Gee thanks Google, don’t know what I would have done without those extra 3 seconds in my life.

The first search term for The Fear Of…., the one that came above The Fear Of God, The Fear Of Flying and The Fear Of Clowns, (yes, clowns, *rolls eyes* Stephen King, you have a lot to answer for) was ‘The Fear Of Long Words.’

The biggest fear people have typed into google is one of a bunch of letters all strung together in a longer than normal line.

Of course, my original search was quickly abandoned as I clicked on The Fear Of Long Words, my mind racing with ideas about what this could be. I envisaged people trembling walking past billboards with words longer than 6 letters. People crossing the street when passing a library so they didn’t have to walk so close to all those long words congregated under one roof. Support groups where they all spoke to each other in only 1 syllable and ear splitting screams erupting from households every time the postman visited, the homeowner shaking and cowering in the cupboard under the stairs trying to muffle their sobs so the evil letters didn’t seep from the envelopes, string themselves into a long line and come to wrap their long spindly legs around the poor sufferers neck.

Sadly, about the phobia, my 30 second quick search in google turned up very little other than some scammy sites trying to sell ebooks on how to get over your phobias and a bunch of places saying ‘oh my God, there is such thing as a fear of long words’ but the name, oh the name. The name is priceless and worth a blog post all of it’s own. And so it got one.

The name for The Fear Of Long Words?

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.

Ahh sweet irony, how I love thee.

I hope the sound is okay, it wasn’t so great on my computer but my speakers are so inferior it’s hard to tell.

Do we women automatically syncronise our bladders after more than 10 minutes in each others company? Are we afraid that if we don’t go in packs we’ll get lost on the way back? And what on earth are we doing in there?

Are we plotting world domination? Spending hours layering ourselves in make-up? Talking about your (lack of) prowess in bed?

Well, yes. But only as something to kill the time. The main reason women go to the loo in packs is it takes so fecking long that you need someone in the queue to talk to, or alternatively, look after your remains if you die of old age whilst waiting.

In a block of eight cubicals, with a queue of ladies with full bladders, there will be two possibly three cubical doors that open and close regularly, those that have finished their business leaving the cubicle, those that still need to go entering. Two or three out of eight. The remaining five or six doors will remain shut for your entire wait. There is definitely someone in there, you can see their feet, here them moving around, but the door stays closed, no-one comes out.

Baring in mind that with a queue of about 20 women going to just 2 or 3 toilets, you will be in there quite a while, waiting, endlessly waiting, queuing up for 10-20 minutes, you wont ever see any of those other doors open.

What the fuck are they doing in there? What do you need, or indeed want, to do in a public toilet that could possibly take that long? It’s not like you’re going to start reading a book is it, or doing the crossword? It’s hardly a quiet retreat, somewhere you will sit and reflect on the day. It’s a public lav, somewhere that smells, if you are lucky, of industrial cleaner and other women’s perfume, the underlying whiff of other people’s poo detectable in the air. It is, in short, not somewhere you would chose to spend vast stretcges of your day.

So what the fuck is going on in there? If you are one of these women that can take 30 minutes in a public toilet, and there has to be a lot of you because every stinking time you go to a public toilet there are at least 5 cubicles taken up by you people, please, what are you doing? And do you think you could fuck off and do it somewhere else, because some of us really have to go pee!

It is a sexual encounter between strangers, the perfect one night stand where both parties walk away with their head held high having enjoyed the moment but with no need to see or speak to one another again.

A Modern Military Mother, inspired by Mary Mac, wrote about her Zipless F*ck with a young guy she picked up in a bar, and asked me to write about, not a one night stand I had experienced, but whether a zipless f*ck makes a woman a feminist or a floozy. An equal to men or just a slut?

If I were to believe any of my male friends I would be under the impression that they all have a 6″ knob, do nothing but masturbate fiercely when not otherwise engaged with the boring trivialities of life such as working and sleeping, and have all slept with at least 100 women.

100 women? Excuse me whilst I laugh. A lot.

However, let us, for the sake of argument, believe that this is true. 100 women, 1 guy. That’s some good going eh? What a guy. Wow, he must be a hero at the local pub. Other men must come flocking to him for advice, pat him on the back and buy him pints as he regales them with his latest conquest.

Funny how if that was me, a woman, I would be a slut.

