Waxing Guilty....

So having had a fabulous rant about the evil demented beauticians who have decided to take a sicky and so can't sort out the aesthetic disaster that is me, I now have to grovel, eat humble pie and generally say sorry.

So they still can't give me an appointment but they are sending me two spa day passes to make up for ruining my holiday (and possibly my life, who knows what could have happened if the appointment had been met.) So now, I feel slightly guilty, faintly chirpier and less afraid of crossing their threshold again.

Horrible thought has just occurred. What if this is a double bluff? They are luring me in with a free pass in order to drown me in the whirlpool and melt the remains away in the wax bucket? The ultimate revenge for the irritated and irritating customer. Aaaargh.

Revenge of the Welsh Yeti

So, I failed miserably to write a blog yesterday. You could argue that this was a good thing as it meant that I actually did rather a large amount of work and ticked off all the pre holiday panic list by four o'clock.

So now here I am with my living earnt for today and only my Victorian bathing suit to pack for my holiday. I should be a leprechaun of happiness but instead I feel rather worried and depressed. I hate that.

What is truly cross making is that the reason for this misery is that the Beauty Salon who were charged with the responsibility of stripping away the last of my winter coat and buffing me up to look gorgeous for my holiday rang this morning and CANCELLED ME!!!!! How could they. I was relying on them transform me from the Welsh Yeti to something akin to Catherine Zeta Jones before she became Mrs Smug Douglas. I feel robbed, cheated and victimised all at once and all the joys of the imminent Easy Jet jaunt to sun, sand and a lot of Rose has leached away. Damn them.

They didn't even seem to appreciate the appalling nature of what they had done. In fact they seemed to think I was over reacting when I cried down the phone and then threatened to hunt them down with my hairy yeti legs. Now I have the additional worry that I can never book any sort of treatment there again as theywill think I am deranged and will torture me with hotter than normal wax and dulcet comments about incipient moustaches and the fact that they aren't magicians and can only work with what they are given. Bitches.

So now my holiday is ruined. It is going to take a lot of Rose and possibly a caftan to cover up the disaster and rescue anything from this debacle.

Running to the grave.

So, one million brownie points for me. I went running all on my own last night. For at least a hundred miles I think (well, maybe a mile). Now I am probably going to die. I think my knees will never work again and one of my thighs feels as though it has been injected with plaster of paris, that has set to a rock solid and immovable rigidity. The good news is that apparently I do have muscles, as they all hurt.

The upside to this imminent death is that it was one of those ravishingly beautiful evenings. I was running up by a lake in the mountains. It is surrounded by forest and the moorland and the light had that 10 million pixel clarity to it that you usually see in the wilds of Montana where no car has ever sullied the air with exhaust fumes. It was beautiful. Well, until I ran through a swarm of insects and couldn't see anymore thanks to the fact that I had inhaled half of them, and the rescue teams were trying to break into my asophogus through my eyeballs.

Who said exercise wasn't exciting?

What to do with £50 million?

I had supper with friends on Saturday night - yes, I do have friends. During the second bottle of wine the question of unlimited riches came up, as it likes to. How would you change your life? What would you keep? What would you hire mercenaries to get rid of permanently?

It's an interesting question. There are two ways to answer it. Apply the £50 million to your existing life, or choose to ditch said life entirely and start all over again. I tend to go for the former. I mean most of my more realistic daydreams are based on what might actually be possible, rather than fantasy island stuff. As I don't buy lottery tickets (I rely on finding the winning lottery ticket that some poor sod has dropped!), the chances of this kind of money ever being available to change my life are pretty slim. Consequently my sudden riches daydreams take the form of wanting to change all the carpet in the house, have somebody to iron all my sheets for me and someone to do the mowing. I can't quite get my head around an amount of money that would enable me to have new sheets everyday for the rest of my life.

