Prince Charles has released a range of tacky souvenirs to celebrate his mother’s Diamond Jubilee, including a stuffed corgi which costs almost $100.
Charles is selling the items through the website of his family estate Highgrove House.
Souvenirs on offer include a $280 teddy bear, a $150 cushion, a $35 pair of baby booties and the special Diamond Jubilee Vintage Corgi, which is reportedly made from a 1950s pattern approved by the queen.
But before you accuse Charles of cashing in on his mother’s special day, all profits from sales of souvenirs will go to charity.
Prince Charles and the stuffed toy corgi he is selling.
Cyberbullies aren’t just targeting children. Adults are falling victim to online smears and the damage can be devastating, writes Amanda Bower.
Michelle, a Western Australian woman in her late 30s, was a bit bewildered the first time she got a Facebook message from herself.
She had set up her profile only a few months earlier and wasn’t exactly enamoured with the technology. So when a message appeared in her inbox, urging her to “check this out”, she did.
“This”, it turned out, was a Facebook profile page set up by a cyberbully. It used a real photo of Michelle and her real name (last names have been removed from this story, to protect victims from further invasions of their privacy).
Michelle reported the fake page to Facebook and a few days later it was removed. Then another one was created. And another.
At first, fake “Michelle” posted about liking various websites and sent friend requests, which were accepted by real Michelle’s friends. Yet things escalated rapidly.
Fake “Michelle” started to talk about the kinky sex she was into, including references to children, fruits and animals. She sent lewd messages to members of real Michelle’s high school, which had created a Facebook group for its 20-year reunion.
And, finally, fake “Michelle” posted that she was having a party and was prepared for “anything” — and gave out real Michelle’s address.
We read all the time about how horrible and how horribly common online bullying is among today’s technology-savvy children.
According to federal government statistics, one in 10 kids are victims, although in a Girlfriend magazine survey, an alarming 42 per cent of 13,300 teen readers said they’d been cyberbullied. Tragically, a number of teen suicides have been attributed to online abuse.
Although there are no reliable statistics on the prevalence of adult cyberbullying in Australia, the experience of Michelle and countless others shows that grown-ups are also victims. In almost all cases, experts say, the perpetrator knows the victim.
Under federal telecommunications laws passed in 2004, using a “carriage service” — email, text, mobile phone — to harass someone can leave you sitting behind bars for up to three years, with an automatic criminal record.
Yet, despite an increasing number of adult cyberbullying cases making headlines, there are many more victims suffering in silence, says Susan McLean, who was Victoria Police’s first cyber safety officer and is now an online safety consultant.
She says she regularly gets emails from adult victims saying, “You know, it’s not just a kid problem. I’m being harassed terribly.”
Yet many are too embarrassed or afraid to seek help. And adults, Susan says, “often feel more powerless because they don’t have confidence with the technology. They’ve never had to experience it before, it’s very confronting for them and they are often floundering.”
Even if you do try to set the record straight, some people may not get the message, says Michelle.
“I’m really a boring person and I thought people would know it wasn’t really me,” she says.
Yet, despite Michelle posting repeatedly that her identity had been stolen, some people missed those messages — and were really offended by fake “Michelle’s” communications.
“They used my real photo, they used my real name and if it walks and talks like a duck, some people are going to think it’s a duck,” Michelle says.
After numerous complaints to Facebook, the bully’s computer was finally blocked from creating another Facebook account, at least under Michelle’s name.
Although she had contacted police, she says it took many weeks for them to get back to her and when they finally did, the pages had been taken down and the police said there was no need for action.
Yet Michelle has taken action in her own, important way. “As soon as it happened, I started talking with friends and family, saying, ‘You need to be really vigilant about what information you put out there, because you can be targeted’.”
Read more of this story in the June issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Have you been bullied online? Share your story below.
Georgia Strickland, her husband Ray and a sonogram of their unborn baby daughter Zoe.
When she became pregnant at 40, Georgia Strickland couldn’t believe her good fortune. Yet, the joy of parenthood was not to be.
I didn’t choose to have a baby so late; on the contrary, I had yearned for children for many years, but circumstances — let’s face it, I chose the wrong guys — had always gone against me.
