The Awkward Girl's Guide to the Week | In Which 'Tis the Damn Season

You can call me babe for the weekend...

Dec 08, 2023

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 lately. These posts are free to all subscribers, but a paid subscription will help keep me out of the Victorian workhouse, allow me to continue creating content for you, and keep the elves at bay.

“Mummy,” said Max, as I got him ready for bed one night this week. “When will our elves be arriving?”

Well, my blood ran cold. It was the moment I’d been dreading since... well, since last week, really, when I remembered Elf on the Shelf was A Thing now, and that Max was probably old enough to start asking about it.

“Elves?” I said, feigning ignorance. “What elves?”

“The ones that come to your house at Christmas time,” said Max, widening his eyes like a child in a Charles Dickens novel. “All of my friends have an elf in their house. I’m the only one who doesn’t.”

“You have Marvin, though,” I said brightly, referring to Marvin the Monkey, who Terry had started hiding around the house, to Max’s great joy. “Marvin’s much better than an elf!”

“No he’s not,” insisted Max. “Marvin’s a monkey. Everyone else has an elf.”

Why am I the only kid who gets a stupid monkey instead of an elf, like everyone else? was the obvious subtext. Why do you hate me?

And, I mean, I get it, I do. It was just like time I wanted Travel Fox trainers because everyone at school had them, but my mum and dad wouldn’t get me them, because even when I pointed out that you could get them from the Freeman’s catalogue, paying 50p per week for just 203 weeks, they still insisted the cheap Gola trainers I already had would last me for at least another 3 years, if I was careful.

This was Max’s Travel Fox Trainers moment, I knew. His entire childhood and personality could be shaped by how I chose to respond to this.

“We have our own lovely Christmas traditions,” I said carefully, hoping to God he wasn’t going to ask me to name them. “And other people have theirs. Every family is different. Isn’t that great?”

“No,” said Max, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. “It isn’t. Every family except us has an elf. I’m the only kid in my class who doesn’t have one.”

Then he started crying. Actually crying.

“It’s not fair,” he wailed, sounding very much like 13-year-old me, doomed to wear The Wrong Trainers to school until such a time as the Ingliston Market started selling cheap Travel Fox knockoffs. “Why me? Why am I the only one who doesn’t get an elf?”

“I think we’re going to have to get an Elf on the Shelf,” I told Terry, once I’d calmed Max down and put him to bed. “It’s the only option.”

“But you said Elf on the Shelf was a form of tyranny over parents,” said Terry, proving that he does listen to me when it suits him. “You said they were creepy and weird and that you refused to bow to the societal pressure to conform to meaningless ‘traditions’ that serve only to contribute to our consumer-obsessed culture.”

“Yeah, but then he started crying,” I pointed out. “Crying.”

“We’re not doing Elf on the Shelf,” said Terry, unmoved. “He doesn’t need to have the same things as everyone else.”

“Look at what not having the same things as everyone else did to me, though,” I said dramatically, pointing to the Adidas Sambas that I’d spent roughly 18 weeks refreshing the Adidas website for, until they finally came back into stock in my size. “It made me obsessed with trainers! What if Max becomes obsessed with Elf on the Shelf? What if when he’s 40 he has an entire room in his house filled with creepy elf dolls, and every night he goes in and moves them around, to make up for his elf-free childhood? What IF, though?”

“He’s got Marvin,” said Terry. “Marvin’s MUCH better than a creepy elf.”

But I knew that Marvin was NOT better than the creepy elf, in the same way I knew that Gola trainers were not secretly better than Travel Fox ones — and that the brown Kickers I got on sale were not better than the red ones everyone else had — no matter how hard my parents tried to tell me everyone at school would be really jealous of my “unique” shoes.

So I took my dilemma to Instagram.

“Just tell him the elves don’t need to come to his house, because they already know he’s been good this year,” said pretty much everyone. “Tell him they only have to watch the naughty kids.”

So I told him exactly that, the next morning before school.

“Does that mean my friends are all naughty and I’m the only one who’s nice?” asked Max, delighted. “I can’t wait to tell them!”

“Er, not exactly,” I replied, but it was too late: he was off to school, desperate to lord it over his “naughty” friends. This is why I didn’t just tell him the elves aren’t real; there’s no way I could have trusted him not to share that piece of wisdom, too.

By the time he came home, though, he’d apparently forgotten about the elves. (And also about Marvin the Monkey, actually, which was an unexpected bonus.) The ploy had worked. Our house was still an elf-free zone.

