SHORT ORDER , ORDER

Order, order! The right honourable gentleman John Bercow has clambered up on his soap box about heightism this week, probably with the aid of a step ladder.

But before you start composing your witty retort to my impudence with that opening statement just let me reassure you that I’m more than qualified to be mounting my high horse on this particular subject , however in my case the towering stallion is possibly more of a Shetland pony .

For I too am one of the vertically challenged and at just 5ft know of the trials and tribulations that being a member of the petite party brings.

In my 39 years I’ve been the butt of many a short person joke, compared tediously and unoriginally to an oompa loompa , one of snow white’s diminutive gentlemen friends and a munchkin dancing with Dorothy down the yellow brick road .

At many an important meeting I’ve sat desperately trying to look grown up as my feet dangle inches from the ground like a toddler on a swing and can regularly be seen intrepidly scaling high rise bar stools in pubs or clubs to reach the seat at its summit.

I’m the fresh faced party goer turned away from a friends nightclub birthday celebrations and told to come back when she’s finished school despite the fact she’s just turned 21 and 8 years later being id-ed for being underage on the eve of her 30^th birthday.

The midget who lurks in the supermarket aisle waiting for someone to help her get something down from that elusive top shelf or expertly devising a plan on how best to traverse the height herself to grab what she needs. A plan that often ends in the purchase of an inferior item because the one she wants is just too far away for her t-rex sized arms to reach.

That said though there are some upsides to being quite a bit below average height, we fit quite well into those small spaces on packed public transport, we never have to mind our heads in those historical old houses with the small front doors and low ceilings and no matter where we get seated we will always have plenty of legroom.

Being small is also associated with youth so a lot of us shorties are often mistaken as being much younger than we really are which is a bit of a downer when you are young and trying to buy alcohol but a real ego booster once you’ve passed the age of 30!

A pint sized stature also makes it easier for you to hide in crowd which is perfect when you’re trying to avoid that person you really don’t want to see or those sales people trying to stop you with their clipboards on the street. If you’re particularly youthful looking and get caught by one of these a quick “I’ll have to ask my mum or dad first “tends to put them off trying to sell you anything I’ve found!

So it’s not all bad being one of the little people Mr. speaker , if you pardon the short pun ,i find it’s best to just rise above it ,even if you do have to invest in a pair of stilts.

MEDWAY MESSENGER - GIRL FROM THE NECK DOWN COLUMN

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NO NOTICE , NO COVER UPS

I don’t make a habit of agreeing with anything Michael Gove has to say but one thing I do think is a great idea is the proposal of no notice Ofsted visits.

Having seen first hand in my time as a cleaner the smoke and mirrors that a school goes into when they receive warning an inspection is imminent I think it’s the only way you can prevent schools presenting a version of themselves that isn’t entirely truthful.

From hiding stuff in peoples cars to staff coming in at the crack of dawn to complete paperwork, charts and wall displays that should have been done daily or weekly just hours before the visit isn’t a fair representation of what a school is really like but a fairy story to make it seem to be running perfectly and if they have time to conceal all that what else could they be making sure the inspectors don’t see.

A no notice visit would put a stop to that and give us a more truthful insight into what’s really going on behind the school gates when you leave your child in their security.

GIRL FROM THE NECK DOWN COLUMN - MEDWAY MESSENGER .....Summer 2014

PANIC AT THE SCHOOL GATE or HOW TO STRESS YOUR MOTHER OUT IN ONE EASY STEP

Standing outside the gate you wait for your child to appear after finishing their after school activity so you can make the journey home.

They told you it ends at 5 o clock and you’ve arrived with 10 minutes to spare so here you stand eager to get back so they can start on their homework and you can get on with dinner.

Groups of children emerge from the building, climbing into parents cars or onto the school buses parked outside the entrance.

The vehicles pull away and small groups of chattering pre-teen and teenage boys start to disperse and walk away.

But you’re still standing there waiting, no worries you think , he’s probably just stopped to chat to someone or is making sure he has everything he needs for this evening

He’ll be out in a minute you say to reassure yourself but as 5 minutes past 5 ticks over into 15 you start to sense maybe something’s not quite right here.

A member of staff driving out of the gates asks if you’re ok and you explain who you’re looking for but this being only their 2^nd week, the name isn’t familiar.

“I don’t think they’ve all come out yet” they say” I’m expect he’ll be along soon” and promise to look out for him and send him back if they see him on their way after being given a rough description of him and his rucksack.