100 men, 1 woman. That’s some good going eh? What a woman. Wow, she must be a hero at the local bar. Other women must come flocking for advice on how she gets her man, buy her glasses of dry white whilst she languishes on the leather sofa in the VIP area regaling her friends with hilarious anecdotes from her latest conquest.

Umm, yeah. More likely…

100 men? What a slut. Are her legs ever closed? It must be like throwing a sausage down a hallway. Women probably smirk and turn away from her as she enters the pub, whispering and giggling, dragging her reputation over the coals again and again because she committed the heinous crime of having sex with different people. Which is clearly wrong, nasty, sluttish behaviour…unless of course you’re a guy.

And yet that guy, the one that slept with 100 women, well, I hate to break it to you, but erm…well, there were 100 women involved, allegedly. 100 separate women whom, one must assume if he has managed to get to a number like 100, that he wasn’t having a loving relationship with. 100 women that are all sluts? Or do we prefer to think of the women as having their hearts broken, as actually believing they were involved in a relationship only to be mistreated by a cad of a man, Mr hero?

Is that it? Is that what this all comes down to? This mystifying nonsense about men being one of the boys and women being whores if they indulge in a zipless f*ck, a one night stand? The fact that we want to think of the woman as the weaker sex, the wronged party, the poor broken hearted little thing that needs looking after, needs the love of a man to protect her against the harsh realities of the world where she couldn’t possibly cope alone, unchaperoned, unprotected.

Is that why anyone that breaks that image has to be separated from the rest of the normal* (*for normal re-read the 2nd sentence of the previous paragraph) women, labeled, ridiculed, scorned and shunned? Because society insists, against all evidence to the contrary, that we are not strong capable people who can look after ourselves just fine in the real world, thank you very much, but women. Like men, only less. Is this what it’s all about?

And if so, who is it pushing this myth? Because most men I know couldn’t give a damn how many guys a woman has slept with. But most women could. Does this mean it is women that are perpetuating this slut myth? Women that are determined to make us seen as either weak, lesser beings, or sluts?

And if the zipless f*ck really is a true sign of feminism, as the book Fear Of Flying suggests, then are women the real enemies of feminism?

Lets face it, the reason most of us women feel the need to dress up, look beautiful, slim, young, and therefore suffer from lack of esteem, self belief and pride when we don’t measure up to impossible ideals, isn’t to impress men but actually other women. It is women and not men that wouldn’t put up with having overweight, imperfect models in magazines. Men don’t notice cellulite, new hair cuts or if you’ve had your nails done, nor do they particularly care. Women do. It is women not men that that rip each other apart during battles about breast V’s bottle, SAHM V’s working mum, home school V’s state school, kids V’s career. It is women that are usually the bully that causes the self loathing, depression, withdrawing from society and sometimes extreme measure of suicide. It is women that do all the judging, peering down noses and social sentencing. Women, not men.

The next time a man looks over a women for a job at his company, or decides she should be paid less than a man doing the same job (and yes, this still happens in a huge amount of companies in the country you are living in right now) is it because he’s a chauvinistic pig that truly thinks women are lesser creatures? Or because he has heard his wife/mother/sister/aunts/female friends/daughters, bitching, arguing and infighting so much that he has come to believe the rubbish they are all spouting? Or worse, that all women are like that?

Could it be that women are shaping the views of these men we consider chauvinistic? Is it really only other women holding us back in our quest to be considered equal, and not men at all? And if so does this prove that feminism doesn’t work, that it has gone as far as it can go and got stuck because it just can not beat this self perpetuating cycle of woman bashing women. It can not get inside the loop?

Feminism has failed, it’s over. We can not be equal sexes because other women will not allow it.

And if feminism is dead then, I’m afraid to say, that makes a vast majority of us women, sluts.

______________

A few other bloggers were also asked to write about this, I’ll add their answers below as their posts appear:

A Modern Military Mother – The Fear Of Flying And Dawn French
Very Bored In Catalunya – Feminist Or Floozy
Vegemitevix – A Feminist Floozy
Dad Who Writes – Really, Is The Zipless F*ck Still News?
Mommy Has A Headached – The Zipless F*ck And The Death Of Feminism

__________________

I’m going to ask

Muddling Along Mummy
Gappy
Redneck Mommy
Dad Who Writes

The zipless f*ck, does it a feminist or floozy make and/or is feminism dead?

