This is it.

Just over a year ago, I got a Twitter notification: ‘@Mr_Fitzgerald is now following you!’

‘That’s nice,’ I thought, because it’s always nice to have a new follower. I had a brief look at his profile and thought he looked fairly interesting, so I followed him back and thought nothing of it.

A few days later, in connection with my food blog, I posted this:

And a few minutes later, @Mr_Fitzgerald replied that the cheesecake looked ‘hypnotic’. Now there’s a good word. And to cut a long story short, it’s a year later, he’s my boyfriend, and we’re living together. And it’s kind of lovely.

People are always amazed when I tell them I met my boyfriend on Twitter. For those not on it, and those who doubt its worth, let me explain: it’s the biggest conversation in the world. You can have your own tiny little conversation with friends, you can interact with strangers, you can just sit and listen – but it really is one big global chat. You don’t have to follow the people that are just tweeting what they had for lunch – you can follow people that inspire you, people that make you laugh, people who you grow to know and befriend. It’s what you make of it – and you can make it really bloody good fun.

So when I got a tweet about a cheesecake from a boy I didn’t know, I replied. He tweeted me a picture of a cheesecake he’d eaten that day. And as he was on a catered residential course with work, he send me a picture of his pudding* every lunch time for two weeks. I started looking forward to it. And then, once his course was over, we continued chatting. A couple of weeks later, we decided it would be fun to meet up in real life and go for a drink. We ended up at a cake show, followed by wine, followed by dinner, followed by wine, followed by a hangover. Our second date was 3 days later.

The best thing of all about meeting someone on Twitter is that I wasn’t expecting to. I would never have predicted it. Neither of us had an agenda when we joined Twitter in 2009 – spookily, within 5 hours of each other on the exact same day. As far as I knew, I was having a nice chat with someone about cheesecake. There was never the awkwardness associated with online dating, or that slight weirdness of meeting a stranger in a bar. It was just two people who’d found something in common and were having a nice little pressure-free chat about it. And that conversation became another conversation, that became another conversation, that became a relationship. It was the most natural thing in the world.

So, 2 weeks away from our anniversary, I raise a toast to Twitter, to love, and to @Mr_Fitzgerald. He’s a good egg, and he has very nice arms. And honestly? I’ve never been happier.

*not a euphemism, behave!

This time two years ago, I started Peach Trees and Bumblebees. I didn’t start out to be a food blogger – in fact I wasn’t really aware that food blogging even existed. I bought the domain name so I could learn how to build a site on WordPress without any pressure. I was rebuilding my previous employer’s website at the time, and having another domain name to play with was just a way of practising new techniques and learning some WordPress magic.

Peach Trees became a food blog when I realised that I could use it as a place to plonk all my family recipes. I was forever ringing up my mum for her recipes, and it made sense to me to have somewhere I could access wherever I was. So Peach Trees was started for purely selfish reasons! Then, as I got more involved with food blogging, I saw an opportunity to create a community – a place where other people could post their recipes too. And if they had food blogs of their own, they could link them in the recipes and we could share the love and the foodie joy.

Two years later, Peach Trees has over 3,000 unique visitors a month, which, though it isn’t a huge figure, still blows my mind. It’s still my personal recipe database and I probably use it more than anyone, but it’s also a fantastic source of inspiration. I’m forever trying new recipes and fiddling with recipes so I’ve got something new to share. It’s safe to say my diet isn’t boring any more.

Being a food blogger has brought so much into my life – not just freebies (which are fabulous), but also new people, new experiences, and obviously new foods and cuisines. I’ve been lucky enough to try out some truly fantastic restaurants, and I get to go to all sorts of cool events. I’ve met so many amazing people and incredible cooks through blogging and I’ve learnt loads. I worked my arse off for the first 18 months and the last few months have been a bit calmer. Luckily I’ve done the hardest bit, so now I just enjoy keeping it up to date and full of new recipes.

I didn’t launch Peach Trees until July 2011, but I started building it in late March, so I say happy almost birthday to my little food blog. If you’re thinking about starting a blog (whatever the subject), I would really recommend it. Having a project that’s completely yours and separate from work etc can be very freeing and relaxing, and you never know what blogging will bring you.

