also, a mild concern

Those headband things never fit on my head. Seriously.

Do you know the ones I mean? The fabric ones with an elasticated bit that make the wearer look slightly hippy-ish and delightfully bohemian.

Thing is, in the evenings my fringe starts to annoy me so I like to hold it back out of my eyes. My tool of choice used to be a black plastic headband (or Alice band, fine), but after the death of it and its many successors I resorted to a red paisley neckerchief thing which used to belong to my Granny and made me look like Rambo.

So, after endless mockery and scorn from the housemates (and partly because I left it at home), today I decided to invest in a new one. I found one in Boots, and it's quite nice - silky and patterny. That'll do the trick, thought I.

But, it was not to be. Either it is made for people with heads the size of peanuts, or I have a malformed skull. While I'm hoping it's not the latter, I have a horrible feeling that it might be the case. Whenever I put the headband on it sits there looking sullen, then pings off my head. It's infuriating, everyone else manages to make it look so effortless - an elegant knot over a perfectly dishevelled chignon, or tied delicately at the side leaving trailing floaty material. I, on the other hand, am rapidly resembling some kind of human elastic band launcher.

What's a girl to do? Is there anything that can be done to tame ungainly heads? Probably not. Until then, I'll have to submit to fringey eyes, or else invest in some sort of latex swimming cap.

Just another one of life's lesser delights.

this afternoon

I went from feeling fairly OK about myself, to feeling like a bloated and corpulent sow within just one solitary stinking hour.

It was all grossly unfair. There I was, doing some innocent bra/jeans shopping, just trying things on in the changing room, and there it was: a gargantuan ape of a creature staring back at me from the mirror in the corner of my cubicle. Not only was it foul to the eye, but it also appeared to require inhuman swathes of material to cover its porcine frame - and even then it was left able to only crush one leg into the insufficient acreage of denim. Horror of horrors, its face looked familiar.

I left the shop with no bras, no jeans, and in a thunderous mood. Only when they've got us under their hideous fluorescent lightbulbs, half naked and tottering about with one leg in our jeans, in a cubicle of roughly the same dimensions as a shoebox, loathing ourselves and our now astonishingly close resemblance to an ox, do they have us where they really want us.

Retail therapy my bum.