Want to add you own? Go for it! Let me know and I’ll add it to the list above when it’s done.

‘Look mummy!’ she pointed excitedly to the road works sign, the ubiquitous image of a man struggling to open an umbrella.

‘Do you know what that means?’

‘Yes, there’s a man, and he’s on the road, and he’s digging a hole, and cars…excited babbling of indecipherable words…careful.’

‘That’s right, it means the cars need to drive slowly, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. And the man, digging a hole, in the road, like that hole there mummy.’ She pointed to one of the enormous pot holes in our road. ‘The man digged that hole mummy, and now he is over there, and he’s digging lots of holes’

‘I think maybe he’s fixing the holes, darling.’

‘No mummy, look’ she pointed to the sign again. ‘Look he’s digging holes.’ Can’t argue with that really. ‘He’s digging lots of holes, and then the cars will fall in.’

She looked up at me grinning I tried to work out what she meant. ‘Like a sort of car trap?’

‘Yes!’ she shouted nodding enthusiastically and then started skipping up the road singing ‘car trap, car trap, car trap’.

Clearly not a lover of the automobile.

This is the first time I’ve been able to capture them on film, always assuming that you needed special equipment etc previously.  But after MrsW from Clinically Fed Up‘s kind words about my photos I started reading a bit about cameras, f stops, shutter speeds and such like, and realised that my camera had a manual mode.  So off I trotted last night, mini tripod in hand, into the garden to see what I could achieve.

They’re not great, but they are there, and right now, that’s enough. I’m just hoping the Sun Gods will grant me plenty of time to practise this winter.

Thank you for the encouragement Nikki, it means more than you’ll probably know.

If you want to learn more about the northern lights, what they are, when you can see them in this part of Lapland, then read this post about northern lights in Ruka.

The camera was set on f4.0 and 10″ (15″ for the first shot).  If you have any advice about changes (it’s only a bridge camera not an DSLR) then fire away, I am ready to be baffled

‘And now to announce the winner of the Best MAD Photography Blog is Heather Sunderland’ rang in my ears as I stared at my name on the big screen for what felt like forever.

Seriously? Me? Oh Shit. I may or may not have said that bit out loud.

I walked, or should that be be staggered, to the lecturn and took the microphone. I think I might have sworn at the lovely Kelly from ParentDish who was compéring the night. She looked a little shocked. Not as shocked as I felt, this was the first I’d heard of giving away a prize.

I was not expecting this. Everyone else had had notes, erudite speaches, they’d been funny, entertaining, witty. I opened my mouth and the immortal words, pulitzer standard that every speach given hence forth will have the onerous task of living up to, fell out of my drunken mouth.

‘So, everyone likes photographs, don’t they?’

Yes Heather, genius.

Sigh.

Of course I then went on to stumble rather drunkenly over the words ‘Best MAD Photography Blog’ and all of the nominees names, making a general drunken tit of myself, but I guess you’d expect nothing less. Deb from Carrots & Kids won.  I called her name, handed over the microphone and did a runner leaving her to give a much clearer and less pissed speech than mine.

I sat down with a final feeling of ‘oh well, I guess that means I haven’t won then’. Plenty of people seemed to be under the impression that I had obviously won because they had flown me to the awards, but I didn’t see it that way at all. I knew that wasn’t quite the truth, that Sally had a fund for the disavantaged that couldn’t afford the travel that she stored from the sale of tickets to PR companies and so I knew she hadn’t been desperate to fly me out, she’d just sold enough tickets to cover the airfare and had no-one else biting her hand off for the money.

I also thought that the flight was kind of my comiseration prize for not winning and now was sure that the being asked to stand up and announce a winner for the Best MAD Photography Blog was my 30 seconds in the lime light and that either Karin or Yuri had won our category, most innovative MAD Blog.

So you can imagine my shock when Vix from Vegemitevix stood up to announce the winner and, after a lovely speach, she opened the envelope, read the winner, giggled to herself and then said MY name!

Oh. My. God.

Great double, tripple bluff, Sally, I honestly had no idea.

Thank you all, everyone that nominated me in the first place and everyone that voted for me in the finals, obviously this wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for you, clearly crazy but wonderful nonetheless, people.

