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Pixelated Blonde .com!

I’m currently in the process of choosing a .com address for this site. I’ll be switching servers/changing addresses etc. over the next few days, so please bare with me! If anyone has any suggestions for domain names for this site, I’d be really grateful to hear them.
At the moment I’m considering quirkyblonde.com. Likey or hatey? Let me know by leaving a comment below!

So lately I’ve been meaning to revisit my “inner artiste”. You don’t realise how much you miss your artistic side until you give up on it, like I did. Not that I’ve always had a secret Picasso lurking within me, mind you, because that would be ridiculous, but I was always one of those kids that liked colouring and proved to be pretty good at it by consistently churning out Crayola creations much to the pride and beaming encouragement of my frumpish primary school teachers.

One thing I always hated about art was the fact that it was – and still is – such an unpredictable subject, both as a profession and as a hobby. Most arty people give me the black look of death when I point out a piece should be judged not on its meaning, but rather on, well… how good it is. Perhaps my ‘not getting’ art must mean I’m a bad artist myself. But I prefer to think of myself as a realist. To me, a painting is either good or bad, based on how close it resembles what it is supposed to resemble, ie. how much a painting of a teapot looks like a damn teapot. So you can imagine why abstract stuff gives me headaches then…!

Despite my artistic confuzzlements, I do miss my art. Concentrating all my efforts in my writing has meant that all my other creative endeavours have slowly taken a back seat, proving evanescent as the Photoshop begins to expire, the camera gains some cobwebs, and the watercolours look mysteriously mouldy. Only now have I decided that selling that ridiculously-expensive Canon camera was one of the biggest mistakes I could possibly have ever made, as I sit here looking at all the cool things which would make some revolutionary photography, given a decent SLR and a couple of lenses.

Not only that, but working with kids has given me the incentive to start drawing again. I’ve forgotten the amount of fun one can have with nothing but a plain side of sugar paper, a couple of felt tips and a pencil and/or pen. How I miss drawing cartoons!

So from this day forward, it has been decided that Miss Anna Jane is to renew her creative ambition with all the gusto and imagination she can manage. Of course the writing will have to remain sole priority, as it always has done, but there is still time yet for a little artistic ambition, a little bit of je ne sais quoi.

So this is a message to all budding/retired artists out there. Giving up is a bad idea because you will inevitably end up honing your talents once again. Either that or you are totally, totally wasting some very invaluable skillz. We live in a world where we are nothing without art – after all, what is creation without design? Ha, I got you there, didn’t I?

So here’s trying. Who knows, I might end up uninstalling photoshop and chucking out the mouldy watercolours once and for all. But for now, Anna Jane le artiste is making a comeback! Watch this space.

For the past two weeks I have been spending my evenings mesmerised by one of the most recent reality TV series to hit British screens: Four Weddings. On top of that, I have just finished reading a magazine article entitled Confessions of a wedding planner, which nearly had me choking on my very crumbly pieces of Wensleydale cheese.

I don’t know why I have been found myself so caught up in the concept of other people’s weddings as of late. What I do know, though, is that weddings themselves must be the most overrated, biggest-time-and-money-wasting, nonsensical, ridiculous extravaganzas to ever take place. Ever.

For one, with the average UK wedding costing somewhere in the region of 15,000 big ones, it’s no wonder there’s a sudden surge of green-faced Bridezillas demanding the most ridiculous and near-impossible fripperies such as elephants, pumpkin carriages and flower-juggling monkeys. And yet, all this nonsense and petty confetti amounts for pretty much nothing, if you think about it.

Whilst green-faced Bridezilla does everything in her power to “be unique” and top the recent wedding of said best friend, her poor fiancé and parents can do little else other than look on in despair as they deeply consider taking out yet another loan or mortgage in order to afford the ivy-draped elephant which will carry a very ungrateful Bridezilla down the isle.

Only for Bridezilla herself to find herself struggling immensely with the financial disasters of divorce some months later, of course.

Yes, another shocking statistic for you all, that’s if you haven’t heard it already. 1 in 3 of us will end up divorced in this day and age. 1 in 3!! so why are the wedding blow-outs becoming more extortionate with an increasing number of failed marriages?
The answer’s simple. Our lavish ceremonies are a means of sealing the cracks in an already less-than-perfect relationship, or rather a way of hiding from the miserable truth – this ain’t no fairytale.

So ladies, you can forget the 90-tier wedding cake and the Swarovski-encrusted ball-gown, because it may not be worth the price tag. And with the recession being reported as apparently “worse than it has ever been”, a registry office wedding might be in order after all!