I fell pregnant at 40 and though surprised, I was quietly ecstatic. My pregnancy proceeded in a textbook way and my new partner Ray and I began thinking of the baby as our little miracle.
Choosing a name was easy. We both loved Zoe; of Greek origins, it meant “life”. Over the next five months, we talked endlessly about Zoe, covering everything from who was going to get up in the middle of the night to what was a suitable age to teach her to snowboard (he thought five; I said, “No way”).
At my 38-week appointment, the doctor said everything was going “swimmingly”. She asked casually about movement and I said I felt a bit, but not a lot. She explained that, because my placenta was in the front, the movement would feel muted.
We were happy as we left the hospital that Tuesday, if a little nervous about how it would really be when Zoe arrived.
On the Friday night, we went to the footy with friends. I started to experience more pains and fleetingly thought that Zoe was moving a bit less, but told myself she had surely moved and I just hadn’t noticed.
I had also heard that babies slow down close to their due date, so told myself not to worry. I regret that decision to this day.
By Saturday morning, the pains had increased, so I took a bath. Ray piled bubbles on top of my head and stomach and took some silly photos. I still can’t bear to delete them from my iPhone; I look deliriously happy.
Ray commented at the time that my tummy looked smaller, and says now that he was a little bit worried. We rang the hospital and decided to go in for a check-up.
We didn’t rush, taking our time to make up the cot and install the baby capsule in the car. We took my hospital bags, just in case.
The midwife listened for a heartbeat, but said there was nothing. Ray collapsed loudly into a chair, startling us all. I just thought she didn’t know what she was doing.
A doctor came in and told me that he couldn’t find a heartbeat, but not to panic just yet. I began to feel sick and clung to Ray’s hand.
A second and third doctor arrived to view the ultrasound, the third saying, in a very calm voice, “I’m sorry to tell you, but your baby has passed away”.
The medical staff in the room all just stared at me. I felt like they expected me to say something, but all I could do was shake and say, “Oh, my God, what have I done, what have I done?”
They quickly said it wasn’t anything I’d done, that it wasn’t my fault.
I finally managed to ask, “What happens now?” At this point, I was told the best and safest thing for me was to go through labour.
Zoe was born, still, at 5.10am on Sunday, June 5, 2011. The midwife told me not to look until she was wrapped up.
I thought it would be too much to hold my lifeless baby Zoe, but I did. I just kept saying to her, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” I desperately wanted her to open her eyes. I had an overwhelming feeling of love, together with more sadness than I’ve ever imagined.
Sunday passed slowly and horribly. The hospital staff took photographs of Zoe, which at the time seemed macabre, but which I now keep with other precious items, as evidence of her existence.
My parents came and met Zoe; it’s the first time I’ve seen my dad cry.
I spent most of the day asking myself what I did that made her not want to come into this world. Did I not love her enough? Ray and I both say we would have died for her. I guess that’s how all parents feel.
A teenage bride who married at 16 in an over-the-top wedding will now divorce her husband of just two years and plans to burn her 30kg wedding dress.
Josie McFayden, who starred in the first episode of the UK TV show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, married Swanley Smith in 2010.
During their fairytale wedding ceremony, which was watched by 6.5 million viewers, she wore a one-of-a-kind white net and diamante dress.
Gypsy wedding dresses are extravagant one-off designs, and the bigger, the better. Gypsy brides often compete with each other to have the biggest and best dress made from layers of tulle and diamantes, which can lead to them being almost unwearably heavy.
Now Josie, who has an eight-month-old daughter with Swanley has moved out of the pair’s caravan after discovering her husband gave half of their life savings to his family and spent the rest on himself.
The pair was given £105,000 ($239,150) as compensation by Surrey County Council after being forced to leave the caravan site they lived in after it became contaminated.
“I am in shock. I’m 18, with a baby and getting divorced,” she told told UK newspaper The Sun.
“I feel I can never trust another man with anything.”
She said cracks in her marriage began to show soon after the pair said ‘I do’.
“It was like a fairytale, but it was too good to be true. Swanley just changed overnight,” she said.
“I was supposed to be a lady of leisure bringing my little girl up and he was supposed to provide for his family.
