Random Skin

When I was very young, I had eczema over a lot of my body, and I remember back to the days when my mum would bathe me using a big plastic tub of white cream instead of soap.

As I got older, the eczema got less noticable, and less frequent – and I went on to use normal soap again all the time I was in Primary school. I remember a boy in my class – lets call him Karl, who had very dry, cracked hands and a red, sore, sometimes raw face and neck. And I knew what it was. Our peers thought he had the plague, or something, and would avoid getting paired with him in Country Dancing so they wouldn’t have to hold his hand. I don’t remember ever speaking to him about the eczema, but I knew what it was – and I knew that he wasn’t contagious. So people used to point and laugh at me too, because I didn’t mind being his partner for country dancing, so I was obviously a weirdo too.

But every now and again, the backs of my knees and elbows would get dry and itchy and sore the eczema would be back. I had to stop using anything on my skin that contained any kind of perfume, in order to keep the sores at bay – but all the while, I remember now, I was thinking – at least I’m not as bad as Karl. Despite the flakiness and the itchiness, my skin never cracked or bled, and I was grateful for it. I never had any patches on my face of neck – I could always hide my sores away while I treated them with tubes of cream from the chemist.

As I left Junior School and went up to my High School, I had cut out almost everything from my washing regime.  No perfumes, no colours – as natural as possible, and preferably hypoallergenic soap and shower gel and bubblebath. I was eczema free for perhaps a year or two. Maybe. And only because I was very very careful.

And then, random patches of eczema would suddenly appear.

I never got them in my joint creases again – just small, dry patches on my tummy and my back. Occasionally on my arm or leg, but mainly on my torso. Even if I hadn’t come into contact with anything perfumy – I’d still get them.

Dabs of cream here and there would help to stop them lasting, but I managed to get away without making too many changes to my routine. Then, as my hormones had run their course through puberty, I found that I couldn’t wash my face every single day with soap or facewash because my skin would dry out too much and get flaky, and then it would over-compensate and produce lots of grease. Yuk. I was the only girl I knew with dry, greasy skin!!

So, I never got away from the eczema. I still have it off and on – no matter what I do. As I’m getting older, my need for big tubs of white emollient cream is becoming greater, and the range of products I can get away with using on my skin is diminishing. Its becoming more sensitive as time goes on.

These days, if those make-up conter people spray me with perfume in a department store, its like I’ve been covered in acid. I’ve had to put signs on my desk at work to stop the cleaners using their furniture polish on it, because when I lean my arms on the polished desk in the morning to type my emails, it attacks my skin, and I’m bright red and itchy all day.

Even my metal name badge can give me problems if it rests against my chest for too long!

There’s no way I can wear cheap jewellery, either. My skin won’t put up with it for more than about an hour. Gold or Silver are the only metals I can happily wear. (oh what a shame!).

So, at the moment I’ve got a small, but very irritating 5p -sized patch of eczema on my tummy, and I’ve had it more than 6 months. It just won’t go away, despite resisting scratching the bloody thing, and all the cream I put on it.

Hmm. I wonder how Karl is doing these days……..??

Hell. Who am I trying to kid? I’ve got nothing to compain about!

Surely

Surely this has been spelled wrongly?

WOW!

I got on the scales this morning – two days before the official end of Cakewatch week 10, and discovered I’ve lost a good pound this week already!

Imagine my joy, then, when I stumbled across this:

My weight loss is equivalent to 4.5 kilos total (just under 10lbs) -the weight of this giant toblerone!! Look here.

Marvellous!

Cultural Shirts

I went to a cultural awareness meeting today. It was quite interesting really, although, inevitably, we started discussing religion and those with very strong beliefs started to get a bit ruffled. I hate arguments, and my role in life is always to be the mediator – so I just had to intervene. Other than that it all went well, really.

Another subject we got onto was that we British do not like discussing how much money we earn or how much we paid for things. This is not the case in other countries. Have you noticed how we never discuss how much we paid for something – unless it was a bargain?

We’ll never say “Look at this shirt – it cost me 45 quid”, but we’ll quite happily tell the world and his wife that “Look at this shirt. Fiver! Bargain!”.

Anyone got any ideas why that might be?

