Hungry for Validation: Melbourne’s Food Hipsters

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Call me a troglodyte, but when did food become such a mondo wank?

I’m not talking about everyone Instagramming their every poached egg (mystifying as that shit is), but the recent neo-yuppie (yes YUPPIE) upsurge in discussing one’s progressively more obscure and expensive dining experiences.

It’s so fucking eighties! And how is this even a thing with the economy at large behaving so cautiously? Let’s fantasise for one second I were filthy rich, (which I do all the time btw and, FYI, I have sooo many monkey-butlers), I still struggle with the idea that one meal can be worth more than my entire week’s groceries. And my groceries are expensive. (Um, hello Coon sliced-cheese family packs do NOT come cheap, my friends.)

Announcing to everyone you ate a $50 salad is not impressive. Expect to hear the “RIP-OFF!” sneeze if you brag about your food bill in my vicinity. You paid $50 to shove your social status in our faces and prove to the world you are ‘fancy’.

You are not fancy. You are a tosser.

(And p.s. when did salad become more than just a kebab filler? It’s gotten waaaay out of hand, guys. Some ‘celebrity chef’ arranges a bunch of stuff on a plate, and that’s a ‘salad’. Skittles and brioche can be a ‘salad’ at the right establishment.)

Who ordered a side of Simmons?

‘So, yeah, we got a table at Wankyswanks last night. The thrice-cooked tea-smoked spatchcock anus was disappointing - but you know, Cambodian hawker food just tastes better when you’re eating it with the local villagers’

Ugh, I can barely hide my sniggers of disbelief when I hear this drivel. The way people lose their shit over a goddamn food truck sausage and talk about an anchovy like it was their first blowjob makes me laugh all the way to the bain-marie.

P.S. If you talk like that and I catch you with a McDonalds bag, then I deem thee the highest category of wanker. You’d be surprised how many of these food fashionistas are the first ones to gag for a McChicken at 1am. Probably because their earlier $50 salad was, well, a MEASLY GODDAMN SALAD.

Fuck your fancy toast!

At this point I feel I must reassure you that this rant is coming from someone who fucking LOVES food. I too have had the pleasure of dining on some truly spectacular dishes at some of Melbourne’s most fashionable establishments and praised institutions, but I’ll admit my tastebuds are JUST as impressed by a traditional (and super-unfashionable) Indian curry from Altona. (‘Gulati’s’ at Harrington Square – I’m going into a $13 korma coma just thinking about it – mmmm).

I hear the food's shit

I don’t care where I eat my meal, as long as it is flavoursome, great quality, and portioned well enough that I don’t need to make mee goreng when I get home all hip and poor. I won’t suffer crappy food, whether it costs me $10 or $100. 

If I had, say, $200 to spend on a night out, you can bet that the majority of that budget would be heavily invested in tomorrow’s hangover. Or, I’d go out for an $8 mega-bowl of Vietnamese pho soup, which is one of the most satisfying and flavour-packed meals I know of, and pocket the rest to spend on a multitude of shiny non-perishables at a later date. Or on, you know, not starving for the rest of the week.

Also, fuck lining up in the rain just so I can update my Facebook status to “HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT ME I’M EATING AT THE FASHIONABLE FOOD PLACE HEY EVERYONE HEY!” *Instagram spamathon to follow*

Goddamn Instagrammers.
WE DON"T CARE ABOUT YOUR FLOOR BURGERS

If you ask me, the rise in foodie-culture and the ‘hip’ dining experience seems to be driven by a new kind of food snobbery recently cultivated by the young and upwardly mobile. (And Instagrammers.)

Like wine before it, where and what to eat has become a form of social currency. Chefs are now filling social pages, being Oprah’s friend and marrying actresses from Neighbours.

As my friends and I have entered our late-twenties and early thirties complete with disposable incomes and inner city postcodes, the ‘right’ restaurant has replaced the right bar to frequent. Which is totally fine – I am just increasingly amazed at how much money we are expected to throw down to be part of the gastro set.

