Remember the days of the old scab yard?

Whatever happened to scabs? They were a stable of being a kid. Most scabs where kept perfectly covered with pristine breathable 3M plasters. But mine were not so lucky. You see my Mum, after rummaging through out of date Pandols and jars of tiger balm, could only ever find the tiny circle or long skinny rectangle plasters. So I would end up with this strange abstract art piece across my knee. Or sometimes Dad would get some scissors out and craft me a bespoke one out of a massive roll of plaster tape. He also used the tape to hold wires together or to wrap up our birthday presents.

But no matter what the plaster was I could never resist picking if off. Sitting on the mat at school it gave me great joy to peel it back to inspect how the healing was going. If it looked as though it was remotely healed I would try and pick a bit off. It would go well at first but I would get over vigorous. And it would start to bleed. I would freak out because my teacher hated scab pickers. Almost as much as she hated kids that played with the Velcro on their shoes. So I would try and stick the plaster back down. But as I had already peeled it off so many times that there was little stick left. And if I was really unlucky it might have even folded back on itself so there was no chance of sticking it back down at all. I would be forced to let it just dangle down my leg like a sad, ripped down Happy Birthday banner.

So now 20 years later and my knees are covered in little scars. I also have one on my hand in between my fingers. Remember how annoying it was to have a plaster there? Every time you moved your fingers it would come off . Or you would forget about it when you washed your hands and it would become all slimey. For some reason when this happened I would put the plaster in my pocket like a souvenir or something. Strange child that I was. But times have changed, I get quite excited when I can put a plaster on now. Strange adult that I am.

There's an art to a good fart

We all fart but we don’t like to admit that we fart so farting will always be a covert operation.

One of the techniques we like to employ is the slight leaning to the side to set the little guy free. But you have to make sure the angle is as subtle as possible so people don’t know what you’re doing. If you end up basically lying on your side while you pass wind you’ve gone to far and it will be obvious to everyone around you that you have just farted.

On the tube I think most of us sitting down feel like we can get away with farting. They make the chairs out of fabric that has excellent fart absorbency. I hate to think how many farts one poor chair has to deal with daily. If you looked at the fabric of each chair under a microscope I imagine it would look very much like a poo particle Jamboree.

Tube seats are good as they are cushioned but you should never try and fart on a plastic chair. Try as it might the chair is far too smooth in texture to be able to get a grip of your gas. Worse still is as your fart ricochets around the pastic chair its every move will be amplified by the superb acoustic properties of plastic. Like farting into a microphone then playing it back through a subwoofer.

Try as we might we’ve all been caught out before. Dropping a loud one tends to be the most embarrassing as it’s easy for everyone to pinpoint its exact location of take off, sometimes a slow moving quiet wafty fart can be passed off as belonging to some one else, preferably a small child or old person.

Hot = Horny

This whole thing about English being prudish is complete bull. They’re just too fucking cold to think about fucking. I was at the park the other day when it was a balmy 18 degrees and the park was littered with couples basically having sex with their clothes on. Gyrating, dry humping, the works.

You only need to look at the randy Brazilians, Spanish and Italians to see there is definitely a connection between the heat and the horny.

And it’s easy to see why. It’s hard to have sexy time when your partner is so pale they camouflage into your white Egyptian cotton sheets. Or they’re so void of any colour you wake up in the middle of the night and freak out that you’re sleeping next to the Casper’s sister.

I know that global warming will probably destroy the world and all that but on a positive note (every acid rain cloud has a silver lining) it might help defrost the frigid English.

I could see a Mardi Gras style parade rolling past Buckingham Palace with the Queen getting low, low, low while Prince Edward puts his back in to it.

I sat next to the bogeyman

If you enjoy studying weird people there is no better place than the tube. It’s like anthropology on acid. After living in London for a while you find it easier to find who will be the best subjects. So I knew I had hit the jackpot when I spotted a guy in his mid twenties riding the tube at 3pm on a Saturday clutching a can of lager. He was either a) still drunk from the night before or b) had been drinking since breakfast. Either way I knew I was in for a treat and something to make my 40 min journey more interesting. So I sat right next to him to so I could observe him out the corner of my eye and in the reflections of the opposite window.

