All posts in category: Fasion Health & Beauty

Why a spring break is like a Pringle

May 29, 2022
Entertainment/Media/Arts Fasion Health & Beauty Friends Kids/Family/Relations Travel/Nature
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Why...

During two years of lockdown and feeling like Papillon on Devil’s Island, locked in and no way out, my wife and I took the sports car to Sicily then on to Calabria and Puglia in the boot of Italy. The problem was we did not want to come home. After being cooped up in Malta, an island so small you could carpet it in an afternoon, the sense of freedom was overwhelming. And just like a single Pringle, a short break is not nearly enough. Had we not had two pooches waiting for us, we would be in Croatia by now on the way to Istanbul!

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🎶 Here comes summer … or does it?

May 1, 2022
Fasion Health & Beauty Food & Drink Life Technology
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Why...

Is the weather schizophrenic? Winter this year has behaved like the house guest who outstays his or her welcome. I have to admit that summer 2021 was hot enough to poach an egg in my underpants, therefore I was relieved for the respite of a winter chill. However, it’s now the beginning of May , yet Nanook of the North would have pulled on extra clothing over Easter here in Malta. Grey skies, a wind that could yank the eyebrows off your face and rain horizontal enough to win a limbo dance competition. Today the sun is shining but according to the forecast, it’s a deception worthy of David Copperfield (the magician, not the Dickens character). In a few days time, the temperature is set to drop low enough to make my pubic hair crackle; so the Ambre Solaire will go back in the cupboard and out will come my hot water bottle.

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I never know what to put in each recycle bin

April 10, 2022
Fasion Health & Beauty Food & Drink Life Technology
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Why...

Do I have so many types of garbage bins when I deeply suspect it all goes into one galopata galopata machine anyway? Don’t get me wrong, I am doing my best to save the planet, whether it means only cleaning my belly button with a Q-tip once a month, or recycling my dogs poop by tossing it over the wall onto my next door neighbours’ geraniums. But bins? I have a battalion of these things standing to attention outside my door. The list is endless. Bins for bottles without screw top collar, sacks for those with them… and then subdivided between clear green and brown. 6 just for glass. Life is all receptacles for spectacles, crates for ash from grates, containers for retainers, hoppers for party poppers and repositories for suppositories. The subdivision for rubbish has gone mad. Surely what burns easily and is non synthetic like paper, real food, clothing and coffee grinds in one and synthetics like plastic, tin and any takeaway food in the other… and maybe one for glass.

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Who took in my trousers?

Why...

Is getting dressed in normal clothes again proving so hard?

As we emerge blinking into the post COVID light (or Putin’s nuclear Armageddon) it is time to put away elasticised tracksuits, have a shave and put on shoes not sneakers.

It was in fact a relief to trim my beard as I was starting to look like Grizzly Adams. Tying up shoelaces took a bit of practice but I got there. Knotting my first tie in two and a half years was a challenge. I also tried to tie a bow tie. The result looked like a drunken moth.

Trousers were something else. When did the tailor fairies come into my house and take all my trousers in? I had to shoehorn myself into my smart trousers recently. If I sneezed my fly zipper would have come undone.

This is all a bit of a puzzle as I thought during lockdown that the times we weren’t opening and closing the fridge, expecting each time for it to have different content, people were superglued to their Pelaton machine, doing a one legged pigeon pose or just having sex. It appears this is as fictional as the Downing Street parties. Someone has inserted a Space hopper into me.

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Officer. Arrest that man. His clothes fit

October 18, 2021
Fasion Health & Beauty Finance/Law Technology Travel/Nature
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Why...

Do policemen look like they have been shrink-wrapped?

Maybe it’s rose-tinted spectacles but back in the day when all policemen looked older than me, I don’t recall them being shoehorned into clothing three sizes too small for them.

