Non merci
THE HIGHEST FORM OF NO.
Totally tropical
Totally horrible
Conclusions:
- What further conclusions does a person really need to draw? This is a time for being kind.
- Hugh’s sage and cheddar scones were incredible – really like eating the feeling of getting in a winter bed – and only took half an hour to make, all in. Everyone should give them a go (and you too could look like a model!)
High-maintenance fashion, low-maintenance food
Reading palms
Bleeding palms
Today I spent so long trying to recreate the glamorous look of the Guardian model that I missed my friend’s entire birthday picnic in Lewes and ended up spending six hours on public transport in return for one hour of celebrations. By the time I got there, all that heavy-duty Sam Fox make-up had dripped off my face anyway, so I may as well have turned up fresh from my bed. Oh well, you live and don’t learn.
Dinner wasn’t much of a looker either.
Pasta with brown butter, sage and capers
Maggots with brown butter, sage and capers
Today my friend Sarah described the food photos on this blog as looking like a “wetter, less well-photographed” version of the Guardian’s recipes. I’d like to add “wan” to the list. Why does all my food look so damned wan? Why, for that matter, do I always look so wan? It struck me that actually that’s exactly what life is, really. A wan version of a magazine.
Happy Sunday!
World of Interiors
This summer
That bummer
I did actually get the pose down better than that, but the dang Guardian went and used a different photo online from the one in the mag itself. I feel obliged to use this one for image quality reasons. Don’t say anything but I could tell my boyfriend discovered a new level of intense lust for me when he saw my feet today.
And now, from homo style to home style. Yep, it’s time for my first interiors photo shoot in more than a year. All the furniture had to be rearranged in order to recreate the look of a Parisian former merry-go-round workshop. (I’m doing something Gromit-like with my eyebrows just typing it, let alone trying to do it.)
Vintage
Skintage
Charm
Barn
French
Merde
Merry-go-round workshop
Rehabilitation workshop
Paris
Pratts Bottom
Quirky
Dirty
Apartment
Afartment
Mixes
Mix-ups
Finds
Losses
Industrial
Imbecile
Surfaces
Social services
Conclusions:
- There’s so much to say at the end of my first week back
- It’s Friday night and I can’t be bothered to say any of it
Back after all this time
I have barely thought about Guardian Girl for the past year or so. Recently, though, I keep bumping into people I haven’t seen for a while who ask me if I’m still doing it and why I stopped. I always tell them it cost too much money, freedom and vascular health, any one of which would be a good reason to stop a blog. Yet despite repeatedly going over the reasons why this is such a stupid idea, just thinking about the subject planted evil seeds of temptation in my mind.
On Saturday I finally got to thinking that it really has been too long since I’ve had a legitimate outlet for my third-rate puns and crushingly unflattering photos. I used to think that reading blogs was only for idiots, so I had no idea of the benchmarks when I first started doing all this business. Since I’ve been away I have read quite a few, which has allowed me to realise that blogs are rubbish, bloggers are morons and I don’t actually have to worry about being a good writer, saying anything clever or having any sense of dignity at all. This realisation has spurred me back into action.
So, here we are.
Happily for posterity’s sake, we begin again with pies and swimwear! As you will shortly see, not that much has changed in the past year.
(We actually began with soup, but my photo of it has got stuck on a different camera, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that making soup out of salad ingredients is actually nice, even if you still can’t be bothered to chop vegetables small and therefore end up with an actual salad floating in some hot water.)
Glade tidings
Forbade hiding
A bad start on the formatting. A bad start full stop, maybe. I did put a skirt on before I left the house. Don’t really know what the caption means – is meant to capture a general feeling, I think.
So that’s swimwear covered for the day; now on to the lard.
I should mention at this point that in the time I’ve been away I have managed to shack up with a man whose appetite for a good pie matches – and possibly even exceeds – the indiscriminating gusto with which I cook them. This is a great relief because although eating two portions of pie for dinner isn’t ideal for a person, eating four is very much worse.
Mackerel and lovage tarts
Mackerel: a lovely start
It hurts to be so positive, but this really did come out good. A great recipe Hugh, ta mate. I used cheat’s roll-out puff pastry obviously, and ready cooked and smoked mackerel. Most of my potatoes had turned green and sprouted like so many limited-edition Shrek Mr Potato Heads (? quip too forced? and also why use ‘so many’ like an american when you from england?) so I chucked those out and just used the remaining couple that were just squidgy, not deadly. Are you supposed to save green potatoes to polish your silver and clean your windows with? I need to ask that woman with the big weird plait who turned out to have buried her stillborn child in a park. Anyway I am digressing into offensive territory here. The pie was delicious, all agreed.
Second outfit of the week and it has been a sweltering day. Needless to say, the blanket only stayed on briefly while Miguel (photographer of the day) took this distracted iPhone shot in which I can’t even keep my eyes open. That’s being wrapped in blankets for you. The rest of the day I resorted to the most pink and blanketlike dress I own, which is just a pink dress.
