#BeMoreDog

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past few weeks, you can't have avoided hearing about O2's Be More Dog campaign. The tv ad is brilliant and the associated social media campaign has been equally fun with bloggers being sent off all over the country on a variety of exciting pursuits.

It all started with two locked boxes and one question. Did I want to be more dog or be more cat?



Despite being a massive crazy cat lady I succumbed to the lure of the unknown and the promise of excitement and thrills. I chose dog. I immediately regretted it. My dog experience was high wires and combat fitness, both of which would have made me sick, not excited. I'm odd - heights don't scare me per se but if I don't have a solid surface under my feet then I'm Little Miss Fainty Vom. High wires are my idea of hell.

I was in luck though. They were kind enough to rearrange it for something I could do and so this past weekend saw me crossing the border into Wales and going karting (or Cartio as it's known in Welsh. Much more fun!)


They go so fast they are a BLUR. Or I have a crap camera on my phone. One of the two.

I'll be entirely honest with you here: I was terrified when I got in the kart. Partly cos those seats aren't designed for ladies with hips and I had the horrors I wouldn't fit in it, but mainly because I was terrified I would stack it into a tyre wall and die horribly. The whole point of the experience was to challenge yourself though, so I swallowed the fear and hit the accelerator pedal.

My nerves were swiftly overtaken by WTF-ery when the kart wouldn't start. It then broke down three times on the first lap. I was too busy thinking "Oh FFS, this is typical" to have any time to be nervous. In the end, a man came and blew in a tube which magically fixed things. Clever eh?

Stats would later reveal that it took me 3 mins and 33.9 seconds to complete my first lap. Not an auspicious start. Once the kart was finally working I proceeded to zoom my way around the track, somewhat hesitantly at first but eventually picking up a bit of speed. It was still chuffing scary. I'm not a naturally fast driver and I must have had a terrified death grip on the steering wheel cos christ, did my arms ache the next day. But it got more fun as I went on and in the end I was doing some spirited wheel squealing round the corners and going much faster than I ever thought I was capable of driving.

Yes, I got overtaken quite a lot at first (I was racing against lads who'd clearly done it before and were much better than I was) but the important thing is that I DID NOT CRASH.

Fastest lap time in session 1: 35.713 seconds
Fastest lap time in session 2: 33.456 seconds

Woop! The important things to note are: a) I got better (I was tons faster overall in the second session), b) I didn't crash even though pretty much everyone else did, c) I successfully overtook someone and d) I came THIRD in the second session. And not even out of three. Out of SEVEN. Plus I beat my brother (he crashed, haha). Woohoo!!


The big loser.