tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-337100952024-03-12T23:03:12.719+00:00Discotheque Confusiondiscotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.comBlogger1463125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-2571683311406522682019-11-25T17:02:00.002+00:002019-12-06T19:07:12.712+00:00Lane swimmingAt the pool today they are playing pop music as I swim my lengths. As the recognition of each song’s opening chords dawn on me — <i>I’m Still Standing</i>? No, <i>Maneater</i> by Hall & Oates — I feel stupidly happy. A small, sweet deviation from what I’d expected. Like a snow day, or how being picked up from after-school club by my mum instead of granny used to feel. My £2.65 entrance fee has immediately earned its value.<br />
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This is my first time at the pool for two weeks and I can feel it. The water is gently pushing back, my tally rising slowly. I push on, promising to get to 10 laps, and after that maybe more, in the same way that I might avoid looking too far ahead when cycling up a hill. But when the music starts, the resistance slips away with the rhythm. My funny breaststroke moves to the beat, and I wonder how my movement looks to the passive lifeguard sitting above me on his ladder chair. Maybe he’s thinking, Wow, look at her fast yet graceful breaststroke, and will approach me afterwards to invite me to a swimming club that has been short of a skilled breaststroker. It is the only stroke I can do. <br />
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It’s not clear why the music is playing — everybody around me is swimming quite seriously, the woman in the next lane doing elegant upside-down rolly-pollies at the turn of each lap. I watch her deft work as she takes off again, and with the music it feels like performance. Over the walkway dividing the deep and shallow pools, the swimming appears more casual, but I see no signs of dancing, no organised clusters of older people or schoolchildren. <br />
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I must have come at the same time on a previous Monday, because again, my time in the water was elevated by a soundtrack of Bananarama and Duran Duran. You should try swimming to <i>Girls on Film</i> some time. Maybe it’s something for people with dementia? Playing familiar music to prompt deep contentment. But the playlist feels too contemporary for that. Old people like Vera Lynn, but wouldn’t swimming to Vera Lynn bring everybody to tears? Nobody likes to cry in a swimming pool.<br />
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The Pointer Sisters’ <i>I’m So Excited</i> plays and I want to shake my head in time and yet I notice that I am restraining myself from any visible displays of recognition, channelled the pleasure into my lengths instead. Maybe I should go to one of those aqua aerobics classes. Do they actually dance, or is it just stretching? I imagine dozens of feet and bums underwater, stepping and shaking in time. I would probably be the youngest by 40 years, like that intensive Italian course I once took, where everybody was retired and had beautiful rolling ‘R’s after decades of holidaying in Tuscany. But dancing in a swimming pool I imagine I could learn something about doing what you like, without worrying how you look. <br />
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I drop the thought soon after, relieved by the knowledge that I will not fool myself during an aqua aerobic hamstring exercise by saying, I thought there would be more Duran Duran?<br />
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As I rest and stretch at the side, two people, acquaintances, are chatting across the floating red lane dividers. She has swimmer's shoulders, google marks across her nose, a broad smile. He is pale with the short beard and brown hair that all white 34-year old men have, and I suppose look better for. I think he owns a lot of striped long-sleeve tops. She had already updated him on a malady she’d recently suffered, I’d noticed that when she listed all the medicines she’d had to take, it was pleasingly in harmony with the The Pointer Sisters’ staccato bridge. He listened attentively, even though a contained body of water seems like the impolite place to catalogue your recent illness. Now she was telling him about her new cat. It had been found wandering around the building she lives in, and unclaimed, her letting agent had tried, but failed, to rehome it, before letting her take it instead. They said I couldn’t have pets, she marvelled, And <i>hello,</i> now I have a cat! She described it’s long fur, it’s green eyes. It was somewhere between 6 months and a year old. That’s not a cat, I thought, that’s a <i>kitten</i>! A sweet, naughty kitten! She seemed delighted by this development, and surprised by how easily, as a tenant used to living with impenetrable conditions, it had come about.<br />
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Walking towards home through the park, I pass a border terrier, the weight of it’s old-looking body leaning into its owner’s legs as it gets a comprehensive rub down. Under the ears, a swift removal of sleep from the eyes, around the nose and down to the flank. Dog and owner are offering themselves to the other, and receiving the same amount of gratification in this exchange, here on the path under the orange leafed trees. That daily walk every dog and owner always seems so romantic. The silence and routineness of it, each engaged in their own thoughts, <i>payday, dinner; stick, lamppost</i>, they look like an old couple taking a turn before dinner.
discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-50863805568625160892019-03-03T13:50:00.001+00:002019-03-03T13:51:29.428+00:00Invite me for dinner, I'll see what I can do. One of the symptoms of living back in my hometown since November is that I really miss my friends who are, of course, mostly in London. I missed familial, unthinking interactions when we were in France, too. But more time has passed - it's almost year since we left London - and the missing has turned now into a longing. I have three friends here in Bristol, and only one that I see with any regularity. She is my oldest friend; we met fighting over a mutual best friend in the playground when we were five. We go to the cinema, she joins me and my parents for dinner, or takes me and Henry to pubs we do not know about on his days off. In the past weeks Lily and I have become addicted to playing Gin Rummy together. It is the one card game we have dedicated ourself to so far. We will work our way up so that when we are in our eighties we will be formidable. But so far we have not tired of Gin Rummy, just like a child doesn't tire of asking the adults to join her in endless, repetitive games.<br />
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One busy Saturday evening last month Lily and I played cards all night at a packed wine bar. Watching the line of people at the door, I wondered if it was a bit anti-social, but thought of how people spend evenings in packed wine bars on their phones, even when in the company of others. I didn't worry about it again. She's now left for Glasgow to work on a TV programme for eight weeks, and when she returns we'll have moved on again.<br />
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I've been thinking about what it is takes to be a good companion. And I don't mean the romantic sort, I just mean somebody who is wonderful to sit next to at dinner or at the pub. (For the record, I am longing to sit next to people at 'dinner'!) To be a good companion, you have to be generous and patient (I am working on these two things, but I also have an abundance of judgement that gets in the way.) You have to be sensitive to social dynamics and other people's comfort levels (I am good at this) and - this is the thing that's been on my mind - you should be skilled at storytelling.<br />
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Adam is my great-aunt's boyfriend, is skilled at storytelling. He makes it look so easy! They are both in their 70s, and I'm incredibly glad that since my granny died they've moved closer into my life. They've taken me out for dinner, and invited us on holiday. A, a life-long lover and collector of wine who can no longer drink, diligently keeps my glass filled with something good-tasting that I could not afford to order myself. He insists I order Port for afterwards, and like those once-in-a-blue moon teachers or even a marvellous stranger you might end up sitting beside on a flight, he makes up in some way for my odd, disinterested uncles, the dead granddads, and yes, even my dad who has been much less than perfect. I'm not sure I can even remember one of his stories specifically. But that's not what it's about - it's about a story for a moment. Not a brag, or a cruel piece of gossip; just something to entertain the table. He has spent decades honing the narrative of his party pieces. My great-aunt has heard them repeated during the last 10 years they've spent together. But no matter; his pauses are polished, his punchlines are tight. The observations delightfully eccentric, and I always leave dinner with them feeling as nourished with wit as with flavour.<br />
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Not long before we left London, we were invited to a party at Quo Vadis, the restaurant and member's club in Soho. This is just the sort of invite a Londoner in her twenties should receive! I thought to myself, already tiring in many ways of all that it felt I wasn't experiencing in the vibrant capital. As we journeyed Central on the hour-long bus, I anticipated meeting welcoming new acquaintances, or in the very least a mix of gregarious party-goers with some good gossip. It's Soho, I thought. I dressed up in wine-coloured satin trousers and a long leather coat, and departed from the first party of the evening; a relaxed celebration of Joe's birthday, where my imperfect but family-like group of university mates were making White Russians and spoiling Joe.<br />
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You probably already know what I'm going to say. The second party was not the hoot I had hoped for. There was a banker who glazed eyes rested over my shoulder; a man in a cool linen suit turned out to be a charmless intellectual property lawyer. I really didn't expect this room of people to simply perform for me - but I also didn't think that spending Saturday evening at a party in Soho would be such a bore. Everybody, it seemed, was taking cocaine. And they weren't even fun enough for it to work.<br />
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Jeremy Lee was there drawing guests in for hugs, kissing on both cheeks and booming "Now, let me introduce you to the marvellous <i>Lucinda</i>..." His natural hostly energy seemed to prop up the inward facing-ness of my own generation, who were sticking with their friends, taking selfies, or skipping the playing music before the last track had finished. I sipped my Campari cocktail too fast and wondered if what it takes to be good company at a party will stand the test of time. Maybe older generations are just <i>better</i> at it. Before mobile phones, they used to knock on their friends and just <i>walk back home again </i>if they weren't there! I decided that of course our generation isn't <i>devoid</i> of charming people. (And anyway, who voted Brexit? Not us!) You just have to be lucky enough to end up beside somebody who is curious and generous, somebody who doesn't really care what you do for a living.<br />
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There have been times when I've felt like a wretched, inarticulate and disappointing dinner guest - my brain hopelessly straining for something, anything interesting to say. I can now see that was a depression trying to strangle joy out, forcing me to take everything to seriously or feel like staying indoors would be a better option. But you don't always have to be an ebullient guest. You don't even always have to be on form. Here in Bristol, without regular friend contact and suddenly finding myself questioning what a social interaction with friends should <i>be</i> if not satisfying, my stepdad shrugged that sometimes you leave the house and the whole night is off. Someone gets too drunk, somebody else isn't on form. It's life. If your expectations are always high, my mum asked looking me straight on, how are you ever going to meet them?<br />
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It's true, I take things to heart too much. I judge people and expect too much of them, I wish to be cooler and calmer than I often think I am. I'm working on all of it, as much as a human being can do whilst earning a living, loving the people around them as honestly as they can. I'm working on the stories too. Invite me for dinner, I'll see what I can do.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12749327618211517956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-12053336170552489502018-07-26T22:07:00.001+01:002018-07-26T22:31:36.722+01:00Get out of the houseI once read that Twyla Tharp, the American dancer and choreographer, has a routine that involves getting up at 5.30am, putting on her workout clothes - "my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat." and walking outside to hail a taxi. Once in, she tells the driver to take her to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where she exercises. "The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym." <a href="https://amzn.to/2Oh1QuC">She wrote</a>, "The ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual."