Screengrab from Blokely.com

A couple of days ago, I read a piece on Blokely* (a man-website which I am quite fond of), which left me feeling a little cold. ‘I can teach you how to get a woman into bed’ tells the story of Kezia Noble, a 28-year-old pick up artist (PUA), whose career is based around teaching men how to “have one night stands, bed strippers and blag threesomes”.

The phrasing is deliberately provocative – it begs you to jump up on a feminist soapbox and decry misogyny. Indeed the first line of the piece is “many women may hate the fact I teach men the tricks of getting women into bed but I don’t care”. Oh, sweetie.

She claims to be the only female PUA, a fact which she emphasises through her constant reiteration that women hate what she does. She’s inviting angry blogs from women. She wants the publicity for her business. Anyone will read a headline if it contains something juicy. It’s horribly deliberate. But I also imagine her own insecurities play a role in this over-confident peacocking – the constant reminder that she is the cool, edgy, sexy girl that will get you laid. By the time she brags that her book, 15 Steps to Becoming a Master Seducer (*snorts*) has been quoted as being “The book women do not want men to read and I know women will hate,” her whole act is just starting to feel… desperate.

But the funny thing is, I don’t hate Kezia for what she does for a living. I don’t care that she teaches men how to approach women. Let’s face it, some men (and indeed some women) really do need the help – even if it’s just to boost their confidence. I am not a prude – sex is great fun, whether it’s a fleeting one night stand, that amazing few weeks when you’ve just started seeing someone new, or with someone you’ve been married to for 20 years. I am definitely pro sex. And hey, if you want to go out and shag someone new every night of the week, that’s your prerogative. I will toast to your multiple orgasms and mad sexual adventures with gusto.

The thing that irritated me is that she’s put women in a box. Not only does she earmark strippers as a particular sexual target (more on that later), she seems to think that the key to getting women into bed is to trick them into it. The ‘push/pull’ method of being nice and then cold to a woman apparently has a very high success rate. She knows this because her sulky ex-boyfriend made her really horny with his moodiness. “If my ex tried it on and I said I wasn’t in the mood, instead of trying to convince me, he would freeze me out and just turn on the TV. I suddenly felt rejected and not sexy enough to keep him interested. Before I knew it I was climbing all over him, desperate to prove to him that I was hot and horny!” What a brilliant message.

I’m sure in this instance it was all very playful, and that the anecdote is something that shouldn’t be read into, but she finishes the story with this: “If a woman feels rejected, she’ll try her hardest to prove herself – and in this case, she’s very likely to jump into bed with the man in question.” The treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen routine is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but when taught as an actual step, it just seems a little… sinister. It’s essential that you jeopardise her self-esteem so she has to prove her self-worth by sleeping with you! Bravo, chaps. Tally ho!

Back to the stripper thing. There’s a whole paragraph about bedding strippers. Strippers, it seems, are not women. Not really. They are literally stripped of all other characteristics and are defined solely by their sexual characteristics. They are not mothers, or daughters, or sisters, or wives (more of this in our super  blog from earlier this year). Stripping has reduced them to a state of walking sex – the available yet unavailable conquest. So naturally, Kezia suggests “heightening their insecurities”. That way, you can “go home with the stripper of your choice”. Oh em gee. Who knew it was that simple! Had I known that, I would have picked up two strippers last week with my Tesco shop! I’ve known some strippers in my time, and most of them would eat you alive. Their business is horny men – do you really think the cheap backhand compliment is going to get you laid? Oh, Kezia. I almost want to hug you.

And the funniest thing of all is that sex is so much better than she makes out. She talks about getting laid and having one night stands, but she doesn’t seem to really get it. Through all her rules and tricks, she implies that women don’t actually want to have sex. They must be cajoled and persuaded and manipulated. God forbid a woman might actually want to get laid. Woman has no agenda – she is a passive barfly, waiting for you to insult her into bed with you.

Part of the fun of sex (in my opinion, anyway) is that there are no rules. We are all as weird as each other. Every single one of us has sexual hang ups, fantasies, fetishes, and skeletons under the bed (perhaps literally, if that’s what you’re into). Kezia reduces sex into a quick and dirty night with a stranger you’ve manipulated into bed. Is the woman who is sleeping with you to prove she’s sexy going to be the best shag of your life? Probably not. Is the stripper you’ve miraculously taken home going to rock your world? Not if she’s been straddling 15 other desperate wankers that night. Nope, sex should be a LOT more organic than that. It’s supposed to be fun. You can’t create that sort of spontaneity through a set of rules. And if you’re looking for something more long-term, you probably aren’t going to be creating solid foundations if you’ve had to make her cry first.

