Guardian Girl

This week I was at a festival, so I set my alarm for 6.30am, climbed out of my wet tent and made a trip to the showers followed by the shop to buy my paper, which came with a free packet of Andrex wipes and a cotton bag. I got back to the tent and had a slightly less enthusiastic look to see what was on the cards than has been known in weeks gone by. Being at a festival with a limited selection of clothes squashed into a rucksack and no cooking facilities is fun for a normal life but tricky if you’re supposed to be trying to replicate outfits and cook recipes in pursuit of the perfect middle-class lifestyle. Having said that I was at Latitude. This is where 75% of the Guardian-reading population (and their gaggles of highly styled teenage daughters) were taking their credit-crunch summer holidays. I’d like to point out at this juncture that despite seeing hoardes of distressingly perfect individuals getting festival style bang on in all their wonderful ways, I saw NOT ONE pair of heels and no lace shawls. So the Stevie Nicks style campaign of the other week clearly hadn’t yet filtered through to the masses.

Fashion:

• Initially I looked at the usual All ages pages, thought that was all there was and decided it ‘d be pretty easy. A week of slightly bizarre hairstyles, plus belts tied around otherwise decent outfits. Then I noticed the interview with the Killers’ Brandon Flowers was actually a fashion story too, which meant more suits, more ties, more unattainable hairstyles. It’s a slightly pointless exercise but pleasingly methodical

Food:

• Blimey! There are loads this week! A whole 11 pages of recipes. I’ll barely get through any of them but I’ll give it a try, and it’s interesting to note the difference between various chefs and the ease with which you can actually cook the damn recipes. I could instantly see that Rosie Sykes has a pragmatic approach to recipe writing – a description I wouldn’t have thought of as a compliment until I started this experiment. I’ve already begun to wish they’d have just a couple of weekend recipes that require a lot of faff, visiting the butcher, letting things cool and set etc, then publish a load of stuff you can cook in less than an hour and buy the ingredients for in your local shop. I can still see a lot of cream involved in these dishes.  Again, times are changing. Once that would have looked like heaven to me but I’m growing tired of the daily richness and slightly concerned about the effects

The Measure (so important that even the Guardian gives it a capital letter):

• Good call on the harem pant pyjamas, as I had enough trouble with the daytime version. However Cari has lent me a pair of silk harem pants in the event that they should emerge in future shoots, so prepare for hilarity on that one. When she texted me saying she’d found them my response was: ‘ooh, just too late for last week’s shoot, but I’m sure Hammertime isn’t over yet.’ Big shout out to my own humour
• The knitting kit sounds great but you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t have time to track one down at a festival/during the ensuing week, in which I have to collect my cat from his godfathers’ house (I know, fag hags eh?), cook 17,000 recipes involving gelatine leaves, try to get an iPhone contract so I can write this blog away from my spirit-crushing desk, wrestle for hours a day with the main object of my hatred Natwest because they failed to change my address SIX MONTHS ago and therefore I cannot get said iPhone as the address I gave Carphone Warehouse didn’t match the billing address and I’m now blocked for fraud reasons until I change my address back to the WRONG one, which takes FOUR DAYS, and work the usual 9-5 hours, get home from work and also attempt a level of human interaction. The knitting kit can probably ____ off
• Pale foundation is unlikely to look terribly fashion forward on top of my summer-tanned body, but the vampire trend will be most welcome come winter

Make-up:

• It has long been my experience that steel blue eyes do not compliment angry red spots, of which I usually have several

Home:

• This is a section of the magazine I haven’t got round to copying yet, although I keep fervently wishing to. I blame this on Natwest, and will continue to blame everything on Natwest until they sort themselves out and complete one task with a basic level of competence

Garden:

• Don’t have one, mate
• However – hanging paintings above the bath? Not likely in my little rented studio flat. They’ve only just redone the beautiful peach, watercolour-effect tiled surround. Guess I might just tear the picture of the bathroom out of the magazine and blu-tac that on to the tiles. Same effect, different size, with extra level added to hint at the nature of representation itself