New Year, Same Me, but Slightly Improved (ish)

Happy New Year!

Today is my first day back at work after a 2 week holiday, a 2 week Christmas break that saw me rediscover the delights and joys of all the foods I’ve spent the last year avoiding.  What is it about Christmas that suddenly makes us think, “Lets eat as much food as we can until we feel sick?” After all it’s really just one day and it’s really just a Sunday dinner with a few more vegetables. Yet for some reason we get the urge to eat peanuts by the bucket load and a whole tin of chocolates before we’ve even brushed our hair (just me?)

  Our Christmases are slightly different now; after Mum died we decided that we didn’t want to spend Christmas at home. None of us could stand the thought of sitting round the dinner table with an empty seat and then watching the Christmas episode of “Eastenders”, where someone would get dumped, killed, have their house burnt down or something equally cheerful, all accompanied by shouts of “get out of my pub” We decided to get as far away as possible, so off we went to Cancun.

  We’d never spent or even contemplated Christmas in the sun, so we didn’t know what to expect. As it turns out we had an amazing time and it was the best thing we could have done and as a result we’ve done it the last 4 Christmases. Weirdly there's a group of people in the hotel, who just like us go every year. After 4 years we still don't really know anyone's names, but we smile and say hello and this year we actually took bets on when the others would arrive! These are our favourites;

• Boss Hog and Nigella - They're from Texas (we think) and they strut around as if they own the place, from the moment they arrive they dominate the staff, push in at the bar and generally strut around. To quote my Gran he walks in a fashion that suggests "here's my head, my arse is coming" and she looks a bit like an older Nigella Lawson and has a sun hat to match every swimsuit.
• Mr & Mrs Essex  - A lovely couple from Essex who have a son called Scott, who makes a guest appearance at some point during the holiday.
• Padre and Mrs Padre - We're not sure if this is his actual name or a nickname that he's universally known by, he may actually be a padre. He NEVER shuts up! And as a result his wife can be seen face down on a sun-bed with her headphones on letting him talk to other people. I think she probably has enough of him wittering on throughout the year. At approximately 3.50pm everyday, Padre tries to make everyone in the hotel gather for water volleyball. So far he's never managed to convince us, our excuses have ranged from "I'm recovering from wrist surgery" (me) to "maybe tomorrow" (Lucy) to "no" (Dad)

Yet this collection of weird and wonderful people are our Christmas companions and although I think we occasionally get a pang that our family Christmases are no longer the same, particularly when you see pictures of pressies under the tree ready for the children to open, but in our Pollyanna state of minds, the sunshine, cocktails and hot stone massage we had on Christmas day, soon helps us feel better. We just have a new normal now.

Merry Christmas from the Trinders!

  It’s this 2-week holiday that has led me to have “scales fear” next Tuesday. I think wherever you’ve spent Christmas, you probably started off with good intentions and then before you know it your paper hat is askew, you’re knee deep in Cadbury’s Heroes wrappers and developed a love of figs, which you must eat by the pound in any one sitting, despite not eating them at any other point in the year! 

  I too started off my holiday with good intentions, picking fruit and yogurt for breakfast and then a seafood salad at lunchtime. By the time a few cocktails had been consumed, I was saying stuff like “one desert wont hurt and then no more till Christmas Eve” This lasted all of a couple of days and before I knew it, rather than fruit I was having pain au chocolate and my salads were becoming laced with coleslaw and cheese and then I was just picking whatever I fancied off the menu as opposed to the healthiest option. The menus even had these little green apple symbols by the healthy options, so there was no excuse really. I started swimming everyday too, but then I got fed up of dodging the heavy petting couples in the pool, so eventually I just swam to the bar, rather than risk getting caught up in an inappropriate situation!

Me trying escargot, which really just taste of chewy nothingness

Hotel surf & turf burger, which are amazing!

  Since getting back I have avoided the scales and am dreading my first weigh in of 2014, but I guess if you do the crime, you should be prepared to do the time!

  I have however had a word with myself and today it’s back to normal and my normal is actually a healthy way of eating. I want to continue with my Slinky mission more than I want to eat chocolate (yes you did read that correctly!) So yesterday I organised myself, made sure I had plenty of fruit, salad and vegetables in the house, de-junked my fridge of the naughty New Year’s Eve buffet and prepared a healthy stew for tonight’s tea. I also met my friend Debbie for a game of badminton, which even after a break of 3 weeks we managed to not play too badly! So I’m hoping by the time next Tuesday comes I’ve undone some of the damage.

 Wish me luck and I hope 2014 is all you want it to be and a lot more besides!

Lucy and me, one of my favourite pics from the holiday

Fun Suckers!

I put a pound on this week, so I’m not overly happy with myself. I think in a weird way I’m sort of maintaining my weight, so I’ve decided that I’m going to try cutting my points a little bit this week, just by 2 a day and see if I can boost my weight loss a little. Still the good news is, I know that when I do reach goal, I’m capable of maintaining, so every cloud and all that!

