The Awkward Girl's Guide to the Week | In Which Autumn Is Over-Rated

I said what I said.

Hi, it’s Amber with The Awkward Girl’s Guide to the Week: your regular look at what I’ve been reading, watching, and otherwise getting up to. This post is free to all subscribers, however a paid subscription will give you access to additional, bonus content, keep me out of the Victorian workhouse, and is basically the only reason this newsletter continues to exist — so if you are able to upgrade, you’ll find the button below: and, to celebrate my first year on Substack, I’m offering 20% off your first 12 months, which you can claim by clicking the button below:

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Every week when I sit down to write this newsletter I have a quick scroll through my camera roll to remind myself what I’ve actually been doing this week that I can tell you about. Other than the painfully basic coffee-shot above, though, this is all I’ve got for you:

Mistakes, mis-shapes, misfits. Raised on a diet of broken… pumpkins…

This was the scene in our local branch of Lidl, 6 days before Halloween,

Green pumpkins. Mis-shapen pumpkins. All the pumpkins no one else wanted, just left there for us Halloween stragglers, who thought a week would surely be enough time to prepare for a one-day ‘holiday” that really only lasts for a couple of hours on the evening of October 31st. “You can’t sit with us,” I imaged all the round, orange pumpkins saying to this lot. “Do you even go here?”

(And yeah, then I wanted to buy them all, just to prove that someone out there would love them. Well, until November 1st, anyway, which is the absolute limit of my tolerance for all things Halloween.)

“I knew we should have gone to the pumpkin patch,” I grumbled to myself, conveniently forgetting that everyone in my family except me hates the pumpkin patch. “Then we could have had a wholesome and charming family day out, for the bargain price of just £35, not including the pumpkins.”

“I paid £80 for the four of us this year,” my friend Lindsay messaged me later that day. “And yes, the pumpkins were extra.”

Related | Taking a Toddler to a Pumpkin Patch: Expectation Vs Reality

Eighty pounds, people.

Eighty. Pounds.

To pick pumpkins out of a muddy field, with no guarantee that it won’t piss down with rain the entire time.

(And it will. Oh it will…)

I mean… this is crazy, right? It’s not just me thinking this whole “autumn” thing has gone too far now? And that — as with most things these days — social media is most likely to blame for it?

Just checking.

Not wanting — or, indeed, being able to — pay £80 for pumpkins wasn’t the only reason I didn’t book the pumpkin patch this year, though. No, the main reason was that, as I said, everyone hates it except me. And I’m not that keen on it either, if we’re being totally honest here.

Max just wants to go to the playpark attached to the pumpkin field. Or, even better, the cafe next door, that sells cakes. Terry can’t understand why he’s being charged to pick his own pumpkin, when the supermarket will pick them for him, and charge significantly less into the bargain.

I… just want some nice photos for my Instagram, really.

This year, though, not even I was willing to continue with the autumnal charade that is the pumpkin patch. I decided we’d take a year off from having to pretend we were enjoying it, and possibly revisit it again next year, when Max will be a year older, and maybe more up to speed with all the things we’re supposed to enjoy about autumn.

Maybe.

Even though my child has only ever been an unwilling participant in my carefully-planned autumn activities, though, I still felt guilty about not taking him to the pumpkin patch — like he was missing out on some kind of seminal childhood activity that I only know about from the internet (And, OK, American TV shows), on account of the fact that my own childhood wasn’t like that.

When I was Max’s age, pumpkin patches weren’t really a “thing” here in Scotland. (Actually PUMPKINS weren’t a thing here in Scotland: we used to make lanterns out of turnips, instead. And we lit our houses with paraffin lamps, and sat warming ourselves by the fire, singing folk songs about our ancestors, and wondering aloud if we might one day have a ride in one of those newfangled horseless carriages. This was all fields then. Not pumpkin fields, obviously… just fields.) Halloween wasn’t much of a thing either, as it happens. Hell, AUTUMN wasn’t even a thing: it was just the dull, grey time between summer and winter, which lasted roughly two weeks, and which it was completely acceptable to hate. Because it deserved it.

But now autumn has been re-branded by the internet. There are pumpkin-spiced lattes, and wreaths on doors, and a really quite nauseating over-use of the word “cosy”. People have “Autumn Bucket Lists” carefully detailing all the things they need to do in order to feel like they’ve had the perfect autumnal experience. A lot of the items on these lists seem to rely heavily on the idea of “snuggling” while wearing fluffy socks. I… suspect I’m buying my socks from the wrong place if this is supposed to be a highlight of the season?

To be fair, Max does enjoy snuggling. In fact, just last week I decided to get him one of those huge, faux fur blankets as one of his Christmas gifts, so he can snuggle in it in front of the TV, rather than dragging his duvet downstairs all the time. He’ll love it.

He does not, however, particularly care about picking his own pumpkins, which is why, after a long rummage at Lidl, we ended up coming home with this guy, who is almost totally orange, and only slightly misshapen: which, same, bestie — same…

I feel like “almost totally orange, and only slightly misshapen” would be a great new tagline for my blog. While I’m mulling that over, though, let’s get on with the rest of the news from the week…

(This part of the newsletter contains affiliate links, so please be aware that I may make a small commission on your click…)

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READING

This week I finished reading The Secret Life of an Uncool Mum by Serena Terry, who I’ve just this second realised is, in fact, a comedian and “social media sensation”, as well as being an author. (“Mammy banter”, it turns out, is her Instagram handle, not just some all-new sub-genre of chick lit, as I’d assumed. I think this probably makes me the “uncool mum” here? I mean, finger on the pulse or what?)