What I’m saying is, we are literally flushing money down the toilet.

Like cocaine was to the 80’s, food fashionistas are this decade’s sign you make too much money.

Kate Moss once said ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. For me, nothing tastes as good as not missing rent.

Unemployment like a BOSS

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When was the last time your daily to-do list included ‘put pants on’?

Hi. I’m unemployed.

Some people enjoy the downtime afforded to them by a break from work, but not me. All this free time is turning me into a dimwit.

Previous to this stint, the longest I’d been sans paycheque was four weeks. And by that fourth week, I was a drooling sanitarium candidate writing my letter ‘E’s backwards.

Dutch TV shows are HORRIBLE

Here in Amsterdam, I am approaching the seven month mark. Yep – seven months in an apartment armed with little more than a Macbook, the shit biscuits and Dutch daytime television. You can only imagine the internet sites I have discovered. (I highly recommend lemonparty.org by the way.)

The days have become sort of a kindergarten for my sanity - I’ve had to structure my waking moments around positive ‘activities’ to ensure my eventual re-introduction into working society won’t be too much of a punch in the undies.

The key is to spend all this free time as productively as possible. Think minimal naps and porn. Here is a list of my daily non-negotiables. (Or, “Leah’s guide to making the most of Loserdom”):

  • Get up when my boyfriend leaves for work. No sleeping until noon like I imagine mums with babies do.
  • Do the job hunting in the mornings. If I scour the online job sites all morning I don’t get the guilts about then playing outside all afternoon, drinking beer in the shower until I kill the hot water system or hibernating in a couch tent watching Teen Mom.
  • Pancakes ONCE a week for breakfast. When you literally have all day to create fancy-pants kitchen fare, you start to shun muesli for more glamorous things like freshly squeezed bacon juice and cereal omelettes. Which is fine. Once a week. You’re too poor to spring for bigger knickers.
  • Put some goddamn pants on. Pants are what seperate us from some animals.

    Kevin Bacon knows pants = success

  • Put those pants on within 45 mins of showering. When my boyfriend is at work wearing pants and being successful, I enjoy completing my ablutions with the bathroom door wide open. After a lengthy shower karaoke session, I often get distracted by all the fun tools in close proximity – floss, nail files, q-tips, anal bleach etc – and forget to dress. Which is fine until I have to go downstairs where all the windows face the street. Instead of just donning a robe, I figure if I just run past the windows fast enough, no one will notice any vaginas. Terrace-house living is really cosy and makes you feel like the street is your own personal advent calendar, but windows only metres from your neighbours means one is forced to complete all daily grossnesses in new, secret ways.
  • Become a first class Haus Frau. I’ve never been one of those domesticated females that is into cooking/cleaning/not picking her nose, so I am using this time to hone my housewifey skills. I make sure my darling lover never wants for pink-tinged smalls or curtains that smell like curry.

    Witness the Fitness

  • Physical Fitness. Part of being a good lady-companion means keeping your shit tight. It is my firm belief that if someone has to see you naked on a regular basis, you should make it as non-scary for them as possible. Exercising every day is easy when you have a clear schedule and consider stirring thick pancake batter ‘resistance training’.
  • Go outside at least once a day. Vitamin D is essential for warding off Rickets. No one wants a bow-legged lady except for that Sailor in that limerick. Also, outside is where the food comes from. If I want to dazzle with my newfound culinary wizardry, I can’t do it with a jar of jam and a chorizo sausage with bitemarks in it. I’m saving those for breakfast.
  • Watch ‘The Office’. If you ever feel bummed about not having a job, watch a few eps of The Office back to back. I guarantee you will cherish your unemployment status again in no time. The only reason I write my name on my food now is because I sort of like the taste of Sharpie.

I hope you found my guide helpful in these harsh financial times. If I can sway just one jobhunter from getting too lazy (like, adult diaper lazy), then hooray for everyone I guess.

Also, could you please give me a job.