  One of the things I’ve always been good at (well despite what I’m referring to as my “purple and green years”) is looking for the positive in a situation and making the most of things. This morning, I dropped my toast on the floor and it landed butter side up and I thought "Yes, today is going to be great" and then I got in the car and this song was on the radio.

Then I found an earring I lost a week ago. These things however small made me happy!

I read an article the other day, it was in a newspaper by a proper journalist and the premise of the article was that he hated people who counted “sleeps till Santa’, because as an adult you shouldn’t do that you should be above that…blah…misery…blah…no joy…blah get over yourself! The irony of this was that it had been retweeted by someone who is a bona fida “Fun Sucker” This person mocked and scoffed at everything from people singing “Happy Birthday” to those that clapped along to the “Strictly Come Dancing” theme tune.

  Don’t get me wrong, we all have things we find annoying. For me I’m not a fan of Joey Essex and I don’t particularly like it when people put “LOL” on the end of everything, when clearly it’s not a laugh out loud situation. I used to work with a bloke who’d send e-mails, which would go something like…

“You forgot to send me a competition question......LOL”

And I’d think did that REALLY make you laugh out loud, because if it did, I’m funnier than I realised, I should take up stand up comedy. Move over Peter Kay, get out my sight Micky Flanagan, I have the ability to reduce people to fits of laughter by forgetting to e-mail them!

  My point is, these things slightly annoy me, but I don’t waste time letting the hatred of them consume me, cutting from my life those that think the fact Joey Essex can’t tell the time is amusing and write LOL after they put that fact on Facebook. I think get on with it, it makes you happy!

  There are lots of things in life designed to make us miserable and being an adult is tough, in fact if we realised how tough, we’d probably all develop “Peter Pan” syndrome and not bother growing up. I spent a lot of years letting my grief and depression take a hold of me. I let my fear of my stalker coming back blight everything. I was so unconfident that I wouldn’t even walk into a restaurant first to ask for a table, I’d make Lucy do it. 

   Depression is a horrible disease and it’s not as easy as one day saying, “right that’s it, I’ll jolly well pull myself together”. My depression wasn’t down to a chemical imbalance, it was the result of a lot of horrible situations all happening within a really short space of time.

 I can’t really remember the moment at which I started to feel better, but once I realised I was worth bothering about, that’s the moment I felt able to start to lose weight and put myself and my health first. For ages I thought I didn't matter, no one else cared about me, so why should I? Now I care about me and I try and do one thing for me everyday, even if it's just 10 minutes to read a bit of a book.

  I also try and find joy and fun in everything, even if I don’t want to. Lucy and I started to make a list the other day of our highlights of 2013. On it there was some of the big stuff you’d expect – going to see Robbie Williams, holidays etc., but then there was a lot of little stuff too. A day out with Laura and the kids that resulted in us getting lost, walking 10 miles and having a cheese and onion cob. Our “Pie-athon” where we watched all the “American Pie” films back to back and evenings sat in the garden talking nonsense with Dad and drinking red wine.

  There are enough things in this world designed to make you feel bad, so if you’re going to get stressed because someone is counting sleeps till Santa or singing along to a theme tune, then get over yourself, these are not big problems, they're things you don't like!

  Oh and it’s 26 sleeps till Santa and I will count those sleeps every year until there is no breath left in my body!

This isn't factually accurate, but you get the gist!

  

Saving Stuff for Best.

So as you can see from our chart my 2 pound a week plan hasn’t gotten off to the best of starts, I stayed the same (boo) and Lucy managed a loss of a pound and a half. Still I’m not feeling defeated, I can still achieve my target!

  The change in weather means that when taking Cyril for his daily walk, I’ve had to wrap up, there was a slightly dodgy moment when I decided to wear new trainers for such a venture and was hobbling around Newstead Abbey in a very unladylike fashion. It also means I’ve been able to dig out my dog walking hat! I had a conversation with my friend Michelle about this the other day and I think she thought that there was a special range of clothing designed solely for the purpose of dog walkers (there isn’t as far as I know, but maybe I could launch a Slinky fashion range and debut it at London fashion week next year, with our key pieces being hats for dog walkers?)

    It’s really just a hat that I liked and wanted to wear, it’s also practical at keeping my head warm when I’m out in the cold, but because I like to give things a sense of occasion my hat had to have a name and a purpose.

  I realised that it’s a bit of a Trinder thing to make a sense of occasion of things and this stems from my Mum. My Mum would always try and make things fun, so for example when we had to go to the orthodontist in Nottingham she would take us on the bus and let us sit upstairs (this is fun when you’re a child!) We would then get to have a wander round the shops, then have our gobs prodded and poked by Mr May and then she would take us for tea at Jessops, where we could pick anything we wanted (within reason!) It just meant that rather than seeing it as a trip to the Orthodontist, it became an outing with Mum, which was far more fun. When I had to have an operation on my ankle, my Mum made sure that waiting for me whilst I recovered was a pile of trashy magazines and a stack of DVD’s. As a family we always celebrate Thanksgiving, we know we’re not American, but any excuse for a Turkey dinner.