Spam Notes

Apparently I need 28 types of Mobile-home Insurance, if you believe the spam that Askimet has caught on my behalf.

I bloody hate caravans.

Ah Hah!

Quick note at the end of week 9 of Cakewatch – I’ve lost just under another kilo this week which is excellent!!! Since I’m only counting complete half-kilos, I’ll settle for recording the loss of another half a kilo, or 1lb.

I’m well past the half-stone mark now, and looking forward to celebrating the full stone in a few weeks time……

Feeling good. xx 

Cars, they’re for driving places, right?

I have never had an emotional attachment to my car. I haven’t ever named a car I’ve owned, nor ‘personalised’ the interior with fluffy dice and chrome gear-knobs, nor have I ever strewn the parcel shelf with soft toys, cushions or rabbits-in-hammocks. A car is a car to me. I don’t care about alloy wheels, body-coloured bumpers, electric windows, spoilers or air-conditioning. When I look for a car, I want a wheel at each corner, power-steering and something that’s easy to park that doesn’t need much cleaning. When I got my latest car – my first ever brand new one – I swooned at the fact that it didn’t let in water, and the almost fainted at the luxury of a decent in-car heater that reduced ice-scraping time. 

I have a basic model, 2005-registered Ford Fiesta Finesse, and all I need it to do is work when I want it to, and get me from where I was to where I want to be. As long as its got all that, I’m very easy to please.  Imagine, then, how impressed I was when my friendly Ford car-salesman phoned me last week to tell me I could upgrade to another brand new car with lots of extras on it for very similar money to my current one. (I’m on ‘Options’ you see – I pay so much a month, and then I can give it back, swap it or buy it after three years).

I told him that I didn’t really need any of the extra gadgets, and I wasn’t really bothered – but he invited me over to have a look and see what we could come up with.  I took badger with me, and he drooled over the specifications in the brochure while Mr Salesman cross-checked and recalculated. I wasn’t very enthusiastic at all -but for just £20 extra a month, I’ve ended up with a higher specification Fiesta, with electric windows, air conditioning, heated windscreen (nice! No ice-scraping at all!) foldy-in wing-mirrors, rain sensitive windscreen (whatever that is), and a special Ipod connection to my stereo. I think I’ve done rather well, there.

Now all I need is an Ipod.

Are you OK?

I happened to find myself at my Doctor’s surgery again last week for another blood pressure check up. The whys and wherefores are of no consequence to this post, because there’s a long rant  story to unfold instead. 

I arrived at my surgery’s reception and waited to speak to the receptionist, but she was on the phone. The receptionist is rather rotund, with blonde curly hair and the huge glasses who looks like cross between Jabba the Hut in a good wig and one of Royson Vasey’s more attractive women. She must be in her 50’s, and I imagine her to have a husband and a family,  but she manages to slump without even trying, and is prone to talking just a little bit too loud, then laughing slowly, but in a patronising way. In short, she’s quite annoying.

Anyway, Mrs Jabba was on the phone, so a lady in a blue cardigan – probably a nurse  -asked me who I was, and said I could take a seat and Mrs Jabba would cross my name off when she got off the phone.  I sat down, and shortly after, I could hear Mrs Jabba speaking slightly too loud saying “Drunken Spaniel? Who is this on that piece of paper, there?” someone was obviously replying, but I couldn’t hear them. Then she said “Oh, they’re waiting are they? Right.” Oh good, thought I. All sorted.

There were one or two individuals in the waiting room, starting the long and tedious task of reading all the posters on the notice boards. I’ve been to the doctors surgery three times in as many months because of my chest infection and cold, so the “Do you have a drink problem?” patient information notices are rather fresh in my mind. I collected a magazine from the selection available. I avoided back-copies of People’s Friend and What Car? and picked up an Autumn 2006 copy of OK! magazine.

I should mention that I’m not really cut out to read women’s magazines. I never buy them, I only ever see them in doctor’s or dentists’ watiting rooms, and they stir hidden anger and frustration from the very depths of my soul. I know that before 30 minutes has passed I will be at best bloody annoyed, and at worst absolutely incensed. I can’t stand ‘celebs’ (like celebrities but you’ve probably never heard of them), I don’t like sentences which consist of shortened words (for example “sis” instead of sister) and I can’t bear the kind of journalism – if you can call it that – which points out the blindingly obvious and thinks I want to know about these people. In short, I’m too intelligent to be reading this trash.

