You Know You're Over Him When...

• You realise the special song you used to share is actually crap
• You've used his old letters to line the cat litter tray
• You no longer brood, darkly. The most you can summon, should you think of him at all, is a dismissive "twat"
• You've deleted his name from your phone
• You've deleted his emails
• You've deleted all his pictures
• Where you had his name tattooed as a gesture of love you have now added "is a twat"
• You can't think of his sex face without laughing
• You've cut your hair short
• You've grown your pubes long
• You haven't checked your phone for messages all day
• The thought of not seeing him again fills you with relief
• You consider telling him what a colossal twat he is but really can't be arsed
• You so want him to find happiness elsewhere you buy him an online dating membership
• You have difficulty recalling his face
• You have trouble remembering his name

Have I missed anything?

All Day Confidence and a Complimentary Wet Wipe

Since no fucker's been astute enough to offer me a publishing deal I have been forced to find other avenues to exploit my online presence. Having studied the market and rejecting several, frankly stupid, ideas I have decided to launch my own range of feminine hygiene products.

The Luka Garden Gusset range is no average jam rag I can tell you. Most fanny mats end up going into landfill and contain nasty bleaching chemicals and plastic to boot.

My environmentally friendly versions are made from recycled cotton nighties filled with super-absorbent compost and scented with real lavender. Menstrual blood contains many nutrients and minerals which make wonderful fertiliser, so instead of going into the bin these little beauties can be recycled as growbags for your tomatoes. Or wardrobe fresheners, if you don't mind running them under the tap for a bit first.

You can wear one with absolute confidence whether you're rollerblading in your white trousers or sitting on the sofa eating chocolate Hobnobs in a curry stained t-shirt and grey knickers. They won't let you down. Well, they might. But you can relax in the knowledge that you are protecting the planet whilst protecting your soft furnishings.

Luka Garden Gusset Towels come in a range of sizes to suit every woman. Choose from Light Flow, Steady Stream, Raging River or Torrent.

Order now and I'll chuck in a FREE wet wipe to smear things about a bit give you all day freshness.



But don't just take my word for it - here's a completely genuine review from a satisfied customer:

"Usually when I'm on the blob I just sit around the house feeling fat and spotty, crying and eating crisps. Then I tried a Luka Garden Gusset towel and it changed my life. I experienced the kind of freedom that only those who have a small tomato plant germinating in their underwear can fully appreciate. No more daytime telly and a hot water bottle for me when I'm up on blocks - now I play tennis, go to important meetings, snorkel and shave my armpits. Thank you Luka for the gift of Garden Gusset!"

Fowl Play

It is the same old story.

Girl meets interesting new blog.

Girl reads blog daily and enjoys it.

Blogger gets publishing deal and turns into a chicken.

"Book book book book book book book." Strut. Crow. "Book! Book book."

It is intensely irritating. The kind of posts which attracted readers in the first the place are now only to be found in the archives, entirely replaced by self promotion and shameless hawking for trade. Fuck right off, I say. I'm not giving some online tosser £12.99 to read their recycled dross when they can't even give me the time of day because they're too busy schmoozing the "A-list" bloggers who also have publishing deals. (Mind you, that said, I don't even give my favourite established authors my hard-earned £12.99, being a massive fan of the public library and second hand book shop. Still, it's fun to be offensive, so fuck off, blog book authors I say, again.)

Maybe it's just me though. Tell me, have you ever purchased a blogger book?

Salute to the Sun

It's been a demanding few weeks, hence my lack of online presence.

I can't share all my dramas and woes as that would reveal far too much about Who I Really Am, and that would never do. Suffice it to say that a couple of events have had me doubting my judgement and calling myself several kinds of fool. It's enough to make a woman tense and irritable.

Wine has helped, of course. I have eaten too many crisps though and an unfeasibly large amount of chocolate. These are the oral pleasures I habitually turn to when in need of comfort, and I really shouldn't since comfort is so readily available from many other, less lardy, sources.

Exploring these alternative avenues led me to my first ever yoga session earlier today. Bearing in mind I am a complete beginner, I can look back at my attempts to contort my body into new and interesting positions and say, with some pride, that I am absolutely terrible at yoga. I spent a great deal of time giggling uncontrollably though, which I am sure does a body just as much good as being able to get your big toe up your own ringpiece.

Tomorrow I shall try modern dance.

T(wittering) On

Sometimes it can be useful to update a group of people at once on something important, useful or entertaining. I can see how the ability to send an informative text or short online message to the world at large could be worthwhile.

I can even see the psychological benefits of always having someone to share your news with, to celebrate or commiserate accordingly.

