Taking on Applejack.

Arguably, when the closest one's Friday night gets to a club involves driving home to Annie Mac Presents, Saturday morning lie-ins are unjustifiable. Especially for a morning person. Despite this, going for a run at 8.25 during one is still pretty ungodly.

After a couple of glasses of wine the previous evening (consumed post-work, alongside a family meal and 'civilised' conversation. WILD), I agreed, nay, was coerced, into going for a jog the next morning avec newly-fitness-fanatic sister. As regular readers may know, I've not been adverse to an early run across the acres of field that comprise the Shire, and so, despite not having done any exercise for two months, this seemed like a great way to squidge in some sibling quality time in a weekend otherwise lost to H.E.R.S (high-end retail slavery, get with it). Or so I was told.

The thing is, I should always have been suspicious. VINCENTS DON'T DO SPORT. As recent nostalgic 'accidental' replaying of home videos from the early nineties has demonstrated, we're missing that from both gene pools. Granted, we're not overweight nor lazy; enjoy a walk and some hands-on gardening. However, P.E and Games were never timetable highlights, the fact that Dad couldn't join in the Dad's Race at primary school sports day due to 9-5 commitments never massively grieved us - we weren't blind to the comparable size of the rugby team fathers - and I, one-time team member of the Rounders 'B' Team in year 9 and a fourth member of the winning relay team due to peer pressure alone, am considered 'the sporty one'. As a bored child I much rather had crayons than quoits, to the extent my mother threatened moving 'to a flat with no garden if you don't go and play in it'. No thankyou, sport, we do vintage motor cars and baking, a healthy equilibrium considering the slight of arse necessary to fit into the former.

Therefore the announcement that female sibling Bowlface had a) decided to run 10K, and b) for a sense of self-achievement, a celebration of youth and well-being and, even more shockingly, c) NON-CHARITABLE FUN, shook us as a family unit somewhat. The lack of sponsorship has been a point hotly and repeatedly justified by her over the weekend, especially considering that Mummy B confessed to 'telling everyone [she] was doing it for Cancer Research'.


I woke up at 8.03 on Saturday morning, sleepily surmised that sister B would be pouncing into my room at any second and that, like my five year-old self trying to avoid a smack, hiding under the duvet would make it all go away. Eight minutes later my room was indeed invaded by Sister B dressed head to toe in overpriced, 'scientifically-personalised' lycra garb from some kind of Clapham-specific running shop. Reader, my resistance was short-lived and futile. At 8.16 I joined her, (in freebie scene-mag teeshirt and grubby mum trainers) analogising that whilst she resembled (My Little Pony) Applejack from our childhood toybox in temperament and appearance, I was feeling like 'Claude', the peculiarly chunky mauve plastic nag from a French supermarket.

Don't underestimate that doe-eyed expression. 'Claude', not unsurprisingly, does not have a Google images entry.

This proved true for the entire 30 minutes and 2.5 miles of tomato-faced 'sibling quality time'. I do believe the words 'go on without me', were muttered at one point. I had turned into the Billy Pilgrim of a Shire-based Slaughterhouse Five, complete with her disbelieving my sheep theories. Never again.  

Can someone give me abs, please?

Old habits die hard. It's my day off from 'style advising' in high end retail hell and blogging has already been interrupted by 'style advising' Mummy Bowlface's lunch party outfit whilst simultaneously explaining my life plan. This wasn't even the old habit I was referring to dying hard. Because, friends, I've returned to the early weekend 'bed blog' - a means of psyching myself up for a run which has, naturally, resulted in me sacking it off. The sun's come out now - a couple hours ago it was still cloudy and under my duvet vague thoughts of dashing through fields seemed a bit like a Witch Hazel advert, from which I would return with rock-hard abs.

Alas and welaway, I shall remain podgy and maybe attempt a few crunches during Friends. Oh hai, being sixteen. Without distractions from the outside cultured world, such as The Creators Project, I find myself using sad bits of trivia and comments from the middle-aged ladies I serve as a root of autodidacticism. Or blog fodder, at the very least. Yesterday I repeated this feeble joke in both verbal and text form to at least four people:

'what's the best cheese to hide a horse?'
'mascapone!'

I got that gem off Radio One, which, Bowlfans, you may remember me shunning in light of Radio Four's erudite leanings. However, I just like 'chart and chat' of a morning when it's spent inside a car, driving to a place which insists on repeating the same Hits of The 80s CDs for eight hours a day. Yesterday it took my colleague about 4.9 minutes to comment on my 'neck beard' - a bit of tufty fluff which, contrary to the urban dictionary definition, was once my hair until an unfortunate sunny afternoon and a friend with scissors resulted in a feeble undercut attempt - before announcing that the septuagenarian she just served smelt like me. Upon entering the fitting room this lady had been occupying, I couldn't smell a thing, which proved her point. Apparently, it smells like 'dairy', more specifically milk - I'm hoping she's trying to describe the smell of cocoa butter because otherwise this is a whole new symptom of Shire Syndrome.

Later the influence of Gok Wan that all broadsheet weekend colour supplements like to comment on at least quarterly was realised as the following conversation occurred between two customers:
'oh, if you try that dress on you have to wear a belt with it'
'why?'
'because Gok puts a belt with everything, so it must be good'.
It's sad but true that the man who adorns high street items with hideous haberdashery really is transforming lives.

