing imaginary hills and racing other stationary bikes, my brain is spiraling into a panic induced overdrive. What would I do if this happened to me? How would I deal with it? Where would I find the strength to get up in the morning and get through the day?

Several gears later and these questions are replaced by guilt – for not appreciating everything that my husband already does for me. Vowing to be an all round better wife, I peddle on with renewed vigour. Oh how my husband – who was at that time sitting in his office and as fit as a fiddle – would have laughed his coffee up at these irrational and melodramatic thoughts. He’s simply not enough of an emotional basket case to take it to these levels, and for that, and the fact that he has a truly proactive approach to death, I am incredibly grateful.

For what sets me apart from this other poor woman is that I know that even if I were to lose my husband, I would never lose my home. Being the ever practical man that he is (and working in the industry, which always helps), we are both insured up to the hairline, and worth far more dead than alive. Cheery thought that, but not terribly helpful it has to be said when it comes to paying the credit cards in life.

So now, whenever I get a bee in my bonnet about some hypothetical tragedy, he is always quick to point out that if he dies, whilst I may be alone, at least I will not be poor. And while I do of course protest that this will not make up for his absence, I know what a difference it would make. Of course I would still grieve and weep and wail, but at least I wouldn’t be forced to do it out on the street, or without a clue about how I was to house, feed, clothe and educate our kids.

That said, I still mutter loudly about the large amounts of money that leave our account every month to pay for the host of different insurance schemes, covering loss of life, limb and hubby’s income. It’s always galling to pay out for something that may never happen, but as my ever sensible husband would say, if you can’t afford to pay for your insurance every month, then you certainly can’t afford not to have any at all.

So to cut a long story short – the spin class ended, my heart rate returned to normal and I proceeded to extract the ‘cushioned’ saddle from my left Fallopian tube.

Somewhat short of breath and damp around the edges, I calculated that in the space of 45 minutes I had not only killed off my husband, mourned my loss and appreciated his knowledge of life insurance, but I had also lost just about enough calories to counter balance the Yorkie I wolfed down the night before. Quite an exhausting morning all in all, and one that I decided called for a Kit Kat to calm my shattered nerves.

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Crimefighting 101

In the papers this week were two stories, which when read side by side, demonstrated that the world of law and order has indeed gone stark raving bonkers, and Mr Common Sense has obviously packed up his bags and left the police force.

First we have Miss Kausar, a farmer’s daughter in India. She went to her father’s aide when Pakistani militants broke into their home and started beating him with sticks. They had demanded food and beds for the night, and he had bravely (or stupidly, depending on which way you look at it) said no. Obviously having inherited the brave gene, Miss Kausar came out from under the bed and struck her father’s attacker with an axe. She then used his own AK47 to finish him off.

Next in the news we have Renate Bowling, a 71-year-old great-grandmother from Thornton Cleveleys in the UK. She went to her own aide, when an intellectually challenged member of the British youth threw stones at her window. Intending to give the yob a piece of her mind, she bravely (or stupidly, depending on which way you look at it) set off in hot pursuit and then prodded him in the chest as she told him what she thought of him.

In India, Miss Kausar was commended by the police for her act of bravery. She has been hailed a national hero and nominated for the President’s gallantry award.

In the UK, Mrs Bowling was arrested by police and charged with assault. She had to use her climbing frame to climb up into the dock and then plead guilty to the charges. She also had to pay £50 costs.

And the moron who threw the stones in the first place? Unbelievably, even though he left bruises on Mrs Bowling wrists, these were put down to ‘self-defense’ and he got off scott free.

Seriously? What is scarier? That the police saw fit to believe the sniveling little oik, and then shoved Grandma into the back of the van. Or that the magistrates, who are supposed to be in possession of a fully functioning brain, laid the blame squarely at a pensioners stocking clad feet.

It seems the days of wearing pants on the outside of your trousers and trying to defend yourself or your property are obviously well and truly over.

I remember about 15 years ago when we were living in Zimbabwe, our family home was broken into. The local police came to see us, and, if memory serves me rightly, said that next time if we were to see the intruders, we were to shoot them, drag them inside the house and then call the police. To my knowledge we didn’t even own a gun at that time, but there was the nice police man not only giving us permission to have one, he was also telling us we should be using one.

In the UK these days however, it seems the police really do seem to be showing just how little the ‘victim’ actually matters anymore.

They failed to put a stop to the Simmons ‘family from hell’, before they drove Fiona Pilkington to such depths of despair that she saw no way out, other than to burn herself and her daughter to death in their own car.