  My Mum also never saved anything for “best, she believed clothing and jewellery were for wearing otherwise it just sat in a cupboard and you never got to make the most of it. She did this because she once read an article about a woman who had treated herself to a Janet Reger nightdress and had promised herself that once she’d lost all her weight and felt more confident she would wear it. Sadly the woman died before she got the chance to wear it, this stuck with my Mum and as a result fancy handbags were used daily and she always wore an expensive watch my Dad bought her. Some of this was down to the fact that she thought if she used something daily my Dad would never realise how much she'd spent on something. She once passed off a Mulberry handbag as something she had bought from Marks and Spencers! My Dad now claims he knew the truth all along, but he didn't!

  It’s the Trinder way to try and turn even the dullest of events into an occasion and I know for a couple of ex-friends it got annoying as they couldn’t understand why we would bother. Well the reason is really simple, you’re a long time dead and if you are spending your Saturday night sat in watching the “X-Factor” then why not make it more exciting by getting everyone to wear matching pyjamas and pretend their a judge? Alright it might not be for everyone, but it beats sitting in glaring at your husband!

  We very much follow the principal that if you’ve got something horrible to do, plan something nice for when you’ve done it. It doesn’t have to be expensive for example today we had to input our expenses and chase invoices, so we decided that once we’d done it, we’d have a cup of tea and a flake. It’s amazing how much enjoyable it was knowing there was a flake the other side of it!

  For the last New Year’s Eve I had a really bad case of laryngitis and so me, Lucy, Laura and Laura’s children had a “Onsie New Year”, where we just hung out at my house watching films and wearing a onsie, it meant that despite being ill I got to spend time with my mates and yet I could legitimately wear my PJ’s without feeling bad.

  If you’re one of these people who always says “when I’m thinner / richer / happier etc. I will do XYZ” Then have a word with yourself, because you’re missing out on so much, wear that jumper you said you’d save for a special occasion, get your friends round and hold your own version of Come Dine With Me and just enjoy life!

  Oh PS, there's now a Slinky By Tuesday Facebook page www.facebook.com/slinkybytuesday and Twitter @slinkybytuesday

Celebrating My Mum

A slightly different Slinky Blog for today, I wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate the life of my Mum and to ask you to do me a favour.

Mum

  Friday will mark the 3^rd anniversary of my Mum’s death and even though it may seem weird to some people Dad, Lucy and I use it as a chance not to mourn her, but to celebrate just how lucky we were to have her. I remember watching “Eastenders” with her many years ago and the Fowlers all traipsed to the cemetery to mourn the passing of Lou Beale (yes it was a long time ago) they seemed to spend the day sat there with a picnic crying. Mum said that she hoped that when her time came we wouldn’t do the same, as she couldn’t imagine anything worse than us sat eating pork pie and picnic eggs in a cemetery and crying.

  My Mum’s death was very sudden, it really was a case of on the Sunday she was fine and by the early hours of Monday morning we were sat in the hospital with a girl I went to school with telling us that she had died. When someone dies it’s the weird things you remember, the nurse was a year older than me at school and she occasionally comes up on my Facebook list of “people I might know”. It’s not her fault, but I always find it odd that someone I went to school with gave me the most devastating of news.

  For those of you who didn’t know my Mum she was a very bright vibrant lady with twinkly eyes and a huge smile, she was amazing in social situations, remembering the tiniest details about people: the football team they supported, the names of their children, where they’d been on holiday etc. She could also strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. When her and Dad came to visit me in Belize, we got the water taxi over to San Pedro for a holiday. Almost immediately she got chatting to a Belizean chap about where he was going and what he was doing.

Mum, Lucy & I , New Year 2009

Mum & I on my 30th Birthday

  My Mum was also a very clever lady and great at thinking through situations logically, Lucy and I always joke that where Mum used to give us reasoned advice on how to deal with people and situations, my Dad would always say “just give him a smack” Although in fairness Dad is getting better at not urging his two daughters to punch those who upset us in the mouth!

Mum & "Santa"

  She was no cook and as children we were treated to her specialities of “Monster Cakes”, which were sponge fairy cakes with hideous coloured dye in and “Rabbits / Mice in a Field” these were either pear or peach halves with chocolate buttons for ears laid on a plate of green jelly.

 We know just how lucky we were to have had her and it is this that we celebrate. On the anniversary of her death we try and do one of her favourite things, whether it’s a trip to her favourite restaurant, her favourite hotel or we just do something that she liked doing.

  So, on Friday, if you could make sure you tell those you love just how much they mean to you, maybe buy the lady in your life a bunch of flowers, treat your kids to their favourite cake or just do something nice for your best friend, use it as a day to celebrate those you love and who you might not tell as often as you should.

  This year the Trinder’s will be heading out for lunch, going to the cinema and playing Frank Sinatra as loud as the stereo will go!