Good times, for a change...

Don't think I am unaware of my reputation as a merchant of perpetual gloom and misery. Life is shit, don't bloody blame me for pointing it out, take it up with your God or gods. However, since you stick with me regardless, I thought it only fair to report on life's little joys, when they crop up. So: I had the best day EVAH today!

Was 8.30am stand-by at Marble Arch, which, for the uninitiated, in winter generally means standing on the street for eight hours pushing leaflets onto unwilling passers by. Not my favourite shift. However, since we're busy for the Christmas holidays, I was only on stand by until noon; time which passed quickly what with my being shuffled from Marble Arch to Green Park, and there being other guides milling around between tours who I could talk to. Then I got sent up to Hyde Park Corner to start an extra tour at 12.07 (I love how precise they are with their timings. 12.07pm and not a minute before was that bus to leave). Top deck was maybe two thirds full, and most of them stayed on for the whole tour. They were undoubtedly the best crowd I have ever had. Most were native speakers, those that weren't were totally fluent (really helps with the nuances), all were competely engaged and attentive. It's like being a very minor rock star with a tiny crowd of hard-core fans.

One couple pre-emptively tipped me a fiver about 20 minutes into the tour, despite staying until a few stops before the end. I like that kind of condfidence in my abilities. About half of them at the end of the tour asked for comment cards so they could praise me - one woman even filled it out in front of me so I could hand it straight in to the office - everyone clapped and someone asked for my full name and said they were going to give me a rave review on Trip Advisor, which would be my closest brush with fame since Peter Hitchens called me a Stalinist. I'm going to so disappointed if it doesn't happen now.

Then I had a half hour break, came back to the stop and was told that I wasn't needed any longer as there weren't going to be any further extra tours and I could retire for the day on full pay at 3pm! Was home by 4.30pm, discovered my new iPhone had arrived far earlier than expected (huzzah!), and was sprawled on the bed with a Crabbies and a bowl of peanuts (really good for healthy weight gain, apparently) by the time I'd normally just be knocking off.

So that was my very good day. Enjoy my childlike excitement at the simple pleasures of life. Just don't get used to it, you know it won't last...

On cheese, curry, tourists and film

I let my Twitter followers dictate my next few blog topics. First up, tackling @Nickehbee's many questions:

What's your favourite type of cheese?

This question is vague - does type refer to style of a cheese (i.e. soft, blue, mature, etc) or a specific named brand (Cheddar, Gruyere, etc)? It is also hard to answer - asking me to choose between cheeses is like asking a mother to choose between her children.

Stylistically, my preferences lay with soft cheeses with garlic and/or herbs. Le Roulle, Boursin, anything you can eat on a toasted bagel (although realistically, I will end up eating it with my fingers, directly out of the tub). However if choosing a specific cheese, it would be between Mozzarella and Halloumi. Mozzarella reminds me of Bologna (and Spain, oddly enough) and the Italian (the first Italian, not the second) and is delicious whether fried (I only recently discovered fried cheese. I can't believe my arteries have remained unfurred for so long) or fresh. Halloumi is not so delicious when not grilled or fried, but is so very versatile, and my Halloumi and Chorizo wrap lunch from the Greek place at Glasto made me feel worldly and sophisticated.

Where's the best place to get curry?

Curry mile in Birmingham, obviously. I went to the first one on the row, closest to the entrance to uni once (come on, there is NO point after the first three. Students don't walk a mile in search of curry when they could walk 5 feet). It was the weirdest thing ever. My chicken Korma was almost pure sugar. I wasn't keen at the time, but I had the left over sauce, cold, with naan bread for breakfast the next morning and it was like coconut ice cream. AWESOME.

Most irritating tourist you've encountered so far?