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I've found the idea of daily routines appealing in the past, but never really taken starting one seriously. There always seemed to be too much variation across the days. When I worked in advertising I, a breakfast fiend, went through a stage of taking two boiled eggs into work and spreading them onto toast which I ate at the desk. Was that a routine? I had a hunch that being interested in other people's routines was just another way to put off just <i>starting </i>the work. It tapped into my fear, the fear I still have, that I will never sit down to do the work I wish to do, that I'll realise one day that I didn't work hard enough at it. Why worry about how Picasso or whoever spent their mornings when you could just...start, I thought, not starting. Perfecting a routine, I thought, was maybe left to people who read Brain Pickings.<br />
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I liked the sound of Twyla Tharp's routine, though. 'That sounds decadent!' I thought, at first. A taxi everyday! Wow, you'd save a lot of money if you just walked. But I liked that she was affording herself that one thing, those few dollars, to get to where she needed to be.<br />
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A couple of weeks ago I was having a rough few days. I missed my friends and I was acutely feeling the loneliness that can come from sitting inside and writing all day. Or, in my case, sitting inside and feeling very down and unsure of my career path. Being here in Clermont-Ferrand, which is relatively cheap is fine, but I wasn't sure I could make the writing I want to do, and the income I need to survive comfortably match up in another city like say, London. (This isn't going to be a post about how I answered that question. I don't know that I will ever answer that question.)<br />
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After a few days of sitting inside feeling hopeless and self-loathing, I decided I would walk up to Parc Montjuzet, the big park that hangs onto the hillside overlooking the city, first thing in the morning. Henry leaves for work at 7.45am, so I figured my routine would be walking out of the door at the same time. Like Twyla Tharp. No shower, just out of bed and through the front door. The park offered me the chance to move, but it also offered dogwalkers, and I knew I wanted dogwalkers. The community of responsive Park People, who are up early, no matter where you live. I wanted to say something to a stranger that didn't involve an uncomfortable exchange while I fumbled with French, like I do at the market or the cafe, or honestly most places I go. A short, cheery 'Bonjour!' was enough for me. It was would also be evidence that people, other than the person I live with, could see me.<br />
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So now I am a Parc Montjuzet walker. I have my own loop. Every morning I see the older woman in cycling shorts, who marches ahead of her four dogs and looks strong. She looks like many other dogwalkers from many other parks. Which I like. I see the Pointer owner who wears a baseball cap and who always looks like he isn't going to say hello until the last minute. 'Bonjour!' The park is 450m up, and sweat runs down to my elbows as I climb. I'm not terribly fit and I enjoy the novelty of this. I wear the same ribbed halterneck and the same navy cotton trousers every morning, so the people I pass probably think, 'There's the new halterneck lady.'<br />
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Sometimes I can't sit on my designated bench because intense jets of water have been set up to hydrate the surrounding lavender. I stand on the path and watch the entire circular course of these rotating water sprays, ttttssss tttttssss tttttssss, and wait for my chance to run through without getting wet. It might actually be nice to get wet and not care, but I have my phone in my pocket, so the momentary spontaneity would be outweighed by caring very much indeed. It would be nice to care less.<br />
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This morning I sat on my dry, unscathed bench and met the man who sets up the water sprays! I rarely see the groundspeople at Montjuzet and maybe it brought some comfort because my stepdad also works in a big garden. He dragged the yellow hose snaking it carefully around the plants and the path. He said something and I must have showed that classic Look of Fear than falls onto my face whenever somebody says something I don't understand. But we started speaking. I was very slow with incredibly rudimentary French but inside I was very excited. I was talking in French! I was pulling verbs out of my head, endings be damned. It wasn't quite "Je m'appelle Jeanne et j'ai un lapin" but it was pretty close as far as GSCE French goes. He nodded along and waited patiently for me to find the right words and actually replied, which means that I made some sense. I'll be honest, I walked home feeling incredibly elated, and liberated rather than embarrassed of my shite French! When I took an intensive week long Italian class in London last year I was the youngest by about 30 years and one day I burst into tears when the teacher was Loud and Persistent when I didn't understand her. I appreciated this stranger, for not dousing my bench in water this morning, and also for listening. It's funny, and humbling, to be in a situation where my grasp on spoken language is so lacking when it's how I make a living. I think I've wasted a lot of time being scared or just... inconspicuously getting tears in my eyes, when I'm embarrassed of seeming like an idiot in situations that are humbling. I wonder what that's all about. Either way, I'm chipping away at it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12749327618211517956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-19918018704832316982018-05-16T19:10:00.002+01:002018-05-16T19:16:38.955+01:00I thought, "Fuck it, I want life to feel easier for a while."At the end of March we put our belongings into a storage unit in South London and left the city fairly quietly. Obviously we told our friends and family but I didn't mention anything online; I think I was putting off saying anything, in case not being in London would mean I stopped getting offers of certain work. I didn't want to miss out, and after all, besides all of the wonderful things about London, this 'not missing out' is a sort of magnetism that brings and keeps people in the city. I figured I could nip back for decent money jobs, and nobody would need to know - after all, there are plenty of people on social media who keep it quiet that they don't, in fact, live in London.<br />
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(I realise that may sound stupid, I realise Londoners have a reputation for not being great at seeing what else is out there. After two years of living in the city, I don't know if I'm a Londoner but either way, I wanted to see what else is out there.)<br />
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In early January, I stood in a Clerkenwell pub for the leaving do of a couple of mates who were moving to Athens. Only a few months ago India and I had sprawled outside the Barbican on a hot lunch break, eating from our tupperware containers, and musing on what we thought we wanted. Her, to move to Athens; me to leave my job in advertising, where I was working under a manager who was making me miserable. Now, in that first week of the year when everything is slow, contemplative and hopeful (and our natural levels of resignation have not yet come out of Christmas hibernation) Eating the pub's intensely garlic-smelling scotch eggs, I felt rather in awe of the fact that India and her boyfriend had fucking well orchestrated their move to Athens. How many conversations do we all have about our dreams to run abroad for a while? They were actually doing it! I told her how I admired that they were making the leap, and she reminded me that she wasn't the only one who'd followed through after that conversation at the Barbican; I had eventually quit my job too. It was later in the month, during a long weekend trip to Venice that I realised I needed to get out of London for a while too. I know, I know - people get all sorts of ideas on holiday. But eating delicious fish dinners in our Airbnb flat in the evenings, it felt so good to have space to ourselves. The stupid, minor resentments I felt towards my housemates for doing things differently to me (well, I do things the right way, but whatever) felt distant but I knew I'd have to return to them. Everything we ate was cheaper than back in London, maybe because restaurants didn't have to price defensively against speedily rising rents. In short, the grass was greener and I thought, fuck it, I want life to feel easier for a while. Even if just for the summer.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">A photograph I took in California, not France, but does it matter. </span></div>
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So next month, after a stopgap in Bristol, we're packing up our car and taking the ferry over to France. (We own a car now! I went to collect it last week, or rather, I asked Julian from the garage to park it outside my dad's house - I can't actually drive yet. My driving test is the day before we our ferry leaves. Will I pull of a pass?!) Once in France, we'll be living in the Massif Central for at least five months, and maybe longer, who knows? That's how much work Henry has lined up for now. Really, I'd love to end up in Italy but it would be rude not to stay a little longer and put my stellar C in GCSE French to good use. And then back to London again when the nostalgia for British humour, Marmite and my friends gets too strong. In the meantime, if you know where I can find a wide straw hat that'll make me look like a farmer from Province, please let me know. I'm not even kidding, I need your help.discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-10714088696276463102018-04-17T22:20:00.002+01:002018-04-17T22:30:47.312+01:00"Oh shit, this is bigger than me"<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p_mclPxq2-c/WtX7EFcW5qI/AAAAAAAAJrE/R2-QIhTDPv0rydFP07pUT61fu5RAIuwPQCLcBGAs/s1600/April%2Bmood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="880" data-original-width="650" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p_mclPxq2-c/WtX7EFcW5qI/AAAAAAAAJrE/R2-QIhTDPv0rydFP07pUT61fu5RAIuwPQCLcBGAs/s1600/April%2Bmood.jpg" /></a><b style="text-align: center;"></b><b></b><br />
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<b><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p_mclPxq2-c/WtX7EFcW5qI/AAAAAAAAJrE/R2-QIhTDPv0rydFP07pUT61fu5RAIuwPQCLcBGAs/s1600/April%2Bmood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b style="color: black; text-align: start;"></b></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b style="color: black; text-align: start;"><a href="https://www.antibadstore.com/red-versace-two-piece-suit" target="_blank">Red Versace two-piece suit</a></b><span style="color: black; font-weight: normal;"> from Antibad (who have a great curated vintage collection) (£150) / Parp! </span><b style="color: black; text-align: start;">'<a href="https://mrlarkin.net/store/sophie-buhai-derriere-brooch/" target="_blank">Derriere' brooch</a> </b><span style="color: black; font-weight: normal;">from Sophie Busai (€470) / </span><b style="color: black; text-align: start;"><a href="https://mondo-mondo.com/collections/jewelry/products/roma-earrings" target="_blank">ROMA earrings</a></b><span style="color: black; font-weight: normal;"> from Mondo Mondo ($265) / Lots of good silk and cotton white suitage over at </span><b style="color: black; text-align: start;"><a href="https://odetoodd.tictail.com/" target="_blank">Ode to Odd</a> / </b></span><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p_mclPxq2-c/WtX7EFcW5qI/AAAAAAAAJrE/R2-QIhTDPv0rydFP07pUT61fu5RAIuwPQCLcBGAs/s1600/April%2Bmood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b style="color: black; text-align: start;"><br /></b></span></a></b></h4>
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I save images like I used to make notes on scrap paper. My phone's camera roll is full of screenshots, and sometimes I take them because my digital exploration has become so complex and full of warrens that I worry I'll forget absolutely everything if I try to remember this one extra reference. On Instagram, I save photographs of people wearing covetable clothes, delightfully retro hotel bathrooms and meals to recreate. But really, it still feels like those old scraps of paper; I'm still creating more, even if it's in a 'cloud'. As a teenager my mum would sometimes help me tidy my room and 'let go' of things. "Do you need this?" she'd ask, holding one of my essential paper scraps. "Yes!" I'd say with panic. They contained the scribbled titles of songs I'd heard on the radio, old films I'd heard name-checked in a documentary. All of this information was so important, and if I lost them then I'd be shutting down an entire avenue of potential inspiration!</div>
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I suppose I'm just thinking about how, even though we have now have digital space to store the photographs, playlists or bookmarks that matter to us, it still all takes up mental space somehow.</div>
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I started making the collage above because I wanted to do something <u>fun</u> with the images I collect. Maybe, I thought, it will feel therapeutic to put the clothes I like but won't buy in together in one place. But once I uploaded the collage, it looked flat. Why did it look flat? Placed together, the individual images looked too ubiquitous for my liking. They look like the Instagram timeline of any woman in 2018 (or 2017 or 2016 or 1976) who likes hammered metal earrings, Paloma Wool, tangerines in a bowl, lavender suede mules or straw bags. I like those things too (obviously, because the algorithm continues to feed them to me!) But it caused me to pause and wonder lots of things about my personal style, and how it might be different today (when so much of my time is spent on platforms with algorithms) compared to a few years ago, when I read fashion blogs and magazines less able to compile data about my tastes. Today it feels like so many of us share a collective taste because of what our algorithms have learned about us. We've ended up desiring items that help us to feel unique, or at least niche in our tastes, but now those same tastes are feeding a proliferation of womenswear brands and stores run through Instagram that are all just so uncannily... the same. Trends have always existed of course, but this feels different. </div>
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I started going down this rabbit hole this afternoon and THEN... Racked published this fascinating and very prescient longread, written by Kyle Chayka: <a href="https://www.racked.com/2018/4/17/17219166/fashion-style-algorithm-amazon-echo-look" target="_blank"><b>"Style Is An Algorithm."</b></a></div>
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It's a brilliant read. (And wow, I had to battle my probably algorithm-learned impulse to zone out because of it's length. Blame everything on the algorithm!)</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 30.6px;">"...As soon as something Cool, Obscure, and Authentic gets put back on the internet, it is factored into the equation, maybe it goes viral, and soon enough it’s as omnipresent as </span><a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/why-millennial-pink-refuses-to-go-away.html" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(255, 0, 128); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #545332; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 30.6px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: inherit; transition: color 0.1s, background-color 0.1s, fill 0.1s; vertical-align: inherit;">Millennial Pink</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 30.6px;"> circa 2017. In this way, algorithmic culture is not encouraging of diversity or the coexistence of multiple valid viewpoints and identities. If a stylistic quirk is effective, it is integrated into the Generic Style as quickly as possible; if it is ineffective, it is choked of public exposure."</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">What Chayka was saying, (that the more we interact with social and digital platforms that collect our data, the more our personal tastes will become more homogenised) made me feel better about my ickiness over the collage. Part of me thinks "Fuck it! If you like the thing, just go ahead and like the thing!" while the other side of my asks "But what is <i>my </i>personal taste anymore?" </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">As I've learned from talking a lot about clothes and personal style with <a href="https://twitter.com/anakinsella" target="_blank"><b>Ana</b></a> on <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/layers/id1319846187?mt=2" target="_blank"><b>Layers</b>,</a> sometimes it's possible to ask too many questions. "What is my personal taste?" is a really big question! Without getting <i>too </i>lofty, it's like looking up at the stars and thinking 'Oh shit, this is bigger than me.' My personal style is two pairs of high-waisted white jeans I sometimes wear on rotation. Except the jeans are shorter than I'd like and are therefore imperfect. Personal style then, isn't always real. Sometimes you just carry it around in your head. It's a reflection of taste, desire and sometimes a resignation that what you wear, and what you <i>want </i>to wear won't always align. Sometimes you'll spend years finding the item that's just right, which of course explains the allure of the hours spend online finding just the thing. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">As you may have established, I don't have the answers. Maybe you don't have them either, maybe that's why you're here!</span></div>
