A few weeks ago I went for my first mammogram. You can tell it was my first because I made the rookie error of wearing a dress to attend it, which is why I am stood there in my trainers and pants with a dressing gown tied around my waist.

This wasn’t a routine checkup for me. I was still 40 (I turned 41 a couple of weeks ago, just after the appointment) and NHS generally screen women between the ages of 50 and 70. But I had been to the doctor with a strange pain – or more of a pressure – in my armpit and down the side of my breast. She wasn’t worried but I really was, it was out of the ordinary for me, so she referred me to a consultant at the hospital who also wasn’t worried but thought there might be a Fibroadenoma (non-cancerous breast tumour that’s apparently quite common) and wanted to schedule a mammogram and a scan to check it out.

Now in one of the biggest coincidences to happen to me this decade, about two hours after I left the hospital the lovely PR for One Welbeck (a private healthcare centre in London) emailed asking whether I would be interested, in a journalistic sense, in visiting their breast screening centre for a mammogram. How mad is that? I’m told by one person that I’ll be booked in for a mammogram in Somerset and a couple of hours later a totally different, completely unrelated person invites me to write about a breast screening service in London! I thought that I was on Candid Camera.

But it was a genuine offer; One Welbeck’s breast screening centre has the most advanced technology in the UK and they had some spaces available for press to visit the centre and write about the facilities and services on offer. It costs £259 for the main option there which is the “3D Breast Screening Mammogram with Radiologist Report” and I thought that this sounded like a very useful service for women who might not be offered screening on the NHS or who wanted or needed a faster appointment.

And so off I went to London. I have to say, I went a lot less fearfully than I would have done, because I had already watched Nadine Baggott’s Instagram video on her mammogram appointment and it had completely put my mind at rest about it. The strange thing was, when I watched Nadine document her mammogram I had no idea I’d be needing one so soon! It was one of those things that I watched, processed and sort of mentally shelved for later, thinking I’m glad it’s not that bad, I’ll remember that for when the time comes.

And that’s  partly the reason I’m giving so much detail here, because I do think that if you can help out a few people by sharing your own thoughts then that’s no bad thing. I think it’s so important not to bury your head in the sand when it comes to your health; I’ve been known to do this in the past because I am quite scared of anything test or hospital-related and so if this post resonates with someone like me then I think it’ll be worth me having written it!

I must say that the experience at One Welbeck was really great: everyone working there seemed geared to make the experience as relaxing and reassuring as possible. And not just for me, in case you’re wondering whether there was some sort of special treatment; all of the women in the waiting area seemed very calm and one even started chatting to me about how amazing the service was there. She raved so much about it that I started to suspect she was a plant, but actually I think it was because she was just so relieved that the experience wasn’t what she had feared it would be. Obviously there are going to be people attending the clinic who are there for routine appointments, but there would also be people who were there to check something urgently and who would – understandably – be incredibly anxious. I think that this woman was in the latter group; she’d already had a mammogram and a scan and a biopsy and was awaiting results on that. But she said that the care and compassion with which she had been treated had really taken her aback.

And I can agree with her sentiments; I felt completely at ease, unrushed and above all, cared for. The mammogram was quick, absolutely 100% painless (the pressure from the scanning machine is weird but it didn’t hurt at all, one bit*) and the ultrasound I subsequently needed was arranged immediately. I was in and out with the all-clear within half an hour. More importantly I was in and out with the all-clear and armed with some very important information: I have very dense breast tissue. I had been told this by my doctor and the consultant but neither had really explained the implications of this so I’d done my mental shelving again and stored the info for a later date. In actual fact it’s info that I need right now because apparently denser breast tissue makes it more difficult to feel small lumps or spot tumours on a Mammogram. (There’s more info at cancer.org on this. It’s why I then had to have the ultrasound follow-up. Dense tissue shows as white on a mammogram but then so do tumours, so it makes it more difficult to see an issue.)

I would never had known this had I not grabbed the bull by its proverbial horns and seen my doctor, asked to see the consultant and then gone for my breast scan. Thankfully all was clear, but it was recommended by the radiologist that I be scanned yearly because of the difficulty with spotting smaller tumours in denser breast tissue and it’s something that I will most definitely now do. I feel armed with relevant, important information about my own body and that is highly motivating; the fear of developing an awful disease is really high up on my list of worries in life, but I feel that there is a small, comforting element of control I can take back by keeping up with things like smear tests and breast checks and any other screening I might be offered.

So the aim of this post is to jog along anyone reading who might have a nagging concern with a lump or visual abnormality to go and get it checked. I tend to have this overriding fear of “bothering” doctors unnecessarily with my ailments, but more often than not when I finally go and see them my gut instinct was correct. (See: massive sinus infection that I lived with for about fifty thousand weeks.)

*A bit more info on the mammogram process itself, which I’m putting down at the end in case people don’t want to read about my boobs being essentially flattened into pancakes and then released. I’m being completely honest when I say that for me there was no pain. But it was uncomfortable. You basically have to drop your boobs (one at a time) onto a plate of glass and have them pressed until they’re essentially flat.

Re the plate of glass thing, if you’ve ever photocopied your breasts (to be frank if you had an office job in the nineties and didn’t photocopy some part of your anatomy then I’m highly disappointed in you) then it’s just like that but without the searing heat of the photocopier light going over an intimate area of your body.

You have to completely relax, which is obviously easy when you’re semi-naked and a lady you’ve only just met is placing your breast onto a piece of machinery, and you have to sort of slump yourself over it so that your shoulders aren’t tense. Then the other part of the scanner comes down to flatten the breast out and you start to feel a pressure which builds up and up and feels incredibly weird and then comes to a sort of climax (not that kind) where you think your boob couldn’t possibly squash more and then poof! It releases.

If I felt any pain at all it was actually where my ribcage was pressed against the machine. But it was fleeting, like the sort of pain you might get when you turn around in your car seat and lean into the back and you awkwardly press against the central console. (Bizarre comparison, don’t know where that came from!) And my radiographer, Miss Johanna Kelsey, was very calming and reassuring and talked everything through in very simple terms so that I didn’t feel scared or worried, just sort of…bemused.

My default state these days. Ha.

(I was very lucky to be invited to One Welbeck without charge because they are raising awareness of their services but I am absolutely going to return every year as a fully paid-up client as I am not eligible for NHS checks at this age. You don’t need private healthcare or insurance to book with One Welbeck, it’s a one-time fee of £259 for the 3D mammogram. Fees differ for other services such as ultrasound or biopsy.)

The post Life Update: My First Mammogram appeared first on Ruth Crilly.

I’ve long been trying to find a word that describes the sort of life you have as a parent to young children; something that encapsulates the feeling of utter chaos, that conveys the sense that your life is very much out of your own control – a word that sums up entirely the way in which your normal day is made up of manic mini-sprints, both physically and mentally.

It can often feel as though you’re just frantically treading water, trying to get work done and also be an adequate, functioning adult, but then there are these blissful downtime moments where everything is running like clockwork and the kids are at school and all seems right with the world.