So we did not get an Elf on the Shelf. Well, not yet, anyway. I’m trying to tell myself we’re making a stand against the tyranny of consumerism, and that Christmas has gone Too Far, but it’s mostly just because I’m already exhausted, and I don’t feel like I have the bandwidth for it. (And also because I think they’re creepy, obviously. Come on, dolls are creepy. And dolls that move around your house at night are the thing horror movies are made of…)

There’s still time, though…

READING

I finished Miss You this week, and I’m just going to ahead and name this my favourite book of the year, even though it didn’t actually come out this year (I don’t think ANY of the books I’ve read did, though…), so I’m painfully late to the party, as usual.

It was just wonderful, though; the kind of book you stay up late just to read one more chapter, because it’s like sinking into another world, and you really miss it when it finally ends. Fortunately for me, there’s a sequel: slightly less fortunately, though, I’m trying very hard not to buy anything else right now, because I’m more than just a little bit freaked out by how much Christmas is costing this year, so it might have to wait until January, while I continue to work my way through my TBR pile instead…

WATCHING

The Couple Next Door [WARNING: SPOILERS!]

The Couple Next Door follows Evie and Pete, who move into a new house and immediately — and I do mean immediately — befriend their hot neighbours, who helpfully turn out to be hot swinger neighbours, one of whom is Sam Heughan of Outlander fame.

ME: There’s pretty much nothing Sam Heughan could do that would make him less attractive to —

SAM HEUGHAN: *starts talking in a whiny Northern accent*

Oh. 1

That’s not the thing that bothered me about this, though. No, I have a list. I will share it with you…

The fact that it’s supposed to be set in Leeds, but is blatantly NOT set in Leeds. (It was filmed in the Netherlands, apparently…) As in, they’ve done literally NOTHING to make it look like Leeds. Not one thing. I read somewhere that they wanted to make everything feel a bit “off”, like in Don’t Worry, Darling, say, which would be fine… But then why keep on mentioning Leeds all the time? Why not just not mention where it’s supposed to be, and then it could feel vaguely unsettling, without constantly drawing attention to the fact that it’s Definitely Not Leeds?2
When Hot Neighbours invited New Neighbours round for a barbecue in their back garden, and the women wore low-cut cocktail dresses and strappy heels. For a backyard barbecue. Now, granted, I don’t know Leeds (Or even Not Leeds) very well, but, round here, barbecues tend to be very ‘come as you are’, really. Do people really roll out the red carpet for BBQs in Leeds? Do your stiletto heels not get ruined on the grass? Is this a regular thing, or just a Hot Swinger thing? I have so many questions…
The way we knew Hot Neighbours were swingers because, when they decided to invite “that couple we met on holiday” round, Becka went out to meet them wearing stockings and suspenders. Right out into the middle of the street in her suspenders, rather than just waiting for them to come to the door like a normal person. In their suburban Not Leeds neighbourhood.
Is this how swinging works, then? Like, is there literally no ‘warm up’, say, where you maybe offer them a drink and a bit of small-talk, or is just '“here I am in my suspenders, no time to waste”?
The fact that, when Swinger Mum went to pick her kid up from school in episode 3, we had to press pause so we could try to figure out if this was supposed to be a plot twist, like, “LOOK, A SECRET KID!” We finally remembered she’d briefly mentioned having a kid in episode one, but he hadn’t been seen AT ALL until then, and, in the meantime Hot Neighbours had been busy living their best, apparently childfree, lives; cocktail dresses in the garden, numerous spliffs, spontaneous trips to the beach with New Neighbours (WHERE WAS THE KID?), spa weekends in country manors… But then, every so often they’d pull out this little boy to remind us they were, in fact Hot Parents, and it was just so weird and random; like, where was he supposed to be the rest of the time? Why did they have sex with “that couple we met on holiday” in their living room if there was a child in the house?
When Ellie has a miscarriage, so she kills her fish. Sorry, WHAT?
When they decided to go on their spontaneous trip to a bleak-looking beach, and they somehow acquired a VW camper to do it in, even though the four of them would’ve fit into a normal car just fine.
Sam Heughan taking the bins out in a “sexy” way. To be fair, I bet Sam Heughan DOES take the bins out in a sexy way, but it was so super-cringe with the rain soaking his shirt while Ellie stood there with her own wheelie bin, running her hands seductively through her rain-soaked hair. Honestly, I’ll never see Bin Night the same again…
Ellie’s transformation from fairly-normal schoolteacher to Woman Who Just Smiles Slyly All The Time. Spotting your neighbour getting into his car? Sly smile. Breakfast with the parents? Sly smile. Telling your religious dad you had sex with the neighbour and are now pregnant with his child? Sly smile. Husband mysteriously shot, possibly by you? Sly, sly smile…

Anyway, I’m not sure if I’ve made this clear enough, but I straight-up hated this. So much so that I insisted on watching it in its entirety just so I could hate it even more. Sometimes I really hate myself…

TRYING

Self-adhesive nail wraps

So, my nails are really damaged after months/years of wearing falsies. I really don’t want to do anything that might damage them even more, but they look so bad I can’t stand leaving them bare, either. Regular polish chips within about an hour on me, which just manages to make them look even worse, so I bought these self-adhesive wraps on a whim, and, seriously, they’re a complete game changer — although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from this not very good photo I tried to take in the car:

These are literally just stickers that you press onto your nails and trim to fit. You can get semi-cured ones that you have to set with an LED lamp, but I didn’t want to cause any more damage/spend any more money, so I just went for the self-adhesive ones, with very little hope that they’d actually stay on my nails.

