Sadhbh Warren

As most of you know by now, the Australian Golden Boy (who I shall refer to as P, not because he is made of phosphorous, but because he likes a little more privacy online than Little Miss Let’s Share Everything With The Group here) proposed a few weeks back. I said yes and we have been exploring the entertaining world of getting married together. Mainly this seems to involve people focusing all their attention on why I don’t have a ring yet.  We are getting something made up with stones from P’s grandparents. His grandparents were apparently lapidarists – which does not mean butterfly collecting and certainly not be pronounced labia-derists, however amusing the concept is – and they fossicked and polished some lovely sapphires as a gift to him for his 21 st which we will be using. So, to answer the next question which is always “have you set a date”, we have no solid plans. There have been discussions on rings, engagement parties, surnames and more. Quite frankly I am beginning ...

This is a partial clipping only, for a copy of the full piece please mail sadhbh at gmail dot com . In 1500 the PA role was for men only. In the 1950s it was dominated by women and in the 1990s people thought it would soon be obsolete. But today’s PA is a valued resource and PR powerhouse, more likely to be working on a document management system than carbon-copying memos says Sadhbh Warren. The PA role has changed in recent times - today’s office support professionals are barely recognisable from the original secretary. While the profession today is highly regarded and dominated by women, historically it’s always been about a trusted right-hand man. The term secretary was first used during the Renaissance and comes from the Latin secretum, ‘a secret’ and referred to the men – and only men - who dealt with confidential correspondence and acted as advisors to the mighty. Women were not initially seen as candidates for this influential position. When Sir Isaac Pitman founded the ...

I have been in Belize for 6 hours and, as yet, no one has answered the most pressing question I have about the place. To whit, why is there a fucking tarantula in the box next to the coffee machine? Most people would assume that a box next to the coffee machine would contain beverage related items.  They’d imagine the mesh lid would be to keep flies off the things within. Perhaps some sugar and tea bags. Maybe, if we get really lucky, a few packets of biscuits. These would be the things that normally I would expect to find in a box on a table next to the coffee machine. But no. There is a fecking tarantula. Approximately 5 inches of sulking black arachnid, hunched in readiness next to the spot where the box flips open. Perhaps he wants out. Perhaps he wants a coffee. Perhaps Belizeans sprinkle spiders on the foam of cappuccinos, like squirmy furious chocolate flakes. Who knows? Belize is insane. First off, Belize appears to be in the wrong place. With a small population w...

A friend of mine once married the girl he hadn’t wanted, and that’s kinda how I feel about Guatemala. He was in the pub and very attracted to a bubbly blonde who was capturing the party‘s attention with her jokes, so he had a good try at chatting her up. She wasn’t keen. But he did end up talking to her friend, a brunette, and he realised she was funny and pretty and sweet and intelligent. And he asked her out and in the fullness of time they ended up getting married. And - apart from a few awkward “how did you meet” questions the wedding - it all worked out just fine. When I was anticipating my 30 day overland epic trip through Central America, I wasn’t really thinking about Guatemala. Sultry Caribbean Belize, with its huge reef and soft creole, was occupying most of my attention, with bouncy, beery Mexico running close second. But it turned out to be Guatemala that gave me a lot of my best memories of the trip, although not where I had expected to find them. Anti...

Judging the States on brief visits to New York and Miami is like judging an extended family by having one night stands with two of the prettiest members. You have got a feel for it (so to speak) but you’re still missing out on all the normal day-to-day issues. And it doesn’t help that New York and Miami are a typical of American culture in many ways. New York because it is so very diverse, a city that has inspired enough purple prose and invective over the years. A city that is all things to all men - a business metropolis, a city of slums, 5th Avenue and Harlem, the New Yorker and Sex in the City, Friends and Sopranos. If you want to recreate the New York in the summer experience, take twenty strippers, thirty assorted religious ministers, forty crazy people, a goat for aroma, fifty feral pigeons and one coked-up DJ. Put them all in an tiny art gallery. Turn the music to loud and make the booze and drugs free. Crank up the heat and you have it; frenetic, diverse, bizarre and oddly...

After luxe-ing it up in Bangkok, my next stop is Ireland, which is lacking in outdoor Jacuzzis and infinity pools but utterly teeming with booze (which is normal) and sunshine (which certainly isn’t). The beach wedding that I have flown over is surprised by unseasonably pleasant summer weather. All the guests have brought umbrellas. None of us have brought sunscreen. P, my travelling companion and an Australian of the “Slip, Slop, Slap” school*, stares in horror at the guests, all turning steadily pinker and visibly dehydrating, who are making no attempts to cover up. He pokes me and whispers. “The Irish don’t know how to deal with sunlight!” True, but we know how to enjoy it, and everyone is maximising their chance of getting a bit of vitamin D to last us through the winter. There is a joke in Ireland about the odds of a sunny day coming up. “Did you have a nice summer in Ireland this year?” “We did, it was on a Wednesday”. In 2010, the summer was on my friends’ wedding day. We ...

There is a saying. “There is a party in my pants and everyone is invited.” If someone were to actually try to fit a few million party people into their pair of pants, that hot, humid and thoroughly frenetic gusset would be Bangkok. The city assaults the senses with it‘s sheer vibrancy, teeming and steaming in humidity so intense that to step out of the air conditioning for the briefest moment is to look like a marathon runner in their last mile. The city’s buildings and temples sparkle in the sun by day and are festooned with neon and fairy lights by night. The river throngs with boats, the dragon boat dangling flowers from their pointed and multi-coloured prows as they skim over the sullen and silt-filled water. Bangkok never sleeps. It might miss something. On our first day and fighting lack of sleep, we are dazzled by the noise, the smells. Street vendors hawk dried fish heads and fruit next to the stench of an open sewer; tuk-tuk drivers chase tourists offering a ride; taxi dri...

