Confessions of a Former Magazine - a- holic

Last week I was having a yucky day so I decided to buy a lovely trashy magazine on a whim while I was at the petrol station. I surveyed the rack of assorted titles and out of habit discounted the Woman's Weeklys and Woman's Days and all that jazz because I have always considered them to be reading material for my Mum. I grabbed an NW and carried on my way. 

 My addiction to mags started at college where I read Girlfriend, Dolly and CLEO and learnt to do such wondrous things as a zig zag hair part ( bonus points if it had glitter running through it)  and lusted over high heeled jelly sandals and off the shoulder peasant tops. I was a true Girlfriend loyal fan and religiously bought new editions, before swapping with friends who were CLEO and Dolly fans. Articles were read and reread until the mag started to fall apart and then the pictures were used to create collages on my school books- I bet my teachers loved my artistic homages to Hanson and JTT! 

The hairstyle sported by most of the girls in my fourth form year at dances ....

 

 

At Uni, I moved onto NW as it was far more scandalous and trashy so became the perfect foil for my English Lit degree. At about $5, a magazine was the well priced treat and distraction when I was meant to be studying and I soon had a sizeable stack sitting in the corner of my bedroom. When Future -Action -Dad -To-Be heard me complaining about having no money one week, he counted up the number of mags in my stack and then worked out how much money I had spent in the six months I had lived in my flat. The figure was fairly scary and confronting and I had a short reprieve from buying mags .... Before sneaking them back in a month or two later. 

NW and I continued to have a lovely exclusive relationship until the purchase of Action Dad and my first home, when I decided I was grown up and needed to expand my horizons to Your Home and Garden. Flicking through the pages, I had grand ideas about DIY and renovations, despite my lack of skills and desire to spend my hard earned cash on beautiful shoes instead of at Mitre 10 Mega or Bunnings- where we seemed to end up every weekend! 

So anyway, last week after doing some cleaning and running some errands and then doing some more cleaning as Miss Muffet had decided to "explore" the spice rack all over the floor, I remembered my NW sitting on the front seat of my car- where it had been for 3 days, untouched. I brought it in and turned the kettle on, planning on having a quick read and a cuppa.   Miss Muffet had other plans in mind for me, namely playing with Peppa Pig and reading Where is Spot ? over and over again.

Finally on Mothers Day, I made a firm plan to sit down and read my mag. I told Action Dad that this was the plan and I was not to be interrupted for 20mins and he and Miss Muffet went out to play. So I lay on the couch, hot lemon honey and ginger within easy reach and cracked open my now out of date NW. 

And I didn't know most of the people within the pages. And I hadn't heard of the movies. Or bands. And I found myself wondering if the clothes being advertised  would cover even one of my thighs, let alone both- and weren't the models cold??? 

It has been a long and lovely relationship, with memories of reading sneakily in lectures and when lying on beaches but I think the time has come for NW and I to part ways and accept that I am growing older, even if it is not so gracefully at the best of times. I need to move on- it's not them, it's me.