Shoe sickness

All women have an accessory weakness of some sort. For some, it's jewellery; for others, it's shoes. For me, it has always been bags. There's something about a beautiful handbag that sends my knees a-quivering and a certain giddyness through my being. Many of my mother's friends had presumed that I would follow in the footsteps of my mother, whose shoe collection could rival that of Imelda Marcos (I'm not kidding).

However, a genetic fault in my collagen means that I'm very bendy and wearing heels is not only very painful but can make me dislocate various joints. Thus, the stilleto and I have never cultivated a relationship, which is a shame really because there are some truly beautiful shoes in my mother's wardrobes downstairs, just waiting to be worn.

Instead, I spent most of the last three years clomping around in the many variations of the Converse Chuck Taylor (I would like to point out that I have clomped with a succession of beautiful bag on my arm). Then ballet slippers came into fashion, as did Primark and thus, my love of foot friendly but beautiful shoes was re-aligned by the fashion gods. My wardrobe is now stuffed to bursting with £8 pairs of ballet shoes in every hue, fabric and variation possible, along with many pairs of Topshop's sole beauties.

Unfortunately, my shoe luck has not continued with the season shift. So far, my boot endeavours for cold weather have not been as successful and I've only got one pair of winter biker boots that aren't Uggs. I have been trying to hunt down a pair of BLACK Gola Moon/Snow Boots for the past six months or so, but as yet I've been unsuccessful. Here's a picture that I stole off some ebay listing of the boots I want (in Black, not the neon pink pictured. Remember that.):


wanted dead or alive but only in black

In the meantime, these are the boots I crave and which no Topshop seems to have in stock. A carefully planned shopping mission to Oxford Street will be executed in the New Year.

Ho ho ho! It's Holly the Wonder Dog

Merry Christmas and Seasons Greetings to all from Holly the Wonder Dog and a slightly nauseous feeling Anti. My family is currently sprawled out in various parts of the house, stuffed to the gills and drunk in varying levels, as tradition demands.

Hope you all have a good holiday season.

Twas the night before the night before Christmas...

...Although technically, my Christmas happens tomorrow because of my Polish roots. I get presents and ridiculous amounts of food tomorrow night instead of Christmas morning. If I survive that long. It's not even Christmas yet and already I'm strung out and exhausted. Today has been one of those days that I try to avoid at this time of year but somehow get suckered into. And since I can, I'm going to bore you all with the whole story, if only to vent the entire experience.

After dropping my boyfriend off at the station for his train home, I came home and dropped off my car before heading back out. Now, I'd like to point out that I finished my Christmas shopping yesterday. My mother however, did not and sent me to do her bidding whilst she and my cousin picked up my aunt from the airport. Thankfully, the fog finally lifted this morning and she was able to fly in because all hell would've broken loose otherwise.

My sensibility won out over my hatred of cold weather and I decided to leave my car at home and get the bus to my local shopping centre. This was probably my only wise move of the day. From there, it started to slowly slip downhill. Topman was eerily quiet as I wandered through to pick up another present. Unfortunately when I hit Topshop, the place was teaming with teenage girls and women with prams.

Why do people feel the need to take their infant children shopping with them on the busiest retail weekend of the year? It's not a jolly family day out, it's a fight to the death. It's almost like they want the dirty looks I shoot them when their gigantic stroller equivalent of a Range Rover is parked in the middle of an aisle.

Today, they seemed to be everywhere. Babies crawling on the floor of Topshop. Toddlers running wild in Beales, their sticky hands pawing at everything at knee level, including me. Multiple under-3 siblings bickering by the turkeys in Marks and Spencer. But that was not the worst element of the day. Oh no.

I should've taken cash to do my shopping. I realise that now. Because technology, no matter how basic or advanced, will fuck you over eventually. In Beales- having dealt with the male shop assistant who'd had a sprinkling of Es on his cornflakes (I kid you not)- I fought my way to the front of the queue, only to discover that their system had gone down and if you didn't have cash, the paying process took three times as long as they manually ran your card and called for authorisation. As you can imagine, this led to a lot of very grumpy shoppers abandoning purchases but I just couldn't face joining a cash point queue and then having to come back, so I stuck it out before moving to my next target, good ole M&S

Among the sea of desperate faces and half full trolleys, Marks and Spencers' shelves were disturbingly bare as I went back and forth, searching for more cranberry sauce for the next three days of competitive eating. My family gets through cranberry sauce at a jar a day when there's three of us, this year there's six and on that projection, we'll get through at least two jars a day. I tried stocking piling early but our housekeeper found my stash and ate her way through most of it. But there was none and so, in a ruthless heat-seeking-missile-like way, I got off the bus two stops early and plodded my way through every merchant of cranberry sauce that I could think of, bar Morrisons because their cranberry sauce is shit.