Thank you to everyone that I met on Monday for being so lovely, for there being just nice people there, no bitching, nastiness or backstabbing. You were a great bunch of people that I feel proud to call my friends and I would love to meet up with you all again in the future.

A special thanks to Sally Whittle for organising an amazing event. To Butlins for putting the shindig on for us – I had no idea that Butlins could be such a lovely place. To Plum Baby for being the wonderful sponsors, and lovely people, that bought the tickets enabling me to be there.

And of course to BitDefender for the fabulous prize of

A Sony Vaio Laptop
A Sony Digital Camera
HP Printer & Scanner
An Ipod and Docking Station
An External Hard Drive
Photoshop Elements
BitDefender Security Software

It’s still sinking in to be honest.

I’ll admit there have been times, due to nastiness and petty fighting that I have not wanted to be a part of the parent blogging scene – but right now that couldn’t be less true. You are wonderful people and I’m proud to be a part of your community.

Thank you.

**If anyone has a video of either of my amazing speeches (sorry Hannah but yours was on it’s side and I couldn’t figure out how to make it the right way up) please let me know. I’d love to share them with everyone.

***I will, in true Heather style, also put together a slideshow of pictures of me making an arse of myself for you all, too, in the near future.  There’s enough of them about.  Weirdly most of the also seem to feature Muddling Along Mummy.

Right now, this means I hate myself. And it’s true, I do a bit. I am ashamed of myself.

I am in Latvia at Riga airport waiting for my connecting flight to London. Before I left I asked the Lover, ‘do they use the Euro in Latvia?’

Ho scoffed and laughed at me. ‘Of course they do, they are in Europe now. Don’t you know your geography?’ It’s a long running joke between us, the appalling lack of geography most of us Brits leave school with, being taught more about oxbow bleeding lakes that where countries are on the map or anything about them.

However, browsing through the book shop I wasn’t sure. There weren’t any € markings on the price tags. No marking at all in fact, just numbers. Numbers that look suspiciously low to be Euros.

I wanted to ask, the girl at the counter looked nice, but I also didn’t want to be one of those tourists, the ones that don’t know things like that. The ignorant and the insular. So I hung around the counter, studying the magnets on the counter as another customer came to pay. Feel all cunning I glanced up as he opened his walet, hoping to catch sight of what currency he was using. He pulled out a credit card! Fuck. The rest of the shop was empty.

In the end I paid using my visa.

At another shop, picking up a travel adapter for the UK (and I can’t even begin to explain how weird it feels needing one of those and how foreign and clumsy the big fat 3 pin plug seems) the lady told me the price in English but used the word for the currency here. I didn’t catch it. I asked her to repeat herself, she said it again. I swear it sounded like Blats. Although I find it hard to believe there is really a currency called a Blat.

Thinking this over as I trawled around the airport, browsing and poking at stuff in the shops, I also realised I don’t know the language they speak here. I assumed it was called Latvian but possibly it isn’t. Latvia was part of Russia until 90 something, so perhaps the language is Russian?

I’m coming back in November to spend 3 or 4 days here in Riga. I really must learn more about the country before I come. Mostly so I can feel smug and superior again in the face of idiot tourists.

I could be anyone, going anywhere. An international woman of mystery.

That military helicopter on the runway flanked by a guard of four could be waiting for me, to whisk me off to a secret war room to broker deals of peace between warring nations and save the world from certain obliteration.

That fleet of shiny black cars waiting by the gate, the bodyguards wearing shades even though it’s not sunny, they could be waiting for me.

I could be a powerful business woman jetting from country to country putting together business deals and plotting world domination, one of the rich and famous, escaping the paparazzi of my own country for a break of anonymity. I could be royalty traveling incognito or on the run, escaping with a countries secrets or with a billion euros worth or diamonds stuffed in my bra. I could be anyone, escaping from or to anywhere.

Not a soul knows me, I am a stranger, a nobody and yet, I could be anybody. I am free. Free of preconceived notions, gossip or prying eyes. Free from labels and assumptions, free to go anywhere and do anything. I could disappear, leave the airport and go native in Latvia. I could cross borders, become impossible to track and live out the rest of my existence on a tropical island making shell jewelry to sell to tourists.

Alone in an airport, the world is my oyster.

