Notorious miser in sensational U-turn over Xmas denialism

London, England —December 1843

Yesterday, upon a crisp December morn, the esteemed author, Mr. Charles Dickens, Esq., graced our humble publication with his presence. A man esteemed for his social conscience and literary prowess, Mr. Dickens regaled us with a tale that could only be described as a marvel as if from one of his own stories – A Christmas Carol, one might dare say!

“Alas, young sir,” Mr. Dickens declared with a twinkle in his eye, “my connection with Mr. Scrooge is but slight. However, his reputation precedes him! A man of flint, they say, with a heart as cold and unyielding as a winter’s stone. Secretive and solitary as a hermit crab, with a miserly disposition that chills one to the very bone. The last time I glimpsed this grasping curmudgeon, his very features seemed frozen in a perpetual grimace, his nose like a sharpened icicle, and his lips pursed tight as a purse string. Yet, through it all, his voice, grating as a rusty hinge, speaks volumes of his cunning and lack of Christian charity. Does this paint a sufficient picture, dear sir?”

“Alas, young sir,” Mr. Dickens declared with a twinkle in his eye, “my connection with Mr. Scrooge is but slight. However, his reputation precedes him! A man of flint, they say, with a heart as cold and unyielding as a winter’s stone. Secretive and solitary as a hermit crab, with a miserly disposition that chills one to the very bone. The last time I glimpsed this grasping curmudgeon, his very features seemed frozen in a perpetual grimace, his nose like a sharpened icicle, and his lips pursed tight as a purse string. Yet, through it all, his voice, grating as a rusty hinge, speaks volumes of his cunning and lack of Christian charity. Does this paint a sufficient picture, dear sir?”

“Patience, young sir!” Mr. Dickens chuckled. “We must first establish the depths of Mr Scrooge’s penny-pinching. Only yesterday, the poor man harshly evicted a friend of mine from his very counting house—a kind soul collecting for the Hospital for Sick Children, no less! An institution I myself hold dear. What would it have inconvenienced this miserly old sinner to part with a few of his shillings for those innocent souls?”

Mr. Dickens’ voice rose with indignation, his words painting a vivid picture of a man consumed by greed. It was clear that the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge if it were to occur, would be a most extraordinary tale indeed. And our reporter, with bated breath, awaited the continuation of this fantastical yarn….

If, like me (until last week), you haven’t read or seen A Christmas Carol for years, here’s a quick recap. The story begins with Ebenezer Scrooge, a cold-hearted financier, rejecting the festive cheer of his nephew Fred and refusing to donate to charity. His solitary existence is interrupted on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him of a bleak future if he doesn’t change his ways. Jacob is weighed down by a chain made of “cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel”. Marley frightens Scrooge by telling him he’s working hard to make his own chain.

Scrooge is then taken on a journey through time by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.

The Ghost of Christmas Past shows him moments of joy and regret from his life, including his lost love and youthful innocence. The Ghost of Christmas Present reveals the hardships faced by the poor, including the family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit. Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come terrifies Scrooge a grim vision of his lonely death, mourned by no one.

Horrified by what he sees, Scrooge awakens with an almost reckless embrace of the Christmas spirit, donating giddily to charity and finding joy in giving to needy friends and family. At its heart, the story is about freedom brought through generosity. Understanding the downward trajectory of his life reforms Scrooge and liberates him from the prospect of a lonely death. The chains fall away and he leaves his miserly ways behind.

Charles Dickens in front of some of his famous book covers
Screenshot

Dickens wrote about issues like the lives of the extreme poor that many other authors (before and since) have shied away from. His vivid characters, intricate plots and social commentary about the human condition are timeless. Many people find his writing style tedious or unreadable these days. Nonetheless, Dickens’ books continue to offer a profound and unsurpassed lens into his world.  

In the class-ridden Victorian society, the line between extreme poverty and destitution was a fine one. Despite an explosion in charitable activity during the era, too many families faced the awful conditions of workhouses and brutal penal institutions. The central message of A Christmas Carol was that wealthy Victorians could do more to improve society through philanthropy and action.

Nearly two hundred years after its publication, this story remains part of the fabric of Christmas because it’s a joyous story. It was an instant hit for Dickens and has never lost its place in our hearts—the second most popular Christmas story.  For a book written in a few days, which only takes a couple of hours to read, it’s captivating. And who doesn’t love a good ghost story?

The gorgeous sketches of Victorian Christmas scenes make the book worth reading, whatever else you take away from it. But I found A Christmas Carol pulling at my heartstrings as I joined Scrooge in seeing the scenes of his life flash by. I teared up as he relived the events that slowly transformed him into a miserable and uncharitable old man who wasn’t even kind to himself.

The people Scrooge’s life offer a simple message that still resonates about the importance of generosity and compassion. Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, may be poor, but he finds the happiness that eludes his wealthy employer through his kind nature and loving family. By refusing to let Scrooge’s miserly attitude dampen his spirits and continuing to invite his uncle to share his family Christmas every year, Scrooge’s nephew Fred shows the beauty of forgiveness. Tiny Tim, the youngest Cratchit, despite his disabilities, joins wholeheartedly in the celebrations with his family and friends and is warm and kind.

Dickens own rags-to-riches story

Dickens’s writing draws deeply on, as we now say, his ‘lived experience’. He started school at nine, but his world shifted on its axis when his father was imprisoned for bad debt to a baker and incarcerated in the notorious Marshalsea Prison. (Over half of England’s prisoners in the 18th century were in jail because of debt). Like a character in his books, sent to the city to earn his keep, the twelve-year-old Charles worked in a boot-blackening factory just off The Strand, where he pasted labels onto bottles for six shillings a week. He lived a bleak, lonely life in wretched lodgings.

Ultimately, his father worked his way out, and after three years, Dickens could return to school. Dickens based several of his characters on this experience, most notably Amy Dorrit, in Little Dorrit, whose father is a debtor in The Marshalsea.  

Dickens was a lifelong social crusader known to have supported 43 charities, including the Poor Man’s Guardian Society, the Birmingham and Midland Institute, the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, the Orphan Workers School and the London Hospital for Sick Children.

“The reason I love him so deeply is that having experienced the lower depths, he never ceased, till the day he died, to commit himself, both in his work and in his life, to trying to right the wrongs inflicted by society, above all, perhaps by giving the dispossessed a voice”.

In celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth in 2012, Simon Callow, celebrating the 200th Anniversary of Dicken’s birth in 2012.

He gave generously to his friends and family and pushed more powerful and wealthy people to contribute. He also wrote impassioned articles supporting his causes and became actively involved with some, such as the Field Lane Ragged School, which educated destitute children. In 1846, he was instrumental in the foundation of a college providing housing and support for unmarried mothers, “fallen women” in the parlance of the times. He helped secure the location, co-designed the structure and interviewed potential staff.

Dickens changed how we viewed Christmas by writing A Christmas Carol and highlighting the importance of caring for others and the happiness it brings. He died at 58 and was intered in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey alongside other literary greats, including Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Samuel Johnson.

I take my share of the feast of love and kindness, which this gentle, generous, and charitable soul has contributed to the happiness of the world.

 Dicken’s friend William Makepeace Thackery in a lecture given in 1853

At least twenty-five film adaptations and innumerable TV, radio and audio versions testify to the work’s enduring popularity. Actors such as Albert Finney, Jack Palance, Patrick Stewart, Jim Carey, Derek Jacobi, and Guy Pears have brought the unforgettable Ebenezer Scrooge memorably to our stages and screens. Even The Muppets got in on the seasonal act courtesy of Disney. The hilarious Muppet Christmas Carolwith Michael Cane as Scrooge and Kermit the Frog as Cratchit. Pundits often rate the 1951 portrayal by Alistair Sim as top Scrooge. Who would you choose?

Despite Scrooge’s redemption in the story, it’s ironic that his name has entered the vernacular, meaning a greedy, miserly type, not the gleeful philanthropist at the end of the story. Calling someone a Scrooge is no compliment. Perhaps Good King Wenceslas cornered the Christmas generosity market. But, in our rich-get-richer world, Scrooge’s redemptive pledge is as relevant now as it was in Dicken’s day.

Its power is the commitment to being better all year round, not just at Christmas, something Dickens believed and lived. The transformed Scrooge “found that anything could yield him pleasure”. Starting immediately, he raises the salary of the near-destitute Bob Cratchit and provides support that ultimately saves the life of the crippled Tiny Tim. Scrooge astonishes the fundraiser he’s been so dismissive of by making a generous donation. Then, he pitches up at his nephew’s Christmas Day party and thanks them for their kindness and welcome.

Like most of us, I’d read Dickens at school and, with my family, avidly watched the TV and film adaptations. But I didn’t know much about the man himself before writing this piece. I’m inspired, humbled and moved by what I’ve found out. Dickens believedNo one is useless in the world who lightens the burdens of another”. He famously wrote, “Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts”.

 His characters epitomise what this extraordinary man experienced and saw with eyes wide open everywhere around him. Rather than getting disillusioned by the enormity of the problems, Dickens never stopped trying. “I cannot stop some dreadful things I try to stop, but I go on in the hope and trust the time will come”.  That’s all anyone can do.

And so, in the words of the Carol cast, “A merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us, everyone.”

Never Succumb to Beige & Other Tips for a Colourful Life Chapter 12 Image: When he says he wants a widget, don't improvise

All I want for Christmas — get into the holiday spirit with this amusing tale of a birthday just before Christmas and the mishaps that occur when it comes to finding the perfect presents.

The Never Succumb to Beige Christmas Earworm Awards 2024

OK, so here we are again—in Christmas music hell. Retailers have been joyfully feeding us Christmas music earworms since the last pumpkin withered on the Hallowe’en vine. Some didn’t even wait for the trick-or-treaters to have their day before decking their shelves with Christmas merch and blasting our eardrums with Last Christmas et al. to imbue the ancient Christmas virtue of overspending.

Soon, there will only be a brief respite as we repent the Boxing Day ‘twofers’ until the whole sorry cycle starts again. Think about it as seasonal scope creep. The hype will begin in February, and All Mariah Carey Wants for Christmas will enliven every waking moment (and likely a few of the sleeping ones too).

To acknowledge this annual procession of sublime to ridiculous, the editorial team at The Colourful Times decided to inaugurate the Never Succumb to Beige Earworm Awards. I unilaterally decided to limit entries to “modern classics” and exclude traditional Christmas carols. Even though there is an abundance of equally glorious and abysmal carol renditions, we had to draw the line somewhere. Maybe next year. The songs range from the good, the bad and the ugly, sometimes alll three. They’re included because … er … “Who’s Queen?”… it’s my call.

Without further ado, the 2024 winners are:

Even the best musicians can fall prey to hubris. This category recognises the many who fall off their talent wagon to binge on banality. Superstars who have temporarily lost any connection with the plot by deciding that recording a knock-off or hastily knocked-up Christmas song would … do what? Add lustre to their undeniable genius. Embrace an exciting artistic challenge. Give their fans an addition to their Christmas playlists. Wait up. Could it be a great way to top up the bank balance? Earworms galore from too many great musicians to mention.

Oh dear. Sir Paul might be the ultimate icon of the music industry, but this song has no redeeming features. It just gets worse from the awful canned opening chords, presumably trying to invoke sleigh bells, to a choir of children singing a ding dong chorus. It’s disjointed, synthetic, soulless, but annoyingly catchy.

Lady Gaga is a star with so many gifts to offer. This addition to the Christmas cannon isn’t one of them. “Wake me up, put me on top, let’s fa-la-la-la”. Full of not very well-worked innuendo, including comparing her vagina to a Christmas Tree, “Ho ho under the mistletoe” indeed. No star is born with this recording.

OK, we all love Babs. But this strange mix of too fast, too slow and plain weird tempi, presumably trying to show off our diva’s musicianship and witty vocal swoops, does nothing for the song (terrible anyway) or the divine Ms Streisand’s voice. What a clunker.

Judge’s Comments: Seeing these incredible musicians self-immolate musically to make our season bright … or them richer … is disappointing.

Santa Baby has been recorded by just about everyone who fancies donning some slinky skimpy Christmas kit and trout-pouting their way through a flirtation to Santa. The song is triumphant celebration of the acquisitive spirit and includes a Christmas shopping list that would make Eva Peron’s tendencies seem unambitious. Let’s face it; nothing says peace on earth, goodwill or love quite like the deed to a platinum mine, a duplex or a stocking full of cheques. Nontheless, it’s unquestionably one of the classic earworms.

Oh come on Michael, if you’re going to record this perennial plonker, don’t keep the title and change the words in the song itself. “Santa Buddy” just doesn’t rock it like “Santa Baby”. Just wrong.

They’ve been ‘awful’ good girls. Awful being the operative word. This one gets an award largely from having the absolute all-time top self-objectifying video. Fantastic costumes and sets, though.

I found 16 versions on YouTube by celeb singers, including one by Marilyn Monroe. The Eartha Kitt original, released in 1953, actually works as a piece of its fifties time. Still a monster earworm!

Judge’s comments: Christmas songs offer extraordinary opportunities to self-objectify. But, like there being only one sale (Harrods of London, of course), there is only one song. Santa Baby is the only gig in town. Thanks to Madonna, the ultimate material girl, for re-popularising this most materialistic vision of Christmas.

This award is for the songs that most evoke the season’s sentimentality. They build a Christmas Fantasia in our hearts and minds. In this world, the snow is glistening in the lanes as you walk hand in hand in a sparkling winter wonderland. People here build sumptuous snowmen and swirl joyously around the local ice rink in matched pairs of ironic (if you’re being kind) Christmas jumpers. When the sun goes down, the stars are brightly shining as they steal mistletoe kisses and toast chestnuts around an open fire, slurping romantic mulled drinks. And all these Christmases are, of course, gloriously white. The nostalgic themes almost guarantee their earworms status.

By a forest of glistening treetops, this is the goldstandard for nostalgia. Bing was the ultimate crooner, and no subsequent recording has come close to his velvety mawkishness. No question, this is a quality earworm.

