An Open Letter to BA Cabin Crew

Dear B.A. Cabin Crew

I read about your upcoming 12-day strike action beginning on the 22nd December with some concern.

You see I don't know if you know but I have some friends coming over from America on the 29th December (that's in 14 days by the way). I haven't seen these friends for some time. Since April 2008 to be precise. And you may not realise this, but Arizona is a very long way away from Hull and I, a mere mortal, do not get to fly to America an awful lot. Unlike some cabin crew.

We are all supposed to drinking in 2010 together in London and everything is sorted. Train tickets are booked, places to stay have been arranged, hotels booked, Eurostar tickets to Paris organised.

Not to mention the almost indecent excitement that I've been feeling for a few months now as I count down the days.

I've been so looking forward to it, I don't think I can really convey how much. Do you have a best friend? Do they live a billion miles away from you so you can only communicate by e-mail (and Facebook obviously)? Do you know how much you would look forward to actually SEEING THEIR FACE if you hadn't seen it in over 18 months?

I understand that you are striking at this time to cause maximum inconvenience in an attempt to get what you want but I don't think you quite get it. You're not just going to cause a little bit of inconvenience, you are going to ruin, actually ruin, peoples' Christmas and New Year. Have you really taken that onboard and are ok with it? Because I find it a little hard to believe that people would actually behave like that.

I hope that if you do go ahead with the strike and you do keep friends and families apart over the festive season then I hope that someone videotapes all the people with a story to tell and then makes you sit and watch them so you can see the consequences of your actions.

Oh and did you realise that by striking and pissing people off you'll probably just end up losing your jobs because people will not wish to fly with your airilne. And also, you know you're not going to get what you want, strikes never end up with you getting what you want, you must know that by now.

I know I won't be flying with B.A. if you keep my friends away from me.

Yours sincerely,

The Girl


(Apologies for my little absence, I will be catching up with everybody's blogs over the next couple of days)

Marshmallow Cupcakes

Well it's happened again.

I'm sick.

AGAIN.

The Cough has returned.

This time last year I got a cough. Which was weird because I never get coughs. And it got worse and worse and I ended up with antibiotics for a chest infection.

The thing is. It's never really gone away. It's got better and I've been ok in myself but if I've cleared my throat it sounds as if I'm a 60 a day smoker with less than a month to live. And occasionally, every time I get a little cold it pops its ugly, mucusy, phlegmy head up again.

So he's arrived back again, out of the blue with not a word of warning which is rather rude in my books.

And I'm sick of him. Him and his horrid ways.

And I sound like a man.

I have antibiotics and Mr Doctor Man has got me booked in for chest x-ray next week to see if we can figure out where he's hiding.

It's left me feeling rather miserable with myself. I'm supposed to be going out tomorrow with the girls for our Christmas night out and at the moment my appearance is looking doubtful and there's nothing like the prospect of missing a night out to put me in a FOUL mood.

So.

To make myself feel better I got my kitchen groove on and made some rather hideously girly cupcakes with marshmallows and pink glitter on them. That's right. Pink. Glitter.

These babies are from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook and they are marvellous although fiddly to the max. Remember me saying how I hate mess in the kitchen when I'm baking? I probably should have figured it out, I mean I had to melt marshmallows, hollow out the middle of the muffins and spoon it in. What was I thinking?!

There was marshmallow all over the spoon. There was marshmallow on the hob. There was marshmallow on the tea towel. There was marshmallow on my fingers. When the boyfriend came home he pointed out the marshmallow in my hair.

But MAN they taste good!

I would recommend this book to everyone. The recipes are mega easy (marshmallow meltiness aside) and they just take a little bit more effort than your bog standard cupcake and they look amazing. I mean hello? Marshmallows? Pink glitter? Can you go wrong?

NO!

Something crafty this way comes...

Reading everybody's blogs has left me feeling rather inadequate about my paltry efforts to the Creative and Crafty Chrismas God.