If you don’t hear from me again, think of me occasionally, sitting beneath a palm tree, stringing shells together, the sound of the crashing surf in the background and perhaps the odd well muscled young man stopping by to fan me with palm leaves and peel me some grapes.

What? A girl can dream can’t she?

‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ my hubby asked. The tone of his voice as incredulous as the look on his face.

I leapt to my feet, guilty, brochures sliding to the floor, feeling as though I’d been caught doing something wrong, and hurried to the phone. The face of someone I really didn’t want to talk to flashed on the display. I groaned and stood looking at the phone as it vibrated and danced its way across the bookshelf. I really didn’t want to pick it up.

‘Well answer it then.’ Hubby piped up, my lack of speed at answering clearly bothering him.

I almost did, I picked it up and held it in my hand, my finger hovering over the green button but at the last moment I hit the silence button instead and put it back on the shelf. I could feel my spine growing back. Why the hell should I feel obliged to answer the phone if I don’t want to? To speak to someone I don’t like just because they had picked up their phone and dialed? When did we become slaves to little pieces of plastic? Since when did someone wanting to talk to you mean you had to leap to attention and allow them into your lives anytime they felt like it regardless of whether you wanted to talk them or not?

Needless to say, the husband was horrified. He couldn’t believe I would be so rude. But then he’s frequently annoyed by my telephone antics. Some days I refuse to even turn my phone on which frustrates him no end, he hates the inability to get in touch at the drop of a hat, or indeed, the press of a button.  He wants to know he can reach me if he needs to, or just if he feels like it. But I don’t, not always. I want to be uncontactable sometimes, to know I’m not going to be distracted by my phone ringing and bleeping, disturbing my peace. To know that the outside world is not going to come barging into my day like an uninvited guest.

But here in Finland, like a closed door not being a barrier for people, it seems to be thought that the phone shouldn’t be either. For some unfathomable reason, the person calling you on the phone takes precedence over the person standing in front of you. I have sat, pre meeting my hubby, on a date with a Finnish guy that spent 15 minutes talking on his mobile across the table from me. Needless to say I didn’t hang around long and I left him there, still chatting on his phone. A few days later I was admonished by a mutual friend for being so rude. You can imagine my side of the conversation.

But it’s not just social situations where the phone ringing is seen as an urgent call to action. I was on a business premises trying to find out some information a couple of days ago. I was half way through explaining what I needed to know when the phone started to ring. The lady at desk held up her hand to me, cutting me off mid sentence, and picked up the phone. I stood wide eyed staring at her, as she chatted to the person on the other end, looking something up on her computer, putting them on hold whilst she went to get some paperwork and then relayed the information to the person on the line.

Had I been able to get this information anywhere else I would have left. Quite possibly holding my middle finger up to her as I did. And I would have been seen as the rude one.

____________

I’m joining in with a new blog hop thingy I just found over at Random Ramblings Of A Stay At Home Mum – cause I’m a joiner like that. you can play along too, just add yourslef to the linky below and then go and read some of the others.   Read all about it here.

How could I not?

Ahh, Finland, how I adore thee.

And then I read this.

A Finnish court was on Tuesday due to hear a sexual molestation case against a doctor who says he sucked a patient’s nipple to diagnose a medical problem in accordance with an old midwives’ trick.

The 20-year-old woman went to the doctor in 2007 for an ultrasound breast exam and told the doctor some fluid had seeped from the nipple.

After obtaining her permission, he used his mouth to suck her nipple in order to taste the fluid, the doctor testified in court earlier.

Read full article

I mean seriously, can you imagine the conversation?

So Miss X, do you mind if I just suck on your nipples a moment?  All in the name of medical research you understand, I just want to taste them.’

‘Oh, okay doctor, why not?’

And so off we go this morning to the doctors…  Half of me hopes they do offer to suck something just so I have something interesting to report back.

Then I scurried away and tried to think of something witty to tell you all about myself and figure out how I was going to take a pictures of myself that made me look both gorgeous and interesting.

And then I realised that the best way to introduce myself to you all was through this video.  It tells you just about all you need to know, I think.

Name: Heather, but does answer to ‘Oi, you’ and ‘Does anyone want a drink?’

Blog: Well, duh.

Twitter: notefromlapland – and I can’t even begin to describe how pissed off I am that I couldn’t fit the ‘s’ in there.

Best way of introducing yourself: ‘Hi Heather, here’s a large white wine.’