It seems every artist in creation has recorded this schmoozy little number. But this Judy Garland version gets me in the tear ducts every time and sticks hardest in my brain.

Did anyone ever live in this fantasy? Who’d want to? There are loads of versions, but I chose this one because of its singularly awful and, to the modern worldview, slightly inappropriate video. Whoever’s singing this causes an instant, replay loop.

Judge’s comments: The winners are all decades old. While there are many more recent mawkishly sentimental offerings, for them to sink into the collective consciousness takes time and many, many plays over the years, so in this category, the oldies are definitely the goodies.

“The best Christmas songs of all time bring tidings of pop-inflected comfort and groovy joy. These… aren’t those songs. They’re sludgy byproducts of humanity’s consumerist urges, sentimentalist miscalculations and questionable tastes”. Andy Kryza, Time Out Nov 2022

This is the most crowded category; the principal qualification is to be a holistically terrible song. The song must fail on every level—musically, lyrically, sentimentally and thematically. These are the genuine Christmas turkeys. The earworms extraordinaire to get friends and family rocking away from the Christmas tree and out the door in horror, hands jammed against ears before you can say In the Bleak Midwinter. I’m not sure whether all of these even count as earworms. More ones that scar you for life every time you here them.

What is there left to say about this? Just eew on every level. The screechy, annoying boy soprano of Michael Jackson. The ludicrous lyrics and popcorn pop soundtrack are now unavoidably layered over the knowledge of the Neverland non-wonderland to come.

If the eggnog (see my other Christmas Post) doesn’t make you shed the contents of your full Christmas stomach, this mawkish, schmaltzy, batshit boring horror most certainly will. It’s only three minutes, but as a Rolling Stone reviewer said, it feels like 30. If this doesn’t make you lose the will to live, nothing will.  

Have a Cheeky Christmas— The Cheeky Girls. The terror in the reindeer’s eyes says it as the girls “get sexy in the snow”. Over-spiced but undeniably catchy.

Drummer Boy — Justin Bieber and Busta Rhymes. Rap meets pap in this crucifixion of an old favourite from Justin’s second album. Perhaps I should cut the dude some Christmas goodwill. He was only 17. But Rhymes was old enough to know betta.

Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)—The Darkness. An OTT falsetto rock Christmas confection of tack and sleigh bells complete with a children’s choir and schoolboy naughtiness. Sleigh balls, more like.

Grandma Got Run Over by A Reindeer—Elmo and Patsy. Matricide anyone? Dark, grizzly and dangerous to know lyrics. “Hoof prints on her forehead and incriminatin’ Claus marks on her back”. Eek.

Christmas Saves the YearChristmas Saves the Year. I’m nearly speechless (sadly, not quite): useless lyrics, terrible vid, and rock-bottom musical effects. “Snow falls down from the grey skies”.  The lyrics alone nearly turned my heart to slush. Just horrible.

Funky Funky ChristmasNew Kids on the Block. Nothing like a bit of rap in fake English accents. 

Don’t Shoot Me Santa—The Killers. More like, please shoot me Santa. Teen domestic terrorist meets avenging Santa—what could possibly go wrong?

Dominick the DonkeyLou Monte. It ‘s been deescribed as the spiritual cousin to the Chicken Dance, but much more irritating. Hee haw.

I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas—Gayla Peevey. This is another cracker where you could blame the fifties or little Gayla’s tender ten years and let it go. But … I can’t. It’s a nasty, nasal, nonsensical calamity.

A Holly Jolly Christmas—Burl Ives. “It’s the best time of the year”. Perhaps, but without a doubt, it’s not the best song. With lines like, “Ho ho the mistletoe…”, kill me now.

Judge’s comments: This judging thing is trickier than it sounds—someone’s hell on Christmas earth is someone else’s heavenly peace. In November 2024 Finance Buzz surveyed more than 1,200 U.S. adults to better understand the most popular Christmas songs and the most annoying ones in every state. Most of the songs on the worst lists were also on the best lists.

2024 Supreme Christmas Song Earworm Award

The final, supreme award category is what it says on the tin—songs you simply cannot get out of your head once you’ve heard them. Love or hate them, they’ve squatted in your mind like a tenement rat and play on in a doom loop until Yule gives way to a New Year. The reason they’re so successful as earworms is because, well, they’re sticky. Many are fun, and some are seriously good songs.

It has to be Mariah. This song is unquestionably the forever winner. It’s the most successful Christmas music earworm ever and the one to beat since its release in 1994.

Consider this if you ever wondered why so many perfectly sensible musicians lose their cool at Yule. Forbes Magazine estimates that Mariah Carey makes a profit of $2.5m every year from All I Want. Let’s not forget the $60 million in estimated royalties when the song came out and topped the charts in 26 countries.

As Forbes said, “It’s the gift that keeps on receiving”.

  1. Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day—Wizzard
  2. Santa Claus is Coming to Town—Frank Sinatra
  3. Merry Christmas Everyone—Slade
  4. Feliz Navidad— José Feliciano
  5. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree—Brenda Lee
  6. Jingle Bell Rock—Boby Helm

Judge’s Comments: This is only a drop in the bucket—I salute the entire captivatingly infuriating, earwormy Christmas canon of music-adjacent songs we love to hate. Who’d be a music critic?

And there you have it. As usual, the judge’s (i.e. my) decisions are final. No correspondence will be entered into, but I encourage you to leave your selections for the People’s Choice Award in the comments.

So, I’ll sign off and leave you to ponder your own Christmas turkey list. If you’re stuck for gift ideas, show someone your true feelings by sharing a song or an entire playlist—a collection of your favs or worst-ever Christmas songs. Forget revenge porn, Christmas song earworms are much worse. Ensuring Christmas crackers like Dominic the Donkey run through their head through to the end of January will gladden the most Achy Breaky Heart and undoubtedly bring the prescribed amount of comfort and joy.

So go deck those halls of yours, listen for the sleighbells, enjoy the jingle bell time, sleep in heavenly peace and may all your Christmases be … whatever you want them to be.

In case you wondered, our lovely German friends came up with the concept of the earworm (öhrwurm) more than 100 years ago to describe the phenomenon of having a song suck in the brain. There’s also “stuck tune syndrome” and “musical imagery repetition”, but they don’t exactly fire the imagination. The thought of a bug crawling into your brain through your ears is much more creepily memorable—a sort of mashup of onomatopoeia and personification—and it quickly became ubiquitous.

Eggnog exposed — the raw facts of a festive favourite.

You’re either in the OMG I’d rather drink hemlock camp with eggnog or a real devotee. It’s binary. No halfway house. You don’t sort of like the stuff. In case you missed the Christmas etiquette manual, eggnog has been a festive drink on the Yuletide menu for hundreds of years. These days, Americans are the nation that slurps it with most avidity.

I struggle to understand the eggcitement about eggnog, after a youthful close encounter of the egg drink kind with Advocaat. Eggnog is just warm, spicy custard in a glass. It might be more palatable with a spike of alcohol, but it beats me why you wouldn’t opt for a civilised mulled wine if you want cosy fireside comfort when snow is falling snow on snow outside. But different strokes for different folks. Each to their festive own.

As we’re in the run-up to the big day and eggnoggers worldwide start salivating in anticipation, I decided to do a little eggsploration to bring you the eggnog backstory.

Starting with an eggsplainer

Eggnog is pretty much what it says on the tin—an egg-based concoction with extras. That is a combination of egg whites, milk, cream, and sugar. You warm the mixture over heat until it thickens and becomes custardy, then flavour it with spices like nutmeg and cinnamon. It can be lightly or heavily “boozed” or virgin. You then serve the finished product either chilled like a punch or warm on those cold winter’s nights that are so deep … noel, noel, noel, noel .. (oops got a bit carried away with the theme there).

Eggnog—who thought that one up?
I wanna get a little drunk, but I also want some pancakes.”

Dave Attell.

All ages and stages, guzzle eggnog. You’d have to hope they don’t feed the spiked version to the tots, though, or they might be dashing through the snow for different reasons.

A festive delight or a pour it into the nearest pot plant dread?

Eggnog celebrants thrill to the nostalgia and romance of it all. Eggnog evokes sentimental flashbacks to happy (real or imaginary) childhood holidays, family gatherings, and days of comfort and joy. They might be nostalgic for Holywood’s take-a-la James Stewart classic It’s a Wonderful Life—incredibly still a favourite 78 years after its release. Moist-eyed, remembering the eggnog-infused glow that gilded past happy times, they make sure the hallowed tradition of Christmases past lives on for future generations. For these aficionados, it’s almost incomprehensible that others don’t like the stuff. They put it down to never having tasted a good one.

“Eggnog reminds me of mucus.”

Fangirl

Haters, on the other hand, find eggnog barfworthy. Eggscerable even. They demonise the cloying, rich heaviness and the underlying unpalatable eggyness, which leaves them frothing at the mouth. To the detractors, even alcohol doesn’t help the eggnog go down, no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar are involved. To these people, eggnog is more likely to induce an eggistential crisis than the aspirational Yuletide joy, love and peace. For them, no eggnog is a good eggnog.

It came to pass

Eggnog is a derivative of the early medieval British drink, posset. Posset combines curdled hot milk and wine or ale flavoured with spices. And you think eggnog sounds eggscrutiating! It was a posh drink—the upper classes were the only ones who could shell out the dosh for the milk, sherry, and eggs to make the posset.

How the transmutation from posset to eggnog happened is muddy, but who can explain evolution? OK, Darwin, for one, but you know what I mean. Here’s how it seems to have gone down. During the 1700s, an unidentifiable egg-based drink, which might or might not be a posset or an early eggnog prototype, stowed away on a ship and made a heroic Atlantic Crossing to the American Colonies. There, it became known as “egg-n-grog”, a mashup of ‘noggin” (wooden drinking cup in Scottish Gaelic) and “grog”( hard liquor such as rum). It didn’t take long for the catchier “eggnog” to stick, and eggnog it remained.

The American colonies were awash with milk, eggs and cream from swathes of chicken and cattle farms. They were also awash with cheap rum. So, eggnog became an equal opportunity drink rather than the preference of the privileged and landowning classes who promptly forgot about it back in the Home Country. Ultimately, it became a mainstay of the Christmas festive tradition in the land of the free.

The USA is eggnog central

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 A YouGov Poll in 2020 found that about a quarter of Americans identify as eggnogers, i.e., eggnog is their favourite seasonal drink. That’s about 84 million people (based on the 2023 US Census Bureau figures). More than the total population of the UK (68.35m), more than three times the population of Australia (26.64m) and nearly 17 times the population of New Zealand. Eggstraordinary!

According to The Smithsonian Magazine, Americans consume more than 15 million gallons of eggnog annually—some 240 million cups of the stuff. Eek! Older Americans (50 +) are the eggy diehards—some sixty-one per cent saying they’re likely to break out the custardy goodness at Christmas versus only about twenty per cent of the under-fifty brigade.

Of course, I have no idea what the eggnog penetration rate was previously, so I have no idea if it’s gaining or falling in popularity. Twenty-five per cent is still a lot of people who love it…or lie to pollsters. Given the relatively low proportion of people under fifty who rate it, perhaps we’ve reached peak nog? Then again, rebellious youth often buck tradition only to return to them once families, jobs, mortages and other responsibilities arrive.

The eggnog has landed … elsewhere

According to Time Magazine, the eggnog Atlantic voyager also landed on the shores of Mexico, where residents revere it as “rompope” and Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans clamour for “coquito”, which rejoices in the exotic addition of coconut milk. Kogel Mogel—great name—is a favourite of Jewish communities in Poland, and Germans have the popular homemade egg liquor, eierlikör.

Eggnog isn’t a Noel bonheur in La Belle France, although they do mange les Eggnog Madeleines with gusto. One reviewer I read called this combo—eggnog taste and Madelaine cake—a “match made in culinary heaven”. Magnifique—vive les Français! Still not feeling it, even with cake involved! But, the eggy-minded in the French Carribbean lap up laid de poule (milk of the chicken).

And then there’s Advocaat

The Dutch, of course, have Advocaat, the beverage that messed with my formative drinking psyche and put me off egg drinks for life. Dutch colonials appropriated the drink from the indigenous people in Brazil who made an alcoholic drink called “abacate” from avocado. The Dutch climate is not conducive to those warm-blooded fruits. You have to give it to them for innovation—they substituted eggs for avocados, which they thought would achieve a similar taste, and Advocaat was born. Advocaat means lawyer in Dutch and became their drink. Let’s face it, if lawyers like it…I rest my case.

Oh, dear god! Google just dished up something worse—Advonog. Or Advocaat plus Eggnog. This concoction has to disprove that the sum is more than the sum of the parts rule. Anyone’s stomach churning yet?

Canned, sealed, delivered… it’s yours

For many people now, eggnog is only something you buy, like custard, in a carton from a supermarket. Despite egg being integral to the whole idea, the commercial product can still claim to be eggnog with as little as 1% egg in the mix. A lot more nog than egg, you’d have to say. People most often drink it virgin—it’s not generally known that it can be a spiked drink.

Ultimately, whether you love or hate eggnog is a matter of personal preference. If you’re not a fan, happily, you can choose from a plethora of other enticing holiday thirst quenchers. I’m thinking the Ding Dong Merrily on High Champagne Cocktail (glass of fizz + sugar cube + dash of brandy). The Good King Wenceslas Kir Royale (Champagne and Crème de Cassis). Or the previously mentioned Mulled Wine (God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen recipe) for those looking for something to rejoice about.

If you’re in for an abstemious Advent, there is the classic Silent Night Virgin Mary. The SNVM offers the Christmas double whammy of your drink colour coordinating with your red and gold tree and acknowledging one of the key players in the Nativity. You could dab some frankincense on your pulse points to get further in the groove. But don’t get carried away—leave the asses in the stable where they belong.

Pavlova anyone?