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discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-52274806906343899832018-04-11T21:15:00.000+01:002018-04-11T21:15:51.004+01:00Just quietly hanging out<span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">Over the Easter weekend, Lily, who is my oldest and best friend, messaged me a link to an article all about how freeing it is to socialise in silence. That might make it sound like one of those po-faced manifestos of minimalism, but it's not. Anyway, it's really stuck with me and as I'm going to be talking about it here - <b><a href="https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/there-are-few-things-better-than-socializing-in-silence.html" target="_blank">you can read it first</a></b>, if you'd like. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've had a manic few weeks of packing up my stuff, moving from our houseshare and filling a storage unit in Bermondsey, London with furniture and things I won't need for a few months. It was a noisy process. Not just the endless sound of affixing brown tape to boxes, but also the constant noise in my head - of making decisions about what to keep and what to throw. Thinking and feeling guilty about how much stuff we accumulate as humans and what a waste it is. (Never an efficient thought process when you have a moving deadline.) I gave away old magazines, stacking them on a chair outside our house. I topped up the pile when it depleted, and bought the chair inside whenever rain was forecast. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've been relishing quiet. There were six of us living together and I was really, <i>really </i>ready to not be living in a houseshare</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">. My tolerance for small talk or, to be honest, any social interaction I did not want to have, was incredibly low at this point. I was easily snappy, which made me feel crappy. I just wanted to live somewhere that felt like a real home, rather than a beneficial set-up in an expensive city, for people with different lives, thrown together for economic reasons. I craved a home that was familial, and I suppose to me that means coming in from the city and being able to read my book, or write, or concentrate on a film in an peaceful, unspoken silence. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's fair to say then, that this article about a New Yorker looking for silence suited my mood:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; letter-spacing: 0.1px; line-height: 27px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"In a poetry class in college, I learned that Wallace Stevens shared an apartment with his wife, but they would often not talk for long stretches of time, circling about the same space in their separate spheres. This struck me as my ideal way of socializing. I immediately told my best friend about this and we began trying it. I would go over to their house and read on their front porch, while they painted their nails in the bedroom, and then we’d converge hours later, maybe make a meal together. Sometimes we would walk to the narrow, wooden pedestrian bridge overhanging the train tracks and wait to feel the train surge beneath us, taking it all in wordlessly."</span></span></blockquote>
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It's funny because for months I've been thinking about friendships and wondering what is the best way to hang out with people without feeling tired by the interaction. It's not like spending time with people is inherently tiring (though growing up an only child I admit I favour solitude more than many of my friends.) But living in a city, it's common to socialise in ways that begin to feel unromantic through necessity. Because friends are so often busy, seeing them becomes this diarised 'catch-up'. Unlike at University, where we were inexplicably always together, finding ways to see each other can feel like arranging a meeting. You go to a pub, or a bar, or a coffee shop, or some neutral space where you pay to eat and something to drink. It means you can leave when you want, and nobody outstays their welcome. Conversation is like a game of tennis, back and forth, question and answer. Sometimes I return home thinking: "If I stay at home tomorrow, maybe I won't feel as tired."<br />
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Writing this makes me feel sad. <i>Why is everybody so tired? </i>I didn't think it would be like this! And honestly, it isn't always, but I do sometimes think it was better when everyone was more collectively skint and socialising meant just - <i>hanging out, </i>and not much else. Once in a blue moon, I have dinner at a friend's and everything feels more generous. We feed each other, we pour ourselves drinks and even better - we get to nose at each other's skin products as we wash our hands in the other's bathroom. But because we're all so tired by - what exactly? - it never happens as often as it should.<br />
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I started writing this, thinking it would be about silence. But the more I write, the more I realise it's about home. And how important home feels when you live in a big, costly city. When I think about how I'd like to spend time with my friends, it involves a long table, a home-cooked meal and raucous conversation. It's me inviting people <i>into </i>my home, rather than shutting them out. And it's a sofa! A glorious, deep squishy sofa which is all mine. Not one that's falling apart and holding us hostage, like the sad, broken-down Ikea sofas of houseshares.<br />
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The dream sofa (and all it represents) might still be a way off yet, but memories of socialising in silence has given me a much-needed jolt this week. There was the whole evening me and Rose spent making our Halloween costumes in Manchester, she fashioning a bloody bull's horn, pushing a cummerbund through her sewing machine for her gory dead Matador costume, while I papier-mached black crows to attack my Tippi Hedren. We listened to the radio, and we didn't ask each other about work. We didn't look for ways to fill the gaps, and it felt like home.discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-59891003184763991472018-04-08T19:11:00.003+01:002018-04-17T09:22:44.446+01:00Sometimes you just have to get the thing out there<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The other week I was writing something for <b><a href="https://audioboom.com/channel/layers" target="_blank">Layers</a> </b>(mine and Ana's podcast about clothes and what we wear - you should listen to it!) which made me feel wistful for the days when I pored so much love and energy into blogging. Or, I suppose, writing for no money at all.</div>
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I didn't pitch ideas to editors and wait to hear if my idea was acceptable. And I didn't have a 'news hook'. Sometimes I wrote utter nonsense (ignore the archives!) and sometimes I'd sit with a small seed of an idea that bloomed into something I hadn't been expecting. There were often typos. Writing this way felt free, lucid and often risky.</div>
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Or perhaps it just feels riskier now? Threading together words and publishing them online can feel more laden with meaning than it did say, 10 years ago. A Twitter feed is less the ephemeral soapbox it used to be, and more a record for any potential employee or snooping family member to rifle through. Sometimes it all feels too revealing, as if writing honestly (which sometimes means recording a feeling that was totally of the moment and has since shifted) might be held against you at a later point. I used to share personal thoughts with regularity, and sometimes sharing makes me feel queasy these days. I don't always want to explain myself. Or updates can end up feeling like a branding exercise. People have multiple Instagram accounts because of that feeling - the pretty ones, and the funny, true ones. I like both, but like the funny, true ones even more.</div>
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As such, I have such a thirst for blogging as it used to be. For the past couple of years I've thought 'Eh! Blogs have had their time. Move on.' I've updated very sporadically, wondering whether to let the thing be. But now, I'm craving a return of writing more freely, fretting less what people think. It seems to me the internet needs less seriousness. More messiness. Or at least words that come in larger doses than an Instagram caption. I've noticed those captions getting longer and longer, like we have more to say. Sometimes the captions are less an accompaniment to the image, and more about a larger though or feeling that needs to get out. Something that needs to be <i>linked </i>to! ("Link in bio") To breathe in a place that's not overcrowded in a feed of noise - of other people's dogs and meals and shoes.</div>
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Whatever. Expect more short bursts on here - the short and the long. I might not always have a photograph to accompany the words. I might have to figure out how to create a composition of outfits I like using a software programme that... may or may not exist any more? I might think about whether that's something I should still be doing, now that I am 26 instead of 16. This blog does <i>not</i> look beautiful on a phone. It's okay though, sometimes you just have to get the thing out there.</div>
discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-30693825420036342362017-08-26T00:07:00.001+01:002017-08-26T00:19:00.263+01:00I could continue, but I suppose the point is that I started writing<div style="text-align: justify;">
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By the end of the day I find that it's far too easy to eye my journal and think "Nah. Some other time."</div>
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This isn't a new habit. It's the way I've felt about diary-keeping for much of my life, as if I must record my days in the most accurate and truthful way, so that later I can revisit my decades-old self as authentically as possible, and really embody the feelings I actually felt. But <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19.2px;">– </span>and this is important <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19.2px;">–</span> the written record should have a sort of retrospective pragmatism too. An older, wiser knowingness otherwise it would be far too embarrassing to read at a later date!</div>
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As you might imagine, this makes the idea of opening my journal, let alone writing inside it pretty fucking tiresome. I think if you've wanted to write from a young age, you have this funny idea that every word you scribble down will one day be a valuable resource to incredibly grateful historians. </div>
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Keeping a diary should be a space for being as free as possible, instead of burdened by whether you're your own reliable narrator. Heidi Julavits overcame this bind by returning to her childhood diary-writing technique. Every entry would begin with "Today I..." The restriction helped the words out, and it became <a href="http://amzn.to/2w5qG9P" target="_blank"><b>The Folded Clock</b>.</a> Today I met this woman at a party and. Today I missed a deadline and. Today I walked over Vauxhall Bridge and felt very light.</div>
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Now that I am freelance again, I feel on the whole much happier. Something about an ending and a beginning has cleared away my brain-cobwebs. I think I'm learning and thinking more, even if the thinking is thoughts like "I think I'd like a pair of blue baggy camouflage trousers??!" </div>
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Even if things feel clearer, I will always been in the habit of treating my brain like an internet browser. Just as I like to open dozens of tabs, I switch between dozens of thought paths. I'll think about 15 different features I would like to write. I'll browse Instagram because I feel like "shopping". I'll screenshot a photograph because the geotag is an art gallery I've never heard of. I'm forever creating new paths to leap down, but sometimes I forget to slow down and actually <i>follow one.</i></div>
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But a diary can be whatever you'd like it to be. So why not treat it as somewhere to set down the cerebral atoms which will otherwise keep crashing into each other? Today I visited the mineral section at the Bristol City Museum and looked at the hulking lumps of agate and quartz. Maybe I thought that going there would feel like being 6 again and visiting after school with Granny. But I'm 26 and there with my sister, and being 6 is still inside me, and so is my Granny even though she isn't here, and I still have the same agate and quartz, and she's those rocks now too. </div>
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What else is life like on 25th August 2017? I spent one hour researching which pair of men's blue camouflage work trousers to buy (<i>on Amazon!</i>) which is proof that right now I feel as giddy about clothes as I did when I was 17. I'm a bit more discerning now though. I want to wear bright things, but breathable things because I'm sick of sweating so much. No more viscose please. I'm thinking about new outfits that many of my friends will inevitably choose not to comment on when we meet at the pub. Everyone will be quiet for a little longer but they'll think "you know what, I respect Stevie for carrying her cards and change in a small construction toolbelt she found god knows where." </div>
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I could continue, but I suppose the point is that I started writing. And after all, this isn't really a diary. </div>
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discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-4000218977498706432017-06-10T14:19:00.002+01:002017-06-10T14:29:46.783+01:00Katharine Hepburn was pouring Bourbon she didn’t really want, thinking “what now?”As I walked up my road last night I saw the local fox with her three cubs. This was very exciting because I know this fox, but I did not know she was a mother. It was only 9.30 but my street was very quiet. More like an early Saturday morning than Friday night. Everyone was either still at the pub or tucking duvets high and close under their children’s chins. I'd pulled myself through that restless indecision that follows an evening of sitting on a sunny curb drinking beer after work. That was some good curb time; I talked to a colleague about New York City and how good people are at flirting there. Better than in London where we don’t like to stare at a stranger’s shoes for too long in case they spot our approval. He is Greek, and told me that "Nostalgia" means homesickness and sadness, that it's a sort of homesickness for a place that made you sad. That's all he really said, but I look it to mean longing for something you don't really want.<br />
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Now I was hungry and incapable of knowing what my stomach wanted. I decided that my stomach didn’t know what it wanted, so I just had to get home and give it something good. I needed to parent my stomach, and that meant being loving and stern. I thought about how red my sister’s eyebrows used to turn when she was a small and tired. It was a warning sign. I don’t have a physical indicator of listlessness. It either comes out of my mouth as a babbling list of possible outcomes, or I just go home. I think lots of people just carry on drinking through that feeling. But I had to go home. Henry was at work, and the others were far south of the river. Everyone already had plans.<br />
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But the foxes. I stayed very still when I saw them. I hoped they’d let me watch, but I couldn’t take a chance on them spotting me and running away because I wanted this moment. The mother was washing one cub's tail while the others raced skittishly. Before I came to London, I never saw foxes by daylight. A fox in Bristol or Manchester was a moment that stood still some time after 3am. I’d round a corner and share mutually shocked eye contact until it bounded off. Seeing a fox was like seeing an big full moon, or smelling a jumper that belongs to someone you love. I’d climb into bed thinking “ahh, thank you universe for giving me a fox tonight!” But the foxes in London are audacious and shabby and not really loved. They sunbathe on garden sheds and pick fights and stalk down the streets like commuters. Because they are Londoners they have learnt to be unbothered by the close-quartered living conditions. They do not have time for privacy, and are not embarrassed about gathering chicken bones or washing their cubs out in the open.<br />
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Hungry on the street, I wanted a fox mum to clean my tail for me. I wanted to be close to other people without having go to a restaurant or a bar or spend more money. I wanted to lie quietly in a room with a door open, and hear people pottering in other parts of the house. I wanted somebody to make me dinner, and for me do the same for them tomorrow. There are so many things I want, and I don’t think I will ever grow out of it. Sometimes I am plagued by longing, but sometimes it wraps me up. It wraps me up when I’m sprawling on the mad flower patterned sofas at my parents house, or at the cinema with my arm hairs on end, clutching at something.<br />