Add a couple of Italians who I overheard saying 'Mamma Mia' and the fact that the campest hairdresser in the village down the road isn't free to deal with the neck beard until THE 8TH OF JULY and I had a thoroughly gob smacking day. Lunch party later: cue scenes from The Graduate. I'm contemplating printing handouts with bullet points justifying my graduate existence to save repetitive and awkward conversations.

Bowlday Sweat

.

Believe it or not, it's a year today since the first ever bowlpost. I know, gone fast, huh? No better way to celebrate, I thought, than reporting from the front line of post-run sweat. Mmmm. Birthday sweat for Bowlface, in honour of guilty pleasure song extreme Jeremih, 'Birthday Sex'. I think I'm pretty much the only person who's not fourteen and potentially 'gangsta' who wishes this was my ringtone, but hey, it's Bowlface's birthday and I can make it cry if I want to.

So, up-to-the-minute reportage on the Shire sheep front. I'd say unnervingly placid, but also present were a couple tractors and farmers. So maybe they were on good behaviour. Otherwise, there have been some lamb reshufflings, with new tiny baby lambs in field number three, and bleaty mcbleat lambs having mysteriously enlarged since Monday in field number six. The story continues.

Yesterday, however, saw my feelings to such livestock weaken as a gatecrashing of Stowe (stately home/mega public school) gardens resulted in some suitably posh lamb activity. They were fluffy, apparently innocent and did all the right kind of bleating, as in for their mums, rather than at me. Fortunately, when it came to scrambling over the Ha-Ha (if in doubt, there's an appropriate wiki entry here) there were no sheep nor official National Trust-looking types about to bleat, so a shred of dignity was maintained.

In a similar mode of 'days out', a.k.a, how best to avoid urgent deadlines in the name of family quality time, today the Bowlface family embarked upon Fulham Palace Gardens. Sad to say, no ancient wall activity was involved as it is entirely free and legal to enter the aforementioned, apart from perhaps those doing community service in the flowerbeds. Lambs replaced with small mini-Boden babies, and a fancy cup of tea in an oversized Georgian room later and I was all set for being Jane Austen in a breton top for the rest of the afternoon.

One last birthday treat for Bowlface regulars (because I'm guessing you can't get Jeremih's greatness out of your head) is another fantastically off-the-wall video launch from VBS's Vice Guide To Film.
Basically, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's film-makers went freedom crazy after 60 years of state-approved Socialist Realism. Now known as Parallel Cinema, VBS's Shane Smith travelled to Moscow to interview its founders. There's a lot of pretending to be animals (probably what I've been doing for the last week, judging by the high sheep content) and booze, and as well as being a nice way to pass the time you can impress film geeks in the pub with all your new found knowledge.

Good News: no more groundhog day. Bad News: sheep will be my downfall

out. to. get. me.

So, it's almost a week on from when I feared my life had sunk into a inescapable cycle of repetition. I am glad to say that I don't think I will be stuck experiencing exactly the same situations over and over and over again. This also thankfully means that anyone reading this blog won't either. Phew.

Non-repetitive activities have involved American Apparel frequenting; slightly terrifying current affairs exams; trying to learn about current affairs for current affairs exams; hosting wild parent-free shire house shindigs; spending too much time standing up in Bicester Village and other more life affirming activities like first-time shopping for 'pants-magique' in a necessary Mother-Daughter ritual. With the exception of mentioning that QVC lies and that my podge did not disappear along with the capacity of my lungs, the less said about over sized, brutally lycrastic cycling shorts, the better.

Other evidence that my life has not turned into groundhog day comes in the changing forms of anxiety I cause amongst livestock during cross-country runs. For one, the aforementioned bleating has got considerably louder, to the extent it can be heard two fields away from the location of the sheep. But secondly, I seriously think they're onto me. On Tuesday there were six large ewes banked up in a wall of farmy fluff against the gate I had to move to get into the next field. After staring them out to no success I dived in amongst them. They reluctantly shuffled about, but they'll be plotting their next move, you wait. The lambs have started ganging up too. They may only be a foot and a half high but en masse I could be trampled to minor injury.

It is mainly this increasingly threatening behaviour that has resulted in me sitting here in 'sportswear' (next to the onesie, my second favourite house-confined outfit. Oh god, so comfy), listening to a running playlist, blogging, rather than actually taking to the fields. My reasoning being that darkness would fall by the time I returned, but that is clearly not going to happen, and it is evidently a beautiful evening. Secretly, however, I'm scared of what the sheep might be upto at night time. Evening-sleepy sheep are arguably more threatening than dozy morning sheep, they might have constructed a trap or something.

Maybe it's because I LOLled at roadkill earlier. It was, naturally, a pheasant. However, unlike most, which have mangled wings and blood etc etc, this one was lying dead straight (ha) looking skywards. Like he was sunbathing. He totally died for laughs.

In the meantime, I'm going to make like a gothy Sue Sylvester. (All my 'sportswear' is black so I can pretend I'm a ninja). Tomorrow, sheep, just you wait.

Also, anybody noticed something new? Hell yeah! The Shire has been officially located on Bowlface. Within the happy vagueness of a 'Vale' however - don't want any cyber-savvy woolly things to start uniting forces.