Fifty Facts About Me

I think it might be time for a get to know me post. So here are fifty interesting, mildly interesting and probably even some boring facts about me.

1) I’ve always consistently wanted to write books. I wrote my first story when I was three, it was about a girl who dances naked in a field and dies of a fever. I must have been a really twist child!

2) I wasn’t taught to read, I simply picked it up as I went along and could read before I started school.

3) Despite this I was diagnosed with dyslexia, very late on, just after my twenty-first birthday.

4) I don’t know what my favourite book is. It depends on the day.

5) I am a huge huge Jane Austen fan, my love of the internet started with Jane Austen fanfiction.

6) I had a story plagiarised, I still can’t get my head around the idea that somebody was making money off something I wrote when I was sixteen.

7) Although Mr Darcy is of course Mr Darcy, I have a literary crush on Henry Tilney.

8) I have a degree in Medieval History, I’d been meaning to read English until I started studying Chaucer.

9) I also have a masters in History Theory. It was probably the poorest financial decision I’ve ever made.

10) I wish I’d thought about becoming an architect, but then I remember that I’m useless at drawing and I don’t really like maths much either.

11) After I’d finished university I became a cliché working in a coffee shop.

12) I still hate coffee. It smells so good, but it tastes so different.

13) I neither love nor hate marmite. I can’t be the only person who is indifferent to the stuff, right?

14) I have been putting together a world carbonara ranking since I was ten years old. It’s my absolute favourite food ever.

15) I’m allergic to tomatoes (mildly) and coconuts (hideously). Aside from food allergies I’m also allergic to chicken pox and penicillin.

16) I’m lactose intolerant, but not very good at it because obviously there is pizza and tea and chocolate in the world and I have zero self-control. And of course there is the aforementioned spaghetti carbonara too.

17) The only food I absolutely will not touch is beef. Although I wouldn’t eat pork after watching Babe.

18) Pigs are my favourite animals.

19) I claimed to hate sushi for years and year, but I’d never tried it. I’ve only just learnt I love it and now I can’t believe I’ve deprived myself of it for so long.

20) As a kid Disney was largely banned in our house, although we were allowed to watch anything we were given.

21) I still haven’t seen Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, but I know that Belle is my favourite princess anyway.

22) I watched The Little Mermaid for the first time in an A-level history class, my teacher was honestly concerned I hadn’t seen it yet.

23) Even though I’m not an avid fan of the films I’ve been to Disneyland Paris four times, the most recent this summer.

24) I haven’t travelled as much as I’d like, but I loved Egypt when I had the chance to go there.

25) Going on holiday with me is quite hectic, I get a bit obsessed with site seeing, and I really want to see it all before I leave. I’m not one for lazing around by the pool.

26) The one place in the world I’m desperate to visit in Venice.

27) I have a twin brother, who is my complete opposite in personality. He was like my human security blanket when I was little.

28) I’m related to Samual Morse, the inventor of Morse Code, which is cool, but would be better still if I was also related to Inspector Morse.

29) My Dad has one hundred and twenty first cousins, but I only have one half cousin.

30) To this day I’m convinced I once levitated around my house when I was eight. Sadly, the rational side of my brain knows I must have dreamed it.

31) I love Harry Potter so much I thought that was a sure fire sign that I’d get my Hogwarts Letter.

32) I believe in ghosts, and have lived in two houses with a spirit. One was friendly and the other ceased her hostilities eventually. I swear I’m not totally crazy.

33) I am a cat person, and have always lived with cats. I only have one right now, I call him Bear.

34) I’d like to keep chickens and goats for pets too.

35) If I was really really rich, the most extravagant thing I would spend money on would be wearing new socks every single day.

36) I absolutely love clothes, but somehow I can’t figure out why I keep running out of storage space.

37) My biggest fashion gripe is that a lot of clothes are made for women without women’s shapes.

38) I wear a GG bra, they’re all real, and it’s quite a burden. Should I even be telling the internet this?

39) I wasn’t interested in makeup in my teens. I didn’t really wear it until I was twenty-one.

40) Like a lot of people, I got into makeup watching YouTube Beauty Gurus. I found it relaxing watching makeup tutorials, I used it as a way of calming my anxiety.

41) Somehow I’m still not particularly good at applying it myself, I guess I just lack any sort of artistic talent.

42) I love dancing, I started ballet when I was three years old, and even though I’m pretty clumsy I’m sure it would have been ten times worse without.

43) As well as ballet I’ve studied tap, modern, jazz, latin and ballroom.

44) I can play the piano and clarinet, but only where there’s nobody around to hear me.

45) Everybody thought I would become an actress, despite being painfully shy.

46) Whenever I meet a famous person I don’t have a clue who they are. This includes, but is not limited to Prince Charles and Camilla. More embarrassingly I once told Jasper Carrot I thought he was a black man (I was nine, my parents still love to tell the story).