TSLOAUM, as I will call it, follows Tara, a mum of three who, at 35, is starting to feel old (This made me start to feel DEAD, tbh…) and past it, and who, with the help of her BFF, decides she needs a glow-up — which is a trope I am very much there for, being in dire need of one myself.

You know the montage scene in every rom-com, where we see our heroine fast-forward through haircuts and yoga classes and quite a few boozy evenings out with her hilarious and culturally-diverse friends, until she finally emerges, a new and improved woman who only NOW can find true love? This isn’t really like that, tbh, because while Tara does go through the montage scene, complete with hair dye and quite a lot of wine, the realization she comes to at the end of it all is that, actually, she didn’t need to, because she was fine as she was.

Love that for her.

(And also for me, actually, because finishing a book is the closest I get to feeling like I’ve achieved something these days. Round of applause for Amber, please…)

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WATCHING

Bodies

The same body turns up on the same London street in four different decades. Four different detectives must try to figure out what the hell’s going on. One of the timelines is 30 years in the future, which naturally means everyone is wearing futuristic looking clothes with their super-sharp bobs, and using tablets made from a clear perspex type thing, which is how people will want their tablets to look in the future.

(We know this because, on TV, people always have see-through tablets in the future. This makes me think people must not lose things in the future as much as I do now (I mean, imagine putting your see-through tablet down somewhere then trying to find it again!), but, then again, this is coming from the person who once spent a good 10 minutes searching for her phone while speaking to someone on her phone, so maybe not.)

Another one of the timelines is the 1890s, where everyone is very proper, and then you have the 1940s (tailored suits, women in bright red lipstick), and 2023 (everything as it is now, except for a thing that hasn’t happened yet, but which we know WILL happen unless at least one of the detectives can figure out why this damn body keeps popping up).

Don’t try to watch this while secretly scrolling your phone, in other words. You’re going to need to pay attention, and also suspend your disbelief a bit (You probably gathered that from the “one body, four different decades” bit…), but if you can do that, you might enjoy it, although I’ll just quickly caveat that by saying we’re only about three-quarters of the way through, so there’s still time for me to change my mind on that…

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TRYING

COLOR WOW Dream Coat Supernatural Spray

This product is a “miracle” for hair, apparently. Here’s how we know:

I… just don’t believe this is real.

I mean, I obviously WANTED to believe it, which is why I bought the damn thing. But now that I have, I’m having a hard time believing they didn’t just muss up her hair on purpose for the “before” shot. Because my hair looks like the “before” shot both before AND after using this, which is why you will not be seeing any photos of it in this newsletter.

To be fair, the instructions on this tell you to blow-dry “with tension”, which I’m assuming doesn’t refer to my mental state (Which IS normally very tense), but to that thing stylists do where they use a big round brush to smooth out the hair while they dry it. I’ve never been able to master that technique, no matter how hard I try, and although I can do it with my Babyliss Big Hair, it would take approximately forever for the Big Hair to take my hair from wet to dry, so I normally blast it with the hairdryer first, then just use the Big Hair to smooth it out.

When I do that, my hair does look smoother than it would without the Color Wow on it (Especially the ends, which have a tendency to be straw-like), but I’m not sure “miracle” is quite how I’d describe it, so take that how you will…

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WEARING

Yes, folks, it’s an all-new section, which is here purely to allow me to indulge my love of fashion — which I still think about fairly obsessively, even though you wouldn’t necessarily know it to look at me.

This month, I’ve been obsessing over wide-leg trousers: a trend I swore I’d never, ever get on board with, which is a sure sign you’re about to see me in it soon.

I kind of like them. And, fortunately for me, I still know all the words to Never Ever (including that annoying spoken bit at the start), so if we’re going back to the All Saints era, I’m ready for it.

After years of almost exclusively wearing skinny jeans and leggings, though, I have to admit, the wide-legs take a bit of getting used to. An adjustment of the eye, if you will. There’s just SO MUCH FABRIC. And I always feel like they’re not quite the right length. So I’m not getting rid of my beloved slim legs just yet (I have these ones, in case you care…), but I guess it’s good to have options.

On the subject of things I never thought I’d wear, though, I was thinking of using this section of the newsletter (or maybe even doing separate posts, depending how much I have to say about it) to explore some of those slightly strange trends: like wearing leggings as pants, which is suddenly acceptable now; or that thing people on Instagram do, where they’ll drape a jumper over the top of their coat. Feel free to add your suggestions…

And now, folks, I must go, because, not only did I start work on book number 5 this week (Pre-order it here! Even though it doesn’t even have a proper name or cover yet!), as some of you will know, today is also ‘1989’ day — the day when Taylor Swift releases the re-record of her beloved album. I’m every so slightly stressed by this, because I still haven’t had much time to listen the bonus tracks from Speak Now TV (I cancelled Spotify just before it came out, which meant I had to listen on shuffle mode, and just hope the bonus tracks would come on), but I’ve got a free trial of Amazon Music now, though, so happy days…

Forever,