They also advised a mother in Warwickshire NOT to report a thug who had kicked in the front door and attacked her in her own home. Why? Because it might ‘inflame the situation’. Okay then. And there was us all being led to believe that the police were there to take the reports and then do something about them. Is that not why they get to waste tax payers money on their overpriced designer sunglasses and flashy top of the range cars in the first place?

It just wasn’t like that back in the days of Juliet Bravo – they got the job done. As did Cagney and Lacey, Starsky and Hutch and good old Edward Woodward in The Equalizer. And as for The A Team. Well, they could bring down an entire army with nothing more than a tractor, a sling shot and a basket of cabbages.

The police force today, it seems, can no longer even bring down the person who’s actually on the wrong side of the law.

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Taxing the fat to pay the thin

So, finally a doctor in the UK has been brave enough to speak out and voice what many people already think  – that instead of pandering to the needs of the morbidly and super morbidly obese with free mobility scooters and Disability Living Allowance, they should be made to contribute towards the massive strain they are placing on the health system, by paying more tax. And in turn, those who work hard to remain fit and healthy should be financially rewarded for their effort.

With obesity related issues draining every last penny out of the already overstretched NHS budget and £6.3 billion being spent fighting fat, this scheme sounds about on the mark to me. No doubt it’ll be met with cries of “You can’t say that”, but it has nothing to do with being judgmental or ‘fattist’, it’s just common sense. As is Dr Chand’s proposal to add tax to the type of fattening food that offers little or no nutritional value, yet guarantees maximum ‘junk in your trunk’.

Such a tax would of course cause outrage amongst the loyal Happy Meal brigade, all of whom would shriek loudly that it’s unfair to target those on lower incomes, who consider fast food a cheaper alternative. Quite frankly, tough. Tobacco and alcohol are already taxed in an effort to target smoking related illnesses and binge drinking, so why shouldn’t unhealthy food be too?

And as for the argument that junk food is the cheaper alternative, what a load of rubbish. It’s the easier alternative. With every supermarket offering cut prices bargains and more BOGOF offers than you can shake a stick at, it’s far cheaper to cook simple healthy food that it is to buy in a round of up-sized burgers, chips and coke. Even if you do have limited funds and an army of hungry mouths at home to feed. People who choose takeaways every night over cooking are just lazy, and parents who feed their kid’s junk for breakfast, lunch and tea should be done for child abuse. (see related post).

Strangely enough, many of these parents who claim they can’t afford to buy healthy food for their kids just so happen to smoke and drink. They think nothing of puffing £5 into thin air or pouring it down their throat, but they can’t stretch the family budget enough to incorporate something that hasn’t been regurgitated out of a deep fat fryer and into a styrofoam box. For £5 you can buy an entire chicken. So do you spend your money on 20 cigarettes, or a whole birds worth of protein to feed the kids? There’s the difficult decision of the week.

The argument that fast food is even fast is the biggest myth of all. At tea time it takes less time to scramble an egg, microwave a potato or even cook some pasta than it does to climb into the car, drive to the nearest nugget dispensing outlet, queue up, order, collect and scoff. Of course most children would probably prefer the nugget option, and as such be more likely to eat it up without a moan or a struggle, but since when was feeding them meant to be about taking the path of least resistance?

Children are just that, children. They should be eating what’s right for them, not what’s easiest for the parent, no matter how much money they have, how brain dead they are in the kitchen or whether by the end of the day they’ve simply lost the will to live. God knows I could well do without the constant battles about how many vegetables are lurking on my kid’s dinner plates, but I’d rather deal with the fuss they sometimes make than watch them both turn into Weebles, and wobble right off their Trip Trap chairs.

So is the idea of taxing the morbidly obese ever going to work? Nope, not a chance in hell. Why? Because many of those who fall into this category probably aren’t able to work in the first place. Their size, and the associated health problems that comes along with it, prevent them from carrying out even the simplest day-to-day tasks, never mind holding down paid employment. So if they were forced to pay more tax, they would no doubt need to be awarded more disability allowance to afford it.

Obesity is a problem that will carry on for many, many years to come. In part this is because many of those individuals who are contributing to the problem, simply refuse to accept any responsibility for their own actions. Instead they prefer to blame the government for its lack of support in helping them to lose weight. They complain about the shortage of free local sports centres and wide open spaces in which to jog. They claim that a bunch of carrots are exorbitantly priced and no one ever taught them how to cook.