I am not sure what I was expecting him to do but I wish my eyes had not witnessed what he did. He picked his nose and then ate it. Not in a discreet way, he didn’t try and look like he was scratching his nose then pretend he was biting his fingernails. No, he very blatantly drilled deep into his nostril with his finger then almost proudly produced a green nugget for the whole carriage to see. He then held it really close to his face as though he was marveling at its beauty or conducting some sort of rigorous bogey quality control. Once he deemed it was up to scratch he put his finger in his mouth and nibbled away.

I have to clarify that this man looked sound of mind. It was only the can of lager that brought him to my attention, apart from this there was no other indication that lead me to believe he would eat his own bogies.

Now I am not looking down my nose at this guy from a throne of someone that has never eaten one of her own green nuggets. Like most people at the age of 8 curiosity got the better of me and i began to wonder if i might have been gifted with Willy Wonka style nostrils that produce bogies that taste of sherburt. But one taste was enough to make me think ummm yeah that tasted like a shriveled up caper that’s been rubbed in sand I won’t be trying that again.

My diagnosis of this man was he was suffering from invisible delusionment. This can also be seen in people that think no one can see them while sitting in their cars so again they pick their nose. If their case is serve people can even wank while waiting at the lights, I have yet to see this on the tube…yet.

Aint nothing good about it. Period.

Boys cover your eyes. I’m talking about periods.

When you first start getting your period is a bit of a novelty and really you’re quiet happy that its arrived because you were starting to worry that it might be a no show.

You feel quite excited to have been allowed into the world of womanhood. You carry around of couple pristine panty liners or ‘pads’ hidden in a secret zip pocket in their school bag as there is a constant fear of the floral packaging being exposed. After you feel a more confident you move on to tampons. You change them with stopwatch precision, every four hours, for fear that they might self-combust.

As you get older you get a lot more nonchalant about the whole thing. It’s pretty standard that at any point in time you will have at least two wild tampons flying around your handbag. You’re so over the embarrassment of it all that you will tell anyone within earshot about how annoying and painful it is, even your boyfriend if he is lucky enough.

You feel comfortable around most of your guy friends but you know that the men you work with can not handle knowing this lady information. So you have to perform a covert operation to get the tampon out of your handbang without them noticing. First you pretend you’re looking for something in the bottom of your bag using the rummaging as a diversion. Once they have been fooled you can grab one of the tampons running free across the vast fabric landscape. You then try and hold the tampon in your hand so it appears that you are actually not carrying a tampon in your hand. This takes years of practice.

Thou shall not covet my neighbour's tiny bottom

Everyone has at least one person that they’re envious of. They have the job you want, the cellulite resistant bum, the hair that doesn’t go frizzy or a lack of bodily hair that needs constant waxing. You know, important stuff like that.

Envy is a terrible emotion because it really serves no purpose apart from reducing your self-esteem down to the size of Prince in a pair ballet flats. But the thing that makes me laugh is that there are probably lots of people that are envious of YOU! Don’t scoff, it’s true.

The person whose bum looks like it was sculpted out of titanium might be envious that you have so much junk in your trunk you could have an impromptu garage sale.

Not that you’d ever know this because we never admit what we’re envious of. That is until we’re in the club getting tipsy. Then you can’t shut us up about it. We end up swaying in front of mirror watched by a bemused toilet attendant holding out a towel and a chuppa chup. We go through each others body like a checklist, I love your skin you never get pimples, look at the size of my pores they’re like fucking overnight bags. But look at your tits, they’re amazing, mine look they belong to Old Mother Hubbard. And on and on we go.

Although you might not always remember what was said it’s pretty fascinating to see what people really think of your body compared to their own and generally I think most of us our a lot hotter than we think.

