I hate Christmas.

I have hated it for years and what’s weird is that every year it gets less and less of a big deal. It’s almost a non event now. You over-eat for a day and that’s it.

I used to really get into it and decorate the whole house and get superpernickety with presents. (I think I am a genius present buyer - I LOVE getting exactly the right thing for people).

Not any more though. I have no desire to give or to receive JUST BECAUSE IT IS XMAS.

The whole thing really feels like a big scam to get us to buy more shite.

It’s all made in China now too - all the stuff you get in the shops. And having been through a volcanic eruption and seen all the shops in the town where I lived with ash and mud through them and with all their wares sticking out of the glumps of goo, I can never see stuff in the same way again.

And it kills me to see people ripping glossy multicoloured wrapping aper off presents and chucking it in the bin.

I unwrap mine carefully because I feel obliged to reuse it. (I have a huge pile of wrapping paper now which drives me spare but I feel too guilty to throw it away.)

As for the actual presents themselves, broadly speaking what a waste!

How often do you get something you actually want? Or need?

The whole thing is ridiculous and out of control.

I have an acquaintance who has millions just sitting in the bank.

It’s been there accumulating interest for years.

Which is very nice. She made the money and she can do what she likes with it.

Thing is though. She doesn’t do anything with it. She is sooo tight. She will text saying “call me”and will wait until you do. And she will notice who pays for coffee. It matters to her. She can talk for half an hour about who paid the last time she drank coffee in a coffee shop. She finds it that interesting.

In my opinion that’s a bit creepy and a bit sad all at once. I think she has a miserable life really, because she is so obsessed with being careful with her treasure.

She could be living the life of her fantastical dreams but no.

She even mows the lawns of her large garden herself because it would cost $50.00 to pay someone and she does the housework herself. The house is MASSIVE so its takes most of the weekend.

Crazy eh?

What’s ghastly about her behaviour though, is that she is quite happy to see those very close to her go without. That’s not so amusing. It’s quite horrible in fact.

The Ministry of Health is looking at spending $47 million on obesity surgery - more than 900 morbidly obese people have been given provisional approval for the operation.

According to a national paper, “North Shore Hospital surgeon Michael Booth said the surgery was life-changing for most who had it, though poor eating and exercise or a slipped or eroded band meant that it failed in 40-50 per cent of gastric-band cases. He said only those already motivated to lose weight through diet and exercise should have the surgery.”

“The idea of taxpayer-funded obesity surgery did not find universal support in a survey of 400 people commissioned by health boards. Of those surveyed, 61 per cent thought it should be taxpayer-funded, while 35 per cent disagreed. Seventeen per cent strongly agreed, while 20 per cent were strongly opposed.”

I am in that last category.

So overeating is a malady now? and food is addictive?

Like sex?

It’s all too silly for words.

What’s wrong with people taking responsibility and control of their own bad habits?

Another recent newspaper article told the story of 32 year old Sarah Woodfield who lost 110 kgs since having gastric bypass surgery. She went from 198kg to 88kg. Says Sarah: “I would have been dead within 10 years.”

Apparently it’s on the wane.

Reason why?

High tech communication means it’s just too easy to get caught, because contemporary e-communication leaves a trail.

In the good old, bad old days, in the absence of photographic evidence, and given that very few people could afford a Private Investigator, an outraged denial from the guilty party from the moral high ground could dispense with a partner’s doubts, but nowadays there’s a greater likelihood that mobile phones and computers will store the proof. And proof makes denial pointless, cheesey and embarrassing.

Divorce rates are down in the US  and in Australia - I am not sure about NZ - but this could be why.

People aren’t fooling around so much because they know the dangers of getting caught. Apparently there are now gadgety things you can buy that can retrieve deleted texts and if you have the money, computer forensics can find out what websites you have been on and also pull up deleted emails.

You can also buy kits over the net that detect semen and (this is really scary) you can hide a GPS in your honey’s car so that you know where he has been.

Real bunny boilers can plant tiny wireless cameras around the home/car/office or wherever and receive pxts on their mobile of what is going on.

Call me old fashioned.

You’d be right.

I am sooo four decades ago. NO! More!

…More like six decades ago.

I have a huge problem with metrosexuality. Six decades ago - back in the 50’s men were men and if they were gay they were in the closet and as we all know, sneaky sex is the most exciting sex, so being in the closet would have been highly charged, highly erotic fun! Men wore suits with shoulder pads that made them look like gridiron players and Clark Gable was saucy because you could see his singlet under his shirt. NOT because he did full frontal nude with a Brazilian.

(No man on the planet should ever have a Brazilian - nothing is more disturbing than the thought of an adult male depilating himself to look like a pre adolescent boy.  My beauty therapist was telling me she does a guy in his sixties!!!..gawd! Imagine being a lady aged 57, dating that guy for an appropriate amount of time (over a week!!!) and then getting intimate and when he takes his knickers off, finding he has the lower body of a nine year old!! I would faint with horror).

