I beg your forgiveness. If you read an earlier column you’ll know that I am prone to being hypnotised by marketing hype.This affliction led me to undertaking a 170 mile round trip last night for a haircut. What? I can hear all the men reading this going “You did WHAT? For a HAIRCUT?” What?
It’s worth it. Hell, I'm worth it. The fact that I woke up this morning looking like Shrek, complete with horns, due to all the product in my hair is neither here nor there. Once I get to fluff it up a bit myself it’ll be gorgeous, and well worth the fifty quid I paid for it (plus the special kangaroo semen shampoo which will totally turn my hair around which was another twenty quid oh shut up don’t judge me).
This road trip meant that I didn’t get home last night till midnight by which time I was beyond tiredness and unable to write anything. So here I sit, at 6am, typing this furiously like a Primark version of Carrie Bradshaw with crabbit face and shrekky hair.
I had great plans to write about something highfalutin’ today but we both know that will happen when Hell freezes over. Instead, we’re having a literary (hah!) dress down Friday. Is that cheating, I wonder? I care not. It’s Friday, and we all know that Friday is dress down day. So, some stuff about me. My favourite subject.
70% of the stress in my life is handbag related. I don’t know how to fix this. Yesterday I was trying to find my bank card to pay for a train ticket and scrabbled through every zippy bit in my handbag, red faced and mumbling apologies, until I remembered I had stuffed it in my bra earlier in the day when buying petrol. I also keep parking tickets in there, and my phone. And my lip gloss, oh, and err tampons and things. In my actual bra I mean. My handbag is too full of receipts, brollies, old tissues and a raft of pharmaceutical preparations for whatever might ail you to have room for anything else.
I have a butterfly phobia. I really do. It’s crippling in the summer. They terrify me. I am virtually a prisoner in my own home in the summer. I can handle spiders, wasps, rats…anything except butterflies. During a recent trip to Japan, I discovered that Japanese butterflies are the size of small dogs and black, like stealth bombers.
I wandered along the Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto - a place for quiet contemplation - unless your name’s Lindsey and you’re a butterfly phobic, in which case you shriek like a banshee all the way along flapping at imaginary butterflies which you’re hallucinating because you’re so hungry but can’t eat the food due to your crappy western palate which can only be satisfied by lard.
I was a nun once. In a film. Most of my scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. The only scene I actually appeared in was one where I was required to eat a fry up. I did that nae bother at aw. One take. By a strange freaky coincidence, filming was done in the summer, and it was butterfly ahoy. During the filming of one scene, I noticed a butterfly lurking high up on a curtain. If it had so much as flinched, I would’ve ran screaming from the room, adding another few thousand quid to the movies budget as I crashed through expensive bits of film making kit and injured several proper actors on the way.
Goodness me, is that 600 words already? Who’d have thunk? Have a nice weekend. Normal service will be resumed next week. I’ll be all literary and intelligent again. Snigger.
Lindsey Mason is a finalist in stv.tv's The Write Factor competition. The views expressed are not necessarily those of STV plc. If you would like to read more from this writer, use our comment system below.
