A rant about the clingy pants rule

In france, in order to swim in a public swimming pool male peoples have to wear clingy pants. It’s true. One reason for this rule is hygiene, i.e., things like dust on the shorts making it into the pool. I also heard a rumour that one person sadly died as a result of getting caught by their shorts in a swimming pool. Not sure if that’s true or not but if so I appreciate how tragic that is, but I really don’t think it warrants this clingy speedo swimming pants rule.

I despise unnecessary rules.

Let’s just put this rule into perspective and think about the things that people do have the free will to choose to do… people can choose to jump out of planes for fun, people can bungee jump from cliffs, people can climb vertically up mountains. These are all extreme examples of the crazy dangerous things that people can choose to do, they are not for me, I prefer to sit reading a book with a nice cup of tea in the safety of my own home, free from anxiety, but I’m glad that should I one day go INSANE and feel it appropriate to jump from a plane that I have the choice to do so. But those examples are a bit out there, they are extreme and so perhaps of a different category; you could argue that the experience you get from doing those things outweighs the risk.

But I’d argue that the experience of swimming in a pool in comfortable loose shorts each day of your holiday is valuable too (I might add that I personally don’t swim around just wearing loose shorts of course, I don’t wear any shorts…but rest assured I wear a bikini) this rule only affects blokes, but I feel so strongly about it that even though it doesn’t affect me it bothers me. It’s really about the stupidity and choice-stealing that the rule represents.

If someone tells me that I have to do something then I automatically don’t really want to, unless it’s really reasonable and necessary, i.e., I won’t argue about wearing a seat belt on a plane. But generally I want to feel like I am choosing for my own reasons why I want to do everything, or at least I have the right to choose, so things like uniform make me feel rebellious. In the grand scheme of things I understand the point of uniform, but there are always little niggles. 

When I worked in a shop (Boots) we had a uniform of course, I appreciate the importance of wearing the uniform, that’s not a problem, however I was also told that I had to tie up my hair…why? I like wearing my hair down, it gets a kink in the back when I tie it up, and also for what reason do I have to tie my hair back…they couldn’t provide a sufficient reason, it was just to look smarter – I don’t agree, I looked smart with hair down. Rules like this make me mad!

Also, the trousers that were part of the uniform were officially a very dark navy blue colour, no one can tell the difference between very dark navy blue and black, most of us wore black trousers- it caused no problem- customers didn’t approach me with my Boots top and name tag on and then just as they were about to ask where the shampoo was…bend down, closely examine my trouser leg, and shout ‘ah no sorry I thought they were navy but they’re not, come on Sheila this girl doesn’t work here after all, her trousers aren’t navy’. But our management one day decided that our trousers MUST be navy. It’s completely pointless to suddenly demand that we all wear navy trousers! Just some power tripping idiot’s idea. I wouldn’t be that bothered about having to wear navy trousers, however, it’s hard to find navy trousers! At least it was back then, you couldn’t find any nice dark navy trousers in any shop anywhere. That left us with one option, wear the navy trousers provided by Boots. Let me tell you a little something about the trousers provided by Boots, the style and cut in which these trousers are made is specifically designed for the older woman, and I’m now truly scared of what my body will supposedly turn into when I’m older, or where I’m meant to zip my trousers up to when I’m old. These old lady trousers are designed for hips the size of mount Everest, just think back to the trousers that your granny used to wear and you’ll have an idea, oops sorry nanny didn’t mean to offend the size of your hips. The idea of these trousers is that you zip them up to just under your chest, it’s the only way you can wear them…I’m gonna need pictures to explain this….

When young people first put on a pair of these trousers there are fits of giggles! …‘Look how high up these trousers come’, what a laugh! We were in hysterics laughing, then the hysteria slowly turns to more of a tearful state when you realise that you are going to be forced to wear said trousers at work! The helplessness! The humiliation, how could they do this to us!

Also, I’m pretty short in the leg so in order to have the length fit I had to pull my trousers up even higher, they then do up just under your bra! I don’t know if older women are actually using their trousers to hold their breasts in place, I can’t understand it.

But upon being told that I had to wear these trousers I thought that’s it, I’m done, throw the towel in, or in this case the trousers, throw the trousers and leave. It would be empowering, but then in a way that would somehow make me look really stupid and sensitive, ‘she left because she didn’t want to wear badly fitting navy trousers’, (Honestly things like that –stupid rules, they make me want to leave a job). You get the point.