And I couldn’t think of a word for the haywire parts, the bursts of hours or days that seem as though they’ve been specially designed to send you over the edge, until my literary agent said to me (humble-brag, dropped that one in, didn’t I? Ha!) that often he feels as though he’s lunging from one thing to the next.

Lunging!

Such an absolutely spot-on word. It really resonated with me. Maybe because I still associate the word lunging with the idea of moving suddenly and speedily towards something rather than that awful knee-bend thing you have to do in the gym. If you’re well into your fitness and only associate the word lunging with, well, lunging, then it might not hit the same note for you as it did with me.

But lunging. Careering from one thing to the next in a reasonably uncontrolled, spontaneous kind of movement, is exactly how I live life. And I’m sure I read someone wise say something, somewhere, about being in control of your destiny and trying not to be reactive all the time (ie waiting for an event to happen and then thinking “shit! Better lunge to the left!”) but I can’t remember what they said the alternative was.

Oh well.

I’ll be lunging for a while yet, then! At least this sort doesn’t make my knees creak.

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that the last life update was in August. I used to write one every month, without fail, and still would like to do that, but I’ll tell you what has become increasingly difficult: the kids are getting older. Might seem an obvious statement to make, but it has a huge impact on the way I write about them. It was fun writing about boobs and poo and what have you when they were more or less inanimate, but as they grow I find myself feeling apprehensive (over) sharing much about them. It feels like an invasion of privacy – even more so than a photo or a video – because, I suppose, there’s an unsaid trust between parent and child that you won’t go laughing about their funny mistakes in public.

Unless it’s the one about lions, because that was pretty good, to me at least. Mr AMR asked the six year old for a book of “hugs, kisses and lie-ins” as a gift and she presented him with a beautifully-drawn pamphlet with multiple vouchers for hugs and kisses. And drawings of lions. Loads and loads of lions.

See? It’s not the best anecdote in the world, is it? I mean it’s cute to me, but there’s nothing worse than other people sharing stuff about their kids that they think is cute. Pass the puke bucket sil vous plait. I get it. I’m with you. The stuff that’s great to share is when they’ve made a clay reindeer that looks like a giant misshapen penis and you can all laugh, or they’ve dyed themselves blue with a hair crayon and you can all commiserate.

So I’m feeling my way with the old “life update” posts. It’s a foray (or lunge) into the unknown. I love documenting life – and where else will I record the fact that my four year-old’s little hand in mine, when we cross the road, brings me to genuine tears of happiness on a daily basis? – but life is constantly changing and the people I once considered to be part of me are now their own little persons. How mad is that? They have their own opinions and everything. You should have seen how hard I had to bribe them to put elf outfits on (see photo at top of post): I now need a whole drum of Haribo to keep up with the bribes train.

I’m pretty sure that bribery via sweets is a massive no-no in the parenting books, but I can’t imagine they look too fondly on my particular method of self-care and stress-relief either* so I’m fighting a losing battle there.

*hiding around the corner, usually in the utility room, kicking the (full, always full) linen basket and silent-shouting hugely offensive swear words into a balled-up tea towel.

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My four year-old has recently stopped calling his six year-old sister by her actual name and instead has taken to calling her just “sister”. It’s slightly unnerving and makes him sound as though he has been beamed through time from the Dark Ages, where he was the wholesome son of a lowly miller.

“Sister! Father has risen from his slumber – fetch the milking pail from yonder the barn and make haste for the cock is crowing and the sun will soon begin to warm the corn in the fields.”

The most confusing thing about this new development is that he refers to my daughter as “sister” to me, and every time he does it my brain takes a full two seconds to recalibrate and realise that he’s referring to someone I actually know.

“I’m going to find my socks in my sister’s room.”

It’s so weird, your own son referring to your own daughter as “sister”, like you need a crash-course on who everyone is: it makes me feel as though I’ve been thrown into a parallel universe where my children aren’t my children at all and I’m this strange lady that they need to explain everything to.

“My sister said she wants the water bottle!”

Is your sister the one in the pink pinafore with a tutu over the top who I actually happened to give birth to and would know by scent alone, or just from the sound of her breathing, or by her silhouette or the way she walks or the exact curl at the end of her hair, OK then. I think I know which one you mean.

I did think though, that I could adopt this same approach in order to bewilder my husband, by talking about my husband to my husband.

Him: “where are the car keys?”

Me: “they’re wherever my husband left them.”

God it would be brilliant. So much opportunity for passive aggression!

Him: “can you not rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher? I don’t want to nag but it’s every time…”

Me: “my husband does say this every time, but what he doesn’t acknowledge is that his wife finds it entirely unnecessary to rinse before dishwashing. Why not go the whole hog and wash the plate if you’re at the sink rinsing it? I say to my husband this: why own a machine that is literally designed to wash dishes and still feel the need to do the first part of its job for it? Would you do this with other machines? Why not make everyone on an aeroplane flap their arms for takeoff to save the plane’s wings? Because it’s designed to fly, that’s why! In the same way that a dishwasher is designed to wash.”

That’s the sort of thing I could say.

Anyway, it’s quite cute, the sister thing – I think it’s because he’s starting school and he’s very aware that he has an older sister and is secretly very proud of her when he’s not trying to batter her with a plastic cricket bat or steal her kiwi fruit.

Only five thousand more weeks of the school holidays to go! We’re still in building chaos and so can’t go anywhere, even if there was somewhere to go, for at least another couple of weeks. Apparently everything is fully booked and the only Air B&Bs left are a couple of empty garages in West London and a patch of grass on a roundabout in Penzance that’s just about big enough to pitch a tent on…

The post Life Update: Sister appeared first on Ruth Crilly.

The just-six-year-old can now read, really quite well, which means I have had to hide all of the novelty mugs with swear words on them and also stop leaving dirty messages to Mr AMR on the fridge door. (Who knew magnetic letters could be so much fun?)

In all seriousness though, I can’t tell you how much joy I get from listening to my daughter read through her school books, even the one about owls. I feel the same excitement for her as I did for myself when I was learning to drive: suddenly a whole new world of experience is opened up. When you can read there’s no limit to where you can go – different times, different countries, different planets. You can meet fascinating people, you can sail on a pirate ship, you can flounce about a tudor court in an uncomfortable dress. I’m quite passionate about reading and how good it is for brains – we all love to be spoon-fed a bit of crap telly, but there’s nothing like getting to work on a good book and plunging yourself completely into a new existence. Great for getting yourself to sleep at night, too, FYI.

This sudden improvement in reading has, and I’m sure this is not a coincidence, come at the same time as a huge “screen ban” in our house. Now before everyone goes crazy and says that screen time (as in TVs, iPads, apps, educational games) is fine and you shouldn’t shame it and how would anyone get anything done without screens and yes our parents didn’t have screens and they managed ok but that was a different era and things aren’t the same now and so on and so forth: I am not shaming it. I am the biggest advocate of a bit of Great Uncle iPad and his unrivalled babysitting prowess and I also love the afternoon movie “treat” that allows me to have a nap, albeit in the world’s most uncomfortable position, while the strains of Can You Feel The Love Tonight filter into my troubled dreams.

