Go your own way #4: Dreams
Finally, the last day in Stevie Nicksdale cometh. Without wanting to be unkind to myself, it’s an image I haven’t mastered well.
Part of the problem is having the right tools for the task. Yesterday I failed on the Hammer-pant score, today I failed on the leather-pant front. I’ve never much wanted to succeed with either anyway. My outfit today ended up as a dress with leggings underneath and a pair of ill-matching shoes, topped with a denim jacket – nothing like what I saw in the magazine but it’s the closest I could get, guv. It’s certainly nothing SN would wear at a festival.
Dreams
Nightmares
Since the outfit lacked authenticity I decided the carpet was important, and invited my esteemed and patient friend Cari on a search for the perfect pub floor. We found it quickly in a place on Praed Street and popped in for a glass of wine and a chat about size zero before the ‘shoot’ commenced. We talked about this blog and the idea of recreating outfits on a size-14 body that have been styled to hang well on a size-zero frame. I’m no size-zero militant – I think models should be available in as many shapes, sizes and colours as the clothes they wear, and if some of them are stick-thin, that’s fine by me – some women are stick thin. But it does get worrying when all you see, page after page, are generic, bony-looking girls wearing clothes that just wouldn’t look good on even a size-10 woman. Cari had some interesting thoughts to share on the matter, accepting that skinny women will always be used to show off the shape and cut of a designer’s clothes and saying that we need to dissociate our beauty ideals from that imagery rather than try to quash it altogether. Neither of us could work out how to do that easily, though. I’m wary of this blog becoming too weighted (excuse me) towards discussing the size of models versus ‘normal’ girls, as there are many writers doing a far better job of that already. I contemplated ignoring the matter altogether but decided that would be dishonest in a blog that is all about dreams, reality, the media and comparisons. I hope I’ll be able to strike a balance by dealing with the fat/thin thing when it’s really relevant and ignoring it when it’s not. I’m already surprised at how often it’s cropped up, but then, as Cari says ‘who cares if you have to buy a pair of sandals that you think look better on thin ankles? Just style them well and have a bit of fun, they’ll look great.’ Wise words, wise lass. I’ll link to her blog as soon as she starts it.
PS Cari is a tall, curvaceous (and not euphemistically) size 12 and has a pair of cropped leather trousers she looks amazing in. Point taken.
Conclusions:
- I guess if I really wanted to nail this style, I’d just have to bite the bullet and buy myself some harem pants, a pair of leather trousers, a cropped, frilled jacket and a top hat
- I don’t really want to nail this style
- Menswear starts tomorrow, yay!
Oliver Burkeman ponders the case of the disobedient shower
This was a very enlightening column, as ever. I love the idea of inanimate objects forming a stubborn household union against us, lurking around waiting to stub our toes and delete our text messages. I’ve tried nurturing anthropomorphism wisely before, for example by renaming spiders ‘velveteens’ and imagining them with cute, high-pitched voices, but it didn’t really work. However with inanimate objects it might be easier, since they provide more blank canvas on which to project. I practised OB’s advice and tried to edit my belongings a bit by shunning the things that routinely irritate me (cheap fork, awkward bag) and embracing those that work well (nice table, iPod). It makes sense. I’m keeping this in mind as a general principle and adding it to my Dad’s wisdom that you should quickly sort out any little niggling problems around the home such as loose carpet, dripping taps, ill-fitting doorframes, before you get used to them and they simply chip away invisibly at your quality of life. Imagining a flat filled with nice stuff and no leaky taps makes me feel instantly happier.
I also followed OB’s advice by cogitating on the fact that the most I know about any of my loved ones is a series of body movements and vocal sounds they’ve made throughout the time I’ve known them. This made me think of chimps, which made me laugh, but once I moved on from the chimp thoughts I felt sad and lonely, so I thought about something else instead.
