Highstreet Honeys: A dream come true?

thisiscornwall.co.uk ran a story today of local ‘beauty’ Charlotte Thompson being shortlisted in FHM’s Highstreet Honeys competition.

The first two comments realised word for word what both sides of my brain was thinking.

The first was less outraged, more disappointed, that the ambitions of a young woman with her whole life ahead of her should rest soley in being conceived as a ‘honey’ in the eyes of men.

The second ran the ‘good on her’ line. Why shouldn’t she make a buck or two out of her looks?

But the idea of becoming a ‘Highstreet Honey’? Just because I’d rather peel my eyes out and set fire to my breasts before I did such a thing, doesn’t mean Charlotte has the same ideals.

Charlotte has been brought up in a world where being a ‘celebrity’ is a career choice – something one aspires to be alongside ‘doctor’, ‘lawyer’, ‘musician’, or ‘journalist’.

But making one’s fortune in Cornwall is a tricky business. Opportunities are fewer and further between than elsewhere in the country. So I wish her luck, while holding tight my reservations.

I hope she remembers herself for something other than looks alone. I hope she doesn’t take personally the comments against her choice, for women have had the vote not yet a century, and have fought hard for her freedom. I hope.

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'Highstreet Honies' - a dream come true?

thisiscornwall.co.uk ran a story today of local ‘beauty’ Charlotte Thompson being shortlisted in FHM’s Highstreet Honeys competition.

The first two comments realised word for word what both sides of my brain was thinking.

The first was less outraged, more disappointed, that the ambitions of a young woman with her whole life ahead of her should rest soley in being conceived as a ‘honey’ in the eyes of men.

The second ran the ‘good on her’ line. Why shouldn’t she make a buck or two out of her looks?
But the idea of becoming a ‘Highstreet Honey’? Just because I’d rather peel my eyes out and set fire to my breasts before I did such a thing, doesn’t mean Charlotte has the same ideals.
Charlotte has been brought up in a world where being a ‘celebrity’ is a career choice – something one aspires to be alongside ‘doctor’, ‘lawyer’, ‘musician’, or ‘journalist’.
But making one’s fortune in Cornwall is a tricky business. Opportunities are fewer and further between than elsewhere in the country. So I wish her luck, while holding tight my reservations.
I hope she remembers herself for something other than looks alone. I hope she doesn’t take personally the comments against her choice, for women have had the vote not yet a century, and have fought hard for her freedom. I hope.

Social Networking melts your soul

Social networking is 'devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance'.
Or at least that’s what Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution thinks.
According to this leading Neuroscientist, Facebook, Twitter and any other networking site you may be getting your ‘fix’ from, infantilises our minds, gives us a shortened attention span, and makes us all ravingly egotistical and self-centred.
I rather suspect I was all of these things to begin with, but that, perhaps, is a whole other blog.
The theory goes that by encouraging instant gratification, one becomes unable to bear anything which may take any amount of time.
That by setting up a profile page dedicated to you, with pictures of you, information of you, with blogs you wrote, and videos you made featuring you sitting in your home going about your daily life might just give us the feeling that we are the most important thing in the universe.
I beg to differ. Too long did we wait for a medium with which to connect to friends, (equally as important as ourselves), the ability to message them (while patiently waiting for a reply), poke them (while patiently waiting to be poked back), and generally have everything we ever needed to know at our fingertips.
Sure, it throws up problems like the diminishing need for libraries, and our inability to remember the alphabet the few times we’ll ever need to go to our dictionaries again.
Looking for something to blame for short attention spans and a lack of real-time face-to-face contact with others? I hope she took a good hard look at the effects of excessive gaming.
But leave our networking sites alone, lady. Thou who does not accept web 2.0 simply doesn’t understand it. And probably has too few friends to make it worthwhile.

Lower abdominal muscles - VERY important

"If I'd told you what you had to do today, you wouldn’t have shown up" says Luke, at my first Personal Training (PT) session.