So finally coming back to the clingy pants rule, this rule is not even in the name of uniform, this rule is for leisurely people trying to have a nice relaxing holiday, but end up having to feel like they are being vaccuum packed into their swimwear. But no, they are not allowed loose swimming shorts! Oh no, the danger, the hygiene, the insanity of loose swimming shorts!

Why is it only in France? Maybe it’s something to do with the fashion, I don’t think they’ve caught up with the fact that speedos are a sin against fashion, and a serious offence to the human eye. Maybe it’s just a ploy for France to keep English holiday makers away, they know the english can’t deal with speedos. In fact at a water park in England (at Alton towers) tiny speedos have been banned!!

It also seems just a tad perverted.

What next? Only swimming naked?

Rules ruin everything, I hate complying when I know the rule is stupid!! So much so that it makes me not want to do things, having to wear a sticker with my name on, having to wear a wrist band to say that I’m allowed to be somewhere, the list goes on. The best solution is to just stay at home drinking tea, muttering to myself about the absurdity of clingy swimming pants, dirty stickers and what not.

For the love of shreddies

I love shreddies a bit too much. I’m trying to ween myself off, but quite frankly on the days that I don’t eat shreddies for breakfast I feel like I’m not living life to the full if you know what I mean. I frigging love them, but the worst part is I don’t even know why?? They are plain, boring and not even sweet. But wow I love them. Mind you, it’s actually just the malt wheats…. I always had malt wheats when growing up (the cheaper non-branded version of shreddies), that’s just the household I grew up in…e.g., my mum will walk all the way to the town centre (a good 3 miles) and go into Iceland…that’s right she is willing to even shop among the chavs in Iceland…just to get a bottle of milk 20p cheaper than what she could get from the shop round the corner from our house. So if she’d ever bought real Shreddies for us I would quite frankly have had to send her for a brain scan to check what had gone wrong. 

If you were given branded cereal as a kid then you are definitely upper class.

To be fair to my lovely mum, shreddies are a freaking rip off and I too was never willing to pay the extra for them, but one day I went to the shop and the only option was real expensive shreddies, it was an emergency, I’d ran out of shreddies 2 days prior, I was already suffering withdrawal, I couldn’t suffer another morning without them, what other choice did I have?? Pick another different cheap cereal?…I wasn’t willing to ruin my day like that. So I bought REAL shreddies, the one’s knitted by grannies. I was pretty excited about it, in fact at the checkout I even caught the eye of the lady serving me and nodded saying to myself…that’s right, I buy real shreddies, that’s just who I am, how I live.

So eager was I to try the real shreddies (after twentyish years of malt wheat enjoyment) I couldn’t possibly wait until morning. So I opted to have shreddies for dinner (cereal dinners are quite a regular occurance for me if I fancy a real treat). But oh the disappointment. Malt wheats are doing a terrible job of imitating shreddies, but thank goodness! Because actual real shreddies are not nice!! (you’re bound to disagree with me but then hey I am the weirdo here so that’s to be expected). So to be precise it’s malt wheats that I love. And I don’t know why.

The best brand are waitrose…so you get the knock off shreddie recipe but from a posh shop

Me running over the green meadows hand in hand with shreddies (boxes of shreddies don't actually have legs so this is only a a dream I have rather than a reality).

Somehow at an academic conference (you know the one’s where you are supposed to say things that make you sound intelligent) I ended up having an indepth discussion with other researchers on the topic of shreddies. It lasted at least 1 hour, strange eh!? These topics arise when people sit near me.

sneaky secret cheese sandwich

My bedroom smells like sandwich. I don’t know why. I keep it relatively clean, and I’d like to think that I am clean, yet the smell of sandwich often rears its ugly head. It doesn’t always smell of sandwich, but just about 4 days a week on average I walk in there and it is a distinctive smell, sometimes ham sandwich, sometimes cheese. I just can’t work it out (why the smell is there not what the filling of the sandwich is… I can always tell if it’s veering more toward cheese than ham). I started to believe that there was a cheese sandwich hidden in my room, but I’ve looked and I can’t find one. The only remaining option quite clearly is that there is an invisible cheese sandwich somewhere in my room. The problem with invisible cheese sandwiches (and invisible things more generally) is that they are pretty tricky to find. I could follow the smell but it seems to be the entire room. It would also appear that someone moves the invisible sandwich, since it isn’t there every single day. Who is doing this? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

