Amazing! I just paid £66.00 to wordpress and now you will be able see my really short, lame videos that you could see on my instagram account for free. You guys are SOOOOOO lucky. I could summaries my occasional videos thus:

Short, boring, lots of background noise, messy kitchen utensils littering the backdrop. Sound quality a bit rubbish. Maybe the kids doing something recognisable, but maybe, equally, probably not.

But onwards, onwards into the media world I keep boldly going, like a super internet girl with greying hair and a permanent crick in her neck from always looking down at my phone. With knickers on over my tights, and dungarees because WHY NOT? I’M ONLY NEARLY 40.

Here is a teaser, a sweet taster, if you will. Casper and his class went on a school trip to Pizza Express in Baker Street last week, and spent the morning wearing paper hats, aprons, and making margarita pizzas. Truly, what a wondrous school trip that must have been. And so he came home, full of pizza-making bravado, and wanted to make the whole family some pizza, because he knows how. Noah was kind of disgruntled, because years ago, he went to an after school cooking club, and he came home with a pizza for us all to share which had some sort of horrendous olive, ketchup, tomato, jam and honey mashup going on, and so they both had a smallish tussle over the pizza-making origin rights. So they compromised, and we all made the Jamie Oliver base recipe, and they took turns bringing it all together. See:

It’s important to note here that we don’t always wear much more than our knickers when we cook. It’s a very warm flat. And that we like to sing the wrong words to “Oliver!”. And that we probably didn’t wash our hands all that well.

Then we had two birthdays in a few days, one kid turning ten, the other kid turning five. We had a joint birthday party at a climbing wall, to save making two cakes and two lots of party bags and all the stress and yelling that always accompanies the terribly humourlessness of trying to be a Pinterest kind of person, and here we are, the first photo of all of us in about a year, looking kind of over-it. And I don’t know what my hair is thinking, really, I don’t. Ned is a bit annoyed by the whole thing, so scared of the climbing wall that he stayed out with the baby and I and waited for his guests to finish with his birthday party climbing wall instructor. He found the whole thing a total drag. And we turned up half an hour late after the instructing had begun, with the 12 assembled guests wondering if we had died en route. It was really just the cake making us late, as we drove to Ladbroke Grove while it slid on its nougat and rice bubble chocolate layers, my fingers firmly clenched into vulnerable icing-free sponge layers, swearing under my breath and hating everyone.

Here is the cake – J.Oliver version, and then mine:

And anyway. It’s now the holidays, and so my thoughts turn to jobs, and how I can get one really fast and legitimately leave the flat in the morning and have somewhere real to go, for an actual reason. I’ve been getting a bit itchy for some money and a job and a future, and thought I should clean up my LinkedIN profile and start looking for jobs.

What I Learned When I Went Looking For A Job 

1. LinkedIN Shows You Up As A Bit Of A Loser

It turns out, when one starts down that deep, dark, twisted, low-self-esteem-engendering wormhole, luring you with the promise of tailored jobs and a community of ‘peers’, that every mofo you find yourself connected to has an MBA or equivalent. And while you were pissing about in the lost years, thinking you were young and you had time and it would all be ok in the end, because of your clear natural intellect and your wit and your excellent way with multiple brooch-application, those other buggers actually had some sort of gameplay and now they are all like, Head of Marketing for Europe and the US and whatnot and you are most definitely not.

2. LinkedIN Pretends You Are Employable

So LinkedIN compares and contrasts you with more successful people in your network. That hurts a bit. Then, LinkedIN hurts your feelings further by offering up job applications for actual qualified people, but you think LinkedIN means you.

There is a list of these suggested jobs, and you may well be onto your second flat white and be very excited by the caffeine-high and the prospect of all these jobs that your great buddy LinkedIN reckons you could do. And you agree with LinkedIN, because you did do very well in your English exams when you were 15 and you did write a really great essay in 1999, which so brilliantly contrasted and compared Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and you got like an A- or something, and so, yes, LinkedIN, your algorithms are right! I certainly COULD BE AN EDITOR AT THE BBC! LinkedIN also suggests you look at the Penguin Publishing jobs, and there are Senior Editing positions there, and there are marketing jobs paying £90k, and it is all so terribly overwhelming until you realise that LinkedIN is LYING TO YOU.

These jobs aren’t for you. You can’t get them. It is pretend, you fool. Besides, you have a baby sticking his finger into an electrical socket and who’s going to do the washing-up if you go galavanting about to interviews in ill-fitting officewear circa 2004?

That is what I learned.

So, before I stick my head in the oven, a la Sylvia Plath, here’s a photo of a salt beef bagel.