We Brits mostly turn our noses up at eggnog—despite its Pommy posset roots. We see it as an American idiosyncrasy like biscuits and gravy and American football. I’m unaware of anyone whose holiday drink is a posset, but, like everywhere, we have our frolicsome foibles and favourites. We love our mulled wine, as noted above and what would the dinner table be without Christmas crackers? And Kiwis (in my adopted country, New Zealand) and our Aussie neighbours prefer our eggs in Pavlova form … mostly.

Whichever way you go, don’t get too egg-cited and eggsxpire from anticipation before the big day arrives.

Felice Navidad y’all.


What camp are you in?

Are you an eggnogger eggstraordinare or Grinch most grizzly when it comes to spiced custard in a cup? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

Check out my other December blogs for some more Christmas cheer.

The Never Succumb to Beige Earworm Awards 2024

Notorious Miser in Sensational Christmas U-Turn

It’s your choice—the self-defining allure of customised drinks

I ducked into a café the other day to get a takeaway. A rare occurrence. I’m usually happy with the sludge I distil from my plunger, which I drink black and limited to two cups in the morning.

For the life of me, I can’t see the attraction in paying some barista to put a silver fern or similar chocolate or cinnamon ‘artwork’ on top of coffee-flavoured frothy milk. It seems a modern sort of financial self-harm, especially if it’s repeated several times daily. Now we also run the gauntlet of choice overload through the plethora of options on offer, including the ability to customise our drinks.

It’s not all chocolate drizzles and boba-bubbled tea

OK, so what genius pioneered the concept of people’s choice beverges? Many cafes and bars offer options to personalise your brew from a seemingly infinite variety of ingredients and combos. Sounds like a great idea on the surface. But it’s not all chocolate drizzles and boba-bubbled tea. As well as the fun factor, there are some distinct drawbacks, not least the time involved which is making the whole concept of convenience frankly, inconvenient.

But perhaps you’re more accepting than me and just scroll patiently through your phone messages while the personalisers ahead in the queue prevaricate. By the time the wretched barista or cocktail maker has crafted their dream concoctions, I’m in danger of losing the will to live. Or, at least, cracking a back molar as I grind my teeth in frustration listening to the dithering. “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind; I don’t want toffee salt lime slush. Can you please make it a cuckoo spit slime?” “Wait, thinking about it, let’s add some hellwort hot sauce…” Oh please people, just get on with it.

Fancy customised drinks are a crowd puller

Whether customised, personalised or just plain elaborate, fancy drinks have become the ‘must have’ offer for any hospitality worth its Tibetan sea salt. Even MacDonald’s is at it. Their new drive-through beverage spin-off CosMcs launched in Chicago in 2023, offers “out-of-this-world beverages and treats” that “lift humans up with every sip.” I’m sure humanity will be duly elevated and grateful for the boost. The menu includes CosMcs Sea Salted Caramelactic, “a shaken (not stirred) Espresso”. So, it’s not only James Bond who prefers his drinks that way. However, the very clubbable 007’s signature Martini is unimaginably dull by today’s standards, with only two ingredients: vodka (or gin) and vermouth. Wait, make that a daring three with the addition of an olive as garnish.  

Coming back to CosMcs (because it amuses me), you could have a Coconaut Cold Brew, an Oat and Honey Moon Latte, or a French Toast Galaxyy Latte. Chai Frappé Burst, anyone? A Popping Pear Slush? These drinks are all “signature brews” and kudos to the creatives for the names. There’s no personalisation but lots of pose and perplexity. Oh, and the good news? Your first “space drink” is on them. I counted 45 options you could choose from to wash down your Creamy Avocado Tomatillo Sandwich and a side order of Cookie Butter McPops. I know, I need to get a life.

Customising your drink—the new form of self-expression

OK, so I’m ignoring the appeal to many people, which is all about the fun involved in experimenting with different tastes. The ability to conjure your ultimate bedazzling magic potion of syrups, powders, fruit chunks, boba, sprinkles, foams, etc. And where’s the harm? Like bling, it’s just another way of making a personal statement. A simple black coffee says nothing in this world. Well, perhaps ordering a black coffee could be taken as a mild rebellion against the herd mentality. A bit of inverted snobbery even.

According to Starbucks barista and TikTok trendsetter Josiah Varghese,  a drink “is a status thing—people can carry it around and show people: This is me”. It sounds like an improbable way of showing your individuality, but he has 1.8 million followers on TikTok, so what would I know? 

I’ve always believed in self-expression. The customised drinks variety, although it doesn’t call to me, is just another way of achieving it. Pretty much every choice we make is to some extent driven by the image we want to portray. Where we live, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, cosmetics, perfumes, food preferences, whether we straighten our curly etc. So why not our coffee and other drinks choices?

It was so simple in the ‘before times’

I’m a Gin & Tonic girl, not only because I like the taste (or acquired a liking for it after a fair amount of experimentation) but also because it enhanced the self-image I aspired to in my youth. This choice has proved to have a shelf life as I’m still a G&T girl when I drink spirits, which is as now rare as sightings of those poor pangolins around the world.

10 Things You didn't Know About Pangolins — www.wild.aid.com

Pangolins are cool

Just digressing for a moment, I’ve done something few other people have and it’s not swimming with the All Blacks which is my other claim to fame. I saw a pangolin in Africa years ago to the astonishment of our small party and our guide. Apparently this sighting was the safari equivalent a one-in-a-million-year event. Pangolins are one of the most endangered species in the world through poaching and habitat destruction, but it’s hard to track how many are there because they’re so shy and rarely seen.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger

Anyway, G&T seemed like a sophisticated choice, a perception that was strongly influenced by a very sophisticated grandmother. G&T was her preferred ‘poison’ and something she thought appropriate for ‘young ladies’. She made an elegant ritual by pouring generous pre-dinner drinks from gleaming crystal decanters which seemed so gorgeously grown up and admirable. Imitation is, they say, the sincerest form of flattery. Whether she was flattered by my adoption of her drink is anyone’s guess, but she certainly did her share of role modelling in many areas of my life.

Now, even ordering a gin has become an ordeal of choice overload due to the burgeoning barrage of increasingly bizarre gin labels. For example, Pisces Chilli and Pineapple Zodiac Series Gin, Hot Cross Gin (handy at Easter) and Malfy Con Arancia Gin. How about Dancing Sands Wasabi Gin? Hmmmm …. must try that. But, as the Joker quips in 2008’s Batman movie, The Dark Knight, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stranger”. I’m certainly not averse to a bit of spicy strangeness.

So, is the hype worth it?

One bonus could be that many of these complex concoctions—are they still drinks?—are close to meals in their own right. No need to fork out on actual food. I guess that’s why CosMcs drinks to food ratio using a beer mat calculation is around 10:4. 

Having been given all this liquid diversity, the pendulum, as it inevitably does, is swinging back. Chains like Starbucks are beginning to recognise that endless choice serves no one. They have radically pruned their “overly complex” menu. The aim is to reduce bottlenecks and win back cash-strapped customers as the cost-of-living crisis bites the hand that feeds people. Starbucks’ global sales fell by 7% between July and September 2024. I’m picking they won’t be alone as fickle customers long for the ‘before times’ when the choice was simple: Lucozde, Robinson’s Barley Water, Rose’s lime juice. Remember them? Maybe even a Coca-Cola if you were an adventurer looking for kicks.

Anyway, talking about G&T has made me want one and it’s beyond the appointed hour. However, in the spirit, as it were, of our times, instead of tonic, I’ve got a sudden urge to add some Berry Hibiscus Tobasco Sourade to the one I’m about to pour. Cheers. 

The love times they are a changin’ — fancy a polycule anyone?

It seems that relationships are getting more complicated by the minute. Or maybe we’re just in an age of micro-definitions. Take the polycule. A concept I was happily unfamiliar with until I read about it last weekend. In case, like me, you didn’t know, polycules are a version of polyamory. Polyamory being of course, the juggling act of engaging in multiple romantic, typically sexual, relationships, with the consent of all the people involved.

New names, old behaviours

I’m pretty sure that the only thing that’s changed is that we’ve now got names for stuff that people have been at since Adam and Eve got chucked out of Eden. People experiment with all sorts of sexual combos. They always have. You only have to think ‘Mormon’ and ‘sister wives’. The practice of taking multiple wives or lovers goes back to the earliest of times—some anthropologists believe that up to 80 percent of early humans were polygamous. But it seems to be a thing now in a way it hasn’t been before, perhaps because of the predominance of social media in shaping or naming trends. As a consequence, there’s an emerging sexual zeitgeist with a growing vocabulary to define an increasing number of relationship variants meaning we can now choose our “lovestyle”, not just our lifestyle.

So we all know about throuples right? Three-way relationships where all three participate. Throuples—also known as triads—have been in vogue for some time as celebs open up about their non-conventional preferences. For example, in 2011, Charlie Sheen openly talked about living with two 24-year-old girlfriends, he called his “goddesses”. Throuples don’t necessarily live together, but they are in an acknowledged and sexual relationship. Imagine if Menelaus, Helen and Paris had the open-mindedness to form a throuple, instead of Paris stealing Helen away from Menelaus and the ten years of mayhem and destruction that followed. Troy might still be standing, as I’ve said before.

So, what is a polycule?

What is a polycule?
https://www.allure.com/story/what-is-a-polycule

In a polycule, three or more people might be involved but don’t all necessarily have sex. Let’s put that in context. Priam is in a sexual relationship with Hecuba and Athena. Hecuba and Athena don’t shag each other. So this group is not a throuple. But they are a polecule because, like the atoms in a molecule, they are connected to each other through Priam, who functions as a “hinge”. The person in the middle. Hecuba and Athena are “metamours”. People whose lover has another lover but with whom they have no romantic relationship. .e., the partner’s other girlfriend or boyfriend or their lover’s spouse. So if you’re partner has another lover, they are your metamour, and you are theirs.

With me so far? I repeat, it’s complicated. The word polycule itself is a construct combining polyamorous and molecule. I’m sure all you chemistry lovers are familiar with the concept of molecules as groups of atoms that are bonded together. In polycules, it’s groups of people that get bonded.

But wait, there’s more…a one-sized polycule doesn’t fit all

Polecules vary in size and shape— some can be extensive. There’s the parallel poly when members of the group know their lover has another lover but don’t form any relationship with them. There’s also garden table poly, which means the various partners all socialise convivially together. The difference between your bog standard polyamory, as far as I can make out, is that polycules are largely a constellation of intimate connections that are not all about sex.  

So if I were in a polycule (I’m not BTW), it could go something like this. I’m dating Hector and Paris. Paris also dates Helen and Cassandra. Hector dates Andromache and Hecuba. I’m not necessarily dating Helen, Cassandra, Andromache or Hecuba. Let’s face it: what woman wouldn’t feel her cup runneth over if it contained only Hector and Paris? But the others are nonetheless integral parts of my polycule, being my lover’s lovers and all. We’re all intimately connected. In the garden poly variety, we’d likely all pitch up at Trojan royal family feasts to listen to Cassandra’s latest doom-scrolling prophesies.

There are many more varieties—thanks to Cosmopolitan for this further insight. There’s V Polyamory (one person dating two who aren’t involved with each other), Quads, Comet Partners, and Platonic Polycules, as well as the different integration levels of metamours. Polycules can be open or closed (i.e. exclusive or permissive) and may be hierarchical with one person as the primary link between the others or ones where everyone is on equal footing. There’s also Parallel Polyamory—polycule members have other partners, but they don’t interact or have contact. It’s a parallel structure. This spawns teleamours— our partners’ partners’ partners. There are no rules as long as everyone’s consenting.  Some polyculers go all in and share houses and bank accounts.

Is the secret to the polycule “authentic love”?

Feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1985), most known for her feminist novel, The Second Sex, was famously married to the even more famous Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). The couple never married, but their lifelong open relationship, which saw each of them pursuing other sexual and romantic partners, lasted more than 50 years. They talked about their approach as “Authentic Love”. Originally Sartre’s idea, de Beauvoir was apparently game to “embrace all experience.” They claimed this approach succeeded because the sole condition was total transparency. Despite the relationship’s longevity, peers questioned how happy they were. It seemed to suit Sartre better as de Beauvoir was reputedly prone to jealousy and had far fewer affairs.

Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir 1954
Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir 1954

Which brings up a good point. How do you navigate any polycule variant without someone getting their nose (or other anatomical item) out of joint? Is everyone involved so secure that they don’t doubt their centricity to the melange? It feels as if the starting point is deciding what you want from any relationship. It must be just as crucial that three (or more) people have convergent expectations as two. And what happens if two of a triad are more into each other and even marginally neglect the third? Is there ever the possibility of love equity, or even such a thing?

It’s not all a bed of authentically scented polyamorous roses

Polyamory isn’t legally recognised in Britain or America, so you don’t get the sort of benefits monogamy brings, such as tax breaks, pension plans, sharing mortgages, child custody, and a clear inheritance plan. Come to think about it, we singletons don’t benefit from those either, but it’s not yet illegal to be single or childless (or a single, childless cat lover).

Polyamorous relationships seem to me to come with as many, if not more, hooks than monogamous ones. There are so many decisions to make, not least how you schedule your playtime. Equally, do you meet your partner’s other ‘squeezes’ or leave well alone? Does it help or start to erode the foundations of your relationship with them?

On the other hand, polycules could be the perfect antidote to giving too much or falling too deeply for one person and the anguish that can follow if it goes wrong. Perhaps sharing the love means fewer eggshells to walk on. If one person in the polycule doesn’t feel like it tonight, there’s a fighting chance someone else will, so could it be the answer to duty sex? In this world, Paris wants to watch the footie. Menelaus wants to watch the chariot races on the beach. Helen wants to bring back a bit of that loving feeling. Paris is happy to oblige. Menelaus is happy they’re both happy, and he gets to do what he wants.  Perhaps it’s easier with your polycule posse taking up the slack when you’re not in the mood, or can’t be fagged to go out to see a play, have another baby … whatever.