The wrap
The Mummy
Measurewise, I have got on the case in astoundingly conscientious fashion and purchased myself some leg make-up, so as never to stray into the sheer-infested territory of Pippa M’s fashion mishaps, and a collected works of Jane Austen so I can understand what this whole Anna Wintour parallel gag is about. Totally with her on the smileys though.
I have neglected to purchase any Stella McCartney eveningwear (guess why), drink a G&T with cucumber (taking it easy on the booze at the mo) and am not yet sure what I’m going to do about this issue of the Orrefors crystal tumbler or HBC modelling for Marc Jacobs.
Will update.
Off to cook courgette and not-lovage pasta now. Has anyone managed to track down any lovage this week?
Conclusions:
- Too hot for blankets, too public for bikini bottoms
- Hooray for pie sharing
- Salad soup, who knew?
- Sorry about blurry and malformatted photos etc. One day I will neaten all this up.
A beiger shade of beige
I’ve re-entered the arena expecting fashion to have moved on since I was last crouching suspiciously about the office getting papped. But nothing seems to have changed – it’s still all beige and nude around here. There was a team of two behind this photo: Ciara on the other side of the lens and Gabrielle doing set design. I don’t think anyone expected us to achieve something of this scale and emotional power.
The stage is set
The full ticket price is refunded
Conclusions:
- We’re back in play!
- If I look unrelaxed, that’s because the box wasn’t weight bearing
The balanced life
I only just read Oliver Burkeman’s column this week and am gratified to see how much it upholds what I was feeling yesterday – that if trying to balance and perfect all the various aspects of your life wears you out too much, perhaps having an imbalanced life is preferable (I hadn’t actually reached that conclusion to be fair, I was just doing the whingeing bit). If this blog is anything to go by, I’m generally happier when my life is hopelessly out of kilter. Trying to do everything well mostly just stops you from doing anything well. I’m veering towards thinking the answer might lie in skewing your life dramatically in one direction at a time, for example becoming uber-healthy for a month or spending all your free time making your house look nice, and then choosing another task to tackle next.
Maybe I’m biased because this is how my life tends to work out whether I like it or not. And maybe in turn this is why I find all the Guardian business so hard. My way of achieving balance happens over the course of a few years, not a few days. Perhaps I ought to adjust the project and dedicate sections of time to completing self-help books with all my concentrative powers. I could become Fabulous in a Fortnight, then Make Any Man Fall for me, then Detox my Life, then Declutter my Home and so on until I have turned into Gwyneth Paltrow and lost all my remaining friends.
In the meantime, my one maxi-dress has come out to play.
Some people
M People
Conclusions:
- I’m still having a break from the recipes, purely to win a point against Charlie the fat-caller. What with all the running I do, a few weeks cutting down on the carbs will sort me out and then I can reinstate the baking with a clear conscience. But my god, the cookies I’m missing this week! They sure do look good. However we can’t be good at everything all at once (see above) and it’s true that I should really get back into my summer clothes at some point. Another chicken salad it is, then.
- Obviously the M People caption is pure irrelevance. It just sort of came out. It always makes me smile to think of M People, anyway.
- Did pretty well on the outfit today though, huh? And is anyone else a bit unsettled by the way the model looks about 20, and you can only tell she’s any older by looking at her hands? I think it might all be prosthetics, like that bit at the end of some Tom Hanks movie or Titanic where you can totally tell it’s just an actor in an old suit. Not sure if this is a cuss or a compliment to the model.
Maxi-ed out
I’m not very good at maxi dresses. I have only one. This week’s All ages is going to be tricky as a result.
The lengths
The shorts
A rather unpleasant photo today.
I am also supposed to be doing something ridiculous with my hair in the manner of someone from Glee, says The Measure. Achieving this hairstyle would mean having extensions put in my fringe, the red colour stripped out, and the whole lot bleached platinum and cut short. Just thinking about it gives me split ends and a migraine. I do however have this vaguely snarling picture of myself in a blonde wig, so that will have to suffice for today’s effort. Lame, I know.
Sue Sylvester's Vogue
Me being grumpy at a fancy dress party
I apologise. It’s the best I can do. I don’t even watch Glee, even though The Measure’s been telling me to for about six months. I tried once and it just seemed to be full of bad jokes. Maybe I need to give it another go. But when one is trying to cook like Hugh F-W, dress like Jess C-M, be as wise as Oliver Burkeman, live in a show home with a perfect garden, earn enough money to buy the necessary accoutrements and exercise enough to maintain the required dress size, where does one honestly find time to watch television?
Back to dinners, I had to work late last night before going off to a gig and then running home, leaving no time for cooking. I bought me some crisps and some chicken drumsticks, and downed a few pints of cider at the pub. That was as close to papas arrugadas with grilled meats and aperitifs as I was going to get. What I did get was loads of grief off my mate Charlie for being fat. I think I might actually have to go on a proper diet and lay off the baking for a while. AGAIN. Jeez.
Conclusions:
- It’s always the same – I come back to a Guardian Girl stint with a vengeance and by the second week I’ve totally lost enthusiasm. How do I always forget how hard it is to make life work in this way? Stoopid damn cooking.