You wonder if maybe he came out a bit earlier than expected and has wandered  round to  your usual end of the day meeting place and whether  you’ve missed seeing him as you’ve come from a different direction  because you chose to catch the bus back but a walk round  there proves unfruitful .

So with your heart now beating frantically as panic starts to set in you hurry back round to the school gates where a group of boys sit waiting for their parents on a tree stump and ask if they know whether the after school event is over to which they reply “ yeah, ages ago “ .

Seeing the worried look on your face one of them sensibly says “maybe you should go and ask at the office “and quite by a stroke of luck one of the office staff happens to be just on their way out of the gate at that moment.

Despite being loaded down with all the items she is taking home, she listens to what your predicament is and advises you to stay put while she goes and has a good look round the school to try and find him for you, even putting a call out across the tannoy in case he is still inside.

Then with almost perfect timing as she walks back to tell you she can’t find him and what you could maybe do next, your mobile starts to ring and there is the elusive ones name flashing up on the screen who upon you answering the call innocently explains that he’d thought as you weren’t there when they’d come out a bit earlier than expected that you weren’t coming and had assumed that meant he had to walk home by himself.

You are cross with him for about a minute then you let the feeling of relief flood over you and rush home after expressing your gratitude to all those who had come to your aid.

So this is a thank you from me to them.

Thank you to the boys who told me what was the best thing to do, my brother who looked after my other son while I was out searching and most of all to the lady from the school office who went out of her way to try and locate him for me.

Thank you to you all from this grateful mum, it was much appreciated.

GIRL FROM THE NECK DOWN COLUMN - MEDWAY MESSENGER 22/09/14

 

DON'T STAND SO CLOSE TO ME

Your basket is full, every item has been ticked off your shopping list and now you’re proceeding in an orderly fashion to the till.

The items are unloaded efficiently onto the conveyer belt and you wait patiently for them to be scanned through the checkout.

But what’s this happening to your rear, clearly worried that they might lose their place in the queue the space invader is making sure no one gets ahead of them by tailgating you through the entire experience.

No gap is left to chance as they repeatedly ram their trolley into your backside with every shuffle forward and no matter that the chip and pin area is there for you to make your payment in privacy they’re going to stay right by your side lest someone creeps in.

They function under the misguided apprehension that this will make you go faster but I have news for them.

If anything it will make me go slower on purpose ,so if you want me to get a move on in the words of Sting whilst he was still in the police.

“Don’t stand so close to me “

GIRL FROM THE NECK DOWN COLUMN – MEDWAY MESSENGER 22/09/2014

ITS MY BIRTHDAY .....

Today is June 30th and that can mean only one thing, it’s my birthday!

It’s a special one this year though, for 2014 is the penultimate year of my thirties and this time in 2015 will mark the dawn of a whole new era for me as the body clock of my life ticks over into 40.

Of course you know you’re starting to advance in years when your childhood heroes and icons either start passing away or getting arrested for dubious reasons and although I know some of you quietly dread that landmark birthday that signals we’re just not that young anymore, but I , myself am secretly quite looking forward to it.

For while these days a night out will require a week’s worth of recovery and any overzealous dance moves could possibly result in a month spent in traction there’s a lot to be said for starting to get on a bit.

When I look back at the shy and self conscious young woman I was in my teens and twenties it’s hard to believe she’s even the same girl as me anymore.

The girl who would do anything to please everybody except herself, who wanted no hassle so just agreed to anything to avoid any confrontation because she knew she could be reduced to tears if she did.

Who was so afraid of humiliating herself in front of others she would go out of her way to avoid any situation in which she might do that and in doing so prevented her from ever feeling truly happy with her life and self .

However she’s just a thing of the past these days because sometime during her thirties something changed and that poor little weedy thing ceased to exist .

I don’t know what caused it or whether perhaps the “ don’t give a monkeys what other people think of me anymore “ fairy fluttered down and delivered it one night when I was asleep along with the grey hairs and wrinkles but I’m pretty grateful wherever it came from.

For that timid little thing gradually started to wriggle and emerge from the cocoon of her old self to reveal a much stronger , confident and sure version of herself than she had ever been before.

She started to express her own opinions and stand by them , stopped letting everyone walk over her and as for bursting into tears that only tends to happen in really sad situations or when observing anything that involves children or cute wildlife now.

 And as for the confrontation, she gives as good as she gets these days and should the suggestion of humiliating herself even be made to her over anything she or someone else think she’s incapable of she takes that as a challenge to prove she can do it.