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I long for the feeling of lying on my parents’ sofa here in London. I long to own more than one shelf in my fridge. I long for summer holidays. I don’t begrudge the longing, because I am used to being guided by it. It’s what gets me up in the mornings, working for a bigger fridge, a longer holiday. I’ve accepted the everyday presence of longing, which sort of makes it feel less deep. Maybe you're reading this and thinking 'oh, she is having a bad time' but my feelings can be flippant. I go deep into my longing, and the next moment I'm thinking about something else. I reserve my right to write something and feel differently later. Longing always summons another Friday.<br />
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I think I like longing when it’s doesn’t make me obsess over money. But maybe I sort of like obsessing over money? I have carefully calculated monthly budgets in spreadsheets, I am always keen to learn how people can afford to live. I don’t know where I learned to love this obsession, or who it is serving. Longing, I think as I watch the foxes, is just how I pass my time. What would it feel like not to? In twelve hours time, I will be walking by the canal, following the Canal and River Trust’s signposted suggestions (“Be like a Tortoise, Not A Hare!”) and I will remember again. <br />
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I left the foxes to their washing and familial tumbling. At home, I stood at the counter shovelled hummus and crackers into my mouth, a really good prawn and mayonnaise sandwich from leftovers. I watched <i><b><a href="http://amzn.to/2rLTDp2" target="_blank">Summertime</a></b></i> in bed, David Lean’s tale of longing in Italy. For much of the film Katharine Hepburn leans on Venetian bridges, marvelling at gondolas, water fire engines and old stone, trying to settle into her aloneness. She is forever crying out in wonder, and then moments later the ‘o’ of her lips has slumped. Her shoulders rolled forward, saying “what now?”.<br />
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There’s no one to turn to and say “would you look at that!” but if there was, she’d have to move through the crowds in a different way. Her holiday isn’t much different from being back at home, if you think about the gaps we really live in. One moment you’re watching a fox and wishing you had your people around, the next you’re spreading mayonnaise across bread, just being. Or rather, you're always being. You don’t remember that listlessness once you’re back at home from your holiday. Everyone had left aperitivo on the balcony for dinner, and Katharine Hepburn was pouring Bourbon she didn’t really want, back to thinking “what now?”. I was asleep within five minutes.discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-90511080429562458622017-05-12T12:25:00.002+01:002018-04-17T09:23:45.623+01:00Peter Shire's Cotton<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Peter Shire's colour-coordinated tee shirt drawers in blue, green, yellow, orange and red. </div>
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Via the ever-compulsive <a href="https://www.nowness.com/series/my-place/peter-shire-barbara-anastacio?autoplay" target="_blank"><b>My Place</b> series</a> on Nowness. </div>
discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-54290226730556506312017-04-25T12:53:00.000+01:002017-04-25T13:22:35.646+01:00Vaguely Similar ImagesTwo innovations I'm truly grateful to live with: the first, Shazam! I'm pretty sentimental, so I appreciate this app which puts to bed the fear of losing a song forever. I once stopped dead on the pavement right next to a man parking his car, to catch the music loud enough to seep out onto the street through his closed windows. The song, <i>E Jibon Choribe Na</i> by Shamim Ahmod, I discovered, had only been matched on Shazam three times before, and it's impossible to find online. No searches result in concise wisdom about who exactly Shamim Ahmod is, and yet Shazam was able to give me the answer, standing on a curb in the dark on Broadway Market. Even though I've never been able to listen to this song, which was my original worry, I am reassured that I have as much as I need to find it, if I really wanted to. How many nuggets of information like this, do we leave by the wayside, when the reassurance of not losing what might have been is enough to sate? To stop the exploration continuing further? Maybe it's the difference between an academic and myself, somebody who could while hours away on Instagram.<br />
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The other glad invention, is that Google Image search function that helps to identify an image. It's like having access to your own steely-eyed curator, only without a vast table full of transparents and a handsome little viewer (tools I imagine, archaically and incorrectly, all curators own). The Prada collections I was able to identify, <i>finally!</i> when I was a hungry fashion blogger and Google first launched this miraculous innovation, instant dot-connecting gratification for a niggling itch.<br />
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What's wonderful, is that once your mystery image has been identified, you're presented with this lush long page of 'Visually Similar Images', arranged according to the shades of marigold yellows they share, or because they contain a sheepish cloud, or a dog in a corner. There's always an accidental beauty to the algorithm at hand, whatever it is. At first, I thought this collecrion was called 'Vaguely Similar Images', a name I much prefer.<br />
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The question '<i>Who edits Luncheon Magazine?' </i>> <b>this<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/t-magazine/luncheon-magazine-london.html?_r=0"> New York Times article</a></b> > these words right here, in blue </div>
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> Was the chain that passed through my fleshy brain cells to find this nice page ></div>
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Today, I learned that it was Salvador Dali who painted this wonderful loaf of bread, used on the Penguin Modern Classics cover of <b><a href="http://amzn.to/2q29LTj">Plain Pleasures by Jane Bowles</a>,</b> and I am glad to know, to feel that I alone have drawn a thread through something, even if I was just making a use of a seamless design for curious people. I do wonder sometimes why I/we are so hungry for information. I think it makes us feel important, of use, absorbing as much as we can to keep us further away from death, or at least "full of something" when it comes!<br />
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discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-86566600191162029062017-03-23T21:11:00.000+00:002017-03-23T21:39:54.707+00:00Practical tips from friendsWe're an amalgamation of all sorts of habits and off-cuts picked up from others, so there's usually a story behind everything we do, even if we don't know it.<br />
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A cool thing about being a human is that memories become tied up in smells, tastes or routine tasks, so you can be washing your hands with a particular soap, or clipping the hedge in a certain way and quickly be transported to another time or place. There are certain tasks we do, that halfway through make us think vividly of those who showed us how to do it in the first place.<br />
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Maybe you know somebody who receives practical tips they didn't ask for un-begrudgingly, and you could be the person they think of as they approach small daily tasks with a new confidence!<br />
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When you rinse an empty jar of mayonnaise there's inevitably one stubborn blob at the bottom, just beyond reach. If your tap is strong enough you might make it budge, but either way, it's good to have autonomy in these moments. My friend Rose taught me that popping a sponge inside the jar, filling it with water before screwing on the lid and giving it a good shake does just the trick. Think of all the uses for a squeaky clean old mayo jar! Or the deep sense of citizenship you'll feel to recycle well-rinsed vessels <i>only. </i><br />
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My Granny was a marvellous present-wrapper, and she had a few tricks up her sleeve which are perfectly attainable and really down to organisation rather than skill. Her wrapping was neat rather than meticulous, and it looked <i>fun - </i>clashing colours and ribbons curled with a scissor blade. First, there's the matter of owning a wrapping box. You just make one and fill it with whatever you find - that fun pink tissue paper than comes with orders from Zara, silly fruit stickers, bubblewrap offcuts or ribbons from cakes or Lindt bunnies at Easter. Recently my favourite bakery started selling goods in these little bags with line drawings of people having all sorts of fun so I shook out the crumbs and put that in my box too. The other thing: tape. Treat yourself to a proper heavy dispenser. Life is too short to be chasing the end with one hand or hanging it off a table edge while you hold a fold.<br />
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To make a fire, start with a bed of paper 'doughnuts'. My Dad showed me how to pull a double page from a newspaper, roll lengthways and fashion into a double knot. Tuck it in on itself nice and tight. For a smaller domestic fire (like in a woodburner for a fireplace) 4 or 5 should be enough. Build a pyramid of kindling on top, and with a match, light the doughnuts, and blow. Place two logs on top. You just completed one of the oldest rituals known to man!<br />
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After my last break-up Simran lent me her Nars lip pen in 'Dragon Girl', because it's good to wear punchy red when your heart hurts. I was struck by how generous this was, to just hand over a fabulous lip pen like that. (I'm not really in the habit of lending anything other than books, and even then...) This pen, I learned, is so much better than lipstick because it clings to your lips through meals and drinks, so you can look good without constantly checking whether you still look good. Another thing I learned is that you don't always have to buy something new for your friends, sometimes you just give them a thing that'll tide them over.<br />
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I'm sad I spent so many years cooking carrots with such a lack of inspiration! I make a great salad with grated carrot. And of course, there's roasting. But any attempt at boiling spawned these joyless orange things of the school dinner variety. All of this changed two months ago when I saw Henry cut a load lengthwise and throw them into a small frying pan with olive oil, and just enough water to cover them. Some cumin seeds, salt and pepper and a few minutes of steaming under a lid. What emerged were these beautiful, oily carrots - for once a complement, a pleasure to fill a plate with, rather than an shitty afterthought.<br />
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When in a public toilet, never fill your hands with soap before checking the water runs first! We've all been there, but there are only so many times one should endure the humiliating routine of wiping handsoap from your palms with thin toilet tissue on a train that's tossing side-to-side. This one's from me to you. Think of me next time.discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-14756714581302975202017-03-11T16:34:00.004+00:002017-03-11T16:47:16.567+00:00Spring's sprung<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I could practically smell the spring before I'd even yanked the window up. There is was, a low gold over the grass and the banks at the back of my house.<br />
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Stripping my bed, I separated the poppers and took apart the two layers of my duvet. A proper spring ritual. In winter, the layers come together to swaddle. In the spring I lie on top of one, and under the other. I blast myself with cold water at the end of a shower, I can be brave enough once again. </div>
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Last night I drank two beers and two shots of Tequila. I never really have shots but I licked that fatty bit in between my thumb and index finger, covered it in salt, took back the tequila, bit into the lime and then danced. Taking it back in one go, and moving to the dancefloor with free hands made me feel purposeful. I felt like I only had two moves and wanted to mix it up. I watched my friends. Gus was doing this really cool thing with his arms, I can't really remember what it was, but it looked like a dance you could do in 1984 or 1996 or 2017 and it would be right for each. Soon I let go and danced and danced and danced, and thank god the music got better after Yas requested Diana Ross. I was so sweaty that when Aisling leaned in to kiss my cheek I lurched back, not wanting to feel anyone else on my wet skin. I was wearing my fake leather green skirt and it was sticking to my legs, I was tossing my hair about, marching back and forth to the free jug of water, sometimes sticking my body under the glorious air vent by the DJ's booth. </div>
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After a sequence of 6 or 7 wonderful Rhythm and Blues songs, the DJ put on Mr Brightside and the whole floor groaned but Joe threw up his hands and shouted to the opening so we followed because we saw it was easier not to resist. Before we knew it we were really red-faced and enjoying this turn of events. </div>
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I hung my washing up in our back yard this morning because it would be rude not to on the FIRST DAY OF SPRING! The air out there smelt like Ecover and June. </div>
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In this week's pottery class we couldn't find any cling film to wrap our wet pots with, and Ben said he needed to go on a "plastic hunt" but it didn't sound like "plastic hunt" when said aloud and we laughed. I laughed and laughed a bit longer. Sometimes my laughter comes out much louder than others' and I wonder if I'm showing off, but I'm not, it just feels really good to let it out. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12749327618211517956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-25913833443175747942017-02-14T21:25:00.002+00:002017-03-10T16:11:45.306+00:00A bartender's jobThe plan was to walk in, pick up the three bottles and get home as quickly as possible. It was one of those days that quickly turns from light to emotionally fraught, but internally so that it’s a fight to make sure nobody notices.<br />
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At work someone on my team said something like “You can always look at it again tomorrow, don’t let it break you,” and I could feel myself struggling to pass off an airy smile. That was the context in which I walked to collect the three bottles of Masieri i’d ordered from my housemate at the restaurant.<br />
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Of course, I was too far inside myself to remember those are exactly the conditions for which a long counter and a bartender were designed. I had that feeling again, that “who can I call?” feeling, but it turns out ducking in and staying for a drink was the only call I needed to make. One for the road. One for February! Funny February.<br />
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My housemate brought me a glass of wine "White, Red or Orange?" and I settled in, watching her walk the room, talking wine with the couples at tables. Every table was couples at tables. It looked a bit weird actually, two by two by two by two. But amidst the self-conscious rituals of St. Valentine's, I felt I had the better deal up at the bar by myself. My housemate looked smart in her apron. Because back at home I sit on the kitchen step and listen as she tells me that 2013 is her favourite year, or gets excited about a new order of White from 2005, I felt excited to watch somebody who fucking loves her job doing it right in front of me.<br />
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Behind the bar, the tender did that specific Twenty First Century dance of iPhone disc jockeying while making the barflies feel seen. He reeled off a brewery’s backstory when one of the patrons swigged his beer, nodded and said “sublime.” I tasted the wine in my mouth, attention switching between the bartender's movements and my magazine, committing to neither. The same dance. He poured wine, and flipped lids off beers for sporadic checks from the floor. Bottles of still and sparkling drinking water refilled, but each activity lasted only as long as a cruelly short song. Two minutes and 40 seconds, say. Then he’d be back, head bowed over the iPhone, fading and lining up. The songs were great. I tapped my foot against my stool. Songs that make you want to come back: familiar-sounding but unknown so patrons are sated while tasting something new. A Hot Chocolate song that wasn’t Sexy Thing or Every 1’s a Winner. One that was really smoothing over the edges in my mood, and which I was pleased to learn was a Grace Jones song called “Bullshit.”<br />
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But it’s not really stylish, is it, the business of iPhone djing? Even the words <i>iPhone djing</i> lack style. (I wanted to write them differently but there’s not really another way.) Too high a value placed on one part of the room’s elemental makeup, so conversational back and forth was always curtailed a moment too soon. But the dance was familiar. A year ago I was behind a bar too. Not a bar quite as calming as this but still, I was soundtracking the room, steaming my face off the pot wash’s latest litter of hot, clean glasses, trying to recall ingredients for this cocktail, holding forth, holding a poker face with a customer who may or may not press £1 into my palm afterwards.<br />