ANYWAY:
I was at a function last week listening a middle aged man talking about his beauty routine (fact - no exaggeration) and I made a mental note to blog about metrosexuality.

I think it is awful and should be outlawed. Helen Clark managed to legislate everything else - how come she didn’t ban this?

OK, well we have been yakking on here for months  now and we have all kind of gotten to know each other a bit, likes and dislikes and so forth, so I thought it would be quite funny if we all gave each other Xmas presents..purely hypothetically of course because we are all far too mean to actually GIVE in real life eh? (Especially to Brew. Brew wouldn’t even get any Xmas cake at my house. I would sell HIS slice to raise money for underprivileged dolphins).

So what would YOU give Brew? (besides a brutal STD?). Answer - his very own dugong!!!!! (see his comment on the  last blog about ******s)

Hans_Blix might like a little disarmament (except that would leave him unemployed)

Whaleoil I would give a year’s PR to. (Have you seen his blog? “Nice” is not an angle he goes with too often - his mother loves him, and his wife thinks he is OK but some of the people in the Labour party would boil him in oil - he needs image work badly! )

Leah should get the best that Work and Income can deliver so she is free to blog-comment as much as she wants

And The Trickster gets an About Town blog party - at HIS place . . . it would end up in a punch-up for sure. The police would be called and Melissa B would be arrested because Brew would have blamed the noise and inconsiderate parking and damage to the neighbours’ fence on HER.

Ages ago I wrote what I thort was my best blog ever.

It was about my p****.

In fact I called the blog “My P****” (but I didn’t use asterisks). That wasn’t too well received by Stuff though and was censored. It wasn’t so funny when it wasn’t rude but it still wasn’t too bad - problem is I can’t remember what the title was changed to and I can’t find it scrolling through a zillion posts, which is a shame, because I could have directed you to it. (It was read by about one person and probably got no comments which was a bit depressing.)

Ah well.

(Anyway. . . the point of that blog was the amount of spam I get from people who are deeply concerned about the size of my p****. Fact is, of course, that, at least the last time I looked (about half an hour ago) I do not have a p****.)

Months later, even with the spam filter amped up to 11/10, I still get emails from concerned folk who are worried about me.

This came today from thereaboutk2, who dropped into my inbox to let me know that

Subject: Life with a small tool is pathetic and miserable.

Now when you look into your spam folder, you will see that 90% of all spam is on this exact topic.

And hilariously, if you check wikipedia for ’small p****’ the first sentence you will get is

Once Upon A Time,

when I wasn’t long out of school, I was a waitress in a night club and among the other people working there was a seriously beautiful model with long blonde hair and perfect features. She came from the other side of town to me ( I am very working class) and she was a type of person I had never come across before. She was private schooled and she was rich and she “thought rich”. Her entire way of being and thinking and living were totally opposite to me.

I have a terrible memory, but to this day I remember, one night, her commenting on the (fabulous) type of car the guy she was interested in, drove.

I was fascinated. I had never in my life had a conversation about the sort of car a guy drove. It never entered my head. (I never even really registered because I don’t care about cars)

I knew then that I was entering another world. Interestingly, I have run into this beautiful woman on the About Town scene. She still has long blonde hair and perfect features and her modeling career was international at one point, and most interesting of all - she is married to a very rich guy with many beautiful cars.

it’s on everyone’s lips right now, as if it’s a modern phenomenon but it’s not.

The most extraordinary Cougar, maybe of all time, was at the French court in the 16th century.

Diane de Poitiers was gorgeous, very smart and politically savvy, and she was a keen hunter so she stayed in shape well into middle-age. And the French king fell in love with her when he was 7 and she was 27!

Forget Madonna. Forget Demi Moore.

THAT, is a Cougar!

He wasn’t king then though and they didn’t start sleeping together until he was 27, but from that point she was his mistress for the next 25 years. It’s a pretty amazing story really. As king he could have very nearly any woman at all that he wanted, but he wanted someone old enough to be his mother.

At the other end of the spectrum is Kelly Osbourne, She’s 24 and she’s just gotten engaged to a teenager. (You can see that one lasting eh?)

You have to really feel sorry for David Beckham.

The woman sitting next to me at the Kids Can adiCouture event he went to last night said it must be like being a caged animal being that famous and I can only agree.

Actually though, the best analogy is of Roman times when they would capture an enemy leader. The poor guy would be put in a cage and dragged through the streets of Rome so everyone could have a gander.

That’s Beckham.

An African friend commented that he is sooo famous there that even the Dark Continent follows his every move. Maybe there are some people in Outer Monglia who don’t know who he is - but I doubt it.

And as for the women who throw themselves at him - it’s horrible to watch.
Both soccer teams actually, must feel like pretty young girls feel around dirty old men.
They were under assault almost all night.

And the night before had been even worse.