I have no problem with screens. God love CBeebies and all that they have saved me from. Rejoice, rejoice in the Toca Life apps and Minecraft games with their buildable worlds. All hail the painting programs that stop my four year-old from falling asleep on long car journeys (if he sleeps for even ten seconds in the day he WILL NOT go to sleep that night). Praise be Netflix with its endless rota of cartoon shite that both kids love and that might buy us an extra 40 minutes of sleep on a weekend morning.

You can see I’m a fan. What I’m not a fan of, however, was how much I was starting to rely on them and what was happening when the screens got turned off. Total meltdowns! On both sides of the parent/child barrier! We were having CBeebies at breakfast (allows enough time to make the packed lunch and find school uniform), CBeebies after school (while dinner was cooked), games on the iPhone when they were bored of the CBeebies, games on the iPad because if one of them had games then the other one needed them too…

And I was always a bit scared of what might happen if I took it all away. How the hell would we get anything done? How would we cook? How would we take an important phone call? How would we even go to the toilet if they weren’t tethered to a screen? (I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, they weren’t on them constantly, but sometimes it felt like it.)

Well I can tell you what they do when you take all of the screens away: they play. Not for the first couple of days, the withdrawal phase, which is when they will come at you like angry Zombies, brandishing metal poles and threatening to kill you if you don’t give up the goods, but after that. A month in and they’ve stopped even asking for CBeebies. We haven’t had TV or a film on for the whole time and only a couple of games at the weekend when we had to go to Dorset to check something on the building site.

I can tell you it’s a revelation. They just play. And not really together, if I’m honest, so if you have one child and wonder whether this would ever work, I’d give it a go. They go off and just…do things. Potter. Ask constantly for things – like bits of string, glue, pens, card, boxes of an exact and unusual size, snail shells, water softening tablets – and occasionally have huge fights, but it’s actually less maintenance than when they’re watching the TV or iPad because they were constantly arguing over what to watch.

Note that they are four and five, my kids – they’re of the age where they don’t tend to get themselves into too much trouble. I’m not sure I could have done this a year ago because we needed constant eyes on my son who could unlock a Swiss bank safe in about thirty seconds flat and has a penchant for playing with bath taps. But now things are a bit easier I feel as though this “no screens” idea might be the way to go. It has been a lot more pleasant around here, I’m sure of it. I’m positive that the backchat I was getting from my daughter had been picked up from some of the things she’d been watching on Netflix, like Barbie Dreamland or whatever it was called.

And my son, with his love of Power Rangers and Mini Force and all of that robotic stuff, well. It all felt slightly violent, really. In comparison to CBeebies, anyway. Mind you anything seems X-rated compared to CBeebies. If you had only ever watched the innocent world of CBeebies, with its talking rabbit Bing and its Chuggington world and its Waffle Doggy, then an episode of Barbie Dreamhouse would be like watching the pool scene in Showgirls. You’ve only ever set eyes on Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures? Well take this, motherf*cka, your first glimpse of Mini Force would be the equivalent of accidentally seeing Scarface for the first time. (Age eleven.)

Say hello to my little friend.

So yeah, let’s see how long this digi-hiatus lasts. The best thing about it (probably) is that because the kids aren’t glued to a screen, it seems wrong for the adults to be glued to a screen, which means we’ve stopped scrolling the news apps or mindlessly delving into Instagram. I now have set times, usually when I’m on the toilet (you asked) and life feels better for it.

And there endeth my life update. I feel as though it’s been uncharacteristically positive but can’t imagine that’ll last. I love moaning too much!

The post Life Update: Oh Sh*t, The Kid Can Read appeared first on Ruth Crilly.

I had one of the best holidays of my life last week. I know what you’re thinking: how has she possibly been on holiday? But it wasn’t really a holiday in the traditional sense. I didn’t even leave my village. And I only include my village in the geographical parameters of my holiday because I had lunch in the pub, for one hour – if I disregarded that, for neatness’ sake, then I didn’t even leave my HOUSE!

So there was no travel involved with this holiday, which would usually be a given – neither was any booze involved. No gin and tonic at sundown, no miniature prosecco bottle on the plane to be decanted into a plastic beaker. There was no rampant, cystitis-inducing sex at improbable times and there was only one meal (the aforementioned pub lunch) that was prepared and cleared away by someone else…yet still it was the best holiday I’ve had for years. I didn’t get a lie in, but then neither did I have to have that awkward shouting-through-the-hotel-room-door conversation with a cleaner about whether I wanted my towels changing. (They always burst in anyway, usually when you’re doing something holiday-ish like Veet-ing your bikini line or foot-filing the sides of your big toes.)

Yes, dear readers, I stayed at home for my best holiday ever – it was the ultimate Staycation and it was the best break I’ve had since Greece 2014. Bear in mind that the holiday was also only from 9.15am until 2.45pm Monday-Friday, to fit around school hours, and you’ll start to realise just how epic this time was. Twenty-seven and a half hours of holiday bliss and I’ve been wanging on about it to anyone who will listen.

The sharpest tools in the box will already have twigged as to why it was the best holiday since 2014: the kids were at school! I took a week off work and there was nobody to look after! I’ve said this before, somewhere, and I’ll say it again: if you have kids and you’re continually at the point of total exhaustion then try and take a Staycation week during term time. I cannot describe to you the level of pleasure it brings to return from the school run, throw your car keys down on the hall table and go back upstairs to bed. I did this every day and slept from 9.30 until noon, waking with just enough time to get hungry for an early lunch thus giving myself an hour or so in the afternoon to lie about in a deckchair (it was very sunny, praise the weather Gods) and/or read a book.

There is nothing, I repeat nothing as restful as being in your own house with no children about. Oh OK, yes, being in a hotel room with no children about, or in one of those sea huts in the Maldives, with no children about, but how the hell do you get away for more than a day or two to do that? That takes a lot of engineering, that does – family who are prepared to step in, people to do school pick-ups – and it also relies on your kids being old enough not to have a total shit-fit at the fact you’re going away.

So actual holidays, away from home, are a bit of a no-go without the kids. And let’s face it – what’s the point of having kids if you don’t schlepp them on holiday with you so that not only do you ruin your own opportunity for anything resembling relaxation, you ruin everyone else’s too? All the people on the plane, everyone in the queue for the luggage carousel, anyone in your vicinity at the same hotel… Lol. It’ll be fun, he said. Think of the excitement when they see the planes on the runway.

Just forget the away holidays and focus on what I’m telling you. The away holidays will always be there, whether it’s camping in the New Forest or jetting off to somewhere hot, and they will almost never be properly blissful. Even without kids in tow, there’s still the delay at the airport and the hire car that has scratches already on it but not marked on the damage sheet, that you don’t see until you’re halfway down the autostrade because you just wanted to “get on the road”. There’s the room not ready when you get there debacle, and then the noisy man in the nextdoor hotel room who likes to parade about in a towel taking business calls on his balcony at eleven o’ clock at night. If you’re camping then the tent will leak and you have to wee in a bush and eat food that has bits of charcoal in it.

