The Museum of Expensive Things

I went to Harrods yesterday. I hate shopping, but no one goes to Harrods to shop, do they? They go there to point, gasp and and do little high pitched laughs at the price tags. 

Because it's Christmas shopping time now, there was a higher proportion of 'real Harrods customers' amongst the grubby parker-wearing, camera-wielding riffraff yesterday.

I saw lots of little groups of women in panda/unicorn-fur hats and designer ponchos being herded along by Harrods salesmen, followed by a trail of husbands, all with Slavic accents, stylishly swept-back hair and pointy shoes that made click-clacky noises on the floor. 

I have always been fascinated by rich people. That could come across as quite condescending. If it was the other way round and I was a rich person 'fascinated by poor people' then it would be. But wealth is innately flashy, isn't it. It screams to be seen. All the expensive things in Harrods (anything over six figures) are kept behind glass boxes beneath designer lighting. It's not a shop, it's a museum. The things are there to be looked at – gawped at, gasped at.

It's not the things themselves that fascinate me, or the people themselves. Take away their tailored clothes and their money and they're just as flawed and boring as I am. It's the air of exclusivity that enamours me: the glass boxes.  

There is nothing in Harrods that I particularly want. I certainly didn't want the £200 furry heart-shaped Christmas tree decoration I saw for sale yesterday, or the £4,000 suitcase. I'm quite happy with the phone I have. I don't hanker for a 4K TV, or a designer coffee machine. I don't even mind that much that the backspace key just came off my laptop. Perhaps I'm naive or in denial, but I don't think there is an object I could buy in Harrods, or anywhere in fact, that would make me happier than I am now. 

And yet I still want to be rich – and, although I can't justify this in any way, I've always believed that one day I will be. It's a strange thing that's difficult to explain. Delusional, perhaps. But I've never been too bothered about my £20,000 student loan, or my disappointing pay slips, because I've always known that one day it won't matter. One day I'll have more money than I know what to do with. 

But the question isn't why am I so certain I'll be rich, it's: why should I even want to be rich, when I have all I need to be happy, and very little interest in buying things? 

Alain de Botton (I've mentioned him in a previous blog about love. He talks a lot of sense) recently wrote an article that questions the motivations of the rich. Why do billionaires carry on working long hours to make money when they don't even need to? Alain explains:

"The rich are not, therefore, working to make more money with an eye to spending it. They are making money in order to be liked. They are doing so for the sake of status, as a way of keeping score and letting the world know of their value as human beings. The rich work for love and for honour. They stay up late at the office out of vanity – because they want to be able to walk into rooms full of strangers and be swiftly recognised by those that matter and deemed miraculous and clever for having made fortunes, whose size is carefully recorded by the media the world over."

Is wanting to be rich a way of wanting to be recognised, loved, honoured? I am on the lower end of the nation's pay scale; does that make me feel undervalued, ignored?

A Taste of Money

I once spent 48 hours as a rich person. My job sometimes requires me to do things rich people do so I can write about them. It's a good deal. This September I found myself in Lisbon being chauffeured around in a Mercedes minibus with blacked-out windows and a personal tour guide. The plan was to spend the night in the Ritz hotel and return the following day to the Harrods terminal in Luton on a private jet the size of a Boeing 737. I'm not going to pretend I felt spoilt, guilty, or over-indulged on this absurdly luxurious trip. It was brilliant. Every second of it, from being at Heathrow Airport and travelling to a country I'd never been to before, to stepping into a suite the size of my flat with the whole of Lisbon spread out beneath my balcony. I laughed. I laughed hysterically, loudly and at length as I ripped my clothes off, wrapped myself in my Ritz robe, slipped into my Ritz slippers, jumped up and down on the emperor-sized bed and popped open a bottle of port. I simply couldn't believe I was there. The room was mine, the view was mine, the slippers were mine, the port was mine and I had three hours to enjoy it all before meeting back up with the other journalists for dinner.

I swam, I saunad, I rubbed ice into my thighs, I blow-dried my hair and escaped the hotel for a walk in the warm late-afternoon sun. I felt freedom. Even though there was a time limit, I felt this sense of utter bliss. I was somewhere else, somewhere I had never been before, experiencing things I had never experienced before, and there was no guilt. Every day I feel a sense of guilt. Guilt for spending too much money, eating too much, not exercising, not working, not writing. Here, my sole purpose was to enjoy myself. Everything was free, everything was planned for us. All of my needs were taken care of. It wasn't the level of luxury that excited me, but the lack of responsibility, and the feeling of pure freedom that comes with that. 