47) My friends all call me giraffe, because of my skinny legs. Each different group has come up with this idea independently.

48) I lived in London for five years, I used to think I’d be there forever, but I’m happier in my field in the country now.

49) Sometime I feel like the only person who’s lost and confused by live. But other days I think I adult quite convincingly. Does everybody feel as at sea as me.

50) I’m sorry I cannot think of a fiftieth fact! So I lied, it’s only forty-nine semi interesting facts about me.

My Not So Perfect Life: A modern morality tale?

I’ve not got a clue if anybody wants to read about books. But I’ve just finished reading Sophie Kinsella’s My Not So Perfect Life and actually felt compelled to tell somebody about this fluffy piece of chicklit and its very modern message. This is not your typical boy meets girl plot, instead it is a reminder that social media isn’t an accurate representation of other people’s lives. The message is pretty simple, and I know in my heart, this is something I already know, but no matter how sensible I think I am the truth is I follow some very perfect lives on Instagram, and I can’t help but envy them.

Katie Brenner is the first of Sophie Kinsella’s heroines that I honestly think I relate to. We have the same hang ups and concerns, stressing over career development, rent, mortgages, the cost of going out (£32 for a salad?!?), and the fear that her friends are simply doing life better than she is. But she still comes with the same hilarious retinue of awkward situations and high jinxes. Becky Bloomwood’s crippling credit card debt, funny though it maybe, lacks the authenticity it had even ten years ago, most of us are not in a situation where would splurge on both the yellow and the orange shoes in LK Bennett, which is not to say I don’t want shoes from LK Bennett.

I was slightly sceptical of the blurb, I thought this was a plot I had read before in The Undomestic Goddess. That is not the case. Samantha was your typical over achiever, we’d all like to be a well-paid lawyer in theory right? Katie has just got her feet off the ground and started to earn some money, after the two obligatory internships obviously. And while they both lose their jobs that is where the plot similarities end. If you’ve read the Undomestic Goddess then you will know that Samantha find happiness beyond her career, and while I don’t want to go and ruin the book for you with spoilers I was rooting for Katie to get the perfect job and not the perfect man.

Katie’s arch nemesis is her boss, not some man stealing other woman. Demeter has the perfect life, and is also to all appearances the perfect monster. She has a husband, a career, two perfect kids and a two-million-pound house, something which would take Katie one hundred and ninety three point four years to pay for. Have you ever used the Rightmove mortgage calculator? Then you’ll know that sinking feeling. Of course there is the obligatory love interest, but he is more like the icing on the cake to Katie’s happily ever after.

“Ok, full disclosure” Katie narrates like an Instagram caption, not all the time, but you know her voice. Each time she imparts a harsh reality or truth about herself she uses her overused phrase, and you recognise it well from comments like, “#fulldisclosure I used a filter in this shot”. It reminded me of Poppy and her hilariously out of place footnotes in I’ve Got Your Number. [1] She is also queen of some of the most inspirational and motivational sentiments I have ever come across in a Sophie Kinsella book, you know the exactly the sort I mean.

Ultimately what I loved the most about this book was the reminder that nobody’s life is ever what it seems. Katie misinterprets a lot of people throughout the book, she is envious, or at least eager for a lot of experiences. She doesn’t fully understand her Dad and his opinions, or the bounds of professionalism on Dementer. Even Katie and her best friend, who is far away in New York and only communicating with her via Instagram, have lost touch with the realities of each other’s lives. On social media Katie outright lies about her life in London, in real life she lies about the places she eats and the state of her finances (she is eminently sensible with money), and to her Dad she conceals her state of employment, to save his feelings. But it doesn’t occur to her, that the people around her are putting on a façade too. Even though she has a job in marketing, which she appears to be good at despite the whole getting fired fiasco, it doesn’t seem to cross her mind that people are essential promoting themselves on social media, ironic. No?

But eventually she comes to realise that she isn’t the only person to ever stretch the truth. Is it stretching the truth if you linger outside coffee shops and photograph people’s hot chocolates while they’re in the loo? But that everybody is guilty of doing it, nobody is completely transparent about their lives and nobody is perfect. It is a worthwhile reminder that we are all susceptible to believing that other people have the perfect lives, whether it is your friend or sibling who everything seems to comes so easily to, or that Instagram star who lives in a cloud of pastel pink perfection. But the truth is we are all guilty of too easily assuming that another person has the perfect life.

Is this the type of thing anybody wants about? My thoughts on a book I’ve read? I’m not sure if I’m even qualified to write a book review. The last time I wrote one I was ten, my favourite book then was Carbonel, and if you’ve never read about Rosie and her talking witches cat, I’d recommend that too. I could have written about something much less frivolous, but somehow, I’ve spent more time thinking about this book in the past week than anything I’ve read in a long time.

[1] Poppy’s footnotes are the funniest part of Got You’re Number have you ever seen them in a chicklit novel before?

* For the sake of clarity, I love Instagram.