I've been thinking I was a bit of a crafty person. But it turns out that I'm just crafty in comparison to the people that I'm friends with. Once I turn to the blogs it turns out I'm lower down the ranks of craftiness. Actually I'm probably at the bottom.

But I must be patient and accept that these things take time. 2009 was the year of the cross stitch. Now I have that mastered that, 2010 will be the time to turn my hand to other crafts. Crochet, knitting, sewing - they're all on the list!

So my creative efforts this year are pretty much solely based around aida and thread. The Christmas cards have been cross-stitched and are ready to be sent out. There is a tier system operating with my Christmas cards this year - family and very close friends will receive the honour of a cross-stitched card through their letterboxes. The next tier will receive Christmas tree cards as blogged about in this post and the credit to which goes entirely to Petit Filoux. The final tier of people (mainly consisting of people I work with and those people who give me cards unexpectedly) will be receiving some shop bought ones.

The cross stitch has also extended to tags for people's presents. There was an alphabet included in the latest issue of Cross Stitch Card Shop and I have been furiously stitching away in an attempt to get them all finished in time for Christmas Day and the last posting date.

They're not too fiddly and only take a couple of hours to do so that's been about 1 a night which doesn't sound too bad until you realise how many Christmas presents you have. The decision was made very early on that no matter how many presents someone was getting, they would only be receiving one tag with their initial on it.

Last night Christmas came to the flat as I sat there and began the wrapping process. I love it. I absolutely bloody love wrapping presents. Normally there's lots of string and bows and fancy stuff which people do seem to like when they see the present but is closely followed by complaints that they can't actually get in to their presents. I figure if they have a special tag then I'm allowed to miss out the streamers.

Oh my goodness. It's actually nearly here...

PS Do you love the sprout wrapping paper? Like really love it? Well tough you can't have it. God alright alright you can, you just need to go to Urban Outfitters. It's £2.50 a sheet so I wouldn't make plans to wrap all your presents in it but it's great for little stocking filler type pressies.

PPS The rest of the wrapping paper is from Paperchase.

Things I love about the house - Part 7

Presenting to you all

MY CHRISTMAS TREEEEEEEEEE!!!! a.k.a. The Beautiful Beast.

We went out this weekend to get our Christmas tree, which was making me rather excited because this is the first Christmas tree I've ever had that's mine, all mine. At uni we never bothered because we were all going home over the holidays and I've lived at home every other Christmas.

When I was growing up we always had a gorgeous tree which my Mum would decorate beautifully but she was rather onerous of it and I somehow never put the right bauble in the right place.

Well no more! I will put what baubles wherever I wish on this bad boy!

We had a little look around and soon came to a conclusion. We could either get one that was about 5.5 feet or we could get a humongous one that towered even above the boyfriend.

Luckily we have the great pleasure of living in a flat that was a very old house so has ceilings way way way way up in the sky.

Decision made. No snivelly little tree for us thank you very much.

And The Beautiful Beast came home.

One downside about this being my first Christmas is that...well...it's my first Christmas. I have nothing. Not even a bit of tinsel to my name.

Correction. I had nothing.

The past few months have seen a rather scary sum of money being spent on Christmas tree decorations, including £35 on Past Times which nearly made me choke on my tongue (I wasn't keeping track! I was just putting stuff in the basket!) I have got some cheapazoid ones and I know that as time goes on we will accumulate more, but I didn't want a bare tree.

And yes I know I could make some decorations and I will do, one day. But I can barely find the time to make my Christmas cards so those kind of things are going to have to wait for Christmas 2010!

My fears about my Paperchase buys colliding with my more traditional decorations has been unfounded. I'm thinking they all look pretty good (although I guess I am biased).

Only thing missing? No star or angel! I forgot about that one essential!! So for now, Beautiful Beast has no crowning glory but I don't think he's holding it against me.

He fits in a little corner perfectly and I like that he's by the window because then, when his lights are turned on, people driving home in the miserable weather might just look up and see him and he'll make them smile a little bit.