That night I got chatting to two publishers over the remnants of my hotel room port. They were talking about watch brands. One of them said the watch he was wearing was worth £10,000. I looked at it. To me it didn't look particularly special. It didn't conceal any 007 weapons, it didn't expand into a semi-detached house in the suburbs. I asked the men what they found so interesting about tiny wearable clocks. They said women have their beauty products, their jewellery and their shoes. Men need something to make them feel special too. I said I didn't even notice he was wearing a watch. 

Status. Feeling special. That is a good reason to want to be rich, like Alain de Botton said. But I don't think it's my motivation. My mum once bought me a designer dress from an outlet store in Swindon. It was a really nice dress but I didn't feel more beautiful or important when I wore it. I don't think anyone knew it was designer - and if they did, would they respect or like me more?

Questions for Rich People

When I see people who blatantly have a lot of money, I feel like I'm going to burst with questions. Are all your friends rich? How much money do you spend on food shopping? What do you complain about? Are you happy? What do you do in your spare time? Do you ever go for a walk and think what's the point of it all? Do you feel special? Guilty? Powerful? Absurd?

I would delight in seeing Kim Kardashian's monthly incomings and outgoings.

When I walk through the endless labyrinthine halls of Harrods, I am faced with shelves and shelves of things I cannot have. Gleaming sparkly stuff in glass boxes that will eventually end up in the house of someone who can afford them. I wonder who they are and why they need a £300 sterling silver cup holder, or a diamond encrusted pen for £13,750. Would we get on? Could we be friends? 

When it comes to money, there are endless things to think about. It divides us and ruins us, and if we're not careful, it consumes us. Like Smeagle's ring. But despite all the wealth, extravagance and beauty in Harrods - the ladies powder room still smelt like poo, and in a way that's quite comforting, isn't it? 

Big Sister

Having a big sister is like having someone carve a path out in front of you, hacking back the brambles and flattening the nettles - taking the brunt of life so you don't have to. When we were young, she used to turn the light off, put a scarf over her head, talk in a high pitched voice and tell me she was a little alien waiting for her dad's spaceship to pick her up and take her back to space. I believed her with all my heart. Every time. Once, she climbed into the wardrobe and told me to keep my eyes closed for 60 seconds. When I opened them, she was downstairs in the dining room. For a long time I believed she could teleport.

I believed everything my sister told me. I adored her. Even when she pushed me into the scary study in our grandparent's big old house, turned off the light and locked me in. Even when she stabbed me in the hand with a pencil, leaving me with a piece of graphite permanently embedded in my palm. Even when she passed off a box of broken things she didn't want any more as a 'present', I still took it excitedly, honoured that I was allowed to have her stuff. 

Her stuff always seemed better than my stuff. Even when it was broken.

She had a knack of making things look nice. Her bedroom was always immaculate, with all her little bottles of make up and creams lined up neatly on her dressing table, and all her books in order. Over the years, she learnt the exact position of everything in her room so if I so much as breathed on her Shaggy CD, she'd know about it. 

When I went to my first disco, she did my hair and make up so I felt grown up and glamorous. When my guinea pig Smarty died, she wrote me a poem about her flying up to guinea pig heaven and meeting a boy guinea pig called Marty. When I worried about not being pretty enough, she told me that when I was older, I would appreciate what I had. When I struggled with GCSE revision, she made up a song on her guitar about the water cycle so I would remember it. She's the only one who knows the sea monkey dance. 

She knows words like metatarsophalangeal and multifidus, she taught herself the guitar, she ran a half marathon in 2 hours 9 minutes and then came back to cycle next to me. She bought her own house and made a life for herself in a town far away, she climbs, she sings, she writes stories and she wraps presents really, really well.

So this is a homage to my beautiful big sister Emma. Even though we're proper grown ups now and we don't see each other much, I still look up to you (even though you're a lot shorter than me now).

Whatever happened to that little alien, anyway?

Video of me definitely doing a pull up today

Day 59

It's now been two months since I made a resolution to do a pull up by the end of the year. Seeing as I've just finished a course in multimedia journalism, it's only right that I embrace my newfound skills. So here's a video of me in the gym illustrating just how far I've come on this tumultuous journey...