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My housemate laid a thickly folded napkin by my elbow. A free-sized bowl of mussels and a plate of something else small and mashed. Mashed celeriac for the adult babies that need it. My neck relaxed. I felt looked-after, glad. Glad for a city that bestows treats like these beautifully smoky mussels alongside all the barging and dogshit. Glad to have these nice things. It’s so easy to slip into feeling stormy. Sometimes food is nurturing enough to calm the seas so you question what on earth got the wind up in the first place. "The harder bits always soften up in time," a septuagenarian acquaintance told me in a Facebook message this week.<br />
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"The order is reversed. The mussels are cooked on the grill first, and then in the sauce," the bartender told me when I asked what made them so bonfireish. “But I don’t know which they prefer first,” He said.<br />
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“What the mussels prefer first?” I asked and did an impression of a mussel languishing on a hot grill.discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-35568251350203015312017-01-18T23:08:00.001+00:002017-01-19T13:02:18.773+00:00Your Daily Routine<div>
Do you think those "Daily routine" lists, detailing the creative lives of writers, artists and philosophers are real? I got an anthology full of them for Christmas. I suppose it doesn't really matter whether they're real, because as readers we value a confidence in the reporting of consistent routine, it lets us feel we have the key to finding creative success in our own lives. Before sleeping, I always read three entries, which is just enough time before my eyes close. (I don't, but I wrote it with brief conviction. Actually, I scroll Instagram until I realise I have 7 hours my alarm goes off, and panic mildly.)</div>
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Carl Jung couldn't start his day without saying Good Morning to his pots and pans and other kitchen utensils. If I was a well-regarded Philosopher, this is the entry my Wife would copy into my diary after my death, just before handing it over to my biographer. </div>
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<i>Rise at 7am when the world just about still feels asleep. Draw curtains (marvel at pink sky or sniff at the rain.) Shower. </i></div>
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<i>Brush hair and dry it naturally while eating soft boiled eggs and buttery soldiers.</i></div>
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<i>Make a big pot of Lapsang, write at desk until 11am.</i></div>
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<i>No more nitpicking! Leave desk for walk through the park. </i></div>
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<i>Buy bread. Watch Collies try to round up their owners, children saying funny things to their Dads.</i></div>
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<i>Light lunch followed by coffee. </i></div>
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<i>Back to the work, which is stop-start after lunch.</i></div>
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<i>4pm, dirty Vodka Martini with three green olives bulging on a stick. Drink, graciously answer fan mail.</i></div>
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<i>Put on pink metallic heels, dance to entire Saturday Night Fever soundtrack played LOUDLY.</i></div>
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<i>Read the day's Internet to stay informed. </i></div>
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<i>Then, pick a quarter from the Choice Pie: see a film alone. Eat out with a friend. Bathe with a book. Stay in with a lover. </i></div>
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<i>If latter, eat slabs of cheese and drink cider while they cook an excellent meal and we talk about our days. Share the good bits, but keep the even better bits for ourselves.</i></div>
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<i>Bed at 11pm. </i></div>
discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-9538468107614125712017-01-06T13:45:00.000+00:002017-01-06T16:25:17.167+00:00I think the task is to keep chipping away and finding warmth wherever it can be locatedTwo head-clearing lunchtime walks to the Barbican this week. It seemed, both times, the thing to do after feeling myself slipping down into a dark one. I think you have to find ways to hang onto the edges before you get sucked under, that you can manage on auto-pilot.<br />
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That's usually walking for me. Just getting out into a street and moving forward physically helps to smooth over the edges. No pressures, no need to do anything with your body but put one foot in front of the other. Sometimes a feeling of moving forward mentally follows too.<br />
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So on this Dead Eyed Day I bundled up and left the office, and headed quietly to the Barbican, deep in a Thousand Yard Stare. What I really wanted to do was go into the Conservatory and stand amongst warm leaves, burrow into that wet smell of any misty greenhouse. Dip my fingers into a pond, or touch a banana plant, or something. Sadly, the Conservatory is only open on Sundays. I asked one of the security guards, and he said "it's used for private events during the week." I peered inside and saw a small group of women, some moving slowly in twos, the others listening to a person wearing a lanyard, with all that space around them. I walked to the centre of the Estate, and sat on a bench watching the fountains.<br />
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The funny thing, and it feels surprisingly hard to type this in a plain way, is that this week i've felt jostled by social media. I've taken visible and even ambiguous signs of other peoples' successes very much to heart, in a way that I didn't used to. And it's left me feeling so glum! That i'm moving so slowly towards to things I want (even if in another week, I may feel differently.) Early January can be so raw! So it makes perfect sense that people want to do things to warm their own hearts a little, to reflect on the tangible successes our society is so obsessed with, and share them online. I do it too. Only standing on the other side it doesn't always feel so good.<br />
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There's a line of thinking i've been holding onto. It's this: when you feel things deeply, you get to live the utter euphoria of sheer highs. To experience a sort of giddiness which, for quite a lot of people, gets lost with youth. I felt that a week before Christmas. Listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqPPslIZkv8" style="font-weight: bold;">this remix of Bamboo Houses by David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto</a>, and feeling that warmth that comes from deep within when the ride is smooth. I was walking to work, hands shoved deep in pockets, frosty nosed and I had a moment of thinking God, I never want to stop feeling this deeply. I never want to stop feeling like a teenager with a soaring heart when I have music that switches something <i>on </i>coming through my headphones. When you feel things deeply you get to experience all of those layers and that is a fucking gift.<br />
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But the point is, with the sheer highs come the utterly glum lows. Of course, how would either one side be sustainable alone. You need to air the whole thing out, to turn between the two. To keep moving, not static. Otherwise you wouldn't recognise soaring, even if it hit you across your frosty nose.<br />
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And so it follows. Last week I was building fires in my parents' woodburner on a daily basis, gladly cocooned in Christmas. Back in London, I was giddily sharing gelatinous steamed spring rolls on New Years Day with cute company. It follows that a little wave of grey could come, a sense of battling against a crowd but not being seen. Working in a building with 300 other people who check their phones whilst waiting for the kettle to boil, or the lift to reach the ground. Living in a city of 8.6 million who barge by (like I usually do) on a day when you need to go slow.<br />
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I'm writing this to put it somewhere<i>. </i>The fragility of mental health continues to be an absolute revelation to me, with every year that passes. There's still this side of me that thinks <i>Jesus, why didn't my parents warn me? </i>I knew there was something that separated adults and children, I just thought it was something vacuous like paying bills, or occasionally scary like cervical cancer screenings. I didn't realise being an adult involves sometimes turning around to find a fucking large cresting wave coming your way.<br />
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Words continue to bring solace, even if it's not always uncomplicated solace. Stringing words together is obviously a labour of it's own, and one that very much takes on the shape of ones mood. It's my day job, and the thing I try to tuck into my other hours too. Not always successfully, sometimes I spend more time admonishing myself for not writing, that my finest moments of eloquence will forever be confined to my Instagram captions. (No wonder <a href="http://www.lennyletter.com/life/interviews/a620/the-lenny-interview-zadie-smith/"><b>Zadie Smith won't buy an iPhone.</b></a>) But you keep chipping away.<br />
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The thing i've been wanting to get to, is swans. This week Helen MacDonald <a href="http://through%20the%20small%2C%20through%20the%20located%2C%20you%20enter%20a%20more%20universal%20domain%20of%20human%20experience./"><b>wrote this utterly beautiful piece of writing about swan upping, English national identity and a Stanley Spencer painting.</b></a> I suppose that reading it was, for me, the equivalent of going to that greenhouse and finding a warm pond to dip a finger into. It is crammed with warmth: of the high July sun on skin, and a tenderness towards complicated feelings. Peppered throughout are dozens of words new to me.<br />
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So I think the task is to keep chipping away and finding warmth wherever it can be located, even if it takes a while. The tasks change over time, of course, but this one never feels far from the surface. I'm quite absorbed by the fact that next week marks the two year anniversary of my Granny dying. So my immediate task is wading through that. But this week, reading about the little boy describing the feeling of holding a cygnet threw off some heat of it's own.discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-23501908415452351312017-01-04T08:12:00.000+00:002017-01-04T10:15:44.182+00:00Knowing when the thing is doneThe Christmas trees are out on the streets again. Some of them lying inches from the front door, so they look as if they've been kicked out arse first like the disgraced cat at the end of every episode of Tom and Jerry.<br />
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They make me think, every January, of <b><a href="http://riza.com/richard/read/samples/what-are-you-going-to-do-with-390-photographs-of-christmas-trees/">that Richard Brautigan poem</a></b> about Christmas trees left in the street. The collective need for a fresh start is almost comical as we haplessly realise how hard it is to dispose of the body after the crime.<br />
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"Those sad and abandoned Christmas trees really got on my conscience. They had provided what they could for that assassinated Christmas and now they were just being tossed out to lie there in the street like bums. I saw dozens of them as I walked home through the beginning of the new year."<br />
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No real resolutions this year besides the ongoing aspirations I generally have regardless of what month it is. After all that lusty slicing through Beenleigh Blue over Christmas, I'd like to own a good bone handled cheese knife made of Sheffield steel like the one at home. I should bloody well learn to drive! I'd like to go to Rome. I'd like to get better at taming aspirations that involve always needing a bigger pile of money. I'd like to get better at knowing when the thing is done.<br />
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Knowing when the niggling thought ought to be put to bed. Knowing when the sentence is done, and the words are fit to stand without more fiddling. Writing is different, it's not always like the end of the meal or the end of a relationship when you can feel it coming. You get stronger in your convictions though, year by year, even if you might not realise it at the time. </div>
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discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-9225030493004773522016-12-03T15:08:00.001+00:002016-12-03T15:14:53.618+00:00We decided we both ought to get Sea Salt Hot ChocolateThis morning, like most Saturday mornings, I walked the few minutes to my favourite cafe. Past the restaurant where the owners and the head chef sit by the window, planning the order of service at a laptop among the empty tables and polished glasses. Past the kitchen door, open ajar, with sound of the radio and frying, empty cardboard boxes that probably held trays of mushrooms or greens stacked on the recycling bin outside.<br />
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People keep asking if, after six months, I am happy in London. They ask in a way that makes me feel self-conscious, that they doubt I am. Have I been too forthcoming about my awareness of the bullshit traps it's easy to fall into when you live in the capital city? Have I told the story of my colleague spending £8 on a smoothie with activating charcoal minerals too many times? Have I talked too readily about how much I love Manchester? I do love London. But I do not forget how living here means choosing to tolerate a certain level of comfort. A level that is probably slightly below the level you aspire to, or could have elsewhere. Smaller rooms. Inevitable acquaintance with other people's armpits on public transport. You throw yourself into a cycle of earning money to spend it quickly, and to spend it in a public way. To eat out. Go to markets, go to the theatre. To send the money back out, instead of putting it somewhere to pile up. Everything is transcient, especially the money. What I do love is that every Saturday I wake up and know there is something new for me to do. I meet people I might not meet in another English city. But maybe you can't love a city wholly when you live there? Any city becomes embedded in the ebb and flow of daily life, the fast tides of mood change, when it is home. I don't know if love is the right word for a city. Swells of happiness one moment, and domestic irritations the next: maybe love is entirely the right word after all. I haven't yet loved long enough to weather the highs and lows over a long period of time and see what's left at the end.<br />
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But walking to the cafe I felt heady off the low sun filling every corner, and the sight of a tall Christmas tree through my neighbour's window. (A house where children live.) On December 1st I saw the Dad dragging it down our street and felt the inner child, that jumps up and down so much more readily in December, rising inside me. "I'm really happy living here, right here," I think.<br />
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I meet Simran at the cafe and we decide we both ought to get Sea Salt Hot Chocolate. The room was filled with other women, all having their Saturday morning catch-ups. It often feels like that. Most mornings I get to listen in because i'm there by myself. A few months ago two friends in their fifties were talking about the break up of a marriage. Overhearing it made me feel claustrophobic because it was the same conversation I was trying to avoid having with myself. "The thing about being an adult," the reassuring one said to the sad, reluctant one, "is that you have to learn to be your own adult."discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-75409999592492115172016-11-23T23:26:00.002+00:002017-03-10T16:37:27.737+00:00"It does put a little cushion between you and the abyss.”“Do you ever eat Aligot?” I ask my French housemate after reading about this marvellous, hug of a dish which - because it is French, is clearly so much more than bog-standard cheesy mash.<br />
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I’m lying on the sofa with the book I just started resting on my stomach. Probably won’t be that committed to it tonight, I concede. Other important matters to put to bed. The ‘Year in Cheeses’ book is found easily on the shelf and consulted. Made with Tomme de Laguiole, served with a Morteau sausage.<br />
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“Morteau…does that mean, like, Sausage of Death?” I ask, imagining something Black Pudding-ish. “No,” she shakes her head, “ it’s a region.” We leaf through the book together in silence. There are infinite new foods to eat, and sausages to know the names of. When am I going to learn French? I think to myself. All that, and then the normal things too, like the unread books piled on my bedside table, the e-newsletters to open, films to catch while they’re still at the cinema. Vague panic about the small things starts the rise.<br />
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“Aligot doesn’t fix anything,” one <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/magazine/cheesy-mashed-potatoes-for-the-soul.htm"><b>Aligot advocate writes in the New York Times,</b></a> “but it does put a little cushion between you and the abyss.”