In answer to that. It’s not up to the government (who lets face it can’t even run the country properly never mind a weight loss club) to prise the fork out of each and every chubby little hand across the land. There are 1000′s of miles of free pavements in the UK, go walk on them. If you can afford to upsize your £4.50 McDonalds meal you can afford a bunch of carrots. Go buy a cook book, or cheaper still, turn on the TV and listen to Jamie Oliver.

It seems incredible that so many people simply refuse to put two and two together and start addressing the problem, instead of comfort feeding and making it even worse. Even with all the fat fighting campaigns, health lectures and awareness raising TV programmes out there, all trying to ram the obvious message home, it’s hard to see what the solution will be.

Perhaps if those who need to shed the weight actually climbed out of their complimentary buggies and used their feet, they might be surprised to find the weight starting to drop off. Obviously there’s no miracle cure to losing this amount of weight, unless you see stomach stapling as a viable option, but it has been done, and is therefore not impossible.

I’m not even going to pretend to have a clue about the horrible vicious circle of a situation that you’d find yourself in, when you reach this sort of size. Or how demoralising and depressing it  could be to live with everyday.

I’m pretty sure that getting the weight loss ball rolling would indeed be painful, and a tremendous struggle of mind over matter to say the least. But any type of exercise was never designed to be easy, it was designed to be exercise. And anyone who’s ever tried a step class (and failed miserably) will know that exercise can be painful, complicated and downright humiliating whatever size you are.

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How to make money disappear

The world is recovering from a credit crunch, UK debt has hit £801billion, unemployment is up and morale is down. So what do the Royal Society deem to be a wise and worthwhile invention to benefit from their generous grant of £100,00? Why an invisibility cloak of course. How very useful.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt – a Harry Potter mad scientist from St Andrews University – has successfully proved that if you have a stupid enough idea and ask a stupid enough person for money, then eventually someone will throw a bundle in your direction.

On a mission to make magic happen, ‘Professor Dumbledore’ now plans on spending all of the money and the next 2 years proving he can manipulate light waves to make himself disappear.

Surely £100,00 could be put to better use somewhere else? I don’t know, say perhaps to buy a piece of life saving equipment for any one of the badly equipped hospitals around the country. Or perhaps a set of dictionaries for the nations young, to show them how to spell L8tr.

If such a whimsical idea by a magic mad scientist is to be funded into reality, why would anyone possibly want to help create something, that if it landed in the wrong hands, would make the lives of perverts, thieves and terrorists so much easier? All the CCTV footage in the world wouldn’t really help much when trying to catch the Invisible Man as he makes off with a swag bag of jewels, or the contents of the Royal Mint.

And as for what any number of extremists could do with a little gem like this. Imagine a whole army of gun welding nutters, all charging down Oxford Street in broad daylight, swathed in their invisibility cloaks and intent on raising merry hell. Even Harry and his little wand couldn’t help out then.

Sounds a little far fetched you might say? About as far fetched as someone who wants to actually create a wizards cloak to make themselves disappear? Or a prestigious society who’s happy to throw money into a top hat just to see what appears – or in this case, disappears.

Of course the absurdity of this study pales into insignificance next to the chemist from Vienna, who dedicated 4 years of his life to solving one of the ‘great mysteries of human biology’ – why men produce more bellybutton fluff than women. Why on earth are some of the world’s cleverest people wasting their brain cells on such studies, when they could be putting their intelligence to far greater use. Like finding cures for 101 diseases, solving world peace and curing world hunger.

Or simply inventing a chocolate bar that’s not only fat free and calorie free, but also lowers cholesterol, fights off Swine flu and helps you lose weight. Now that would be money well spent.

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How to beat unemployment

According to the paper I’ve just finished reading, the UK is currently overrun with fresh-faced school leavers, all clutching their 9 A* A-Level results and fighting with 50 other over qualified graduates for the chance to work on the tills at Primark.

Students such as a 19 year old featured in the article, who was complaining that since taking his A-Levels last year he hasn’t been able to get any work. The reason being, he claimed, was because he didn’t have any experience for the jobs he was going on. And he couldn’t get the experience because he couldn’t get a job.

Now no doubt this annoying Catch 22 was true in his case, but recession or no recession, it’s always been this way. Not every employee wants to hire someone, just because they have slept through 3 years of lectures and downed 10 pints of Red Bull to cram for the right results at the last minute. This may seem unfair and frustrating to those at the bottom of the employment ladder, but if it makes them feel any better, it also works in reverse.