Anyway, the longer I spent reading this magazine, the more insensed I was getting. The particular edition, I felt, should have been called Jordan’s OK magazine, since it was mainly about her. It had some laughable, almost verbatim transcript of a so-called interview with Jordan, aka Katie Price, and her husband Peter Andre, which took up about three double-pages. Each page had a posed picture of the two of them wearing outfits from Topshop and Top Man (Yeah, like they shop there!), which took up the majority of the space so that the poor readership didn’t have to struggle with too many words to read on each page. My favourite quotation was by Jordan herself and went something like this:

“I don’t like people staring at my body. When I’m on holiday, I try to cover up because I hate the attention.”

What the??!!! Why did you buy the huge tits, then?

Anyway, there was more. Her son, Harvey, it seems weighed 7 stone at the time aged 4 years old. Jordan claims she only weighs 8 stone. Firstly, why draw attention to the fact your son is morbidly obese? It only makes you look like an apalling mother! Secondly, there’s no way that girl is only 8 stone. Maybe if you removed her breast implants she is, who knows.

Still, reeling from the ‘interview’ I flicked over to read some hideous ramblings of Kerry ‘the face of Iceland’ Catatonic, or whatever her name is. In OK! she has a double page where she tells you what she thinks about other people. Like I care what her opinion is of someone else’s party-frock! Who is she to judge? Bloody cheek! I did raise a wry smile, though, as she tried to gush all sympathetically over Jade Goody’s failed beauty salon business (It was called ‘Ugly’, apparently. How apt.) To Kerry it was sympathy, but to me reading it in a sarcastic tone of voice it could just as easily been entirely the opposite. But it was no good, I could feel my blood pressure rising anyway.

I looked at the clock. I’d been in the surgery for 40 minutes. Seemed like a very long time! There’s no way I should have been reading the magazine for this long – 10 minutes tops. I went over to Mrs Jabba to ask what was happening.

“You haven’t arrived” she said to me. What kind of a statement was that?!! I explained the circumstances of my arrival, and she said she “could only apologise”.  She didn’t sound like she meant it though.

I went back to my seat, and crossed my fingers the nurse hadn’t gone home yet. I flicked through the last pages of the magazine, and spotted a reader’s photo. It was slightly blurry, but you could make out a double-bed with a white bedspread, and the words “Marry Me?” spelled out in rose petals on it. Draped across the pillows was a woman in her 30s holding a copy of OK! magazine for the photo. The caption explained that Damien had proposed to Linda on their holiday in this romantic way, but they’d spoiled the moment by photographing a magazine cover and sending it off to the editor in the hopes that they could get the picture on the same glossy pages as their heroines Jordan and Kerry.  I fely quite sorry for the happy couple, really. Not only that, the end of the sentence read “and Linda will of course be referring to OK! magazine to get some hints and tips for her big day from her fave celebs!!”

There it was. Fave and celebs. Agggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!

Funnily enough, my blood pressure was a little bit high when I finally got it checked out by the nurse. I wonder why.

Week 8

It seems I had not weighed myself accurately last week - the Kilogramme marking on my scales isn’t very clear on the dial, so I’ve started looking at the imperial dial, which is easier to see. It turns out that I had in fact put on another pound during my holiday week, making the grand Christmas gain 1.5 kg (3lbs). Still not too bad.

Anyway, this week I’ve lost that stray pound, and I’m certainly back on track again to make up the short-fall. I’m glad to be back in the routine.

Not losing it

I’ve had a setback on my wonderful weight loss programme. I did well to begin with, and lost more than half a stone in those first 5 weeks, but then came christmas and a week’s holiday, and now I’m sitting by the scales at the end of week 7 and I’ve gained a kilo and lost nothing in the last fortnight.

I shouldn’t be too hard on myself, because in the first week of watching my food intake I lost 1.5 kilos in 7 days. I just need to get back to my routine, I think. Oh, and take a bit more exercise, of course! 

I hope to have better news next weekend.