The lovestyle choice for a growing number

I’ve always believed that pretty much anything goes between consenting adults. So, if a polycule or any variation on the them is what does it for you and your polyamours, good for you. In any case, you’re not alone.  Polycules are growing in popularity. A recent YouGov poll found that about two per cent of adult Brits are in polyamorous relationships, and seven per cent say they would be open to it. Those numbers aren’t going to turn society on its head. However, it does mean that an increasing number of people are asking the questions differently and challenging norms that no longer work for them. 

If you’re into a whole lotta love and not finding conventional couplings are doing it for you, perhaps a polycule might yield better returns for your labours of love. Less chance of love’s labours lost? As for me. Well, I’m too lazy. Or too old. Or both. If sticking with one person for the long haul has proven challenging, how on earth would I wrangle several? Eek. In any case, call me old-fashioned, but for me, “Be my teleamour” doesn’t cut it like “Be my Valentine.”

PS Despite the title, I’m not really asking if anyone’s up for a polycule…in case you wondered.

You’re a brand, like it or not, make it count!

We hear a lot about online influencers and personal brands these days. As a brand thinker, I’m a little sceptical about whether these personal brands are good. Unless you’re scrupulously honest, the brand, oops, of course, I mean person, simply becomes a construct. A facsimile of someone designed to highlight the heroic and park the problematic. It offers a polished facade with no apparent flaws. A title with no story. A standard of perfection that the rest of us can aspire to but never reach.

I want what she’s got!

Influencer brands are carefully curated to make us want stuff. By the way, anyone else noticed that we no longer just design or make things; curating them implies much more finesse and we live in a time when more is … er … more, so curating it is. Anyway, influencers seemingly live the dream—they inhabit perfect lifestyles, surrounded by perfect people, played out in a series of perfect locations. Sounds a bit like Barbie’s world and its inhabitants in the recent movie, come to think of it.

If the influencer is flawless, the implication is that by walking a mile in their shoes, you can be just like them. By following their wellness regime, you too will be rampagingly healthy and desirable. Going to the places they go or at least recommend, you’ll be too cool for school … like them. Forking out on all the stuff they’re peddling on behalf of consumer brands who milk FOMO for all it’s worth, you’ll be the envy of everyone in your orbit.

Absent better options, we find our heroes wherever and however we can. Where’s the harm?

But who am I to judge? It were ever thus. Absent a better option, why shouldn’t my new deity be an online influencer flogging over-priced skincare or exotic travel? Spirituality even. What’s the big difference between that and a medieval priest peddling indulgences? In any case, being a follower makes me feel like I am part of something bigger and that I matter. A like on my post worshipping at the (TikTok or Insta) shrine of the demi-goddess I’m following puts me on top of the moon. Who am I hurting?

But, going for perpetual perfection is paralysingly pointless. We all know that no one is. Even Barbie figured that out in the movie. On the surface, there’s a compelling and colourful story. But when you scratch the surface, the story lacks depth and nuance. The facade cracks faster than you can say “Lululemon”. Worse, by wanting what they’ve got, you risk trashing or trivialising what you have—your precious individuality and identity.

Seeing yourself through a branding lens

I recently published a new book—Never Succumb to Beige & Other Tiips for a Colourful Life. It has attracted a lot of publicity, which is cool, not least in converting to the number of books sold. But there was another, wholly unexpected benefit. The interviewers loved the title, and the questions they asked me were playfully provocative and opened up some interesting discussions. This process made me think long and hard about what I value and believe in at this stage in my life. What genuinely matters to me and how I want to present to the world.

A recurring theme from the interviews was how one does it. Stay visible, that is. After much navel-gazing, I figured I could best answer that question by swopping my ostrich feathered, bling-encrusted personal hat of many colours for my slightly less ostentatious professional hat as a brand development specialist. Think about the questions in terms of my brand.

Personal brands are not just something for the young and trendy

The most successful brands know what they’re about and who they’re for. However flippant my opening paragraphs, I like the idea of thinking about who we are through a brand lens. It’s a helpful framework to define and review our evolving selves, particularly as we age. People are as multi-faceted as the eyes of a dragonfly and just as complicated, so we need to tap into deep self-awareness to see through to our essence.

I always thought the complications would diminish with age. Instead, they seem to multiply by the day, perhaps due to experience hammering home the fact that instead of the arrogant assumption that we know what we don’t know, we finally get that we don’t know what we don’t know. There’s a gap the breadth of the Milky Way between those two sets of understanding.

Writing your story and controlling the narrative

All good brands have defining stories. These change and evolve as the brand matures and their operating environment changes. Quite by accident, I came across a great way to define my story. The concept of Never Succumb to Beige started as a challenge about what I would call my autobiography at a dinner party one night. It was a fun evening. At the time, I think I went for something a bit lame like Frankie’s Follies (my friends at that time all knew me as Frankie and seemed to see me as a cross between Virginia Woolf and Barbarella so this was really pandering to their perceptions rather than mine).

Over the years, I’ve come up with a range of options, at least one of which will feature as a chapter title in my next book, so I won’t do a spoiler alert here. But I stuck with Never Succumb to Beige, which I used as the title of my blog and now the book, because it captures my philosophy of being true to yourself and who you are. This philosophy hasn’t fundamentally changed since. Never succumbing to beige has become the central theme of my brand. It’s my pole star that helps me safely navigate life’s jagged reefs. My guiding light that shines a light on the path I should follow.

It’s not a pose. I love living in a rainbow of glorious and colourful attitude that allow me be seen and counted. It’s important to me to stand and deliver in how I present, what I say and write, how I am with others, and what I bring to the world. I’d like to matter … in a good way. That doesn’t mean I aspire to perfection. Far from it, but I do aspire to perfect the qualities that make me unique and set me apart from everyone else. After all, if I don’t control the narrative and tell my story my way, in this online era, Google and the other apps will do it for me. Who wants that? It’s also a vision of who I can be as I get older and allows room for life-long curiosity and adventure.

Leave the cloak of invisibility on a hook by your door

I’m saddened by how many people I’ve encountered who feel invisible, marginalised or useless as they grow older. They tell me it’s inevitable—I fundamentally don’t believe that it has to be. We don’t need to allow society’s judgement to push us into the railway siding of invisibility. If we don’t give ourselves licence to stay on the main line, no one else will. 

Perhaps that’s easy for me to say. I was born with a sunny, outgoing nature and insane corkscrew hair—I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the latter throughout my life. Still, it has the merit of giving me a head start in the non-invisibility games. Likely, it also played a part in developing a deep-rooted commitment to my individuality and sense of self.

Despite this, I’ve worked hard to fight feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. I’ve also faced down that lurking menace known as Imposter Sydrome on more occasions than I can count. My brand, my recidivist disinclination to be anything other than wholly and colourfully myself, helps me feel the fear, do it anyway and bounce back when the going gets tough.

Strike the pose, there’s nothing to it

My last post was about being scammed — Scammed, Slammed and Hung Out to Dry — written solidarity with all the many others who’ve experienced this morally bankrupt contemporary blight. Not succumbing to beige clearly has little to do with colour and lots to do with attitude. How you deal with setbacks like this, which rock you to your core. I’ve had to dig deep to cauterise the wound it left. The scars are still vivid, but they get paler by the day and I certainly won’t get fooled again. It would be easy at such times to retreat inwards. Having a strong brand like m non-beige one, gives us the confidence, mandate even, to move forward without losing ourselves.

I’d love to inspire people heading towards their older years to believe that invisibility isn’t a given. To blaze a trail for younger women that shows ageing isn’t a long, lonely, greying road to oblivion. In modern parlance, I’d like to be an influencer. But not one that postures at caring whilst peddling endless products, destinations or wellness miracles for affiliate brands’ marketing programmes. I want to use whatever influence I can muster to find joy and commonality in our shared and, at times, very bizarre humanity. To lighten the mood and bring people together.

Successful brands are built on insight not wishful thinking

It’s said that personal branding begins the moment you discover yourself. Knowing what you’re about and who you’re for requires deep self-understanding. Defining and living by a set of firmly held values. Making a promise about what you bring to the world and sticking to that. It raises self-awareness and honesty above self-interest and greed. For your brand to succeed means being consistently you wherever you are, whoever you’re with or whatever you’re doing and holding yourself to the highest standards. Not giving yourself a pass when it’s inconvenient or difficult.

Successful brands are not flim-flam.They don’t get blown about in the wind like so much tumbleweed in a Western ghost town. At the end of the day, whatever our brand, we’re actually still people, with all the frailties and idiosyncrasies that entails. Even the best brands get it wrong sometimes, but the ones that last, don’t go down in a fiery bonfire of blamestorming and bruised egos. Their managers recognise what’s happened and find a better way. On a personal level, when we lapse or stuff up, our inner brand manager should cut us some slack and understand that there are times when we just step out of character, flare up in the moment about something stupid. Ultimately we are people not brands. Seeing ourselves through a branding lens just helps us be the best we can be.

Be yourself — everybody else is already taken

So said the peerless Oscar Wild who know a thing or two about being an influencer and icon. As American actor Graham Brown (Malcolm X, The Muppets Take Manhattan) said, “Life is about choices. Some we regret, some we’re proud of. Some will haunt us forever. The message: we are what we chose to be”. We might as well choose to be something special and gloriously original.

I don’t know about you but, given my “druthers”, I wouldn’t choose to be a Barbie Girl living in the Barbie World, however superficially enticing it appears. Life in plastic is only fantastic if you’re a doll.

Scammed, slammed and hung out to dry

I still cringe when I ‘fess up to anyone that I got scammed a few weeks ago. And why do I see in in confessional terms? As something somehow shameful? I was a victim not a perp after all. Knowing that doesn’t help much. Getting scammed is not something anyone is keen to admit to because we don’t want to admit to being helpless or gullible. It’s embarrassing. I certainly consider myself to be competent, confident and generally on to it. But, to be Biblical, pride goes before a fall. And how I fell.

I took a call early one morning which woke me up. It appeared to be from my bank asking about charges that had been added to my credit card and could I confirm whether they were bona fide. They mentioned several quite large charges in the $1,500-$2,000 range and I got into a panic because the voice on the phone kept telling me another one had come through and asking me to provide text message codes they were sending so they could stop them.

What a moron! The lack of request for vocal ID by the caller (supposedly from my bank) should have sent great big red letters of fire flashing before my eyes in warning. It didn’t, and I just kept on making it worse for myself. I’ve adroitly side-stepped other scammers. Not this time. I walked blindly into this one and the trap snapped savagely shut on my credulity like a gin-trap on the leg of a harmless little animal. Like the animal, I had no way out. I can hear your groans and cries of “what were you thinking?” from here. Believe me, there is nothing anyone can say to match what I’ve said to myself.

Being scammed is the ultimate own goal — you might as well set fire to the money

Of course I blame myself. But I’m not the villain of the story. I had a moment of poor judgement and am paying for it on many levels. Scammers are thieving amoral clever cxxts (sorry but there is no word I can think of that adequately describes my feelings other than this) who prey on our decency, credulity, frailties and fears. They don’t care who they hurt or how deep the damage. When I got the call, my fear of financial loss was triggered and I didn’t stop to think. Stupid me. Poor me. Maxima mea culpa. All of the above. But it’s not my fault that predators exist. There have been charlatans, mountebanks, fraudsters, imposters and confidence tricksters since Adam was a boy.

The financial loss wasn’t insignificant and it doesn’t look like there’s much chance of getting the money back. They’re investigating, but my expectations are lower than the proverbial wicked stepmother’s morals. I lost what was to me a fair chunk of money which means I can’t take trip home to the UK that I was planning for Christmas. But the scammers thankfully didn’t wipe me out.

I know scams often leave some people with nothing, so it could have been a lot worse. That’s like telling your kids to eat their greens because starving kids in less lucky places would be so grateful for your Brussels Sprouts! Just BTW, do any kids anywhere like Brussels Sprouts? Hard to imagine. In any case, it was enough money to cause me some real pain. If there could be a silver lining, I was lucky that I didn’t give any actual passwords to any of my other accounts.

But it’s not just the money

The financial loss was only a part of it. I felt violated. Dirty. Pathetic. Ashamed. Foolish. Vulnerable. Duped. Fragile. Worst of all, defeated. These are not emotions or states that I often experience. That sounds very smug, but it’s true. In my own eyes, I’m not a fool or an object of pity. Yet in the course of one very mis-guided phone call I proved myself to be just that. I got well and truly hung out to try. Trussed like a fowlfor the spit. Taken to the clearners. Caught hook, line and sinker. Done like a dog’s dinner. The scammers ate me up and spat the bones out.

It’s hard to put my finger on why this epidode has left me reeling when many other ostensibly worse things haven’t hit so hard. My last blog covered how to use the lemons life lobs at us creatively. I’m pretty good at that, but I’ve been struggling to think how to put a positive spin on this. I know from experience that time will heel the wound. I just wish time would also wound those scamming heels. It was a bruising experience that rocked me to the core. The whole sorry saga doesn’t jive with my sense of who I am. I’m Tigger for God’s sake! But I seriously had to check my premises and assumptions because if I could be that fooled in that way, am I fooling myself about other stuff?

The ‘gift’ that keeps on giving

I am still struggling to let myself off the hook even though I know I’m in good company and smarter folk that me have been hooked as badly or worse. Maybe some of my self-disgust is because I’ve seen too many movies where wealthy mature women get targeted by charming con artists like Steve Martin and Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Scammed is another one of those things I didn’t want to be when I grew up. And yet here I am.

I wasn’t going to write about this. I thought I’d got over it. And, to be honest, why would I focus on my own idiocy. But I mentioned what had happened to someone I know just in passing in a text and that ripped the Band Aid off. The hurt and bewilderment is still lurking like basking sharks waiting for their opportunity feed. I’ve cried as I’ve written this. I’m surprised by the depth of emotion. But it’s been cathartic and I’m glad to have got it off my chest.

