LUV & HAT

LUV - Let’s not beat around the bush, ladies and gentlemen, feet are fucking awful. Basically they’re scaly deformed HANDS garnished with horns and corns and irregularly sprouting hair. At best, feet look like undercooked pancakes full of chicken bones. At worst, they smell like Belgium.

As you might have guessed, I am a fully paid-up podophobe. I fucking hate feet and, of course, the podes I phobe the most are my own. Because I have the partially collapsed, war-torn feet of an ex-dancer run to fat – part barnacle, part monkey paw and part upsettingly mutated Ripley clone in Alien Resurrection.

In fact, they’re not strictly human feet so much as rebellious HOOVES, and taming them (and I must, for Havaiana season is upon us) involves tricking my feet into the bathroom by pretending that I’m going shopping for Converse, then launching a three-pronged ambush with a pumice stone, a foot file and an industrial vat of that vile Body Shop peppermint foot cream* stuff until their spirit is broken.

But all that’s behind me now that I have a PED EGG. I no longer have to balance miserably on the edge of my bath, set my jaw like a stoic lumberjack and saw away at my stumps with sandpaper for a day and a half. With a PED EGG, I buff my way to public-friendly feet in minutes. It’s amazing. It’s so easy. For someone like me, whose rebellious hooves are now gently dozing Andrex puppies, it’s life changing.

And of course, it’s horribly, horribly disgusting.

I mean, you’re cheese-grating your feet and collecting the shavings like some terrible milky sociopath. But you empty that shit and wash it afterwards, because using a PED EGG is one of those disgusting things – like smear tests, like being nice to your mum’s creepy younger male friend who wears a fucking SHARK TOOTH PENDANT - that you get over and just deal with. Because you’re an adult.

Not convinced? Here are five everyday things that are more disgusting than using a PED EGG:

1. Sleeping on dust mite-infested sheets
2. Having poo spores on our toothbrushes
3. Eating beetles in pretty much all red-coloured food
4. Washing our faces with sheep secretions
5. Proctology.

So, bon appetit and sweet dreams! What was my point again? Oh yeah. PED EGG! Get over it, have nice feet. LUV.

* I’m such a podophobe that typing the words “foot cream” triggered my gag reflex.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Life is basically one horrible letdown after another. We discovered this as children when - after watching the adverts promising that Teddy Ruxpin would be our charismatic new best friend - we realised that he was actually just a hairy cassette player that looked like Michael J Fox if Teen Wolf was a film about a rapist toddler’s battle against progressive cerebrovascular degeneration.

We discovered it again when - after believing that it could revolutionise the world of commerce - we realised that Groupon was actually just a sick experiment to see how many harrowingly inept daily emails about laser hair removal a person will voluntarily read before they die of sadness.

Yet still we believe. Thus, the Ped Egg. The Ped Egg looked like a miracle invention - a beautifully effective way to banish hard skin from your feet forever. Not only would the Ped Egg stop my feet from looking like leathery, yellowing planks of stinking driftwood, but it would help them become as smooth as a silken bag of eels. By using the Ped Egg a few times, I was sure that I’d end up with such aristocratic and velvety feet that I could cause them irreparable damage just by looking at them quite hard.

Better yet, all the dead skin removed by the Ped Egg’s 135 precision micro-files get stored up in a little container. Imagine that! A little container full of dead foot skin! What a wheeze that would be! Maybe I could convince people that it was parmesan, or sea monkey eggs, or makeshift confetti for last-minute weddings. That little container of dead foot skin would be my fortune! The Ped Egg was going to change my life!

And then I used one.

And then I fucking used one.

Turns out that Ped Eggs are fucking HORRIFIC.

First, using one means you have to look at your feet, which is no fun. AT ALL. Turns out I’ve got feet that look like baby elephant corpses. They look like Gollum’s nutsack. They look like sad clowns without any makeup on. Looking at my feet is a genuinely unpleasant experience.