My belly the blobfish

DAY 54

We're 54 days into 2014, ever so slowly creeping through the shit months of the year where nothing happens except weather. 

Finally it feels like this relentlessly cold, wet, stormy winter could be coming to an end. It's projectiled the worst of it onto our doorsteps and now it's wiping its proverbial mouth and preparing to be a bit more dignified from now on. It's almost time to get excited about the summer again - BBQs, swimming, sunbathing, sunny runs, long walks, weekends away. Except the reality is that I will just sit inside like I am now but with a higher guilt level.

Things have changed! I have work. It's a little unreliable, but it's with a magazine and it's paid so I'm happy. It all happened very quickly. One minute I was enjoying my leisurely job-seeker-allowance-funded unemployed time playing WordHero and other productive things, and the next I was in an office in Brighton sub-editing that week's issue. It's a little challenging, but exciting. Like Devil Wears Prada but without the fashion, glamour, or mean people. It could turn into a permanent position too, so I hope I'm making a good impression. On one day though I did wear the top my mum bought back as a present from New Zealand, and it was only when I got home and looked properly in the full length mirror that it dawned on me that having 'WILD KIWIS' emblazoned across my chest might not have given off the 'she's got her journalistic shit together' look I probably should be going for.  

Aside from the work, I'm still 5:2 dieting and exercising towards that ever-elusive dream of doing a pull up by the end of the year. So far, I have:

• Lost 5lbs in total
• Reduced my body fat percentage by 5%
• Gained 5lbs of muscle (I've got 7stn 9 of pure henchness now) (but can still only do girly press ups)
• Been very hungry every Monday and Thursday
• Felt a little disconcerted by the fact that my belly looks quite a lot like this:

 

It's even got that sad downturned mouth when I sit down.

In case you're interested, a blobfish is essentially a shiny face that lives between 2,000 and 3,900 ft below the surface of the ocean. It spends its days bobbing around just above the seabed, expending as little energy as possible and swallowing anything that happens to float in front of it (mostly little deep sea shrimpy things but I suspect the blobfish is not fussy). I think I may have been a blobfish in a previous life.

Interestingly, Google has provided a visual example of what 5lbs of fat and 5lbs of muscle look like, which is this:

It's satisfying to think I've replaced all that yellow jelly on the left with the muscle on the right. From where, I really don't know. Probably my tits. This also shows that weight isn't necessarily a good indicator of how well your diet/exercise regime is going. Possibly the best thing to do (and I haven't done this) is to measure yourself.

Anyway, I'm boring myself now. Goodbye, thanks for reading.

Love

Romance makes me feel a bit sick. Ever since my first boyfriend in Year 4 demonstrated his affection for me by giving me one of those plastic eggs with gloop and an alien inside, I've been a bit weird about public displays of affection. Don't get me wrong, I liked the gloopy alien very much, I just didn't like the niggling feeling of embarrassment and guilt that plagued me afterwards, as I sat there pondering the meaning of love while squeezing alien gloop between my little 8-year-old fists.

I still feel much the same now. It feels like romance is a performance - a series of actions and symbols that we all act out because we think we should. Giving flowers, candlelight, hearts, the colour red.

During my late teens and early 20s I was single - sometimes out of choice, sometimes not. But during that time, I became very happy with my independence, and very cynical about love. I read a book recently that really resonated with me and that period of my life. It's called 'Essays in Love' by Alain de Botton. In it he dissects the process of 'falling in love'. It's a brutally honest account of love and I like it because it covers the things we don't like to admit to ourselves or each other. The doubts, fears and illusions. The pain of losing something, the confusion of feeling something for someone that you once felt for someone else, the boredom of domesticity. 

The rose-tinted gloss of Valentine's Day hides all of these things, but this is the truth of love. And it's so much more complex than anything we're drip-fed by Hollywood - so much more enjoyable. It's not cynical to acknowledge the dark side of love. In a way it makes it easier to be with someone and forge a relationship that runs deeper than a few gestures or happy memories.

I can't really do the book justice by writing about it, so here are a few passages to give you a taste:

“We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?”  

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

“.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.”    

  “The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.”  
  