I also get faintly squirmy at the idea of what I would do everyday if I really didn't have to work ever again. I mean, as you know I am not married, or even dating anyone so how would a single girl pass a lifetime of non financially motivated time????? I'll have to think about it.

Wasted Weekend, in all the wrong ways.

I am in shock. I have just had an entire weekend where I didn't have to go anywhere or do anything. This is rare for me. I seem to be in my car more than my house and frequently expect to get a council tax bill for a second home. This weekend was the exception. Typically it was repellent weather all weekend. I can't really complain about the whole water situation - at least it means I acutally have some of the vital stuff. I've run out before and the charm of going to the pond with a bucket wears pretty thin after about four minutes.

The last time that it happened I had friends coming to stay from London. Now they already think that Wales is a backwater which probably needs innoculations and a passport to go to. I'm not sure whether they were resigned or astonished when they rang to ask if they could bring anything and I casually said that 8 litres of bottled water could be good. That night, their son was bathed in Evian in the kitchen sink..... The joys of country life.

So, there I was with a free weekend stretching out in front of me like an American Highway (without the bill boards and fast food of course). And what did I do? Pretty much stopped at the first layby, unpacked my tupperware and watched the world go by without achieving much of anything other than a massive calorie intake and a refusal to get wet on Saturday or blown away on Sunday. Pretty perfect really.

Unfortunately, as with all good things, there is a side effect. Guilt. There were all sorts of things I should have got done with those endless hours of playtime. None of it remotely playful. Tackled the wood heap that needs to be stacked so that it can dry in time for the winter, which is probably only a month away knowing this country. Battled with the voracious goosegrass that is taking over the entire garden. I am expecting it to make its way into the house for breakfast soon. Weeded the vegetable patch, where I can't see the vegetables for the miscellany of other plantlife that has made itself at home in that particular 8 square metres of ground. Written all my thank you letters, painted the doors of the house, which I have been promising myself I would do for the last seven months. That is just the highlights of my never ending list. I did none of them. Hence combination pleasure / pain result for the weekend.

Having written that, I am now worried that my life is tragically dull. Should my weekend not have been filled with Sex and the City style dramas? Brief love affairs, Cosmopolitans and Manolo whatever they are called? Ok, so this is Wales, the best I can hope for is a gossip at the bottom gate with the four hundred year old farmer, endless cups of coffee, and a new pair of Wellingtons, but you know what I mean. I've never been a Carrie style girl, and I love my life, but there are moments when you set out your list of chores and realise that things aren't ever going to turn out the way you expected. Life isn't a box of chocolates, it's a freezer in need of defrosting, and a box of paperwork that I haven't any interest in dealing with.

Jogging hell

So, the recent horrifying arrival of my 35th birthday (I was so sure I was going to be 34) made me make the appalling decision that I would have to start taking exercise. This was based on the fact that 5 years of sitting around drinking, smoking and eating was not having the expected result of turning me into a slender reed who can look good in a potato sack. It just made me look like a potato sack.

Having realised that I was actually going to have to do something to fix this I promptly ate two mars bars and rang a friend who seems to like exercise. I suggested that she might like me to come running with her and once she had recovered from the desire to laugh hysterically, and had assured herself that I didn't want to just run to the pub, she foolishly agreed to let me accompany her in her bi weekly run around the lanes.

I thought I would try out this running lark myself on Wednesday night without an audience. So armed with my only pair of tracksuit bottoms, that I normally use for painting and so look like an advert for Art Attack, I took the loyal hound and decided to run to the cattle grid, just half a mile away. This was not a success. Quite aside from the fact that as a plan it involved running, the field my track runs through is filled with cows and their brand new, wobbly legged calves. It seems that they view jogging with great suspicion (so do I come to that). Having let me through on the way out they point blank refused to let me back. Consequently, it took 30 minutes of negotiating myself through a bog and two streams to get home and I was thoroughly off running by then.

