I’ve eaten all of the cooking chocolate over two days.

I don’t buy chocolate anymore, because obviously then I would just eat it, but I do buy the Green & Blacks cooking chocolate for those times in my infrequent baking life where I need to make double batches of Nigella’s brownie. So there is usually one or two slightly dusty and bloomed packets of cooking chocolate up there, up in the far recesses of the Sweet Cupboard (so named by Otis who spends a lot of time investigating it, usually having perilously climbed up badly-attached cupboard door handles and narrowly missing his little thighs getting branded by the red hot La Pavoni coffee machine to stand up on the bench and open the door and attempt to steal anything in there whenever I’m not looking/engaged with my phone*).

*that’s quite often

The Sweet Cupboard is mainly populated by old M&S biscuit tins carrying the gross leftover slightly  weeping sweets from Halloween hauls, and chocolate coins which are neither white chocolate or milk chocolate anymore but straddling hues of worrying grey, as well as unexplained single broken crackers and ten year old packets of lentils. Additionally I have noticed an ironically posh bag of pork scratchings that someone gave us in a Christmas Hamper one year squeezed between the tins and the cupboard walls and because I cannot find the right time or occasion to eat them they just stay there, getting greasier and more rancid as each new year comes and goes.  And so the cooking chocolate has latterly been shouting out my name from about 7:30pm until late. And so I’ve eaten it, and I feel bad about it.

I’ve totally misunderstood how to make money from the internet.

After last week’s succulent-wreath/blogger-event situation, I have become more active on social media than usual because I thought that I would do as those other women do and try my hand at becoming so popular that they’d (‘they’ being people who sell scented candles, who might own a restaurant or two, or a clothing line or a place that sells chairs or personalised stationery) simply HAVE to pay me for withering on and taking bad photographs from my oblivious kids, and so that would become my job, and I would be able to get a mortgage as well as filling the house with trinkets of utter uselessness while people freeze in Calais. #goals

So, I thought the first step was to follow people who have lots of followers so that I could figure out what magic and wizardry it takes to be popular on the interweb and not a total mother truckin’ narcissistic bore. To that end, I have spent time watching other people and liking them and I have even made my own instagram stories about cooking dinner and running at 6am and bad hair (more on that later) and the end result is this: I have gained five more followers and am now 84 quid in the red.

Let me break that down.

Influencers are not called influencers for nothing. In my pursuit of infiltrating the world of women who blog successfully, I found a few who have entered my consciousness and have not left. I shamelessly copied @catwalkschoolgates by buying a jumper she was championing from H&M (it’s a 24 quid Ganni knockoff, she said), which was the first of many strategic stumbles:

See the appeal? I’m wearing it now and it feels a bit Christmas Jumper Without The Christmas Bits.

And then I went all the way to St Johns Wood to infiltrate the charity shops there because she said @chanelofficial had dropped some clothes there. I kept trying to ‘use the lingo’ of the Women Of The Discounted Clothing Blogosphere by phrasing my request like this:

‘Excuse me, has Chanel dropped some clothes here?’ and the charity shop people pretty much uniformly didn’t understand what it was that I was trying to say, instead walking away to ask someone in the back office if there were any ‘drops’ in the store.

Are they like capes? they asked, confused.

No, not like capes. And no, Chanel hadn’t dropped anything. So I had to buy this Chloe cardigan for 60 pounds because it was a long way to go to return empty-handed. I KNOW IT’S A BIT GRANDMA-ISH. I know. Also, chins:

I am apparently balding.

I have been having some hair issues and I thought it was just that I am getting a bit old and my babies have pretty much sucked a lot of life and moisture and youthful chemicals out of me. I had heard that babies ruin your hair as well as your boobs and your teeth and your skin and your waist, so I was expecting and accepting that the curls which once sat atop my head all unruly and fun have begun to thin out and straighten in a mean and scanty way.  But it got worse than that – it’s gotten weird and bumpy at the crown and almost looks as if I have on purpose made a cool bouffant as a statement, but it is actually a short, uneven MULLETY bouffant which makes no sense at all.

So I went to see Ronan at Aveda and as soon as I sat down he told me I needed to go to the GP AT ONCE to sort out my work-shy follicles. He was kind, but there was a bit of urgency (call your GP NOW, he said) and so I tried to be cool about my hair loss while telling entertaining stories and generally trying not to look into the mirror at the sad state of the top of my head, and then he styled it differently by effectively giving me a forehead combover and dried it flat and I looked very odd, in a slick newsreader kind of way. He told me I probably lacked iron and zinc, and then he said that I must never go to a job interview without flattening my hair into sheets of shiny nothingness, like he was doing. And I was like:

HOW DO I DO THAT? How do I become the type of woman who knows how to do her own hair? And he just shrugged.

I tried to go to the GP this morning to sort out the impending badness but I can’t get in until Jan 2. WILL IT ALL HAVE FALLEN OUT BY THEN? You’ll have to wait and see. Here’s my instastory once the rain and wind had gotten deep into the blow dry. I look like Rhys Ifans in ‘Notting Hill’. Imagine going into a job interview looking like this:

Anyway, does anyone else have anything to confess? It can’t just be me.