My hamster (Cozmo Anne Dibbs): The one that died 3 times and came back to life again

I love fluffy things. And if you think about it a hamster is a ball of fluff that moves around (okay it can bite you more than normal fluff and you also have to feed it) but other than that it’s fluff that moves. So as a kid I wanted a fluffy hamster. My parents agreed (one of the happiest moments in my LIFE!) and so off we went to buy the hamster, I picked the fluffiest hamster in the pet shop, he was so unbelievably fluffy (see picture below – it’s quite accurate although it seems that drawing hamsters isn't my best ability) I was thrilled! Like most things that move and have teeth I was a bit scared of him, but he was very very cute. I used to comb his tufty fluffy hair. I named him Cozmo Anne Dibbs, I guess really he should have had the same last name as me but I really like the surname Dibbs and so I game him my middle name instead (Anne), I suppose that’s quite a feminine middle name for a male hamster but no one ever uses middle names anyway, especially not for hamsters…in fact do normal people even give their hamsters middle names??

The late Cozmo Anne Dibbs (that's right he dies eventually)

I know the drawing above is a bit poor but if you compare it to my initial attempt below it's pretty good, turns out I really struggle to draw hamsters in the standing up position... it looks more like a scary (yet quite endearing) old granny in a cape).

Cozmo standing/Scary granny in a cape

 

He was a lovely hamster, so as you can imagine the first time he died I was so upset. He’d been doing mini hamster sneezes all evening and then he just went limp and stopped moving, I thought he was dead, but we decided let’s wait until morning and deal with it then. Next morning we woke up surprised to find Cozmo alive and well, what a relief- so I guess on that occasion he didn’t really come back from the dead, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. A few months later however, he got really ill, he was slow and sleeping all the time and then my parents broke the news to me one morning that he was dead.  This time he was clearly dead… we didn’t really want to have a dead hamster in his cage all day so my dad put him in some soft fluff and put him in a cardboard box, he wrapped the box tightly with string, then he had to go off to work, so we decided that later that day we would bury the hamster in the back garden. I went to school and told my friends the sad news and slowly came to terms with it.

However, that day my mum had popped out, on her return she found what must have looked like the ghost of Cozmo sat on top of his cardboard coffin box! He had woken up and nibbled his way out of the box! My mum is scared of animals such as hamsters so she panicked, but managed to heroically scoop him into a tea towel and return him safely to his cage. As shown below. GO MUM! what a hero!

 When I got home I was prepared for an emotional hamster funeral, so upon seeing Cozmo alive in his cage I was thrilled and also confused! We were all confused! Until we stumbled upon the fact that hamsters hibernate when they’re cold, and when they hibernate they go hard and don’t move, i.e., they look and feel dead! This information should be better circulated!! That’s right you’ve now got that horrible sinking feeling that you buried your pet hamster alive haven’t you!!? no?

Just think, if we had buried him that morning he would have nibbled out of the box and would be chilling in the back garden (that gives me an image of him chilling on a miniature sun bed with a gin and tonic - actually his prospects wouldn’t have looked great with the foxes and cats out there), in fact that realisation of what really might happen to your pets when you bury them in the garden has just dawned upon me, oh dear.

 

So I got to enjoy Cozmo for a few more months until the next time he died. It took a lot of convincing for me to really believe he was dead… I asked my Dad many times… ‘are you really sure he isn’t hibernating!??’

Turns out he was dead that time and so we buried him in the garden and that was that. Though come to think of it, how can I really be sure that he wasn’t hibernating again? Maybe my Dad just wanted to get rid of him?

I did have a dream a couple of months later of a giant Cozmo arising from the ground in my garden and running toward my house :-/

Killer whale phobia explained

Returning to the killer whale story – I’m feeling brave today! Prepare yourself this is a long story!

So as far as I’m aware the first time I ever really got scared by killer whales was when the film free willy came out, my sister loved that film and so it used to be on in my house a lot, I used to watch it hidden behind a cushion as I was a bit scared. However it wasn’t until a real life encounter that I truly shat myself. Again, I can’t understand why the rest of the world aren’t completely freaked out by killer whales too! They’ve got the big white eye patches which just look like mahoosive googly eyes. Even if I draw a bad picture of a killer whale it genuinely really scares me (hence the picture further on took a lot of effort).