So, Kezia, I salute you. You are a lady pioneer in the field of pick up artistry. It is always good to see a woman making her way in a male-dominated environment. And good for you for running a successful business. But please keep your douchebag puppets out of my knickers. I don’t have anything to prove.

Image from someecards.com

Last week, I finally started to feel like a grown up. And it wasn’t because I’d moved out of home (9 months ago), it wasn’t because I started nine to five life (13 months ago) and it wasn’t because I’d finally figured out how to wear bronzer without looking like an orang-utan (2 weeks ago. Shh.). No, last week the big event that woke me up to being an actual functioning adult was this: my Nectar card arrived.

Ok, let me preface this post by saying that this blog has not been sponsored by Sainsbury’s, or the Nectar card people (though guys, do feel free to throw some dollah or some free brioche my way). Nope, I’m writing it because getting my Nectar card genuinely made me realise I am actually an adult. A useful(ish) member of society. A real, working person. An grown up, capable of earning her own moolah, running a business, and (one day, hopefully) making other mini adults.

Woah*. Woah. It only seems like yesterday that I was playing Stingray in a muddy backgarden** , when my biggest fear about growing up was that I wouldn’t know how to pay bills. I guess I never quite envisaged the having-a-job bit of adult life, but still. Now I pay about ten different bills every month. By direct debit. On time.

I suppose being an adult has been creeping up on me for a little while now. Everything I’ve done up till now has just felt like the next natural step. There was never a moment where I lept off the barge labelled ‘childhood’ and landed on the iceflow of ‘young adulthood’. I don’t know what I was expecting. We’re not the sort of culture that parties at your first period, so there’s never been an opportune moment to say oh hai, you’re an adult now.

So yes, the Nectar card. As someone that now shops at Sainsbury’s, I get asked on a weekly basis if I have a Nectar card. I have always said no, and waved it off casually. A couple of weeks ago, the same happened but I suddenly thought, NO. I don’t have a Nectar card, but I could have one. And I asked the man how to get one. It had never occurred to me that I could actually have my own, probably because none of my family has ever had one. And it was this moment that made me realise, WOAH. I am totes my own person. I am totes an adult with her own independent means and financials. I am totes capable of having my own Nectar card without first asking for the advice or permission of an elder. YE GADS, I am going to take this Nectar card and I am going to RULE THE WORLD.

Ok. Perhaps a slight exaggeration. I mean I coped just fine with my Boots card, obtained aged 14 (thank you Boots, for keeping me in Lancôme). I have coped just fine with debit cards, credit cards, railcards, library cards, that little card that tells me my NI number. But I think the Nectar card, being brand new Fryer territory, had just eluded me. Shrouded in mystery, it remained something I’d never really considered getting. And yet now, as a normal (!) functioning human, I have claimed my right to go where no Fryer has ever gone before.

So I’m finally starting to realise that I’m an adult now. An adult that enjoys Disney movies and owns High School Musical socks, but an adult nonetheless. And it’s kind of marvellous. I’m not ready to have a house and 2.4 children, but I’m ready to poke my nose into the real world. Who knows, I might get a pony or a Vespa next.

~

*’woah’ is actually a common mispelling of the exclamation ‘whoa’, but I think that looks funny, so I’m sticking with my version.
**not a euphemism. Behave.

Hopeful little mini me.

When I was a kid, my biggest fear was that our house would be burgled. That at some point in the night, strangers would break into our house and take the TV and the stereo, before riding off into the sunset in a getaway car, driven by some man with a balaclava and black eyes. It wasn’t so much the stuff being taken that worried me; I came to realise later that it was the shift in power that scared me. This was probably the first sign of being a control freak, and I will forever blame my parents for not shoving me into therapy straight away to nip that in the bud.

Aside from neuroses and a pretty severe case of dramaticus queenicus, growing up has never really frightened me. I have always been a cheerleader for love – right from when I was a little girl I would ask every couple I knew how they met, how he proposed, did they or did they not imagine staying together forever (hey, I was a precocious eight year old). I always imagined I would grow up, meet my future husband at university, get married at 22 and be settled with kids by the time I hit my 24th year.

