Mademoiselle

This birthday I gifted (according to U.S press office’s that I receive press releases from, that is a new verb) myself a new ass for my birthday last week. Happy new-ass-day to me. Actually it was more of a nightmare than a gift.
I went on a bikini bootcamp in Scotland where I kid you not, I ate nothing (unless you count seeds, a bit of porridge and some lettuce leaves as eating). I was forced to run around from 5.30am, thankfully not actually in a bikini – that would have been both cruel and ugly.

I did this bootcamp thing last November and wrote about it in the March issue of ELLE, so I did know what was coming quite frankly. Basically four ex army dudes get you up at puke o’ clock (5.30am), run you around a circuit for an hour, feed you 100 calories of porridge (7.00am) made with water, then run you up and down mountains (until ‘lunch’ – the smallest piece of tofu I’ve even seen and a sprig of spinach), through woods, rivers and streams until dinner (a smaller piece of tofu with a tiny sprig of something, perhaps even grass from the lawn) with the aim of dropping a whole dress size in six days. It works; let me tell you, but it breaks you (I cried five times – but got very hysterical on day three over the size of the portion of soup). Don’t even get me started on the ketosis – Google this, otherwise I will tell you something medically untrue, but it basically means fat burning. The side effect of this hideousness is a strong metallic taste in the mouth. VILE DOT COM.

Obviously the pain of this ordeal is now almost forgotten, as I imagine mothers forget the pain of childbirth, given that most of them go on to having more then one child. I can once again fit into my Topshop tea dress that I bought last summer, however in the recent winter months, and even with the help of good old M&S suck it all in body shaper tights, I couldn’t do the zip up so it had to be worn with a baggy jumper over the top. Nice.

I’ve also made some new non-fashion friends! Like Claire the clever lawyer and Laurence the fabulous producer and Amanda the yummy mummy who is giving up her hot-shot career to move to Spain for a year. Put the four of us together and it was a bootcamp version of Sex In The City… except the outfits weren’t quite as good and there were no cocktails.