Decorating the tree with the boyfriend made me a very happy person indeed, even if he did keep putting baubles in the wrong place. (Naturally it's completely different to when my Mum used to complain that I was putting them in the wrong place.) But he was very handy for putting baubles at the very top of the tree, even if he had to stand on his tippy toes to do it.

Now I'm going to sit and admire him in all his beautifulness.

And then get the hoover out for approximately the 14 millionth time because I swear to God if he doesn't. stop. shedding. needles.....so help me

PS The birdie, cat and Union Jack baubles are all from Past Times and the little lady with the teddy bear was from a little shop in Ashby de la Zouch when I went to see my sister.

The Secret Blog

Once upon a time a girl had a blog. In fact it was one of those MSN Spaces – remember them?

At first she didn’t really understand what blogging was all about but she was a student and anything that provided a distraction from the serious business of getting a MSc was welcomed.

She didn’t know what to blog about so it was just about random things. So random that she can’t really remember what it was all about. But she made some bloggy friends and discovered a rather marvellous feeling known as “Comment Glow”. She would log on and see that someone had commented and it was good.

But MSN Spaces was not very private and the girl was not very smart and internet savvy. She made the mistake of mentioning the name of the place she worked in a post one day. What the girl didn’t know is that one of her bosses had a gadgety gizmo piece of internet wizardry which highlighted things on the internet that mentioned the company’s name and he found the girl’s blog. But rather than tell her that he’d found the blog, he would creepily read it and then casually mention things that were in the blog in conversation with the girl. It took her a while to cotton on but when she did she felt a little queasy.

So she made it private. But that was rubbish. She quite liked her musings being open to the world but not if people actually knew they were her musings.

Blog number one – closed down.

Then she found somewhere else and started blogging again.

Anything and everything went in there – posts about cats, annoyances about work (being careful to leave out company name references), general musings about life. She had learned her lesson though and it was anonymous. No names, no faces, just that she was a girl and was from Hull. But no-one ever really read it and sometimes she wondered why on earth she was bothering.

The girl’s boyfriend asked if he could read the blog. “Of course” she said “but I should warn you that sometimes I’ll put stuff up on there about us.” Nothing terrible, but if he’d annoyed her a little rant might appear from time to time. “That’s fine” said the boyfriend.

But then she kind of regretted her decision. Because once she knew he was reading it, it automatically altered the way she wrote and the things she wanted to write about. Even though it was anonymous and no-one would know who she was talking about, she just felt a little uncomfortable.

And then the comments started.

They’d only appear on comments that concerned the boyfriend and they were ‘anonymous’ but I was pretty sure who was behind them.

Not the boyfriend, but the woman who wanted him.

He had ‘shared’ my blog with this person and they didn’t have the guts to put their name on their comments.

And in the end, the other woman won.

So the girl used the blog to talk about the breakup. It was the first time she had had her heart broken and her friends weren’t as great as they could have been. Being the only single girl in a group of very coupley couples was tough. She needed an outlet.

So the pain and the hurt came out.

But the comments continued.

And then the e-mails came from the now ex-boyfriend saying that the girl was publicly humiliating him.
a) She wasn’t, she was recounting how he broke her heart,
b) how many times do you have to explain what ‘anonymous’ means, he was the only one who knew it was him, and,
c) why on earth were they sat together reading the blog of his ex-girlfriend?

It made the girl feel horrible inside. The thought that they were sitting there, reading about her life. She didn’t want them to know anything about her life.

Blog number two – closed down.

But the girl missed blogging. She was too lazy to write a real-life diary for a start, typing was much easier. But more than that she missed the idea of writing something which was then ‘out there’ in the blogosphere. Any maybe, one day, someone might read it and think “I know what she’s talking about.”

And she had a fairly momentous occasion coming up. She was moving in with a boy for the first time. If ever there was a time when someone needed an outlet of some description, this was it.

She told her new boyfriend she was starting a blog and said that she wanted to keep it private from him and she explained why and asked him if he minded.

And he didn’t because he was marvellous and wonderful and understanding (and had lovely eyes. But that might be irrelevant.).