I am not sure where I factored in a high flying career, but the feminist in me reckons it was in there somewhere. I would then raise my children in a big house with dogs and cats and chickens (yes, chickens) and learn things like ceramics and knitting, while writing my bestselling novel in the evenings while the children were asleep. You can’t say my hopes and dreams weren’t thorough, if a little clichéd.

Now that I am in my final year of university, with my 21st birthday being a mere week away, I am starting to worry I may only have 6 months left in which to find the perfect husband in time to marry them, AND have 2.4 children before my time is up. If only it were that clear cut. No one warns you about recessions when you are a kid. No one tells you that you might never meet the perfect man or woman. No one tells you that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce these days. No one tells you that you can marry a girl instead of a boy (though to be fair to my parents, they have been suggesting I get a girlfriend since I was about 13). No one tells you you might have trouble conceiving and thus may never get your 2.4 children with the Volvo to match. Sorry Mum and Dad, but where is my happily ever after? I am still waiting for the fairy tale to start, let alone end with marriage and babies. If Sleeping Beauty could nab a husband in her sleep, why can’t I find mine in the harsh light of day??

My plan has clearly got a major flaw. Possibly something to do with life getting in the way. Like, seriously. Who knew I would have no time at all to go man hunting when I have a dissertation, a newspaper section and a social life to worry about? I will almost definitely continue to plan out every aspect of my life, but I am starting to realise that I am really not in control of most of it, and that scares the hell out of me. But I have started to realise that makes it a little bit more exciting – you never know who you are going to meet, what you are going to find, what opportunities might come your way. Similarly, you don’t know if you are going to crash your car, have a stroke, get your heart broken. If I could just console the control freak with the dreamer, maybe I would be alright.

Still, getting older and freaking out about it does have its perks. I get to stash away my Disney dreams for a few more months of shameless student life before I really have to worry. And if I haven’t gotten something sorted by graduation, there’s always a Masters…

Wish me luck. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.

Picture the scene. You are wearing your new sparkly party dress, heels you need painkillers to walk in and a smile that says, “I am me. I am incredible. I can take on the world.” You are chatting with your friends as you walk through the bar, you toss your hair back and laugh attractively… and just then some absolute scrotum of a man grabs your head and mashes his mouth up against yours. Delightful.

Now I am not one to deny I have had a fair few (insert shameful number here) cheeky snogs in my time, but none of them involved grabbing the face an innocent bloke plucked from obscurity by my vastly exaggerated sense of self worth. It seems the right cocktail of testosterone and trebles can convince any man that we are back in the Stone Age – and I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy being dragged back to some guy’s cesspit by the hair.

Now before the menfolk start wailing, I am not suggesting women are any better. In fact we are just as bad. We totter around in heels and mini skirts, made up to the nines and drinking fruity little drinks, while eyeing up the talent (or lack thereof) on display. A few drinks later and we find ourselves grinding with some guy nicknamed Banana who does architecture and plays cricket on weekends. And you’re lucky if you get that much information.

A drink or two after that and you will be mashed up against Steve/Bob/Fred/your-best-friend-Helen, furiously making out as if your lives depended on it. For some people, the night ends here; for others, it goes further. Regardless of your personal taste for casual snogs/sex/fumbles-in-the-taxi-home etc, it has come to my attention (only now, after two years of uni) that romance didn’t die on its own – we killed it.

When we are little boys and girls, we are taught that when we grow up, we will find someone perfect, marry them when we turn 20 and then have a host of kiddiewinks and live happily ever after. How old are we when we realise that it’s really a load of bollocks? 10? 15? 20? Does romance even exist?

Isn’t this what it’s meant to look like?

It seems to me that we signed up for unicorns and ended up with horses – they get the job done but they can’t fly, they can’t heal wounds and they aren’t even remotely sparkly. We still got the horn but it’s not exactly what we were looking for either.

The beauty of fairy tales lies in the fact that they make children hopeful – imagine how disappointed they would be if they knew what we all get up to on a Wednesday night in Tiger Tiger. And there is nothing wrong with it, but in the harsh light of day, it makes me a tad jaded to think of all the strangers I have pulled – kisses which should be passionate end up as carnage of the mouth, chemistry is just a subject you did at GCSE and the stranger you are locking lips with probably has a hairy back. When did we start settling for hormones and stop thinking about love?