Warmest Truliness,

Leah

Humpily Ever After

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Last week I was perusing a list of 2010-11 film releases and noticed that the ‘fuck buddy’ relationship appears to be a popular theme throughout the most recent crop of romantic comedies.

Interested to see how Tinseltown would treat the subject, I sat through what looked to be two of it’s sassier offerings, ‘No Strings Attached’ and ‘Friends with Benefits’.

And may I say, BLEEECCHHH.

After I finished barfing and barfing and barfing and barfing, I got really annoyed.

In both of these ‘cheeky romps’, the male and female leads predictably realise they are soulmates (barf) and convert their copious copulating into coupledom (and a really embarrassing flash mob scene).

I don’t know what else I expected from movies starring Ashton Kutcher and a former member of a 90′s boy band, but I admit there was a teeny tiny part of me that thought MAYBE, in 2011, Hollywood would be a tad more realistic about the likelihood of everybody living humpily-ever-after.

Here’s MY portrayal of a real-life friends-with-benefits (FWB) situation:

Sally and Jonny meet at a bar one night and are both like, ‘I would totally tap that’. After a fun evening of flirting and pretending to be normal, they swap numbers and proceed to go on a few dates. Throughout these sober outings, it becomes apparent they don’t have a lot in common. But Sally, suffering through a dry-spell long enough for her yum-yum to almost close over, manages to block out the fact that Jonny doesn’t read books and focus instead on his purdy lips and they go on to have regular squelchy times.

Their lack of romantic compatibility eventually dampens their efforts at dating, but the sex is unreal and occasionally Jonny decides jerking off to old Kirstie Alley films ain’t gonna cut it and texts Sally to see if she’s up for a quick bout of sexual intercourse. After all, she’s about a 7 (away from fluorescent light) and is actually pretty fun.

If Sally had shaved her legs that morning and her irritable bowel syndrome was behaving itself, she was usually down for a doinking. What the hell – she was single, and Jonny was a friendly, no-strings way to have someone diddle her skittle without feeling skanky. (Plus, it’s basically a pilates class if they do it over his desk.)

Months pass, it gets colder outside, and Sally begins to feel a little lonely on a Saturday night when all of her friends are out getting couples massages with their boyfriends and laughing at single people and their luxury cats.

Those poor single people and their Snuggies for ONE

Jonny starts to receive more booty calls than usual. The easy familiarity is comforting to Sally and the ‘drink’ invitations soon extend to home-cooked dinners, DVD nights and sleepovers.

Sally wakes up one Sunday morning to find that she and Jonny are spooning. A feeling of warmth washes over her like a dutch oven of emotion. She has learnt to overlook his original shortcomings in the ‘boyfriend must-haves’ department, and has come to realise that even though he once said he’d fuck a chicken for a hundred bucks, they are meant to be. She rolls over, kisses him awake and asks him where they should go out for eggs.

He yawns, nudges his boner against her undies and murmurs into her hair that he can’t do brekky today as his girlfriend gets back from an anal bleaching convention and he needs to pick her up from the bus station.

Poor Sal-Sal. She’s sitting in her car right now, crying and burping into a bucket of KFC and ordering more cats. “I’ve HAD it with men!” she blubbers, a snot bubble ballooning from one nostril.

Sally is a V.I.P. customer

Take note of Sally’s plight. More often than not when it comes to pals who pork, somebody gets their heart pounded harder than their front-bums ever did.

Sometimes, one party is in it for love from the get-go, hoping to turn every ‘O’ face into a lifetime of squeezing each other’s back zits. Some of you even manage to turn your exes into a dial-a-dick. When such strings are attached it’s tricky, but not impossible to pull off. Even if my attempt became ‘Enemies with Benefits.’

The easiest endings occur when both participants mutually abandon the pants-off party with no hard feelings. (Maybe THAT was the problem! I’ll see myself out.)

Generally, the FWB relationship has a use-by date owing to the very nature of it’s lusty foundations. But done right, you can hold on to these sexual snackpacks for years.

