Hello, Mobile Phone Makers! Just a query. If – whatever brand of phone I buy – it must be highly recommended that I have a screen cover to protect said screen from the abuses of normal use, and a case for the back of the phone which is liable for destruction if used in the normal course of its purpose and storage, then why don’t you include these necessary items with the phone when it is purchased? Why do I have to buy these items separately? I understand the casing may be a fashion accessory and therefore I might prefer something colourful and flamboyant, but you could give me a basic black or white at the time of purchase to start me off. Couldn’t you? And I’ll decide if I can live with that and if not I’ll spend more money jazzing things up.
Or better still – just make the back of the phone sturdier and the screen of the phone more resilient. If you can produce a phone that can do everything but slice the bread and whip up some sandwiches, surely the covering for the phone is…err… a piece of cake?
Hello, Mascara Makers! I am an older woman. I do not expect what cosmetics I use to work any miracles. I just like a little bit of this and a little bit of that to make myself look a little bit, well, smarter, sometimes. I like to look as if I’ve got eyes. When I buy mascara I am not foolish enough to think I’ll look as if I’m wearing false eyelashes, as the blurb says. I have been wearing mascara for a long, long time and I’m yet to meet one that makes my lashes forest-like, or is indestructible and doesn’t react to tears or rain or an itch satisfied. But I’m happy to spend enough to have one that isn’t too gunky, and that doesn’t make my bags look even blacker.
I do expect that when I open a new mascara that it has some get up and go in it. I don’t want it – brand spanking new as it supposes to be – to be as dried out, if not more so, than the one I am replacing. That would be false economy. Because I will have thrown out my receipt in a moment of purse cleaning madness, so I can’t take it back and prove THAT I JUST BOUGHT IT! Right here. And, look, it’s a piece of rubbish.
Hello Gossipy Magazines! Every time I stand waiting to go through a cash register checkout, I see you. Sometimes, when there’s a price-check emergency up ahead, I even pick one of you up and have a flick through. I’ve seen your screaming headlines and your invasive photos. I know your job is to get all shouty about who, in the celebrity kingdom, is pregnant and getting married and getting divorced and shacked up with someone else’s husband. I know you and the facts have a very flimsy relationship, but I’ve also heard you mention that you’ve got the scoop.
So then, how did you miss it? How did you, so obsessed as you are with Angelina Jolie and her children, her pregnancies, her weddings and her separations (real, imagined, manufactured) miss the fact that this woman has just made a massive decision about her future and her body, and had major surgery? A double mastectomy in fact. And it’s all over and she’s telling us all about it in her own time and her own way.
Because, for all your snooping and stalking, you don’t know nothing, is how.
Oh, I am cranky, I know. I have a leg full of sciatica which pains me – to a greater or lesser degree – all my waking hours. Even when I succumb to pain killers, I can be standing at the neighbour’s fence chatting or at the library counter watching my pile being processed, and a spasm of such intensity will rip into my leg that I will quite possible groan or double over.
In the parlance of the seven-year olds who once filled my house, I am bored of it. And frustrated and impatient and exasperated and sooking. And grumpy. Very, very grumpy.
The local council parking by-laws and the neighbour with the endlessly barking dogs and the woodman who delivered too many massive logs should be very relieved. I’m out of words tonight.
By if this keeps up, be warned. I’m coming after you next.
RosieL
endgame 