Then you actually have to use the fucker. You’re basically zesting a lemon here, if lemons were big and flat and sweaty and covered in scar tissue and stank like rancid milk. And you can never get all the hard skin off your feet with a Ped Egg. You end up with a foot that’s part smooth, part hard, and part worn down all the way to the bone.

And worst of all, it turns out that a container full of dead foot skin stops being funny the second it becomes a reality. Because it’s not skin. It’s dust. It’s manky beige dust. It looks a bit like anthrax, only it’s worse than anthrax because it’s MADE OF FEET. Looking at a container of your own foot dust is one of the most upsetting things that a human being can do. You want to see what Ped Egg foot dust looks like, don’t you? Don’t lie. I know that you do. Well, fine. Here it is.

LUV - When people see the contents of my handbag, they often exclaim “You’re a walking PHARMACY!” Personally I think that’s a rather high-handed approach for pick-pockets to take, but this is twenty-first century London and I suppose no one has any real boundaries anymore, what are you going to do.

But they’re right. I do carry a lot of medicine around with me, because if I didn’t (dramatic pause), I would die.

You know, eventually.

You see, I am sickly. Not stab-me-with-insulin-or-I’ll-die sickly (yet) – I’m more can-we-sit-in-the-shade-please-I’m-getting-a-headache sickly which is in many ways worse than having a proper, valid illness like epilepsy or death.

Because people on trains won’t give up their seat for someone with a migraine the way they would for someone who was pregnant. And THAT’S NOT EVEN TECHNICALLY AN ILLNESS. No emergency doctor would fast-track a really bad case of weekend hayfever, even if you’d been at a great boozy picnic all day but were totally sobering up now, and it was seriously harshing your buzz.

And you can’t call into work sick in the morning because you ate one spice the night before and now have to live in the bathroom for the rest of your life. Apparently.

But that’s okay. Because, if you’re like me, there are MEDICINES which take the edge off and basically stop you malfunctioning in lots of tiny irritating ways every day. And if that means I have to lug round a bunch of pills with me all the time and occasionally have interesting conversations with policemen and airport security, you can bet your sweet bippy I’ll do it.

Unlike Christian Scientists or people like a) my mother, who hangs a dreamcatcher above her bed and uses the word “energies” too often, or b) Stuart Heritage, who tries to purge his body of viruses by drumming his fists on his chest and screaming, I am FOR MEDICINE.

Medicine makes my life slightly less problematic. ALSO without medicine we, as a species, would all be dead in ditches by the time we were 30. But MAINLY it means that I, Robyn Wilder, can eat a curry once in a while and don’t always get wheezy when climbing a hill or stopping to smell the roses, and you can’t put a price on that. At least I can’t, because I’m not a pharmacist.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Now let’s all calm down. Hate is a strong word. I don’t hate medicine. In fact, I think that some medicine - like the medicine that keeps children alive and the medicine that stops me shitting and puking all over the inside of people’s houses every time I go to a hot country - are actually quite useful. So, no, I don’t hate medicine.

I’m just suspicious of it.

First, look, I’m a man. I can cope with illness. The last thing I want to be is one of those people who flounces off to Boots the second a molecule of pollen gets within twelve yards of their face. Those people are WEAK. I am not weak. I am a MAN. I will accept ANY FORM OF MINOR ILLNESS and then KILL IT WITH MY MIND. Yes, I know that this headache would probably go away in a couple of minutes if I just took a paracetamol, but paracetamol is for BABIES AND GIRLS. I am neither of those things. I am a MAN. I will ENDURE. More than that, I will CARRY ON AS NORMAL during my headache. In fact, I will DRIVE A TRAIN and SOLVE CRIMES and KARATE-CHOP THROUGH CONCRETE during my headache. Taking a paracetamol is the easy way out. It’s for WEAKLINGS AND YELLOW-BELLIES. I WILL NOT BOW TO PARACETAMOL.