Canoes, ponchos, pub dinners
This bank holiday I canoed along the River Stour with a bunch of lovely people, several angry swans and no pairs of tailored shorts.
At the precise moment I was supposed to be in River Island (according to the Measure) I was instead on a river, poking affectionate fun at an extremely small island (it was my insecurity that made me do it). A far better use of time, we can all agree – especially when you see the pair of shoes I would otherwise have been buying. For £85. Why?
I’d decided canoes and cameras probably weren’t happy bedfellows so no photos exist of my rivergoing unfashionableness. Even for someone who publishes large amounts of awful photos of themselves on a daily basis, this is a great relief.
On arriving back to London I got back to my rightful duties and cooked up an enormous bowl of potato salad à la Fearnley-Whittingstall for me and my mate Charlie. I used more potatoes and more bacon than the recipe called for and yet we still polished off the entire thing, plus a family sized bottle of chocolate milk each. It was a bit sick but very enjoyable really. Coincidentally we also watched Easy Rider, which is (very nearly) the name of the fashion shoot this week, so in some roundabout way I feel I’ve achieved a degree of success. You may think otherwise. Here’s the evidence.
New potato salad
Huge potato salad
Today I woke up early and attempted the shorts/mac/belt ensemble dictated to me by my papery friend. Unfortunately, despite all the miles I’ve clocked up running around London and paddling around Suffolk, there’s no escaping the fact that I enjoy a pint of Stowford Press and a good yorkie more than the next lass. The shorts I was wearing last summer do fit me again, but that’s where the relationship ends. After staring at today’s fashion for a further ten minutes with my mouth open, I realised I was about to be late for work again, put a frock on and ran for the door.
Easy riders
Easy on the ciders
Conclusions:
- Canoeing is the don of exercise, and River Stour Boating are the dons of canoeing. A weekend to be recommended.
- I’d rather have the cider than the shorts anyway, so that’s OK.
Hot date cake
My goodness me, Mr Lepard was underestimating this cake when he said it was in the running as one of the best date cakes around. I’d nominate it as one of the best cakes full stop.
My enchantingly intuitive and crurally balletic friend Emily came over to share it with me and, although she described it as “very nice, comforting, warm and old-fashioned tasting”, she did leave the crust on the plate. The fact that there was a crust to leave may, I concede, be part of the reason it was discarded. I didn’t particularly go out of my way to weigh any of the ingredients at all, but I did use my lovely measuring jug and my keen eye for a teaspoon to make the mixture. I used the right sized tin for once but the cake only took 30 mins to bake, not an hour. Maybe I put in too much sugary stuff and not enough flour.
To ring the changes and wrestle a bit of profit from the conglomerates I had done my shopping at Mother Earth this time, and I couldn’t find any tamarind paste in the shop. But no matter – I had foreseen this eventuality and thought of the sort of substances I might use to replace it. I don’t know if you’ve tried it but there’s this delicious pure fruit spread stuff called Sunwheel that’s a bit like molasses, but made of just apples and pears. In my experience of tamarind paste, this Sunwheel thing isn’t completely different, and it did add to a nice, moist cake. The walnuts didn’t even sink! The icing was a disaster, of course, but I don’t mind that much. To me it seems entirely natural that I would be able to bake a tasty cake but get the icing wrong, in much the same way that I can choose myself a lovely frock but my accessories will always let the whole thing down. Details or something. But who wants to be good at icing, anyway? That’s just a rubbish skill. Be good at cakes.
Here it is:
Tamarind date cake
Other kind of date cake
I was intending to do a home styling shoot last night but, what with running, bathing, entertaining and putting the recycling out – which somehow seems to take me hours – I never got round to it. The dahlias also remained in their packet due to the heavy rains my neighbourhood was experiencing at the appointed planting time.
Other updates: the final outfit of the week has me replicating this young lad’s vibe. I’m sure you’ll agree my success is uncanny.
Checks
Vexed
I think that pretty much rounds off the week, other than to say that I have carried in my heart and mind Oliver Burkeman’s words, as always, to test out their life-changing abilities. This week’s column had quite a positive impact on my daily life, as it happens. This Column WIll Change Your Life is often among the pages to capture my imagination the most when I open the magazine on a Saturday, but it barely gets mentioned in my blog. I think that’s because I’m so utterly rubbish at writing about it. I just had to delete a whole paragraph I’d written about this week’s because it made me feel nauseous. I seem to go extra pompous sounding as soon as feelings are involved. I think I’ll try to work on this. In the meantime, I trust you’ll find my writing lovably imperfect.
I've always found it funny when people write letters to the Guardian's Weekend magazine complaining that the recipe ingredients are too middle class and the fashion only looks good on thin people. After all, it's just a magazine. Or is it? I decided to follow its recipes, fashion and lifestyle advice as closely as possible, to see if the aspirations promoted therein can really be achieved by the average reader who is not especially wealthy, not necessarily model thin and is obliged to work regular office hours. This blog has no affiliation whatsoever with the Guardian but I link to the Weekend magazine website for the purposes of illustration. 
Guardian Girl 
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