Is he lying? He doesn’t look like he's lying.
A nervous laugh from me, but my swallow sticks in my dry throat, and it's with something of a sinking heart that I realise he's serious.
I have to run (Forrest, run). Full pelt. Up a steep gradient. For as long as I can (hah!).
This is apparently the only way to measure my body's ability to absorb oxygen from my lungs.
Let's cut to the chase, I lasted 2 mins 45 seconds. Luke reckons he's made it to 12 minutes in the past. I'd love to scoff that this ex-services fitness fanatic is full of hot air, but looking at him - I can believe it.
Shame faced, chest burning, heart screaming, some more calculations incredibly, nay, unbelievably show that I once again fall into category 'good' for oxygen consumption. There has to be an easier way.
The rest of the session comprises core stability and strength - my ex-gymnastical days have put me in good stead for this, and the stretches and crunches placate me after The Ordeal.
However, after a depressing discovery that my lower abdominal muscles need some serious work, Luke tells me something which at once changes every single one of my goals. Not just in fitness, but in life, generally.
He once saw a video of an elderly lady who's lower abdominal muscles had all but disappeared, pass her bladder through her… "you know" . His head nods the direction of a place I have no intention of ever seeing my bladder protrude from.
This is now my sole motivation. There is no more important goal.
You will have to check back here in about 40 years to see if its worked, though.

A woman's place is in the home?

When I was fresh faced out of uni, I worked on a BBC TV show called A Family of my Own, which came under intense scrutiny by those labelling it 'Pet Rescue for kids' - esentially a show highlighting the amount of kids looking to be adopted in the UK, and how to go about starting the complicated procedure of adopting. It seemed like a worthy cause, but there is always a reason for people to get their knickers in a twist.

So it was with no surprise that when Channel 4 aired Boys and Girls Alone last night, there would be the odd hairy moment as sticky-beaks and serial-complainers alike did their best to take it off the air, with it's own special label of 'Big Brother for Kids'.

A group of girls and a group of boys were placed in separate communities away from parents, school or rules, to see whether The Lord of the Flies would, indeed, happen.

And my, wasn't it interesting?

While the girls began in style, chosing rooms, painting walls, baking cakes, the boys literally played until they dropped - settling eventually down to a tea of cold beans and dry pasta (none of them knew how to cook), drank a few mugs of Coke Cola, then passed out exhausted at about 10pm.

The girls mean while, had decided that no amount of DIY SOS or Ready Steady Cook would keep the peace, and warred with each other until the early hours - big girls vs little girls - big girls bullying their way into the psyce of the less popular, tormenting, demonising.

In an alarming twist they then scribbled what can only be described as twisted messages from the dead on the walls of their enemies, and tried to pass off the grafitti as a peace-offering.
Both groups ended up realising somewhere along the way, and the boys endeeringly came up with a list as sensative as to include 'no animal hurting', but the girls couldn’t agree long enough for the rules to ever get written.

How marvelous and insightful journey into the scocialisation of the different genders. Mothers confessed to still doing everything for their sons, while preparing the girls for independence and self-sufficience. How the girls, seemingly the better prepared, then almost self-destructed with the responsibility of it all, while the boys simply played and starved.

Are we treating our kids differently in comparison to their gender? Are we still teaching boys to rely on their future wives to cook clean and organise the home? Or is it nature?

My mother always reminised that although she would give my brother and I idential toys, I would without fail always end up 'homemaking' with the dolls, while my male counterpart would fashion a gun out of sticks and dedicate himself to turning the local woodland into an imaginary war-zone. Is this simply what the different genders are hard-wired to do?

Skin folds and hankies

D-Day. About as frightening a day as any woman could dream up in an over-active imagination, fuelled by cider binges and chocolate indulgence.

The day Luke Collins, personal trainer, Redruth rugby player, and all-round fitness-guru had to go through my daily food intake, then weigh, measure, poke, prod and evaluate my strength, 'skin folds' and body fat mass.

