The Annotated Weekender
My life in a picture:
Now I’ve discovered it, I’ll be using The Annotated Weekender as paracetamol for the heart after every tricky recipe.
Gurning bright
I didn’t wear this outfit to the catwalk show earlier in the day, but I did put it on for a bit of telly watching later.
On the run
Got the runs
Conclusion:
• At least this was one of those outfits I had very low expectations of.
Jumping, fair trade
Steak salad, fairtrade cake, jumping in a pink minidress. That was the weekend for me. Wasn’t it for all Guardian readers?
Today I took the day off work and went to the Nicole Farhi show, being sure to take a packet of Mini Creme Eggs in my pocket (see this week’s Measure). I found it a curiously pleasing experience to eat chocolate while watching those coppices of bony thighs breeze by. It was like watching The Snowman in front of an open fire.
I also popped into Jigsaw and tried on the drape-front cardigan that gets the thumbs up this week. It was lovely and soft, a good colour and a great shape. But I still couldn’t make myself spend £79 on it.
Tonight, fried pineapple and ice cream. Happy times.
Mango, avocado and steak salad
Mangled avocado and steak salad
Shorts stuff
Warthog
Banana chocolate cake
Bedraggled chocolate cake
Conclusion:
• So far, the week is good and the food is great. The fashion, notsomuch.
Date night
Weirdly could find no figs in the supermarket, so Photographer Cari (remember? yay!) is sharing date cake with me instead. And taking my photo again, like the old days. Witness the return to form. On one side of the lens, anyway.
Grey
Blee
(Caption dedicated to Smash Hits readers of the ’80s).
Fig, wine and honey cake
Fug whine and hurry cake
Conclusion:
- A pleasant cake, but was confused for bread more than once, sometimes by people who had a mouthful of it at the time.
Military chic
I was looking forward to getting out of Cartoonies mode and back into sensible clothes. Then I saw my reflection.
I’m in harem pants again today because they’re my only pair of non-jean trousers that fit. Centre partings, which are good on some people, give me the look of a teenage boy with unfortunate 90s curtains. My shirt has been washed with so many non-whites it looks like the ‘Before’ shot in a Daz advert. My stubbly calves, demonstrating the colour my shirt’s supposed to be, are straining to escape the silk cuffs of my trousers with the determination of a pair of malnourished paratroopers, which is the only military thing about my look today. As for chicness, the faint aroma of last night’s kipper isn’t helping much.
Luckily the light in the ladies loo at work is broken at the moment, so my colleague Flavie has managed to capture a dusky shot that reveals none of the above disturbances in my appearance.
Military
Defensive
Conclusions:
- Never thought I’d say this but I’m starting to crave a good pair of slacks.
- For a clandestine photo I will undo two shirt buttons.
- For a day at work I will undo no more than one.
One more day of backcombing and fish
Top of tonight’s shopping list is a giant bottle of conditioner. My hair has remained in a matted beehive for three days now, slightly morphing in shape dependent on the position I slept in (Cliffhanger last night, for those of you who bought the magazine this week – I stayed over with a friend and the Heimlich would not be appropriate).
Today’s outfit has mostly been provided by Harriet and involves a long denim dress gaffer taped up underneath to make it thigh-length.
The beehive has been bobby-pinned within the bounds of Monday morning social acceptance and the Mary-Quant-visits-a-burns-unit make-up was rejected entirely this morning. I pretended to myself that the reason was my being in a rush to catch the train to work, but the truth was I’m too scared to come into the office looking that odd. Maybe if I’d been here a year I might be more adventurous, or if everyone knew what I was really up to, but at the moment I’m trying to retain a sense of reliability when defending my deletion of a semi-colon. I don’t want my colleagues staring at my eyes trying to work out whether I’m having an allergic reaction or am just an Adam and the Ants fan. It’s not fair on other people.
Jump to it
Frump to it
Fried herring
Fried salmon
Conclusions:
- Even in a creative office, there are limits to how ‘interesting’ you can look – work is work. This fashion shoot was quite funny to try out at the weekend but it’s definitely one for the leisure time.
- No fresh herring in the supermarket, so I allowed myself some nice but boring salmon instead and boiled a couple of kippers to try for good measure. I always imagined I wouldn’t like a flat, Simpson-yellow oily sea creature that smelt of concentrated fish, but in fact I thought it was delicious. That’s butter for you. Unfortunately I returned Harriet’s borrowed clothes to her reeking of kipper – bad manners.
The day yesterday: no herring, some denim
I looked like such a fool in this outfit, and that is putting it very politely.