We won’t get fooled again

I won’t let those parasitic, bottom feeding low life’s grind me down or I’d risk becoming a recluse who despises their fellow humans. I’m not that person. I’m still Tigger. Tiggers have to bounce. See all the happy things. Believe the best in people. But I’m also human. I hope Karma is a real thing. That what goes around comes around. So these travesties of humans who steal and cheat people out of their honestly gained savings, bring endless misery and don’t bring or create anything of value, get theirs in time.

We get bombarded with scamming stings. Phishing phantasamagorias. They work because they are so believable or play on our sympathies and inherent good nature. Would it have been less of an issue for me if the money involved was less? That a yes, because I wouldn’t be angry on two levels. If it was only a few dollars, I’d only be feeling foolish. But being scammed is a horrible experience on many levels. No one walks away unscathed. I hope telling my story will offer solidarity to others who have gone through it so We Won’t Get Fooled Again.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?

I’ve recently heard at least three people trot out the old trope that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. It’s such an easy-to-understand metaphor for staying optimistic in difficult times and turning the tables on what life deals to you. It’s the lemony version of playing the cards you’ve been dealt.

The expression first appeared in print in an obituary written and published in 1909 by the  American writer, publisher and artist Elbert Hubbard in the Literary Digest. In his opinion, “A genius is a man who takes the lemons that Fate hands him and starts a lemonade stand with them.”

It’s more often attributed to Mr Win-Friends-and-Influence-People, the king of self-improvement, Dale Carnegie. Carnegie used it in his 1948 book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: “If you have a lemon, make a lemonade.”

However, others used it between the Hubbard and Carnegie instances. I particularly like this one in a poem published in a 1940 edition of The Optimist by Clarence Edwin Flynn:

Life handed him a lemon,
As Life sometimes will do.
His friends looked on in pity,
Assuming he was through.
They came upon him later,
Reclining in the shade
In calm contentment, drinking
A glass of lemonade.

I like lemons. What would lemon tea be without the lemon flavouring? There’s no obvious substitute. Mandarin tea, anyone? I don’t think so. Gin and Tonic—unthinkable without a zesty zing of a slice or two of lemon. Okay, some people prefer lime. But the purists still choose lemon—the cynic in me thinks this could be due to the price difference, but that could be … well … cynical. The adventurous might even go for a taste bomb by adding a slice of both. I salute their inventiveness. Worse than a lemonless G&T, imagine a gorgeous white fish fillet slathered in herbs, garlic and butter without the blissful finishing tartness of a twist of lemon.

The lemon dissing even carries over into song. Harry Belafonte, the singer and actor who popularised Calypso and fathered Halle Berry, released Lemon Tree in the fifties. Lemon tree very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.[1] Duuuuude—come on. We all know you don’t eat lemons like other fruit. They’re garnish. Ingredients. You’d have to be desperate to peel and chow down an entire lemon au natural like an orange. But … lemon meringue pie … lemon cake …. lemon souffle … lemon mouse. I love the flavour of lemon in pretty much any guise. Ironically, except for lemonade, which I can’t see the point of and wouldn’t give you beans for.

Anyway, there is a point to this meandering story. Like most people who have lived any length of time and taken the odd risk, life has lobbed a fair swag of lemons at me. But I’m not bitter, unlike those sour little yellow suckers. I tend to see my lemon mountain as an acknowledgement of an adventurous spirit prepared to try new stuff and push the envelope a bit. My adventures haven’t been at the extreme end of the spectrum. E.g., journeying to the centre of the earth-type adventures. I haven’t (yet) been embroiled in a space odyssey, even a minor one or been part of any pioneering expeditions to find world-changing places like the Northwest Passage. I haven’t even climbed any mountains of note. But I’ve most definitely taken the road less travelled at regular intervals.

Back in 2010, in addition to becoming co-owner of a creative agency, I was co-founder of a pioneering event app, and I could see the dramatic impact smartphones would have on our lives. The ramifications were mind-boggling and made me think long and hard about the future of branding and design. This resulted, in 2012, in a short business plan in infographic form—we are a design studio, after all—setting out a blueprint for a digital transformation of our business. Not exactly messianic. All creative sector businesses worth their salt could see the writing on the (digital) wall and the need for reinvention to stay relevant.

But my thinking was a little different. I didn’t just want to make lemonade, as in shifting from a print worldview to a digital one— we had to do that anyway. No, I wanted to do something entirely different. To shift the paradigm (as we were so fond of saying then). I understood that our value wasn’t so much in our team’s undoubted skills and expertise or our quality of work and service model. Print-led or digital, any pivoting in the business-as-usual sense would be about survival and continued competitiveness rather than systemic change.

Our primary value was (and still is) in the IP around our brand development process, which we have amassed over many years. You’ve heard about software as a service. My thinking—couldn’t we create a branding-as-a-service offer. I.e, take our IP online and enable people to learn the nuts and bolts of developing and managing a standout brand, drawing on our years of intel, insight and innovation?

It was a great idea, but in 2012, it would have required us to build a complex (aka hugely expensive) bespoke web portal. We didn’t have access to template-driven websites like this WordPress one I use, with all the widgets and plugins that enable almost any interaction with users at affordable prices. There are even subscription-based learning platforms that host video courses, learning resources and offer community building tools. Everything you could want at a tiny (miniscule) fraction of the cost of building from scratch. Better still, it’s on them to keep adding features and functionality and support the system. My 2012 aspirations were ahead of the curve—the idea wouldn’t have succeeded even if we’d had the funding to make it happen. But the times and tools they have achanged.

Catalysed by the latest tsunami of lemons delivered to small businesses like mine in the COVID aftermath, supported by the seismic shift to online everything, I am finally making it happen. I love working with ambitious early-stage businesses, but our conventional pricing structure makes that hard. My online learning platform will allow anyone to access high-calibre brand thinking without the fancy agency price tag. I published the programme’s flagship Brands with Moxie — Eight Steps to a Winning Brand late last year. This book sets out to help entrepreneurs, small business owners, and early career marketing and comms managers understand and leverage the full power of their brands. That used up quite a lot of lemons. I’m now converting the remainder of the lemon mountain into video training courses and other resources, and I’m poised to launch the first of these by the end of the year.

I’ve wanted to throw in the towel many times over the last few years. Go into hibernation mode as I talked about in a previous post. Admit defeat and walk away. Give up on years of business development and find something less challenging. But I decided to, as the saying goes, keep calm and carry on. Whether your bag is lemonade or lemon soufflé , with the right attitude, you’ll always be able to find something to do with the lemons life lobs at you. I’m not out of the woods yet. My new take on my business still has a long way to go to earn its and my keep, but I’m hopeful.

I feel proud of myself. Every time life has given me lemons, I’ve come back with a burst of extraordinary creativity, bringing a lot of personal growth. Everything is risky. There’s no such thing as a wrong decision. There’s just a different destination. I’m saying this as much to shore up my resolve as to convince anyone else. Bitterness is seductive. The drama of disappointment is too easy to get derailed by. Making disappointment a defining characteristic is diminishing and a massive turnoff to other people. Life increasingly becomes a dark place where ‘they’ are out to get you, and perspective disappears.

So, I say, whilst raising my G&T with its extravagant two slices, Slàinte Mhath—cheers—fellow adventurers. When life gives you lemons, don’t just make lemonade. Get creative. Make something new and exciting. Step away from your comfort zone. What’s the worst that can happen? You get more lemons and try a different recipe.


[1] YouTube failed me and I couldn’t find a recording, but here’s one of his most loved songs from that era Island in the Sun.

Brattish or demure—which tribe do you belong to?

A couple of days ago, I read about the trending makeover of the word demure on TikTok in an article How Demure Are You?[1]. TikTok is awash with advice about how to be demure. Before you get your feminist dander up, no one is urging a dash towards traditional womanly demureness. The repurposed demure is not about being reserved, modest or shy. It’s been hijacked to serve more modern mores.

The instigator of the new demure is TikTok creator Jools Lebron, who sets standards for seminal stuff like managing makeup and moustache sweat. The concept has been seized on and spread like wildfire. Lebron uses demure semi-ironically to encompass the ideas of respect and mindfulness. Well, who can argue with that? Not me—those are two qualities I wish were in greater supply, as a matter of course. So, sitting gracefully. Demure. Showing restraint in your coffee order. Light milk, not the full version. Yup, also demure. Demure dainty spritzes of perfume instead of the usual scent surplus that challenges the olfactory senses and triggers anyone with allergies. Demur clothes to show respect to others at work. Wow, maybe all those female lawyers flashing their cleavages in fantasy TV courtroom dramas could take a leaf out of this book?

I thought the word demure had long since been tossed on the bonfire of, if not the vanities, the behaviours no one (broad generalisation) seems to care much about. Instead, it’s heading towards the stratosphere in the influencerverse. It’s hilarious when you think it’s pretty much the antithesis of the “brat” thing inspired by Charli XCX’s recent album. Like demure, which is no longer about keeping your eyes modestly lowered, a brat is no longer a brat— a petulant, badly behaved child or someone acting like one. No, the new Charli XCX brat is a different beast altogether. This brat is super cool. Petulance has transformed into the more admirable audacity of non-conformity. Bad behaviour is now spirited youthful defiance and ‘out there’ or creative self-expression.

Whatever happened to the seductiveness of slow?

OK, so you probably realise I’m not a TikTokker. Reading is my primary source of what’s hot and what’s not, with an underpinning of docutainment from the streaming services. Even though I don’t spend time on TikTok, the impact of it is everywhere. As a reader of opinion, you can’t be entirely oblivious to some of its influencers’ influences as they whoosh past. It’s fascinating. It’s like the world exists in fast-forward—words and images flash in front of our consciousnesses in perpetual motion as each new thing grabs headspace and headlines. But you’d have to say all the brouhaha is entertaining. A bit of fun in our not-so-fun times. But, like Shakespeare’s Darling Buds of May[2], TikTok’s lease has all too short a date. Summer ends, and so do TikTok trends.

I’m taking a bit of licence here by bringing in Shakespeare in the context of TikTok, but his Sonnet 18—Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day?—is one of the most enduring and loved of all poems. The language is gorgeous, but the meaning is divine (see the poem below). Shakespeare’s theme is the opposite of our fast-forward and instantly forgettable ‘content-driven’ times. It is an exquisite word picture capturing the enduring power of love and poetry to immortalise and preserve. The Sonnet so elegantly puts across the author’s belief that the essence of a person, an idea, or a love can outlast death. These can be captured in words that long outlive the writer or the subject. The wonderfully comforting thought is that as long as we can see (read) and breathe, the subject will live on with each new reading.[3].

When I was the age of the current Brat Pack, I’d have been rampaging in brattish trappings with the best of them. An invitation to be demure, even in it’s made over sense? Not so much.

The whole “Brat Summer”[4] break out fun. Ditto, the reinvention of demure. I’m not saying they don’t matter—when I was the age of the current Brat Pack, I’d have been rampaging in brattish trappings with the best of them. An invitation to be demure, even in it’s made over sense? Not so much.

Whether your tribe is brat or demure, it’s okay to flirt with a new thing. But it all seems so fleeting and ephemeral, encouraging attention spans that might struggle to compete with the average goldfish. It were ever thus when it comes to shiny new things, but the speed at which the carousel is spinning is mind-boggling—an average TikTok post lasts less time than ice cream in the sun. Or, maybe I’m just demurring the reality of digital overwhelm when I say I prefer to keep company with concepts that eternal summer cannot fade.

Sonnet 18 — William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Charli XCX Brat

Jools Lebrun on TikTok


[1] Madison Malone Kircher, Callie Holtermann, Gina Cherelus, Melissa Guerrero and Anthony Rotunno in the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/style/demure-tiktok-mindful-cutesy.html?searchResultPosition=1

[2] The timeless Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare. Originally published with Shakespeare’s other sonnets in 1609.

[3] I enjoyed this commentary of the Sonnet by ThoughtCo.

[4] The other big trend du jour, inspired by Charli XCX’s recent album Brat.

Mutton dressed as lamb and other outdated taboos

I’ve always had at least one foot in the if you’ve got it, flaunt it camp. While I was flicking through the op-eds a couple of weekends ago, one of the headlines I hovered my mouse over was, Are You Ever Too Old for a Bikini?  The old mutton dressed as lamb thing in a more beguiling wrapper. In any case, that clever little clickbait title acted like catnip to … er … a cat, and I was hooked.

It turned out to be an advice column. The seeker of advice was worried about what to wear at her daughter’s beach wedding and whether a bikini would be appropriate. There would be a lot of conservative types attending and she didn’t want to be seen as a try-hard, attempting to look too young or an exhibitionist set on upstaging her daughter. While the main worry was about this specific occasion, it posed the broader question of whether there is an age beyond which one shouldn’t go all itsy bitsy teeny weeny[1] when on the beach, at the river or poolside.

My first thought was, are you fricking serious—this is something you need to ask? My second was, don’t you have anyone better to discuss this with??

I’m often surprised by the questions people send to newspaper advice columns. Perhaps, more accurately, I’m surprised by how many people lack self-confidence in the context of the question. But I’m amazed when it’s a question of what’s OK or not to wear—another headline that grabbed me a while ago was How Many Rings Are Too Many to Wear?  More disbelief on my part, I’m sorry to say.

But the people asking these questions in the public glare of a high-circulation newspaper or magazine are doing the rest of us a favour by bringing difficult topics into the open. Whether the question is to bikini up or not, or any other variant of Am I too old to wear…whatever…it is indeed a good question. It’s a question many of us ask as we stare in indecision at an item in our wardrobe while the mutton dressed as lamb monster lurks, rubbing its hands in glee, cackling at our dilemma. Gung Ho, though I am, I am certainly not immune to its judgements.

It’s all part of the invisibility trap: the pressure to act or dress your age and not break the myriad taboos laid down over generations.