Running in the wind, not like the wind

Blustery run selfie

DAY 43

Today I ran 5 miles to a Chinese buffet. Not because of a sudden uncontrollable carb craving, but because I'd left my purse there on Sunday after meeting old school friends for dinner. If I really did run 5 miles every time I had a sudden food craving, I wouldn't be here banging on about my 5:2 diet and exercise regime. I'd be skinny and rich and shouting abuse at fat people from my window while doing one armed pull ups.    

So I ran to town today because, unlike normal 23-year-olds, I can't drive yet, and I didn't have any change for the bus because my purse was at a Chinese buffet. Thinking about it now, it must have been quite a shock for all the lunchtime diners when a 5ft 11, wind-swept, purple-faced woman(?) crashed through the doors in full running gear demanding her purse back. 

The run was difficult, and in many ways comic. I was facing into the wind the whole way, and the wind was STRONG. It felt like one of those dreams where you're trying to run but you're just not getting anywhere and it's so annoying. It was like someone had put a big sheet up in front of me and I was trying to run through it. Not that I know what that feels like. Pointless activity. I had to lean right over and pump my arms like Tom or Jerry and I could sense the people driving past laughing at me, with their comfortable interiors and heating systems and limitless freedom to go wherever they want without breaking a sweat or looking a bit scary.  

But in the end I got my purse back and got a run in and at least I'm not being an unemployed person cliché. I haven't watched any day-time telly. In fact, I've turned into something of a Californian housewife (without the tan or rich husband), doing all sorts of annoying productive things and exploring my inner creative person. Yoga, painting, website designing, running, writing, cooking. If I wasn't so keen to stop spongeing off my very patient parents, I'd give up the job hunt altogether. I think we all would. I'd be a good lottery winner. Not the 'divorce, tummy tuck, tasteless mansion and bingo addict' type you hear about in the Daily Mail.

It was diet day on Monday and it will be again tomorrow. I took pictures of breakfast and lunch but forgot about dinner. The porridge is supposed to be 25g at 100 calories but it exploded in the microwave again. The lunch was pretty good - half a piece of brown bread with a dippy egg and lettuce, tomato and cucumber salad (200 cals). I have the same very hot chilli stir fry for dinner on every diet day now.

....Which leads me nicely onto my next titbit (good word) - I'm going to see the Red Hot Chilli Peppers play at the Isle of Wight festival in June! Can't WAIT to see Anthony Keidis and his paedo moustache in real life.    



Exploded porridge - 25g, half teaspoon of honey: 100 cal
Might sell this one to Nigella.

Working out like Gerard Butler

DAY 35

If you ignore what a stupid name 'Gerard' is and look past the slightly mental eyes, you'll notice that Gerard Butler is quite fit in a rugged, Scottish sort of way. The best example of this can of course be found in the film 300, where the combination of oily eight-pack, shark tooth necklace, cape, leather budgie smuggler and angry bludgeoning is almost too much for a pervy girl like me to handle.

Before the cast started filming, they had to train hard for four months to get the chiselled physiques you'd expect from an ancient warrior army. The routine Mr Butler and his co-stars followed has become known as the '300 rep Spartan workout' because, as you might expect, it involves doing 300 reps of varying exercises without a break.  

After four months of this, the actor's soft belly had transformed into rock hard abs, his thighs great slabs of bulging muscle and his arms convincingly the big, hairy arms of an angry Spartan King. So I figured I'd give this workout a try.

My boyfriend-turned-personal-trainer designed me a 300 workout I could do in the gym, which looked exactly like this:

10 minute cardio warm up
2 minutes of alternating sit ups and crunches
25x press ups
Start to doubt one's ability to complete another 275 reps
25x box jumps (never forget your sports bra when you attempt these babies. Even if you're a man.)
25x lat pulls
25x low row
2 minutes of sit ups, just as a nice break from the reps
1 minute plank
25x squats
Try to run off, get caught and dragged back
25x shoulder press
25x lat pulls
25x chest press
2 minutes of sit ups
That exercise where you sit on the floor, lean back a bit, lift your feet off the floor, catch a medicine ball and twist to touch it to the floor before throwing it back (don't know what it's called but it hurts.)
25x rope pulls
25x tricep extensions
25x bicep curls
25x press ups
2 minutes of sit ups
IMMINENT DEATH

It sounds difficult, but you can adjust the weights to suit your ability and it's actually quite fun. My arms are getting hairier so I think it's working.