Blinky blimey.

I’m not usually one to go further than armchair contrarianism, but I’ve just been compelled to sign a Downing Street petition to protest against the banning of the Red Arrows at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

And the reason for this? They are apparently ‘too British’. Er, pardon?

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport, in all its infinite wisdom, has deemed the display team ‘too militaristically British’. Apparently they might offend other countries taking part in the Olympics.

What bobbins. You can’t ban the Red Arrows. They’re cool. Like Top Gun. Like Ice Man. Like being someone’s wingman, anytime.

If they’re that odious, we’d better bulldoze Buckingham Palace, have a white out at Westminster and stick a flipping fez on Nelson’s bonce. Although I very much doubt that Health & Safety would allow you to climb up there.

This is fuckwittery of the highest order, descended from Red Ken’s army of simpletons.

And I’m going to stop right there, before I morph into Jeremy Clarkson.

I suppose it is too much to ask to expect the window replacement man to arrive on time.

To measure up, he was supposed to arrive at 4pm Tuesday. He finally rocked up at 11.15am Wednesday. That is 19.5 hours late.

Today he is due at midday to replace the glass (that The German had to break last weekend when he locked us out of the flat).

As you can see, it is now heading for half past.

My fuse has just been lit. Let’s see how long it lasts.

Fucking hell.

I’ve just been down the gym to cancel my stupidly expensive membership and they won’t bloody let me. And they won’t let me downgrade and I am pissed off. Oh, they’ll let me buy myself out. For the entire lump sum of my remaining contract. Oh good then.

I’ve really got into road running and the faff of the whole gym experience is increasingly getting on my wick. My fear of catching a verruca is also growing daily.

So my options are stick it out, try and collar an unsuspecting innocent to transfer it to or cancel the direct debit and do a bunk.

I clearly can’t be trusted to put my name to anything. If I wasn’t forking out each month for the gym then I’d be paying for a chaperone.

A week and a half into this blogging malarkey and I thought I’d better get to grips with the wizardry that is Wordpress. I’ve been trying to pad out my Blogroll and it’s all bobbins, because it’s not doing what I ask it. (The colours aren’t uniform, see? How the fuck do you right that?) I am cross.

I’ll hold my hands up and admit, I’m something of a technophobe. Gimme quill and parchment over a petulant PC any day. In stark contrast, a colleague is so enamoured with Apple Macintosh and all who sail in her, that he frequently tries to flog me some widget or other: a piece of 21st century tomfoolery that will apparently make my life infinitely better (and my bank balance infinitely worse). I’ll be down the Apple store soon, begging them to take him on for free, just so he can work the sales patter out of his system.

So, I eventually caved to the pressure (chided gently as I was by the fond memory of a glorious eight months spent in a publishing house working on a pretty, turquoise Mac - oh halcyon days when I could accessorise with my hardware) and bought a Macbook. And yes, it’s lovely. All white and shiny and creative and sleek and did I mention shiny? And it doesn’t spit bile at me and crash, wiping out five years of my life in one fell swoop, like my Sony laptop did after I spilt red wine all over it. Even after I lovingly tried to rescue the ungrateful bastard with the panicky application of tea towels and a hoover.

But here’s the thing. I feel like a fraud. The reasons are threefold:

1) I only really use Word and iTunes. Macs do so much more.

2) Vitally, I still haven’t worked out how to transfer videos from my mobile onto the damn thing. Surely a simple task that would prevent me from jamming the phone memory.

Which brings me onto my next point…

3) I can’t be bothered to learn either.

I feel like I’ve bought a Porsche 911 and I’m refusing to go above 30mph. It’s like dating Brad Pitt, ducking the kiss and telling him you just want to be friends. Here I am, stropping around in five inch Christian Louboutin heels with a pair of cosy slippers secretly stashed away in my handbag.

The crux of the matter is I’m flagrantly underusing a whizz bang piece of kit.

Oh fuck it. At least I’m trying to work Wordpress, I’ve kept fluids away from my Mac with an unnatural zeal and I haven’t tried to break the internet for months now.

And to the man who I work with: know your audience. You wanna sell me something? Let’s talk about shoes…

Meandering round the interweb the other day, I stumbled across this.

Skinny Bitch, written by an ex-model and a model booker, is ‘A no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous!’

Pass me the sick bucket. After I’ve binged on chocolate digestives, of course.

With a call to arms that screeches, ‘Stop being a moron and start getting skinny!’, we are left in doubt that all that is good in this world is rake thin and shuns dairy as if it came - not from a cow - but from the nipples of Beelzebub himself.

I loathe shit like this. Especially when the authors, Rory and Kim, are quite clearly a) self-satisfied, finger-wagging hags, b) out to make a fast buck and c) are doing so by riding off the back of the airbrushed bunkum we are peddled on a daily basis.

It’s worth noting that Rory and Kim are both from LA. This is a place where unless you’re into minus figures on your dress size, you’re shunned as a fatty boom boom outcast (unless you’re Beth Ditto or a Brit).

I used to be ’skinny’. Like, proper skinny. Like gangly skinny. And I hated it. Six foot and barely packing out a size eight isn’t pretty when it’s not dressed up to the nines and shoved behind a camera lense. And teenage boys simply aren’t interested when you make a couple of bee stings look like Lolo Ferrari. They’re all too concerned with the business of pinging the bra straps of girls who can fill one.

Ten years on I’ve got tits and hips and everything that comes with it, and fuck me, I ain’t giving them up for nobody. (And neither would you if you’d spent nights repeatedly pressing your palms together, in the vain hope it would kick start a growth spurt, while chanting, ‘I must, I must, I must increase my bust.’)

I’m all for healthy eating, taking exercise and glugging water. I eat my five a day and go to the gym three or four times a week. But I also like to fall spectacularly off the health wagon on occasion. That usually means cosying up to Monsieur Merlot and flirting outrageously with Mr Murg Masala before devouring him whole. You see, I always thought the watch word of the moment should be moderation.

This book chats regimented crap. The opening gambit of ‘Stop being a moron and start getting skinny!’ sets out its store of reinforcing the stereotypes that make so many women feel like utter bobbins. Like the one where looking like an emaciated husk of a girl-woman equates to success. Oh and my favourite, where size is inversely proportionate to brains.

“Help me! My brain is withering because I ate a Jaffa cake!”

Some fuck ups will love this book. If you’re one of them, then go right ahead and get reducing. See how you like it when your tits shrink faster than Ben Fogle’s balls when he rowed the Atlantic naked.

Besides, with you lot all sans scaffolding, I do believe I’m owed some long overdue bra strap-pinging…