“But I spent four-and-a-half hours a day cleaning and he stopped going to work. I just never felt like his wife, I felt like his maid.”
Josie, who is part of the gypsy traveller community, says it is not uncommon to get married at a young age, but said she would be advising her own daughter to wait until she is in her 20s to get married.
He is a major heartthrob, recently posing topless on the cover of Elle magazine, and a doting dad. But it seems David Beckham is also one of the sweetest guys in the world!
Arriving back in the UK on Thursday from Los Angeles he immediately visited two of the most important people in his life, his mum and his gran, posting these adorable pictures on Facebook.
“As I’m sure you would have expected, I had a pie and mash lunch today with my mum. There is nothing better,” he wrote alongside a picture of him with his mum.
“Great to be back in London. Paid a surprise visit to see my gran,” he wrote on another.
David with his mum Sandra.
David with his gran and a group of her friends.
David Beckham’s recent cover shoot for Elle magazine.
Like more than half the Australian population, Chrissie Swan is overweight. Unlike most of us, she’s not ashamed of it.
Chrissie — who found fame on Big Brother in 2003 and went on to host morning show The Circle before she quit in December 2011 — has never let her size hold her back. Her attitude is inspiring.
“I never bought into that, ‘I am fat, and therefore I am bad’ way of thinking,” she tells the June issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly, out today.
Chrissie started dieting when she was 10 years old and has been on diets her whole life — even as a child, when she didn’t need to be.
Chrissie believes this set her up for a fractious relationship with food. Yet now, after almost 30 years, Chrissie says she has come to terms with her size and is happy.
It may have caused her unhappiness in the past, but she has never let it hold her back or define her as a person.
“To me, it was always just weight,” she says. “It’s quite popular now, television shows like The Biggest Loser and all that stuff. They weep and say how ashamed they are and they are terrible people [for being overweight]. Why can’t it just be kilos?
“It’s shaming fat people into thinking their heart’s about to explode, their legs are about to be cut off due to diabetes. They’ll never conceive a child, they’ll never get married, they’ll never find love, they’ll never get the job they want.”
Chrissie — who has two sons, Leo, three, and nine-month-old Kit — is especially upset at the messages conveyed to children, that there is something wrong with them and they ought to be ashamed if they are chubby.
“We can’t say fat people are bad, we can’t have them crawl through mud pits on national television and have skinny people yelling at them, saying, ‘How does it feel?’ Because kids see that and they go, ‘Okay, it’s cool to scream abuse and belittle a fat person. I’ll do that next time I see Billy in the playground.’
“The responsibility is on parents to try to set up a healthy relationship with food and exercise, right from the get go.”
In 2010, Chrissie became an ambassador for Jenny Craig, signing up to lose 40kg before trying for a second baby. She lost 20 and fell pregnant easily, but won’t sign up again.
“I actually don’t think the answer is in a pre-packaged microwave meal, but again, you don’t know until you have a crack,” she says.
“For me, the whole time was about stopping the weight gain, which was just going nuts, and learning about eating because when you are overweight, you actually don’t eat that much. I just didn’t eat, I wasn’t eating almost anything.”
Now, Chrissie is a size 22 and happy. She can’t escape wagging tongues — she was photographed without her knowledge at the beach in a swimsuit with her family.
Yet, as she wrote in her Sunday Life column, she refuses to feel ashamed.
“Life as an overweight woman is an exercise in apology,” she wrote. “You always feel like you have to say sorry for your presence. That’s what those sad eyes on the awkward size-18 waitress are saying, ‘Sorry you have to see me.’
“Ordering a full-cream flat white is often met with judgemental eyes, yet people at their ‘goal weight’ do it every day of the week. So I do it, too. I’m not ashamed any more.”
Weight, she believes, brings its own benefits. “Fat people are different to thin people,” she says.
“When you are overweight, that’s the first thing everybody sees, so you do have to work harder. You have to be good at something else. I’ve had to get to know people quickly and be interested in them, and all that sort of stuff.
“Our personality muscles I think are stronger because of that.”
Read more of this story in the June issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Have you battled with your weight? Share your story below.
