Tiggle Tiggle

Themed parties seem to me to show that as humans, we need to have a reason for things; a distraction from ourselves and our want and need to get together and have a knees-up. But they’re great nevertheless.

One of the best themed parties I went to was a couple of years ago and the theme was ‘dead Christmas number ones’. Someone turned up as Kirsty Maccoll, complete with a model speedboat protruding from a hat on their head. All in excellent taste.

But themed parties can go either way, really, and depending on the company you keep you can end up with a roomful of poncey overdressed idiots, or a room full of nothing except thin air.

That seems to be the way that people roll; they are either really, really up for dressing up and going to town on their outfits, buying all sorts of ad-ons and modifying their clothes for the do, or they categorical DO NOT WANT TO DRESS UP, believing themselves to be far too cool for such malarkey, or simply being too shy.

It’s also one of those things we do to mark ourselves out as humans by being cultured; man’s attempt to distance himself from his faeces.

Wouldn’t it be great if each year, along with the other mundane services that must be done; car service, boiler service, that kind of thing, you got a body service?

I’ve managed to quash my inner hypochondriac who plagued much of my teenage years during which time if I had a pain in my head I was convinced it was a tumour, or one bruise too many on my leg and I surely had leukaemia, but those nights I spent unable to sleep for fear that I would die in the night of my obvious ailments would have been eradicated if only I could have had a body service.

I’m sure such a thing exists, but it’s got to be expensive, so hardly anyone can afford it. What if they ran services at £20 or £30 a pop though? Surely everyone would sign up and they’d make a killing(!).

We are all dying, there’s no getting away from that, but no one wants to die prematurely and in pain. Unless your Thanos is sky high, you want to stay alive.

I think it’s a good idea. All this boiler service, car service malarkey is necessary I suppose, but what’s more necessary, your boiler or your life? Hmm?

Something that’s been annoying me recently is people spending lots of money when they don’t have to.

That is somewhat of an exaggeration; what I mean is that the recession has been good in many ways for the consumer, and not everyone’s taking advantage of it.

There are loads of money saving vouchers kicking around on the internet, and they aren’t even that hard to find.

Vouchers are for all kinds of popular pastimes and pursuits, but my favourites are restaurant vouchers and shopping vouchers, and this is because I’m a girl ergo I like eating nice food in restaurants and shopping, obviously.

Vouchercodes.co.uk is a great site; you can search for vouchers for a particular place or shop on the site, and have the 20 best vouchers emailed to you each week. These vouchers generally encompass all the usual restaurant chain favourites, Prezzos, Pizza Express, that kind of thing, as well as discounts for stores like Debenhams and New Look. Check it if you haven’t already!

Moohaa if I cause a recession everyone will think I'm the Messiah

People getting married, that’s who. But weddings are a waste of time really aren’t they?

Well, maybe more a waste of money than time, but still, for the couple, a waste of time too. All that time spent scrutinising wedding venues, wedding outfits, menus; whatever else you need to organise for a wedding.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally love a good wedding party, but then I like ANY kind of party, or any situation in which you can have a drink and a good time.

But with most of the weddings I’ve been to I couldn’t really care less about the people’s marriage. Good for them and all that, but I can’t really get excited about other people’s love lives.

So all the time people plough into making sure this is exactly right and that is perfect is a bit of a waste really, because for me weddings are like Christmases; they all roll into one, and it’s really hard to distinguish which wedding venues were for whose weddings, who served what food and what the weather was like. It gets worse when you have a relative who has had multiple weddings, as is common in my family.

Car hire is possibly one of the most stressful aspects of a holiday, even if, or as in my case, especially if, you are not the one driving.

There’s something about the roads abroad in the holiday destinations I frequented that is just impossible to understand, and natives’ driving is akin to the type I’ve seen from kids on the bumper cars on Clacton Pier.

But the worst part of it, for me, was the blame I faced when it was realised by whoever was driving that I didn’t know the way to the destination any more than they did.

Sorry, had I not mentioned I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the road systems in Portugal?

I’d sit quivering with an out-dated map that didn’t seem to correlate with any of the roads we had driven down, laden with blame and fear, while whoever was driving demanded to know whether we were on the right road.

A frantic few hours later we’d arrive at the resort stressed and in need of a holiday.

Some people think that money or love make the world go wound, but it’s actually sex that makes the world go round.

