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So. The service industry. The United Kingdom gets minus ten points in this domain. America gets plus three hundred and sixty four thousand, nine hundred and forty-three. Why? Because these guys are INSANE. I'm talking snort-your-crack crazy. Perkier than Heidi Montag's new double D's. I mean eat all the chicken, dance naked on the roof, lock yourself in a room full of teddy bears and cry out for the return of Elvis from our friends E.T., The Who and Willy Wonker MAD. And I could qualify this a big OH NO! I MEAN IT IN A GOOD WAY! but I'm pre-menstrual so actually, I'll take the rude and sullen British for now. Thanks anyway. I guess I'm still pissed that the veggie option here is tofu or tofu. I've gone three days without a poo AMERICA. And it's all your fault. At dinner with my flatmate (hold on- apartmentmate? No. That just sounds wrong AMERICA) and seriously, the waitress? I don't understand why she didn't just pull up a chair and take a honk o

So. I edited a book. It has a story of mine in it too. You should buy the book, and not just because you think I'M amazing (which I am) but because the book is amazing (it really is). It features death. Chance encounter. Lies. Secrets. Sex. It even has a man with a strange relationship with the moon. So, you know, BUY IT. If you live in the UK go here , and for my US friends, click  here  for your fill of What We Wrote delight. I'm so, so proud of this. So proud that if you buy a copy I'll give you a free footrub*. Enjoy! (And email me on mynameislaurajanewilliams@googlemail.com to let me know what you think...) *I wouldn't actually touch your manky, unpumiced feet with a sterilised teen foot bargpole. But you know. That's my creative license.

We'd talked about hanging out, but when the call came I wasn't expecting such a strong call to arms. "If you are free, do you want to come and work out with me?" he said. I was flattered he thought I might even own a pair of trainers. I weakly uttered an okay because I promised myself a long time ago that I would- rightly or wrongly- ALWAYS SAY YES TO LIFE, so we arranged a time and then I went to have a bit of a preemptive lie down. When the time came for us to leave the house though, it seemed like the Gods were smiling on me. I couldn't find my house key. And I mean I really couldn't find it. It wasn't nestled in my sock drawer between my ex-boyfriend's socks and my new Victoria's Secret knickers (Victoria's Secret gets America ten bonus points by the way. VERY NICE. But then they don't sell Quorn, so they started at minus ten anyway.) (I mean that America doesn't sell Quorn. Not Victoria's Secret. That would be weird. Could you

Place puff inside jar and hold in place. Invert and shake gently. Tap excess. Apply.

So it's been two and a half weeks and I've still not been on an American date. I make the distinction because Brits don't date. Not properly. We spend a series of Friday nights eyeing up some guy in a bad shirt but who seems to be laughing a lot in the pub, then one night we get drunk enough to talk to him, let him grope us on a park bench, and then seventeen years later we wake up with three kids, saggy boobs, no sex drive and his credit card debt in our name. What we don't do is hang out, progress from coffee to dinner to movie night to intimacy. W hat we DEFINITELY don't do is VALENTINES DAY, which is already is rearing it's ugly pink, sparkled head here in Michigan and it makes me want to vomit in my mouth, swallow, and then wash it down with a double hit of razor blades soaked in vodka. On the rocks. I commented to my British friend that come V-Day, I'll be watching E! in bed with a tub of Ben and Jerry's and looking at photographs of when I was hap

You have a new me but I've got brand new sneakers that fit properly.

I'd had a whole half pint of cider, so when he stuck his tongue out at me I stuck mine out back. I could tell he was one of those guys. Not washed in a while, kind of sweaty from the effort of throwing down so many beers in tight convoy down his throat, on the prowl. So naturally he approached the table. "Ladies!" he said, swaying awkwardly from side to side and doing that point with the thumb-as-a-trigger thing as he attempted to wink. It turned out as more of an exaggerated blink. "I'm Bob." I suspect he thought he was talking to a table of nine girls. His gaze was sort of blurred. "Hi Bob!" we chorused. "And who are you lovely-" he hiccuped at this point, "-girls?" I winced at his choice of words. "Natalie," said my friend, whose name is not Natalie. "Courtney," said my friend, whose name is not Courtney. I thought on my feet, and quickly. "Lorraine," I said, offering a hand. Natalie and Courtne