Forget all of that, forget it all, and believe me when I say that the lone Staycation is the way forward. I had to shift heaven and earth to make my week off happen – I worked almost double the hours the week before it and I’m doing the same the week after – but it was worth every single second of eye strain and screeching stress levels.

I keep using the words “alone” and “lone” but of course Mr AMR was here a bit too. He hadn’t fully subscribed to my holiday idea and annoyingly kept going off to do things, like take stuff to the tip, or mow the lawn, but he was mostly about and it was lovely.

The best part was that there was a sort of mini demi-heatwave for the latter half of the week – I say demi-heatwave because the weather couldn’t quite decide if it was in Ibiza mode or Arctic mode. It felt like about 25 degrees with no wind blowing but if there was even the slightest breeze it was like being hosed down with a dry-ice machine. Thus I sat in my deckchair with only knickers on and a sunhat and had an old cardigan to cover myself with when the breeze got up. I devised a way of turning the cardigan into a wind-break-cum-cover-up by sliding one of the sleeves over the top part of the frame of the deckchair and, quite frankly, the genius of that invention alone made the Staycation worthwhile.

This Staycation was long overdue – I had actually booked it in at the start of January. I was so done in after moving house in the previous lockdown, and then Christmas with two kids who were permanently hyped, that I cleared any commitments for the first week back at school in January. No work calls, no work full stop, no house renovations, no cottage renovations, no visitors, no nothing. And then the third lockdown happened! Literally the night before my Staycation started. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did cry with disappointment. The promise of the Staycation, just a few hours a day with total quiet, had seen me through what was quite an intense Christmas.

Then, obviously, there was Home Schooling-ageddon, which went on for approximately eight years, and then, the day the kids finally went back to nursery/school, the floor restoration company moved in to sand and restain the floors and woodwork. Which I naively thought would take a week or so, but took seven. Seven weeks of noise and dust – I can only compare it to what I think it would be like if someone shrunk you and put you inside a hoover.

So being able to walk around the house, with just the ticking of the clocks and the sound of the birds outside? Marvellous.

And on a soppy note, before you all think I’m cruel for wanting a holiday without my kids, the best part of each day was knowing that at three o’ clock sharp the house would be chaotic and noisy again. And that there would be unanswerable questions to answer and bickering to endure and little plates of food to dish out… The joy seems to be in the extremes, these days. Oh, the rollercoaster that is adult life!

AD/press sample/affiliate link: dress in photos is the Camo Spliced Dress from Me+Em online here

The post Life Update: The Ultimate Staycation appeared first on A Model Recommends.

When these life updates (and indeed my children) were still in their early infancy, I regularly used to jinx myself by writing prematurely about them passing certain milestones. Not the starting walking, starting talking sorts of milestones, but the ones that make your life as a parent easier: the sleeping through the night, potty-training sorts of milestones. No sooner would I have written about “turning a corner” with the sleep deprivation or “successfully mastering” getting a toddler to the toilet on time for a wee (“no more peeling down sodden trousers, which seem to stick to wet legs like glue”) then the kids would almost gleefully do a total u-turn and start pooing behind the sofa or waking up at hourly intervals throughout the night.

(Actually neither of them ever did a poo where a poo should not have been, for which I am eternally grateful.)

Anyway, I jinxed myself again this week by drafting this post and joyfully announcing that my youngest turning four seems to have worked a charm on him in terms of sleep and temperament:

“No longer does it require” (I typed) “the skills of an FBI negotiator to get him into the bedroom in the evening and we have managed to reduce the seven or eight bedtime stories he requires to be read to him in order to calm down enough to actually sleep to a more comfortable three. The best thing, though, is that he has stopped being woken in the morning by the intense need to use the toilet. (Lucky him! Wish I could say the same for myself.) For the past year, at least, we have been woken early by the faint sounds of him calling out, always the same song: “I need a weeeeee weeeeee.” Inexplicably, he says this in a broad West Midlands accent, but that is a whole other story. But it has been our alarm call for longer than we can remember and now, all of a sudden, it has stopped.”

So after drafting that little passage, recording for posterity that lovely nugget of memory, what do you think happened? I’ll tell you. On the first night post-draft, he woke up while the owls were still hooting. He then climbed into our bed – this has never happened – and proceeded to spit-whisper things into our ears until six-thirty, at which point he started a brand new song:

“I’m huuuuuuungry! I want breakfast! I’m huuuuuuuuuungry!”

On the second night post-boast, which was last night, he decided to have an almighty breakdown right before bedtime, getting so cross about a Transformers video that he turned puce, and then got up at 5.45am, which is why I am sitting in the kitchen editing this post at 6.35am. (Managed to lie in bed in a semi-doze for a while, boy clamped around me like a koala.)

Fully jinxed.

The funny thing is, however, that the next part of my draft included the following:

“But I will miss, in a strange way, that first light call of I need a weeee weeee. Especially said in that mystery accent, for which we have absolutely no explanation for. With every passing milestone, I realise that I’m needed a bit less – or at least I’m needed in a different way.”

HA. HA. HA. How weird we are, as a species. We look back on the “baby years” and think we miss them, but we forget about the absolute torture that is sleep deprivation. We’re told by others “not to wish time to go faster” or “wait until they’ve left home, then you’ll realise that you should have appreciated each moment more!” but those people in turn have mainly remembered the highlights and not the feeling of relentless exhaustion. We’re programmed to remember the best bits in order, I expect, to survive. So that elders can look wisely down on the younger generation and say, with complete credibility, “oh you’ll be great – the baby years are just the best. How wonderful.”

Disclaimer: I’m not saying that the baby years aren’t the best, or great, or an absolute gift. Just that there are really shitty bits and it’s fine to mention them. I feel as though when you write anything online now, about anything at all, there needs to be this huge disclaimer to make sure everyone knows that you are above all grateful and thankful. Anything that could remotely be considered a moan is met with derision from the Gratitude Police who don’t seem to realise that there is a joy in reading about things you relate to, whether it’s an article about those annoying people who cut their nails on the train or a silly Instagram post about someone’s kids smearing poo on a freshly-decorated wall.

“Why did you even have kids if them smearing poo on the wall annoys you? Some people would kill to have the opportunity to have children and let them smear poo on the wall.”

“You should feel lucky you’re even on a train! How dare you complain about inconsiderate commuters when so many don’t have a job to commute to? Absolutely tone deaf.”

You can see this sort of comment all the time online now, beneath Instagram posts, on newspaper articles. It’s as though some people have totally lost all grip on any sort of humour, satire, tongue-in-cheek-ness or even just the ability to recognise that you can share an observation, or a part of your life, without it needing calibrating or putting into some kind of hierarchy of perceived suffering level. If you’re writing about how you bought a pack of Jammy Dodgers, waited all day for a chance to eat them alone and then opened them to find they were mouldy, you don’t need to be told how lucky you are to even be able to buy Jammy Dodgers in the first place.