Oh, easy, although it was a group of tourists rather than one. This has happened quite a lot, but one group were stand out. Four stops into the red tour is the stop for the blue tour, with recorded commentary in a variety of languages. So you get a few people per tour on the bus for the first four stops who clearly neither know what you're saying, nor care. This is fine. What they should do is sit quietly downstairs for four stops, but they don't, they sit on the top deck, usually right at the front, and talk loudly. You know, at the same time as me. The absolute WORST lot was a massive group of Spanish people last week, who colonised the entire front of the bus and talked loudly through all my initial commentary. When I started shouting - partially to make a point, partially because people at the back were motioning that they couldn't hear - they seemed to view this as a challenge to their authority and started shouting over me. And sighing and shooting me glances that would imply they felt *I* was rude for interrupting their conversation. Fucking unbelievable.

Also got a group of teenage girls who stayed on for ten stops and spent the entire time on their mobiles. They were the only people on the bus. It's so frustrating when there's literally no point in you speaking, but you have to carry on. I'll never get people who seem to use the tour bus just as a method of transport, with no regard for the commentary. It costs €27! A taxi would be cheaper!

Also group of French tourists at a stop, wanting to buy tickets. Quite apart from the fact that I'm not sales staff and it wasn't my problem anyway, they were getting REALLY angry at me for not being able to speak French. WTF?! When I work in France and don't bother to learn a few token words of the language, get pissed off with me, but are you seriously going to get arsey with me for not happening to be fluent in your particular language when you're in MY country?! Also got a family of German who thought I couldn't understand them slagging me off.

Really, I just fucking hate tourists.

Worst film you've ever seen and why?

I saw a film at the cinema once, and I can't remember what it was called, or what it was about. All I remember is that it starred George Clooney, and there was a scene where he wallked through his house in the twilight. That is literally it. There have been lots of films I have hated, but I think the fact I can remember a single thing about them implies they were a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever the fuck it was I saw that day. Although The Singing Detective remake was pretty fucking horrific.

First date feedback

1.) On a scale of one to ten, where one means "unsatisfactory" and ten means "very satisfactory", how satisfactory was our date?

2.) Will you be calling me?

Yes/No (Delete as appropriate)

3.) If "no", why?

You did/didn't put out and I only wanted sex/You're a horrible human being and the thought of speaking to you ever again makes me physically sick/Other (Delete as appropriate)

Where "other", please specify:

4.) What improvements could I make?

5.) Other comments:

Maybe I've just been rejected without any explanation too many times now, but I can't help thinking that getting the above questions printed up on comment cards to hand to any future dates is the singular greatest idea I've ever had.

I get asked out about once a year; in fact, last week's date may actually have fallen EXACTLY 12 months after the last one I had, in Berlin. That'd be freaky. And both times exactly the same thing - we had really long, deep conversations, we laughed a lot, we had tonnes in common, we seemed to get on really well. In the case of the latter, there was an amount of slightly inappropriate touching. And then he says he'll call, and he doesn't.

I'm just so sick of the disconnect between my perception of things and the reality. I can never stop being confused by thinking things went really well when the guy obviusly thinks I'm a douche. Couldn't we all just be more honest? God, if a man stood up midway through a date with me and said "You're not as pretty as I thought you were when I was drunk, and your left wing politics bore me, I'm off", I think I'd applaud.

I am not actually that insecure about my looks. I know I'm passably attractive in a weird, fashiony kind of way. I'd far rather be commercially, classically pretty like Victoria's Secret models or my friend Hanna; the kind of pretty no one can argue with, but I know I only scare maybe 60% of the horses. And my friends keep telling me I'm hot (although friends are liable to lie on this front), and scientific theory has long held that we're generally friends with people on the same scale of attractiveness as ourselves and my friends are all coupled up; so either I'm an anaomoly, or it's my horrible personality that's to blame.