And antibiotics are worse. People take antibiotics for everything. But illnesses know what you’re doing. Illnesses have wised up to antibiotics. More and more illnesses are becoming resistant to antibiotics. They’re mutating into SUPER-DISEASES that will KILL US ALL, just because you took too many antibiotics when you didn’t need to, you GREEDY FOOL. It’s likely that humanity will be WIPED OUT by an army of 20-FOOT SINUSITUS BACTERIAS with MACHINE GUNS AND LASER-EYES and it’s ALL YOUR FAULT. This is why I will NEVER TAKE ANTIBIOTICS. Because antibiotics are for CRYBABIES AND SHIRKERS.

But most of all, I’m scared of getting addicted to medicine. It’s easily done. First you take something to help you sleep. Then you forget how you ever managed to sleep normally. Before you know it you’re taking several sleeping pills every night. And then you get fat, and you start to look sluggish, and you keep slurring all your words. You’ve turned into MATTHEW PERRY FROM FRIENDS. Well, NOT ME BUDDY. I am a MAN. I will NEVER TURN INTO MATTHEW PERRY FROM FRIENDS, because I will NEVER TAKE MEDICINE for ANYTHING. Send me a minor illness and I will KILL IT WITH MY MIND. I am the ANTI-PERRY. I will never be addicted to ANYTHING. Not even PARACETAMOL or SUNTAN LOTION or those MULTIVITAMIN TABLETS that come IN THE SHAPE OF DINOSAURS. I AM A MAN! I HAVE NO NEED FOR MEDICINE! I AM THE ANTI-PERRY!

Unless, you know, I’ve got quite a bad headache. I’m not mental.
- Stuart Heritage

LUV - Being a short-sighted child is no fun. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you that, like me, their first memory was of some blurry arsehole barking “Well YOU’LL never be a fighter pilot!” right into their face. And after that, it’s all downhill. When you’re short-sighted, your life becomes defined by its limitations.

But that’s nothing compared with having to wear glasses to school. It’s not like wearing glasses as an adult, where you can offset them with a tiny hat and an asymmetrical haircut and a 10p Oxfam cardigan in the desperate hope that you’ll be mistaken for an obnoxious Shoreditch fuckpipe. No, when you’re a child your glasses are your worst enemy.

They’re the things that get you called things like ‘Double Glazing’ and ‘Milky Bar Kid’. They’re the things that break when you play football, that steam up when you walk into a warm room in winter, that reduce swimming to a process of blindly flailing around inside a giant wet smudge. And then you get older, and glasses become the things that get caked with foundation on the rare occasion that you’re actually allowed to kiss a girl. And people constantly ask if they can try them on. But they don’t ask toothless people if they can try on their dentures, do they? Oh no. It’s discrimination, plain and simple.

But contact lenses? Contact lenses set you free. True, you might not think that the first time you try them on, after spending half an hour gingerly jabbing at your eyeball until it turns into a livid red jelly of tears and nerve endings, but they do. Slide in a pair of contact lenses and the world suddenly transforms. Strangers start noticing you. Watching a 3D movie no longer involves basically stacking things onto the end of your nose. Best of all, people stop immediately assuming that short-sightedness is your biggest flaw - they’ll have to take time to discover that it’s actually your horrible breath or innate mistrust of women, just like they have to do with normal people.

It doesn’t stop there. You can head footballs without worrying that you’ll have to spend the next fortnight picking shards of metal and glass out of your face. You can wear actual sunglasses, and not those enormous sunglasses that fit over your normal glasses and make you look like a cross between the Terminator and a pensioner with exploding cataracts. You can go swimming. OK, technically you can’t go swimming because there’s a good chance that you’ll spend the next few days so squinty and red-eyed that most people will automatically think you’re a crack addict but, you know, don’t tell anyone.

