I am becoming increasingly aware of a fundamental misunderstanding on the behalf of lots of loud-mouthed idiots and bullies. A deliberate misunderstanding designed to make other people feel inadequate, deceived and weak.   This misunderstanding is of one simple, four letter word: nice.   The meaning of nice has been taken over, twisted and manipulated into a negative. Nice is now a weakness. I find it hard to associate the word with anything other than a snide mocking tone and an attempted insult.   This isn’t the first time I’ve observed this worrying trend. I wrote about it a couple of years back, when fashion was going through a distinctly fugly and edgy phase. I got sick of seeing the phrase “subverted sweetness” in fashion magazines. I wanted to scream “LET THE SWEETNESS BE!!!!”.   A self-help book* called Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It by Lois Frankel and Carol Frohlinger has prompted this current rage. The advice given in the book isn’t bad. In fact a lot of it is practical and helpful, especially around assertiveness and confidence building. My issue stems from the author’s assumption that nice is bad.   Lacking confidence is bad, being a walkover is bad, making yourself miserable to please others is bad. Last time I checked, these traits have very little to do with being nice.   Nice is charm, nice is politeness, nice is making a room a better place by simply being in it. Nice doesn’t mean avoiding conflict, but it does mean not actively seeking it for kicks. Oh, and nice isn’t just for girls. Women, men and boys can be nice too.   Nice people don’t have to finish last. It is all another line of mythological bullshit from the bullies to hold us back and weaken us. Being[.....]

I really hate it when people act all coy and secretive on social media. Pseudo-enigmatic tweets and statuses that read “So excited!” or “Heard the most amazing news!” make me gag. Whatever it is, just tell us already, or face losing my interest and/or getting unfollowed.   Back when I was involved in community radio I was told: “never trail the news”. This meant that you could hint and build excitement about upcoming programmes and songs, but never be a tease about the news. It makes sense; the news transcends such cheap chicanery. As it is in community radio, so it should be in real life.   After all that, I’m now going to pull a rather dramatic about turn. Today’s blogpost is a collection of photos. This is because I’m really busy working on exciting stuff that I can’t tell you about. By my very nature, I want to tell you and squeak excitedly in your general direction (sorry). But I can’t, at least not just yet.   There you have it, I have become a cheap and tacky social media tease. I feel dirty.   Here are some pretty pictures from the day I went to Bridgnorth and Instagrammed the place to hell. If there’s one thing that the world needs, it is another blogpost of try-hard “artsy” pictures. Enjoy.   BBxx            

    Do you ever get the overwhelming urge to go out and dance? Put on a trashy frock and highly impractical shoes; spend an hour applying eye make-up before trying to squish a huge amount of stuff into a teeny-tiny bag?   I live the good life – it is all cocktails, fancy dinners, highbrow cinema, galleries and obscure indie artistes. It is all terribly grown-up and I love it. I just sometimes miss going out wearing a short skirt, strawpedoing a Smirnoff Ice and dancing to Flo-Rida.   I was never a wild-child. There was a six month period in 2005 when I went proper batshit crazy (another story, a never time), I’ll be honest: it was bloody hard work. The cost of the extra eye make-up remover alone was very off putting. In the main, wild nights out were a rare treat rather than a weekly event. That’s probably why, six years on, I’m still not bored of them.   Growing up near Wolverhampton has given me a warped perception of what constitutes a “wild night out”. It is a place where a cocktail comes served in a pitcher and contains four cans of Monster. The music tends to be of the R‘n’B/Cheese/Reef Place Your Hands variety. By hipster standards, it is a lot shit.   But who cares? I’ve had enough of standing around and “appreciating” the music, I’m fed up of seeing blokes with beards wearing chunky pullovers, discussing real ale and nu-folk. I want to get sweaty dancing whilst drinking cheap gin and tonic from a plastic beaker. I want to laugh at silly boys with silly haircuts wearing silly All Saints low-cut  t-shirts. I want to eat a sandwich from Subway at 2am and spend the next day sending and receiving texts of[.....]

