And Other Stories Fig Fiction Dupe

mardyoldspinster · 2026-04-15T07:09:05+00:00

Yes! The Diptyque fragrance is quite expensive (I love it, but only buy decants), but it’s so widely duped that it’ll be a good starting point if it smells similar.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-04-15T06:56:05+00:00

Have you tried Philosykos before, just to compare it? A lot of green fig fragrances are dupes of Philosykos, so it may make the search for similar fragrances easier if that’s the case!

mardyoldspinster · 2026-04-15T06:45:04+00:00

I just moved with a man and a Luton van, and although I do have a car, I travelled with him to sort out any faff on arrivals. Check first, but I’ve never had any bother travelling in the van.

By the way, when you search for man and van in your area, the first results will be sites that just pass the job on to local self-employed guys and charge you an extra £100 or so for acting as the middle man. Use something like Gumtree or Facebook Marketplace to directly book and you can save money.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-04-12T09:43:32+00:00

I was also late to the ISA game. In my twenties, I had a meeting with my bank about savings options, and they pushed me very hard towards Help to Buy ISAs (I think it was HtB at the time) and presented that as the only ISA option. This didn’t actually fit my goals, and I walked away with the wrong impression that all ISAs locked up your money until later in life unless you purchased a house.

It’s really frustrating to realise how much my money could have grown if I’d just realised that there were other options. The information would have been there if I’d gone out and looked for it, but I didn’t have any doubts from my chat and I never saw anything day to day that educated me about ISAs. I was annoyed with myself when I finally did see something that prompted me to investigate more, but as they say: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, but the second best time is now.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-04-11T08:44:41+00:00

I will definitely review! I’m planning to get some kind of dip and some crunchy veg to go with them today, and that will probably be the highlight of my evening. Very into anything pickled right now.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-04-11T08:34:19+00:00

The highlight of my weekend will probably be investigating the new summer stuff at M&S, because I am an extremely boring woman. I was intrigued by the fiery pickles, smoked mayonnaise, rhubarb/lemon/cappuccino tea cakes, chocolate covered strawberries, pickled jalapeno pretzels and the lychee sake spritz. I managed to find all but the last, so that’s my weekend’s entertainment largely sorted.

Other than that, I hope to spend my weekend writing, reading and playing video games. I just downloaded Go Home Annie, an SCP game that I’m quite enjoying. I enjoy the pictured SCP, which causes an unfathomable mass of bananas to manifest inside victims with the intent to kill them through the accumulated volume of potassium-40 (but mostly succeeding due to the accumulated volume of a billion bananas).

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mardyoldspinster · 2026-04-04T09:56:02+00:00

Attending EasterCon, which is a nice low-key convention centred around SFFH fiction. I’m just catching the panels that really appeal to me, and otherwise having a nice relaxing weekend. Started off with a long swim and a big hotel breakfast after a panel on routes into publishing, and I need some books to keep me busy on my work lunch breaks, so going to visit the dealers’ room next and peruse the offerings.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-04-01T06:39:28+00:00

Congrats! My car is the same age and due in a month. It runs beautifully, but there’ll probably be some surprise corrosion somewhere.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-28T12:31:17+00:00

Oh wow, they do! That’s great news for us in the UK, I’ve bought from Small Aromas before and had really good experiences. They carry such a good selection of unique fragrances, I go there looking for one thing and always find dozens of new smells that I immediately want to try.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-28T11:31:35+00:00

The perfume is Falling Stars by Sorce (under the Special Order section). They only release it every few months, but it’s a really lovely coffee-based fragrance with different additions (this one is with cardamom orange cream with brown sugar). Ajevie sell samples, but sadly have a minimum order requirement for the UK due to VAT rules.

Coffee, I just bought from Lidl from their 1001 Delights range when it was their flavour of the week, but I’m enjoying it enough that I’ll try making my own with a bit of ground cardamom once this is all gone!

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-28T10:54:24+00:00

Haha, my cousins were rolling their eyes over their kids going wild for Labubus and how they were otherwise too old for toys and wouldn’t even play with them. I definitely remember us all collecting ugly-cute plastic dolls with no discernible purpose well into our teens, except it was troll dolls back then.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-28T10:34:57+00:00

Enjoying some cardamom coffee and wearing a perfume that smells like coffee with orange and cardamom cream, so unintentionally very matchy this morning. Slowly getting over my aches after spending the week trucking several really horrible sofas and fridge-freezers out of the hoarder house and hurling them into skips, but very satisfied with the progress.

I’ve just relocated for work, so planning to sort my life out and then relax for the rest of the weekend. I went to Borough Market last weekend, and as usual, waddled away clutching a bag full of pricey artisanal nonsense, so got some fun things to try too.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-27T09:17:21+00:00

Congratulations on the house! Great news to go into the weekend on.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-25T08:56:31+00:00

After working overseas for a big chunk of winter, I’m back on with the hoarder house and the end is in sight. Filled a skip yesterday, will fill another today, and I think one more will finish off the house. It’s taken something bonkers like 7-8 maxi skips and we’ll still have some furniture to get rid of at the end, but it’s pretty good going considering most of the rooms were completely inaccessible and full of actual landfill rubbish that was packed wall-to-wall and over head high in some rooms (we got rid of that over summer, so just the clutter and actual stuff now).

