Ding dong, Avon lady calling!

I have spent the weekend feeling sorry for myself. My throat is impersonating a fiery volcano with real lava flows of snot. This morning I have woken without a voice, which my husband and children seem to be enjoying but it makes barking orders impossible.

'Look out for the cup of tea!' turns into ' 'look out for the cup of tea!'. It's impossible to sound authoritative without a voice. And my big treat for the day is going to be grocery shopping. Stand back before the excitement kills you.

The only thing of interest to report from the weekend has been my husband embarking upon a scorched earth policy in our garden, hacking down almost every tree we have. I think he thinks that gardens need a good hack in the winter so that they grow better in summer. But I do believe that you need to leave something to grow and I'm not sure he has. He was a man with electric saws and other power tools and nothing was going to stop him once he started. Now that the decimation is complete, he is faced with a mountainous pile of trees, shrubs and bushes to get rid of. I feel that the wood chipper will be making an appearance today. This actually means that my husband will get to stand in the garden on his own feeding branch after branch into the machine under the guise of 'gardening' while secretly enjoy a sanctuary away from the children (who will tire of it within minutes).

So while our weekend has been a shrine to domestic mundanity, on Friday I did get to go into London in proper clothes rather than jeans, talked to grown ups and pretended I was a regular, sophisticated townie. Except I wasn't. When you live in deepest, darkest West Berkshire with Newbury as your nearest town, your ability to dress fashionably is somewhat hampered. Newbury's only remotely fashionable shops are White Stuff, Fat Face and Phase Eight. It has a department store with teeny, tiny sections for Oasis, Hobbs and Fenn Wight Mason, where those stores send the clothes they can't sell anywhere else. It is a desert wasteland in fashion terms.

Walking around Carnaby Street, I realised that I wasn't in Newbury anymore. I was wearing my newest, trendiest clothes and I still looked several years out of date - in fact its questionnable whether I was ever in date. This was depressing but resolvable, I felt. One day when I don't have to pay the tax man, I could take a trip into London with someone who knows about how to wear boots on the outside of your jeans and I could restock my wardrobe. (And to be honest, a daily walk to the school and back to my home office doesn't require much in the way of fashionable clothes).

What is going to be more difficult to resolve is my face. I caught glimpses of my reflection in several shop windows and kept wondering who the old lady was. I had applied make up for my big trip into the city yet somehow it sat on my face, enhancing my wrinkles making me tired and dull. In contrast, shiny, dewy, bouncy creatures sashayed past looking as though they'd fallen into a vat of beauty flash balm. They managed to achieve a natural look even though none of it was natural.

It made me realise that the time has come for serious action. Not a scalpel. But an overhaul of my beauty regime. Given that I'm using free samples from purchases made several years ago as my beauty products right now (cost cutting and all that), I do have quite a long way to go. I spent my evening googling 'how to get a dewy look' (apparently you need to put cutical remover on your face and then make your own face misting spray with rose oil and witch hazel) and investigating Avon's website thinking that perhaps I need an Avon lady to call and tell me exactly what I need to do for a sagging neck and wrinkly dull skin.

I feel that the tax man is just going to have to suck it up and wait for some of his money because my face is more of an emergency right now. If anybody has any top beauty suggestions, please share them. A brown paper bag over my head isn't a lasting solution.

Things that annoy me

Today I am in a black mood. Dark, brooding and thoroughly unfriendly. Strange that I should have this mood on what is a gloriously - if incredibly rare - sunny morning. What's more, husband is back home. I had a full day to myself without children on Saturday sailing the high seas and spent yesterday pool cleaning and gardening so that we now look like we live in a show home (except for the congealed cornflakes under the kids table). I've even managed to get the pool to be blue, clear, clean and warm all at once. Small miracles do happen every now and then.

However, I am still in a miserable mood. Let's hope a full day of sunshine can cheer me up. But while I'm in a grump, I might as well make full use of it and have a little rant about things that annoy me:

Annoyance 1: The fact them when trying to type this blog, I can't leave a space between numbered items if I use their silly numbers so have to type it as I have here.

Annoyance 2: The Gillette Venus razor advert that blathers on about women revealing their inner goddess. Do the ad executives who come up with this shite really think that women feel like a goddess when they shave their legs? Don't they think that perhaps women shave their legs because they've started to look so hirsute that people have begun to call them Yeti and their husbands keep complaining that they've got stubble rash on their own legs thanks to yours scraping theirs in bed. And do they really think that women get to lie in the bath, languishing about with candles while they transform themselves into a goddess? Of course they don't. They hop about frantically on one leg in the shower while two children crawl around the supporting leg trying to catch the bubbles and learn a few choice words when mummy realises that the blade is so blunt she's removed her shin bone instead of the hair. So no, I do not want to unleash my inner goddess while shaving thank you very much. I just want to be able to not bleed to death.

Annoyance 3: Those pages in magazines - particularly the Sunday Telegraph magazine (Stella) but it is not alone in doing this - that take some mildly famous person and ask them for their address book of their favourite places. So of course they prattle on about some fabulous little shoe shop in Venice and the perfect place to get sushi in Tokyo as though they are there every second Wednesday just because it's so fab that they'll endure a transcontinental flight just to eat some raw fish. Stop showing off. For a start, your carbon footprint is pants. Secondly, I too could rustle up a handful of must-see places in different parts of the world. Just google it. Twats.

Annoyance 4: Stuff. We seem to accumulate a lot of stuff. And it drives me nuts. There is a particular corner in the kitchen that is particularly prone to gathering stuff. And it's homeless stuff. Stuff that has no real place but probably shouldn't be chucked out as it might be vaguely useful one day, and so it goes into the Drawer of All Things (which in itself is a nightmare but at least it is out of sight). Why do we have so much stuff? Why am I not better at selling stuff on eBay, giving it to homeless shelters or just putting it in the bin? I think my life would be happier if it was completely decluttered. But you just never know when you might need an inflatable exercise ball or a bag with 25 tins of paint samples in it. Do you?

Annoyance 5: That I have to drive all the way into Newbury now to post a parcel and withdraw some money (on the wildly optimistic assumption that there is some money to withdraw) because I refuse to pay a £1.99 fee to a hole in the wall money box at the service station. Of course the petrol to get to Newbury will cost more than £1.99 and the time I spend not working is worth far, far more but it's the principle of it. Blood sucking thieving swines.

Annoyance 6: That women who've had children end up with stomachs that look like tinned sweetcorn mixed with orange peel wrapped in an uncooked thin covering of pastry, with the consistency of a jelly that isn't fully set. It's not fair. We had to cart the little beasts around for 9 months and then push them out doing untold damage to our pelvic floors and fanoirs only to be thanked with a Mr Blobby jelly roll that prevents the wearing of midriff tops and bikinis ever again. Where is the justice in that?

I'd better wrap it up there as I do have to do some work (another annoyance). Here's hoping my mood improves. Otherwise it's going to be a long week (particularly for my husband.)

Kiss kiss.