wassup08.com |

I don't care what any man says, romance is easy!

I'm sick of men complaining about not knowing how to be romantic and woo a lovely lady, it's easy.

Be a nice person. There's a start, it's pretty simple.

From there on out it's just the little things. If you think she looks pretty, tell her that, if you think she looks amazing, tell her that, but be honest.

Little gifts just because you felt like it can put the biggest smile on her face. Bringing her a cupcake or a cookie for later if you're meeting for lunch, or 'I sat this an thought of you' presents are golden. It shows you were thinking of her!

And there's nothing better than a good old bunch of flowers, there are plenty of flower delivery england services that will help you out with that. Send them to her work, she'll be the envy of all her co-workers!

There's your start. Now, go forth and be romantic!

Photo: **Aina** (Flickr)

The dreaded month of September, when it's time for me to set about renewing all my insurance - car and home - and renewing my road tax.

I don't know how I managed to have them all happening in the same month, it just coincidentally ended up that way somehow!

So now I'm trying to work out how to get a better car insurance deal, and I'm even looking into life insurance with critical illness cover too.

A friend of mine with a family got struck down with an illness and has been out of work for a few months, they couldn't pay him sickness any more and he's in a huge battle with his life insurance policy holders to pay out for the cover he thought he had and was entitled to. His family are really struggling with just one income and he's powerless to do anything about it.

I wish I could do something to help him, we're all trying to help out as much as we can but none of us can pay him the wage that his insurance company won't!

Photo: cafemama (Flickr)

In Chur, Switzerland, they are holding the 26th International Alpine Beard Competition!

How cool is that? They have similar competitions all over the world, I have to find out if there's one here that's hilarious! Beards are fun to look at, especially if there are beard freestyling categories!

Imagine being in a room full of beard enthusiasts with crazy facial hair? I sound like a weird beard fetishist now, I'm not! But they're funny and a lot of the bands I listen to are full of awesome bearded rockers who are super enthusiastic about beards!

Apparently in this Alpine competition there were 60 entrants from Switzerland, Bavaria and Austria competing, I'm sure we could get more than that over here! There are plenty of bearded, moustachioed facial hair celebrators over in the UK!

I'm doing my research now, and apparently the biggest competition is the World Beard and Moustache Championship, lauded by its organisers as 'the premier event in the international sport of bearding'. Might have to grab some friends and plan a holiday around wherever that is next year, a few beers and a lot of beards - sounds like a good time to me!

Photo: zieak / ruspace (Flickr)

I've been thinking for a long time about getting a tattoo, and I might finally stop being a chicken and go do it.

I'm not scared about it the pain at all, that's a given, what's been taking me so long is deciding what it is that I want, how I want to express my thoughts behind it and trying to make sure it's individual enough so that nobody will ever see anyone with the same sort of tattoo, anywhere.

I have friends who have a couple of tattoos, and I have some friends who are pretty heavily covered, I don't know where I want to be. I get that once you start you end up wanting to get loads of different things, like an itch, but I think if I've put enough effort into the tattoo that I want to get, it will be pretty big and I'll be pretty in love with it so that I won't be tempted to get anything else after.

"And what is it you're going to get?" I hear you ask. Well that would be telling...

Photos: immaterial.labour / Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Flickr)

I'm getting a bit sick with the way the world works, we're hearing so much these days about rates of obesity in the UK, childhood obesity, bad health, junk food diets, and so on. Then we have adverts everywhere for junk food at the same time we have diet plans, diet foods, fitness DVDs and celebrity weight loss programs all jammed down our throat.

But do you know what we really need? Some cost re-adjustment. It's that simple.

If you give a child £1 to buy something to eat, they're going to go and buy some sort of packet of sweets and can of fizzy drink combination. Even if they wanted to buy a bottle of orange juice and a banana, they wouldn't be able to afford it!

Junk food is cheap, and it shouldn't be. It's full of saturated fats, MSG, sugar, sweeteners including carcinogenic ones like aspartame, and it's all bad for us. But if you want to buy the healthy stuff, like healthy 'candy' cereal bars, whole foods, fruit bars, fruit juices, they all cost significantly more.

Surely junk food should be more highly taxed like cigarettes and alcohol, and there should be no tax on fresh fruit and veg and healthy foods. It shouldn't cost us more to keep ourselves healthy, it would be much less of a strain on the NHS if they sorted all this out!

Photo: TheFoodJunk (Flickr)