Yet when I go to my Twitter page I am bombarded, swamped with the minutiae of other people's lives.

The level of information deemed worthy of transmitting to the planet at large is staggering in the depth and breadth of its tedium. Tweets about breakfast, tweets about the weather, tweets about other tweets. This is the kind of excessive detail I would find arse-numbingly dull from my nearest and dearest and I actually give a fuck about what they're up to. If my daughter, husband, best friend or mother phoned me up every five minutes to tell me "I'm having my first coffee of the day", "I fancy some toast" or ""I might buy some trousers" I would have to have them sedated. It's just not normal.

Who are these incessant babblers of crap and why do they spend so much time on Twitter? It's not that they don't have anything else to be getting on with, surely? Many of them appear to have jobs. Jobs which involve sending out a message on their caffeine intake, what they fancy for tea tonight and how incredibly stressed and busy they are at work today every three minutes. Which is odd because when I am at work I simply don't have the time for this sort of obsessive compulsive behaviour, even if I did happen to have the inclination.

There are one or two Tweets of Interest. Links I would have missed if someone else hadn't flagged them up. The occasional snippet of genuine interest. Most of it, however, is the kind of stuff you'd only pretend to be interested in if you were humouring someone (eg. the nodding and "uh-hum"ing one does when engaged in a one sided telephone conversation with an elderly relative) or hoping for a shag (eg. the nodding and "uh-hum"ing one does when stood at a bar with a talkative drunk who, though boring, has big tits and may well be up for it).

Why do I still bother with it then, if I hate it so much? Fuck knows. Much like blogging I just seem to wander in now and then, hurl a bit of abuse and stagger out again. I shake my fist at the television too.

Hot Naked Icon Action

Look at those little piggies. Not even a lick of nail polish to hide their brazen nudity. It's positively indecent. I shall take them away and cover them up with leather, buckles and studs immediately.

Next week: Luka exposes a burly forearm.

Plagiarism

Ealier today I received an email from a very nice anti-plagiarism crusader informing me that some of my posts were being cut and pasted onto some dreadful godforsaken blog on the find-a-social-incompetent-and-shag-them site Adult FriendFinder. Apparently someone calling themselves FoxyNE was busy pillaging sex blog sites far and wide and posting their contents as her own.

I was somewhat surprised to learn my words had been looted too, as, to be frank, I would have thought that you'd want to post something sexually stimulating or alluring on AFF. I mostly babble crap and stagger around being offensive. It's a bit of a poor do if you haven't the wit to think of saying "sex bloggers are silly" or "you're a twat" for yourself.

So, off I went to check out the offending post for myself but, of course, I wasn't able to view it unless I became a member. So I did just that. Pulsating with righteous indignation I became a huge, throbbing member, thrusting into the dank ringpiece of the internet that is AFF blogs.

Once signed up I immediately tracked down the post in question and composed a friendly little heads-up comment, thusly:

"Foxy, you are a terrible and unrepentant plagiarist. You have stolen this almost verbatim from the post Great Expectations on the most excellent blog Barbed Wire Boudoir. I am reliably informed that this is not the first time you have done so, nor is this the only blog you have ransacked for material to pad out your own pathetic attempts to string an original sentence together.

Rest assured this will be flagged up to you, your handful of readers and the site admins at AFF each and every time you show yourself up in this tawdry manner. Try a little self respect for heaven’s sake, possibly try an evening class or two on writing. Maybe get a life so you can write about your own instead of leeching from your betters, you sad, sorry individual."

I hit send and saw that my comment was awaiting blog owner approval. I did not hold my breath. However, a short while later the entire post was deleted, so score one to Kick Arse Luka. There are still a plethora of plagiarised posts which have not been deleted however, and much as I may lampoon sex bloggers I do not like to see them being ripped off. They spend a lot of time and effort thinking up new ways of saying "he put his willy in me and it did feel good and I did squirt my love jam up his curtains" and for someone else to take that hard work, format it in lurid pink, cover it in nausea inducing glittery icons, put it on a sex site and wait for the accolades from "SuperDong of Dorking" to then trickle in is just galling in the extreme.

Readers and fellow bloggers alike I implore you, whenever you encounter plagiarism of this sort do flag it up and do please join me in being a total pain in the rump for such ripoff merchants. Together we can't actually stamp this practice out at all, but we can make the occasional plagiaristic fantasist stop for a moment, readjust their wig and their wife's knickers as they type in the darkened living room, curtains drawn against prying eyes, and think "fuck, I've been rumbled."

It is a lost cause, but a fun one to play.