Nowadays they all seem to be trying to burst out of their uniforms. I understand the theory is… it makes them look intimidating and gives you less to hang onto in case you get into a scuffle. Quite how clothing tighter than a sausage skin is meant to be intimidating, I am not sure. However, judging by the actual size of many policemen, I reckon I could hop faster than they could run. Why scuffle if a brisk walk will leave a Bobby panting like a pug in the Sahara?

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Going going going. Sold to you sir. Expect to die horribly

Why...

Buy criminals belongings at auction?

I read with interest recently that no one in Mexico was interested in buying one of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guizman’s hideouts; he being the cocaine kingpin and fervent underground burrower who eventually was brought to justice.

So the government gave it away in a special lottery, no doubt with the the strap line ‘this time your number really is up.”

Who in their right mind would buy anything confiscated from a mass murdering thug who has a propensity to escape jail. Even if he didn’t get out you can be sure as hell if something was still buried there a baddie would be round to dig it up……and put the new owners in the hole instead.

Same thing if you buy a luxury yacht or jet! Who knows what booby traps are still on these things and remain undetected? One minute you open a locker door below decks to what you think gives access to the pipes in the blocked head (loo) next minute you reveal neatly stacked cellophane wrapped blocks of cocaine before ka-boom and you are in Davy Jones’ locker.

It’s not like your relatives are going to sue the Government. ‘Caveat Emptor’ would be my position if I was the City Official who sold it at auction. “What do you expect to find hidden if you go poking about in some narco king-pin’s favorite toy? A Christmas tree?”

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Be still my beating heart. No, I’m not lovestruck. I am about to get on a plane

August 29, 2021
Fasion Health & Beauty Food & Drink Travel/Nature
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Why...

Am I so excited to get on a plane again?

After a catalogue of medical oopsy-daisies and the dreaded Covid lurgy-lockdown, my wife and I board the big silver bird soon. For me, the first time in 20 months. Love Malta as I do, you can carpet it in an afternoon. I have increasingly felt like Dustin Hoffman or Steve McQueen in Papillon, waiting to jump off a cliff with a net bag full of coconut shells to drift away to somewhere new.

I really don’t know what to expect at the departing or arriving airports. It appears things are totally random. When my wife flew to the USA earlier this month the words Covid or vaccination were never uttered in Washington DC, yet as she flew out of Frankfurt she was made to feel she should be hermetically sealed and vacuum packed. We have friends who have been grilled with more questions than a debrief of a defecting spy, while others drifted through without ever producing a vaccine certificate. As usual there is no consistency or joined up writing between what various health ministries decree and what happens on the ground

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I need a degree in physics to work in my kitchen

July 5, 2021
Fasion Health & Beauty Food & Drink Technology
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Why...

Has my kitchen overtaken scuba diving or GoPro as the haven of gadgets…many of which are meant to save time and patently don’t?

Let me start by contradicting myself in saying the oldest gadget I possess is a pressure cooker. This indeed is a miracle machine capable of making mashed potatoes in six minutes and Osso Buco in under an hour instead of five. However, recently just as slowly and surely as the pressure valve drops from maximum to minimum when you let it cool, my own love affair is no longer hot and steamy. It is dropping off. But it makes no sense.

The blame for this is Sous vide cooking. Essentially sealing food in a vacuum packed plastic bag and plonking it into a bowl of water. What looks like a giant hand whisk standing in the bowl raises water to a very specific temperature and keeps it there. In theory you can never again overcook anything but you can cook something for three days to improve taste and tenderness. For me, it works. Especially on tough cuts of meat like brisket and tip, ribs or even Osso Buco. These can take between two to four days. But even a roast chicken at eight hours is fabulous.

But now rather than half an hour before dinner wondering what to eat, I am pestering my wife at breakfast what she fancies for dinner the day after tomorrow. And there lies the rub. Hunger is a funny thing. You know what you want right now but never in a couple of days. Let alone when crossing meal times. Breakfast with Rice Krispies is never a moment to contemplate whether you want Coq au vin or spag bog!