When an experienced person tries to re-enter or break into a new industry, despite them having years of knowledge to back up the bluster, many can’t even get a look in. For you may indeed have helped Nasa to launch the first shuttle, or performed open heart surgery on a pig, or run your own multi-million pound business empire, but if you haven’t got a first class degree and a diploma in advanced Tweeting, then you haven’t really got a hope in hell. Obviously it goes without saying you also need to be fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese.

Of course half the job requirements listed on any recruitment site are 90% wishful thinking. If someone were that qualified and had the experience to boot, then they wouldn’t be scouring the pages of Monster and offering to commute 5 hours for the minimum wage.

In Generation Y’s defense, it probably doesn’t help that the educational system has now been so badly dumbed down that obtaining a degree seems to be on much the same level as getting a gold star in your primary school spelling test. Everyone knows that GCSE’s and A Levels are easier. These days you’ll now be awarded 5 bonus points for spelling your name correctly on the exam paper and 10 points if you use at least 1 full stop. If your beloved budgie died from old age the day before, then your D will of course be upgraded to a B. On compassionate grounds don’t you see.

In the oldish days, your only excuse for missing an exam would be if you were caught under the wheels of a bus on the way to school. Upon the resit, you’d be marked down a grade for not having followed the highway code properly and looked both ways.

Of course no one taking exams these days would ever accept or admit that they are easier, but come on, how can they not be. There has to be some reason that all these kids who can’t talk properly, can’t text more than 3 letters and couldn’t pick out Africa on a map are somehow managing to get all these A* passes.

A great example of this Diploma’s for Dumbo mentality is a new cutting edge scheme that’s just been rolled out in the form of a ‘Using of Public Transport’ certificate – a prestigious award for those students who have completed the incredibly complicated task as catching a bus. I kid you not.

They must first walk to the bus stop. Once there, they must wait for the bus to arrive, board the bus quietly, find a seat, look out of the window and then finally stand up and step off the vehicle. Impressive I know. Who knew the youth of today was so intellectually advanced that they would be able to pull off such an impressive feat. Oh no, hang on on a minute, people have been doing this for years haven’t they.

Now I don’t want to make light of a terribly serious job situation, but here’s a thought as regards to why so many young people can’t get a job. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the stupid subjects and degrees they are taking. Subjects that are surely chosen for the fun factor and not to actually qualify them to do anything at the end. Take Hannah for example, also featured in the paper. Fresh from the hallowed halls of Southampton Solent University, she is the first person to have graduated from a laughing course, with a degree in stand-up comedy. Now isn’t that funny.

Since when was telling jokes on the list of choices at the school careers day? Surely someone is either funny or not, and if they are destined for a career under the bright lights, then they’d be able to do it without 3 years in the classroom and thousands of pounds worth of student debt to their name. Sure most forms of art, from music to drama to interior design are taught and studied, but stand-up comedy. Really?

So if you happen to be trying to decide which path you should take and don’t think that laughter’s really your thing, then not to worry. There’s always the option of spending 3 years studying how to surf, or better still, writing your thesis on the life, haircuts and marital affairs of David Beckham.

One final pointer for anyone hoping to get a job after school – try picking a subject that actually has a point to it. Or if you really can’t bear to study anything too serious, learn how to unblock a toilet. I mean, who ever heard of a poor or out of work plumber.

Drunk Aussie booted out of UK

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So Andrew Symonds, the Australian cricketer best known (aside from his skills with a bat and ball) for sporting rather dirty looking dreads and white lipstick, has been sent home from the UK in disgrace.

You have to wonder, when you look at this picture, whether he would have even made it through British customs without a full cavity search, without his cricketing credentials to back him up. He looks to me just the sort of shifty and somewhat arrogant person customs officials would be tripping over each other to inflict some of their ‘I’m having a bad day’ power on.

So anyway. He was banished from Australia’s Twenty20 World Cup squad for an ‘alcohol-related incident’, or, if you take the back-peddling spin doctors eloquent phrasing out of the equation, for turning up for practise half cut.

Apparently he is ‘disappointed and understandably upset’ by what has happened. So he bloody well should be. Here’s a man who is paid large sums of money to play cricket and represent his country. If he can’t do either, because he chooses to drown his cornflakes in Jack Daniels, then he doesn’t deserve a place on the team in the first place.