In my opinion it’s also wise to accrue a few of these boner-cronies, because when you’re drunk and horny at 4am it’s better to go fishing with a big net. The one who lives closest is asleep, the one you WANT to come over is in Columbia at his sister’s wedding, and the Swedish classmate you suspect lives with his girlfriend, well, he’s living with his girlfriend.

Over time, you’ll lose some of these companions of convenience to serious relationships, their return to the Mother Land, or gender-reassignment surgery. Other times you lose them to a gross tattoo or a panty-drying ipod playlist. (I’m talking to YOU, ‘Vengabus’ guy.)

Whenever a new party is introduced into the rotation it’s generally an organic process – never have I heard of two actual friends sitting down and giving each other a big unsexy list of ground rules before shaking on it and de-pantsing.

And even if people ARE getting all secretarial about their baser instincts, that in no way safeguards you from getting attached. I myself have had to bail out on occasion because I began thinking about my bedroom abettor a little too much, and all of a sudden I’m showering before dates and wearing my most revealing overalls.

Like playing Boggle or slapping people with trout, the sex between pork pals needs to be considered just another fun activity. Once you start fantasising about running away together to start an aardvark farm it’s time to lock it up, lady.

Joyce cranks in the sack

So why DON’T more fuck buddies become full-time lovebirds?

If you’re bumping uglies often enough, your body produces a chemical that bonds you to that person and synthesises the chemical reaction we know as ‘love’. That sneaky sex haze tricks you into thinking you must nest with that person simply because they pull your duds down on a regular basis.

And on that, how often can you ‘hang out’ with a mattress mate before it’s deemed a gross abuse of racy resources?

I was at breakfast with a male friend (regular friend, not sex friend), last year and the topic of who I was ‘seeing’ came up mid bacon-on-toast with a side o’ bacon. I explained I was still ‘seeing’ the same person I had been for about a year. He asked how often Mr X and I ‘hung out’, to which I replied about once a week, sometimes more, pass the salt.

He put down his fancy avocado moosh and shook his head. “That’s too much. No one needs that much bacon.’ *Relieves my plate of some bacon* ‘P.S. I hate to break it to you, but you’re dating.’

And now that I think about it, maybe he was right. That WAS too much bacon.

He may have also been on to something regarding the frequency with which I frequented my ‘friend’.

For awhile there, Mr. X and I had been behaving sort of like ‘stunt’ boyfriend and girlfriend. My friends had met him, we went out for dinner, movies, and afternoon drinking binges at lawn bowls clubs. We stayed at each other’s houses, picked each other up when drunk, and offered to play nurse when one was sick. We even hung out on the 5 ‘lady’ days a month when I wasn’t prepared to ‘hang out’ at all.

Before the danger of a Sally and Jonny situation presented itself, Mr.X and I met other people and fell in love within weeks of each other. And luckily for us, we were open and honest when the time came we had to redefine our friendship. We could have been total balloon-knots about it, having never defined our situation out loud, but ours was an unspoken adult understanding where the friendship had became a large part of whatever-the-hell-it-was we were. We couldn’t have just slunk out of this one ignoring calls and telling each other we had rabies. The genuine ‘like’ we had for each other as mates meant it was important for us to be ‘cool’ in the end.

And we are.

And for real-life friends-with-benefits, I think that’s the closest you’ll get to a Hollywood ending.

‘Bye bye now.

Trivial Matters

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I am a Know-It-All.

An armchair expert. A walking, talking wikipedia page. You name it, I’ll find a way to wax lyrical about it. And despite my attempts to market myself as a ‘fountain of fun facts’, it’s really not the most charming of traits.

Recent example: (Boyfriend) “What’s the point of an appendix?” (Me, without hesitation): “It’s basically a biological leftover from the days we ate more dense plant matter. Back then it was larger, called a caecum, and secreted stuff that helped us break down difficult-to-digest fibrous matter.”

Spurred on by the topic of dietary fibre, I continued by launching into what I thought was a canny commentary on the appalling state of modern human consumption. A glance at my beloved mid-speech revealed a facial expression that I’m beginning to see all too often.