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We’re three weeks into November and I am consumed by food. Consumed with thinking about it, tasting it, reading about it. After three months of living in this house, I’m getting to know my housemates better. We talk about men, they tell me about the films they’ve watched as they come through the door and unravel scarves, we notice the fit of each others jeans, we talk about food. I, perhaps, slightly more lustily than they. One’s a cheesemonger, another a sommelier - a fact I make a point of sharing when people ask about my living situation, to show how truly I have lucked out, like those smug New Yorkers talking about their rent-controlled apartments in 90s television shows.<br />
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My broodiness for food is revived after a spell of dormancy. While the interest in food itself didn't fade, the ability to nurture myself with rustled-up meals did. It was dulled by a general weariness, apathy blotting the effort of making a proper meal in favour of something quick and 'enough'.<br />
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Looking for that "little cushion"<br />
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The instincts for warming ritual, which coincide with early winter have awakened a somewhat primal urge to fill up and build a nest. Looking for that "little cushion" has become a gastronomic endeavour, in much the way that buying three lambswool jumpers is the equivalent sartorial effort. Hot baths, whiskey in drinks, wrapping up wherever possible. Reading hungrily about Aligot, slicing cheese onto toast, my body leans into a natural desire to hibernate.<br />
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And so with this stomach-rumbling reawakening, this November could be recorded as a food diary alone. A quick scan of my bank statement would tell the story. On Sunday 6th, I ate herring roe for the first time. Meaty, and curled in on itself in tumbling piles over toast. We ate it before the ceilidh at the Herring Fair in Hastings. And seconds after the dancing, because it was too good not too. In a demonstration for pickling Herring the woman says that Herring can live up to 22 years old, though you wouldn’t want to eat them when they're that big, as they tend to have picked up more pollutants over time. I ask her how long other fish usually live for, and she doesn’t know, but we agree that 22 years seems surprisingly long.<br />
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On Wednesday 9th, I ate a Braeburn whilst listening to Trump's victory speech through headphones, and disbelief allowed my need for sustenance to override the usual appley sweetness as I walked to the Doctors in the rain. The ends of my new trousers sucking moisture from the pavement. My GP didn’t know it had happened until I told him.
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On Sunday 20th I went on a date and recalled meals eaten this week. I don’t think i’ve said the word “aioli” so many times in my life as over those two drinks, and I revelled in it. Aoili makes me think of that scene in <b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077613/">Girlfriends</a></b> where she buys herself fizzy wine and three giant prawns to celebrate a new job. Prawns are best when there's a jar of mayonnaise to hand. Aioli is made to go with food that absolutely requires you to lick your fingers after the last piece and before the next.<br />
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On Monday 21st, I once again fall into that end-of-the-day Thousand Yard Stare when faced with the boxes of vegetables outside outside the grocers. To pick one of the root vegetables I would never buy, take it home and drive a knife into it or… stick with what I know? Stick with what I know. I carry lychees and plums home in a plastic bag for pudding.<br />
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On Wednesday 22nd, which is the day today, I am writing this and drinking one of the bottles of pink Moscato I bought from Australia last year. I bought it back with me, anxiously wrapped alongside a box full of pottery, only to see it casually for sale in a shop in Manchester. It tastes good, because I don't have to share it with anybody else and wonder whether the transit was worth it. If somebody else was to share it with me, they might say "God, that's sweet", and it is. It tastes like those fizzy apricot Haribos you can very occasionally find in a shop. They too, are worth the transit.<br />
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My designated fridge shelf is above the shelf where J keeps all of her cheese. The smell hits me each time I open the door. She eats cheese with most of her meals. White, matte bits of goats cheese, like paper clumsily bashed off a wall with a chair leg. Sometimes just chunks of (I don’t know the names) cut straight off the block and eaten at the counter. At the market over the weekend I buy two cheeses. One is a truffle pecorino, which I gather is rather trashy because who needs their pecorino infused with <i>truffle oil</i>? Still, it is utter crack and I plough through it in two days. The other is softer, good for melting over a tomato sauce. I take our breadboard, piled with slices of bread, the cheeses in their wax paper, and caramelised onion chutney from Co-op, into the dining room and spread out at the table. Rain thuds down on the plastic roof over the utility room. Storm Angus dutifully arrived. Really no reason at all to sweat the small stuff, the unopened newsletters, the episodes my colleagues have watched and I have not, when you can make a Sunday afternoon taste like this. <br />
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<b>Reading and Listening</b>
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<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/20/jeanette-winterson-family-christmas-sherry-trifle-recipes"><b>Jeanette Winterson</b> on rye bread, carols and Christmas food rituals</a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.24px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></li>
<li><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/double-solitude"><b>Ruth Rogers</b> on Monocle's The Big Interview podcast</a></li>
<li><a href="https://munchies.vice.com/en_uk/articles/meet-the-electrician-who-sells-the-best-olive-oil-in-england"><b>Cypriot olive oi</b>l from Embassy Electrical Supplies </a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/double-solitude"><b>Double Solitude</b></a> by Donald Hall and <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard-cohen-makes-it-darker"><b>the last Leonard Cohen profile,</b></a> each purely for their references to eating sandwiches with lovers at lunch. </li>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12749327618211517956noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-66701004795019066042016-10-03T21:29:00.002+01:002016-10-03T22:04:44.760+01:00Put on your headphones and feel raw love<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm wrapping my scarf around my neck. (Wrapped around once with just enough left to tie a knot under my chin. Or <b><a href="http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/news/a39465/henriette-lazaridis-scarf/">"shorter than we consider stylish these days"</a> </b>as Henriette Lazaridis describes that particular tie in a article I read in ELLE on the plane the other week. I like it tied like this, it makes me think of my Mum dropping me off at school.) I'm wrapping my scarf around my neck, and throwing my arms into my coat and I have to find a song to play for my walk home that'll keep my mind feeling as alive and full of ideas as it is now. It's easy enough to stop at the pub on the way home from work and have a glass of wine and a generous bowl of green olives (two cocktail sticks) and finish a book. It's better still, lucky even, to feel buoyed by that arrangement. To have things that pop and fizz around your head and require a receipt or slip of paper to scrawl them onto. But then how do you transport yourself home without popping the bubble?<br />
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I listen to Steve Reich, who is always at his best when you're <i>kinetic. </i>His strings, his clarinets are lively and cinematic when one foot is moving in front of the other and you're on the go, with a destination and a delight in the getting there. I listen to The Four Seasons: I. Strings because it's high up on the quick-to-click top-rated list. I much prefer Steve Reich when I'm walking. Once I was listening to him whilst walking around Manchester in the evening and came across an empty convertible, all doors flung wide open in the middle of the street outside the glassy Hilton skyscraper. Nobody seemed to bat an eyelid but I convinced myself, I became absolutely certain, that it was about to gloriously blow up. I was listening to Desert Music, the sort of high-octane yet gloomy soundtrack that lends itself to the obvious culmination of exploding car. A car <i>must</i> explode when there's a chorus of operatic voices. Of course nothing happened, and I walked on with only my heightened anticipation, but the point is that Steve Reich, or in fact the majority of music listened to through headphones on the move feels cinematic.<br />
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I don't mean cinematic in an egotistical "i'm in a film" sort of way. Really, I'm sure I don't have to explain it at all. The success of the Walkman and two generations of music-in-ear devices comes down to the fact that we all understand that entrancing state. Just like me in the pub, we're with people, surrounded with them, but without people. All alone with the music. It's unnatural to be walking around without the accompaniment of the real sounds around us (stillness, leaves, footsteps, car horns) But it's <i>right!</i> It carries you along, it gives lends your movement a rhythm, it frames a moment in exactly the way a cinema screen frames a moment. The frame of the camera. The frame of the screen against a darkened room. The focus of you inside the room, the world safely outside of the auditorium.<br />
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With headphones in your ears, a sort of focused mental frame comes down. Suddenly, with the removal of outside-world sounds, there's less to distract. An awareness of the movements of the people on the street becomes heightened. Sometimes they're heightened because you've had one glass of wine on an empty stomach but. So I walk down Columbia Road and it's properly dark now. My hands are deep down in my pockets, my scarf cosy and tight and the sharp air is drumming little stabs at my knees. A warm upper body and a cold lower body is usually delightful for about two weeks right at the start of Autumn. The novelty soon wears off. But for now it's truly on. This is a great stretch of walk. I'm glad I started taking this short cut. Internally i'm cooing at the fronts of the houses along the street, and how, in the darkness they make me think of Victorian London and kids with hoops. I feel like an American tourist. I never want to stop loving cities like this. If I ever stop loving cities like this I honestly may as well be dead.<br />
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Walking down Broadway Market people are bundled up in their coats eating Italian at the tables on the pavement under heat lamps. Up above us in the flats over the restaurants, two men lean out of their windows and hold a conversation across the street.<br />
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Back at the pub the things I wrote on the back of a receipt were: "there is only me, this evening, here on earth." From a passage about an acquaintance, an actor known for his powerful monologues, who is reading Beckett to an small audience in his apartment after a stroke has badly affected his speech. Sometimes you underline a sentence in a book and come back to it only a few months later and fail to understand the significance it held. Maybe tomorrow I won't even feel the same way, but sitting alone with a Picpoul and a briny pile of olives it means something. It makes me think of how no two theatre performances can ever be the same, and how that marks a gorgeous unique energy between a cast and their audience. <i>We will never have this ever again. </i>It makes me think of making eye contact with a stranger on a train. Only a stranger you've enjoyed noticing of course, and standing beside them as the carriage snakes and bounces along. And that moment of shared eye contact says the same thing. <i>This is it! Now or never. </i>I am constantly falling in love with strangers on trains. Aren't we all, though. We don't need to know anything about the other person, only that if you'd said something to them, really said it out loud then you'd inevitably end up embarking on that one great affair. A longer than brief encounter.<br />
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I finish the book - Vivian Gornick's The Odd Woman and the City. I'm probably going to read it straight away again, something i've never done. This book has really caught me at the right moment. I check Facebook. "It's too late for sympathy and prayers, so please spare me - i'm now trading only in raw love," this is the latest post from an old family friend. Seng-gye is a character. Calling him a 'character' actually just sounds condescending and doesn't do him justice at all. He's bloody marvellous. And he's important to me, even if I haven't seen him for around 11 years. He and his family lived in the flat downstairs when I was between the ages of 3 and 10. He wore one of those army surplus-type utility waistcoats with all those pockets. Lots of khaki. Always bare feet, even on the streets of Redland in Bristol. He has a bald head, a long grey beard (now temporarily banished with the chemo) and one eye, after a motorcycle crash in his youth. He kept the eye in a jar of formaldehyde in a jar in the flat! I was in absolute awe of it when I was little. He didn't wear a glass eye, or cover it up with a patch, one of the sockets is just sort of... dark. I thought this was very cool. I still do. He lived with two partners and their three children. I'd never been to a house that had three adults in it like that. I absolutely loved them. I was always hanging out with the kids, mixing perfumes from lavender and sage and water in the garden, arguing with them and getting to understand the varying levels of feelings in very sensitive human beings, having them show me slow worms in the garden out the back. My Mum left the latch to our door open do I could come and go, racing up and down the stairs to hang out with them. I'd jump into their beat up Land Rover (sometimes Seng-gye would scream at us to be quiet in the back so he could focus on the fucking road!!!) and later into their old American Chevy (it had actual carpets and armchairs in the back and a heavy sliding door!) and we'd all go to the 24 hour Tesco Superstore in Eastville and get baked beans and chips at the cafe. (We'd go late at night! Like, 11 o'clock at night!) He's recently been diagnosed with what looks like terminal cancer. In his Facebook post Seng-gye scientifically outlines the pros and cons of chemo and the realities of the poison and asks "if you need to visit, bring good food! If you need to see me, you have NOW!" I don't even feel that sad. Of course this is another <i>it's now or never! </i>but it just feels essential. We're all waiting for it, and here it is, explained peacefully. Yeah. What else is there to say? Here's my raw love. I have it. I love this man, and I love his family. I think about the time he put on his roller skates (rare footwear) and cycled over to my Granny's house to help her out because her back was bad. The strange, important adults in my life. They went into her bedroom and closed the door and he clicked her into place and we could hear all these comedy noises coming from the room and my Mum and my Mary absolutely pissed themselves laughing through the whole thing. I looked up at them and didn't really understand why it was funny but I joined in too because it's fun to all get the giggles together. I have raw love for so many people who are and aren't here. It stays though.discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-12046997934175243702016-09-20T20:38:00.002+01:002016-09-21T16:22:36.543+01:00A Stop at Thompson Chemists<div class="p1">