This is a story about a friend of mine. Theoretically speaking, say you own a MacBook. Say that you are in an airport hotel the night before an overly-delayed flight to say, I don't know, Detroit by way of some-guy-jumped-security-and-we-couldn't-find-him-again-so-we-closed-down-two-terminals-for-hours-thus-irritating-and-delaying-lots-of-international-passengers airport. Say that automatically, your MacBook finds every other Mac sharing the same network so you can see other people's files and documents if they haven't seen sense enough to set the privacy levels right. Would you look? Because damn it  I  my friend would. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing GAVIN. Gavin likes Abba's Dancing Queen and Grease's Summer Nights. Gavin's Christmas newsletter began with the words, ' Now that Henry has had the charges against him dropped...' . Gavin has a MacBook Pro with the privacy settings on low. Gavin likes porn. I swear, it was totally accidental that I

I sent a letter to my friend. In between his first name and his surname on the cover, I had given him a nickname. He text me. My friend, not the nickname. "Thank you for my package in the post today Laura, it made me very happy. I love that I am "The Fox", but I don't understand why." "Because 'a fox' sounded too generic. So thus you are 'The Fox', as in definitive." "I was rather more questioning the word 'fox' over the word 'the'." "I thought 'really fucking hot' might upset the post office lady." "Really? I heard she is a right saucy bitch. Mind riddled with filth." I guess you need to see my post officer to know why I haven't slept in three days.

Nice International Office Lady: You could get involved with Martin Luther King Day next Monday- you'd meet a tonne of people that way. Me: Yeah- what is that? Nice International Office Lady: Do you know who Martin Luther King is? These Americans really break shit down.

So there I was, sat in a room full of about thirty strangers. Thirty strangers that are supposed to be friends I just haven't met yet, as we all live in the same campus apartment block. We were introducing ourselves, in that American, get-to-know-you sort of way that makes everybody quite uncomfortable as they try to invent an interesting yet unique fact about themselves as way of differentiating from the rest, whilst remaining personable and likeable, but warm and funny too. It was complicated. "I have one attached earlobe and one unattached earlobe," was my personal favourite.  It was true, too. As one girl pointed out, there would appear to be a genetic question mark Right. About. THERE. Anyway. I had already wondered aloud that if I was to get a round of applause for merely stating that I was from the U.K. what would I get if I were to say my starsign or my favourite food? I got a polite chuckle. I don't think the British sarcasm thing I have going on really compu

If I were to google "shitty travel journey" I'd probably have a list longer than my alphabetised menu of favourite baked goods about people stranded at airports and train stations and in foreign countries and country back roads. None, of course, would rival my own miserable flight across the Atlantic this week. I guess Everybody Hurts, but I hurt more than everybody else. Obviously. I'd had no morning coffee, nothing to eat, and had no mints on me, so when the Continental Airlines representative announced that the flight we hadn't even checked in for yet wouldn't be leaving for another nine hours, quite literally it wouldn't have taken much to kill her. All I had to do was exhale through my mouth in her general direction. I hold up my hands: My name is Laura and I wanted to kill the messenger. There. I said it. I passed the time chatting with the guy in front of me in the queue. We used the line as a word count for a novel about queuing at an airport. As i

Well, since you ask; actually, my introduction to the new year has been a bit of a bitch. And yes I can still swear without warning because that was the resolution I broke two new years ago and this year all I have resolved to do is stay upright more often and spend less money in Primark. I'm allowed to swear since I was honored enough by our divine lord to be privy to the many applications of the word Fuck. As an adverb, transitive verb, intransitive verb, noun, adjective, and my favourite the plain old 'doing word' verb. It can be used to describe so many emotions. I admire it's versatility. That was what broke the resolution, that epiphany. But I know this is before the watershed, so kids: potty mouth isn't big and it isn't clever. My New Year, incidentally, had the most promising start. I saw it in from my bed where I was snuggled up with Julian Fellowes and a giant bag of giant Buttons. The only thing that would have had me more excited as the clock struck