Though your heart is breaking

The amazing thing about my teeth is that they are still in my head – a minor miracle given the way I speak to people. As a victim of commercialism I am currently cleaning my pegs with a cocktail of toothpastes. Recipe to follow:
1/3 toothbrush Sensodyne Total Care Gentle Whitening
1/3 toothbrush Colgate MaxFresh with Cooling Crystals
1/3 toothbrush Arm & Hammer Brilliant Sparkle Crystal Clean-88 Plaque Removal for ULTRA CLEAN teeth.
Topped with a frosting of Hollywood Smile Pearl Drops Whitening Toothpaste.

Fuzzy logic

I am lying in bed trying to figure out whether sipping Diet Coke whilst eating Snickers somehow offsets the calories. I think it probably does.

There will be blood

Despite last nights musings on activism I awoke today in the real world of Liberty bed clothes and petty bourgeois concerns like chipped nail varnish and ingrowing hairs. Call me old fashioned but I will not pay some one £45 to humiliate me with a tub of hot wax. Thanks to Nair stripless hot wax, patience and my fundamentally cheap nature I have learnt to do my own bikini wax. Its only £6 a tub which equals about 10 Brazilians or 8 Hollywood’s depending on my mood, either way it adds up to huge savings in my beauty budget.

I love the New York Korean nail salons in the lower east side where it is possible to get a manicure and pedicure for $20! Even poor people have pedicures in the US – over here it means that you have either come up trumps on a scratchcard or you are getting married. I did once make the mistake of letting one of these Korean salons have a go at more than my nails and that was a once only mistake! I decided and even while I was saying it, part of me was yelling ‘shut the fuck up’ to have a full on porno bikini wax because it was like $20 or some kind of a price that should have raised the alarm. I can’t quite piece together too many of the details but basically this evil bitch who I realised way to late had probably been a hench woman for some Korean dictator back in the day, ripped out every single public hair I owned all at once with some filthy rag. Then (it gets worse) as I was loosing consciousness with the pain, she started plucking out bits she had missed from my bloodied pubis with some rusty tweezers. It was the Guantanamo Bay of New York City Beauty Salons. I couldn't even look down for a week – the weight of a gaze would have been too much to bear. So fingers and toes only from now on. The point of this post was actually to share with you all that I have found a fabulous cheap nail salon in Soho where you can have a manicure from as little as £10. Its a cute salon called Glams of Soho, 30 Windmill Street opposite the clip joints.

More dash than cash

I did a really bad thing – it was so bad I may well do it again. I purchased a dress to attend a wedding then I wore it extremely carefully to the event (if you can call it that) and this morning I sniffed it, pressed it, wrapped it and took it back! What a buzz! And although I feel bad – I feel much better than I did when I had an expensive dress that I didn’t want & couldn’t afford in my wardrobe and a couple of hundred quid missing from my account. I am not suggesting that we all make a habit of this; however, if you are tempted it is important to follow a few rules. Do not ‘borrow’ anything you cannot afford to buy. Don’t risk your rent to have some idiot pour red wine over a cream Chanel Jackie O suit. For best results, no smoking, drinking or eating, during your loan - wear perfume on your hair and ankles only. Give pale items a complete miss. If it helps with the guilt, know this – department stores let celebrities, photographers, stylists and magazines take items to wear for functions and shoots and then they put back the price tags and hang them out on the shop floor often with out so much as a dry clean. It’s how they treat us so why wouldn’t it be how we treat them?

The inconvenient truth

My body is not so much a temple as a no go zone I have become healthy purely by default. I don’t drink or smoke, I exercise daily and although I feel and see the benefits of that the fact is that I would like to loose 5 kilos and the only way to do that in my experience is to diet. Therein lies the problem - I hate to abstain from my favourite foods. Yesterday for example, I had a fruit crumble from Food For Thought for lunch, a cream slice from Maison B for tea and dinner at an Italian restaurant where I ate a vegetarian starter and a tiramisu. I realise that in order to achieve what I laughingly refer to as my ‘bikini body’ I am going to have to review my snacking schedule. My favourite diet short term is one that was apparently made up by heart Drs who needed patients to loose 10lbs pronto to prepare for heart surgery! And I think I've got problems – it is the strangest combination of foods but on the up one of them is ice cream. I substitute veggie protein for the meat choices and I think it still works or it would if I could stick to it.

How to get a hot body

High on the list of things I have never wanted to do, camping, bungee jumping , tattooing my face was Bikram Yoga – 90 minutes of strenuous Hatha Yoga postures in a room heated to ‘centre of the sun’ centigrade. However I am both greedy and weak willed so when a friend talked me into going along with her and signing up for a months unlimited classes for £29.00 I trotted along like a lamb. To be realistic anything that is unlimited for under £30.00 is unlikely to be pleasant but you don’t get to try the class first so I paid up and went inside the studio. The room was large, carpeted and extremely hot, I spread a towel on my mat and lay down next to about 30 other women and three men. I wriggled around on my mat ‘limbering up’ - ten minutes later the class was about to start and I was ready to go home. I can’t remember what actually happened – I can recall laughing out loud at the very idea of one of the instructions – staring at the clock wondering if time had actually stood still – wondering what the hell had possessed me to come along etc. I did manage to do a few manoeuvres I am not too bad at standing on one leg (I some times practice at the bus stop) I do OK if I am lying down, I had to be careful pointing my toes because I broke one of them in a hideous cleaning accident over the weekend and I can’t bend my spine backwards at all. My friend said even staying in the room for the full 90 minutes is an achievement and it was. Everybody, even ladylike me was dripping sweat, but anything that traumatic has got to be good for you. Some of the women in the class had amazing bodies, I am going to use up all my free classes to see if I can get one too.