After all the other stunts he has pulled in recent years, being sent packing with his tail between his legs couldn’t have come a moment to soon for Australian cricket.

During the 2005 Ashes tour he showed up drunk for a one-day game, and was threatened with the sack – an incident that obviously didn’t teach him the error of his ways. He has had to receive counseling after ‘a string of behavioural incidents’, which also led to him being banned from selection for the tour of South Africa. He called New Zealander Brendon McCullum a “lump of s***” on radio, and was fined $4,000 for his troubles.

Last year he was expelled from the team because he went off on a fishing jolly instead of attending a compulsory team meeting, and in November he got into an ‘altercation’ with a patron at a Brisbane hotel.

For crying out loud, he already gets to play a game everyday that he obviously loves, and is paid incredibly well to do so. How many more chances should he get? He can hardly use his job as an excuse for the drinking and bad behaviour. Yes, cricket at this level must be stressful, but this isn’t a reason to act like a complete and utter w*nker. Shouldn’t he be grateful to have the talent to do what he does in the first place, instead of insisting on peeing it up against the nearest wall.

Why are so many sports ‘stars’ allowed to become so much more important than the game itself? Why do they think they can act this way without facing any consequences? He should be permanently booted off the team to make room for someone else who really cares about the game they play.

If a politician started using public money to fund their housing…  oh hang on a minute, that might not be the best example to give… If a doctor kept turning up to work drunk, and beat up every patient he didn’t like the look of, he’d be kicked out of the hopsital before his stethoscope had time to even hit the ground. Now granted a doctors job description may he slightly different to Symonds, but only so far as a doctor saves lives and actually makes a real difference in the world.

Who has the most talent?

Stop the press, hold the headlines, refresh your browsers. Susan Boyle wasn’t crowned the ‘Britains Got Talent’ winner after all.

Talk about the results not living up to the worldwide hype, or the bookmakers expectations. Despite being the favourite to sing her way to victory, the crown was whipped away from Ms Boyle and handed over to Diversity, a group of 11 incredible dancers from Essesx, aged between 12 and 25.

So why didn’t she win? Maybe the viewers, all 18.5 million of them, felt she had already achieved her place in the spotlight, and others now deserved a shot at fame more. Maybe people assumed she has her money making future in the bag, and no longer needed the prize. Or maybe people just thought the dancers were better.

Now I haven’t been watching the show, but I would have to have been blind, deaf and half way up a mountain not to have heard about the singing sensation that is Susan Boyle. I, along with some 220 million other people, watched her on YouTube back in April, when she first performed “I Dreamed a Dream”, from the musical “Les Miserables”. The video clip flooded our screens and filled inboxes everywhere. And I, along with everyone else, including the open-mouthed judging panel, sat and went – ‘Wow, that came out of that’.

Since then, she seems to have become something of the singing equivalent to Marmite – with her legion of adoring fans on one side, including Oprah Winfrey, Demi Moore and Jon Bon Jovi, and those who couldn’t wait to knock her down on the other. And there goes the fickle fame of fame, and the double edged sword of celebrity. Apparently, some people really don’t like to see a frumpy, middle aged church volunteer do well.

People’s obsession with ‘looking the part’ aside, what seems to me to be the most absurd, and probably saddest part of this whole singing circus, is that the day after losing the competition, Boyle checked herself into The Priory suffering from ‘exhaustion’. Isn’t The Priory the place that all those poor coked up celebrities crawl to, when they simply can’t deal with their charmed life and the negative press anymore?

Surely things can’t be that bad? Surely she can’t have got so bad in just a couple of months that she really feels the need for an ambulance and the assessment of the Mental Health Act – just to reconfirm that she’s tired and stressed? Why not just lock the door, take the phone of the hook and sit down with a nice cup of tea.

All this fame and glory must be a terrible thing to have to endure, it certainly never seems to make anyone happy. Oh well, she may not have won the competition, but at least she has the wealth still to come, with a reported eight million pounds up for grabs in the next year alone, from a record deal, book deal and possible film.

That should cheer her up a bit. It nothing else it will help towards the big black sunglasses, army of bodyguards and weekly sessions on the shrinks couch that she will certainly be needing, when the reality of her new life really kicks in.

I have to say, I was amazed that Susan Boyle didn’t win. Then I watched the clips below, and I could see why. She is without question a brilliant singer, but those dancers, they were just amazing.

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Watch Susan Boyle’s FINAL performance.

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Watch Diversity’s FINAL performance.