My arthritis makes my arms ache from the moment I wake up until halfway through the night. Comments: “Well, be grateful you even have an arm!” Louise78_Unicorn

We were hijacked on flight 653 to Hamburg and I thought I’d never see my family again… Comments: “So not only is this Times journalist able to take a (probably #gifted!) flight, when the rest of us are unable to travel, he now expects sympathy for an event he escaped from unscathed. Millions don’t.”

When did we lose our nose for nuance, our deftness at sniffing out context and our basic skill for reading something in the way it was intended? Why can’t people just have a moan about trivial things, like Jammy Dodgers, or even non-trivial things, like tiredness or illness or the stress of home-schooling, without it having to be subjected to a comparison contest? It’s not Top Trumps! Top Trumps, The Misery Edition.

Parenting is a particularly tricky one to write about because we are expected to love our children unconditionally, which we do, but many seem to think that this also equates to having to love everything they do unconditionally. I love my kids so much that it makes me clench my jaw and sometimes I think I’ve broken a molar; but do I love it when they are both whining when I’m on a conference call, working on me in a sort of emotional pincer-move so that I agree to let them play a game on the iPad? No. My annoyance doesn’t diminish my love for my children and it seems strange that it always feels necessary to pre-empt any kind of “real life” observation with a whole stream of background and fact to give it context. Surely it’s evident from the style and the tone of the writing?

Well. That went off on a tangent. It’s because I have time to spare – I’m writing this in the early morning rather than at five minutes to midnight. See what absolute masterpieces I produce when I get a bit of time to do things? (Disclaimer: irony.)

I feel as though this month’s update wouldn’t be complete without a nod to the fact that the Lockdown of Horrors (because this one has surely been the grimmest one to date?) is about to become a lot less stressful for those with school age kids. A few more days and they are back in the classroom. It almost seems like an alien concept, now – I don’t even know whether my kids have shoes that fit. They live in wellies or mismatched socks.

And there are whole swathes of ancient manuscript I could write about life in lockdown with two small children but for some reason it doesn’t interest me. Writing it, I mean. I think I’ve been on complete autopilot for the past two months and I’m neither proud or ashamed of the way we’ve made our way through the schools closure – I was a rubbish homeschool teacher, so we did pretty badly at that, and I didn’t organise any of the “fun activities” I saw other people doing online, like mud kitchens or garden obstacle courses or crafting or making puppets out of toilet roll holders. But on the other hand everyone got fed and to bed on time and went on a daily walk and did a bit of reading and had an afternoon movie session (slept through most of them, with my head nodding forward like a nonagenarian) and still cheered when it was the weekend and had a cake on Fairy Cake Friday and pancakes on a Saturday.

Both children have grown by what looks like about half a foot since Christmas and they are still smiling, so I doubt that they will even remember the era they fondly know as “the germs”. They’ve each only ever had two full terms at school or nursery (Autumn term 2019 and 2020!) and so really they don’t know any better, I suppose.

I was thinking about this the other day, how Mr AMR and I were so totally bowled over in that first term in late 2019, when one had started school and the other had started nursery, and we had the entire day to ourselves. I just kept pottering around, muttering “I can just get on with my work now. I could just work! Or lie down. I could lie down now and nobody could stop me! Or I could work. Or both.”

Which is exactly what I’m going to do when the schools go back next week. I’m going to mutter-potter and do a lot of work from a lying down position. Good for getting ideas and planning them out, I find. If you don’t fall asleep…

The post Life Update: Top Trumps, The Misery Edition appeared first on A Model Recommends.

The three year-old is now suddenly four, which means that he can, by no stretch of the imagination, be considered a baby. Me miserum! No more babies. Actually, me not miserum at all, because I’m quite sure that another baby would definitely be the end of me. I love my children beyond the point of all reason but the various lockdowns and ensuing periods of intense familial chaos have purged me of any and all remaining broodiness. I fully appreciate my own babies and can absolutely see why people keep on producing beautiful little additions, but I could not handle any more responsibilities. The dead houseplants are a constant reminder of how you can only divide yourself so many ways – the cat has started to chatter to himself in the mirror for company and I haven’t checked in on some of my friends in months. Another baby would have to be raised by wolves. Or the dog.

So adamant are we that another baby is not on the cards, we have started to practice an extreme version of the withdrawal method: withdrawing before sex proper has even started. And despite knowing my cycle inside-out, I’ve decided that no days are “safe” days – all must be treated as though I have the world’s flirtiest, most sperm-receptive ovum that’s just bust out of ovary jail and is looking for a good time. I’ve even looked into heavy-duty prophylactics, too, the sort the thickness of a lorry tyre. A wall, however, is an even better barrier. A stud wall will do, it doesn’t have to be a structural one – I’m not mad! – just so long as it kills any passion and makes penetration impractical.

I’m joking, obviously. Sex is now one of the few permittable leisure activities and if energy levels allow, after the daily five mile walk and the Key Stage 1 phonics and the many Zoom calls apologising for missed deadlines, it’s a great thing to do in our spare time, which is between the hours of 7.45pm and 9.55pm.

God! I honestly just thought that Santa’s sleigh was about to land in my garden – I could hear bells jingling and the sound of dozens of hooves! (Though why hooves would make a sound in the air I’m not sure.) Alas, it was just Mr AMR mashing potatoes below me for the children’s dinner. Sausage and mash for them – we, the adult faction, have Hello Fresh tonight. This is our third week using this particular food ingredient delivery service and I’m going to do a review video on Instagram soon. I thought that an honest, straight-talking review could be a good thing, as it’s sort of a strange concept to get your head around. Or I found it a strange concept at any rate! I think we have Thai-Style Pork Bowl this evening, which sounds intriguing – cue lots of tiny sachets to squeeze into the pan – and maybe a Cadbury’s Creme Egg afterwards because it’s Grand Designs night.

(Little insight into our rock ‘n roll lifestyle, there.)

I’ve gone off piste: it’s my second baby’s fourth birthday, which means the baby years are well and truly over. It’s amazing how you forget each stage (one of the reasons I’ve kept up with this monthly life update, so that I can always refer back to it) and how the growing up happens so subtly and gradually, a little every day, that you only really notice it when you a) have to buy new clothes for them and b) get those iPhone photo “memories” sent through on your notifications screen. What the hell are they all about, eh? On the one hand: cute. On the other: creepy! A computer has pulled out a load of photos from your albums, based either on date, location or facial recognition, and then it has put them into a slideshow and chosen a (usually tear-jerking) royalty-free tune to play as a soundtrack whilst you digest it all and exclaim “that was three years ago? It can’t be true!”