Breath in, ladies.

Settling down in the relaxing aroma of a spa treatment room, 6ft 6" Luke could have been about as intimidating as Alan Sugar to David Brent, but he wasn't.

Deeply sympathetic, he walked me carefully, patiently and un-patronisingly through food fixations and neurosis, body image and the advantages of fitness.

I learnt things I didn't dream could be possible - such as no amount of cardio work or praying to the Lord Almighty can ever reduce the amount of fat cells I now possess - this is only possible in childhood. All I can aim to do is simply reduce the size of the fat cells I am currently left with.

I raise my eyes and thank God I was an active child. The dangers and problems of childhood obesity now inherently clear, as the number of fat cells are then passed on through genetics to the next generation.

Also, Luke informs me, I am to no longer refer to myself as 'getting older'. Apparently 28 is the prime of a woman's natural physical fitness. Once again, a small prayer of thanks is uttered. Perhaps that second helping of apple pie might simply forget to travel via my hips.

Nestled in the room with us are a variety of complicated sciencey looking implements, designed to see into my very soul. Ok, not quite that far, but that’s about as naked as I felt when they magically told Luke all my secrets - what my resting heartbeat is (an annoyingly higher than wanted 72, although anything up to 90 is ok. Luke's thumps at an incredibly relaxed 40 or so); what my blood pressure is (practically registering me dead it's so low, but we knew this about me already); and most horrifically, what percent of my body is fat.
This is it. Callipers at the ready, my biceps, triceps (bingo wings), sub-scapular (back fat), and supra-iliac (love handles) are gently pinched, measured and scrutinised. Luke's face gives nothing away but I am getting more and more frantic.

A few complex calculations are scribbled down and worked out (who knew personal training was so mathematical!?). He then measures the results on various age/weight/eye colour charts (ok, I lied about the eye colour). He fixes me with his eyes.

"Ok. On a scale of fitness, average, below average, and GP referral, where do you think you are?"

Difficult one. I do a few calculations of my own in my head. I take into account Wednesday's apple pie, my office based job, minus childhood fitness and a small frame. Throw in a total consumption of what must be 3 large bars of dairy milk since new year. I play safe. 'GP referral?'

Laughter is a good cover for nerves and I laugh. His is more genuine however, as he breaks the jaw-dropping, incredible, impossible news that I fall within 'fitness'. My body fat is a respectable 22.5%.

It is almost too much to take in and for a few elated moments all I can do is assume he is kidding. When it turns out he is not, I go to shake his hand and leave. Surely, my work here is done?

Wrong. The wobble still exists, there's no getting away from it. And although I have allowed to talk myself into being far less fit and far weightier than I actually am, there is still lots of work to be done.

I am severely deficient in vitamins provided by veg (I am a renowned green veg-dodger), and I don't consume enough carbs. The thigh circumference is too high to put in print (I blame a childhood career of gymnastics), and I still can't wear a vest top without turning white every time I see my upper arms.

It is with this resolve that I book to see Luke again in a few days for a session in the gym - apparently the body's 'wall' is far beyond the wall in my mind and he's going to 'push me through it'. It sounds like Chinese torture, but he's such a gentle giant I just can't believe it of him.

Day 6:
Food intake: have already forgotten to eat the breakfast I promised Luke I'd force down - must tie a knot in my hankie to do so tomorrow. Must also buy hankie in which to tie knot;
Cigarettes: 2 yesterday, none today. Feeling like I should be able to knock this on the head once and for all;
Alcohol units: Am half tempted to count cider simply as a 'fruit' to add to my 5-a-day (which Luke says should really be 9 anyway - not sure I could physically consume that much a day, though);
Optimism: After a refreshingly relaxed and super-friendly hour and a half with Luke, I feel like anything's possible. Kate Moss, here I come;
Age: Not 'getting older' just yet...