Conclusions:
- Simple and true: surrounding yourself with nice, just-right objects makes life so much better
- Chimps are cheery, while solipsism, even mild solipsism – if there can be such a thing – is saddening
Raspberry tarts
Last night was the grand finale for fruit tarts, perhaps luckily for my increasingly indistinct waistline, although sadly for my pastry-loving tastebuds. Hugh sure does put a lot of cholesterol in his recipes. I look upon this as a good thing but perhaps I should have undergone a series of Supersize Me-style tests before and after this project. Too late now ( I’ll tell myself). I’ve got a bit cocky by now about the success with which I’m not taking these recipes very seriously, and these raspberry tarts followed the same happy pattern. I keep finding that Hugh’s pastry recipes come out too dry (it’s hilarious to hear myself write that – WI here I come) so I always add extra eggs, water, cream or whatever is to hand, which I think is why I keep ending up with cakes more than pastry. I also realise that the dryness is more likely to be due to my lack of scales than his bad recipes, although I have been using an ace French measuring jug that has marks up the sides for each ingredient by weight, for example Farine 100g etc. You just pour in the flour, sugar or whatever, shake it around a bit and pour it in. I love this jug so much I use it despite it being full of cracks. I’m scared I won’t be able to find a replacement. Terrified. I suppose I should just look in the shops.
Anyway, I did channel my inner pâtissier(e?) at Hugh’s suggestion and glazed the tart/cake shell things with jam before filling them with the homemade pastry cream and berries. They were delicious. Really, really great, and the pastry cream was simple to make as I ignored such words as ‘clean’, ‘gently’, ‘strain’ and ‘chill’, none of which I have in my vocabulary. My flat filled with acrid smoke when I preheated the oven because yesterday’s supplementary tart filling had bubbled on to the floor of the cooker and was burning, to which my shameful solution was to open the oven door and all the windows, and let the goo mostly burn away before putting the tarts in regardless. They only had a slight taste of industrial fires about them. I’ll sort the oven out mañana.
Raspberry tarts
Raspberry barfs
Mine could do with a bit more snow, hey? And those neat little turrets around the edge. And some distressed floorboards underneath.
Conclusions:
- Learning a bit more about pastry has been really fun, very tasty and surprisingly successful
- All those tubs of cream, packets of butter and cups of sugar don’t go well with the fashion. Hypocrites! I knew it! I’m writing in
- I think there might be more pies next week but tomorrow I finally get a salad, thank you Yotam
Go your own way #3: Gold dust
An unrecreatable look with my wardrobe. I haven’t gone down the harem-pant route, which i suspect of leading to a fiery inferno. I have only one pair of jeans that fits at the moment. Hugh! Salads! I don’t look like Stevie Nicks. It just isn’t happening. Here, nonetheless, is my attempt.
Gold dust
Old rust
Conclusions:
- With most of these fashion stories, each look really does rely heavily on a key piece, such as harem pants or a feather skirt, without which you have no hope of recreating the intended atmosphere, even if you were Ekat, 34-24-32
- A blunt fringe is like a bold accessory and totally changes the way stuff looks
Cherry tart
Last night I baked Hugh’s cherry tart recipe.
It was Sunday and I spent shop opening hours searching for summer boots and maxi-dresses, so I missed the big supermarkets. Another peril of this aspirational lifestyle thing – you have to be very organised, and have far more than 24 hours in each day, or no friends.
Tesco Metro had only one punnet of cherries left and no fresh apricots so I threw caution to the wind and decided to put whole dried apricots in there instead. Hugh would probably be cringeing as I reached for the very packet, but he wasn’t there so I chucked them in the basket. There were no ground almonds so, get this, I opted for a big bag of mixed nuts and dried fruit, which I decided to mix into the pie filling whole. Daring. Tesco had no kirsch, strangely, so I subsituted that with a slug of rum. This magazine following lark is all about bold substitutions, I’ve decided – advice I’d like to share with all those who write into the paper complaining that the ingredients are too hard to find. Just get on with it! Put something else in instead! With that in mind, however, I might have to change this blog’s subtitle to ‘following the Guardian lifetstyle not quite to the letter, but more with a slapdash and arguably pointless level of commitment’.