The Apple iMemory iCreepy service-nobody-asked-for doesn’t work perfectly every time, I have to say: the other day I had a slideshow that played romantic music whilst two dozen photos of a window-fitter I’ve only met once gently transitioned across my screen. There he was holding an A4 sheet of paper to show scale for a timber-look cottage window; here he reached into his toolbox for a tape measure. The climax shot was one of him leaning out of an open window, mainly to demonstrate the casement openings, but Apple’s algorithm apparently thought it was some sort of Romeo and Juliet situation.

My second baby is four though! If you fancy reading my birth story for Baby 2 then it’s here – you can also scroll back through all of my monthly diary entries, if you fancy, they are here. I can remember the birth in full technicolor, still, Morphine dreams included, whereas Mr AMR remembers nothing.

He did a fine job on the Transformers cake though (tenuous link, there!) cutting about ten thousand pieces of a Decepticon’s headpiece out of ready-to-roll fondant icing and laying them atop my freshly-baked sponge. (Not a euphemism.) I honestly thought that us making a celebration cake together would be one of those awful, marriage-defining events, like when you have to go to IKEA to buy furnishings for your first flat, or you go abroad together pre-sat-nav era and have to navigate to some godforsaken place that’s set into the side of a canyon with no habitation around it for at least four kilometres.

To be honest, I’m being silly – it would take more than a cake to wear us down. We once accidentally drove up a dry riverbed in Spain after being awake for thirty-six hours, in a hire car with less legroom than an old red telephone box, and I insisted it was a road for at least ten minutes until the riverbed narrowed in a deep ravine and there was no way to turn around. We had to reverse, painfully, in the midday heat. It was excruciating. You know when someone is so cross that you constantly feel you might laugh? Everything is suddenly hilarious. I’ve never been so desperate to speak – I knew I shouldn’t, but I just had this overwhelming urge to say something and break the silence.

“Isn’t it weird how the view is identical through the front and back windows?” I think I said. Boulders to the front, boulders to the back, a couple of dangerously fresh landslides, dried-up tree trunks, the odd skeleton of a goat that had no doubt died of thirst or frustration at the fact it thought it was meandering down the small road to Castellfollit de la Roca when it was actually following a river. (Why would you draw a map with roads in dark blue and rivers in medium?)

So yes the cake has been a success. And now I’m waiting to see whether “four” means more sleeping in past 5.50am. He lulls us into a false sense of security with a 7.30am wakeup call and on those days, emboldened by a good sleep, we decide to stay awake until – gasp! – 11pm. Maybe we indulge in some Bridgerton-esque sex, mentally, through the stud wall which takes us to midnight and you can guarantee that the next morning will be a 6am-er.

I had so much more to say in this life update: stuff about lockdown, stuff about moving (we’ve taken on a big renovation project in the most incredible location, see video here, there will be a proper update when I’m on top of my work again), stuff about homeschooling, stuff about missing parents. (As in missing them, not that they are missing.) I seem to have gone off on a silly tangent about sex and babies which was completely unintentional but perhaps it’s just more…fun…than stating all kinds of obvious about lockdown.

Of course if this was a private diary I would probably just have scrawled I am losing my MIND in my own blood, but I think the effect would be lost in translation once typed out on a MacBook Pro…

Main photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition on Unsplash

The post Life Update: Barrier Methods appeared first on A Model Recommends.

And so here we are, thrown back into the deep pit of lockdown confusion. Each of us with a different and unique inconvenience or disaster: some have lost jobs, some are caring for the sick or elderly, many are suffering with their mental health, lots are working in risky situations or working when they shouldn’t be working. Some people are incredibly bored, others can’t find enough hours in the day to get everything done, there are people who have found their lives largely unaffected and those who have welcomed the changes, others who have refused to make any changes whatsoever…

(A few have “all the time in the world” and are learning how to cross-stitch, speak Cantonese and correctly prune Bonsai trees but we shall ignore them for now.)

My own personal Mastermind specialist subject (Lockdown Edition) is “working from home with two very young kids”, a specialist subject shared by many and only truly understood by those with first hand experience. It’s like being in a high-energy high-stakes gameshow, let’s say Crystal Maze, but a gameshow that never ends. There’s Richard O’Brien standing at the door playing the flute as you try to conduct a crucial work call and wipe a child’s bottom at the same time, he’s constantly telling you that you’re running out of time and that the door’s going to lock and you’ll be trapped in the room…the door’s already locked Richard!

I learnt from Lockdown version 1.0 that to survive being trapped with small children 24/7 you need to consciously kiss any kind of freedom goodbye. And try be OK with that. You have to wipe all plans for any kind of personal development or achievement, even if the height of your ambition is “trying to find some new recipes so that the family can get more nutrients into their diet”.

You have to learn to function on a reduced service – essential tasks only – and not be frustrated if you can’t fit any of the other stuff in. Like sleep. Reading. Leaving the house for exercise. Talking to an adult human that isn’t sick of talking to you.

And that’s just about doable, but bloody hell it’s tiring. Bone-deep exhausting, in fact, and the sort of mentally draining trial of endurance that makes you want to drag yourself up into a tree and hide there for an indefinite period of time.

But anyway, you plough on as best you can through the exhaustion fug, until you see annoying comments underneath online articles saying things like:

“why have kids if you don’t want to look after them?”

“erm, how did these people who are desperate for schools to open not know having kids would be hard?”

and then, the inspiration for this post, one that sent me cross-eyed with incredulity:

“all these parents whining about being stuck with their kids: what do they think people did in the olden days?”

Ah, the olden days. What did people do with their kids in the olden days, “Ducati821”? Enlighten me. Just the fact that you’ve managed to squeeze the entire history of humankind pre-2020 into one easy category suggests to me that you won’t have properly thought this one through.

Is it “the olden days” of the eighties, for example, which I have firsthand experience of? Because I can tell you that we used to spend most of the day playing on bits of old carpet, sliding down an embankment that ran alongside a busy road. We stayed out for hours. In fact, most kids I know who were brought up in the eighties barely saw their parents in daylight hours, unless it was for a quick lunch.

And speak to Mr AMR, brought up in the seventies, who used to play on the motorway with his siblings and walk himself to school. (The way he tells it he was frying his own cooked breakfast at three and chainsawing trees down by the age of six, but I suspect he is prone to exaggeration when it comes to childhood memories.)

How olden days shall we go, Ducati821, because I think you’ll find that the further back you delve, the less time parents probably spent with their kids. In centuries past, if you were rich then you didn’t look after your own offspring at all – poor parents sent theirs out to work as soon as they could convincingly wield a set of dangerous-looking tools. And if the kids weren’t working, they were running about the manure-strewn streets getting kicked in the head by a horse, or shot through the thorax with an errant arrow or enslaved by an evil Sheriff.

Basically, children have for the most part either gone to school or they’ve been put to work, depending on historic era and/or socioeconomic circumstances. Very rarely do people voluntarily decide to spend every single waking hour with their progeny once they have graduated from nappies.

Look at my parents’ generation – their parents used to boot them out of the door at about six in the morning with a heel of granary bread and an apple. And they used to get into all sorts of mischief finding horrendously dangerous places to amuse themselves. Marshes. Train tracks. Quarries.