But they DO.

At the time of writing, these have been on for 6 days, and although there’s some wear along the edges, it’s much, much less than I’d have had with regular polish, and I think a lot of it’s just down to it being my first time applying them, too. Apparently if you use a top-coat over them, they last for longer, so I’ll try that next time, but, for now, I’m pretty damn impressed. Up close, it’s obviously not a salon manicure, but, as I said, it’s so much better than the results I’d get from regular polish; and I say that as someone who’s pretty hard on her nails, too — as well as typing for hours every day, I seem to never stop cleaning, so the fact that these have stayed put, and still look pretty good, is all kinds of amazing to me.

They should apparently just peel off when I’m ready to remove them, too, so, assuming that goes well, consider me a convert.

BUYING

I’m feeling quite smug, because this week I did ALL the remaining Christmas shopping in one go. All of it.

I haven’t actually wrapped any of it yet, because gift wrapping is my most hated chore ever, and I’m still harboring the hope that I could somehow become rich enough to pay someone to do it for me in the next two weeks or so. But the gifts are in, and now all that’s left is the last-minute panic when I look at everything we’ve got for Max and decide it’s not nearly enough, and that I must panic-buy more STUFF, or ruin his childhood — assuming we haven’t already done that with the whole ‘Elf on the Shelf’ business.

Other things I’m hoping I’ll become rich enough to pay for in the next couple of weeks:

The three — THREE — sequined dresses/ skirts I bought on Vinted, thinking it would save me some money, but which actually ended up just bleeding me dry because the things I liked kept selling before I could convince myself to hit the ‘buy’ button, so I made an offer for a couple of things I thought might work, then literally — literally — as soon as those offers were accepted and paid for, along came the perfect dress (Or at least, I hope it’ll be the perfect dress: it’s Vinted, so you never really know, do you?), and I obviously had to buy that, too. Honestly, this is why I hate Vinted; I always seem to end up spending a fortune on things I don’t like and can’t send back…
All the Christmas jumpers I had to buy because Max’s school tend to do back-to-back Christmas events, so your only options are to have multiple jumpers, or commit to washing the existing one every night, so it’s ready again the next morning…).I also — for absolutely NO reason other than that parents are often expected to attend these events — bought a ‘Christmas jumper’ for me, and then there was all the Christmas presents, and… look, I think it’s fairly obvious that I’ve fallen off the “no spending” wagon this month, OK? Quite spectacularly, in fact.

I’m trying to tell myself no one can realistically hope to NOT spend money in December, and that I’ll get myself back on track next month, but I honestly feel a bit sick about how much this Christmas has cost, and how poor my impulse control has been during it. It’s made me feel quite panicky, really, which is the surest sign yet that it really IS the damn season. All we need now is for someone — by which I mean all of us — to get sick, and the Christmas bingo card will be complete.

Panic-buying of sequined clothing? ✔️
Too many Christmas jumpers? ✔️
Sudden need to deep-clean the entire house? ✔️
Massive spike in anxiety? ✔️
Entire family getting ill? — TBC

Ho ho freakin ho….

WRITING

Over on the blog, I finally did the thing you all knew I’d be doing sooner or later, and started writing about why I love Taylor Swift, even though I’m really old, and people make fun of me for it. I’m not sure whether it’s weird that I did this, or just weird that I hadn’t done it already, but, either way, if you want to see someone being weird about Taylor Swift, I’m your girl…

I also finished the first draft of book # 5 — which sounds like bigger news than it actually is, really, because I’m not massively happy with it — especially the last two chapters, which seemed to take almost as long to write as the rest of the book combined. I mean, I finished NaNoWriMo having written over 60,000 words of this book in a month, then took literally about 4 days to write the last 500 words of one chapter, so… yeah.

But it’s done, and now I’m going to let it settle for a while, before I dive in with the editing. And I’m also going to have a celebratory glass of wine, because, what the hell, I wrote a(nother) book, guys! I really wish I could go back in time and tell 2006-me that I finally did it (and five times, too!), but I suspect she probably wouldn’t believe me, so hey, I’m telling you instead…

Until next week,