Best of all, wearing contact lenses is basically a license to regularly spend several hours at a time on your hands and knees, combing through carpets with your fingers and muttering “Oh for fuck’s sake, it must be around here somewhere.” And how many people with 20/20 vision get to do that, huh? None of them. That’s why contact lenses - and the people who wear them - wonderful.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Unlike Stuart Heritage, I haven’t been blind since birth – my eyesight started deteriorating in my twenties. Apparently this is quite common, so I think people should warn you about this shit, just the way they should warn you that one morning you may peel back your duvet to find - not a stomach exactly - but a sort of fleshy bunched-up bumbag with a long hair sticking out of it; and that, if you’re female and manage get to 27 without kerflumping a series of sprogs out of your vajayay, anyone older than you is legally obliged to say “tick tick tick” whenever they see you.

Having your eyesight suddenly fail you is very unsettling. One minute you’re all THAT HADRON’S OUT OF PLACE MUM, I CAN SEE IT A MILE OFF LOL and the next you’re blundering through Sainsbury’s wondering how long they’ve had a ‘Breasts’ aisle and why they’ve made all the checkouts smudge together. At which point you’ll have three choices:

1. LASER EYE SURGERY – paying a Bond villain to clamp your eyes open and fire up a WMD while you wonder who the hell is barbecueing pork around here because something smells delicious.
   
   
2. GLASSES – which make you look like your own grandmother or a member of the Gestapo.
   
   
3. CONTACT LENSES.

Obviously you choose contact lenses, because they snap the fuzzy, indistinct world into whining, crystal HD clarity with lines and edges and depth, give you your peripheral vision back and – unless someone examines you very closely – you don’t look like a massive specker. 

Unfortunately, contact lenses are bastards, which is why I hate them.  

PUTTING THEM IN
They’re so FUCKING FIDDLY. You have to balance a lens on your fingertip, pinion your eyelashes open, then sort of lob the lens hopefully at your eyeball, praying that it doesn’t a) have grit in it, otherwise you’ll have to walk around with a sore eye all day, involuntarily winking at probably some very unattractive people, and b) fall on the floor – because if it does, you’re fucked. 

I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever TRIED to find a tiny transparent nothing on a tiled surface when your eyesight is so bad that you genuinely can’t distinguish between a departing bus and a fat woman in a red coat, but it is JOLLY HARD. Never mind the fact that your contact lens might not even be lost - it might be, as I discovered three days after losing one, folded up behind your eyeball.  

TAKING THEM OUT
Having to remove your contacts at night is a pain in the arse. It means that, if you bring a young man home and slip into the bathroom before bed, he’ll expect to see you emerge resplendent in four-inch spike heels and an Agent Provocateur basque. So imagine his confusion when you plod out in your glasses and he doesn’t know whether you’re going to wipe his face with a spitty tissue or reenact several key scenes from ‘Allo ‘Allo at him.

Which is why contact lenses - even though I’m wearing some right fucking now - can SUCK IT.
- Robyn Wilder

LUV - Self-service checkouts are brilliant. I don’t know if you remember what supermarkets used to be like before they existed, when you had to run everything by a checkout assistant, but it was rubbish.

Look, supermarkets have always hated you. Supermarkets are basically vast warehouses strewn with signs that say ‘THIS TOWN USED TO HAVE A FISHMONGER UNTIL WE CAME ALONG’ and ‘NONE OF OUR CHICKENS HAVE EVER SEEN SUNLIGHT AND MOST OF THEM DON’T EVEN HAVE BEAKS’. That’s fine. That’s the ethical trade-off you have to make in order to buy a lasagne-flavoured sandwich at 11pm on a Tuesday night.

But checkout assistants? They were gold-plated, stone-cold proof that supermarkets absolutely fucking hated you. Checkout assistants were trained to greet you at the till with a surly “Spose you want BAGS” that suggested you were entirely responsible for all the dead polar bears in history. If that wasn’t enough, they’d then judge you for everything you’d bought.