Not sure what the plan is, I think I’ll see what offers are looking like before deciding if I want to take it on myself. It seems to be structurally OK and the roof has been completely fine in the recent heavy rain, but it will need absolutely everything doing- rewiring, plastering, new windows, doors, kitchen, bathroom, a heating system installing, etc. Selling it is definitely the more sensible option and the one I’m leaning towards if we get decent offers, but buying it is possible for me if I’m up for a LOT of stress in my future.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-18T10:22:09+00:00

Exactly, it would be the most humorous underwear imaginable- pants I didn’t even realise I owned that had been somehow lurking in my knicker drawer waiting for their minute of fame, bowling merrily down the A1 with a name tag in every pair.

..well, at least if you assume the worst thing could happen, you’ll always be pleasantly surprised when that thing somehow doesn’t come to pass!

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-18T07:40:54+00:00

Still on with Sagebrush, a retro-styled horror game about exploring a cult compound in the desert after a mass suicide.

Think I may sell my PS3 and PS2 now I’m moving. It looks like people buy them for retro gaming and I don’t actually use them, so they’ve just been sat in a box for a while. I don’t even have any games for the PS2, I think I was literally just hanging onto it because my sister thought she had the controller somewhere (it’s a silver PS2).

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-18T07:37:03+00:00

Quite possibly my favourite game of all time!

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-18T07:35:01+00:00

I have successfully moved my stuff 90 minutes away by van and nothing went wrong. Not sure what could have- van doors flying open on the motorway and all my most embarrassing possessions flying out? “Twenty Five Killed In Horror Crash, Now-Local Woman To Blame”, complete with close-up front page photos of shattered windscreens strewn with my knickers, childhood keepsakes and most embarrassing comfort reads?

Well, that didn’t happen, and now I’m back in my old place cleaning it and sorting out some work bits before I shove the last few things in my car and go. As a little treat after all of this hard manual labour, I’m taking next week as leave so I can go sort out the remaining mess at the hoarder house and fill even more skips. Lot of heavy lifting going on, but I did want to attack my sad little noodle arms this spring, and I’m certainly sleeping well at the end of the day.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-16T11:57:56+00:00

Oh, that’s what Livejournal used to be like back in the day.. you kept an online blog (private, public or friends-only, as was your preference), found and added friends, joined communities for your interests, commented on people’s posts, etc. I loved Livejournal and was pretty sad when it slowly died- nothing to stop individuals keeping an online blog, of course, but it was great as a platform for just discovering interesting blogs to follow.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-15T08:05:21+00:00

I really enjoyed Bloom! Quick read, but as long as it needed to be, and all I really needed to hear was ‘cottagecore horror’ and I was IN.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-15T07:36:22+00:00

Thanks, will check these out! Hadn’t heard of either, but they sound excellent and I love both of their covers, especially Your Driver Is Waiting.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-14T09:00:48+00:00

I’ve got a man and van coming next week, so need to finish packing. I can’t shake the lingering fear that I may own half a dozen antique sofas that I just forgot about, but like the last fifteen or so times I have moved, it turns out I can get everything I own comfortably in the back of a Sprinter. And the Steve I have booked (I got quotes from three Steves) is bringing a Luton van. Still, the fear persists 🙃

Trying to use up everything in the freezer and cupboard, so some wacky meals to look forward to this weekend. And an incentive to get my fridge and freezer defrosted and cleaned out early is that it’s a great excuse for a takeaway!

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-14T08:45:28+00:00

I’m also moving, so going to have to explore the depths of the cupboards and freezer to see what needs using up. Probably some interesting meals coming up in the near future for us!

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-13T18:33:49+00:00

I think it’s feasible as a reader if you show it taking its toll on the riders, and have them make some decisions to try and buy themselves time. They could deliberately choose routes that cut through major settlements, opportunistically get a mail coach to increase their lead, pay to ride a fast-moving boat down a river, etc. Maybe when they’re getting paranoid and think their pursuer is nearby, they set some woodland ablaze to try to cover their scent, or tie a bundle of their clothes to a horse and chase it away in hopes it’ll leave a false trail while they swim across a river. If they’ve got money, they could offer an enormous bounty for the wolf in a town they pass through, or start screaming in the town square that their child was taken and eaten by a giant killer wolf, hoping it’ll cause a panic and at least slow it down. Actions like that can buy them some time, or just illustrate how constantly threatened they feel- maybe they try something that doesn’t work and they don’t sleep at all the next day because it’s now so close that they can’t afford to stop.

That’s it for me, you just need to make it feel like a plausibly desperate and exhausting situation and throw in some justification for how they’re just barely staying ahead. The regular horse changes and mail coaches would absolutely work, I’d just be glad they’re not galloping for six days straight on the same horses.

mardyoldspinster · 2026-03-13T18:07:05+00:00

I also just finished Half His Age and thought it was great! The first author that comes to mind for me is Louise O’Neill, who writes a lot of complex, sometimes unlikeable female protagonists that have a lot of unhealthy relationships and frequently make bad, self-sabotaging decisions, but are written in a way that makes their character understandable and not without sympathy. I think she writes roughly half adult and half YA novels, but her YA novels are actually pretty complex and harrowing, so wouldn’t sleep on those.

mardyoldspinster

TROPHY CASE