So many conscious and unconscious biases are baked into our neural pathways from our earliest days about what’s acceptable in almost every facet of our lives. It’s particularly insidious when it comes to clothes. Running the gauntlet of dressing too young for our age is unthinkable. It would almost be preferable to die or become a hermit than to be considered mutton dressed as lamb. I’m shuddering as I write. But, like many buts, it’s a big one: We get so caught up in worrying about it that we don’t stop to worry about how effectively the wool (!) has been pulled over our eyes.

Although lamb and mutton can be male and female sheep, like many social mores concerning appearance and dress, this little mutton dressed as lamb canard is uniquely applied to women. But where did the lambasting expression come from? Sheep meat is defined in two ways; lamb is from animals up to twelve months old (young and tender before they’re weaned), whereas its mutton (mature and tougher) after that. The metaphor not only plays on this division in age and meat characteristics but also acknowledges the culinary procedure of ‘dressing’ something to cook, making it a conscious act. An attempt to gull others into thinking you’re younger than you are.

“Someone the other day asked the Prince of Wales at the Ancient Music whether he did not think some girl pretty. ‘Girl!’ answered he, ‘Girls are not to my taste. I don’t like lamb, but mutton dressed like lamb!’”.

Comment attributed to The Prince of Wales (later George V) by Mrs Frances Calvert, in her Social Gossip Journal compiled in 1811

The above quote is one of the first references, but there were earlier variations and other applications of the sheep (mutton/lamb) epithet, as I found in this fascinating book preface Mutton Dressed as Lamb? Fashioning Age in Georgian England by Amada Vicary. The author references period publications like the Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, which noted in a 1737 article that a woman past her prime could be labelled an ‘old Ewe’. The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London, 1785) included entries ‘Laced Mutton’—slang for prostitute—and ‘Mutton Monger’—a man addicted to ‘wenching’.

According to the Fashion History Museum, until the early 19th century, there was no real distinction in how the different ages presented. “Children dressed like miniature adults, and with an average life expectancy in the 18th century of 43 years, old age was not something to worry about, but rather to hope for”. Towards the end of the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, fashion designers started offering fitting (pun intended) styles for different age groups as people began to live longer through scientific and medicinal advances. Children got clothes that acknowledged their activities instead of making them so many Minie-Mes.[2] Younger women dressed in sportier and brighter-coloured costumes, while older women were trussed in subdued but highly elaborate colours and styles.

Formerly attributed to Nicolas de Largillière, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Formerly attributed to Nicolas de Largillière, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Soon, this separation became convention, and it wasn’t ‘done’ for younger women to dress too extravagantly or older women to dress too young. By the 1920s—the ‘flapper’ era—older women were still sporting the ‘buttoned up’ pre-war formal wear, while racy young women got adventurous. Hemlines shrank, whalebones were tossed away, and lower legs became daringly visible as they Charlestoned the nights away.

After WWII came Dior’s New Look, Courreges’ mini skirt, and many other couture innovations intended mainly for the young woman of the world.  Acknowledging the growing gulf between young and old fashion, Vogue created a column for older readers, ‘Mrs. Exeter, catering to “the woman of a certain age who chose colours to suit greying hair, and similarly suitable ‘styles’ for every social occasion — town or country.”

Then came the “youthquake” that was the Sixties, when the fashion world turned on its axis, and the generational divide became wider than ever. While some iconic designers, like Karl Lagerfeld, made clothes that “make older women feel sexy,” the new kids on the block designed for hipsters and made clothes unashamedly for teens and young adults. In this world mutton was even less welcome in lamb’s clothing than ever.

Coming back to the article. After reading it, I admired the woman for even contemplating wearing a bikini because swim or beach wear is where many lines are drawn in the sartorial sand. However well-toned and put together the age-kissed body is, displaying it in a bikini is quite brave and can be confrontational to others struggling with their self-images and fears. It’s one thing to bikini up in the seclusion of your garden or pool to catch some rays or enjoy a bit of water therapy, but should you flaunt it in public places?

My body’s not in bad shape for my age. I can’t kid myself that it’s in the same league as the movie stars of my vintage, but I’m proud of it, and I’m glad it’s all down to my efforts, not that of any cosmetic surgeon or treatment. While I recognise that my outer casing now is a well-lived life away from its younger versions, but I still have fun dressing it. Even the most phlegmatic amongst us don’t live in a vacuum where it’s possible to ignore the knowledge that youth and beauty still rule the roost (As I’ve written about in a previous post—I Feel Pretty). Or should that be pasture?

Bearing ageing arms in strapless tops is one path mature angels, like me, often fear to tread for example. But fashion has our backs on that one with so much choice of skimpy tops with mesh or diaphanous sleeves. There are some things I won’t wear—pelmet style short skirts have been out of the running for decades (other than for fancy dress parties—I work one recently to a Rocky Horror Picture Show fundraiser).

“I Feel Bad About My Neck!”

Nora Ephron onthe practive of ‘compensatory dressing’ by wearing turtlenecks, scarves and mandarin collars to hide one of the big flags of age, a crepey neck.

While it’s often difficult to come to terms with it, there is nothing unnatural or shameful about ageing skin and bodies. It just messes with our vanity and self-image. Our inner person is still young at heart and it’s hard to sync that with what we see in the mirror. There’s also the other aspect in that showing too much of it scares the crap out of younger people—OMG, am I going to be like that one day?

Faced with the bikini dilemma, this recidivist flaunter would probably dial it down if it were my niece or great-niece’s wedding. I can’t imagine anyone in my family opting for a beach wedding, but you never can tell. The last time I went anywhere near a beach, I coaxed myself into a somewhat skimpy one-piece cossie, but a bikini is probably beyond my comfort level. Why is this? What difference does a small additional bit of covering make? As we say in my brand world, “It’s all about perception.” Equally, as I’ve said before, if you have to get any part of your kit off, if you can’t tone it, tan it.

To bikini or not bikini is a choice. The length of your hemline is another choice. Whether you’re comfortable bearing your arms, keeping your hair long, or wearing tight jeans or figure-hugging ‘wiggle dresses’—all choices. I sincerely believe the choice simply depends on what you feel comfortable with. If you are hesitant about wearing something, don’t— there’s not much worse than suffering through an evening of wearer remorse. There will be something else that you can really rock.

I hate that we are so inhibited by so many unwritten and outdated conventions and proprieties—what’s ‘done’ and ‘not done’, The snobbery and judgementalism that pushes us into a doom loop of self-flagellation. Who can ever measure up? When I’m the ruler of the world, phrases like mutton dressed as lamb will be banished from the vocabulary in perpetuity, along with all those other ghastly limiting expressions that keep us chained up behind the bars of invisibility.


[1] The ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Bikini’ was immortalised in this truly awful song by Bryan Hyland of “Sealed with a Kiss” fame (a bit better, still cheesy) written by Vance and Pockriss whioch reached #1 on he Billboard Hot 100 chart, (#8 in the UK) and sold almost a million copies in the first two months of its release, when Hyland was only 16, and over two million copies in total.

[2] Mini-Me is a fictional character from the spoof Austin Powers film franchise, a miniature clone of the gloriously awful antagonist Dr. Evil. 

To smooth or not to smooth? The eternal dichotomy of curly hair.

If you came into the world sporting insanely curly hair like me, you’ve probably had a love/hate relationship with it throughout your life.

It’s estimated that about 60% of us have curly hair. That’s a fair chunk of people who regularly decide they don’t want the hair type they were allocated because it’s not the ‘in’ thing. Of course, we shouldn’t fall victim to this eternal runway of fashion ins and outs but … advertising is a powerful shapeshifter. We want to be beautiful, have the right look, not be ‘othered’.  

To be clear, I haven’t spent my entire life obsessing about whether to straighten my crowning glory or let it do its corkscrewed worst, but here’s the thing. At times when the world has worshiped at the shrine of flowing straight locks, for us frizz heads, smooth, sleek hair seems as precious as Tutankhamun’s Golden Mask, and just as out of reach. We live our lives on that most uncomfortable of places, the horns of the to smooth or not to smooth dilemma.

People, talk about beauty shaming. What about hair shaming? Shouldn’t that be a thing too? Straight or curly, there’s always a time when what you have doesn’t cut it according to the fashionistas and you don’t feel in the slightest pretty — a topic I’ve covered in a previous post.

When I finally acknowledged a couple of years ago that I might as well have been trying to nail jelly to the wall as keep my tousled tresses under control for significant chunks of my life, I put a stop to a lifetime of denial. I stepped away from the Curly Wars and towards my best hair life, casting aside all the primping paraphernalia like so much unwanted baggage.

I was a curly-haired cherub as a child. People would positively croon over my gorgeous golden spirals … and I basked in their admiration, right? Wrong, I hated it. As I entered my teens, I realised my look just didn’t make the cut … as it were. I wanted to be a long-haired badass, not a curly-haired little butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth poppet. When my mother’s hair writ split at the ends in my early teens, I went on a long march to curly freedom.

But oh, the pain of the journey. Getting short curly hair to the bit where it’s a cascading glory not a god-awful grotesquerie builds lifelong attributes like inner fortutide, grit and determination. My recalcitrant curls couldn’t seem to stir themselves to grow any length, and for a couple of self-loathing years, I became that person. The nerdy, bookworm, violin-playing possessor of a horror story triangular frizz.

At that time, it wasn’t the curls per se that were the problem—Marc Bolan had already seduced us with his lyrical depth, “I ain’t no square with my corkscrew hair” in Telegram Sam. And I wanted to be that person. Pity the diminutive Glam Rock pioneer prematurely got curled around a tree in a pocket rocket Mini in 1977 just a couple of weeks short of his 30th birthday. The curly world mourned more than the loss of a rock legend. Think what he could have done to change the curly conversation over the years. Or maybe even the Mighty Mouse of the singing world would have succumbed to prevailing hair trends along with the rest of us Lemmings.

It doesn’t matter a damn that other people rave about your curls – curls are a personal thing.

It also doesn’t matter a damn that other people rave about your curls. Many people have put mine up on a pedestal. Everyone except me seems to love them. But curls are a personal thing. Mine weren’t the sleek Siren look I lusted after because “it is known” (a la Daenerys’s handmaids in Game of Thrones) or at least it certainly seemed to me that straight hair was perceived as more appealing and sexier than curls. As a consequence, I spent hours daily duelling the unruly little suckers with a blow dryer. I’d section my hair and brush each one over and over until it had a semblance of straightness. It was all awful for the hair, but we didn’t have the flat irons and specialised product we do now.

Ironically, I grew up in a cold climate where gale-force winds, driving rain or blizzard conditions were the prevailing weather conditions, so all the hours of smoothing went out the window the minute I stepped out the door. Remember the episode of Friends when Monica landed in Hawaian humidity with glorious sleek hair that frizzed out the minute she stepped off the plane? Been there, done that, worn the tee-shirt.

So, I started straightening in the mid-seventies, the time as some wag said, when hippies roamed the earth and footballers sported perms and ‘tashes. But it wasn’t until the mad eighties that we reached peak curl. The eighties were a riot of too much everything. I moved to London in 1981 and revelled in the excess. It was a time when fashion was said to have thrown discretion to the winds and gone plain wild. It was all about extreme individuality—the tail end of the Punk Era and the rise of the New Romantics. Big, curly hair wasn’t just a style but an attitude. In that decade, if you had straight hair, you were screwed. Hair was ‘pouffed’ to within an inch of its product-laden life. Body was the bomb. Curls reigned supreme. I was at last free to stop trying to coax my curls into conformity and revel in my great good fortune in not needing a perm to achieve the look.

By the eighties, we reached peak curl. Big, curly hair wasn’t just a style, it was an attitude. If you had straight hair, you were screwed!

Then, from the mid-nineties, it all went pear-shaped again as the pendulum of fashion swung, as is the way with pendulums. And, to my shame, I swung with it … and then swung back … and swung again.  

OK, so I exaggerate in the interests of a good story. I’m not—quite—the fashion victim I’m making myself out to be. What’s fuelled my personal curl-path more than wanting to be in with the In Crowd has been my prevailing mood. Curly is confident me—the kickass, outgoing facet of my many-faceted self. Straight has often accompanied the stressful, conflicted me, coping with times of uncertainty and change. I guess it was a way of imposing some order and feeling a bit glam.

Women are notable for slashing long hair when relationships break down. In my case, I tend to go to ground and dial everything, including my hair, down while I re-energise and recover from whatever’s bothering me. For sure, fashion trends have some impact—I don’t live in a vacuum—but it’s largely about how I’m feeling.

Anyway, in this tale with a lot of twists, I’m glad to have once-and-for all accepted that my curls are one of my superpowers. I am once more a rebel without a comb. Like the Hidden Tiger, I’m coiled and ready to spring. My hair has always been more mood than mane. I finally see that curly hair like mine isn’t just a plate of food. It’s a signature dish.

And how clever of me to come to this life-changing conclusion at a time when curly hair has become infinitely Instagrammable. Tellingly Tik Tokable. The frisson of frizz fascinates rather than frightens. Posting endless pix of your capricious curls is all the rage. It’s not just in our modern times that curls have come and gone. It’s been the same story since Eve was blamed for everything and chucked out of Eden.

Humans are contrary by nature—we’re rarely happy with what we’ve got. The curly want straight, and the straight want curly. It was ever thus. My advice? Keep calm and curl on.

Here’s my Top Twenty picks from Instagram’s curly cuties whose “spirals have gone viral”.

Courtesy of Wolf Global
  • Embracing the chaos, one curl at a time
  • Sassy, classy and a bit smart-assy
  • Born to be wild and curly
  • Twist, shout, and let those curls out
  • Curly hair, don’t care, got flare everywhere
  • Curls rule the world
  • In a sea of straight, my curls are the wave
  • Living the curly life one spiral at a time
  • Embrace the chaos of your curls
  • Let your curls do the talking
  • Sassy, classy, and a bit smart-assy… courtesy of my curls
  • Walk through life like it’s a curly runway
  • When life gives you curls, flaunt them
  • Own your curls, own your crown
  • Fearless in the pursuit of what sets my curls on fire
  • My hair isn’t messy; it’s just erupting with awesome
  • Curls are the exclamation point of my personality!
  • Perfectly curled and unapologetically bold
  • Curls on point; life on track
  • It’s not just curls; it’s an attitude with spirals.

