The Maroon Diaries

How many times a day do you see some advertising in all our varied forms of media that is really stupid at best, or horribly offensive at worst? Probably really quite often, unless you live in a cave in Outer Mongolia. How often do you speak out and try to do something about it? Probably not very often. You might have tried once or twice and become discouraged at how hard it is to find someone responsible for the ad to listen to you. Or maybe you're just so overwhelmed by the enormity of this issue and don't know where to start. I want to give a HUGE congratulations and thank-you-for-fighting-the-good fight to Lucy from the wonderful blog Lulastic and the Hippyshake for her her fantastic response to an incredibly stupid AND horribly offensive ad for Weetabix in the UK. Bonus points for sending Barbie through the mail. Really, have a look, it's gorgeous. I must admit, only twice have I ever bothered to actually put my outrage into a formal complaint. The first time was

I read a fabulous book recently, as I often do, and I want to tell you about it, which is something that I also often want to do, but often don't. I had a little epiphany about why I don't get those thoughts out and onto a blog post. I've been using the term 'literary review' in the titles of posts about books. This is because I like literary reviews, and they're definitely a good thing to do. But now I realise I need to stop using this expression. I have too many constrictive ideas about what a literary review actually is, and many of the thoughts I have about books don't seem to be part of my definition of a literary review. So I'll just write about books. If you would like to read a more conventional kind of proper literary review of this book, there's this one here on Goodreads and this one on Novel Niche , both of which I quite liked. To begin with, my story about a book begins quite a bit earlier than when I actually read it. First, there

My family and I have had at least our fair share of health problems and hospital stays, but I never really understood how much pain there is in the world until I became Mr CJ's carer. When he first became unwell, I knew that it would take a long time and a gazillion tests before they worked out what was wrong with him. But I was still naive enough to imagine that once they worked out what the problem was, they would be able to treat him, and he might not get cured, but at least be able to manage and learn to live with it. That was four years ago. It turns out that even with all our whizz-bang medical technology, there's not much they can do with him other than prescribe addictive painkillers that just dull the pain, just a little. He's still in almost constant, intense pain. Whenever I look up from what I am doing, whether it's the dishes or a puzzle or blogging, the first thing I see is Mr CJ heroically bearing up under incredible pain. The first thing that happens

I had to have a little chuckle when I came across  this post this morning, where  Stan Carey describes his 'to-read' stack of books as a mountain. Then he corrects himself and points out that the mountain is actually more of a range. Now there's a man who's honest with himself, I thought to myself. I am still in total denial, obviously. I'm still just calling mine a 'pile' - though now I'm suddenly aware that this is a terribly inadequate word. Since as long as I can remember, there has always been, somewhere, in some form, a pile of books that I intend to read. This is what my Pile looked like a fortnight ago when I started writing this post. Then I procrastinated, which of course is something I'm very good at... though now I'm kind of glad for it, because I got to find that gem about the Pile becoming a mountain range. In the meantime there was another trip to the library. And now my Pile looks like this. These pictures, however

1. Suffer miserably through another record-breaking heatwave. Climate change? - well isn't is obvious ? 2. Wake up after the cool change has come through and have a meltdown, because it's so much easier to have a breakdown about something after the fact, rather than while you're busy coping with it. 3. Try to take it easy but end up feeling sick with over-exhaustion by evening. Become driven to distraction by a powerful craving for something , only you don't know what it is. Something to do with nutrients that the heat sucks out of you. 4. Go through every item in the kitchen, looking for whatever it is that you don't know what it is yet. Find a bag of frozen blueberries in the freezer. Oh, that's it. Or close enough. 5. Wonder what goes with blueberries while they are defrosting. Go through the kitchen again and come up with yoghurt, honey and linseed-sunflower-almond meal. Mix them together in a bowl. 6. Hmm. We're getting there, but it's not

Tonight, I had such a strange feeling come over me that something was wrong, something that felt terribly like a premonition of danger. Have you ever had that? Well, I reckon it would be a pretty safe bet that somewhere in the world, there are many terrible things happening tonight. But I've just had the strangest experience. Mr CJ and I were out and about, and planning to go get some takeaway for dinner. But then suddenly, I started to feel bad - an anxious, dreading, foreboding kind of bad. It was such a profound, unusually keen sense of immediate disaster. It was just not 'like me' - I'm not generally prone to paranoid tendencies. I insisted that we go home immediately and check on the house. We got home and the house was fine. I called my mum and my best friend - they were both fine, relative to their circumstances. I turned on the news to see if there's been a terrorist attack or an earthquake. I checked my blog list for any indication of bad news. Nothing