Like a Pavlovian dog, if someone mentions Chinese food just before I am due to eat, lights and switches go off inside me and not even pot of Beluga caviar followed by Wagyu beef in the Sous vide will deter me from some dim sum and Peking duck. Even if it’s crap!

Same with pizza. I can be sitting there gently watching my four day Oxtail become a thing of epicurean wonder and ready to serve but my wife only has to say. “You know I actually fancy pizza and “the best laid plans of Mice and Men…etc, etc, etc.”

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Cycle lanes … they worry me

June 27, 2021
Fasion Health & Beauty Friends Kids/Family/Relations
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Why...

Does anyone think reducing the width of a road increases mobility?

Recently in Malta, many of our main arteries are being choked with cycle lanes cutting into the roads in the name of increasing mobility and reducing pollution.

To be honest, whilst I sort of understand the logic, it is a million miles away from reality. Let’s start with heart attacks. Who is really going to cycle between the months of July and September up and down our hilly rock where heat and humidity would test a Tour de France cyclist? And these are the months the traffic is at it’s height due to tourists.

If these cycle lanes cut into and reduce the pavement width I would be prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt as people promenading during these months along artery roads is rarer than a smile at passport control. But with each car in summer shuffling usually four tourists about in a mini car not much longer than a bicycle but going four times quicker, can it really help movement of traffic by narrowing the lanes? Lorries and buses are now perpetually driving like threading a needle adding to jams and pollution as everyone now grinds to a halt to let them squeeze around corners or roundabouts.

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The only time it is acceptable to wear a tag is on your toe in the morgue

Why...

Do people dress like they are an advertising billboard?

If you have to yell at people you are wearing a Dolce and Gabbana top, a Gucci jacket, Louis Vuitton bag or La Perla knickers you must be more insecure than a Labour candidate in an upcoming U.K. by-election.

Not only are you insulting the intelligence of those around you, you broadcasting that you are a tasteless oaf to those within 50 yards of you.

From the designers point of view they cannot believe their luck. Here they are charging like the Light Brigade at $250 for a T shirt that cost them less than $5, and their high end and sometime influencer clientele is advertising the fact for free!

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Whatever time I wake up, I always feel everyone else should be awake

June 7, 2021
Fasion Health & Beauty Friends Kids/Family/Relations Sex Technology
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Why...

Do Hospitals insist on waking patients up at 0:Dark Thirty?

Recently, due to a prolonged hospital stay where I was actually woken up each morning at 05:00, I now luxuriate in home visits from a nurse every morning at 07:00. So, my wife and I have been getting up at a time which in my younger nightclubbing days I would have just about been going to bed.

Before you all send me messages about how much earlier you get up, that is not the point. For me, I usually wake around 08:30 and down a heart-starting double macchiato by 09:00. Remember the commute to my office is a flight of stairs. So, for me I expect all my friends in the same time zone to be bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to talk within an hour and a half of my waking up, i.e 10:00.

Right now though,10:00 seems an eternity away from when I greet the dawn. 3 1/2 hours for European time and 4 1/2 for UK. I mean there is only so much shit, shower and shave, breakfast news, morning papers and Facebook abuse a man can take. I need human contact outside of my beloved wife!

I start to wonder who will equally be up early because of kids or gym. At least I can call friends in LA when I get up. It’s early evening for them.

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Time for an enema

May 18, 2021
Fasion Health & Beauty Food & Drink Technology
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Why...

Even in hospital is there still ying and yang. As some have commented it has been a while since I have written a ditty. The reason being I have been in hospital under the surgeon’s knife. Three times in fact; the result of which is my sense of humour has been sorely tested.