Obviously there is something wrong with me, and if I knew what it was, maybe I could do something about it. And I know my friends are all going to say "there's nothing wrong with you, he's a twat", but it's a simple numbers game. Not every bloke I've ever been rejected by can have been a complete twat. It's like with email boy. I'm tortured by the dichotomy of the fact that I fell for him because he's so motherfucking nice, and the fact that I recognise he has treated me in a pretty horrible way. But if you asked his girlfriend of god knows how many years, of course she would say he was lovely, and not at all a twat. It was email boy who said once, not to me, but to one of the other models, that men treated her badly because she allowed them to. Obviously there is something about my character that is the equivilent of my having "doormat/disposable" or just "horrible person" tattoed on my forehead.

It sucks that it is not generally the done thing to ring men up ask them why they hate you. Because I need to know what is wrong with me, because I don't think I can face the idea of going through this again. I know most of you wont believe me when I say this, but I'm an eternal fucking optimist. Every time I meet a man I idiotically think he really likes me, and every time he just ditches me, and I end up getting crushed again. I genuinely don't think if anybody asked me out again I would say yes, no matter how I felt about them, because there's no point, I KNOW the same thing will happen again, it'll be one date, and I'll never hear from him again.

Nothing my friends can say can make me feel better. People tell me that I'm smart and talented, as though that somehow makes up for the fact that men find me about as attractive as a recently exhumed corpse. Men don't give a shit that I got all A*s in my GCSEs, or that my Popdash article was the most read for one whole week. I'd far rather be thick and happy than clever enough to realise I'm miserable.

I don't mean to sound like I don't appreciate my friends and their tireless efforts to bolster my self-esteem. I'd probably be in the nuthouse without them. That I probably belong in the nuthouse anyway being beside the point. I just really, really want to know what's so fundamentally unloveable about me. I feel totally worthless at the minute; I've been bursting into tears all day. I feel supremely lucky to have my job, because after so many menial office jobs, this is the first job I've had where I literally do not have the time to get sad, and that's probably what's keeping me from being more depressed than I already am.

So yes, I think this is a splendid idea.

The Rules

Date last week. I never fucking learn. Do not be yourself. Never EVER be your fucking SELF.

Well, you lot can probably be yourselves, but people don't like MY self. Remember, when I thought it was really sweet that Email Boy told me I was a really interesting person to know? Stupidity; that's the kiss of death for romance. In reality, men do not care if you are clever, they do not care if you have good taste in music, or are politically engaged or have an opinion on anything whatsoever.

I am so tired of men telling me I am so very fucking interesting, then going home and fucking blonde girls with all the personality of an empty shoe box. Interesting girls finish last. I wish I could just be pretty and dumb like everybody wants.

So very fucking tired.

On Internships: the system is wrong when you have to break the law to get a job.

So, couertesy of the Guardian, I learned something rather alarming yesterday - for two weeks last month, I was breaking the law. I'd love to say killing spree, but my crime was rather more boring than that; I was, apparently, in contravention of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998. Again, sadly, this was not because I was running an illegal sweatshop from my basement (first problem with that being that I don't have a basement). No. I did an internship.

It should have been obvious really. It is illegal to pay anyone over the age of 21 less than €5.93 an hour. I hadn't realised it, but working for less than €5.93 an hour is also a crime (way to penalise the victim there).

So to clarify: if you do an unpaid internship both you and the person who hired you are breaking the law. Yet, I never questioned the legality of what I was doing, because it's just so ingrained in all our minds that working for free is just something you have to do to get a job. How the hell did it come to this? To a state of affairs where it is considered the norm for thousands of people to be forced to resort to criminal measures to get a foot on the career ladder?

I expected it to an extent with the industry I'm trying to get into. In journalism, your portfolio is your cv, and it's just always been a fact that you'd have to offer your services for free in exchange for those crucial bylines. I worked two days a week at my local paper for four months while I trained, and for a full week at The Times. In retrospect, I don't know which was worse; the Basildon Echo happily employing me as a junior reporter, keeping me in the office all hours working on stories without any pay or The Times offering me "work experience" only to use me to fill in for their receptionist while she was on holiday. Neither of them even paid me travel expenses. But I didn't mind, because I accpeted this was something I needed to do. Where I went wrong was thinking afterwards that I had paid my dues.