Money will buy things, bear with me on this oh patronised one, expensive things like flashy cars, designer clothes and even chauffeur hire if that’s your thing, and we all think we want it, don’t we?

Who wouldn’t want more money? Lots of it? No one. Why do we want it? So we can buy stuff, things; better things than we already have that will make us feel better, look better and enhance our lives. But still, inanimate objects nonetheless.

We want more money so that we can enhance ourselves. How we enhance ourselves is subjective and differs from person to person; a boob job here, a nice designer suit there, chauffeur hire or a massive great telly.

And we want to enhance ourselves to attract the best possible mate, one that will think we’re the best because we have all of this good stuff. And we want them to want to have sex with us.

"Wicked, now I'm gonna get loads!" squealed Mildred

Announcement from Christine Pratt, head of the National Bullying Helpline, about bullying allegations from  staff at Number 10 must have been about as welcome to the Labour party as an air conditioner to a Siberian.

And posh boy Cameron has leapt on the bandwagon in sheer delight, calling for investigations into office bullying at Downing Street and crossing his fingers in hope that something sinister is unturned. Oh how his chubby, ruddy, privileged little face must have lit up when he found out about Pratt’s announcements!

“Despite my leading in the polls, there is still the stubborn undercurrent amongst the great unwashed that insists on supporting bloody Labour,” he spat, stamping his privileged little feet.

“I must, must, must run with this possible slur on Brown’s character and make the most of it, lest another poster campaign of mine featuring my delightful bourgeois face is disastrously spoofed by those scum-of-the-Earth Proles.”

Unfortunately for the spoilt one, the latest poll from YouGov has found that Tory support has slumped massively, and the gap between the Tory Party and the Labour Party is at its smallest since December 2008.

If houseware doesn’t make a good present, even if you REALLY wanted a new toaster or a set of towels, then what does?

For some ladies, it’s all about the bling, for others, it’s all about the thought. Thoughtful presents include photo books, surprisingly cheap and easy to come by, yet meaningful due to the effort and thought taken in their composition.

Photo books of special moments in a relationship show time, care and effort, which translates to the female brain that you are a man who will spend time and effort on your ladyfriend and, more than this, WANTS to spend time and effort.

But if exterior displays of sentiment and mush aren’t your thing, and let’s face it, photo books could turn into one big stomach-turning mushfest, any present that shows thought and effort is a good ‘un.

For example, the best present I’ve even been given was two pet mice. I think it was for my 20th or maybe 21st birthday, I can’t be sure. The giver took time to consider that I love animals and especially little pet animals. My hamster had died earlier in the year and they’d seen how sad this had made me.

Is it acceptable to buy your lover houseware for an occasion such as their birthday?

Does a gift of a toaster or blender to your girlfriend render you a hopeless un-romantic, or should she show some respect and be grateful she got anything?

I asked around some female friends to gage a general opinion, and it seems that the answer is that it all depends on what you want to say to her, and what you want her to think about you, and what you want her to do about it.

If you want her to feel romanced, cared about and appreciated, and earn yourself some good boyfriend points in the process that you can bank for later, buy her something for herself; jewellery, clothes, a weekend away, anything shiny or pretty or girly.

If you want to get dumped, buy her houseware.

So there we have it folks.

Say bye bye to scenes like this

We are all a product of chemical reactions and nothing else, and I’ve just discovered something worrying.

A study has found that a hormone called Oxytocin, when administered to Aspergic people, causes their social inhibitions to lessen.

That’s a good thing though, right? Asperger’s is a form of Autism in which people suffer, amongst other things, the inability to interact socially in the way that a ‘normal’ person would; lack of eye contact, a dislike of being touched, that kind of thing.

It’s also the hormone that is released during sex, particularly in women, which causes them to ‘bond’ with their partner, and experience feelings of love and trust. All those feelings are caused by this hormone. Dangerous stuff. Imagine what you could do with it if only you could buy a bottle of the stuff online?

Well guess what, you can. Oxytocin is sold online by numerous vendors, most of which are unscrupulous about the potential manipulation that one is possession of a bottle of the stuff can achieve.

“Discover the power of trust!” one website proclaims in its gleeful call-to-action to buy ‘liquid trust spray’. How sinister? Salespeople, apparently, can get anyone to buy anything from them once they have ‘the power of trust’.