A look oscillating between bewildered amusement and “Shut the fuck up.”

Yup, living with me is like being at a really shit trivia night that never, EVER ends.

It tends to get worse at night, around about the time the Sandman roofies one’s nightcap. Prompted by drowsy ponderings, it becomes the time of night when our bedroom becomes host to a languid philosophical forum.

A time to discuss grand visions for the future, dream up elaborate creative concepts, and substitute words in movie titles with ‘anus’.

“What’s the difference between an Astronaut and a Cosmonaut?”
“How do eyebrows know to only grow there?”
“Why the hell do you know so much about vegetable families?”
“What’s the difference between Buffalo, Yaks and Bison?”
“Did you just fart?”
“What is the plural of Bison?”
“What exactly is Grug?”

Seriously, what ARE you??

Real, deep, soul-searching shit. How we eventually sleep at night without answers to these burning questions is just astonishing. But luckily for us, I know all the answers to everything, ever.

And just in case the zzz’s do remain elusive, a brief earful of my spoutings has been known to have strong narcoleptic effects.

Sometimes I surprise even myself with what I actually know.

A question is posed to me, and while my brain is busy filing it’s nails and yawning, “Beats me, bitch”, the answer still manages to fall out of my mouth like an unconvincing movie spew.

Any time I respond with an especially obscure (or dodgy) knowledge nugget, I provoke an incredulous “How do you even know that?!”

To which my honest response is “I have no idea.”

And I don’t.

My best guess is that apart from being addicted to Doctor Karl’s science podcasts, I’m relentlessly curious and blessed with a 7 mega-pixel memory. My rate of retention appears to be a happy accident thanks to a mind more absorbant than your Gran’s Depends.

The sponge effect has it’s perks. I rule at trivia nights, exams, and telling jokes. (A talent that doesn’t extend to my entire family. My little brother Stu will begin a gag, “So this chicken walks across the road into a bar….”)

He gets the yarn-butchering gene from our mother. Although her recall is less ‘bad’ as it is ‘selective’.

I’ll cite a significant childhood incident and her face goes all, “Hmm, I want to look like I know what you’re talking about….” but admits that no, she doesn’t remember that time my brother and I raced each other down a hill at Currumbin Sanctuary, went too fast for our legs and performed a synchronised faceplant into a gully full of wildlife.

How do you forget two of your children emerging from a valley bawling their eyes out and smeared head-to-toe in kangaroo shit?

And while I’m doing better than her in the recollection department, I’ll admit I’m not always correct.

There are cases where I’ve been so incredibly wrong but so supremely confident that no one has questioned my logic. To the point where I have made sceptics of GPS. That’s right, I made others doubt INFORMATION BEAMED FROM SPACE.

A couple of years ago, my dad and I hired a car in New York with the intention of a scenic few days cruising along Cape Cod.

I vehemently declared I would NOT be volunteering to drive, and settled into the front passenger seat with the intention of being chief stereo-fiddler, gummy things-eater and sarcastic remarks-maker.

Unfortunately, that declaration was made well before it became apparent that Wayno was going to repeatedly try to kill the pair of us.

If he wasn’t absent-mindedly steering us into oncoming traffic, his plucky commentary on New England architecture was distracting him from things like not mounting the pavement. Somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, I threw down my bag of Jolly Ranchers and commandeered the steering wheel.

And for a while, everything was dandy. Until we neared the picturesque seaside town of Mystic. (Of ‘Mystic Pizza’ fame. Early-Julia-Roberts-film-career-knowledge high-five!)

This is where I chose to defy logic and our GPS (which we’d cheesily christened Mary-Sue).

Up until Mystic, Mary-Sue had only served to be the perfect navigational companion. But suddenly I’d got it into my panties that she was leading me astray. That her dulcet, non-regional, United States-accented tones were telling me damn stinking lies.

Yes, I realised I was in a foreign country on unfamiliar roads, and yes, satellites in space built by scientists were directing me very politely toward my desired destination, but nope, my internal compass had made up it’s immoveable mind.