 You know how when you’re really afraid of something you kind of want to see it!?? People like scary films because it’s a bit of a rush with all the adrenalin, it’s like going on big roller coaster rides. So part of me was secretly much more eager than anyone else in my family to go to marine land while on our holiday in the south of france. Off we went to marine land, before we had even gone in I was a bit shaken up because I was surrounded by pictures of killer whales and kids walking round with big plush toy killer whales. It’s a bit like going to a shrine of something that you’re afraid of, most phobias don’t really have that, I’ve never heard of the dirty sticker factory for instance (although going to see my niece and nephews is almost equivalent to a visit to the dirty sticker factory anyway - you leave with lots of free dirty sticker stuck on you). So returning to the story, you can imagine that I’m already feeling pretty anxious.

We started off just looking at the friendly penguins, then on to the dolphins, lovely dolphins, I’ve even swam with them on another occasion (that was pretty terrifying too- no one is ever supposed to admit that about dolphins but really for me it was a case of KEEP ON SMILING - mum and dad have paid a fortune for this, whether you poo your pants or not you are getting in there with those giant razor sharp beaked giant fish…awww sigh lovely dolphins).

So we sat down to wait for the dolphin show to start, but I didn’t feel like sitting still and waiting so I thought I’d just pop and see the sea lions in the meantime and then come back to our seats soon.

People like dolphins and so it turns out that nearly everyone in marine land was waiting for the dolphin show to start, great I thought, nice and quiet for me to go and see the sea lions, so off I went, then I saw a side entrance that looked like it lead somewhere so I took a look and saw a huge tank…I thought cool! I’ll go this way, what a big tank for some sea lions…to be fair to me if there were going to be killer whales in there you’d expect there to be a big sign right?? Well not at the side entrance there wasn’t, there was also no one else around yet.

So I walked up to the tank, it was a glass tank so you could see through it which is pretty cool, I had a good close up look through the glass and then from my periphery I see this huge big smug blur of black with these huge white eyes! (I know I know, those aren’t its actual eyes but they’re terrifying – think of the scream mask and then think of a killer whale! Resemblance eh!!?) I think some daredevil little part of me must have thought beforehand that just maybe there could be killer whales in that tank, but when that killer whale swam toward me I was terrified. Now, in these situations you kind of forget that the glass will protect you…my brain reacts like this…huge massive killer whale swimming at you = PANIC and get away from it right now!

 I had two options, I either ran back along the path back to the way I came in – a much shorter distance yes – but also in the direction that this killer whale is coming, or I run away, following the path around the tank, naturally that’s what I did. But killer whales can swim faster than I can run funnily enough, so I basically have a killer whale swimming closer and closer, it feels like it's chasing me, until this killer whale is swimming alongside me with his big smug face, and let me tell you they are big. It was horror. The picture below will give you a better idea, and it’s pretty accurate too!

I made it back to my mum and family (that’s right, it didn’t manage to jump out and eat me! Pheewwey!), none of them cared one bit, but I calmed down watching the dolphin show. Later on we actually went to watch the killer whale show, we sat quite far back and there was a bit in the show where they asked kids to go and stand at the side of the tank so the whale could splash them, my mum gave me a nudge to go down and I gave her that look that said ‘don’t you f***ing let them take me mum, don’t you dare!’ And that was that.

I’ve been terrified of killer whales ever since, but okay you probably think well apart from marine land when is your fear of killer whales ever going to affect your life!? Oh ho ho!!! You would not believe…so I’ll tell you!

People can’t get enough of killer whales!

They are on the tv all of the time! e.g., planet earth, free willy AND free willy 2 are on all the time (fortunately friends will go out of their way to send me text warnings when it's on). My fear also generalises to pictures too and you’d be surprised how many pictures there are! It’s a nightmare..there are many unexpected killer whale surprises. e.g. watching a nice fun episode of IT crowd and then bam it's ruined....see picture below. You don't see them because you are normal, I DO!!! :(

One of the worst things are the big blow up killer whales you can buy on holiday to go in the sea! Before I can go in the sea I have to scan for children riding on blow up killer whale inflatables.

When it’s dark at night and I walk along the river by my house my imagination gets carried away and I expect one to jump out of the water….so I have to take an alternate route home for this very reason…you probably think that’s a lie – it isn’t. sob.

So that’s my irrational killer whale phobia explained.

Am I weird?