However, as the genuine bona fide heroine of this tale (also the villain as I am the only character), I met up with said friend for a run last night. She promised no undue strain and we started walking, which I thoroughly approved of. Then she suggested we break into a slow jog. This was not too bad for the first 100 yards. After a mile (most of which I walked) I could no longer feel my legs. Instead I could feel two limp pieces of spaghetti attached to my trainers. I had no control over my pasta leg substitutes and it is a miracle that I didn't just splat nose first onto the comforting tarmac. And we hadn't even turned for home yet.....

My jogging tormentor was amazing - full of encouragement and not one word of bitter reprimand that her four mile run had turned into a long walk with me huffing like an asthmatic carthorse. We finally, after a few more yards of me whining like a child did a bit more jogging, interspersed with a lot more walking. We made it home having been thoroughly drenched by a light welsh shower that saturated every article of clothing and gave me enough water to wring out and fill a water butt. This at least solves my water shortage dilemma.

I thought that was the worse over, until I woke this morning. And couldn't move - at all. Stiff as a board was nothing on me. I couldn't bend anything. If you had starched me I would have been bendier. I finally made it to a telephone to phone my jogging guru and find out if this was remotely normal or if she could perhaps send an ambulance there and then.

Now I am publicly stating that she assured me this was normal and that it would only happen once. That I would run like a gazelle next time (Sunday)and would never be stiff again. And by god, if I am going through that exercise torture again she had better be right.

I'm not sure that I don't love being a potato sack having found what all those slender reeds are going through .....

shagging rabbits

In my eternal quest to keep my garden free of rabbits I occasionally line up the sights of the air rifle on any flopsy, mopsy or cotton tail foolish enough to come within range. This afternoon, they not only came vaguely within range but they were actually shagging, like, well - like rabbits.

And no, I couldn't carry out the ultimate coitus interruptus, so I left them to it. I'll pay though when there are hundreds of the little fiends raping and pillaging my meagre kitchen garden.

Lost the will to work

OK, so I worked like a dervish all morning, honestly, I did. Well apart from oversleeping and starting much later than I will admit to (10.15 - oops!). Having juggled various things with effortless ease (Cirque de Soleil look here) I then made the fatal mistake of surfing.

That's it - rest of the afternoon was a washout. I have played here, played there, and failed to finish what I was supposed to. And I don't really care that much either. The only downside to surfing (particularly blogs) is that I end up feeling everybody else out there is funnier, more accomplished and better at wasting time than I am. I thought I was good at frivolity and frittering......

OK. this is it. I am going back to work. Stop distracting me.....................

Missing David Tennant

So I have been meaning to book tickets to see David Tennant in Hamlet for MONTHS now. I finally get round to it and they are bloody well sold out. How typical is that? In fact it may be the story of my life. I know what I want, but I am too busy faffing about that I never get around to doing any of these things that will make my life a shiny happy fabulous place that other people will envy.

So, what have I been doing that meant I didn't book tickets - reading other peoples blogs and laughing a lot for a start. OK, so there was a bit of work there as well but who wants to know about that.

I am desperately trying to keep my excessive crow population under control with an air rifle. The problem is that they are sneaky little suckers. I can walk out of the house and go and polish their beaks but if I appear with a gun they fly to 5 yards beyond range and laugh their asses off.

For all those precious nature lovers out there don't get stressy with me. Those things eat all the songbirds and peck the eyes out of live lambs and they are taking over the world (along with buttercups).

The joys of being childless

Ok, so now it is raining really pretty hard. This is good. I need rain as I was bored of watering the garden and was also (and possibly more importantly) running out of water. So to celebrate this noah like downpour I lit the log burner in the office, put on the radio and pretended to work for a few hours. Actually drank a lot of coffee and diet coke, made a futile plan to go jogging (which I can't bear but feel I should start doing) and read a book. Not much really done on the actual work front then.