Not a dry eye in the house? There’s nothing like a good cry.

OK, so full disclosure: I’m a crier. I snivel at the drop of a happy or a sad ending. I tear up at feats of astonishing human achievement, bravery, loyalty, courage, against-the-odds survival, redemption, etc. Thinking about it, I tear up at astonishing feats of animal bravery, loyalty, courage, and against-the-odds survival. Not sure if redemption is a thing for animals, although there are some fantastic stories of animals that have gone feral and been rehabilitated, which have the same effect.

Perhaps a better way of putting it is that I am easily moved. I hope that means I’m healthily plugged into my emotions, not just at the mercy of a heap of repressed crap that gets triggered by the stuff I see, read and listen to. In any case, our experiences, good and bad, shape our responses, whether they bring smiles, laughter, tears or even a whopping great punch-up—some are just more in more socially acceptable than others. I’ve written a lot about the benefits smiling and laughing with, or even at, others, but a good cry is up there in the feel good stakes too.

According to Dr Thomas Dixon, in a recent book where he examines the history of British Crying — Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (don’t you love the title?), “Weeping is an intellectual activity, and yet it is also a bodily function like vomiting or sweating, or farting.” Tears seem to fulfil a higher function than just a vulgar bodily emission, but I guess they’re all forms of purging. When you think about it, crying’s not just an eruption of our emotional geysers, they’re also a way of protecting our eyes from spoilers like onions, billowing smoke, and particles carried in the wind by washing them out.

Whatever. There’s nothing like a good cry, or, as my Scottish compatriots would say, “a guid greet”. We have a rich vocabulary around crying. Snivelling, tearful, blubbing, wailing, sobbing, weeping, howling, bawling, to name the ones that instantly spring to mind. Bit like Miss Smilla and all those words for snow. Given how essential it is to our wellbeing, it’s a pity that publicly crying is one of the last taboos of our era. It’s almost up there with PDA (public displays of affection) on the pantheon of awful. We make fun of outsize emotions. God help the celeb caught crying a river over a broken relationship — paps have a field day, and it’s nirvana for the wits of the world who conjure meme magic to the schadenfreudistic (is that a word?) delight of all.

It hasn’t always been like this. We’re much more buttoned up than we used to be. From the earliest of times, tears have been associated with mourning rituals that included extreme acting out—prostration, excessive crying, tearing the hair, ripping clothes, smearing ashes on your face, for example. I’m glad that style of mourning has … er … died a death. But we’re far from it being considered good form to break down sobbing if our cappuccino is delivered cold.

In the medieval and Tudor world, histrionics were all the rage. People regularly gave their lachrymal glands a workout. Think big beefy Henry VIII (in his later years) projectile crying and generally carrying on like a toddler in full view of his court when something didn’t go his way. Up to comparatively recently, crying and emoting bit time were social norms. In the grip of high Romanticism, the early Victorian ear was awash … literally. It wasn’t until Albert died, leaving Victoria a grieving widow, that the vibe changed and emotional exuberance exited stage left. In it’s place came the stuffy, straight-laced, stiff-upper-lipped society we associate with the later era (at least on the surface). And it happened in only a couple of decades. Thanks for your legacy, late Victorians!

Subsequent generations copped all those repressive sentiments like “big boys don’t cry” and “I’ll give you something to cry about”. Even now, with much more relaxed standards and our buy into the concept of emotional intelligence, we’re not performative in our grief like our forebears.

The Tearjerker movie was a genius invention in a world with so little tolerance for adult tears. Tearjerkers allowed us a legitimate release valve. We could snivel up a storm in a dark auditorium where the tear police’s writ didn’t run. Of course, penance for this self-indulgence came in that ghastly moment when you had to exit your local Odeon clutching a wad of soggy tissues with bloodshot, morning-after panda eyes, and mascara-streaked cheeks. A blobby red nose and puffed-up, swollen lips completed the wrung-out look. The fact that everyone emerged the same did nothing to diminish the cringe factor of being seen having given in to an emotional storm. You could even hear the most blokey blokes coughing manfully, trying to camouflage this heinous crime. No one met anyone else’s eyes. It was wonderful and embarrassing and deeply cathartic. There is nothing like a good cry.

Credit: skynesher

I read an article this week about the absence of tearjerkers from our screens over the last couple of decades. Perhaps, with the advent of streaming services, we no longer saw the attraction of collective emoting in the dark. It’s just not the same sitting at home blubbing to yourself, your family and / or your companion animals.

Although tearjerkers have been Hollywood’s secret sauce since the earliest “I want to be alone” Garbo movies, their heyday is considered to be the seventies and eighties. This time saw a plethora of cryfests like Terms of Endearment, The Way We Were, Love Story, Kramer vs Kramer, Field of Dreams, ET, Top Gun, Beaches, Watership Down, and A Star is Born (the Streisand/ Kristoffersen version) and many more, hit our screens. We cried. And cried. And cried some more. It was magnificent. Not a dry eye in any house. Then peak tears arrived in 1997 with the titan of them all, the blockbuster Titanic, and we gave our tear ducts a rest. However, it seems there are stirrings in the wind that it might just be crying again[1]. Oh yeah, baby, yeah.  

The article got me pondering my all-time, guaranteed to open the emotional floodgates films. I blubbed my way through all of the above and many more. But if I want to cry without resorting to watching a movie— if I were an actor getting myself into the zone—there are two standouts. Curiously, both are children’s films, and both are about animals. So … drum roll … at the pinnacle of my all-time weepies? The 1994 film of Black Beauty. Specifically, the bit when Beauty sees Ginger for the last time alive.

“As if by magic, there she was, my beautiful Ginger. She was skin and bones. What had they done to her?”

From the 1994 film Black Beauty

They stand next to each other in a cab rank for a moment, and Beauty remembers when she was young and beautiful and all their happy ‘before times’ when men were kind. The next time he sees her, she is being hauled away, lifeless, on a cart. Tearing up as I write.

Black Beauty was my favourite book as a horse-mad little girl, which likely underpins my response to the film. I still have a copy. The last time I read it, I cried from about half way through, ending in convulsive sobbing at the bittersweet end . Luckily, it’s not a long book—I don’t think my internal waterworks could have coped.

Next? The ever-green Disney classic, Bambi. Specifically, the bit when a hunter shoots Bambi’s mother, and he’s left all alone. Gets me every time. In third place, Bambi again — when we realise his father is watching out for him. Now I’m crying as I write. It’s amazing that this 1942 movie still tears the heartstrings in a way many more recent ones don’t.

What are your favourites when you want a good cry? Here are a couple of handy top compilations of films, songs and books to get your give your tear ducts a workout. I don’t always agree with the selections, but each to their tearful own.

Films I Songs I Books

Anyway, must run. Off to my local cinema to catch Freud’s Last Interview. With a title like that, it’s bound to be a tearjerker!


[1] If films don’t do it for you, try this this gravelly Ray Charles, version of It’s Crying Time Again.

Who pays the ferryman when disaster strikes at sea?

The series was about a former soldier who returns to Crete to take stock after his boatbuilding business is bought out. It’s thirty years since he fought alongside the local resistance (andartes) during the Second World War, and he finds the ghosts of the past waiting for him and a cast of people who wish him ill.

The ‘ferryman’ in the title refers to Charon, the Ferryman of Greek mythology who carried the souls of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron to the underworld, Hades. The fee for the journey was a single coin—the custom was to place a low-value place coin in or on the mouth of the deceased so they could pay Charon’s fee. Charon served Hades, the god of the dead and king of the underworld, who judged the souls entering his domain, deciding where they would spend eternity depending on how they lived. As well as the dead, Charon gets into all sorts of trouble with Hades by ferrying legendary heroes such as Hercules, Orpheus, and Odysseus to and from the underworld, which is supposed to be closed to the living. 

This somewhat macabre train of thought and the question Who Pays the Ferryman?, which still haunts me, got me thinking about disaster at sea and two very different examples that happened back-to-back last year, one playing out in Greece’s maritime territory, where Charon might have been lurking, waiting for his fees. It’s hard to believe these tragedies happened nearly a year ago, and I’m sure I won’t be the only writer to comment on their anniversaries.

Disaster at Sea #1: The Adriana

On June 14, Adriana, a rust bucket of a fishing trawler, left Tobruk, Libya, heading for Italy stuffed to the gunnels with about 750 assorted Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian and Palestinian people seeking a better life in Europe. Its journey ended in an infamous and possibly preventable disaster at sea. As I’m sure you’ll remember, three days out of Tobruk, the dangerously overcrowded ship became stranded in Greek fishing waters with minimal power. Ultimately, as people panicked and rocked the unstable boat, Adriana capsized and sank in the middle of the night of June 18. Only 104 of the 750 men, women and children on board were found alive, making it one of the worst sinkings the Mediterranean has ever experienced. 

“Everyone knew the migrant ship was doomed. No one helped. Satellite imagery, sealed court documents and interviews with survivors suggest that hundreds of deaths were preventable.”

Martine Stevis-Gridneff and Koram Schoumali, New York Times (July 1, 2023)

Adriana’s story of disaster at sea is a harrowing one of neglect, brutality and lethal inaction. When it capsized, there was only one Greek Coast Guard ship to act as a witness. According to Stevis-Gridneff and Schoumali, passengers, some of whom had talked to humanitarian workers by phone, “waited and waited for help that never came.” Officials watched and listened for 13 hours via sonar, radio and telephone on ships and aircraft … and did nothing other than to instruct two nearby vessels to offer food and water and despatch the Coast Guard vessel to play a waiting brief. This small ship couldn’t have saved everyone on board, even if it had instructions to intervene. The whole thing was complicated further by Adriana’s captain refusing help—he and his crew would likely have only been paid on arrival in Italy. 

Who pays the Ferryman?

The reluctance to get involved by the Greek authorities in this unfolding catastrophe and with so many others experienced by European nations is that smugglers pack the boats, holding our hope for the desperate passengers who accept the conditions and pay money they’ve scraped together to get on what can only be described as ‘death boats’. Some of Adriana’s ‘passengers’ spent $4K plus for their place; the collective total was around $3.5m. The smugglers rely on European marine authorities to rescue people if things go wrong. The maritime authorities are hesitant to intervene and go to the rescue if, by doing so, they encourage the smugglers to despatch more people on ever less substantial ships. It’s a chilling, vicious cycle. 

Nine Egyptian survivors from the Adriana were arrested and charged with smuggling and causing the sinking. From sworn testimonies and interviews, survivors said that many of the nine brutalised and extorted passengers—another $50 could get you a relatively ‘safe’ spot on deck. 

Disaster at sea #2: The Titan

Then, on June 18, the second disaster at sea hit our news feeds just as Adriana was heading into crisis. The submersible craft Titan set off on a journey to the bottom of the ocean for a once-in-a-lifetime dive to see the wreck of the Titanic resting in Stygian darkness more than three kilometres (two miles) below the surface. Forty-five minutes into the two-hour dive, the support boat on the surface lost contact with the Titan. After a massive search operation during which seemingly the entire world held its breath, hoping against hope for a happy ending, wreckage from the Titan was discovered on the North Atlantic seabed near the Titanic. This confirmed that the submersible had suffered a “catastrophic implosion”, severing communications with the mother ship, and instantly killing the five people on board.

“It was perhaps the very unlikeliness of that outcome (rescue) that increased the appetite to see it realised”. 

The Guardian Newspaper

The Titan’s plight gripped the world as it unfolded in real-time via round-the-clock news stories. It somewhat took the oxygen from the coverage of Adriana’s investigation. But why did one eclipse the other so strongly? After all, they were both disasters in progress, with people in peril as the world looked on. Why did the Titan pull so much harder at people’s heartstrings and attention?

For starters, there was the absolute horror of the thing. I remember being appalled as I thought about those poor people spending their last hours crammed in the claustrophobic interior of a craft the size of a minivan, knowing communications were down and there was only so much oxygen to sustain them through to rescue. They were on a trajectory towards the ocean floor where the sub would have to withstand pressure 400 times greater than at sea level, which it could only do for a limited time. We agonised with their loved ones. We didn’t know until six days into the search when hope had all but been extinguished anyway, that the implosion had spared them that fate. 

The people involved were a source of voyeuristic fascination. The five were two wealthy businesspeople and one of their sons, a French explorer, veteran of 30 similar dives, and the CEO of Titan’s operator OceanGate. The price of a seat for this fatal dive was a cool quarter of a million dollars. The sheer bravura of the dive, combined with a price few of us could afford, only increased the fascination.

Who pays the Ferryman?

The stakes were raised by celebrity filmmaker (Titanic, among others) and deep-sea explorer James Cameron and several other marine dive experts criticising the owners for their lack of safety protocols and testing in their quest to move quickly and ‘disrupt’ what they saw as an over-cautious sector. 

The Titan tragedy continues to dog the submersible industry. According to Patrick Lahey, an expert builder of and advocate for submersibles (who repeatedly warned a friend who was one of the passengers not to make the dive), order books remain full. Still, questions abound—given the amount of regulation that governs watercraft, how could the tragedy have happened? It might now be a little harder for operators like OceanGate to bend the rules … you’d have to hope.

It seems not All disasters at sea are equal

The Titan disaster was a thoroughly first-world tragedy, whereas the Adriana was only a boat full of human flotsam shining an unwanted mirror at us, and we mostly turned the other way and went with the better and more immediately horrifying drama playing out. The Adriana had one small Greek Coast Guard boat to witness its end; the sea search for Titan had five well-equipped marine search vessels and significant air support. The Titan’s passengers had agency and choice, however badly it played out for them. Adriana’s victims were desperate and prepared to risk everything for a better life. 

