Fran on Sunday: I’m definitely not one of those Get Ready With Me girls

A new social media trend is sweeping Australia but not everyone is on board.

Frances Whiting invites you to “Get Ready With Me”, but be warned, there’s going to be a lot of swearing.

For someone with not one, but two columns – not bragging, just stating facts – also bragging a little – I am a deeply private person. I know, it seems incongruous but it’s true.

It’s also true I write about my personal life at times, but the key word here is personal. Never intimate.

I don’t, for example, write about friends who have died, ill health of my own or in my family, or any sort of trauma.

This is because my brief for this column all those years ago was to make people smile on a Sunday, something that doesn’t lend itself to telling you about a recent two year period when I had a broken arm, shingles, viral meningitis, a double hernia, a dislocated shoulder, double pneumonia and a hysterectomy.

See, I told you, no-one needs to read that on a Sunday morning, and yes, thank you, I was a little soldier.

Bentley illo for Fran column

So as I was saying, I am a private person which is why I could never document my life in the way that social media influencers do.

All kudos to them, by the way, but for me, it’s a hard no – especially to those Get Ready With Me reels, known in the business as GRWM.

In these, women with fresh, scrubbed faces sit at a mirror in some sort of silky wrap to take us through their skin and make up routine, followed by a glide through their wardrobe to pluck out different pieces, all of which match and are ironed. IRONED, I tell you.

Now, I love these women, I really do, but they are not me.

If I was to do a GRWM at home, it would look less like this and more like the opening scene from Four Weddings and a Funeral, where Hugh Grant and Charlotte Coleman swear. A LOT.

If you would like a visual of me getting ready in the morning just google that scene, and you will get the exact picture.

Did I mention there is a lot of swearing? There is, I am sorry to say, because I did not get up at the first alarm, nor the second, nor the third. Eventually, however, I do get up, swear a bit more, jump in the shower, dry off and stand in front of my wardrobe.

I then begin my clothes selection, which involves more swearing because I have nothing to wear, ironed or otherwise. Mostly otherwise.

Frances Whiting.

I like to grab at the clothes indiscriminately and throw them on the floor because I hate them. Then I choose something I hate slightly less than the others, throw it on, throw my boots on, because that’s the only sort of shoes I apparently own, brush my teeth, spend quality time with the children yelling at them to get up, and then leave for work, where I do my make up at the traffic lights.

There is an art to this, by the way, one I have mastered, by choosing which make-up item to apply at which set of lights, not including mascara because if the traffic moves, you can have an eye out.

Lastly, I like to put my hair up when I arrive at work, and then have a coffee the moment I walk through the door because this level of personal grooming is exhausting.

So, who wants to GRWM?

FRAN LOVES: For the dog lover in you, or in your life, Marcus Zusack’s (The Book Thief, Bridge of Clay) first work of nonfiction Three Wild Dogs and the Truth is a beautifully written love letter to human’s best friends.