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but it sure would be nice to get to know a boy before I get to know his tonsils. I would be a hypocrite and a liar to say it’s not fun, but I can’t help but wonder, when do we settle down? When do we stop grabbing strangers in bars and start having conversations that end in a polite, gentle lip-lock at your front door? How am I going to find the right man if my mouth is otherwise engaged with some nobody who just happened to be there? If you have the answers, I am willing to hear them. Seriously.

So thanks Mum and Dad, you promised me Prince Charming and all I got was thirty three (unanswered) booty calls and saliva on my chin.

Note - this is *not* how to put a tent up.

So, last week I was supposed to spend a week in the loving arms of British hippies, shunning technology and learning about compost and such. But alas, the Big Green Gathering was cancelled for political reasons (!?) and thus I was fated to spend the time visiting family in Cornwall with my friend E.

Fortunately for me, the fates had seen fit to give me what turned out to be a lovely three days with my family – grandparents, uncles and various family I rarely get to see. Blessed with a single day of good weather, E and I explored little towns all over Cornwall and even got to spend an evening with my godson and his brother – Louie and Alfie, two of my cousins. I should add here as a sidebar, that following an evening of playing snap (with postman pat cards), Alfie (who is 6) asked me to marry him, thus making my second marriage proposal of the year, and the third from a cousin since I was about 5… (I was once engaged to my cousin Tom when I was about 5 or 6, until my mother explained that our children might be a little retarded so it was probably for the best that we called it off). I am clearly destined to either marry into my own family or have a seriously underage toyboy. Things are not looking good.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Cornwall. So E and I spent three magical days in which the familial harmony renewed my faith in the goodness of mankind etc, and then decided to go camping for three days, up near Bude. I have been camping on several occasions throughout my life, and despite the doubtful looks I get from friends, I have always prided myself on being good at camping. I view myself as having a sort of reckless abandon when out in the elements – a Pocahontas-esque image of myself standing at a waterfall with the wind whipping through my hair and making me look incandescently beautiful, while a chorus of wild birds sing out some Disney style crescendo. I even got cross with the man in Millets who asked if I was a ‘raver’ when I asked him if they sold glowsticks. “No,” I informed him crossly, “I am a serious camper with a wind up head torch and a special little stove and everything.”

Anyway, you can see where this is heading. Not only had E and I picked the most sorry little campsite in Cornwall, we had picked the worst weather you can possibly imagine. We trundled through the gates in my little Ford Ka (which had already done 500+ miles AND accidentally gone to Devon when we were lost) and it promptly started to rain. And it only went downhill from there. Our practice run of putting up our six-man-tent-for-two had been in my quiet little back garden in Buckinghamshire – a far cry from the wilderness we now found ourselves in, struggling with a tent that kept trying to take to the skies in a whirl of beige and green nylon.

So we finally sat down, smug in our giant princess tent while the couple next door wriggled in and out of their standard two man tent, and read magazines and played cards and generally felt very cool and earthy and organic. I even bought a book of crosswords to complete the next day while lounging by the outdoor heated pool (which wasn’t open and looked like a hole in the ground as it was). After an hour of playing snap, the weather had become a force to be reckoned with, and E and I began exchanging glances of concern over our supposedly fabulous minimalistic holiday. Combine that with the fact that we forgot cutlery AND mugs (which led to spreading peanut butter with a three day old wooden chip fork and drinking schnapps from a measuring jug) and things were going seriously downhill. Shouting over the wind to one another, we questioned the stability of our tent, which was bending in a worrying angle in on us. Deciding that we were basically in a hurricane, we prayed for our safety and passed out around 11pm (following an eventful trip to the bathroom 250 m away in the howling wind and rain – sidebar: I was wearing cowprint hotpants and wellies with goretex – not a good look).

The next morning, we were puffy and exhausted and swore blind that camping was not for us. Admitting defeat and throwing away £30 worth of camping fees, we climbed back into my little car and spent 7 hours getting back to civilisation, where we had vanilla lattes and caramel hot chocolates. It seems my Pocahontas fantasy will have to wait until camping can be a little more accommodating… call me shallow, but until I can emerge from a tent without full waterproofs and gale force winds, I am sticking to hostels and hotels.