By the time I got home I was a bit cranky and hungry and all things considered didn’t feel like chilling pastry. I felt like eating pastry. So I skipped that step, sorry. I did everything extra-hamfisted this time, and it came out bloody delicious. I squashed the pillowy dough (which I flavoured with vanilla essence cos El Metro didn’t have pods) into a loaf tin like a kid at the Play-doh and pre-baked it with no beans while I mixed up the filling with a George’s Marvellous Medicine spirit. It came out looking like a bowl of lumpy sick, if you’d been eating emeralds and rubies and opals – those were pistachios and cherries and lumps of unsieved (sorry again) icing sugar. I poured half the mix into the shell, which was really more like a small cake by now as I’d made no attempt to get the pastry thin. Half was left over, so I snacked on a bit of it and decanted the remainder into a baking tin to cook into a sort of floury, lumpy pancake thing. When the ‘tart’ came out of the oven 40 minutes later it looked like a fruit loaf and tasted gorge-ous. Gorgeworthy. Not surprising given that it contained pretty much an entire packet of butter. I ate a fair amount and then packed the spare filling into the cavity, put it in a carrier bag and headed off to see some friends. The verdict from everyone was very positive, although my friend Liv also detected the trademark raw dough taste (I haven’t yet learned my lesson on the oven temperature thing). On our way home we bumped into another mate, Martin, who stuck his thumb in and pulled out an apricot, which had soaked up some rum and butter and gone all delicious. Turns out they weren’t a bad addition at all, although they weren’t the best bit. The best bit was the fluffy, crumbly, cakey pastry.
Conclusions:
- If you can’t find the right ingredient, buy the wrong ingredient and throw that in instead. You’ll either regret it or you won’t, but it won’t matter tomorrow, God willing
- Vanilla essence is another good pastry ingredient
- Put rum in stuff
- It doesn’t always matter if you’re impatient – even with tarts. You just end up with a cake instead, and who could complain about that?
Flowing maxi dresses
Flowing maxi dresses are going down. It’s all about finding a dress that looks good belted yet reaches the ground, it would seem. At 5’8″ I’m used to having trouble finding long dresses and skirts that are really long, although in fairness I haven’t tried for about… 14 years. I assumed that since every cheap magazine is filled with maxi dresses at the moment (I say that but I haven’t actually read a magazine other than Weekend and the titles I work on for months – I just sense they’re full of maxi dresses), shops such as Monsoon, Next, M&S, maybe French Connection would be rammed with them. This is not the case – I could barely see any, and Angel’s charity shops weren’t giving either. So I headed for the last resort option that in my case always bears fruit – the market shop. It’s one of them that’s basically a market stall unloaded hurriedly into a shop, with a peeling box room covered by a musty curtain for a changing room. Cash only and filled with gaudy, rank garments you wouldn’t be seen dead in even if the Guardian told you to wear them three weeks in a row. I always find good stuff in these shops. It’s a questionable way to shop because as most people know, when surrounded by hideousness, a bog-standard nasty item looks like the bargain of the year, but if you’re shopping with a fixed idea of what you’re looking for it matters less. I found, for another £20 (how long is this blog going to last on my wage? Weeks, I’d say. And what does that tell us about the pursuit of a magazine life? Whatever) a floor-length drapey black jersey dress with a weird, metal halterneck thing. It’s kind of a necklace with a dress hanging off it. I actually look alright in it, a bit Cleopatra-like with the fringe and this week’s eyeliner, which I consider a positive thing. I didn’t take a photo though. I was having a badly timed break. Now I just have to work out where on earth I’m going to wear it. No doubt it will be making an appearance among these pages shortly. Possibly combined with a turban.