After pulling over, poring over upside-down roadmaps, pointing stabbily at the pier and stubbornly digging my cowboy booted-heels into the gravel, I managed to convince Dad we needed to turn back.

I threw the car into a U-turn and pealed off with smug conviction. This smugness lasted for about 8 miles, when I came across signs for the town we’d had lunch in earlier.

Whoopsie.

And instead of learning from this incident and coming to understand that my ‘never-wrong’ navi-brain might still be set to southern hemisphere, I managed to repeat this stubborn insistence across the next three states.

So yeah.

If you ever need to know what a fluffer is, or want to know the baby mama’s name in some B-grade celebrity’s paternity suit, or why dogs drag their asses along the floor, I’m your gal.

That’s right, think of ME next time your dog has a blocked anal gland.

(Just don’t ask me for directions.)

‘Bye.

An Ode to Disobedience

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Won't be needing my helmet HERE!

On a recent sunny day during the week that Holland calls ‘Summer’, I met a friend in the Vondelpark for a mid-afternoon froffie. It was a weekday afternoon, and the gardens were packed with the usual suspects: hipsters, pervs, offbeat-sports enthusiasts, no-goodniks, and a healthy cross-section of the canine community. It made me wonder who exactly goes to work in Amsterdam – surely they couldn’t all be employmentally-challenged like my friend and I? Being unemployed, it’s expected we drink during the day. These others, this legion of leisure – what was their excuse?

As we lolled on the lawn, I yanked the ring pull on my can of Heineken and found myself instinctively trying to shield the motion – a shifty habit ingrained in me by my former city of residence where it’s illegal to get your booze on in public. This ‘law’ never meant that anyone actually refrained from the practice, it just ensured that one got shitfaced as politely as possible and with a minimum of public nudity.

So here I am in the heart of Amsterdam, surrounded by so many people smoking pot that I’m getting an open-air contact high, yet somehow still getting a nerdy thrill from the blatant public consumption of booze. In a town where it’s perfectly legal. The same place it’s also perfectly legal to smoke marijuana cigarettes. That’s right, DRUGS! In PUBLIC! In front of cops, little old ladies, and God HIMSELF!

Now, as an Australian, and more relevantly, a Victorian, I have lived with rules both reasonable and ridiculous my entire life. And these rules, well, they just seem to keep on comin’, each one making us feel more like a naughty child than the last.

It’s not that I have a problem with authority – if anything I’m dorkily eager to please – but I’m still supremely opposed to the kind of laws where I believe Darwinism could’ve sorted it out just fine (I’m talking to YOU, helmet law).

I also have mega beef with laws designed to ‘save lives’ by fining those hooligans doing a Schumacher-esque 55kms/h in a 50km/h zone. (Maniacs who must be stopped).

As a generally well-behaved citizen with a healthy boner for people doing things in an orderly fashion, I feel my native Victoria may have gone a wee bit too far with the recent introduction of the ‘swearing in public’ penalty. I think that’s a bit rich coming from the state responsible for Australian Rules Football. (AFL matches being the birthplace of the more ‘colourful’ language I choose to sully my sentences with.)

Seriously, Australians not allowed to swear? That’s kind of our thing. We had a whole tourism campaign based around the words ‘bloody hell’.

It’s like telling the French to stop smoking or Italians to stop parking like assholes. (Seriously, they find anything that resembles not-road and cram 14 Fiats into it. Look behind any dumpster in Rome. I guarantee you there’s at least one Smartcar shoved in there.)

We actually asked a Roman resident if there were any parking rules. “Not so much,” he mused. “As long as they think you make a good attempt, then it is fine.”

Ha! In Melbourne it’s fine too.

PARKING Fine.

Maybe leave the car at home? Incorrect change for ticket machine.

TRAM fine.

This makes you angry. You get to swearin’. CUSSIN’ fine!

Gah!