However you view it, no one should die in either circumstance—both of these disasters at sea could arguably have been prevented. But the reality is that refugee boats are very far outside most people’s comfort zones. In contrast, Titan’s unfolding story was familiar from disaster movies and other real-life catastrophes in which we’ve got similarly caught up. One example is the “Houston we have a problem” near-disaster for the Apollo 13 Space Shuttle. It had similar dynamics with a small number of people trapped in a malfunctioning ‘tin can’, but Apollo’s crew still had open communications with Ground Control, who were able to help the astronauts do a patch job and get the shuttle back to Earth with no loss of life. 

We were appalled, shocked and saddened with Titan, but we understood the rules. It was happening to people like us who had choices and for whom the dive was a wealthy person’s quest to boldly go where few had gone before. With Adriana, we were appalled but didn’t understand the rules—it was an alien situation to us, happening to a boatload of seemingly alien people with few choices left. I truly do wonder who pays the ferryman for such people. Or was it just another disaster at sea that was easier to close our eyes to?

Illustration Copyright

The illustration of Charon the Ferryman from Goethe is by Luise Duttenhofer (1776-1829). It is in the public domain in any country or area, including New Zealand, where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or fewer.


[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/world/europe/greece-migrant-ship.html

Are you doing it this winter?

Are you taking the plunge this winter? Readying yourself to tap into a euphoric eruption of endorphins? Already wondering what I’m on about. I’m talking about cold-water swimming, of course. What? Did you think this might be a spicy little post about something else? Bad luck: you need to go elsewhere for your X-rated intake. 

We’re heading into winter in the Southern Hemisphere, so it’s time to consider the exercise regime of choice over the cold months. In the Northern Hemisphere, people are throwing in their cold-water towels and planning beach breaks and warm stuff. I just read a review of her second year at it by Caitlin Moran. She seems to like this what? Hobby … sport … therapy … self-inflicted act of sadomasochism? “Who needs drugs when I can get off my face cold water swimming?” Whatever you choose to call it, cold water swimming is riding a wave, as it were—I know at least two people in NZ who swear by it. Maybe in NZ, it’s worth a go. Where I live, we rarely even get frost, so it could add a bit of frisson to one’s day as winter sinks its fangs into the underbelly of autumn. But in colder climates like the UK, when you likely have to get a coast guard to chainsaw a swimming hole for you through the ice, it has to be nuts, right? 

But growing it is, and growing both in popularity and controversy. It seems to have triggered some resentments which have bubbled to the surface in its seasonal wake.  

Cold-water swimming seems like a relatively new thing. It’s not. It’s been a thing in many northern countries since … forever. In Russia, pre-Christians frolicked in ice water, and it became part of court protocol and was a custom among the ‘plebs’ throughout the Moscovian era from the late Middle Ages. Muscovy was a Grand Duchy or Principality founded in 1283, which morphed into the Russian Empire in the early eighteenth century under the first tsar. 

What’s changed is that ice-swimming competitions have sprung up like icicles after a deep chill. The establishment of the International Ice Swimming Association in 2009 formalised ice swimming as a ‘sport’. Swimmers compete in the Ice Mile (1608 metres). The water must be colder than 5 degrees Celsius, and competitors are only allowed the basics of swimming goggles, caps, and togs. There’s now also a metric 1500m version. Are they mad? To borrow from Gordon Ramsey, “Expletive me!” 

So why do people take the plunge? Caitlin says it involves “ten minutes of gasping, often agonised breaststroke through frost, sleet, hail and snow, but the endorphins make it all worthwhile”. Put like that, does it sound like something everyone should try at least once? Adherents say benefits positively affect the cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems. There’s also the psychological and metabolical lift (remember all those endorphins). 

However, I would never inadvertently put my readers at risk by encouraging something that could negatively affect your health and well-being. For all the apparent benefits, detractors claim it’s pretty risky, particularly for inexperienced and untrained swimmers. So, if you’re considering it as your next wellness springboard, it’s recommended to go for a gradual acclimatisation. Dip your toe in the water, so to speak. Break yourself in one shivering inch at a time over time rather than jumping in at the deep end. While cold water swimming might be verging on a religious rite to some, this extreme version of total immersion can kill you. Heart failure brought on by extreme cold is one of the risks, as is the only slightly lesser possibility of hypothermia. 

I have tried it, though, so never let it be said that my opinions are based on prejudice and hearsay alone. One night, many (many) years ago, as an undergraduate at Saint Andrews, a few of us were having dinner at a friend’s house. Said house was a stone’s throw from the town’s celebrated outdoor swimming pool, located on a wind-blasted shore and filled by the incoming tide. Such pools used to be common in coastal resorts, but they’ve fallen out of favour. From the late sixties, we Brits deserted the bracing outdoor experience, lured by the advent of the cheap ‘bucket shop’ holiday. Cheap all-in packages allowed us to escape our dismal summer and flock in droves to Mediterranean nirvana, where we pursued the honourable pastime of frying ourselves to a crisp on a beach, falling into the bath-warm sea to break the monotony of hours prone on a sun lounger mitigated by copious quantities of lager and cocktails.

Back in historic St. Andrews, imagine the scene, if you will. About six of us are in the post-dinner alcohol-infused bravado stage that tends to herald trouble when you’re a student. At some point, someone (history doesn’t relate who) said, “Let’s go for a swim”. It’s February, in the middle of the Scottish winter, but we’re pretty drunk, and it seems like a great wheeze. Our host somehow rustles up towels for everyone. We lurch over to the pool, which is as wind-swept as ever, black as Hades, and we could just make out the white tops on the not-inconsiderable waves. Some brave soul sheds most of their clothes and jumps in, provoking the rest of us to follow quickly—no one wants to appear a wimp. 

John McMillan / St Andrews sea swimming pool

Gordon Ramsay’s ripe vocabulary applies here, too. It was beyond cold. Eskimo Pie cold. The sort of cold that makes your lungs want to collapse to avoid it. I doubt we stayed in for more than a nano-second as the freeze factor sobered us up, and we grasped how insane it was. I don’t imagine the current practitioners get in a wild sea pool at 2am at least five sheets to the wind. You’d have to hope not. How we survived without succumbing to hypothermia, I’ll never know. They’re right about one thing, though. The endorphins are incredible – once you’ve convinced your lungs to start functioning again and the blood starts flowing back to those important muscles, like your brain. As the chill receded along with the blue flesh and chattering teeth, the big-noting began, and a saga was born. 

A very long-winded way of saying that cold-water swimming isn’t new. But it’s spawned a new, highly divisive fashion accessory—the dryrobe. Ever ready to get on a new bandwagon, the fashion industry has seen this predominantly middle-class pursuit as a potential gold mine. Ergo, we now have the dryrobe as the accessory of choice for the dedicated cold-water swimmer. In case, like me, you’d missed the arrival of this seminal new garment, they’re huge coats with towelling lining. They break all the prevailing fashion rules, which require a garment to render the wearer less, rather than more, bulky. Dryrobes also apparently achieve the sleight of drape that makes wearers look triangular.

Nonetheless, swimmers love them so much that they’ve started popping up in the most improbable places— supermarkets, football stadiums, and even workplaces. It won’t be long before someone decides to discard their ball dress for one. Their popularity now goes way beyond the original purpose of post-dip warmth and modesty.

But in parallel, dryrobes have become a weapon in the class wars. Google and ye shall find headlines like Too Cool for the Pool: How the Dryrobe Became the Most Divisive Thing You Can Wear. (The Guardian) and Don’t Humiliate Anyone You Spot in a Dryrobe, Especially When It’s Me. (The Times). There even is (or was) a Facebook Page, The Dryrobe Wankers, with more than 80,000 followers. Let the games begin!

I live a hop, skip and a jump (or a slide, skate or slush trudge in winter parlance) to a waterfront. Once I’ve saved enough money for the eye-wateringly expensive, must-have dryrobe accessory, perhaps I’ll give it a go. Perhaps. If the tides are right. If there’s a full moon and I can see hair growing on the palms of my hands. If Hell starts freezing over. Wait, it seems to me that cold water swimming actually is Hell on Earth, so why opt to get there early, even equipped with a dryrobe? I like my swimming holes to be like the velvet warmth of the Mediterranean mid-summer or the waters inside the reefs in the Fijian Islands, where you can bask like a lurking shark for hours on end without getting cold. Without the sharks. Or the rip currents. Or even any waves when I think about it. I’m sorry, Caitlin, but you can keep the big chill, endorphins notwithstanding. I’ll take a long soak in a hot bath every winter.

Do the (Side) Hustle

Remember the 1975 disco hit The Hustle by Van McCoy and the Soul Symphony? The ‘song’ made No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Soul Singles charts during the summer of 1975 and on the Canadian RPM charts. It peaked at No. 3 in the U.K., No. 5 in New Zealand, and No. 9 in Australia. It only made 38 on the French Singles Chart, confirming (in case it needed to be) that the French are different. The Hustle won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance early in 1976 and sold over a million copies. 

But wait, there’s more. This catchy but annoying ‘song’ has been featured in films including Stuck on YouVampires Suck and The Lorax, T.V. programmes— Shark Tales, That ‘70s Show, American Dad! and Futurama, amongst others. You’d have to say it was a whopping success despite only having three words—Do the Hustle! 

According to wikiHow, The Hustle is a “fast-paced partner dance, related to swing, and commonly danced to disco and modern pop. The dance involves four basic moves: stepping, twirling, chicken dancing, a move called ‘The Travolta’, and turning.” Then it was rinse and repeat until you drop. 

If you want a walk down memory lane and the chance to brush up on your hustle moves or try them out for the first time, you’ll find instructions in this incredibly cheesy short video. You’ll love it … honestly. Despite my cynicism, listening to it brought a fun flashback to my mid-seventies teenage disco queen. 

Anyway, despite a cursory search into the background of the dance, I couldn’t find anything specific. Presumably, it was a nod to the need to hustle to succeed or survive in the hustle and bustle of the seventies. It’s become much more sophisticated these days—it seems everyone has a side hustle—as a cheeky ‘must have’ accessory to one’s working life. Side hustles are flexible work that you do over and above your primary job to bring extra cash, get your creativity flowing or add purpose to your life. It could be taking up a new hobby, learning a new skill or using an existing one you want to ‘monetise’ at some point. Could even be volunteering for a non-profit you rate. 

As professional speaker and coach Alissa Carpenter says, “We all know Millennials love a good side hustle—to fuel their passions and wallets”. But it’s not just Millennials. It seems we’re all at it, including me; you’re no one if you don’t have a side hustle. It’s the ultimate put-down of our contemporary world: “What, no side hustle!”. I exaggerate, but the concept of the side hustle is endemic. 

I feel we need an updated version of The Hustle—Do The Side Hustle. What a pity Van McCoy died in 1979, shortly after the hit’s success, so he can’t do a side hustle of his own by remastering the original and raking it in. Clearly, it’s a great opportunity for some keen hustler.

Of course, it isn’t new. People have been forced or opted to take up additional burdens to make ends meet since Adam and Eve were ejected from Eden without notice. I’m sure they hadn’t had time to build up a rainy-day nest egg. People bandy the words around like membership of an exclusive club, but for people living on the margins, it’s always been an unwelcome part of their reality—the only way they can feed their families and survive. There’s also always been the darker side. I’m thinking black marketeers during war and rationing when fortunes are made by offering consumer goods that couldn’t be bought in conventional shops at exorbitant prices. The side hustle all too often comes wrapped in the trappings of despair, manipulation or holding people to ransom.  

While this type of side hustle is still shamingly very much part of the human condition, the trendy contemporary version seems pretty harmless. Side hustles, after all, make us better, more rounded, more connected, or simply wealthier people. Where’s the harm? Who suffers if you decide to set up an Etsy Shop as an outlet for your creativity? Or if I use all my waking hours outside work trying to become a best-selling author? Surely, it’s good to pursue the paths that make our hearts sing beyond the 9 to 5 grind. Why not use our ingenuity to make money on the hoof?

I’m a side hustler with the best of them, but there are issues. I’m about to publish a new book, and I’m running on fumes, trying to keep all the plates spinning. Side hustles can be hungry beasts sucking up all your best energy. In my day job, I run a design studio, which I own. As my book launch date looms, I’m not entirely clear which is the side course, and which is the main one as I scramble to keep all the plates spinning and keep my business dynamic whilst doing everything it takes to give my book its best shot. I’m blessed with high energy levels, but they’re not infinite, and I’m conscious of the risk of burnout if I keep the candle lit at both ends. I live alone, so it’s my call how I use my out-of-office time, but side hustles can short-change friends and family, stealing time that should be theirs. 

I’m all for putting time into hobbies and gaining new skills. You meet new people, expand your horizons, and potentially earn a bit of welcome extra dosh. I’ve met a wide range of like-minded people through mine, something I didn’t even consider when I started my indie publishing business with my sister. However, the statistics show that side hustles as a necessity are on the rise. According to CNBC’s Gilli Molinsky, “44% of people with a side hustle think they’ll always need it—and more are picking one up”. According to an April 2023 Bankrate survey of 2,505 U.S. adults, more than 39% have a side hustle to help cover living expenses rather than for discretionary spending. Half of the Millennials surveyed and over fifty per cent of the Gen Xers have one. 

The tragedy behind these stats is that too many people are going backwards financially, often underpaid, and coping with eye-watering costs of living hikes. Inflation at least seems to be under control (for now), but that only means commodities stay at the same high rates; they don’t revert to their more affordable pre-inflationary levels, so the cost-of-living hike is hard-wired in even though the curve has flattened (again, for now).

Anyway, I’m sure you get my point. Side hustles can be fun and richly rewarding on many counts for those of us lucky enough to follow our dreams because we can. They shouldn’t be a survival mechanism for people who have no choice.

P.S. Sorry if I’ve given you an earworm. If it’s any consolation, I can’t get the pesky Hustle thing out of my head either.