The parents knew that the kids were up to no good but they kicked them out for the whole day anyway. They basically had the option of swimming in an old, deep sinkhole, swinging from rusty, broken scaffolding or shooting at tin cans with the rifles their dads had brought back from the war. The safest playtime activity was probably having picnics in the scary wood where the “strange man liked to watch them”.

“Will you be away and out of my hair Liam and don’t be getting sucked into that bog like wee Patrick and little Malachy before him and Jerry before him and all of those other poor boys who keep getting sucked into the bog I should probably tell you not to go and play in.”

I digress: my point is that spending all day and every day with your kids is quite wearying. 100% of the time is…a lot of time. No relationship is designed to be that relentless, even if the other person is Tom Hardy. (Ha! Had to get him in somewhere.) You can see why women with many, many children (my granny had eight, that wasn’t unusual or even notable) got the eldest to look after the youngest and then sat there chain-smoking roll-ups and staring forlornly at the mangle.

Tell me, as a sort of sociological/historical factfinding experiment: how much time did you spend with your parents when you were young? Did they constantly play with you, sit and watch films with you, make dens and forts with you, or did you get sent out into the garden/street with your siblings and the boy from Number 9 who was eight years old and owned a replica Rambo knife? (Complete with sewing kit in the handle.) Comment below, please, and update me on your lockdown status: Bored, Surviving or End of Tether.

The post Life Update: This Isn’t The Olden Days appeared first on A Model Recommends.

Just wondering if anyone can help me out with this email I’ve just had – I’ve obviously managed to get myself into a bit of a pickle. Not for the first time, I should add. Every time I sift through my junk mail I’m being blackmailed for one thing or another!

“In case you didn’t get the last email. Pay attention now.
You have used Zoom recently. And I have very unfortunate news for you.
I’ll give you some background on what happened.

There was a zero day security vulnerability on Zoom app, that allowed me a full time access to your camera and some other metadata on your account.
Basically, you were hacked.
And as you can imagine in your worst dreams, I have made a footage with you as a main actor.
Where you work on yourself (perform sex act to be clear). Having fun is ok with me, but is not ok with your reputation.

Please dont blame me or yourself for this. You couldn’t know that the camera was working.
I’m sure you don’t want to be the next Jeffrey Toobin and get embarrassed in front of all your friends, family and colleagues.
You should get this very clear, I will send this video to all your contacts if I dont get paid.
Are you wondering how I got your contacts and emails? Through the same exploit, zoom app allowed me to extract all sensitive info from your device.

So here is what we will do. You pay me $2000 in bitcoin, and nothing of this will happen. You have 2 days to make the payment.
After I get the money, I will delete the footage and information about you. The amount is not negotiable.
Send 0.11 Bitcoin (less than 2k USD at the current exchange rate) to my wallet.
Having trouble with buying bitcoin? Just google on how to buy it, it’s very easy to use and anonymous.
P.S. Don’t try to report this to the police, I use TOR and bitcoin can’t be traced. Do not email me back. If you do something stupid, I will distribute the video.
Good luck. Don’t stress.”

This isn’t my first time at this particular rodeo, people (you can read about my other alarming experience with a potential sex tape scandal here) but the whole thing is still slightly confusing. Because I can’t actually remember performing a sex act on myself during the last Zoom conference I participated in, but then I can’t even remember where the charger for my iPhone is or what it was like to sleep in past 6.30am and so it’s perfectly possible I did something disgusting and depraved without even realising.

Although, come to think of it, my last Zoom call was at the weekend, on my 40th (happy birthday to me, thank you thank you) and involved eight of my family members, wearing silly hats and playing a game of Mind Meld. So it’s unlikely I managed to fit in a session of self-pleasure – or, as it’s so practically put in the email, find time to “work on myself”. (“And BACK and FORTH and BACK and FORTH and BRING ON PHASE TWO!”)

Regardless, this anonymous, dastardly blackmailer (probably on the FBI’s most wanted list) has evidence of my sex act and my reputation is at stake. Anon is going to make footage with me as the main actor which could quite possibly destroy my impeccable public image. (Or catapult me to fame, just like Hilton, Kardashian et al.)

What to do, what to do? Can I take the risk that my public image may be left in tatters, or could it be great for A Model Recommends to get a new, main-actor-in-sex-footage lease of life? Now I’m forty, perhaps it’s time for a change of direction!

But there are many questions that need to be answered before I can make a considered, sensible decision.

Firstly: if I am the main actor, who are the others? My supporting cast? I’d like some say in it. I mean are we talking Olivia Coleman? Tom Cruise? Danny Dyer? Which level of stardom are we plumping for here? And how are they to be introduced to this Zoom orgy – will we all be on green screens with the same background and sort of patched together in a skilful silky montage of sex acts or will there be a degree of CGI involved?

And do you think it would be acceptable for me to make some requests as to how this footage is going to pan out? Ultimately I wouldn’t mind directing it. Perhaps we could reenact that scene in Taboo where Tom Hardy tries to copulate aggressively with his sister (it’s sexier than it sounds, you had to be there). I don’t like too much unnecessary sex talk, which probably wouldn’t make for the most engaging dirty movie, but I’m sure Tom’s actions would speak louder than words! He only has about five lines to say in Taboo anyway (you can read my post about that here) so you’d hope he’d be big on action.

Actually, this whole sex-tape idea isn’t turning out too badly. I don’t know why I was even (un)worried. Anyone fancy a copy? It’s already going to all of my contacts, which means that all of the people with obscure names like “Lisa Shelves Woking” and “Javid Sports (Knees)” and “Michael Windows Remember Call” will be getting a thrill!

(Does anyone else use the first name/last name/company entry fields as a sort of temporary notebook? I know that Mr AMR does. He has no actual full names in his contacts, just first names and then two clues as to who the person is. It helps him remember. His lists look like this:

First name: JAMES

Last name: PRO LIGHTING

Company: REDDISH HAIR LOW VOICE

I have contacts from around fifteen years ago and I have absolutely no idea who the people are. The only time I even realise I have them stored in is when I use my car phone thing, where you say “dial whoever” and it phones them from your iPhone. Except it never actually phones the right person.

“Dial Jim Fenning.”

“Dialling Jennifer Hemling.”

“JIM FENNING!”

“Dialling Peter Manning.”

“DIAL JIM FENNING!”

“Dialling…Mum.”)

So yes, a lot of mystery people will be getting my explicit green-screened tryst-with-self, co-starring Tom Hardy. Because I’m definitely not going to give into demands and pay those 2000 bit coins, even if I knew how to pay something in bit coins. Even if it means that – should things go tits up – I might be, as anon warns, “the next Jeffrey Toobin”.

The thing about Jeffrey Toobin is (pencils and notebooks at the ready!) that he most definitely knew he was performing a sex act upon his own person (little Jeff, let’s call it) in front of his laptop. Even if you think the camera off, it’s just a crazy thing to do. Personally, I think if you have a penchant for fiddling then it would be wise to make some sort of makeshift camera lens cover for your laptop. A piece of masking tape would do it and isn’t too technically challenging.