If there was one benefit to this it was the endless supply of opiates, mainly morphine and pethidine that they have sent me gently wafting through some truly fabulous dreams and thoughts for the past month away from the raging storm of pain. No wonder heroin is so addictive. Like everything in life that is enjoyable there is a downside. Opiates turn your stomach contents into rocks. I will spare you all the details, but dignity is left behind when you check into a hospital. After managing somehow to unblock my insides with what amounted to industrial strength Draino I happily drank four litres of water a day along with sandcastle amounts of diuretics to prevent any reoccurrence. I have to say that on some days this was not helped by the food, which was more suited to building cladding and had all the nutritional value of a bicycle pump.

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Resistance is futile... I will dress like a pimp from a blaxploitation movie

Why...

Do certain pastimes creep up on me as I get older? Golf is a great example. Forty years ago the whole clubby, cliquey, smug aroma of joining a club and spending eons smacking a little white ball around manicured lawns represented everything the young urchin in me hated. I refused ever to pick up a golf club, wanting the world to know I was kicking against the pricks in every sense of the word. I would rather have entered Richard Nixon than a golf club. Then a few years ago a virus struck down many of my friends who suddenly started not only playing the game but wearing tartan V neck sweaters and trousers, accompanied by white flat caps and checkered leather shoes that Cab Calloway would have been proud of. They even started drinking gin. Fortunately around that time I met my beloved wife. In an earlier life she had dated a professional golfer and it had put her off the game for life. I was safe. However a dear friend and his wife came to visit recently and both are avid golfers. As I listened to them ramble on about such arcane terms such as nibblets, bogies and my particular favourite an Adolf Hitler; (two shots in a bunker), I suddenly said: "That sounds great." Time stood still. You can't unring that bell. My wife instead of getting up and looking for a rolling pin to shuffle my teeth added: "There is only one course here in Malta!"

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Do I get loyalty points if I have to quarantine for two weeks in a hotel?

February 7, 2021
Fasion Health & Beauty Kids/Family/Relations Sex Sport Work
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Why...

Not get some benefit from being locked in a gilded cage for a fortnight?

Now I understand many of you might think two weeks in quarantine in a Premier Inn in Wigan might just be a first world complaint. However, that will only be from people who have never experienced a wet Wednesday in Wigan in February. For those who have, it’s the closet thing to purgatory outside of having to watch endless repeats of the Wheel of Fortune with someone who constantly shouts out the wrong answers.

It troubles me that you can tip out of your first class seat at Heathrow and end up locked in some orange and beige nightmare in Brentford for two weeks instead of your normal sojourn at The Ritz. I hear the allocation of the actual quarantine hotel is luck of the draw. That clearly can not be true. There must be a fiddle somewhere. I just don’t believe you might end up in a magnificent palace with a suite large enough to have a croquet tournament or a hutch so small a mouse with a hard on could not turn around. Does anyone have the skinny on how to get a decent allocation?

And what do you do for two weeks? Do you end up tapping morse code on the walls with your jailed neighbour? Maybe fling open the curtains and scream out the window like Peter Finch in Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Or would that mean the boys in blue come around and lock you in an even tinier cell instead?

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My pet is a drug dealer

January 31, 2021
Animals/Pets Fasion Health & Beauty Life Technology
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Why...

does my beloved dog get prescribed Prozac easier than me? It seems pets have far easier access to grade 'A' drugs than humans. My pug has been known to bark and the effect of our entire house going into packing cases and being shipped to Malta, now has him in paroxysms of fury. To be fair his eyesight is a bit dodgy and maybe at 13 years old he imagines all the tall wooden cases are people. ( As for the dogs thinking my friends are wooden...well that's a worry at a different level). So to calm his anxiety he has been proscribed Prozac. Who knows... if it gets worse maybe Xanax? He sure has taken on a calm 'Jack Nicholson-like' insouciance now. He's even relaxed and laid back as I prepare his food. Before he used to jump and pirouette in wild anticipation of the plate. Now he just watches looking at me as if to say: " Yeah, OK, Mark. Looks good, bro.Can I check those ingredients? No mono sodium glutamate, no artificial preservatives, contains 80% meat. Perhaps a glass of Pinot Noir with that?" When he and his younger brother go to the park I understand why other dogs come up to him so enthusiastically. They all think he's carrying! No barking, just a wry grin. I can almost hear him saying to the gathered crowd of fellow dogs: "Isn't that grass so green today? Hey, like what you did with your fur...Nice lead....., your owner still going through a bad divorce? Stressed? You should try these. Two bones a pill. Trust me. You'll just glide through the day....."