If we lived in a world where everyone was an alcoholic or the Thames water supply was treated with ecstasy we would compliment each other all the time and as a result our self-esteem would probably be higher. I better start writing to Boris with that suggestion…

The Carrie Complex

It was scenario I'm sure you're familiar with. It was a Sunday afternoon and I had taken up residency on the couch after quite a big night on the slightly distressed tiles of east London. I had just indulged in a carb buffet of baked beans on toast followed by more pieces of bread with cheese on it that I had stolen out our communal fridge. 'Come Dine with Me' wasn’t on for another couple of hours so I reached for the box set of Sex and the City. I ended up watching eight episodes. At 30 mins a pop that’s four hours.

When I told my friend about this she told me off saying she read an article about women that start to identify with Carrie. They feel like dysfunctional relationships are normal and spend too much on shoes. After hearing this I totally freaked as after my marathon I had gone out and brought some shoes, they weren’t exactly Manolo Blahnik high heels, they were a pair of £10 flats from New Look on Brixton high street, but shoes all the same. Then I realized that I had started putting all my thoughts in to rhetorical questions…’I couldn’t help but wonder, did my life need an emotional spring clean?’…’I began to wonder how do you actually pronounce Tzatziki?...

So now I am prescribing myself some hard-hitting docos on dinner party hot potatoes like war, religion, politics and stuff. Anything that doesn’t feature fake flower corsages and women talking about relationships over egg white omelets. ‘I wondered though would this be enough to get the curly haired gal to stop narrating my life?...

Eye know the secret to Thom's success

I was thinking today if there might be a connection between Thom Yorke's infamous lazy eye and the fact he writes such beautiful melancholic music.

If both his eyes had decided to play ball and open properly would he still have been such a musical genius or would he have spent his youth doing handstands on kegs and chasing High School snatch?

Properly not, I would say even with two functioning eyes Thom would never have been a quarterback, but his eyes might have meet with the eyes of a nice looking girl called Meredith across a mosh pit and they could have fallen in love. Then Meredith might have got pregnant and Thom's Dad would sit him on the porch and tell him, without making eye contact, about the importance of being a man and getting a real job and forgetting about all this music melakey and so Thom would get a real job selling fake plastic Christmas trees door to door.

So before you curse your flaws think of Thom's sloth like eye and appreciate that your 'flaws' might be the things that are helping you achieve a higher level of awesomeness.

Are all women lost in a man Matrix?

I was watching an episode of Sex in the City the other day with my flat mate. After we finished watching the four neurotic New Yorkers she posed the interesting question, do men obsess about women as much as we obsess about men? I don’t even need to say it do I? Of course they bloody don’t. And I for one am really jealous of them!

We analyze each text message like we’re trying to crack the god damn De Vinci code and every date is pulled apart by interrogation style questioning from our girlfriends, What did he wear? What shoes did he have on? Was he wearing sports socks? Were his jeans too short so when he sat down you saw his socks?!!

Oh to be a man, to walk around in a simple world where only two questions exist. Was she fit? And did you shag her? Everything is so black and white, not the million shades of grey that girls spend hours trying to decipher. It’s like being trapped inside the matrix but instead of Neo helping us get out he adds to the confusion as we have to ring our girlfriends up to ask if it’s ok to date a man in a full pleather jacket. Get me outta here!

Why wrinkes are a lot like pubes

Now that I am in my late twenties there is no doubt that my body is changing. Notably my liver is showing its age with the two day hangovers that now seem to be the norm. Also showing the years is my face. The other night as I was brushing my teeth I was contouring my face slightly to make sure I reached my back molers and BAM all of a sudden i looked like Donatella Versace’s Grandmother. How the fuck did that happen? Where did these wrinkles come from?

Then i realized it was exactly the same as when I got pubes. I didn’t remember them turning up individually but all of a sudden I woke up as a 13 year old girl with 70’s porn muff. And it seems like it’s the same process with wrinkles. Now I have started to go sleep with my face so oiled and moisturized I have trouble not sliding off my pillow.

The return of the rear???

I brought a pair of highwaisted Levi shorts recently and when a put them on I realized they gave me Eighties bottom. To be honest I was shocked to see my bum on display as really our rears have had a big break from the spotlight. Even though they have been sucked into skinny jeans they have remained hidden under long tops and dresses. Men’s bottoms have also been enjoying a long hiatus as they have been left swimming in an ocean of denim for what seems like forever.