‘Erm, how’s Jukka.’ I’m not really sure what he expects me to say.

‘He’s just been telling me we are getting a rabbit.’ He holds my gaze

I stare at him, confused for a few seconds and then it hits me. ‘Oh yeah, the toy rabbit Tiina wants to give to the kids.’ I say laughing now I know what he’s talking about.

He says nothing, just looks at me.

‘What?’

He raises one eyebrow.

‘What? It’s a toy rabbit. It’s not like it’s a… Oh God, it’s not, is it?

Both his eye brows have shot up now and he’s giving me a look of ‘how stupid are you?’

‘Please tell me I didn’t.  I haven’t, have I?  No.  It’s not a real rabbit?’  I say laughing, half sure he’s teasing me.  ’It’s not, is it?’   Panic starts to creep into my voice.

He just shakes his head in amazement at me.

‘Oh God, no! A real rabbit?’

He nods.

‘What the hell am I going to do with a real rabbit?  They poo on the floor, they chew electric cables.’  My mind floods with images of the chaos that will ensue if we add a rabbit to our already over filled house.

‘They’ll be bringing it later this week’

‘A real rabbit?  Oh god, we can’t have a real rabbit.  The kids’ll tease it, the dog’ll chase the cat’ll stalk it.  It’ll be a nightmare!’  I rub my eyes with the heel of my hands, my brain frozen in shock.  ’I didn’t really say we’d take a real rabbit, did I?  I thought she meant a toy one.’

Why would she have a toy rabbit, her kids are teenagers?’

‘Well…I don’t know, it just, it made sense at the time.’

I think back to the hurried exchange on Facebook.  I was busy when a message poped up saying someone had written something on my Facebook wall.  I read the post quickly, it was in Finnish.  I got the gist, something about her wanting to give their children’s rabbit to my kids, but didn’t understand everything, I just assumed she meant a stuffed rabbit.  There were some words I didn’t get, wasn’t sure about, but my pride brushed those aside.

Even if no-one cares that I don’t understand the language properly and they wouldn’t think any less of me if I asked for clarification, sometimes I care.  Sometimes I want to put on a show of being able to speak the language, understand the written the word.  It helps me feel like I’m fitting in better, like I’m less of an outsider, less of a failure at this whole assimilating myself in a foreign country thing. And sometimes I want other people to think that I do too.  Sometimes I’m just too God damned proud.

And you know what they say.  Pride cometh before a fall, or in this case, a rabbit.   Sigh.   So, it looks like we are getting a rabbit.

Know any good recipes?

Sadly there was nothing nearly as funky as this.

So yeah, Finland, it’s a great place.  You should come some time. Ahem.

Thank you@ 52Betty for posting this on Twitter. I very nearly wet my pants laughing.

Astounded and thrilled but also a bit sad.  Sad because I knew there was no way I was ever going to be able to go the awards ceremony, I just couldn’t afford the airfare.  Sad because I knew I would be at home, reading about everyone else having a blast on Twitter whilst I sat in my pj’s at home trying to pretend it didn’t matter.  Sad and feeling a bit sorry for myself about the whole thing, if I’m honest.

But then I got some fabulous news!  Thanks to the fabulous people at Plum Baby and the rather wonderful Ms Sally Whittle, I get to go to the UK’s first parenting blog awards, The MADS!

Oh. My. God!!

I’m going to get to meet some of the most wonderful bloggers

Vegemitevix

Muddling Along

MrsW

Sally Whittle

Josie

UrbanVox

PippaD

Cafebebe

And a million more I haven’t mentioned and will probably get poked in the eye for leaving off the list. Whoops. I’ll have to practise my eye poking aversion technique before the night!

I will get to stay in the new Butlins at Bognor which looks rather snazzy on their website and not at all like the Butlins of old as I remember it.  And I’m totally having a go on those slides!

I will get to see who, out of Cafebebe, UrbanVox and myself, wins the fabulous prize for Most Innovative Blogger

Most Innovative MAD Blog

The Most Innovative MAD Blog award recognises the blog that best encapsulates the spirit of innovation in blogging, whether it’s using video or podcasting or creating amazing content for readers to download.