Unfortunately, there was no cranberry sauce anywhere and I walked a mile with very heavy bags. Moral of the story, be more cunning with hiding the cranberry sauce.

Can't see, shan't see.

The last few days have been blisteringly cold. We're talking a drop from 12°C on Monday to -2°C today. The sudden cold has also brought on a thick, soup-like fog that makes driving anywhere a bitch as there's always some knob who thinks he can still break the national speed limit but ends up rear ending someone else who isn't. Cue horrific traffic everywhere. The M25 around Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent was described by one caller to Capital FM as "Just like Independence Day when everyone tries to leave town...Just not moving at all." I know the picture above doesn't really show the extent of the fog but I didn't want my neighbours to think I was a nutter taking pictures of them so I couldn't use flash.

However, the cold does have benefits. Such as this frozen spiderweb that was hanging outside the back entrance to my office.



I figured it would melt before my next cigarette break but the temperature stayed firmly around zero and I could come out and marvel at it a little more. Unfortunately, there was no way to photograph it without an ugly background. It was a green door or concrete. I chose the green door, figuring it was as close to greenery as we were going to get in the concrete jungle that is my workplace.

Mcjob Prospects

Tis the Sunday before Christmas, I didn't get up until noon and I thought I should take advantage of my blog mentality before it slips away in a puff of Sunday lethargy and newspapers.

One of the first things I read today was Time magazine's Person of The Year 2006...You (as posted on Perezhilton.com). I often wonder if I'm alone in my hobby-quest and the article made me feel a little less weird. If there's some dude denying himself Lost to make films starring his Iguana, then I'm definitely the less weird of the two, spending 10 or 20 minutes to write a post about something inane that probably won't be read by more than five people. I admit, that sometimes at work, I'll dedicate an hour of my time to kicking back in my chair and mentally composing a post, only to forget it in the rush of lunch or the dizzying activity of making tea and coffee for everyone.

However, I finish my job on the 22nd and then, I'm giving myself the month of January to find something new or else, I may be forced to apply for a McJob. Bored curiousity (and the sight of a Big Mac) led me to the McDonalds site a few nights ago. In one of my filthy nihilistic moods, I decided to humour/torture myself by clicking on their McJobs section. However, rather than be repulsed outright by the prospect of smelling like Mcchip fat and burgers for 40 hours a week, I found myself being drawn in against my will. Mccompany car - Mini Cooper, nice. McPension plan - can't see Mcdonalds going bust now that fat people can't sue them anymore. Mcnice wages - lots and lots of shoes.

Thankfully, I pulled myself back sharply and reasoned that I had not spent the last three years doing a degree to sell burgers for a living. I know someone's got to do it but that someone ain't being me.

For the love of God, someone hire me before I'm reduced to this.

December roundup

I had such grand plans for the week (actually, longer) absence that I've incurred recently. I was going to finally get round to changing the layout, tidy up all of the posts and upload some new stuff. Have I done any of the above?

Of course not.

Well, actually, I did add a few tags in the new updated version of blogger but I quickly got bored of doing that and wandered off to do something else, as is typically the case. So I guess we're back to where we started so I should offer some reasoning by way of apology for my shiteous blogging behaviour.

I spent the first week of December on location in the middle of a field trying not to get blown over by gale force winds or die of boredom. However, when you have six tonnes of fake snow and vast amounts of time at your disposal, there are always ways of keeping yourself occupied, such as fake snow angels and removing fake snow from various cracks and crevices. I would have pictures to show but unfortunately the confidentiality contracts we all signed mean that we're not even meant to have cameras on location. Of course, everyone does but posting said pictures would probably get me fired and blacklisted. Even though I only have a week left, I figure its just not worth the hassle of a lawsuit from the bigwigs.

I got to escape the delights of backwater England and return to the civilisation of London for my 23rd, although frankly, I needn't have bothered. Most of my friends were shit and couldn't muster up enough time/energy/interest to bother coming out for my birthday drinks so a small group of us went and got absolutely hammered, ending up at Madame Jojo's in Soho, which really didn't impress me as much as I'd hoped.



As you can see, at the beginning of the night, we all looked fairly normal, sobre and respectable.



But the spiral of alcoholic mess was quick to kick in and by the end of the night, this was as pretty as it got. Somehow, my boyfriend manages to still look normal, sobre and respectable, whereas I resemble a gargoyle that's been dipped and marinated in a barrel of Jack Daniels.

In completely unrelated news, I was browsing the Mirror's website today when this caught my attention:



The answer's YES.

Sorry-sorry-sorry-blah.

Once again, I'm back, tripping over apologies as I go. Several reasons have led to my disappearance such as going on location to the middle of nowhere where technology has not moved past the light bulb, then my 23rd birthday and the gradual shift from my old laptop to a brand new shiny one.

Hopefully, I'll be back up and running by the end of this week.