Summer dictators can shove it where the sun doesn't shine!

Are you a summer dictator? Take this easy test to find out.

1. Do you insist that everyone should be outside as soon as the sun comes out?

2. Did you moan about people choosing to stay inside to watch the Wimbledon final instead of going outside?

3. Have you been sunburned already this year? Bonus points if you posted a picture of it to a social networking site with a caption similar to "four hours in the park, look at my tan lines!" or "fell asleep on the beach after too many lagers".

4. Is hayfever 'not a big deal'?

5. On Sunday, despite the south coast being hotter than Peru, Brazil, Egypt and Spain and you living a bit further north where temperatures were at least 5 degrees lower, did you express your disdain at people finding it hard to cope in the heat?

6. Are you confident with your body and do not understand why everyone can't just 'slip into a bikini' or take their t-shirt off to cool down?

7. Do you find it easy to regulate your temperature therefore never having had a panic attack after overheating and finding it hard to breathe?

8. Do you have air conditioning in your bedroom so regardless of the temperature outside you can sleep with ease?

9. Is sunscreen for wimps?

10. Have you been to Iceland and stocked up on disposable barbecues and multiple cheap burger/horsemeat/sausage/chicken combo packs?


If you answered 'yes' to three or more of those questions then CONGRATULATIONS - you are a wanker summer dictator.

Prizes include:

An overwhelming inflated ego
Being a massive bell-end
The personality of a wooden spoon
Dry, peeling skin (bonus points if you burned a mole - who doesn't love skin cancer)
Accelerated ageing process
Dehydration
Sickness and dizzy spells from sunstroke

Enjoy your future.

Have a nice day now!

What Really Grinds My Gears

We've all got our pet hates, things that grind our gears for inexplicable reasons. Things that make us wince, squirm and struggle not to correct. They're usually really simple little things that have absolutely no detrimental effect on our well-being or happiness but yet they they grate like nails on a chalkboard. We know we shouldn't let them bother us but they do and these are mine:

Expresso

I don't even drink coffee so I have no idea why this causes me such pain but every time I hear someone say "expresso" I want to strangle them and scream at them that "IT'S ESPRESSO, NOT EXPRESSO, THERE'S NO X YOU BLOODY MORON". I know I'm not alone in my hatred of mispronunciations, my best friend quit a job once because one of her co-workers pronounced mayonnaise as 'maronnaise' and she just couldn't deal with it any more. Perhaps it's a blessing that I don't like coffee so I don't run the risk of encountering these imbeciles on a regular basis inside coffee shops. 

Dr. Who

I love Doctor Who and it really, really, really grinds my gears when I see it written as Dr Who. It offends me for so many reasons. Firstly, the show is called Doctor Who - it's not called Dr Who. Secondly, it implies his surname is Who. To explain - if I was a doctor I would be Dr Meehan because that's my surname so calling him Dr Who makes his surname Who. Which it isn't. Thirdly, he introduces himself as The Doctor and it's a running theme in that people then say "Doctor? Doctor Who?" because his name isn't Doctor Who and writing it as Dr Who makes it look that way, to me at least. Again, I know I'm not alone in this as it's a common cause for complaint amongst fans of the show. Shouldn't we worry about more important things? We probably should but it won't stop us being irritated by this.

Prom

Proms themselves don't upset me but the way the word is treated like a proper noun does. It's the word 'the' being missing from most sentences involving proms that gets me. People say "It's prom this weekend" or "I don't have a date for prom". I feel like it should be "It's THE prom this weekend" and "I don't have a date for THE prom". If we were going shopping, we wouldn't say "I'm going to shops", we'd say "I'm going to THE shops". A proper noun refers to a unique entity eg a country, person or city. Proms are not unique entities, they're events. We don't say "I'm going to cinema tonight" or "I'm going to concert" we say THE cinema and THE concert. I'm raging just writing this. I hope I've explained it properly because I have to move on before I throw myself and the laptop out the window.