Having said all that this is a moment to be grateful for the no children situation. If I had small children (or large ones come to that) then my day would have been a dazed blur of school runs, snot, feeding and feeling inadequate. Now I am not saying that I don't feel inadequate occasionally, I mean unless you are Madonna and believe your own press, everyone feels inadequate sometimes (you all do don't you?? Please say you do and that I am not a freak....), sorry a bit off point there. Getting back to it, I can feel as inadequate as I like because I am not potentially warping someone elses life by doing so - Hurrah. Thought I'd share that with all of you before returning to my book and a new cup of coffee.

Rainy days need chocolate and bad television

Is it just me, or do rainy days always instill a need for chocolate, a roaring fire and some old school Indiana Jones / James Bond type film on television? What they don't cry out for is sitting in the office surrounded by filing that you don't intend to do, bills you don't want to look at and notes you haven't typed up. Obviously that describes some hypothetical slob's office, not mine......

Of course, having spent yesterday loitering with intent around the garage, I sort of have to be in the office. There are moments I hate being my own boss. Quite aside from the complication of trying to give myself a verbal warning and an annual review, it can make days like this very noisy inside my head. One side of my brain whinging that it doesn't want to be at work, and the other getting all headmistressy and telling me to 'buck up' and 'knuckle down'. Both unattractive phrases to start with, let alone extremeley unappealing as activities to pass the day with.

At some point whatever work that I do manage to achieve is going to have to be taken down to the post office to be sent. Now for most of you this might be a simple task but for me it involves opening two gates in the pouring rain. I can hear some of you thinking so what? But think about it - this is one of those classic 'living on your own' frustrations. There I am in the car on my own. I get to the gate, stop. Get out and slip in the sheep / cow sh*t, open gate and hook it back. Return to car, forget to wipe feet and cover foot well in aforementioned cow / sheep deposits. Drive through gate, repeat performance and that is just the first one. and I'll have to do the whole thing again on the way back....... So after my 4 gate / 8 mile round trip, I usually discover the post office is closed for some obscure reason such as the fact that it is half day, it is lunch time, tea time, tool time - you see where I am coming from. It does put me off coming down from my mountain.

I expect the overwhelming urge for chocolate will induce me to tackle the rutted track, sas style escapee sheep who try to 'great escape' it out of the gates when I am not looking, and the cattle in the third field who consider it to be their life's mission to hold the road against me. The chocolate had better be good.

Waiting for the garage

Who knew that the moment I would put ethereal ink to fictional page would be sitting, waiting for my car to be serviced in the Skoda showroom? Turns out they have free web access along with coffee bars, magazines and very slow mechanics. Good cars though.

There is a nice anonymity to the idea of blogging. That everyone might read your entry, or nobody at all. You could argue it is the perfect diary form. Let's face it if you write a paper diary you are always writing it with a view to the fact that somebody may read it, whilst pretending that you think nobody ever will. So I say, go for broke, write online and see what happens. Enjoy the idea of a lonely farmer in New Zealand tripping over your typing in the middle of the night.

Having thought it would be tricky to set all this up, it turns out to be alarmingly easy so here I am, and there are you. This is the point where we shake hands and wonder if we have forgotten each others names already.

A few things first. I wanted to call this blog a variety of fabulous different things, but none of them were available. I loved that. It says that there a wealth of people out there with imaginations working overdrive who are writing and reading in every spare minute they can pretend they are working.

That digresses slightly from the point though -the title I settled for in the end perhaps implies that my marital status (or not) is of overwhelming importance in my life and it isn't. That's kind of the point really. Shall I set the scene for you?

I'm 35 (just), single and always have been. I live on my own, with a dog. I have family and friends and a company that I have set up and kept running (miraculously) for three and a half years now. And I'm still trying to work out what all this means for my life, and why it is that though I am debt free, have a career of sorts and all the other things we are encouraged to want I can feel restless and panicked that I am missing something in the big picture.

Unfortunately for you, my car is now ready so this is the end of my first post. Better than having the last post I suppose.........