The winner of this award already knows how to use technology to create really special online content. So we can’t wait to see what they can do with £1,000 of technology. This amazing prize package will include a Sony Vaio laptop computer, a Sony digital camera, HP printer and scanner, an iPod with docking station, an external hard drive, a copy of Photoshop Elements and – of course – the latest security software from BitDefender, which has recently been named “Best for Beginners” by Which? magazine.

Website BitDefender

And cheer them on whilst secretly hating them a little bit for beating me.

And I’ll get to have a great night out, get rather drunk and make a tit out of myself on twitter and other social media platforms before falling over, puking in a pot plant and dropping asleep in a corner of the room.

I can’t wait!

So now all I need is a posh frock and a funky new smart phone for keeping you all upto date with the latest embarrassing thing I’ve just done.

Who else is coming?

Thank you once again to the lovely people at Plum Baby, I really appreciate your support and am looking forward to seeing you at The MAD Blog Awards.  I’m sure I owe you a drink or three.

Not because Nutella is the devils food or you should never give it your kids, but because there has been a lot of misinformation about Nutella given to parenting bloggers who have then, understandably, passed it on in their blog posts and I think as adult and parents we ought to be able to see the facts and make the decision based on them and not propaganda.

3. She also told us that one portion of Nutella is 2 teaspoons (which seems a lot to me!) but has less fat and sugar than jam like for like.

First of all, there’s no comparing like for like between the two. The sugars in jam are mostly natural fruit sugars. And there is no fat in jam. But, just for comparisons sake let’s take the scenario of a slice of toast with margarine and jam on it. I don’t know about you, but when we buy jam instead of make it, I always get the “twice the fruit” kind as it has less sugar and is tastier. It also (depending on brand) has no added colouring or preservatives. One of our favourites is a store brand here in Canada. A 1 TBSP serving contains 5 grams of sugar. A lot less than the 11 grams in a serving of Nutella. If you bought the worst jam on the shelves you would probably find it contains about 10-12 grams of sugar. So, even the worst jam is only equivalent to Nutella, not worse. And, lets remember, the sugars in the jam are mostly natural fruit sugars not processed and added white sugar. There is a difference.

Go on over to Readily A Parent and have a read of the whole post. It is very interesting stuff.

Whilst I hear about people’s summer holidays on the Costa Del Chav in overbuilt resorts full of Irish bars and fish and chip shops, where learning the local language means brushing up on your cocky slang, I sit here in a tranquil paradise just a 3 hour flight from the UK with hardly another human around.

It’s mind boggling.

Whilst they worry about drinking the tap water and not letting their children more than a meter away from them in case they get lost in the crowds, I sit here writing this with notepad and pen on one of the natural beaches on the lake shore whilst my children splash about in water so pure you can drink it, with not another soul in sight.

How can this be? How can somewhere so amazing be so empty?

Do you all have mental issues? Have you all become addicted to the traffic fumes and chemicals they pump into your drinking water? Do you actually enjoy sitting in the little portioned off section of beach inside your windbreakers, an office cube environment on your holidays? Or do you long to break free? To escape to the wild, open spaces, to breath in clean air and let your body and mind detox from the grime and grind of life in the city?

I know I used to.

Looking back at how my life has changed, from living in the UK to living here in Finland, I’m amazed at how life used to be. There was a time when organic food was something you paid a fortune for at the shops rather than grew yourself. When you had to triple lock and deadbolt your front door, and that was when you were home. When berries and mushrooms had to be paid for rather than picked for free in the forests. Christ, I remember drinking bottled water – something so laughable these days – thinking clean air was a luxury you had to travel to find, and that a manly man was one that liked cars and going to the gym rather than came home with the days catch slung over his shoulder and then went out to chop wood.

This summer, without travelling more than 30 minutes from my house, I’ve been bear watching in a hide near the Russian border, hiking in a national park so clean and untouched that several species of rare and endangered plants grow there and animals like bear, reindeer, moose call it home. I’ve caught perch in the lake at the bottom of my garden, been white water rafting, sat around a campfire in the wilderness with friends cooking sausages, had to stop my car to let herds of reindeer cross the road and been skinny dipping in the lake at 3am under the bright midnight sun.

A hell of a lot better than anything Costa Del Chav has to offer.

Why would you chose to be in a crowded, dirty city when you could be here? Why would you choose an over crowded beach, listening to Daz and Shaz argue over whose turn it is to go the chippy whilst some idiot plays shity music too loud and kids run past kicking sand in your face, when you could be spending your summer holidays in Kuusamo?