Best/Cutest/Greatest in the WORLD

I feel a bit hypocritical about this one because I've got a photo of Monty in a Facebook album that I've written "the cutest little doggy in the whole wide world" on. To be fair I uploaded that picture before this became a pet hate of mine as it's something that has developed over the past 18 months. But I sure do hate it now. It's such a lame and lazy compliment. It's something people say when they lack any sort of creativity to say something nice about the person they're talking about. Obviously getting a card from your 6 year old kid proclaiming you to be the best parent in the world is a pretty special thing. Getting a card from your 30 year old offspring with the same message is a bit less special. It's such a boring, stealth brag - especially when parents battle it out with other parents on photos of their kids. And don't get me started on "I really do have the best boyfriend/girlfriend in the world" followed by something utterly mundane like "they've hoovered the lounge" or "they've bought me some Malteasers". The fact you can't think of something a bit more creative or nice to say pretty much negates your claim.

That's Tom with a capital T

I've had to save this for last because this is The One. Such a blight on my existence that it makes me want to scream every time I hear it. When someone gives you their email address and they tell you it's all in lower case or that the first initial has to be a capital letter. I have tried my very best to rise above it and to not let it bother me but every attempt has failed. Miserably. It's an unhappy coincidence that for the past 10 years I've been working in offices so I hear this a lot more than any person should ever have to and sometimes it's taken real effort not to correct people. I've had colleagues who, despite me patiently explaining it to them and sending them an email to JoHnSmItH@PrEtEnD.CoM, still insist on specifying that it all has to be lower case. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? IT'S 2013 FOR GOODNESS SAKE! WHY ARE THEY ALLOWED OUT OF THE HOUSE LET ALONE BEING ALLOWED TO USE A COMPUTER?? I've got an eye twitch just from thinking about it. AAAAAARRRRGH!

So those are my top 5 pet hates. I realise they're silly and unimportant and I know there are much bigger things I could spend my energy on but I can't help it, these things get me every time. If you've got something that inexplicably causes you to see the red mist, I'd love to hear what it is! Perhaps it's something I'm guilty of doing in which case - sorry! 

Now, here's some dachshund puppies. Everything is right with the world again.

The Significance of Being Insignificant

Every now and again, no matter how happy you are with your life, you'll experience a short period of time where everything seems to go against you. We've all heard people say that they're having 'the day from hell', a 'bad week' or that 'they've been having a tough time lately'. 

I have a lovely life, usually, and I often can't believe how lucky I am but the past couple of weeks have been rather stressful. We bought our first home a month ago (yay) but we've been having some difficulties with a nearby house being horrible neighbours, work has been incredibly busy and the upstairs flat had a slow leak which lasted almost a full two weeks and caused a lot of damage to our living room. The insurance policy was still in the name of the seller of both ours and the upstairs flat so we weren't able to get it sorted because calling in our own plumber would have invalidated the policy. The upshot is that we, along with the upstairs flat, have to pay hundreds of pounds to a plumber as well as the £300 policy excess but we will eventually be refunded the plumber's fee. Because of this I had to cancel a trip to Manchester for a birthday party as I simply didn't have the money. My reaction to stress is to eat so with all of this going on I'd put on a few pounds. It's fair to say I was feeling very sorry for myself. And then I got the news that an old friend had been murdered.

I won't say it put things into perspective because my mind doesn't work like that. I can't stand this totally bizarre notion that you're never allowed to moan or be upset about anything because someone somewhere has it worse than you. I do believe that you should pick who you moan to and be considerate when sounding off. I know how frustrating it was when I was on dialysis to hear friends complain about trivial things like breaking a nail or forgetting a tv show was on. But if on the basis that somebody out there is suffering more than you so you can't possibly be sad then surely by that reasoning you can never be happy because someone is no doubt in a better situation than you. 

It did however make me think of a personal revelation I had several years ago and no doubt anyone reading this has had this thought at some stage too. One of my close friends had gone into labour at 3.30am and I drove her mum and sister to the hospital. I was on my way home at 5am and although the hospital was on the other side of town I saw barely any other cars on my entire journey. All I could think about was that everyone was asleep but my friend was having a baby. As the whole town appeared to sleep a new life was coming into the world and they had no idea it was happening. I had work that day and it seemed hilarious at the time that in 4 hours I would be at my desk which may as well have been a million miles away. I got to thinking about all the times I'd been doing the laundry or napping and what might have been happening at those exact moments all around the world. Births, deaths, marriages, wars, scientific breakthroughs, great sadness and great happiness. All things I would never know anything about. I'd thought about things like that before but it really hit me that time because I knew something so momentous was happening back at the hospital. 