We have a masking tape cover over the camera lens on our Peloton exercise bike and we don’t even perform sex acts when we’re on that. I just don’t want people accidentally seeing my sweating, gurning face as I pedal like a maniac to nineties R&B. I cannot for the life of me fathom why anyone would want others to see them as they sweat away on an exercise bike, but the camera is there, nevertheless, for those who want it.

Thinking about this camera cover thing some more (quiet news day here!): shouldn’t the laptop itself come with a lens flap? Like those glasses that have the flip-down shades, you could have a little lever that covers the camera. The online equivalent of a condom. Because as we all know from our teens and trying not to get accidentally up the duff/landed with an itchy STD, nothing beats a physical barrier! It’s all very well having a little light on the lid that tells you whether the camera is on or off, but do you really trust it? It’s like trusting John from lower sixth to pull out. Computers would have no moral qualms about overshooting the mark, so to speak.

God I don’t know what’s happening with this life update. I was going to write about the cost of organic kids’ snacks (which I don’t buy because they’re more expensive per gram than, I don’t know, white truffle) but here I am thinking about flaps and Jeffrey Toobin and laptop modifications.

By the time there’s a next (hopefully more sensible) life update we’ll have had Christmas and I’m planning a lengthy festive break – three, perhaps even four weeks! – so I’m not sure whether it’ll be published on time. The thing about taking a break is that if you even have one smallish thing to do, that’s related in some way to all of your other work, you’ll just end up working. “I’ll pop on quickly and write my life update” will become “I’ll draft that piece on best acid exfoliants” and then “I’ll just make a quick Instagram video to go with it” and then the holiday will be no more.

So I’m warning you in advance. There will be other posts before Christmas, but when the Out of Office sign goes up and the camera flap goes down (lol!) I’m kicking back and seeing 2020 off in a totally relaxed, non-work-mode manner. In the words of the infamous Zoom Sex Tape Blackmailer: “Good luck. Don’t stress.”

[Photo credit: if you know who took this then please tell me because it was a long time ago. Obviously. I don’t look like this in a negligée now. I don’t think I even own one.]

The post Life Update: Main Actor in Sex Footage appeared first on A Model Recommends.

Who knew so many of you waited for the third of the month with such a sense of delight and anticipation? I have say that I’m deeply flattered by the messages and emails I’ve had asking where an earth the monthly update has gone (I always publish on the 3rd, without fail) and it just goes to reinforce my notion that one day in the future my online journal will become a very important historical primary source.

Students at the Virtual University of Barcelona will be there, plugged into their VR headsets, watching a CGI version of Ruth Crilly as she reads out her diary entries. Hopefully they won’t CGI a reenactment of me almost impaling myself on a shower attachment (see here) but I suppose I won’t have any control over it and if it’s far enough in the future I’ll be dead anyway and won’t care.

So it’s with this sense of duty to future generations that I force a November Life Update out of my hardened, dried-out brain: I really can think of nothing worse than sitting down to write at this particular moment. I’m just absolutely fried. And I did, in fact, start writing this month’s update on time, but in the final few hours on the night of the third, when usually I would be at my desk wondering why on earth I leave everything to the last minute, typing furiously on my laptop, I wasn’t even at home.

I was, Dear Readers, doing the equivalent of an Iron Man competition (but more stressful), wearing a maxi-dress, tights, cashmere jumper and a parka designed to withstand arctic conditions. I have never been so sweaty in my life. It didn’t help that I was performing this act of extreme fitness inside, or that I was carrying a fifteen kilo (living) package on my front. The world’s heaviest koala.

Down the hospital corridors I ran, desperately asking all those I passed by for directions to unit B24 – “where’s B24? I cannae carry on!”, staggering under the weight of my child and blinded by the sweat that was running into my eyes. The corridors were endless, my knees began to buckle – by the time I reached unit B24 I must have looked like someone who had just completed one of those horrendous fake SAS training courses.

“Take her,” I wheezed, “take…the child.”

So anyway, that’s why I couldn’t finish my life update in time. A purple rash, an evening of tests, a late arrival back to the manor. Please don’t be concerned by the hospital visit: all is, thank God, well. A dramatic temporary condition but not one that tends to be serious or pose a long-term problem. Saying that, it has been incredibly stressful – there’s nothing like the feeling of dread when your child is ill. Even a fever and a cold sets me on edge, so rash + blood tests + swellings + whatever else sent my mind into total overdrive. I felt as though I wanted to be sedated for a month or so, until she was better, but of course that wouldn’t be a practical option would it? You have to front these things out. I’m becoming convinced that parenthood forces you to mine into previously un-mined depths of bravery – you have to be brave and you have to be stoic, because you can’t let the little ones see that you’re scared.

Phew. What a ride it is.

The part of my life update that I started writing (pasted below) is actually quite bizarrely prophetic: I was feeling a strong sense of unease as we were going into second lockdown that week and much of that unease was because Mr AMR and I had both had some health scares within our families. So it seems mad that I was writing this at about two in the afternoon, and then by four I was in the local A&E and by seven I was at the big hospital in Bath! Seems only fitting that you read it, really, so here it is. And I promise to deliver the next update on time…

“As we head into another national lockdown in the UK, I can’t help feeling a slight sense of panic. Some non-Covid-related health incidents in our extended family this year have really drummed home the importance of being able to spend time with – and support – the people you love, but at the same time keep them protected and shielded as much as possible too. It’s the sort of deep-set anxiety that makes you want to retreat into your shell, like a tortoise, because on top of worrying about people you love there’s also the very real, very devastating economic fallout to process and the fact that the world is becoming a very different, completely unfamiliar place.

It’s a lot to soak up and it’s not something that I really feel comfortable writing about, even after months and months of constant discussion and deliberation. The subject is just too…big. I think that there’s enormous pressure online to dissect and debate, to come up with a cuttingly sharp political meme or an acerbic tweet, but most people are just trying to get through the week.

And so instead of thinking about the pandemic, I’m trying to recreate Farrah Fawcett hair flicks with my old heated rollers. It’s work-related, so I don’t feel that it’s too frivolous, but even if it is a silly thing to be doing as the country folds in on itself you can rest assured that I’m being suitably punished. So far I’ve scorched six out of ten fingers, two so seriously that I fear I may have lost my fingerprints.

Perhaps that’s a good thing – I could go and commit some two-fingered burglaries! Watch out museums. I’ve never understood why they used to try and remove their own fingerprints in films – why not just wear gloves? You can get some excellent tight-fitting gloves, I can’t imagine that there would be too much compromise to fingertip agility. Although they used to say that about ultra-thin condoms, didn’t they, in our younger years? “Featherlite for her pleasure!” Or was it “Ribbed for her pleasure”? I don’t know which women they used to test the pleasure-rating of those condoms but they must have been really easily pleased.”

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