It’s winter coming up and let me guess, those of you that are planning a skiing holiday, you’re going to the Alps, right? You are going to sit for 3 hours on a flight and then another 3 on a bus, after fighting your way through Geneva airport.  Then you are going to spend a week paying through the nose for poor food and gassy beer in a busy, dirty ski resort.  You are going to be spending 30 minutes and more waiting for each ski lift, fighting the crowds at the mountain restaurants and constantly stopping to let those trains of children zig zag down the mountain in front of you all the while trying to kid yourself that you are out enjoying nature, in the peace and quiet, having a restorative break from it all.

If you’ve already spent the money and booked it, I wont tell you about the beautiful, wide and empty slopes of Ruka, the non existent queues for ski lifts, fresh local produce they use in the restaurants and the friendly helpful staff.  Nor about the children’s adventure ski slope with real reindeer on it and  all the things like visiting the real Santa, going on reindeer sleigh rides, husky sledding, snowmobiling across frozen lakes and snowshoe trekking through the national park, that you can do.

And I definitely won’t tell you that I’ve just seen that Inghams are selling package holidays to Ruka for about £265 pp, it’s only a 3 hour flight and then a 30 minute drive from the airport.

Seriously, are you all addicted to the crowds, pollution and noise?  Why haven’t you come to Finland yet?

Find out more about Ruka and Kuusamo here and come out to visit. You wont believe how amazing it is until you’ve experience it for yourself.

your desire to please is admirable, your wanting to give me my hearts desire, is sweet.  But I could have done without spending a whole day looking at gorgeous new log houses to build on our farm, deciding on room layouts and choosing styles.  Building up my dreams of having a fabulous new home where everything works, the windows aren’t cracked, the pipes aren’t about to burst any moment, the dodgy wiring doesn’t keep blowing light bulbs to the point where I’ve just stopped bothered buying new ones and we will be spending this winter in the dark, that all looks out over the lake (something which our current home, although we are right on the edge of said lake, doesn’t do for some inexplicable reason) and everything is shiny and new (really new, not your 20 years old is still new Finnish way of thinking) only for you to come home and tell me that we can’t afford it anyway.

Really, just for future reference, that little snippet of information would have been better delivered before I wasted an entire day looking at houses and ordering brochures.

Sigh.

Signed, your ever loving and not too desperately depressed (nothing a new kitchen wouldn’t fix, anyway) lover,

H xx

* I’ve not taken a new lover that wooed me with the promise of a new house, but after the comments on this post about us not being married have decided to call him my lover instead of husband.  It has a much better ring to it somehow and always makes me smile.

‘Mummy, juice mummy, I want a juice mummy.’

‘ungh’

‘Cartoons mummy, the cartoons mummy, want cartoons mummy.’

‘ungh.’

I carried on, my trajectory clear. The kettle. No-one was getting anything until I’d had my cup of tea. I flicked the kitchen lights on and filled the kettle. I set it on its base and flicked the switch, the pleasing sizzle of water warming, soon coming from it.

‘Mummy, juice mummy.

‘Umm. Minute.’ I managed, watching the kettle. Cup in hand.

Flick. It went dark. The kettle stopped sizzling, the lights went out.

‘Wha? No!’ I flicked the light switch feebly. Nothing. ‘Noo!!’  A power cut. Great.

I need a cup of tea in the morning. I cant manage the demands of these little dictators without having first scolded my mouth whilst curled up on the sofa for 5 minutes of quiet before the day starts.

10 minutes later, sulking at the kitchen table, sans tea, the lights came on again. A steady flick, flick, flick echoed around the house as various appliances turned themselves on, the kettle one of them, and I could hear the sizzle start again in the kitchen. I breathed a deep sigh and relaxed. All was right with the world once more.

And then ‘flick.’ Off it went again.

The next 30 minutes were filled with peaks and troughs of my hopes building and then being dashed again as the lights came on and the water warmed a little more, and then everything went off. I was getting close to breaking point. I was starting to twitch. I was actually considering having a warm cup of tea with the not nearly boiling water in the kettle.

‘Right, bugger this.’ I did what any sane person would do after being kept waiting for over 40 minutes for their first cup of tea of the morning.

I got the camping stove out.