Walking to the usual cafe for Sunday’s fry-up with backcombed hair piled on top of my head, magenta lipgloss striping across my eyelids and silk hareem pants billowing at my knees, I felt the eyes of the world boring into me scathingly. When you next wake up with a paranoid hangover and just want to pull on your favourite jeans and a soft, comforting t-shirt, try fashioning yourself as a dramatic beast of Dalstonicity instead and walk around town attempting to look inconspicuous. On a ten minute walk I had to phone four friends for moral support and none of them answered, probably having tired long ago of comforting me on my daily jaunts in ridiculous outfits. I don’t mind looking silly or eccentric; what I object to is looking like I think I’m cool. There’s something mortifying about that. If I could only wear a sandwich board with a disclaimer on it. The All Ages story looks pretty staid this week but this big hair/pink eyeshadow combo is really tricky to tone down.
Anyway, as usual, the photo doesn’t nearly do justice to how stupid I looked. Thanks to Elin for the action photography, although we had to reject the jumping shots as they were disfiguringly blurred.
Dinner wasn’t herring because it was Liv’s actual birthday and you don’t refuse to attend your best pal’s family meal on the basis that you have to stay in and cook fish for your vanity project.
(Happy 30th Liv. You are the most brilliant person, without whom the world would be very, very much less enjoyable. )
Strike a pose
Dyke with woes
A quick update on the Measure front: I’ve seen this Kate Halfpenny stuff before and it’s very lovely indeed but when jewellery shopping involves commissioning, one-offs and/or prices on application, those of us who aren’t yet CEOs know it’s time to wait until dragonfly trinkets hit Claire’s Accessories. By which time we don’t want one. I’m not dead keen on dragonflies anyway – they’re a bit naff aren’t they. They’re for girls who have those mini-hairbrushes in their handbags. The Reiss skirt looks pretty nice but, again, budgetary considerations can’t be pushed too far aside in late-January and I spy posh rucksacks slightly further down the Measure list this week. I could really do with a rucksack to help avoid dropped shoulders on all my long walks, so I might put a bit of cash into that.
Conclusions:
- iPhones can do all sorts of amazing things but they can’t really take decent snaps of magazine pages.
- Sorry if the caption is in any way offensive today.
- What is good is how differently various styles make you behave. I found this get-up put some new dance moves into my repertoire, a loping swagger into my walk and, curiously, a series of chimp noises into my lungs.
- Liv’s family has some pretty eccentric dressers in it, which meant nobody batted an eyelid when I walked into the room looking like a Janet Jackson backing dancer on steroids. Relaxing.
- Great timing on the herring/birthday curry front. Only one more day of oily fish to get through.
Too many spanners in the works
The straw has broken the camel’s back yet again.
I tried on my only posh frock last night and it didn’t fit me anymore. I’m officially taking another sabbatical from this project until my broken foot heals and I can exercise again. Until then the horizon is lined with salad leaves.
I look forward to having my evenings back for a while and some spare cash to spend on xmas presents.
However, look! I discovered how to make a random post button (top right).
This means you can catch up on all the extremely hilarious posts you never bothered to read before.
X
Hitchcock is it
Dearest Olivia took me to Tesco’s to get the food shopping in last night and, upon setting eyes on the four-page list of ingredients I was supposed to buy, helped me reach the executive decision to give cookery a miss this week.
It’s the end of the pay period, I’m not exactly rolling in it and I’d rather buy electricity and phone credit than vine fruits and pudding basins. I apologise to my mum and dad for this because it means I probably won’t be turning up to either of their houses over Christmas bearing seasonal homebakery as I’d hoped.
Today my friend and now colleague Flavie accompanied me on a mini-reconnaissance through Primrose Hill to find a good taxi-hailing street where I could loiter, lumpen in my orthopedic footwear, and pretend to be glamorous despite it being pitifully clear that will be impossible for the next six weeks.
The outfit went down the pan because I couldn’t even bring myself to try on my pencil skirt with flats, let alone wear it to a new job, and then the accessorising fell by the wayside too.
Skirt suit
Law suit
We had to run away quickly because people started throwing coins at me. One of them implored me to please not spend the money on a good meal.
Conclusions:
- In the absence of recipe cookery I was able to buy a trolley-full of exciting fruit, veg, yoghurt and other healthy items I hardly ever get to eat. It’s the equivalent of how a normal person feels buying a load of cakes and pizzas.
- A few things ruining my chances of looking like a Hitchcock heroine this week: flat shoes, special boot, crutches, neon socks on crutches, too-low waistlines on clothes (cinching and flats have a difficult marriage), eighties tailoring, heavy fringe, lighting.
Argghh
I have to dash (if you can call it that) to Antwerp now and haven’t had time to upload all the cake/boot/omelette/interiors pics I harvested last night. Suffice it to say I’ve had remarkable success and the photographic proof will appear early next week.
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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