Typecast

Emily Organ is a long-time blogging friend of mine and it's wonderful to see her producing such engaging and interesting fiction. The Outsider is Emily's second novel.   Yasmin and Daniel meet by chance at a business conference in New York. Both are looking for a reason to move in a new direction in their lives but didn't expect it to be with each other. The only problem is that Daniel is a recent widower and his wife's death is shrouded in mystery.  Back in the UK, the story continues with the growth of their relationship, how Yasmin feels living in Daniel's wife's shadow and the fact that she doesn't really know the full story of how or why Lisa died. To complicate matters, Richard, one of the villagers, was slightly obsessed with Lisa and believes that her death wasn't an accident, even though the inquest ruled otherwise. He is determined to find out what really happened and conducts his own investigation, upsetting and unnerving almost eve...

...and IN WRITING, from a PR company that I'm working with, which sort of makes it official, doesn't it?   For those who don't already know (where HAVE you been?), I'm a bit of a pedant when it comes to the written word. Spelling mistakes leap off the page at me, grammatical errors make my teeth itch, txtspk - even on texts - makes me want to scratch my eyes out and I think we should all just learn to touch type properly slow down a little bit and take more care over the words we are sharing with others. Ooohhhh deep!!   Anyway... I'm a little disappointed that I haven't gravitated to the higher echelon of actual ' disco cunt ' but it looks like my reputation precedes me and I still have something to strive for. To paraphrase the words of Mark Knopfler:  "Wanting something is far better than having it." Onwards and upwards. To Cuntdom...

Yesterday, I saw a tweet from 80s Nostalgia which asked what the exact Green Cross Code was (apparently to solve an argument) Was it "Look right, look left, look right again" or "Look left, look right, look left again"? Anyone help? #argument pic.twitter.com/BaoWUr0xyq — 80sNostalgia.com (@80sNostalgia) March 10, 2015 Now, as a fully-fledged member of the Tufty Club and proud to be born in the 1970's, I jumped straight in with "Look right, look left, look right again..." because we all know that you have to check the oncoming traffic first and the UK is a driving-on-the-left-hand-side minority country, isn't it? And then, just for shits and giggles, I thought I'd check out the retro adverts on good old YouTube. Well, my ghast is still flabbered!! Not anywhere in those three videos does  Darth Vader  The Green Cross Code Man say those actual words.  Neither does Tufty, alt...

I caught up with a few of my favourite blogs this week and saw that a couple of people had been listing which books they had read out of a supposed ( according to whom? ) "Top 100 Classics".  I will be totally honest and say that I have probably read less than a third of any "Top 100" list and a few of those - like The Bible and Of Mice and Men and Far From The Madding Crowd and Macbeth (ok, I'm stopping now) is only because I was forced to at school! I have a special bookshelf in my house which houses all my favourite books and when I counted them there was 101.  These books will never be swapped, sold or donated and have been kept for many different reasons.  These reasons don't really matter, but you can ask about specific books in the comments section if you like.  Yes, there will be some crossover between my list and the "classic" list, but not many.  There are a few 'extra's on the shelf but they are not as important as the o...

I keep hearing about this shamazing driver service called Uber.  It's mentioned on social media all the time with '£10 money off codes' offered on Twitter with increasing regularity. When I look it up it appears to be an uber-expensive (see what I did there?) taxi service and very much a 'city thing'. It feels to be marketed more as a 'private hire' or 'personal driver' type experience with all the Uber marketing being accompanied by pictures of sleek black cars with drivers that are suited and booted to match.  Here's what happens with Uber... You open your app, you set your pick-up location (presumably using your phone's location services because what if you don't know where you are?), enter the address of your destination (what happens if you don't know that either?) and the nearest driver accepts the job, After pick-up the driver is provided with your destination and you are shown your route and estimated time of arrival....

Did you know... a full Kindle weighs a billionth of a billionth of a gram more than a brand-new one? That's one of my favourite facts from the book 1227 Facts To Blow Your Socks Off  whch I've had on my Kindle for a couple of years now.  But what are you actually supposed to DO with the e-books once you've read them?  You can't (as yet in the UK) lend them to anyone, you can't donate them to charity, they aren't sitting on a shelf collecting dust and even though you can store approximately 3500 books on one (and even if you read one a day that would take over 9-and-a-half years) they aren't much use sitting on your Kindle. I love my Kindle.   I have the Kindle 4 and it was a surprise present a few years ago. I've never upgraded because there's no real need - it does the job it's supposed to. I've got a couple of hunddred books on my Kindle and that's the beauty of it - there's always something to read whether it be a new book fr...

I look in the mirror and I'm fairly happy with what I see. Given the (no pain) option I'd change a couple of things and I know that losing more weight will change the shape of my body and my face even more so that's a work in progress. But why does the mirror version of me look so different from the camera version of me? I look at old pictures of myself - the time before I realised about looks, style, angles... I'm a fairly good-looking kid; I'm happy (aren't we all on photographs from the '70s and '80s - none of that 'here's my kid in a dilemma' type Facebook upload)... it's the time before self-conciousness. I've tried the smiling with my mouth open/closed I've tried the "drop a hip" method I've tried turning to the side I've tried different hair cuts and different make-up looks I've even considered using a company like Showtime Photo Booth who offer video booth hire in London to see if tha...