Reality bites

Today's mission is to find ways of wringing money out of real life magazines. I've already mentioned our Pick Me Up poem (see It works a treat. Perhaps I should expand on Buffy's (and my) growing obsession with real life magazines first...

Every night, before falling asleep, Buffy needs a bedtime story to help her switch her brain off. So she lies with her head on my chest as I tell her a sweet tale about one of the following:

a) A middle-aged divorcee who got laid by a 23-year-old Turk/Tunisian ne'er-do-well on holiday before giving him all her money and watching him run off with a pregnant German;

b) A weedy bloke who is imprisoned in a caravan by his wife and her new lover. With only a goat - whose name has been changedto protect the innocent - to keep him company;

c) A woman who was tortured by her ex-boyfriend/next-door-neighbour/ex-boyfriend who lives next door, lovingly and graphically detailed for vicarious thrills;

d) A family of 'monsters' ie chavs who terrorise the street, revving up their motorbikes and generally murdering each other before inevitably appearing at Leicester Crown Court;

e) A 19-year-old woman who has seven kids who is 'finding it quite hard to cope' so agrees to become a drugs mule then gets caught and slung into a foreign jail (and not even paid for her story);

f) A miserable husband (all husbands in real life magazine world are miserable) who doesn't want his wife to run up massive credit card bills or have any fun, so she sleeps with his friend for revenge (and gets paid for her story);

g) Another middle-aged divorcee who got laid, etc, etc, and has a convenience store named after her.

Among all the fun you'll find top tips - "If your hands are too cold to pull your card out of the ATM why not carry a peg with you" - plus pictures of pets doing 'hilarious' things, toddlers doing even more 'hilarious' things, hubbies washing up in the nude while wearing their girlfriends' knickers, and so much more that if I went on I'd run out of blog space. I particularly enjoy the psychic pages, where someone sends in a picture of a piece of fluff that landed on their sofa and Mystic Mary tells them that it's their guardian angel, named Kevin.

The best thing about these mags is that they pay for everything. So, as I said, we've been trying to think of ways of getting paid . Today, as well as our poem, we've sent in a picture of Buffy with super-frizzy hair, asking for advice on how to get sleek chic hair for a party she's going to; we've taken a picture of the rats' cage and are going to pretend we found it at a boot fair, for the Boot Sale Tales section of Take a Break, and if they print it we'll get £50. I also posed for a 'Hubby in the Nuddy' pic but am too chicken to send it in. It's yours for £50.

I will keep you posted on our attempts to become real life magazine stars. Now we just need to persuade Flake to do something funny... Come on Flake, you can walk across that tightrope while holding a flower in your teeth...