Europe seems to be doing a far better job at managing it’s population’s potential forays into naughtiness. Apart from the accepted disdain for road rules that makes crossing the road a daily dalliance with death, I applaud the trust these governments place in their residents and their life choices. They have become the community equivalent to those kids in high school with hippie parents – no point rebelling if ya gots no no-no’s.

I guess that makes Victorian legislators guilty of being the helicopter-parents from Hell. Zing!

Think about it – if you never had to follow a rule in your entire life, I guarantee most of you would still do the decent and sensible thing most of the time. But, like anyone, the more over governed you feel, the more instinctive your urge to disobey. That’s normal. I’m normal. But if you said to me tomorrow, “Uh, hey – no more wearing green on weekdays. It’s officially banned.” You better KNOW I’d be stocking the fuck up on green scanties and gleefully flouting such nonsense at my very own in-pants protest.

If you relaxed all the rules in Victoria after all this babysitting, people would totally lose it with all their newfound long-leashdom. I’m talking some sucks-to-your-assmah shit.

Now, over here in The Netherlands, dutch rules are as relaxed as the coffee shop-cats getting unwittingly hotboxed on a daily basis. The usual laws to protect basic liberties appear to apply and are enforced (as far as I can tell. I saw a cop once. I think. Either that or riding a horse through the streets while wearing fluoro is just a ‘thing’ over here.)

Aside from the biggies (Murder, Rape, Theft, Wearing Head-to-Toe-White), the laws of common sense seem to dictate the general decorum. My overall observation is that society seems not to have crumbled in the face of the odd joint and a cheeky disregard for road signals.

I must admit though, as I watched people almost blow themselves up with illegal Belgian fireworks last New Year’s Eve, I watched fluoro horse-guy grinning at the spectacle with the rest of us guffawing drunkards and couldn’t help but think, “What the fuck are you ever going to arrest anyone for?? EVER??”

Anyhoo, I have noticed that this newfound lack of boundaries is having the effect you would expect on someone that has always coloured within the lines. (Me).

I am reveling in a dastardly glee for all things brazen.

Well, brazen for me.

For instance, while holidaying recently in Turkey, I took my hotel bathroom towel….. to the BEACH!! Like, a whole kilometre off hotel property! TEEHEE!! (I mean, nobody told us NOT to do this, but I’m pretty sure it’s frowned upon.)

To add to the sheer audacity, I handed the filthy sand-riddled rag back to the reception dude on my return, and was all like, “Uh yeah, our room needs new towels ‘n’ stuff,” and he gave us FRESH ONES!

Eeeeeeheeeheeeheee!

Oh and it doesn’t stop there.

I was in the Sistine Chapel last month, and they have these two Lame-oes whose job it is to shush everyone when it gets a little dull-roary all up in there.

Well, not only did I NOT shush, I TALKED QUIETLY.

I was also asked not to stand on the step while I craned my neck to look at the ceiling.

Instead of my usual blithering ‘Sorry, whoops, oh – sorry, sorry,’ *giggle, blush* bit, I did my best to look VERY affronted and took my sweet, insolent time to alight that stupid 6 inches.

Take THAT, Vatican goons!

Finally, in one last act of bratty defiance, I let my boyfriend touch me slightly inappropriately in the Vatican just to show the Pope he ISN’T the boss of ME.

Blatant disregard I tells ya. Lookah me all fearless ‘n’ shizz. I totally rule at disobeying rules of little consequence.

MmmHmm.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to get on my bike (sans helmet, Mum) and tweet things while ignoring red lights.

(Just to let you know, I would totally smoke a joint at the same time if pot didn’t make me projectile spew.)

‘Byeee

Behold! My first ever credited piece of copywriting. Not to mention a bloody important message. Do it, fellas.

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Credits for the Movember campaign 
Agency: Dolly Rogers
Client: Movember
Concept & art direction: Paul Orzoni & Jennette Snape
Copywriter: Leah Dunkley
Photographer: Sarah Esteje
Photo studio: Studio13 Amsterdam
Model: Isabelle Maitre
Hair & Make up: Tynke Jeeninga