Guardian Girl

Today was a day of great expectations.

I recruited my most fashion-savvy-yet-honest homosexual chum and off we skipped, arms linked fabulously, to buy lots of Measure stuff. Here follows a breakdown of successes and failures succeeded by a heinous photo of me looking like I’m taking a crap in the woods.

Gold cuff This was achieved with Adam’s help, as French Connection had one I thought relatively nice, and he gets 50% off thanks to designing for Nicole Farhi, which is part of the same group. He thought the cuff was revolting initially but came around in the end. However he put the kiboshes on a gypsy-ish necklace I wanted to buy on account of its having some turquoise bits hanging off it. He said I looked like a middle-aged administrator in it. So?

Turquoise jewellery However I did find a fairly nice pair of heart-shaped turquoise (-coloured) earrings that look like something you might find on a narrowboat, only I found them in Accessorize. As I find some of my dearest friends on narrowboats, this has positive associations for me. When I say find, I mean they are there getting on with their lives, not that I scour narrowboats for new friends, which I don’t have the spare time to do.

A dress with a “rush of gold sparkle” Adam and I decided they meant one with a subtle gold glitter or thread spun through it, and I tried on several such garments in H&M (Adam’s conclusion: “That sleeve doesn’t do much for you, darling-heart.”) However I’ve sworn off high-street clothes wherever possible thanks to Nin and Phoebe’s reality check, so we headed to Beyond Retro where I found a dress so lovely that Ad and I decided to reinterpret the rules – it has a gold ruffle and cuffs rather than a “rush of sparkle” but hey, it looked nice. It even – dare I say this – had a faint air of the Pamela Ewing about it. I’m going to wear it for my 30th, and if I don’t get compared to Pamela every ten minutes I’ll have a tizzy fit.

’90s Madonna No conical bra-tops on the high street as yet but I allowed myself to buy Immaculate Collection on vinyl even though strictly that’s ’80s Madonna. I think it was released in 1990, just scraping into being Measure approved. Kind of. I just wanted the record really.

Mienna boots I was quite up for these but the moment Adam clapped eyes on them he declared them the most repugnant thing he’d seen in a long while, stamped his desert boot on the floor and banned me from even trying them on. Since I was fully expecting to look more overfed heiress than Twiggy chic in them, I went along with his judgement and with an enormous sigh of relief saved myself £140 into the bargain. How the Guardian gets off putting “only” in front of £140 during a sentence about boots is anybody’s guess anyway. 

Gap crombie Good job Ads was with me or I wouldn’t have known what a crombie was. I mean, I knew it was a coat but I couldn’t have been sure exactly what style. We found the coat in question and it’s a nice garment, thick and warm and relatively well cut. The problem is it made me look like Little Miss Whatever High Street. Very boring. Not inordinately flattering to my shape, although not ugly either. A darker grey tends to suit me better, while this one is a pale felty-marl-pebbly shade. All in all it looked fine but I couldn’t bring myself to spend £98 on it. It really would have been a waste of cash I can’t afford to spend. I would shell out that amount pretty happily if I put it on and thought “yehhh” rather than “erhhmmmm”.

Barrettes As Adam pointed out, I think Katie Grand and chums are thinking of a different breed of barrettes from those found lurking on the lower racks of Boots’ haircare section/Accessorize. A very poor selection to be seen, all of which would have made me look rather First Violin, even with messy locks. I kept my money in my purse and decided to wait for them to hit Topshop instead.

I decided I ought to check out what’s going on in the head of this Katie Grand and bought a copy of Love, the magazine she edits, which WHSmith was doing a great job of hiding in some irrelevant place in the shop. I would have got it from a newsagent but I needed to pay by card. I read it later that night in the bath and got a bit spluttery about it. What is Pixie Geldof doing being treated like style royalty? Tavi on the other hand – what a girl. Apparently I’m not allowed to write good things about her without her permission and I’ve never read her blog properly but on the strength of that interview alone – top marks.

GQ Style I looked around but could only find GQ Plain. I didn’t like it much – I read it in the bath later too. It’s exactly the same as Vogue but with more erotic photos of men and slightly more openly misogynistic copy.

Aztecs at the British Museum I went along on my own having been dropped off by Ads with tears in my eyes. It was an interesting exhibition in the main and the turquoise mosaic masks were really incredible, but overall too much grey stone and too much writing on plaques obscured by crowds. One thing stood out: in the era of Moctezuma the Nahuatl word for gold meant “excrement of the gods”. I’ll remember this next time I need to refer to my new Godshit cuff. For £12 a think the British Museum could have pumped some interesting smells into the exhibition, or put a few fairground rides in, even if only slow, small ones. The shop was a bit lame too, apart from a range of sequinned decorations I had my eye on – the mask and the peacock were ace but I can’t see them in the online shop – can you?

That evening I rejected making potted mackerel in favour of hot buttered rolls with ready-smoked mackerel. The decision was a result of missing the Sunday supermarkets and being at the back of the queue when the Lord was doling out motivation to pot fish. I was at the back of all the most important queues, I tell you.

I swapped my Dallas boxset with Adam and Thomas’ DVDs of Absolutely Fabulous series 1 and 2, Ring of Bright Water and last year’s Criminal Justice, the first episode of which I watched that evening with my mackerelly rolls. Never have I seen such a frustrating, tense, brilliant thing. I was clutching on to this giant cushion thing I have all the way through. I have to stop writing about it though or I’ll go on for even more years.

Today’s outfit: I put it on for ten minutes to get the snap. I wore something totally different into town. There’s no need to ask why. An abomination:

Bare

Mare

Conclusions:

• French Connection has some pretty nice jewellery.
• No one has nice barrettes yet.
• GQ is kind of  lame.
• Love is a bit better.
• Vintage dresses are much better.
• I wish I’d spotted Jonathan Ross at the BM. Adam called having just seen him go in wearing a pair of rubber waders. Drat.
• What’s with H&M sizing anyway? A size 12 dress fitted me perfectly yet a different size 16 clung to me like a terrible black contraceptive device.
• Faith boots are controversial.
• I will pot cheese, fair enough, I will. Manana.