By September 19th the heat in New York is truly intense. The humidity has grown from damp hairline sweat to aggressive hot rain that always finds a way under your umbrella. Without a dramatic storm to cut through it all, the air is heavy like a wet towel. Because of this and more, I feel restless and easily teary. </div>
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So I take myself to Strand books. What I really want is a sofa to sink into and hold me while I leaf through a pile of paperbacks. But of course bookstores can’t have inviting sofas. They’d be much too tempting for loiterers. I’m a loiterer! </div>
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I buy three books (all, in degrees, about big cities and learning to know yourself. Themes I will maybe, at some point grow out of) and two pairs of socks (Botticelli’s Venus! The Statue of Liberty!) and feel that some new sense of purpose. I’m also aware that spending $50 in order to feel better about yourself is not a sustainable solution. </div>
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Still, I walk down to Washington Square Park, where the mist from the fountains dampens passerbys several feet away. I watch the biggest St Bernard I have ever seen. It’s the size of a small car, sitting with a view over the knock-off Arc de Triomph. A dog it would be a true delight to grow up with, to ride on it's back and cling onto it's brown mane. What a childhood, to surrender yourself again and again to that pet on the floor, giggling NO! as it snuffles and licks at your face. To grimace as it shakes a walks worth of rainwater (and whatever else) onto you. To be fiercely protective when your friends try to clamber onto his back, to show them how to mount him the right way, more carefully than you are in the habit of doing. To experience the raw depths of pet-heartbreak long before the end of a romantic human relationship. I fantasise about all of those things, but am free to walk away without a dog companion. I can browse suede tasseled skirts at the nearby vintage shop without having to ask my St Bernard if he’s okay to wait outside. </div>
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Another way to counteract restless is, I figure, to go to Sephora and have somebody put makeup on me. The heat melted what I’d put on my face in the morning, and having a stranger tilting my chin gently and saying “look up” would hit the spot. I think, after spending a lot of time alone, I want to be seen. Even if that's by somebody fetching me glitter rollers at Sephora.</div>
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Plus there’s the matter of sheet masks. I want to buy them for me, and for Simran who has been waylaid at Toronto airport for 28 hours. A sheet mask with a girlfriend is a calming activity and one I never do as much as I’d like. I think of <a href="https://intothegloss.com/2015/07/amy-sedaris-beauty/"><b>Amy Sedaris talking</b></a> about doing masks with her friends when they come over, like it’s the most casual thing. A cut off pair of tights holding back a fringe, a white wet balaclava accompanying gossip. </div>
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Sephora is not meant to be though. Because Thompson Chemists pulls me in with it’s primary green front. It looks like a place that might contain answers. Answers in the form of tangible ailments but also in herbal smelling pots of cream that can smooth things out in the short term. I have a certain tolerance of quackery when it smells good. </div>
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Of course it all comes down to nostalgia. Nostalgia may not be cool, but it is comforting. This pharmacy triggers a retrospective longing for herbal smelling Grandparents. It smells like being small and being allowed to scoop grains from deep buckets in health food shops that smell of oats, spice and Ecover washing liquid. </div>
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This is what I think of when I smell the olive oil and peppermint soaps wrapped in a fern leaf adorned package. That, and, for some reason damp fronds on a drive through the Pacific Northwest in a Volvo 740 Estate with Stewart Brand in the back seat. Something – clearly – I have never done. But all the same, associations that any of this old-style packaging triggers in me. 1970s wellness before Instagram and marble backdrops and paying three times the price for social capital. Woody Harrellson wellness! Hemp, commitment, bio-diesel travel. </div>
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Thompson Chemist has it all. Janeke toothbrushes in gold, chrome and faux horn. Mason Pearson brushes for ponyish hair. At the counter are Altoids, tempting kazoos and bouncing balls. A collection of natural sponges asking to be doused in water and squeezed over a soapy back. The shop is small, and everything has a place. Floor to ceiling shelves holding bottles, answers. An ode to storage solutions, if nothing else. </div>
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An expansive pharmacy with more than one floor is exciting. You can browse hair dryers and get your eyes tested in the same trip. But it’s easier to walk in and forget what you wanted. Here you can buy bouncy balls! </div>
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“Let me know if you have any questions,” the woman says. And of course I do, because isn’t that the whole point of a place like this? To find answers, you just have to speak to people. They don’t have sheet masks but they do have all these clay masks in pots and she’s tried them all. </div>
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A man walks into the shop and he has questions too. Head lice kits? He looks like an older Dad, who might be raising his second family. It looks like the head lice situation is tiring him out. The woman finds a kit from the around the back, with all of these bottles packed in a big clear zip-up bag. It looks like a jet pack. Maybe it even has straps – I can’t quite see – but that would be cool. To get this groovy, see-through rucksack to wear to school with your new Tea Tree smelling hair. </div>
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“That’ll get rid of them!” I say, while I wait to pay for this stick of Baxter’s – the final chance I’m giving to the natural deodorant cause. He smiles at me and shakes his head, mumbling something like <i>finally. </i>He drops a note of paper and I go to pick it up for him but he waves me away. I feel bad about rushing to pick it up, like he was too old to do that himself. Sometimes you offer your seat on public transport to somebody with white hair and they’re like <i>I’m not old, child. </i>Maybe back at home he’d sit with his son or daughter between his legs and run a small comb through their hair in front of the television. Maybe there’d be a St Bernard sprawled nearby! </div>
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I pay for my olive soap and my deodorant, and then a last minute bottle of Thayer’s peach and witch hazel astringent. Something probably quite mundane to anyone familiar with the American drugstore but charming to me in the same way as Arm and Hammer toothpaste, or Smith's Rosebud Salve. </div>
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I leave armed with a recommendation for Sunrise Mart and the possibility of sheet masks for a couple of dollars. It feels like there should be a bell on the door when I leave, but there isn’t. </div>
discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-80938853171158361522016-09-17T16:35:00.000+01:002016-09-17T16:36:36.867+01:00Falling in love in five seconds<div style="text-align: left;">
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A woman on West 23rd Street cackling HAHAHA I forgot how much I love this city.</div>
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Two elderly Chinese couples ballroom dancing on a tarmacked tennis court, their classical music drifting to soundtrack the nearby runners and teenagers playing basketball.</div>
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City cowboys sprawling on benches without their cattle.</div>
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An old guy on the steps of his apartment building with a regal parrot on his lap. It's green with a tuft of feather hair and observational head turns that make it look startlingly human. "Beautiful parrot!" I shout from a distance, and he nods slowly. (The man, not the parrot.)</div>
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The Empire State Building, every time it comes into view at the end of a street.</div>
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A cute-assed waitress wearing head-to-toe white: Levi's and a James Dean t-shirt and not a coffee spillage in sight. She seems the type to ask More Tea Darlin'? but this is New York, not Tennessee.</div>
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Any of the Tall Men on Park Avenue making Bold American Eye Contact while passing me on the sidewalk. The passing bit is important. You never want these men to open their mouths.</div>
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Solo margaritas at a bar that's playing the very best songs from B'Day. Green Light. Upgrade U. Get Me Bodied. A huge dog - a Chou Chou apparently- sits next to me. This is the sort of dog I usually laugh at, not with. It's a sheepskin rug. A teddy bear. A Lion with a blow dry. He is called Richard and that alone means I fall in love with him. Richard! He doesn't need my love. He cocks his head and stubbornly looks away every time I try to take a photograph. Every body in the room is pulled towards him.</div>
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Three firefighters at Ladder 20 standing around and drinking beer on the warm afternoon of September 11. On the pin board outside there's a sign commemorating Twenty, the Dalmatian pup given to them in the days after 9/11 to boost morale. There's a photograph of her sitting on the steps of an engine. She looks like the kind of dog with a strong tail that mercilessly knocks objects from surfaces, and a sandpaper-licking tongue too loving to refuse. "I can't say enough about what she did to help us," the paper reads. "She went on all the runs, she'd jump in the truck, stick her head out of the window and bark."</div>
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discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-47744260266102261952016-07-02T14:29:00.004+01:002016-07-03T13:10:02.560+01:00Picking one thing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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My Mum went to Tate Britain recently, and after looking at a couple of Henry Moores decided she'd look only at the sculptures in the collection. She told me this when we met up afterwards, over a spread of Turkish food balanced in large-lipped plates on our small table. "Do you have any side tables?" I'd asked tentatively. They didn't, so we stacked the plates up. I felt like I really needed my Mum that week, and was pleased to have her visiting London, sleeping on the sofa bed in our sitting room, filling her days with good things while I worked. She'd chosen the sculptures to get an idea of how that one specific medium had changed over time in Britain. No musing over the paintings to get in the way of seeing how Hepworth and Nicholson and Moore had carved wood and stone and moulded, and what sculpture looked like before and after these three.<br />
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Part of me thought that wasn't very adventurous when there are so many beautiful paintings in that building to gawp at up close. I like looking at paintings up close because i've always craved the ability to put colors on canvas with the conviction of knowing what to do. When I get up close i'll look for actual clues to see how the thick the colour is, and how steady the strokes are. Does it look like the painter had a plan or were they just channeling some deep painterly instinct? Whenever I've painted (rarely) my dominant thought has been "Right... I'm painting. Yes.. i'm painting. What am I painting?"<br />
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But deciding to stick to one thing- looking only at sculptures, painting only apples or shopping only for fuchsia coloured dresses is comforting in a pragmatic way. It's manageable. And I say that because "manageable" can feel so important in a big city. Otherwise how would you ever know where to start? It's like that paralysis of choice <b><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce">Malcolm Gladwell spoke about</a></b> when faced with dozens and dozens of jars of spaghetti sauce. Having categories and filters helps us to get through a day. (Pick the jar under £3. Pick the jar nice enough to use afterwards. Pick the same jar your Mum always picked.)<br />
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Today i'm at Tate Modern. And because I recently treated myself to a membership, I can go into any of the current exhibitions without needing to pay! So what did I do? Unable to pick between the two options I wandered into the free galleries... There was so much I liked, and I liked it all even more because I'd got out of bed early on a Saturday, eaten a giant almond croissant for breakfast, and felt like my hair looked nice. I looked at a sleeping young woman, lying neatly across the frame. Her pillow tucked under her shoulders in a way i'd never think to tuck it. So comfortable looking! <a href="https://refields.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/duncan-grant-interior-at-gordon-square.jpg"><b>A Duncan Grant painting</b></a> with Richard Diebenkorn-esque blocks of colour in ocre, mint green and browns brushing up against chair legs. I looked up close. He looked like he'd had a plan for his brush.<br />
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Then I walked into the next room, and this is where I appreciated my Mum's "pick one thing" approach. Because this room was just black and white photographs of glasses. Wine glasses with hexagonal bases. And boob-shaped dessert glasses- hopefully once filled with a spherical scoops of ice-cream. Eaten with a teaspoon! Glasses that made me think of holidays in Europe. Or maybe holidays in Europe that i've seen on-screen; characters drinking from glasses like these on the dark terrace after a hot day. Katherine Hepburn in Rome. Tilda Swinton on Pantelleria. Short glasses throwing shadows and tall glasses distorted so they looked like buildings, those early photographs of awe-inspiring skyscrapers in the 20s and 30s that are <br />
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I liked the order in this room. I imagined being the curator and thinking <i>right, glass! </i>and going to the archive with a mission. I didn't feel like I needed to go in any of the other galleries after that. Glass will do for me today!<br />
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Which is funny because now I'm sitting upstairs in the cafe with a view over the city and all I can see is glass.<i> </i>The glass sheets covering buildings aren't as satisfying as the round glasses on tables though. I can't imagine them being drawn out of a furnace and turned in circles in the same way as a wine glass, or a bottle, or anything that holds a liquid. They're glorious but they're majestic in a distant way, like they separate people. Glass with no openings. Glass that's glass but not a window. I know this because I struggle with my desire to throw open a window when I work in a place without them. <i>Where does it open? </i>These buildings surely throw shapes like the drinking glasses. It's a shame we can never get far away enough to see how the light marks their shape in shadows across streets. Maybe that's why people take helicopter tours over cities. (Actually- let's face it- it's probably not.)<br />
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There weren't people in any of these photographs but they were implicit in the arrangements. You can't see a collection of used dessert and wine glasses on a table without thinking about the people they've brought together. An evening of filling and pouring. Social props. A glass so pleasing to look at, it makes the drink taste better.<br />