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It’s a passport photo, not a Henri Cartier Bresson portrait

January 24, 2021
Fasion Health & Beauty Sex Travel/Nature
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Why...

Do we go care so much about our passport photographs? It’s not as if we expect to go on a date with a Custom’s Officer? A dear late friend of mine was a wildly successful manager of Rock and Pop Stars. He got a call one day from a world famous client who was performing at Wembley and due to fly out and perform three days later at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. His passport had expired so my friend went to his London home, picked up the passport and went to Petit France (where passports were renewed in those days) and due to the fame of his client managed to get a new passport. Two days later he got a furious call from his famous client saying he would not be going to Berlin as he hated the photo his agent had selected in the new passport. He refused to use that passport and had it incinerated. Concert was postponed! And no, I am not saying who this was! In our new COVID world you can renew a passport online with an I-phone photo. Let me just say my wife was extremely upset at the photo I took of her recently for her new passport. “Darling, you are an eternal beauty. But it’s flat lighting, a head on shot against a white background, blank expression, hair pulled back... so the odd wrinkle might show.” She was still not happy. “The only person ever to see it will be an overweight Immigration officer with halitosis that could strip paint and a probably unhealthy desire to give you an “internal” search. My recommendation is to look as appealing as roast pangolin served by a waiter with a cough.” That worked.

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Not only is diet a four letter word, but Darwin was a lying bast*rd

January 17, 2021
Animals/Pets Fasion Health & Beauty Food & Drink Kids/Family/Relations Sex
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Why...

Do foods I like to eat mean I have to diet? My wife has read me the riot act after indulging in too much Christmas pudding and Port. This is where I have a disagreement with Charles Darwin whilst floating around the Pacific in HMS Beagle. He had his Eureka! moment looking at finches in the Galapagos and noticing different beaks for different foods on different islands. “Aha,” he cried. “We evolve with our surroundings; especially with regards to eating specific foods.” If, as a species, our diet evolves with our surroundings, surely the fact that I prefer the taste of a Jelly Baby to that of a raw carrot means my body, via evolution, adapts to the candy? But no. My body apparently directly challenges my taste buds. “Jelly baby, No. Carrot, Yes.” On the other hand if my eating habits were purely hereditary rather than evolutionary surely I would be turning up my nose at a fillet steak or coq au vin whilst longing for a Tyrannosaurus Rex cutlet or Mammoth Osso Buco ? I prefer to think that evolution will catch up. Mac and cheese followed by peach cobbler and ice cream will hopefully do me or at least future generations, far more good than artichoke hearts and a tofu sausage. Mother Nature implants desire into us for our own good. Humans are sex mad to keep up procreation. Therefore, there must be a method behind me salivating at the smell of frying bacon or going weak at the knees at the sight of a chocolate eclair!

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Internet Influencers. Now you see me, now you dont

October 11, 2020
Entertainment/Media/Arts Fasion Health & Beauty Technology
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Why...

Are some ‘Social Influencers’ allowed to sell themselves in a way that if they were a product they would be yanked from the shelves for gross misrepresentation? Over the past six months the launch of my book Fall Out has thrust me into to the world of digital promotion and social media. In addition, my CBD business is substantially expanding its range and reach so I equally have become involved in the world of credible marketing content influencers and reviewers. Let me be clear. There are wonderful decent influencers out there. Real professionals whose dedication to their speciality is pure and the idea of paying them for an opinion is an anathema... substance not image is their calling card. However, it is the fakery in a business that is meant to engender total honesty that has my jaw hitting the floor. The proliferation of enhanced photo images on-line has reached epidemic proportions. During the period of a learning curve so steep it was nearly vertical, I discovered the story of the two ladies above. Coeyyy and Extreme are mega influencers from China and just one example of bloggers or vloggers who have ‘tweaked’ their image. This raises more questions than a condom in a nunnery. Firstly, the whole point of an influencer is surely that people trust their judgement, not their cheekbones, to make a decision to purchase something. In addition, as an Influencer it’s surely what you say or write that matters; not if you unfortunately hit every branch of the ugly tree.