With just a few days to go until I take off around the world, there are lots of important decisions to be made. Namely, what to do about shoes. There are numerous guides to packing for long trips out there, all of which tend to advise taking somewhere in the region of one pair of underpants, 2 rain-coats, 3 types of anti-diarrhoea medication and 13 types of antiseptic lotion. Clearly, these people are advising for a trip that I do not want to go on. They all advise 3 pairs of shoes to cover all eventualities; 1 pair of flip-flops (that's thongs to the Antipodeans out there), 1 pair of heels and 1 pair you can walk in. Two comments. One, if you can not WALK in your heels, get another pair that actually fit or wear flats. No one wants to keep you company in A&E in a foreign city when you do a Bambi on ice after your eighth Mojito. Two, that is not even CLOSE to covering all the eventualities. Here is what you will actually need: The Indestructible Boots (Doc Martins are good, ...

Regular readers will notice this blog has been quiet of late. That's at least partly due to a blogging job I got in April with Boomerang Books. If you'd like to see, head on over to my real-life and non-fiction reading blog, Read Up On It. Can't be bothered clicking? Here's one of my entries from there, Hating the Classics. I've always enjoyed the refreshing honesty and downright rudeness some authors display when they dislike a book. From the bluntness of Stephen King saying Stephenie Meyer “can’t write worth a damn” to Dorothy Parker’s caustic book reviews (“[this] novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force”) there is no shortage of pithy putdowns amongst the literary set . But what if you are not in the literary set? It’s all very well to dislike a book when you are a writer yourself, but when you haven’t got ten bestsellers and a Miles Franklin to your name, it seems a little cheeky to declare a book a waste of tex...

When it comes to diet and fitness, it seems that people don’t think the oldies are the goodies. It’s weird. If I announce I am following the latest celebrity diet, everyone is interested. After all, how what can go wrong when you follow the advice of people who believe in size zero and Scientology? But when I mention I’ve taken up running people respond with horror. It won’t work, they tell me. Jogging is too hard. It’s bad for my joints, they wail. I’m doing the Couch to 5k, a beginner-friendly plan designed to get you to running 5 kilometers without tears, injuries or requiring illegal steroid injections twice a week from someone called Big Boxing Bob. I can see the results and I’m enjoying it. But people insist on worrying about my knees. Won’t someone please think of my knees? From the stories I have heard, a small but significant proportion of the population has explosives in their patella. Much like the bus in Speed, they’re fine at a walk.  But i...

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, take photos. Wondering how to take great holiday snaps? Ben Groundwater has tips from Richard I'Anson , professional photographer and author of Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Photography, on how to take the perfect pic. Except he’s forgotten the best tip on taking travel photos. Don’t. Put the camera down and go do something. As Ben says, many travellers fancy themselves as photographers and “like to take the odd snap to show off to their friends back home”. But it’s not the “odd snap”. It’s endless monotonous sunsets, sunrises, and blurred pics of the view from the train window, plane window and the local toilets. So many photos I wonder if they did anything on the trip other than press the shutter button. There’s the scenery bore, usually a single traveller who takes endless shots of landscape and them standing in front of it, safe in the knowledge that their precious pictures are unsoiled by social interaction. “This, this is a shot of a ...

When it comes to diet and fitness, it appears the old fashioned options make people nervous. While I can announce I’m following the latest celebrity diet and get polite interest in response (after all, how can you go wrong following the directions of genetically-freakish neurotic stick insects who have embraced size zero as a concept), every time I mention I have taken up running people tend to respond with shock and admonishments. Never mind that I am following a conservative program, the Couch to 5k , so called because it aims to get you from being a non-exerciser (that’s the couch) to running 5 kilometres comfortably in nine weeks of training. Never mind that I am an unfit cow who could clearly benefit from getting up off her fat ass. Never mind that I can see the results in my fitness, shape and heart rate after a few months. Never mind that it appears to be working and I enjoy it. It won’t work, they tell me. Jogging is too hard. It’s strenuous and bad for my joints, they wail...

Think you’re a normal weight? So did I, until I got stuck in a lift at 2am. A big group of us piled in and it promptly broke. After the shock of screaming to a halt between floors, we were indignant. The lift said it could hold 12 people, and there were only 11 of us! But a closer look at the lift safety sign revealed the truth. 12 people - at 780 kg total. That’s 65kgs a person, and none of us weighed that. Not that any of us thought we were fat, just normal. The average Australian weight is 71kg for women, and 85kg for men . What was this, a lift for gnomes? Sick gnomes on a diet? How could they expect real people to fit? The simple answer is they don’t. On average, most Australians are too big. Too heavy for lifts, too large-breasted for one-size-fits-all tops , and too big for airline seats. Although Australian airlines have said no, some of the Australian public is saying a big yes to increasing fares for obese passengers. According to poll on news.com.au , 85% of respondents woul...

Up on The Punch today, my thoughts on the proposed x-ray airport scanners and people perving on my bald blue bits. If you're swinging by the Punch, also check out David Penberthy's sex doll piece , I nearly died laughing at it. Having survived the recession, swine-flu and my affair with Tiger Woods, it chills me to find out there’s a new threat - airport scanners. Now, I’m used to scanners. Used to queuing for ages behind people who empty their pockets only when they get to the scanning belt. Used to my (completely non-metallic) shoes setting off the alarms. I’m used to getting through and then being stopped for an explosives scan because I just love being scanned that much. But these new scanners, recent coverage suggests, are different. A perversion of the metal scanner I know and love. These scanners emit x-rays that pass through my clothes and then flash up a monochromatic image of me, denuded of clothes and hair, for security officials to leer and peer at my bits. But its...