Conclusions:
- Maxi dresses still look nicer flowing if you have big boobs. Making them cling to your curves gets all Morticia Adams if you’re obliged, for eccentric reasons, to team them with a fringe and Dita von Teese make-up. They go from looking relaxed and flattering to vampy and a bit naff. The men in the room would approve and the women in the room would think you didn’t have especially good taste. With a small chest, I can see it working much better. Yet another bird-bone prejudice then. Hugh had better get on to the salad recipes
- Don’t bother trying to buy long dresses in charity shops. Get to the discount shops, which have just cottoned on. Or polyestered… no
Summer boots
Summer boots with open toes and heels are on their way up, according to the Measure, so I headed to Angel at the weekend to see what was on offer. Quite a lot, was the answer. Oasis had lots of pairs of sandal-boots in jewel-coloured leather, including a pink pair reduced from £35 to £20. Didn’t seem too bad for a versatile pair of shoes that will be much more useful than spike heels for tramping around festivals in all God’s weathers. There was one snag: the ankle thing. If you’re going to make a feature of your ankles by buckling them up in pretty leather straps, they’d better stand up to the packaging. Mine don’t, really, as is illustrated by the picture below.
Summer boots
Wow, that came out big. I hope the photo of my own flat, rather veiny plate of meat isn’t going to be the same size:
Summer hoots
Hmmm.
Conclusions:
- Summer boot bargains are to be had on the high street this week
- Here’s one item that’s actually practical for festival wear
- Why do so many of these trends rely on having small bones, of all things? Or perhaps it’s my imagination…
Go your own way #2: Angel
I have a demonic expression in the photo below for good reason. The shawl looked ridiculous. I took it out with me in my bag that day, but there it stayed. As for the lace leggings, I’d look like Tiffany on a pie diet if I tried that. Best stick with the old faithful black pair. I needed a long shirt to cover my Lycra’d rump. Luckily my great pal Adam not only designs menswear for FARHI by Nicole Farhi but is generous as well, so I have in my possession the most brilliant long, poplin manshirt of the sort of visible quality I’d never usually shell out for, and I put this on over everything. It’s so useful it never really gets washed. This sort of garment is the best friend of the festival goer – not a lace shawl. For starters you need to be able to move to the music without looking like you’re in a shamanic dance workshop/The Crow. Plus, shawls may look chic on narrow, birdlke shoulders but I looked like I’d just got out of the bath wrapped in a towel. I suppose a good long head of hair might balance it out a bit. I’ll splash some Baby Bio on later.
Angel
Devil
Conclusions:
- Delicate shawls for delicate shoulders; manly shirt for manly shoulders
Blueberry Galette
It’s another pie, isn’t it, but this time it’s called a galette.
I managed to get all the ingredients this time. The pastry was somewhat raw again, but with the addition of lemon zest it was far more palatable and I experienced an only mildly stomach upset this time – well worth it! I discovered that if you don’t have a rolling pin, Hugh’s suggestion of putting pastry between sheets of baking parchment works a treat as you can do the GBH approach without getting your fists sticky. God that sounded awful. I still didn’t use the hand blender, although I got it out of the cupboard and felt happy staring at it for a while. I took a good, long look inside myself and discovered that my reticence to use the blender is the result of a previous trauma with a bowl of egg whites. I’ll ask a friend to help me with the speed settings and then get back on the horse next time.
Blueberry galette
Blueberry regret
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Add lemon zest to pastry for a happy life
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I obviously need to turn my oven up a bit hotter than Hugh says
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Who needs rolling pins, except as an apron-related style thing?
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I have to face my hand blender issues before they begin to rule my life
Get the look: Lauren Luke discovers her inner Dita von Teese
Well it’s all very well having an inner Dita von Teese, isn’t it.
This make-up look involves frosted eye primer and brow wax. I can’t help but feel that anyone who has these items in their make-up bag doesn’t need to be told how to put red lipstick and black eyeliner on. The beauty spot was a bit of a revelation though. In the past this has been strictly fancy dress territory for me but I gave it a go and drew over my natural beauty spot with an eye pencil. It actually looked kind of foxy and provides an ingenious distraction from acne, I discovered. You’d think it’d just look like too many dots on one face, but not so. Brightest star in the sky and all that.
Dita von Teese
Deep vein Thrombosis
Conclusions:
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Less of a conclusion, more of question raised – do people really own frosted eye primer and brow wax?
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Beauty spots rule OK
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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