No, they're not. Get over it.

*Warning.  This post could be accused of being shallow.  It is.*

It is a truth universally acknowledged that not all men and women are attractive.  There are varying degrees of attractive, but in all honesty, there are some people on this planet who are downright ugly.  That's cool - usually they've got some redeeming quality like brains, or kindness, or imagination to compensate.  And it works both ways.  There are some stunningly attractive people in the world who are (pardon my bluntness), dumb as shit.  That's cool too.  When you're hot, you can generally survive on the fact that other people (blinded by your beauty) will help you out with tasks that might be beyond you - like changing a tyre on your car, identifying a type of vegetable, or filling out your tax return.

So, if the world is full of attractive adults and ugly adults and everything in between, then it stands to reason that babies (ie what these attractive and ugly adults all were before they grew up) fall into those categories too.

Right?

RIGHT?

It would appear not.

Am I the only person who's honest enough to say that not all babies are cute?  There are some seriously unattractive babies out there. Many of them pop up on the newsfeed of my facebook page, as they belong to people I'm friends with, usually with the caption "my beautiful child".  Many's the time I'm tempted to comment "woah - your kid looks like an alien!".  But I can't write that.  I can't write "holy crap, that kid is minging".  No. The only acceptable comment I'm allowed to make would be along the lines of "oh, isn't he/she adorable. What a beautiful child".  

But I can't bring myself to do it, so I just don't comment and usually have to force my fingers away from the keyboard, lest they type something I'll later regret. (I do however, comment quite enthusiastically on the attractive ones)

Now before you start on that I must hate kids, stop right there. I love kids. My nieces and god-children are loved beyond measure by their Aunty M.  I would walk through fire for each and every one of them.  Some of my friends' kids are adorable as well.  In fact, some of them have produced the most stunning babies the world has ever seen (Stevo, Sal, Emsie B, I'm looking at you).  But some of my friends (and relatives - my gene pool's not immune) have given birth to some really, really, ugly babies.  Hopefully, they'll be blessed with brains, charm and a quick wit. They'll need it.  They may even grow up to be beautiful. Some ugly babies do, you know. Just as some beautiful babies suddenly turn unattractive when they reach adulthood.  Nature's quirky like that.

All I'm saying is that not all babies are beautiful.  End of.

(Also, I need to learn to keep my mouth shut and my fingers away from the keyboard when ugly baby photos pop up in my newsfeed.)

Vale, Sally

When I was a kid, my heroes included (in no particular order):


•  Enid Blyton;
•  Audrey Hepburn;
•  Jean Louise (Scout) Finch; and
•  Sally Ride.


Enid Blyton wrote the awesome books of my childhood and fostered the imagination of a shy, suburban girl from a small city at the bottom of the globe.  From all accounts, she wasn't the most pleasant of people, but my god, did she write some great stories.  I still wish I'd been able to go to school at Malory Towers and spend summers having adventures with the Famous Five.  My love of all things British is, in no small part, due to her stories.


The talents of Audrey Hepburn were introduced to me by my father, when he took me (aged five) to a screening of "My Fair Lady".  I was enthralled.  I thought she was gracious and elegant and beautiful and I wanted to BE her.  I think I managed to talk Dad into taking me to see all of her films by the time I was about ten.  She wasn't the greatest actress of her generation, but she was a convincing storyteller and her humanitarian work later in life, was wonderful.


Scout Finch, albeit being a fictional character, was introduced to me (again, by my father - awesome man that he was) when I was seven and started complaining during the summer holidays about being bored.  (In reality, it was probably along the lines of: "I'm boooooorred Daaaaaaad.  There's nothing to doooooooo.  Brutha won't plaaaaaaay with me").  Telling my father you were bored was never a good idea, because he'd always find a 'holiday task' for you to complete; often these tasks involved menial labour, like cleaning walls in preparation for painting, polishing silver, or digging up weeds.  On this occasion, however, he marched me to the bookcase, pulled out "To Kill A Mockingbird" and said: "Read this.  Properly.  Make notes, because in two weeks, we will be discussing it and I expect you to have opinions on plot and characters".  Really.  At seven, that's how he spoke to me.  Like I was an adult.  Anyway, I read it.  In about ten days.  Then we discussed it at length.  Later that summer, he discovered that a cinema on the other side of the city was showing the movie, so he took me to see it.  That was it.  Scout was firmly entrenched as one of my heroes.  Smart, curious, tomboy-ish, just and honest.  Qualities I'm sure my father was happy for me to adopt.  Incidentally, she also had a pain-in-the-ass older brother.


In 1983, two days before my twelfth birthday, Sally Ride became the first American woman to enter space.  In the male-dominated field of space exploration, she blazed a trail and made it cool for girls to study physics and aspire to orbit the globe.  Sadly, my grasp of even the most basic of scientific fields was not what you'd call strong (language, literature, art and music figured highly in my electives during high school), so I was unlikely to ever become a scientist, let alone an astronaut. But the fact that it was actually an option (if I was so inclined), was definitely due, in part, to seeing women like Sally Ride forging a successful career in a field long-dominated by men.  She made news headlines for being a leader in her field.  She didn't have her own perfume line, she didn't date celebrities, she didn't have her own reality TV show.  Nobody wrote about her love life, her weight or whether she was wearing make up or not.  She was a scientist.  An astronaut.  She explored the universe and showed girls that with hard work, a good education and a keen mind, you could do something amazing and worthwhile.  


The news of Sally Ride's death today saddens me.  The fact that young girls of today look more to the likes of the Kardashians as their role models, also saddens me.  I would like the world to be a place where brains matter more than looks. 


Vale, Sally Ride.  The world needs more of you.

Astounding

Today I received my tax refund.  This is exciting for a number of reasons:

• I was dangerously close to being totally broke... credit cards and all. Whilst not a massive refund, this is enough to keep me out of trouble for a while.
  
  
• I can be efficient!  I can be efficient!  Never, in the entire of my working life, have I ever been organised enough to submit my tax return in July.  Or August, or September for that matter.  Usually, I'm just scraping it in by the October deadline.
  
  
• I can now file away the mountain of receipts and paperwork that have been cluttering my study for the last month and concentrate on using my study for more important things. Like writing.
  
  
• I can finally go to Ikea, buy another bookcase and unpack the two boxes of antique books (some dating back to the mid-1800s) originally belonging to my Great-Aunt which were rescued from a thrift shop by my Claytons aunt and uncle, after my real aunt had decided they weren't worth keeping.  She's an idiot.  

Huzzah.

Right.  Back to it.  

As you were.

All's quiet...

It's seriously quiet at my workplace today.  When there's loads of customers, I'm happy.  I can chat to people.  When it's quiet (like today), I get so lonely.  Which can be bad for the rare customer that does come in, because I tend to chew their ear off.


Oh. My. God.  I'm turning into my mother.


I have the next 5 days off.  Not intentionally - just due to shift swaps, etc, I happen to have five whole days in a row off.


Ordinarily, this would be cause for a holiday.  But I'm a bit strapped for cash, so my "holiday" will have to be from home.  I need to work out some (free/low-cost) activities to do, otherwise I'll spend the whole 5 days sitting on the sofa in my pyjamas watching bad daytime TV.


Suggestions on a postcard please!


In the meantime, I'm going to go and write a shopping list. I have hardly any food in the house.  Domestic fail.


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