So I found myself, several years later, accepting the offer of an unpaid internship at Popdash, the music news website. I fucking loved it. Even though 90% of my output was related to Cheryl Cole (and about 10% of that was likely to actually be true) I loved it, because I was doing what I wanted to do - spending all day writing. In most jobs you spend a certain portion of the day watching the clock, and fucking about on Facebook and Twitter in workplaces kind enough to allow you to do so. I can honestly say I never checked the clock except when I was on my lunch break. My boss had to literally force me I had to go home every day because I always wanted to stay and finish one last thing. I could have checked Facebook, or Twitter, or my emails, but it never occured to me to do so.

I felt productive, felt valued, like a member of the team - exceedingly foolishly, it would turn out, as two weeks into my month long, supposedly rolling internship I got an email telling me not to bother coming in any more. I was only doing two days a week, they'd found someone free to do the whole week, so they wanted to go with her instead. Makes more sense they said. And of course, it does. The fact that they told me they only wanted me to do two days a week and then held it against me doesn't make any sense, but I'm done driving myself mad over that one.

So my foray into the murky criminal underworld has left me feeling bereft and utterly fucking used. This wasn't an opportunity for me to learn vital skills, like anything masquerading as "work experience" should be - I was a trained journalist and received no further instruction from them. This was just an opportunity for them to have someone come in and supplement the work of the ONE permanent writer on the website for free. It was the same at all of the titles in the stable - each was run by one permanent writer, who got to call themself the editor, and a rotating cotarie of interns. Talk about fucking cheap. I worked out on day one this wasn't going to lead to my being offered a job there. And because I was unceremoniously booted out ahead of schedule, I never even got to sit down with my editor and discuss my performance, ask where I could improve, and ask for his advice on breaking into the industry, which I was planning to do. I didn't even get to pick up my travel expenses. I'm not sure exploitative even begins to cover the extent of the dodginess of that operation.

But like I said, I at least, was prepared for this. When did it change from creative jobs like writing and design requiring people to "pay their dues" working for free to ALL jobs? Every week I am inundated with emails from job websites, particularly those aimed at students/graduates all advertising internships: "Marketing Internships", "IT Internships", "Finance Internships". It reached it's absolute zenith, however, last week, when I spied an ad for an "Administration Internship".

When I'm not busy working for free I do temp work in offices, reception, general admin, that sort of thing. Have done for many years, while I was still modelling, travelling etc. This is what I do formoney, and more pointedly, my first job after uni when I had no experience whatsoever. So I was racking my brains trying to think what on earth someone could want to do in the administrative field that would require/justify some form of unpaid training. So I clicked on the details, and job description ran thusly: "Working behind the reception desk, answering calls, greeting visitors etc, plus filing, data entry and ad hoc administrative duties". That's not an internship, that's a receptionist/officer junior role, a school-leavers job, full time, for no money. That's what I won't get out of bed for less than €7.50 an hour for (I'm so rock and roll), for FREE. I'm sorry but whoever is behind that is taking the fucking piss, and should be ashamed of themelves, because they're not helping anyone but themselves with that "great opportunity to gain some experience in the challenging world of office administration". If you need to breal the law to get a job anwering phones now, Cod help us all is all I can say.

As for my experience, it hasn't got me any closer to a career in journalism. Maybe I should have been hacking people's phones.