She’s tried every diet, pill and potion. She’s suffered bulimia. She’s seen doctors, dietitians, nutritionists. She’s exercised.
Her weight has oscillated wildly, but the kilos always come back and, as a result, Kath has spent the best part of 40 years feeling like “the most worthless person on the planet”.
She has tried to kill herself several times, figuring there was no point in living if she had to live fat.
Many Australians can relate to Kath Read. Statistics released last year show 61 per cent of adults are overweight and one in four is obese.
Governments are urging people to slim down and many are desperately trying. In 2010-11, Australians spent $789.6 million on weight-loss programs, low-calorie products, dietary supplements, low-fat cookbooks and even surgery.
Yet, both personally and as a community, we are fighting a losing battle. Not only are obesity rates rising, but statistics show that the majority of people who lose weight put it on again, plus more.
According to conventional wisdom, losing weight should be simple for those with enough willpower — just consume less energy than you expend, or eat less and exercise more. Following that logic, those who fail are lazy or gluttonous.
Yet, as Kath Read already knew and experts are beginning to learn, losing weight and keeping it off is far more difficult than that. It requires not only relentless discipline, but an almost unwinnable fight against our own bodies.
When we gaze enviously at naturally skinny people, we should remember that, a couple of thousand years ago, they would have been gazing enviously at us.
In the days when humans were scrounging for their next meal, the genetic pathways that helped some people hang onto fat were key to survival.
Professor Louise Baur, a specialist in paediatric obesity at the University of Sydney, says up to 70 percent of variation in body size is determined by genetics.
Not one gene, but hundreds of them, governing everything from whether cells prefer carbohydrate or fat as fuel, to the way taste works or how the stomach tells the brain it’s hungry.
“If we only had one pathway that determined what our body weight was and whether we stored fat, the human species would not have survived,” she says.
Nevertheless, obesity only became a widespread problem in the late 20th century, when food became cheap, accessible and processed.
This provided the environment for people who already had a genetic bent towards obesity to start tipping the scales in numbers we’ve never seen before.
“We’ve had massive changes to the food environment in the past three decades and genetically vulnerable people in particular are responding,” says Professor Baur.
The fight against hormones and genetics is tough enough, but at least that’s a private battle. For many, living in a world that seems to unashamedly discriminate against fat people is the most difficult thing about being obese.
Studies have shown overweight people earn less, are less likely to be promoted and are more likely to be sacked. In the United States, they are less likely to be accepted into college.
At 35, Kath decided to stop worrying about her weight. She couldn’t take the emotional roller-coaster and her body had been through too much, so she quit dieting and embraced life. “I can’t express the difference,” she says.
“I spent the first 35 years of my life waiting until I was thin. Now, nothing stops me. I have so much more confidence. My life is joyful.
“People still make those comments, but what I’ve realised is that other people’s crappy behaviour is not my burden to carry. It doesn’t measure my worth. I’m not going to let anyone else stop me from living my life.”
Read more of this story in the June issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Have you struggled with your weight? Share your story below.
Lisa Wilkinson has shared a flashback photo to the 90s of when she was editor of CLEO Magazine. Here she writes for The Weekly about what life lessons she wish she knew at 16.
Lisa Wilkinson today, and as a teenaged school girl.
Imagine if you could whisper in the ear of your teenage self. What advice might you have shared? TV presenter Lisa Wilkinson shares her letter.
It hasn’t been easy lately, has it? In fact, it’s been three long years since the bullying started and I know better than anyone how many tears you’ve shed.
I also know how relieved you are on this, your 16th birthday, that school has broken up for the Christmas holidays, liberating you from that handful of girls who have made your life hell.
Lisa Wilkinson shared this picture of her CLEO days in the 90s.
Yes, it does seem strange that not one of them has told you what it is you’ve done to anger them, but that is the point really.
There is no reason and their actions have very little to do with your imperfections … and everything to do with their problems.
Yet here is the amazing thing — you.
One day, when you least expect it, some of them will track you down for a different reason. To apologise.
They will be grown women with children of their own, living in fear that others will do to their kids what they did to you.
You will be surprised by your calm when this happens. And your understanding that you have left it all behind. They perhaps might not.