  Something has occurred to me lately, prompting me to write this post. I recently saw the trailer for the documentary Miss Representation and it has had a BIG impact on me. Directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the film highlights the shocking lack of realistic representation of women in media and the equally troubling lack of visible powerful women.     The film has made me look at adverts and TV shows more closely, read magazines with a sharper eye, pick apart the weird dynamic between male and female presenters, look at films and their characters in a new light; and you know what? Women are getting a shit deal. We are either “totty”, “eye candy”, “a loveable kook”, “bitch”, “cute”, “fashionista”, “shopaholic” or “an angry feminist”…   …we are one dimensional . Here’s the thing – I’m all of the above at one point or another, plus a hell of a lot more.   Women and girls need to be represented in all of their unpredictable complexity. I don’t want 1000s of smart talking Junos, I don’t want every female character to be “feisty” and “strong”, I don’t want female newsreaders that never giggle at their cohost’s terrible joke. Diversity is what is needed, women that let girls know that, sometimes, being unsure or shy or sweet or confused is all OK. As is being smart, feisty, strong and sexy. We don’t have to conform to one single ideal!   What has this got to do with me writing? As a writer I’ve struggled to find my place. I don’t fit into any boxes, mainly because I don’t want to be put in one. I struggle with “labels”, especially with the big one beginning with “f” that regularly gets placed on female writers and academics. I often wander by[.....]

  Sometimes, the world makes me feel like this song:     That is all.   BBxx  

    Shampoo shopping. I suck at it. Since when did I require a PhD in pseudo-science and fluency in bullshitanese to buy a new bottle of shampoo?   All I want is something that makes my hair clean, soft and smell nice. What I don’t want is to stand in the hair care aisle at Boots for 40 minutes trying to work out if my hair is “normal” or not. I mean, I think it is normal – it grows out of my head and, last time I checked, it wasn’t made out of snakes. Then again, I saw a split end earlier – how many split ends make me abnormal? Ah, my hair is shoulder length too, is that long or short? OH MY GOD, I’M A FREAK!!! I feel so bewildered that I can barely summon the mental strength to consider my conditioning options.   I’m ready to hightail it over to “Complementary Therapies” and neck a bottle of Rescue Remedy – not for the magical fairy flower extracts, more because I need a drink and it tastes a bit like brandy. You try finding a decent Martini in a branch of Boots.   Why does it have to be so hard, why does there have to be so much bloody choice? The Boots website lists 507 different shampoos and conditioners. 5-0-7 - that’s 261 shampoos, 230 conditioners and 16 types of dry shampoo. Aren’t we lucky! These beauty companies are spoiling us with all of these fabulous vitamin complexes, pearl extracts, essential oils, mushed up flowers and hydrating aqua formulas. We can even have hair that smells like a tropical waterfall if we so desire!  Who hasn’t sniffed a tropical waterfall and thought “I’ve gotta get my hair some of that”.   It is all a load of[.....]

    I’m not ill, a trip to A&E the other week established that. The visit left me red faced and with a fetching pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose.   I’d convinced myself that the stabbing headaches and the general sense of listlessness were signs of something sinister. Turns out that they were migraines and that my eyesight had got a bit shit. My vision is now crystal clear and the migraines have gone, so why do I still feel like the woods have dressed up as trees and are scampering about my mind jeering “bet you can’t tell what we are”? Why do I want to curl up on the sofa every night watching TV? Why do I put off writing? Why do wake in the middle of the night convinced that there is something important I should have done? Why on earth have I seen that stupid John Lewis advert so many times that I now have an opinion on it?   Yes, I’m under the weather – not in the sniffling snotty way, in an all in my head kind of way. And it is annoying the hell out of me.   That’s why I’m forcing myself to write this, I want to snap myself out of this pesky malaise that has sneaked in, riding on the coattails of all these dark mornings. I’ve dabbled with the idea that I might have Seasonal affective disorder and, on closer examination the symptoms on Wikipedia (as you do), my dabbling appears to be pretty close to the mark.   Yet there is a little part of me that is convinced that this maudlin inactivity is some form of well-earned break, a winter reward for a spring, summer and autumn of hard work. Eating a[.....]