From then on I've looked at people differently. It's almost as though every person is in the starring role in a film about their life. They're the main character, the one that would be nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars. Their inner circle are the supporting cast and then there's a whole bunch of extras to set the scene. But they also are a supporting actor in the film about another persons life or an extra in the life of someone they pass at the supermarket. We are all at once at the same time both significant and insignificant. It's beautiful and somehow tragic too. 

I've since found out that The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrow had a name for this and it's called "sonder". A definition:

The realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

While I had been going through some personal stresses my friend had been murdered. The tributes that flow in from all the people, whether supporting actors or extras, are like the end credits to the film of his life. Each of those people now have one less character in their own films. Once less friend, one less customer, one less person to walk past in the street. But somewhere, on the other side of the world perhaps, someone is in a state of excited awe that something so wonderful is happening to them right now in this very moment. And you will never know about it. 

Red Nose Day Glossybox Raffle - UPDATED

We have a winner! Emma Mae has won the raffle.

I used the Random Picker website to draw the winner. All names were uploaded and the site does the selection for you. 

Here's an image showing there were 55 entrants, one for each pound donated, as well as confirmation that I couldn't edit the result. 

After a mix up with friends over who was ordering a 3 month subscription for a birthday present, we have ended up with one too many boxes this month. We have therefore decided to raffle the box for Comic Relief.

The box is unopened so we cannot guarantee the exact contents but brands featured this month include Jelly Pong Pong, Juicy Couture, Nails Inc and Monu. You can view the full list of brands and products at the Glossybox website.

The rules and entry are very simple. Entry will cost you £1 but you can purchase additional entries for every £1 you donate. We will pay the postage to a Mainland UK address. The winner will be announced at 10pm on Friday 15th March here and on the sponsorship page.

Normally a single Glossybox would cost £10 with an additional £2.95 postage so for a small £1 donation you could be getting quite a bargain.

We have joined Dawn O'Porters fundraising team so please feel free to promote this raffle using the Twitter hashtag #teamhotpats. We've set ourselves the target of £50 so we need 50 lovely people to enter the raffle before 10pm on Friday. It's a bit short notice but we're hoping for the best.

You can enter the raffle here:

https://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/romanyscarlett

Thank you so much for your support.

Valentine's Chocolate Bouquet

Valentine's Chocolate Bouquet

I made this chocolate monstrosity for Rich and it was supposed to be for Valentine's Day but due to the unexpected snow flurry he was working from home this afternoon and he's already seen it. Oops! Still, it means I can do this blog a bit earlier.

We don't usually bother with Valentine's Day and never get each other cards let alone gifts. There's only 4 weeks between mine and Rich's birthdays and Valentine's is right in the middle so it's not really something that we feel the need to celebrate. But I've wanted to make a chocolate bouquet for ages so Valentine's is the perfect excuse. 

To make this bouquet you'll need a few simple pieces of kit.

I used a cylindrical gift box that I got from The Card Shop, wooden garden cane from Wilkinsons and some oasis (usually used by florists) from Hobbycraft. I also used some flower themed cupcake wrappers from Cakes Cookies and Crafts. I had everything apart from the container already lying around the house and if you don't want to have to go to several shops there are other things you can use. Kebab skewers instead of garden cane, polystyrene instead of oasis and the cupcake wrappers are entirely optional. There are a lot more options for the container - vases, gift bags, bowls etc.  

You'll also need some goodies. I picked up some of Rich's favourite chocolates but I also got a marshmallow Me to You bear lolly because I thought it was a nice addition to the Valentine's theme. 

Additional items needed are sellotape and something to cut your rods - I used secateurs. You can also add some decorations, I used a piece of shredded tissue paper to cover up the oasis and these cute heart picks I got from the 99p Store. 

Here comes the science.

Step 1

Put the oasis inside your container. Cover up with shredded tissue paper if desired.