 

So if the sight of that big 4-0 looming over the horizon is getting you down and you think that all you have left to look forward to is the menopause swiftly followed by half price fish and chip suppers and free bus passes think again because as far as I’m concerned if my thirties have been this good to me then I can’t wait to see what my forties will bring.

And if things haven’t worked out quite as well as you’d hoped they would ,just remember you still have time to change it, after all isn’t that what the mid life crisis was invented for !

I am my hair ....

You’d think i would have learned my lesson by now wouldn’t you?

Having been hitting the bottle since the age of 13 you’d think I’d know what does and doesn’t work well for me.

But before you start scrabbling around to find the number of the local A.A meeting ,don’t worry, for my addiction doesn’t lay in the bottom of a bottle of gin but in the pursuit of finding a new way to accentuate my beautiful plumage .

At birth I emerged from the womb with beautiful strawberry blonde peach fuzz on my head that my dad jokingly enquired of our red haired milkman if he had anything to do with!

 There’s no need for a Jeremy Kyle D.N.A test here though because as I bloomed into a walking talking madam of a toddler my fine thatch gradually lightened into the white blonde that he had had as a kid confirming once and for all that indeed he was my father.

Fast forward about ten years though and that angels halo of wispy white hair has darkened into that shade so boring it’s named after a member of the rodent family, mouse.

There’s a moment of hair excitement around the age of 11 as during the summer holidays I decide that I want to start secondary school with a completely new look and cut off the Status Quo style mane I’ve been cultivating for the past decade into a crop just like the one Keren from Bananarama was sporting in that week’s smash hits but then it’s another 2 years before the real hair experimenting really starts to begin.

As I enter my teenage years I’ve become obsessed by the 1950s and especially Marilyn Monroe, so I want to be as much like my idol as a 13 year old grammar schoolgirl is allowed to be .  I don’t go for the full on platinum blonde just yet but as my mum lightened my hair for me that summer I felt like I looked a million dollars. In actual fact paired with the worst home perm kit 80s money could buy I probably looked a bit more like a crumpled old tenner but hey, it could’ve been worse at least I never experimented with Sun In !

And that is pretty much my hair regime for the next 4 years but once I’ve left school and am able to afford my own dye that’s where the fun begins.

Over the course of the 90s my hair takes in varying degrees of the colour spectrum from platinum blonde to pillar-box red to the shade of deep purple that shocks the manager of the shoe shop I work in so much that I’m banished to the stockroom for the week. Chilli red , chocolate brown and the dark auburn shade that caused one young buck to try and chat me up with the line “ooh you look just like a swan vesta match “.

On into the noughties and leading up to present day we’ve had some badly executed attempts at blonde that turned a violent shade of ginger and yellow, an attempt at red that turned me into Ronald McDonalds twin sister and a gothic stage where my preferred shade of choice was that of the raven.

 However about 2 years ago, I finally cracked that perfect shade of Marilyn inspired platinum and decided this was the hair colour i was going to stick with apart from brief forays into mrs slocombe inspired pastel rinses.

That was, until last week.

Feeling a little bored with my appearance I decided that maybe I needed a change and turning to my latest girl crush of choice Christina Hendricks I decided that copper red was the way to go.

In my mind I would have everyone’s heads turning as i sashayed like her Mad Men character Joan around the area where I lived...In reality though they were just gawping at my head lit up like a belisha beacon.

It won’t be around for much longer now though it’s been issued an ultimatum by my other half; it has to be gone by next Tuesday as he’s refuses to take me to his friend’s funeral like this.

“Anything’s got to be better than that “he says “even pink “.

Pink? Hmm, now there’s an idea!

GIRL FROM THE NECK DOWN COLUMN - MEDWAY MESSENGER

 

DISHWASHER BLUES

After a week of puddles on the floor and lacklustre cleaning this week we finally conceded it was time to buy a new dishwasher.

The delivery date was set for Monday and i waited excitedly at the thought i wouldn’t have dishpan hands anymore due to excessive washing up and that the old rubbish dishwasher would be taken away in the process.

Or so i thought until the delivery driver took one look at my appliance and announced “sorry love i can’t take this away, it’s still wet inside, i can only deliver it , you’ll have to sort that out and then get us to come back out unless you can find someone else to do it.

Which is fair enough given after a few hours of indignant whinging the small print on the website  did indeed reveal this was company policy.

However it did feel a little like double standards when on unwrapping the new machine to fit it ourselves with help from a good friend we found that the inside was still damp from where it had been tested !

Girl fom the neck down column - medway messenger