So she started blogging about living with a boy. Except sometimes there wasn’t that much to blog about living with a boy because it actually went far smoother than she could ever have imagined. So it started being about other things. Like cats. And trees.

And at the beginning she wondered why she was bothering again. No-one ever came and visited.

And then one person did.

And then the girl realised she’d been doing it all wrong. Sometimes she can be a little selfish (she blames this on being the youngest child and sort of an only child because her siblings were much older than her, it’s probably not the best of combinations) and she was also an idiot. You can’t just expect people to read your blog can you? You have to invest, you have to put the time in (perhaps a little too much time) and start looking about for other peoples’ blogs and commenting on them and introducing yourself. You can’t just stand in the corner of a party and expect everyone to come over and talk to you.

Very slowly the girl found more bloggy friends and would get very excited if she ever got a ‘follower’ and would tell the boyfriend “ARGH! Someone likes me!” And the boyfriend would smile and say “That’s brilliant honey.” Probably thinking inside, “This girlfriend of mine has mental problems.”

She soon found herself immersed in the lives of total strangers and wanting to share more of her life with people she had never met. And sometimes she would tell the boyfriend what she was writing about and sometimes she would even show him certain posts (usually those concerning the visitors), but would be very careful to keep everything about the blog hidden so he couldn’t find it.

And it’s not because she doesn’t trust him. It’s because she likes having something that’s all her own.

Also if she wants to blog about how it annoys her that he doesn’t clean properly, she doesn’t want him to read it and take it heart because he’s nice like that and it’s only for fun. To be honest if he really wanted to find it I'm sure he could and if he does then that's fine, I just don't need to know that he knows about it.

Sometimes she thinks she should reveal herself and whack a photo up there. After all, her bloggy friends still wouldn’t know who she was, she’d just be a face instead of a picture of a sunrise.

But she’s still a little bit afraid. Maybe in time she’ll grow in confidence and have more courage to put a face to the words.

But for now let’s hope that the third blog’s a charm.

(And to those of you that read my wafflings, thank you so much. Thank you for being interested in my life and allowing me to hear about yours. I still get the “Comment Glow” whenever I check my e-mails and see that one of you has responded to a post of mine, and you do all feel like friends, although I feel a little silly saying that.)

The Annual Christmas Manchester Trip 2009

This weekend I made my way to a rather soggy Manchester for my annual Christmas pilgrimage. I go to Manchester a fair bit anyway but it is written down (somewhere) that I must go at the end of November/beginning of December to make the most out of the superior shopping experience that the city centre holds.

Many many items were purchased this weekend, some final Christmas presents (hurray for nearly being finished buying everything!) and also some little treats for me. I tend not to buy a lot of clothes and stuff during the year, only when something breaks or wears out do I venture in to the shops. Instead I save it all up and have a mini splurge on my Christmas Manchester Trip.

For example: these little lovelies from Next.

(Tina Teaspoon couldn't help but get her face in the photo)

I have been in love with these shoes for many months now after spotting them in Mum’s catalogue and then seeing them paraded in all their glory on the TV adverts. And now they are mine, ALL MINE. I hope they’re kind to me. Sometimes the prettiest shoes aren’t always the nicest to your feet. These will be getting their first outing on Friday so keep your fingers crossed!

And what do you know? A book fell in to my hands. But before you yell “But you’re banned from buying books!”, (as I’m sure you will, being devoted readers and having read this post) let me tell you that this doesn’t count. I had to buy Christmas presents you see and thanks to Waterstones’ 3 for 2 offer, this little fella didn’t cost me a penny so he’s allowed. OK?!

The annual Christmas Manchester Trip is not complete without a wander to Paperchase to get my Christmas wrapping paper. The visit this year was even more exciting because I get to have my very first Christmas tree this year (cue lots of clapping and jumping up and down).

Paperchase do the most fabulous Christmas decorations – full of colour and glitter and always bordering on the “Oh my god this is so ugly and tacky but I LOVE it!” side of things.

I went for these bad boys in the end.