Step 2

Push your rod through a cupcake wrapper like this. If you're not using cupcake wrappers then just skip this step. Pull the wrapper down to the bottom of the rod ready for the next step. 

Step 3

Secure a chocolate bar to the rod using a couple of strips of sellotape on the back. You could use glue but it's a lot messier and if you use tape you can easily remove the chocolate when it's time to eat it. 

Step 4

Pull up the cupcake wrapper so it sits underneath the chocolate bar like petals. 

Step 5

Insert your rods into the oasis. You'll want the chocolates to be at different heights so you can cut your rods down to size. I found it easier to put the rods into the oasis first to judge how much I needed to cut off. Play around with the arrangements until you find something you like. 

Step 6

Keep adding the rest of your chocolate until you're happy with how everything looks. It doesn't matter if you don't use everything you've bought. I ended up with a spare Toffee Crisp and box of Malteasers. They're unlikely to survive the rest of the week. Yum. 

Step 7

Add some decorations. I used the felt and glitter hearts but you can use anything your imagination can think of. Fresh flowers, ribbons, feathers - whatever you like. 

Step 8

You could finish things at step 7 but I do like to go over the top whenever I can so I tied on some bags of chocolates onto the base. Voila - a completed bouquet. 

While you're making this you'll have to be careful that the whole thing doesn't topple over. Keep the rods as short as possible and every time you add a chocolate, put the next one on the opposite side to balance things out. Once it's completed it will be stable, it's just during the creative process you'll need to watch out. This project is incredibly easy and only took me an hour. Chocolate bouquets cost an absolute fortune in the shops, similar ones online with the same amount of sweets are over £30 and that's without postage. And, perhaps best of all, there's no way one person can eat that much chocolate on their own so they'll have to share - huzzah!

Diabetes? I Dia-beat-it.

On Monday I had what is known as a glucose tolerance test. You have a blood test and then you drink a small cup of glucose solution and two hours later you have another blood test. Today I saw the diabetes specialist for the results and got the news I'd been hoping for - I no longer have diabetes.

I'm writing this blog because I knew I'd get questions and they've already started. You can't cure diabetes, it's not something you can take antibiotics for and after a few weeks it goes away. It's usually a life long condition but can be managed with a variety of drugs and informed choices about food and drink.

By way of background I had type 2 diabetes and it was what is known as NODAT - Now Onset Diabetes After Transplant. It is incredibly common to get diabetes after any kind of organ transplant. The anti-rejection drugs and steroids artificially push blood sugar levels up as well as causing rapid weight gain. Personally, I put on 3 stone in 4 months.

I started to get symptoms at the beginning of March last year, around 8 months after my transplant. Routine transplant blood tests showed that my blood sugars were exceptionally high. I was referred to the diabetes nurse at my local GP surgery and was closely monitored for a fortnight because the healthy range of blood sugar should be between 5 and 7 whereas mine was between 26 and 33. Very scary indeed. With the help of medication I was able to bring it down to safe levels but it meant a daily cocktail of 2 tablets, Metformin and Gliclazide and 2 injections, Insulin and Victoza. It took a few weeks to mix the perfect cocktail, a few times I'd have cold sweats and shaky hands. In the space of 3 weeks my sugars had gone from 33 to 3.

Over the next few months with the help of the renal doctors my transplant medication was reduced. I was weaned off of steroids and finally came off them in July. That made a phenomenal difference and I was able to decrease my dosage of Insulin.

I lost the 3 stone I'd gained after the transplant, coming off the steroids really helped this, and as the dosage of the other transplant medications were reduced, I was able to gradually drop the diabetes medication. First I stopped taking the Gliclazide, then I stopped the Insulin, then the Victoza and finally the Metformin. I haven't taken any medication for diabetes since November and my blood sugar averages a healthy 5.6 reading even on Christmas Day after champagne and orange juice for breakfast, a huge roast dinner and mountains of chocolate.

It's not unusual for a transplant patient to be able to get rid of their diabetes as long as they do what the doctors tell them, which is exactly what I did. It's taken almost a year but I've followed all their instructions and the hard work has paid off. There is no guarantee that I won't get it again in the future but my doctor says that I keep on doing what I'm doing then I've got no reason to be worried. I'll have another glucose tolerance test in 6 months time just to see how everything is and I've got a diabetic eye test in a few weeks time just to check whether any damage has been caused but other than that I can forget all about it. No medication, no sugar level tests in the morning and after meals and no more worrying. Huzzah!