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If it’s not broken, don’t fix it

Why is it that some companies just can’t help themselves. First they give you too much choice, flooding your brain impossible decisions. Then they fiddle around with something that already works perfectly fine – and has done for many, many years.

Take the humble deodorant bottle. It’s simple, straightforward and stops you smelling like a tramp on a hot and humid day. It’s not one of those products that really needs to be fancy. You aren’t likely to ever display it next to the cut glass or amongst the family photos. Far from it, when the deodorant bottle does makes it out of the bathroom and into public view, it is normally being whipped out of a bag and up under a jumper in a quick, trying to be inconspicuous kind of way.

And as for the design. Well it’s small, flat bottomed and rounded on the top. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember and always seemed to do it’s job to me.

So given this, why do the packaging, marketing and design gurus out there have to brainstorm themselves into a corner and come up with a new design. Surely that’s a bit like reinventing the wheel, just for the sake of making it that little bit rounder.

I’m talking, in case your wondering, about the new ‘upside down’ deodorant bottle that seem to be springing up all over the place. The adverts are of course very catchy, implying how much easier and better life would be if you lived it upside down. Would it? Really?  I can think of a number of times right of the top of my head when it wouldn’t be so great. Maybe I’m just a fan of gravity.

Of course being a sucker for new packaging, I went out and brought one. I’m a double sucker really, if you consider my line of work and insider knowledge of how to sell a gimmick to the blissfully unaware.  Still, like my other fellow magpies and lemmings, I like bright, shiny things and am always happy to jump off a cliff at least once. Who knows, maybe I thought life in an upside down world might be more fun, it would certainly put more volume in your hair when you’re drying it…

Oh fool that I am, for listening to heart over head and letting my curious fingers do the buying. The bloody thing is useless. Yes, it dispenses a pleasant white lotion onto my skin, that does, granted, make me smell good. But it also dispenses a pleasant white lotion all over my hands, down the outside of the bottle and onto the floor.

Surely it has been tested by small men in white coats for it’s capacity to spill? So how could this be? Hmmmm. Let’s think for a second.

Oh yes, that would be the incredibly stupid nature of the design. Something perhaps to do with the whole ‘let’s push everything to sit in the bottom of the bottle and then remove the lid’ frighteningly good idea. Now how many marketing monkeys, dressed in skinny jeans and Che Guevara t-shirts did it take to come up with this innovative new crap design?

Did they perhaps think a more aerodynamic shape would help the gloop to leave the rolling ball at a greater speed and velocity? It’s a deodorant not a cruise missile for crying out loud. It doesn’t need to break speed barriers or have more bleeding thrust than a Lamborghini.

But then I though, hang on a minute, maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the way I’m holding the bottle. Perhaps after all these years I’ll find out I’ve been doing this, apparently idiot proof task all wrong. Then I noticed my husbands deodorant. Sat there, just like mine, all upside down on the shelf and caked in dried up gloop.

Haaa! It’s not me after all.

I know that products, especially those of the hygiene and beautifying sort do need to shout ‘I’m young, hip and trendy’ as they jostle for your attention on the shelf. They need to have sexy shaped bottles, bright shiny colours and lids that open in 10 captivating new ways. They need to make attention grabbing promise, ones that blind you with science and conjure up images of molecules, test tubes and miracles.

Of course all they really need to say is   ‘Use me today, and you too can have smooth, glowing, wrinkle free skin…. just like this pretty little pre-pubescent model in the poster’. Or even  ‘ Use me today, and you too can have hair that bounces and shines, never fades with age or splits when you brush it… just like this airbrushed, Botox injected, aging actress in the poster’.

That’s right. We did all notice that anti-aging creams are sold by toddlers, shampoos are sold by wind machines and foundations are sold by Photoshop. We may well be gullible enough to part with our cash, but we’re not stupid enough to believe in perfection.

So really packaging, marketing and advertising guys, here’s a revolutionary idea. Instead of spending 100′s of 1000′s messing around with the tried, tested and perfectly acceptable shapes of our bottles, jars and pots of potion, or trying to sneak a fuel injected turbo engine inside the lid, for a slightly faster roll, why not just lower the price instead?

Yes, yes, it’s a radical thought I know. But remember, the average buyer is of a terribly fickle breed. We hunt out discounts. We study the sales, promotions and BOGOFs like the Pope studies the bible. We want value for money and preferably change from a $10 note.  So make your product half the price of that snazzy shaped bottle sat beside it, and then sit back and watch us buy it right off the shelf.