I know that a career seems like a giant question mark right now. Air hostess? Teacher? Secretary? Journalist? I have good news, but you will have to work hard.
When opportunity comes your way, recognise it, back yourself and run with it. When others see promise in you, believe it. It’s then that you will fly.
There will come a rainy Thursday in a few years’ time when Mum will tell you to pull your head out of the pages of Dolly and go and grab The Sydney Morning Herald to see if there is a job with your name on it.
I really don’t want to say too much, as that would spoil the surprises in store, but at least know the well-thumbed Dolly copies under your bed Mum keeps telling you to throw out? Maybe don’t, just yet.
I know Saturdays can be a little quiet at home when the whole family heads off to the rugby and your two brothers take to the field.
I know you wonder, with four of your girlfriends dating guys in the team (as you stay at home playing, yet again, Janis Ian’s ‘At Seventeen’), whether you should, too.
Resist. Eventually, rugby will find you. And so will love. In a very different way than you could imagine. Even though Dad might not be there when it happens, he will have a hand in it. You will know the moment. And you will smile, sure in that knowledge.
When it comes to boys, try not to lose “you” when you love. Scratch that … I want you to know what that feels like so you know not to do it again.
But, yes, there will be one and, before you know it, a family, walking life’s path with you; a family you’ll love more than you can possibly imagine loving anything.
Lisa, it is all going to work out. You won’t be a stranger to tough times, though.
Sometimes, you’ll wonder if you need your head read over some of the challenges you take on. You will know sadness, fears and disappointments, too. But from where I sit, I wouldn’t change a single second of what lies ahead.
No regrets. Ever. No one could ask for more.
Hugs, your older self,
Lisa.
Your say: What advice would you give your 16-year-old self?
This Is How It Ends by Kathleen MacMahon, Sphere, $29.99.
Despite the furore about this book in the publishing industry, This Is How It Ends is a quiet book, gently written, about some very big human issues and therein lies its charm.
Protagonist Addie Murphy is approaching 40 and in an empty, sad, lost, phase of her life. An architect with no work, thanks to the post global financial crisis recession, she’s temporarily living with her cantankerous doctor father who needs care following a freak accident and is also fighting a malpractice suit.
Addie spends her days walking the windswept beach in her Irish seaside town with faithful pooch Lola chasing seagulls, her iPod ratcheted up high, and swimming in the ocean — where she really feels free.
Enter 50-year-old Bruno Boylan, an American banker who has just lost his job with the infamous GFC demons The Lehman Brothers, and is escaping the chaos by tracing his Irish ancestry, a dying wish from his father.
Interestingly Bruno is not your typical financier but a closet Democrat and is certain that the only hope for America and the world to rise from the abyss is if Obama is voted in.
But with McCain rising in the polls, his whole life teeters on the brink. That is until he meets relative Addie, and a sweet, tentative love match is struck.
Bruno has two marriages and a serious romance under his belt, and Addie has recent trauma from a broken relationship fuelling her, so the path is certain to be rocky.
What follows is both heart-warming and unexpected in ways we don’t see coming, although looking back the seeds have been sown.
But it is not the love story, nor the contemporary political background, nor the dramatic ending, but the female characters that give this book the edge.
Addie and her sister Della are complexly constructed and recognisable, their emotions yanking them in all directions but each with a strong, intense core to steady them.
The male characters are moth-like cyphers around their flames and it is this compelling flicker that like the men, we find endlessly fascinating as the plot plays out to its shocking conclusion.
About the author: Kathleen MacMahon
When Irish TV news journalist Kathleen MacMahon, 42, landed one of the biggest advance book deals of 2011 for her debut novel she was she was “surprisingly calm,” she says.
“I think it was because I was so sure of the book. And I remember thinking: I’m a grown-up, I can handle this.”
The daughter of a barrister mum who quit the law in her 40s to raise Kathleen and her sister and a civil engineer dad, Kathleen wrote during the days off in her shiftwork schedule as a journalist and has since taken a year off to work on a second novel — also part of the deal.
Her inspiration for This Is How it Ends was “solitary walks on the beach, Bruce Springsteen on the iPod, the election in the US, and my dog Lola.” The latter being the only character based on reality in the book.
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