Five Years Since My Friend Took Her Own Life

Next week is the fifth anniversary of a friend taking her own life. We all know the cliche of time being a great healer but it isn't. The emotions today are as raw as they were back then.

I can remember in vivid detail what happened the moment I found out. The text message came in and it was so blunt and to the point. The final sentence was 'She's gone' and it will stay with me forever. I didn't believe it at first and called the sender, my best friend, to ask what she was talking about. It was late at night, around 11pm, and I was living on my own in London. Our conversation was brief as we were both in shock and five minutes after I hung up I was crying like I'd never cried before. I phoned someone who didn't know my friend and sobbed down the phone at them saying that I couldn't believe what had happened.

The next morning is a total blur. I woke up, showered, got dressed, caught the train and went to work. I sat at my desk but instead of starting work I logged into Facebook. I began looking at photos of her and getting more and more worked up to the point of hysteria. A colleague walked by and said good morning. Thankfully it was a colleague I was friendly with because within seconds of her words coming out I broke down and all the emotion came out. I can't remember her taking me out of the building but I found myself sat on a wall outside the office on an incredibly busy street in the middle of the city with a cigarette in my hand which was so weird because I made sure never to smoke at work. I'd stopped screaming by that point and was calm but the tears were still coming so I sat there silently crying. I didn't care that people were looking at me as though I was some kind of lunatic, my friend was dead and at that moment it was the only important thing in the world. I don't recall the conversation I had with my colleague but whatever she said must have helped because she snapped my brain back to reality. What the hell was I doing still in London and why the hell was I at work. I went to the head of the department and said I had to take some time off at short notice and then I left. Within an hour I'd gotten back to my flat, packed a bag and got in my car to head to my home town.

I went straight to the place where my group of friends were congregating. I remember people coming and going, I remember people crying and I remember the big joke about one of our group taking longer to get there from the other side of town than it had taken me to get there all the way from London. I was there for a few days but I can hardly recall a single solid thing, it's like those days are gone from my memory. I know we talked about her and shared stories but that's it. I think we were all just so stunned. I'd been talking to her only a couple of days before hand about arranging a stripper for our youngest friend as he was about to turn 18. She had plans, things to look forward to.

When I got back to London I sat on my bed and ate an entire tub of Ben & Jerry's Baked Alaska. I cried the whole time. And then the world started turning once more. Normal life resumed except it could never be normal again. My beautiful friend is dead.

Every year since then I've followed the same ritual. Every day in the week leading up to the anniversary I look at photos of her, I watch her YouTube videos and I listen to the song she was playing when she died. I feel so sad for her that it becomes a physical pain. Sometimes I get angry, sometimes I smile and sometimes I cry but whatever the reaction, it hurts so very much. I miss her.

I've purposely not revealed her name or how she died - her story is not mine to tell. What I will say though is that her death is down to depression. She was such a beautiful person inside and out. I know that is what everyone says but in this case it's the truth. She had a figure that people pay a lot of money to replicate and she loved kids, animals and her friends. She was always up for a good time and always had a smile on her lovely face. But the thing with depression is you can't see it and underneath it all she was hurting.

Her pain is now ours to carry. We have lost somebody special and we also have to live with the fact that we couldn't help her. Deep down we know its not our fault but it still doesn't make it any easier.

The impact of suicide was not new to me. My maternal grandmother took her own life many years before I was born. Again, depression was to blame. The ripples and aftershock of suicide travel through the years and can never be forgotten. They find ways of encroaching into happy times and tainting things. When something good happens and then you remember you can't share it with that person. The memories you have of that person become bittersweet. The death of my friend and the circumstances around it are just so tragic and it scares me to know that other people may be feeling what she did.

So much has happened in the last five years from world wide events to small personal victories. But every February I'm back in my tiny flat in London reading a text message with the worst possible news. It will be the same in another five years time. These emotions are never going to go and in a twisted kind of way, I like it. It means I'll never forget her.