The End of the (Non) Affair

"O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever." - Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

Confession: I have never actually read The End of the Affair. Is it ethical to steal quotes from books you've never read? Nicky Wire seems to think so. Seriously. You know how the Manics put a literary quote on the back of every record they release? I used to love them for that (I still do. I know people who hate the Manics will probably site this sort of pretension as a reason why, but what these people don't understand is that being pretentious is cool. I aspire towards it, genuinely). I used to read the books the quotes were taken from. Because Nicky Wire is awesome and ridiculously clever, and I want to be awesome and ridiculously clever too, like how people buy Kate Moss perfume because they want to be beautiful like Kate, but with loftier aims. (Incidentally, why did/do people buy Jade Goody perfume? Do they want to be thick racists? I don't buy that you shouldn't mock the dead. Yeah, yeah, she's not around to defend herself, but I don't think she spent a great deal of time reading my Facebook page when she was alive, either.) And then, a few years ago, the bombshell - Wire confesses that he hasn't read all the books that he quotes from, and it some cases, theived them from the blogs/fanzines of Manics fans who had probably only read that book in the first place because they thought Wire would have! That bastard! I read Crash because of him! Well, I think Crash was mainly a Richey one, but still. THERE ARE NO REDEEMING FEATURES TO A BOOK THAT USES THE WORDS "SEMEN", "SMEGMA" AND "SPLATTERED" IN THE SAME SENTENCE. ON THE FIRST PAGE. NONE. So my theory being, if it's all right for Wire, the fount of all awesomeness in the world, it's all right for me. And I will read it one day. Honest. I was originally going to call this just The End of the Affair, but then I opened the Guardian today and that was the title of their feature on Emmy the Great (seriously, Guardian film and music section - GET OUT OF MY HEAD) and so it seemed passe. And besides what I'm writing about doesn't really count as an affair anyway. Oh, I suppose at some point you'd like me to get around to the point of all this? Well then, let's begin.

"No you never kissed me, never felt anything for me...." - Manic Street Preachers, Sepia

Yeah, includes song quotes too. That's how you know you've really fallen for someone, I reckon, when you think about them and all your thoughts arrive in the form of lyrics. If I'd ever had the courage I'd have said "I know it sounds like such a line/But why live in your world when you could live in mine?" (Art Brut, Sexy Sometimes), but as it is, my life for the last eight months or so has been Binary Love by the Rakes ("Despite the metal and wires/I still have human desires") and Boyfriend by Best Coast ("The other girl is not like me/She's prettier and

skinnier") on repeat.

So as I said, it was a Sepia situation, because it was a Boyfriend situation ("If only I could get her out of the picture..."). And I knew that he had a girlfriend, who was shorter than me (no one likes tall girls), and prettier than me, and blonder and more Russian than me (I am in fact, not Russian at all, something I've been insecure about ever since I learned that a) 99% of succesful models are Russian (and 14) and b) every man I've ever liked has either been with or left me for a woman from the former Soviet Union. Ok, not every man. But like, three in a row). Ideally I'd have liked to have known thatbefore I asked him on a date, but you know, we live and learn. But in retrospect, there's a lot of stuff about the whole situation that I don't know. Like, since he had a girlfriend, and I knew that, and he knew that, why did he have to go and make me feel so god damn special? I know plenty of people in relationships flirt, and it doesn't mean anything, but oh this felt different. Maybe it's just because (I don't think) a man's ever told me I'm beautiful before (fit, yes, but it doesn't quite have the same ring) or that my having strong opinions on things makes me interesting to talk to (most other people at Sassoon only try to engage me in conversation about feminism or politics because they think it's funny to watch me get worked up about it) or that they miss me when I'm not around, or maybe they have, but they were all trying to get in my pants and the fact that he wasn't just made me like him more, in the same horribly ironic way that men you fancy not cheating on their girlfriends with you is wont to make you that much more into them because they're so bloody honourable. Fucks sake biology.

So every couple of months, work would throw us together for some show or trip or some such, and I'd come home from every occasion more into him than ever, more convinced that one day, one day, it was definitely all going to work out between us, and then I wouldn't see or speak to him again until the next time, and I'd just have all my hopes crushed again. Ad nauseum. Whether it was intentional ot not, at some point his behaviour with me crossed the line from "harmless flirting" into "sadistically toying with my emotions" and now I don't think my poor, battered little heart can actually take any more. I'm out.