Oh, the judging. Buy a readymeal and you’d see them thinking “Single are we? I can’t say I’m surprised, not with that haircut.” Buy a bottle of wine and they’d think “ALCOHOL? But it’s TWO-THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON, you MONSTER.” And, let’s be honest, anyone who says that they ever bought condoms without being directly vomited on is either particularly good at vomit-dodging or a liar.

Luckily, technology has killed the checkout assistant, just like it killed other useless professions like tube drivers and journalists. Now, instead of having to go through all the poxy rigmarole of human interaction, there’s a machine that can handle the transaction all by itself. It is the self-service checkout, and it is wonderful.

Forget pleading for a bag, because the self-service checkout practically flings them at you. “Take a bag”, it chimes. “Take 12. Fuck the polar bears. I don’t give a shit. I’m a robot”.

And there’s no judging with a self-service checkout. It’s a machine. It can’t judge you. You can buy whatever you like - condoms, Anusol, guidebooks called How To Murder Your Bitch Of A Wife - and the machine just lets them pass without so much as blinking. I mean, obviously all the wires from the machine lead directly to the supermarket HQ, where a fat man in a top hat sees what you’ve bought and barks “CRANBERRY JUICE? I bet your vagina’s ALL FUCKED UP!”, but it’s fine. He can’t look you in the eye while he does it. It’s fine.

So congratulations to you, self-service checkout manufacturers, for making the world a better place. Yes, admittedly you’ve probably just invented the earliest stage of Skynet, but at least now I can buy doughnuts without worrying that the woman on the till thinks I’m a fat wanker. It’s totally worth it.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - It’s 2012, you know. Twenty-twelve. The sort of date that should flash across your screen in a silvery font and go KAPOW. It’s the future, and as a child of the future I should rejoice in the self-service checkout.

But I don’t.

In fact I’d rather malinger in a 100-person supermarket cashier queue than follow the employee trying to usher me over to the self-service machine. Because I know his game. He’s not really asking me to expedite my twelve Wispa Golds and one low-fat sandwich, is he? What he’s really asking is “Would you like to FAIL today?”

Because everyone fails at the self-service checkout - you, me, Feliks Zemdegs the 2011 Rubik’s Cube record holder, everybody. It doesn’t matter how urbane or technologically adept we are. I’ll bet even the inventor of the self-service checkout starts speed-beeping his groceries through with blithe confidence but ends the process in panicky tears, desperately swiping a lemon across the barcode reader before ED209 stomps out to gun him down if he can’t find his Nectar card in 20 seconds.

The bastard machine dooms me from the outset. As soon as I rock up it’ll shout “START SCANNING YOUR ITEMS NOW” before I can put down my bag. Then it’ll bark diktats as I fling my groceries across the FUCKING SUDDENLY DEAFBLIND barcode scanner while trying to liberate a carrier bag with my teeth.

Then I’ll come across an item - like the aforementioned lemon - which doesn’t have a bar code, so I’ll have to key it in manually. This involves selecting “Menu” on the screen, then clicking “Product” then “Plantae” then “Magnoliophyta” then “Magnoliopsida” then “Rosidae” then “Sapindales” then “Rutaceae” then “Aurantioideae” then “Citreae” then “Citrus” then finally “Lemon”.

At this point the self-service checkout will decide that lemons don’t in fact exist, and also that there is something unexpected in the bagging area. Often this is nothing, or air, or the previous shopper’s aura. Regardless, the self-service checkout will sulk until I call for assistance.

But, as I said, everyone fails at the self-checkout. Even the terminally bored girl employed to fix the self-checkout. She’ll resignedly turn a key in a thing and press another thing, then jab ineffectually at the screen as the self-service checkout machine commands her to “ENTER your pi- PLEASE ask for assista- RESCAN the ite- PLEASE take your shoppi-”, and the only silver lining to the whole horrid affair is that it allows me to tiptoe to the exit with not-technically-my shopping.

Anyone need any lemons?
- Robyn Wilder