Guardian Girl

Same pose today but with different actors. Flavie very kindly wore the required outfit to work and in fact, to my shame, did a better job than me of matching the model.

We both felt it necessary to wear tights though. All these bare legs are most perturbing and totally inappropriate for the weather. I understand the need for fashion to be a season or two ahead of good sense but must a weekly magazine really follow suit?

This season

Last season

I was supposed to bake a pear tart last night but instead I prioritised the opportunity to go for dinner with my bruv and his lovely lady Ella.

Instead of a recipe photo, a riveting tale (please feel free not to read it – I just wanted to exorcise the memory):

I took a short-cut through Regents Park to get to Soho, assuming it would be full of  joggers, dog walkers, lovers and no doubt rollerbladers. In fact I was the only person in that damn park, other than one gloomy figure who loomed out of the dusk a few hundred yards ahead at one point. All I could hear was distant traffic, and all I could see was a dark, dark path and the occasional satanic form of a tree or sculpture silhouetted against the pale night sky. It was terrifying – so much so that I turned off my music and pressed the “Girlfriend” icon on my iPhone that serves as a hotline to Best Liv. Luckily she answered and I instructed her to phone the police immediately if I got cut off. I felt momentarily safer. But when I finally got to the other side of the park my heart stopped, for I was locked in.

There are times in every girl’s life when she thinks to herself: “This is just STUPID, why am I here? If anything happens to me now, my parents are going to be at least as angry that I put myself in such a situation as they will be sad that their daughter is now in small pieces.” As I scrambled through the undergrowth around the pitch-black perimeter of the park, alone and palpitating of heart, I was silently planning, writing and naturally sub-editing the article reporting my demise. The fence was tall and covered with unnecessarily brutal spearheads (Camden Council: why?). To cut a long and pretty boring story slightly shorter, I had to hoist up my frock, ram my half-broken foot into a gap between two spears, haul myself up so I was pretty much standing on the fence, and pivot over the top without impaling myself. But my foot got stuck at the crucial moment and I only just managed to wrench it out of the gap before landing on the other side. Not being very good at physics I’m not sure what would have happened if my foot had remained stuck, but it might well have involved cracking bones, caved-in faces and unnatural angles. I landed rib-rattlingly on my good foot, noticed a couple walking along the road towards me, brushed myself off and sauntered away in the manner of a cat who has just committed a grave act of foolishness in front of its human family. I was shaking a bit, and late to meet my brother.

We went for a very, very fabulous Malaysian dinner (Melati, Peter Street, highly recommended) and I rejected the late-night pear tart idea. I don’t like pears that much, the supermarkets were shut and what the heck, I always try to have two nights a week off cooking so I can maintain a balanced social life.

Conclusions:

• Up with tights.
• Down with spearheads.
• Is that somehow a sinister combination? Oh dear, sorry.
• PS My oven glove arrived. It looks more grandmother’s quilted gardening gilet than Chanel’s quilted handbag, and John Lewis failed to include my specially composed gift card to myself. Granted they might have spotted that the name of the sender matched that of the recipient, but that’s none of their business. I paid for the oven glove, now hand over the card, JL.