Guardian Girl

The first task of the day, after the paper had been bought and magazine scanned for potential ridiculousness, was to get dressed in a nasty approximation of a very feminine look. I don’t own much pastel stuff because I ain’t much of a pastel kind of a girl, plus I’m beginning to realise that a lot of the things in my wardobe are horrible clothes I bought at least nine years ago. I am only realising this now because I have to find the most similar garment to the one in the picture each day. Which leads to me sitting on my bed with a long face thinking ‘well i suppose the closest thing I have to that shirt really is the cream bell-sleeved top I bought for Beltain camp 2001 back when I was a druid,’ etc.  Witness saturday’s heinous combination, which left me looking like a frightened sixth former in 1997, suddenly liberated from the dictates of school uniform and clueless as to how to use this new-found power. Also I have no furniture in my flat that’s the right height to balance my camera on, so i had to cut my legs off at the ankles (in the photo, that is).

Frills and spills

Ills and spills

Gawd, I can’t look at that any more. Scroll down, scroll down I beseech you! Noweth!

As if the pastel clothes weren’t enough, I also had to put pink eyeshadow on my face. I wasn’t impressed. The lack of eyeliner combined with my blunt fringe meant my eyes looked like currants stuck on the front of a gingerbread man.

I also had to wear lipgloss, which is very rare for me as I think it’s too Vicky Beckham c. Spice Girls era. Luckily I used to work on a duty-free trade magazine, during which time I got basically as many free cosmetics as I wanted (I know! I miss it so much…) so I have a drawer full of all kinds of unlikely make-up items, all of which are about three years old and smell of paraffin, but ne’ermind. Make do and mend.

The trick of brushing lips with a toothbrush is one I know well thanks to Just Seventeen in 1994 and it does work momentarily, but I’d still rather a good slick of red lipstick.

Anyway here’s the result of my efforts this week:

Summer pink

Summer hink

Thanks go out to Jonny, the latest graphic desinger chum to offer his skills in photo-fouring (but also the man who commented on my huge shoulders [please see previous post as I can’t be bothered to link to it – must dash to Carphone Warehouse {see any previous post}], so it all evens out in the end).

For dinner I was supposed to cook newspaper-wrapped bream. However I spent all day trying to get my tiny flat to look like a Guardian interiors shoot, which was no small feat as you will soon see, so I missed the shops and ended up shovelling down a tuna and pasta salad and taking a bottle of wine to a mate’s house instead. I tried to get a bottle of Australian riesling but whatever, I couldn’t see any, it was only Tesco Metro, I wanted to actually see my friends at some point, so I just got some cheap Pinot Grigio and headed off to dance to early ’90s club classics with my chums instead. So much more fun than baking fish in newspapers . Maybe Hugh could do a playlist one week.

So perhaps the most amusing thing I did on  saturday was trying to make my flat look like a chic, utilitarin Antwerp loft apartment. My flat doesn’t even have an official front door, so I have to let my friends in through a locked iron gate leading to a rat-infested concrete alleyway. It has no heating. It is decorated in mint-green woodchip and the carpets are royal red with a rank gold print. The electrics are so dodgy you have to choose between cooking dinner and being able to see while you cook dinner, or else there is a burning smell and the trip switch goes. My post is collected for me by a Turkish men’s club. The laminate-covered corridor is full of cockroaches and resembles something out of a David Lynch film if David Lynch set his films in Hackney and had no sense of mystery, only desolation. So whenever I look at the aspirational interior design pieces in Weekend magazine I feel a sense of wry amusement mixed with a strong pang of wanting, wanting, wanting that life. Please see below my tragic attempt at achieving that life. At least I have a home, and it’s dry, and it has a lock, and I have my own washing machine. And it only costs me seven-eighths of my salary each month to live there.

I’ll just post the pictures next to one another and you can see what I mean. I think no droll commentary is required.

Conclusion:

• There are too many tears cascading down my cheeks for me to see the keyboard, let alone draw conclusions.