Of course the sountrack to my life the whole time, outside of slushy songs of unrequited longing, was the cacophony of my friends all saying "He's a dick, he's a dick, no, really, he's a dick, why are you still obsessing about this man who is CLEARLY A DICK?" It probably says something about how much faith your friends have in the potential of you forming a relationship with someone when they start using "keepyourfeetonthegroundV" as a hashtag on Twitter. But you

never listen to your friends on such matters, do you?

Everyone told me he was leading me on and I wouldn't have it, because he's just so fucking nice, I didn't think he would do something so intentionally mean. I still don't think he would, intentionally, because for all his faults I still think he's a vomit-inducingly amazing person, but he did lead me on ("I led you on/And leading's wrong" - Have I Been A Fool, Jack Penate), and now I'm fucking angry about it. Sometimes I fancy he's laughing about me behind my back, or that he views me as a some kind of charity case - "Oh, poor pathetic girl, in love with someone so hopelessly out of her league, I'll throw her bone every now and then, make her feel better."

I don't know what he wants from me. He left the company, would have been the perfect opportunity to finally rid himself of me, but apparently he wants to be "friends" (you see where I get the non/affair part from? It's like a break up except there wasn't even any sex in the preceeding months). "Set me free why don't you/Because you don't really want me/You just keep me hanging on" - Keep Me Hanging On, Kim Wilde. So far, I question his definition of friendship. If you want to be my friend come get tight with me in some grotty pub on cider and alcoholic iced tea ("tight" is 1940s slang for tipsy or drunk and I love it and want to use it forever), or lets do our make-up together and fight over Barry M glitter pots (this is a gender neautral activity in my friendship group. I fucking love being a Manics fan). Don't text me season's greetings on Christian holidays and think this demonstrates that you care. That' not fucking friendship, that's the relationship you have with relatives who you don't actually like!

I read a quote from a book about relationships that said you should never chase after a man who isn't interested in you, because it'll just knock your confidence and leave you doubting your desirability. Now you tell me. I don't think my sense of self-worth has actually dipped any lower than when pictures of him with her turn up on my news feed. Desirability? I don't mean to sound self-pitying but it's hard to feel desirable when you've essentially spent the better part of year being continually turned down, even if it is by the same bloody person. If anything I don't deserve a happy relationship because I clearly dont fucking learn. And there's the fact that LOADS of hairdressers have got together with hair models at Sassoon over the years (it's like rock stars and Vogue models, but on a comically smaller scale), so why not me, what's wrong with me?, and etc.

My friends, having moved on from calling him and dick and warning me not to get carried away, are now threatening physical violence against him, every time I find myself cryng over him, again. And it does help, a little, having offers of beatings, and knee-cappings and a somehow more ominious threat to simply "fuck him up". Lightens the mood, because obviously, they're not going to do it. And of course I wouldn't really want them to, except....sometimes I wish he could feel even a fraction of the pain I'm feeling. And he clearly doesn't care about me (despite protestations to the contrary), so he's never going to feel the horrible....nothingness that you feel when you've got a broken heart, like somebody took away your soul...But a broken bone? I dunno, worth a shot.

Relationship book woman said you should move to Russia if that's what it takes to get over an unrequited passion. That would probably make things substantially worse in my case, considering. Maybe I'll go to Newquay.

Parents, stop Sexualising Your Children

So I'm sure everyone who reads the papers is aware of Cameron's big new initiative, halting the "sexualisation of children". On the surface, it's something we can all get behind. No one want to see eight-year-old girls in padded bras and Playboy knickers, under t-shirts reading "Daddy's Little Porn Star" - apart from, presumably, the people buying them. As Barbara Ellen beat me to saying this morning, they don't jump into little girls' underwear drawers all by themselves, do they? I'm a liberal, and as such am supposed, apparently, if you listen to Tories, to be all in favour of any and all governmental supervision of personal matters. And I'm not opposed to this plan per se, for the reasons stated above, but I can't help but thinking it's kind of pathetic for parents (the plans were drawn up by the head of the Mothers Union) to whine that the government needs to sort out a problem that is almost entirely of their own making. So henceforth, I offer you my handy print-out-and-keep, two part parenting guide to stop the sexualisation of children:

1.) When your daughter asks why she can't have a Playboy branded pencil case, choose the most appopriate of the following three answers:

*For the under 12's - "Because the man who makes them is a very bad man who wants to hurt women and little girls like you and we musn't let him."

