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.
Tuesday 4 August
I’m delighted to be back out of swimwear and into boys’ jeans and a jumper my granny knitted me many years ago. Although I love these clothes I have to admit that my interpretation of the model’s outfit is fairly weak – except for the hairstyle, which I’m getting much better at after weeks of practice. I still find it hard to get all the partings straight but I don’t have to look at them so nevermind.
Shoulders
Toldyer
It’s getting disheartening to repeatedly look so much less glamorous than this woman. She’s becoming my arch-enemy.
For din-dins it was supposed to be another of Hugh’s summer marinades – the final one, in fact. Again I didn’t get home until half eight or so and I really couldn’t wait another few hours to eat, so again I used his marinade ingredients to cook the meat without leaving it to soak. First I fried a bit of salmon in lemon, olive oil and the herbs, then ate it as a starter while I grilled some chicken pieces in the same stuff. It was tasty and moist and good.
Before I was allowed to bathe and bed myself (?) I had to attempt making my flat look like an Australian factory conversion – no small feat. I used to live in an old toy factory, which would have yielded so much more joy, but now I live alone, sob, I can’t afford wooden flooring and white walls and all that jazz. These interior design photos are going to become very samey very quickly as there are only so many angles from which you can photograph a small, dishevelled studio flat/large, luxurious cat litter.
Nonetheless I’ll have you know I put a great deal of effort and back-work into rearranging my furniture to meet the requirements. The resulting configuration means you have to climb over the sofa if you want to sit on it. But then the sofa is actually two chairs pushed together anyway, and those chairs are of such poor quality they are more like cheap dollhouse furniture that’s been zapped by that machine in the Honey I Shrunk the Kids sequel (was there one? Probably). The point is that I wouldn’t recommend anyone risked sitting on them anyway, so the amount of effort required to reach them is of little importance.
My cat, at least, was entertained by all this moving about of his usual landmarks.
Here are the results. I’m sure you’ll agree my flat now looks like something straight out of Wallpaper*:
Light
Dark
The cactus room posed problems, as predicted. I’m afraid I just couldn’t make space for one. So I took a photo of the closest thing I have to a let’s-eat-breakfast-in-the-cactus-room-this-morning-darling table, which is an old dining table piled with records and magazines. Chic.
Cactus room
Cacktus room
And finally, the adorable lift. At my home I have to go up the stairs like a regular pleb so I took a picture of me door instead, because it looks a little similar.
And that was that for the day.
Conclusions:
- I don’t have enough shoulders in my wardrobe.
- Marinades are for the weekends, I’m now certain of it.
- There are limited ways of restyling the same small room. That sad truth of home styling should be enough to put anyone off committing a crime punishable by incarceration – then where would you put the cactus room?
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 
1 comment