Would any woman appreciate a return of bum enhancing jeans? I think most of my friends are quite glad that their bum is behind them so they can pretend it doesn’t exist like a Chinese symbol tattoo you have on your back. I think this bad relationship most of us have with our bum would lead me to think that we would go for a minimizing rather than enhancing option.

Would a rear renaissance for men’s jeans be a good thing? I personally don’t get the whole ‘check out the arse on that’ thing. Men’s bottoms don’t even register for me. I would be severely traumatized if a man that I liked wore anything that highlighted his hiney.

Or even worse is when you see the seam of the jean going up the bum a little or if you see a man clench their buttocks! They usually do it when they’re having an awkward conversation with someone in the office. The poor seam becoming the reluctant slice of cheese in a buttock sandwich.

As our bodies start to lose their firmness it seems we also start to lose our firm restrictions on what makes a suitable mate. Were as in the past I may have tossed aside a perfectly good partner because they admitted to liking a couple of Nickelback songs, or having shoes that looked like they had orthopedic properties or sunglasses that looked like they had been designed by NASA. Now I wonder do these things really matter? Does the choice of lesuire trainer really make the man?

And if I am being more open minded does that mean I am being more mature and less fickle or am I getting worried that my next of kin might end up being a tabby called Mr Socks?

As the average age to get married is now 31 does that mean that we will be seeing less shallow matches happening based less on looks and more on true love? Or is it just that we realize that there is no such thing as a perfect partner and someone that treats you right but wears NASA sunglasses is better than some that wears Ray Bans and treats you like a turd?

I am sorry you're breaking up...

I think technology has the changed the whole break up process forever. Drunken dialing being a fine example. 20 years ago you would have to remember their number plus have the co-ordination to punch the buttons. And if you did call and they weren't home, unless you were sad enough to leave a message, you would get away scott-free but now with caller ID you're screwed.

You can't even wake up the next day and rely on your own memory loss to protect you from the shame, because your call log will show you the exact minute past sad-o'clock that you called or half-past heartbreak when you sent a text message asking what felt very like a very nonchalant question at the time but in the cold light of day just reeks of a bottle-of-the-house-red-desperation.

And that's just mobiles, never mind the inter-bloody-web. Thanks to crackbook seeing a pick of your exes new chick is only a click away. Back in the old days you would have to camp out in a bush for ages in the cold, now we can stalk from the comfort of our orthopedic office chairs. And we know the minute they start seeing someone new because of the little smug looking heart symbol that flashes up when they go 'in a relationship'

That's just post break up technology, don't get me started on breaking up with a text message...its not u its me :)

If you liked it then you should of given me a ring, innit?!

On the weekend i kissed a boy and to be honest it wasn't that great. He had a torpedo like tongue that was using my tonsils as target practice but i still ended up giving him my number. I didn't really want to give it to him but when i asked my mind to come up with a default number it panicked and hide behind a thin curtain of Mojitos. So i yelled my digits out and he eagerly punched them into his phone.
Now 3 days later and guess what? No word. I think some brave cat managed to get his torpedo like tongue in its clutches.
Lads, here's a heads up. You don't need to take our numbers if you don't want too. Sometimes a snog is, just a snog. A fleeting embrace that's never destined to go beyond a sweaty dancefloor. But as soon as you take a girls number you have taken the relationship past the doors of the overpriced nightclub. Now even though the girl doesn't really like you she will be destined for the next 3 days to be on edge waiting for you to text. Picking her phone up and pushing the keys to make sure the screen still lights up. Getting her phone out as soon as she emerges from the underground. Texting her self to make sure her phone is still working (so i hear).
Yes, just rip the plaster of rejection off right then and there. We will be fine as we have a thick alcoholic amour on that will reassure us that we still look like a white Beyonce. We will fall into the waiting arms of comforting girlfriends then bust out a heart felt rendition of Single Ladies. Now put your hands up, oh, oh, oh. oh, oh...