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Maltese Termites are fed up with lockdown

October 3, 2020
Animals/Pets Fasion Health & Beauty Politics
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Why...

Did these wood-chomping insects decide to come out of hiding last week and treat my home as a smorgasbord? Recently I awoke to the sound of my wife cursing and yelling. As I was still in bed I wracked my brain if I had said or done anything offensive the night before. We had hosted a fairly drunken dinner party during which all I could recall was the dogs farted and the charming lady next to me hoovering up food and drink with abandon. Being brave I got up and went to where the wailing and gnashing of teeth came from. My wife was gesticulating at a wall that seemed to be crisscrossed with curved lines of what looked like pepper. She was frantically pulling picture frames off the wall. “They have eaten my ‘I will not talk during class’.”Sure enough a picture frame that housed the final page signed by her father of a punishment of several hundred lines handed out in 2nd grade, now looked like it was made from Swiss cheese. It was full of holes. In fact the entire back of the wooden frame had proved to be a canapé before the main course of this highly prized family heirloom. This troop of munchers seemingly overnight had devoured several picture frames and half a door frame. A feat of gluttony that was pretty impressive. “Honestly, will you look at that. These things are no respecter of Covid lockdown.....” This time I had to move quickly to avoid a slap.

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Whatever happened to bath time?

Why...

Do I nearly always shower? A long soak in the tub comes from an era when things were less hurried. Bath time for me now evokes a period in England that is ‘mid Agatha Christie’. Milk was delivered to your door and fruit flavoured ice lollies contained no actual fruit, only additives. Women wore A line skirts and no one ever swore on TV. Any form of ablution was to be enjoyed, be it a bath full of ducks, battleships or even other playmates! And nearly always at the end of the day so you could take as long as wanted. Morning showers have sort of crept up on me as the only way to clean. I have lived for two years in this house and whose bath is a whirlpool. In that time the only things ever washed in it have been the dogs! As a kid the idea of a whirlpool bath would have offered more fun than an aircraft hanger sized slot car track. Creating bubbles without having to fart would have been nirvana; the idea it was big enough for all your friends to splash about would have been so exciting that I would have performed household chores just to be able to have a bath like that!

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All posts in category: Fasion Health & Beauty

Why a spring break is like a Pringle

Why...

🎶 Here comes summer … or does it?

Why...

I never know what to put in each recycle bin

Why...

Who took in my trousers?

Why...

Officer. Arrest that man. His clothes fit

Why...

Going going going. Sold to you sir. Expect to die horribly

Why...

Be still my beating heart. No, I’m not lovestruck. I am about to get on a plane

Why...

I need a degree in physics to work in my kitchen

Why...

Cycle lanes … they worry me

Why...

The only time it is acceptable to wear a tag is on your toe in the morgue

Why...

Whatever time I wake up, I always feel everyone else should be awake

Why...

Time for an enema

Why...

Resistance is futile... I will dress like a pimp from a blaxploitation movie

Why...

Do I get loyalty points if I have to quarantine for two weeks in a hotel?

Why...

My pet is a drug dealer

Why...

It’s a passport photo, not a Henri Cartier Bresson portrait

Why...

Not only is diet a four letter word, but Darwin was a lying bast*rd

Why...

Internet Influencers. Now you see me, now you dont

Why...

Maltese Termites are fed up with lockdown

Why...

Whatever happened to bath time?

Why...