When I sent Frankie her sponsor questions, I had high hopes for her responses. Her blog is hilarious and there’s no two ways around that, but the answers she gave me were, in a word, glorious. I don’t want to prattle on so I give you….: Frankie The Mayfairy!
This picture was sent to me captioned as: “Frankie meeting the person who reads her blog”
1. What motivated you to start blogging?
a) I like writing.
b) blogging includes a lot of writing
c) I was working in social media and figured why should everyone else have all the fun?
2. a) What’s the one thing that really surprised you about blogging?
b) And one thing that you’ve learned?
a) Lots of people on the outside won’t understand and may even make fun of you for taking photographs of your food, your shoes, your lipstick. In their minds you’re the idiot doing all this free promo for other people’s companies for a bit of free food and you’re a mug. Don’t let it get you down. I’ve never met anyone who held this opinion living a life anything close to the kind I admire.
b) You can never second guess which posts will be popular and which won’t, but you have to make your blog exactly what you want it to be. If everything feels like an obligation post you’ll stop having fun and that’s the perfect recipe for blog death right there.
3. You are being forced to play awkward icebreaker games. Everyone in the room has to tell a short story. What story from your life do you tell?
When I was about 17 I adopted a kitten. We had another cat, you understand, but he had been adopted into our home after my grandfather died and he was a bit strange. I think his formative years as a kitten had been spent on the cold, hard streets of South Invercargill and he never really took to snuggling. So, I needed a fluffball to train in the ways of tummy tickling.
My mother’s friend’s cat had just had kittens and I chose to take home the runt of the litter. She was teeny tiny and much cuter than her siblings because of it. Turns out, she was the loudest cat in Christendom. THONK THONK THONK. She didn’t creep into the house like a delicate cat burglar on a secret mission, no she THUD THUD THUDDED about the place. She was so heavy pawed you could hear her casually ambling through the kitchen even if you were all the way over in the bedrooms. At night you’d hear her pounding her way down the carpeted hallway towards my bedroom. She’d enter with a sneer of regal ownership, smacking her arse against the door on the way through. This ensured it would open up all the way and I’d have to get out of bed if I wanted it closed. She’d then leap onto the bed and plonk herself down directly onto my face. Just in case I hadn’t noticed her presence.
Of course, she could be quiet if she tried very hard and really wanted to. She caught birds and mice with ease. She terrorised the local kitty gangs. Finally, she trained herself in the art of cat burglary. What were her spoils of choice? My best knickers; the frilly ones, the lacy ones and the expensively cute ones. The ones you definitely don’t wear on your period. You know the kind. Some just disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. Possibly exchanged for some of the good catnip from one of the pervert moggys in the empty section down back, who knows. Some, however, ended up on the hedge outside our house. Thankfully, they were always clean when she swiped them from laundry basket, but that’s scant comfort when your mother goes out late in the morning to collect the mail and finds your g-strings decorating the shrubbery right along the main road. To this day I can never look a New Zealand Post worker in the eye.
4. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I tell stories. I write. I don’t know how to make this pay the rent exactly, but whether I write plays, screenplays, novels or instructional pamphlets that come with vacuum cleaners I have so many stories that I need to get out.
If I don’t figure it out I’ll probably just claim a small European country as my own, become a tyrannical dictator and live in a castle. Feel free to visit (after obtaining the correct ridiculously expensive entry visa, of course).
5. What are you top 3 favourite places to eat in London?
– The Green Pea in Greenwich – amazing food and Tom the owner is hilarious. If you like your restaurants pretentious you’ll just have to bring your own champagne and monocle.
– Truc Vert in Mayfair – very un-Mayfair, rustic, chilled out and run by some of the loveliest people you’ll ever meet
– Those places you just happen upon when exploring a new borough. The hunger pangs lead you past the chain coffee shops, down those dodgy back alleys and into the glorious confines of a quirky independent restaurant with attitude. Places where “trendy” food isn’t even on their radar and the wild boar dish is so wild you catch it snorting cocaine off a hooker’s arse out the back. Those kinds of places. Where spontaneity reigns supreme.
6.What inspires you personally?
Fear. Fear of wasting my life. Fear of not being able to express myself. Fear of not letting it all out, of letting opportunity and serendipity pass me by. Of letting the status quo rule the roost, the garden and the whole damned palace while what is right, what is true and what is good sits bound and gagged in the basement because I wasn’t brave enough to go screaming into the abyss and make myself heard.
I also bloody love cat videos.
7. What do you miss most about New Zealand?
Being able to talk about pens and decks and data without the confusion, the pointing, the laughing, the ridicule. Also, Pizza Shapes and Black Forest Chocolate. Friends and family obviously but I still get to talk to them often. The Black Forest Chocolate never calls, never pokes me on Facebook, never so much as favourites a tweet. It’s a cruel mistress, that Black Forest chocolate, and it never forgives.
8. Who would play you in “The Mayfairy: The Movie”?
There’s this blogger I know named Amanda who’s an actress…
You’ll need to work on your kiwi accent, but it’s not a bad gig. There are no weird or dodgy sex scenes, and it mostly focuses on eating. Though there will also be quite a lot of wandering around in your underwear in the early hours with panda eyes and split ends. It’s a story for the ages.
9. You can pick one superpower, what do you pick?
Being able to freeze time. Letting time hold still while I sleep, so I can sleep for longer if necessary.
Also good for those times when someone pisses you off so much and you know you should hold your tongue but your face ain’t all about the lie of being polite. You could freeze time, spaz a little, then get back to it when you’re ready and composed.
10. What’s your favourite form of social media? (Instagram, pinterest, twitter, facebook, etc)
Twitter. It’s full of hilarity. You’ve just got to find your people.
I have my main feed, which is just madness and where I discover so many new topics and ideas, then I have my lists! Lists of blogger friends, lists of random hilarious mo’fos, lists that are important for work, lists of everything! Whatever my mood, I just pick the list to match.