Saturday night was spent with a good friend having good food, drinking wine and watching Strictly Come Dancing.

And naturally I couldn’t forget to mention the Christmas Market. Manchester has the best Christmas Market I’ve ever seen. And yes I might be just a little bit biased seeing as she is my favourite city and I love her. But it’s certainly the biggest I’ve ever seen. Some people think it’s confined to outside the City Hall BUT IT ISN’T! The stalls snake their way through the whole centre of town and can be found in St Ann’s Square and outside Harvey Nichols and Selfridges too.

These stalls are beyond wonderful and I have to whizz through them, rather than taking my time because I can’t afford all the things I would like and it would only end up with me crying.

I got a few more Christmas tree decorations. I’m not entirely sure what this tree is going to look like – I’m hoping it’ll be a lovely blend of traditional and quirky and won’t come off looking like a complete mess.

My little trip definitely got me in the Christmas mood, you see I know that once the annual Manchester Christmas Trip has been completed, and the wrapping paper purchased, then it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to the festive season proper.

And a little mug of Gluhwein always helps.

Sweet & Simple Bakes - Snow-flecked Brownies

“I haven't baked anything in AGES” I announced a couple of weekends ago.

“Okaaaaaaay” said the boyfriend, with more than a hint of trepidation.

You see I enjoy the baking. I like creating sweet things, it’s fun and then when everybody likes them you get a lovely warm glow inside that makes you feel wanted and seeing as I’m a people pleaser I’m all over it like a rash.

However.

As much as I love the baking there’s an equal part of me that hates it. Know why? It’s messy.

MESS! Argh! It drives fear in to my inner core. For some reason I don’t end up messy myself, I’ve never had to wear an apron, it’s just everywhere else gets covered! And I seem to use about 45 bowls and every single utensil we’ve got in the drawers. I put the beaters in to the mixture and for a week afterwards I’m cleaning flecks of batter off the walls and the cups on the mug tree. And god help me if the recipe calls for me to use my hands. You might as well as me to put my hands inside someone’s body, it fills me with revulsion. I honestly, honestly have to take a deep breath before I start doing it. I actually have to gear myself up. Probably why I don’t make a lot of cookies and scones. Muffins are a hands-off concoction.

Anyway.

I decided to have a go at this month’s Sweet & Simple bake, snow-flecked brownies. I’ve only tried brownies once and they were a total disaster so I was a bit nervous about attempting this one.

Everything was going swimmingly. My chocolate and butter were nicely melting in a pan, I had my eggs cracked in to my bowl with my vanilla essence and just needed to add the caster sugar.

...

...

...

...

...

Have you ever knocked 350g of caster sugar ALL OVER your kitchen?

I don’t recommend it.

It. Was. Everywhere. Including the bottom of my feet which was driving me round the bend.

The boyfriend came to the rescue with the hoover (or rather I screeched at him to get the hoover, it’s a wonder he stays in the house when I’m baking) and all traces of it were cleared away. Almost. I’m sure I keep feeling it between my toes when I’m in there.

I could have given up there and then. But I am brave.

And luckily had a new bag of sugar.

It wasn’t a complete disaster although I had to massively increase the baking time. This was rather inconvenient as it cut into a very important transatlantic telephone call that I was having with of one of The Americans about the forthcoming trip to England. Cue calls to the boyfriend to go and check how they were doing.

The mixture was in for about 1 hour and 10 minutes and I still felt it was a little too gooey on the inside. The trouble was it was almost burning on the top whilst still liquid inside so I ended up covering it in tin foil and that seemed to do the job.

I have to admit I’m in the minority though. Everybody seemed to love them and especially loved the gooiness in the middle although there was general consensus that maybe 5 minutes more would be good. I’ll also halve the recipe if I did it again because I had way too much brownie goodness than I could handle!

So I still feel a little unsure where brownies are concerned but things could be getting better.

I’m definitely not speaking to the caster sugar though.

If you would like the recipe then please go here

(Apologies for the crap photos but I don't seem to be at home in the daylight these days!)