Years ago, we might have sat and daydreamed about a fairytale wedding whilst gently combing the knots out of Barbie’s permanently tatty extensions, picturing a day where we too would resemble le Princess immaculate, complete with a carriage pulled by six white horses. No one told us, though, that a carriage drawn by six pure white horses would be a near impossibility at our wedding, if not a damned-expensive impossibility, with a recession to knock us back even further. And we were most certainly not told that boys did not share this fantasy with us. Their action men remained single and fiercely independent, braving the great heights from wardrobe to carpet, with very little time to wonder about what skanky Barbie was up to.

Years later, and whilst Barbie may have long been dumped in the garbage bin, the little girl fantasies have long remained. And the male lack of interest in the actual wedding ceremony itself still remains. But as females, we naturally don’t notice this very male aspect and go on dreaming, and dreaming, regardless of price or anything unimportant like that.

Maybe then, it’s time we stopped dreaming of Barbie weddings, cut the spoilt Bridezilla façade, and enjoyed the planning and ceremony as it really is – a union of two people connected by love. Corny, I know, but how many of us forget this as we demand specific colour arrangements and “lilies – ONLY lilies”, whilst our wedding planner stuffs away more and more of our hard-earned cash into his bulging pockets. If a marriage is truly about love, as we like to say it is, then maybe we should start proving it by doing the following:

• Listening to our fiancé’s wants and needs as well as our own
• Having a low key, low cost wedding and only including what is necessary
• And just accepting, as hard as it is to accept, that your wedding is no different to anyone else’s, your attempts to be unique by spending ridiculous amounts of money enough to buy a house are pretty damn stupid, and that whilst you think this wedding is all about you, you, you, it is also your husband getting married and believe it or not, one of the bridesmaids looks so much hotter than you.

I hate to repeat the words of my mother, but her wise old saying is unfortunately very true: “Driving is merely a reflection of your own personality”.

This means, then, that the majority of us are hideous trolls fumigating with inner rage and turmoil, if our hooligan-esque driving standards are anything to go by.
For example, how many of us have been offered a lift by a friend, only to be rattled around like a caged budgie as our notoriously-delightful bestie swerves and swears their way through the traffic, leaving us clawing the tacky plastic dashboard in vain as we witness a very intense front-row game of tailgating?

Since I learned to drive 2 years ago, I have been judging people based on their actions behind the wheel. Forgetting all those petty ancient proverbs of “lest ye not judge” and all that, judging is an interesting game, as the results are never quite as you would expect.
Oddly enough, the most stressful drivers tend to resemble the cool-as-a-cucumber work-based-types who can manage their day jobs without so much as a drip of armpit sweat. More oddly enough, it seems the smiley-smiley-very-smiley types are equally stressful on the roads, with the addition of a car resulting in the subtraction of a smile.

Why is this, you wonder?

The answer, my friends, seems to lie in one simple word. Competition. From the moment we set foot on this increasingly overpopulated Earth, competition becomes a necessary survival tactic within any group of peoples. It rears its ugly head from birth and follows us to the nursing homes as we fight over the radio channels and electric blankets. We see it in Financial Freddie fighting his to way to promotion, as well as in Gossipy Gita gossiping her way to stardom.

This same competition refuses to leave us on the roads. Even now, as I sit here with all my many hypocrisies, I think of all the times I have pushed the pedal to the metal with hell-raising manner; all for the sake of some jealousy-fuelled competition with a fellow female roadster. If anything, us females should be supporting one another, not fighting for that number one spot at the point where two lanes merge into one. After all, we know we’re not the world’s best at parallel parking and there probably should be a license banning our sex from purchasing 4×4s, so why do we insist on trying to outdo one another behind the wheel?

It seems as a nation, as a continent, as a global contribution of fully able-bodied drivers, our brains have been warped and moulded into believing that we have never-ending abilities, enabling us to do anything we put our minds to. Whilst this thought is both humbling and indeed self-appreciating, it is slowly creating a generation of ever more determined and angry drivers, willing to make any selfish compromise to put themselves on top.
Competition and self-belief are dangerous when applied to certain situations, and this includes driving. Driving is a method of transportation which relies on tolerance and acceptance as a means of getting from A to B. Next time you’re out in the car, have a look at the amount of times you have to stop and give way to another driver. Then take a look at the amount of times you allow another driver to overtake or change lane in front of you. It makes for an interesting comparison.

So next time you feel you might be rattling your poor friend around your tinny Peugeot, please consider the following: you are not invincible, you can’t do anything you set your mind to, and you most certainly weren’t destined for a career as a racing driver. Life is a competition, driving isn’t!