*For the tricksy 12-16 demographic -" Because I bloody well said so, that's why. Now stop complaining or I'll make you start taking the Westlife one you had when you were 11 to school."

*For the over 16s (imagining you retain any shred of control over what they do) - Presuming you have been a responsible parent and already given them a grounding in the basics of feminism, start introducing them to statistics on the number of women working in the sex trade who were a.) trafficked, b.) victims of childhood abuse c.) drug or alcohol dependent d.) all of the above. Ask if they want to lend tacit support to an industry that preys on vulnerable young women and does nothing to offer them the support they actually need. Show them evidence demonstrating that rates of rapes and sexual assaults increases dramatically in areas with a preponderance of sex-encounter establishments (the new Playboy club, for all its claims, is nothing but). Explain to them, if they don't already know, that Playboy and its ilk objectifies women. Ask how they feel about being judged on their looks above anything else. Ask if our cult of beauty ever makes them feel bad about themselves; explain that this is a direct effect of our pornified, Playboy culture. If, after all this, she still wants Playboy branded anything, consider disowning her.

Take control over your daughter's underwear drawer. You buy her bras until she starts earning enough to buy them herself - don't buy a nine-year-old a bra except in the unlikely event that she needs one. If she complains of feeling immodest, buy her a vest. When she does need to start wearng a bra (not that anyone *needs* to, but you know what I mean), select non-wired, unpadded ones. Explain to her that breasts come in all shapes and sizes and small ones are just as nice as large ones. Instill her with self-confidence. Similarly with knickers - do not buy your child thongs. Do not buy your child lacy, see-through knickers. Do not buy your child knickers that have anything approaching a sexual slogan. If in doubt, avoid anything with a slogan at all.

Which brings me to t-shirts saying "So many boys, so little time", "Future porn star" etc. Ask if she understands what any of these slogans mean. If she doesn't, she's too young to be wearing it. Institue a no-lying-through-slogan-t shirts policy: only allow her to wear a t-shirt proclaiming her to be the next big thing in porn if she shows demonstrable desire and determination to forge a career in the adult film industry. Make her prove herself by sending her to meet with a few sleazy casting directors. If this does not scare her straight, you may wish to refer back to the advice on dealing with teenagers who wish to own Playboy branded products.

Re: the Christina Aguilira prime time X Factor performance and Rihanna's uncensored music videos (and music). Turn the television off. With older children there is only so much you can restrict their viewing if they spend time at friends houses, etc. But under your roof it's your rules; if Christina is writhing around in her underwear at 8pm, turn the television off or change the channel. If Rihanna is writhing around in her underwear moaning derivatively about how she likes to be spanked, turn the television off or change the channel.

THIS IS NOT DIFFICULT STUFF, PEOPLE.

2.) The slightly harder part. Take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself who's responsible for creating a culture in which the under-tens view Katie Price as a role model, tits and all. Got it yet? It's you, dumbass. Stop deliberately encouraging a porn culture. Turn the X Factor off when it showcases female or male artists sexually degrading themselves in a desperate bid at increased sales. Stop consuming pornography. Stop buying lads mags. Stop buying tabloid newspapers. Stop buying fashion magazines like Vogue and Elle that feature spreads using models unlikely to be above the age of sexual consent, pouting and half-naked and air-brushed to the extreme. Stop visiting strip clubs, stop buying music by recording artists who make promo videos that look like the Adult Channel's Midnight Teaser. Stop going to see films that treat women as sex objects. Stop treating women as sex objects. Just bloody stop it.

There, problem solved. You can thank me later.