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I go and buy <span style="text-align: center;">a beer!</span>discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-69005053062030221802016-05-19T23:47:00.003+01:002016-05-20T00:32:06.971+01:00Golden Years<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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We all notice our moods lifting and rising throughout the day like little levers that get nudged easier some days than others, depending on time or weather or the month, or whatever else. It's incredible how quickly the moods can change. Medium, medium...<i>high high </i>HIGH! Wowwww down again and <i>low. </i>One minute you're red-cheeked, drinking wine and eating salt cod croquettes with a girlfriend at a bar, and the next you're emotionally floored. I think those feelings are heightened when you're living in a new place. This month I moved to London! I packed up my lovely pink room in Manchester and i'm here! I'm subletting a room, and I'm working in a new office. I am constantly leaning on kitchen counters making conversation with people I'm not used to talking to.</div>
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This evening I went to watch a film at The Barbican with Ava, and after we parted ways I sat on a bench in the blustery-as-hell courtyard and looked up at the flats (as we all do at The Barbican, sighing a little bit) and I hungrily shovelled some leftover popcorn into my mouth, while the fountains churning through water, drowning out city sounds. Sitting alone on a bench at Barbican in the bluster, when the sky is fading towards evening is a very newbie in London thing to do, and I felt high, like <i>I'm here! </i>Sometimes that feeling is very real, and sometimes it's mustered without realising, from a corner of your brain where film scenes are stored and quietly marvelling in a big new city feels like the right (cinematic )thing to do. It felt real though. It was both of those things. As I walked to the bus I could feel that moment fading fast, as all around me other people also made their way home. Jesus, there are 8 million of us here, I thought. You know that feeling when you want to phone somebody because you feel a little internal shriek saying '<i>I'm a human!' </i>and you should probably sit with that feeling for a while and let it pass, but you can't quite bring yourself to, and so you end up doing that mental checklist of who fits the bill? I was quickly in that headspace.</div>
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I phoned my Dad, and launched into an update. Can I call you back? he asked, I've just arrived at work. Sure, I said. I'm used to his late work hours but I sensed that he was in fact sitting in a bar with a Gin and Tonic in hand, and in that headspace that is stronger, when you decide to not go through your mental list of close people, and to sit quietly instead. I know that headspace, I protect it too when I'm in it. But it's hard to understand that when you're making your way to a bus stop in the bluster in the capital city and you're 24 and suddenly things have a way of feeling very tricky to navigate. When I was 14 or 15 my Mum and I went to a cafe, and I spotted my Dad at a table in the far corner. As we ordered drinks at the counter I phoned my Dad and waited to watch his face as he answered and I could tell him to look up, but instead my Mum and I watched as he took out his phone, hung up on me and returned to his drink. I can't remember what happened after that, I just remember being like "it's cool!" to my Mum, and trying not to act too traumatised, but now as i'm writing it and feeling it in my stomach I feel so fiercely protective of that 14 year old. How do we protect our own mental headspace without treading so un-carefully across those of others? </div>
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<img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Rfpb5pqkWMU/Vz4_0U6ig7I/AAAAAAAAJjs/Av8YMddn4mMd08l65Fo1fAkHxYKUkqCuQCLcB/s1600/pink.png" /><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">A nice shade of pink.</span></div>
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Six months after David Bowie died, i'm still feeling affected by his death. It feels like you should reach a place- after a few days, maybe- when you don't feel weird about a famous person dying anymore, and i've ended up stayed too long at the party. (The wake!) For me, there's obviously more wrapped up in Bowie's death than Bowie himself (he died the morning before the 1 year marking my Granny's death, and as with so many families, Bowie was a legitimate connecting thread between our generations) but also <i>there isn't </i>more to his death! Or there shouldn't need to be.<i> </i>I'm letting myself still feel sad about Bowie. I have varying levels of grief in my body. Last week I cried at a Richard Linklater listicle, last year I lost one of my most Important People. I'm fucked off about watching my Dad hang up on me, and with all of this I honestly don't know where one grief starts, another ends.</div>
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One thing though, that is such a relief, is that Bowie is still here! As long as you have a way of accessing music, you can access him whenever you want! You can listen to <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cSAKlu0OlU">Wild is the Wind</a></b>, or <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDoLjW4YmHs">Slow Burn</a></b>, or <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgcc5V9Hu3g">Heroes</a></b>, or <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM85EOxgFnU">Without You</a></b>, or <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWm03wYBTbM">Five Years</a></b> when you're feeling a bit tender and like you want to lean into it. When you need a pep talk from beyond the grave you can listen to <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jg4ekLG9Zo">Rock 'n' Roll Suicide</a> </b>("Gimme your hands, 'cause you're wonderful") or <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9OIrJQIn2Q">Golden Years</a></b> ("Don't let me hear you say life is taking you nowhere") and if you really want to finish yourself off you can listen to <b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqW-kvU5cLg">Dollar Days</a></b> from Blackstar ("If I'll never see the English evergreens i'm running to, it's nothing to me. It's nothing to see.") This is why music is so important, it's a comfort in so many moments, but especially when you have a pair of headphones in your bag and the itchy-fingered urge to phone somebody because you think an external pep talk is the only thing for your head. (Sometimes it is, but i'm trying to be better at not doing that so much. Ranting down the phone to your long-distance love isn't always good for either of your souls, when you could find personal solace somewhere else first.)<br />
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When my Granny was dying she told me "I'll always be close" and I believed her. After she'd died I felt angry, like <i>Well?! Where are you? </i>when I needed her, and her presence was intangible. But you have to trust that closeness is as much a feeling you produce in your own head, as it is something you feel from others. There's a crossover. When I'm walking down Exmouth Market at lunchtime, or under the last fall of the Cherry Blossoms around Islington (as I did last week) I feel close to her. I know how excited she would be for me, to be in this new city, getting paid to write words during the day. When I listen carefully to Bowie's lyrics on Blackstar, of survival sex, of accepting what you will and won't do and not being able to give everything away, she is incredibly close, and that's why I continue to feel so strongly about Bowie's death, because he's become like this artistic and emotional conduit to my Granny. Where on earth do these people go when they die? And isn't it just the greatest gift to have all this leftover art to absorb and comfort ourselves with?</div>
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I have this urgency to string words together in a beautiful way, and pick through feelings and give people a knowing nod, and I know who that came from. Sometimes I look back at the few blog posts i've written in the past year and I feel self-conscious that so many of them are about <b><a href="http://discothequeconfusion.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/about-annie.html">this Important Woman in my life,</a></b> but you have to find your ways of working through those delicate moods, and picking through things for yourself, sometimes before sending your best friend a "give me a pep talk?" text. (I'll talk about those soon, because that's a whole other gorgeous can of worms.) Pouring it all out into a text box continues to bring comfort. Into the place i've been figuring out how much to keep in, and how much to put out for almost ten years. I figure it's going to take years worth of effort to build a shell against blustery winds that turn from <i>high </i>to <i>low </i>in a matter of minutes, or perhaps grief will fade and the skin will grow back. Either way, taking words in and sending words out continues to be such an utterly comforting way through, as I'm sure it will always be. That, and a plate of creamy scrambled eggs, covered in smoked salt and eaten in bed. Look after yourself!</div>
discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33710095.post-67940348330333945032016-03-26T18:06:00.000+00:002016-04-08T04:46:23.026+01:00Style apathy is a thing, but eyeshadow fans the flames of a fire emoji<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Something I miss: writing unselfconsciously about fashion. I lost it when I decided it was okay to not be so dedicated to naming a look from a particular fashion collection, of seeing a side-parting in the beauty pages of Vogue and knowing 'Prada'. And then I stopped feeling qualified to comment on the party at all. Instead I thought <i>I'm going to learn ALL THE STATE CAPITALS in the United States! </i>and wanted to become as well-read as some of my friends. I started to feel uneasy about fashion as another endeavour hell-bent on creating more shit to take up space in the world. </div>
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Actually, there's a specific moment when my desire to write about fashion took a hit- it was walking over London Bridge after a show at London Fashion Week and I starting crying and thought <i>Fuck This</i>, feeling utterly crap in the outfit i'd liked until I was positioned in a crowd of assessing eyes. Being in your teens and having well-known street style photographers take in your outfit from head to toe and then walk past you like 'no' was enough to make me leap into the arms of the early rumblings of Normcore. Steve Jobs knows what's up, I thought, and a pair of New Balance trainers, moss green cords and rotating knitwear got me through my first year at Manchester where it was mostly grey and I was trying to figure out whether or not I really enjoyed taking drugs, with a new bunch of friends. I started to judge what I wore in correlation with how easy it was to 'get shit done' whilst wearing it; could I feel comfortable cycling around the city, buying vegetable and flowers which I'd purposely position so they stuck out of my panniers, and could I walk into a lecture without needing to hoik my skirt? I developed a crush on the guy who lived upstairs and wore old Dickies dungarees with the arms folded around his waist and grey felt Birkenstocks, mostly because his style seemed to encapsulate this approach. His girlfriend wore transparent rain macs and they'd lock themselves into departmental buildings at the University as the Occupy movement kicked off. I liked the idea of being able to sit through political planning meetings and not be disheartened by the fact there was always one guy who'd stand for 20 minutes talking about something entirely unrelated, while everybody politely gave him a platform.</div>
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It's not uncommon for a steadfast teenage commitment to fashion to waver. The tricky layered Venn Diagram in which changing physical shape, body image, capitalism, diversity, environmental responsibility all overlay with fashion played into the wavering, but even though I'd always think <i>who are these people?</i> whenever I read a style profile about a rich woman in Vogue, I was still interested<i> </i>in fashion. I'd still see women in the street, or at festivals wearing just the right sort of suede jacket, or carrying herself in a way that made me want to follow her, and that was always down to clothes. Reading blogs, sites, magazines in which women said something about fashion and style that went beyond "I love this!" has always been an antidote to the wavering; those women who tell a story about how a Cerulean eyeshadow can make them feel as blissed-out and ON as the bottom of a swimming pool, or how a period of depression implicated the way they felt about their favourite pleated dress. I'm always thirsty for these stories. </div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AbxPZDTEpQo/VvbMp7DLbDI/AAAAAAAAJi8/kJj3NSJ3rAULFGEcAVNDVltJR8PT_L1dg/s1600/blue%2Bmood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AbxPZDTEpQo/VvbMp7DLbDI/AAAAAAAAJi8/kJj3NSJ3rAULFGEcAVNDVltJR8PT_L1dg/s1600/blue%2Bmood.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Clockwise from left: <a href="https://intothegloss.com/author/stacey-nishimoto/" target="_blank">Stacey Nishimoto</a> x 2 / <a href="http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/a-reality-worth-dreaming-about-from-marquesalmeida-autumnwinter-16" target="_blank">Blue eyeliner at Marques Almeida AW16</a> / <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BBaYqSQwzEe/" target="_blank">Miley Cyrus</a> / <a href="http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/30009/1/richard-malone-is-one-young-designer-unbothered-by-fame" target="_blank">Lime green lashes at Richard Malone</a></span></div>
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The last couple of weeks I've been thinking about how I can dedicate my time to writing the sorts of features that tell these stories, and the extent to which I can afford to do this (writing purely about the good stuff is a luxury unless you have an income coming from other places too) In the process I've become hooked on <a href="https://intothegloss.com/categories/the-selfie/" target="_blank">Stacey Nishimoto's The Selfie</a> beauty column for Into The Gloss which reminded me <i>god, I love the things we humans can do to ourselves to feel good and distracted and make it through the day and to fan the flames of the fire emoji. </i>Connected to this same headspace: i've been wearing a new pair of bright white Reeboks everyday and enjoying the hang of my grey winter coat and feeling VERY ON (sartorially speaking) and reflecting that spending money on things that make your heart sing is always valid. </div>
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Stacey's column appeals to my current need to not waste so much time on the little details in life that really don't matter. (Me: spending days searching for the right Airbnb apartment, checking the menu online before visiting the restaurant so I can select the optimal dish.) Stacey Nishimoto is serious about beauty, but she also takes the approach that aiming for perfection will take the fun out of the endeavour, which is to experiment, look bloody fantastic and wear lipstick on your cheeks if you want to because, jesus, there aren't any rules. This week I've worn baby blue eyeshadow <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18.2px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">à</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> </span></span>la The Face, defined my eyebrows and bought copper coloured glitter to go wild with because what's the point of feeling like I 'don't get' make up and that it's an area of expertise for other people, when I could just get stuck in.<br />
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discotheque confusionhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17452755202106942784noreply@blogger.com4