The Weekend List: No. 8

This latest edition of The Weekend List has been put together on the 9.07 Manchester to Bristol train service. I got onto the train and found myself, as I often do, with a reservation on one of those seats that has a big, white chunk of plastic wall where the window should be. Instead of a pane for watching Manchester make way to Cheshire and great heffers in fields and deep deep green there is large sticker locating the nearest fire extinguisher. This really is one of my pet hates in life. The regularity with which this happens is so often that it's almost funny. Almost. I wonder if it's an occurrence designed to make me a more patient person, somebody with less pet hates. My love of train journeys and of the view from the window always triumphs though, along with my irritation.

Onto more positive notes. This week I have been mostly listening to Sharon Van Etten's album 'Are We There'. I particularly like the jarring way she delivers the lyric "I washed your dishes but I shit in your bathroom" in the middle of the Every Time The Sun Comes Up, such a gentle and meandering song that the mention of shitting in a bathroom is quite unexpected and all the better for it. This week I also tried navigating the best way of spending lunchtimes so that you can get out of the office, and move around and rest your mind without having to spend money. I always find it easy to linger at my desk reading articles online as I eat and I'm trying to get out of that habit. Yesterday I walked the short distance to the train station and spent the hour sitting on a bench people-watching and reading. The day before I went to the library and at the start of the week I took my book and sat in the grounds of the Manchester Cathedral. I'm still working through Olivia Laing's book Echo Spring slowly, slowly.

Now I have a week off and will be spending it in Bristol with family and catching up with my Granny. My Granny who has long been chronicled on this blog as a very important part of my life. Collage-influencer, Sex in The City-introducer (I can still hear her helpless guffawing as we both watched one of Samantha's particularly graphic upside-down sex scenes with her gym instructor. I love that we watched this together) fantastic writer of letters and advise-giver. A cheerleader, except in thick-rimmed glasses and knee high boots. Granny is unwell and it looks like this will be our last chapter of gallivanting together. I'm hoping we can spend the week together, eating food that's good for the soul, and maybe guffawing more about sex, if I can find get my hands on a copy of Scotty Bowers's memoir Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars which I read about in Sadie Stein's Paris Review column and sounds fantastic. A tome dedicated to who was shagging who in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

For now, here are some tasty reads and listens for the weekend. Have a good one.

Culture

"Success is when you can buy any book you want without looking at the price and you never have to be around assholes." John Waters on fans, shocking parents and pushing limits. 

"She was strong yet humble, serious yet hilarious, both teacher and student, and in my mind, the physical embodiment of life itself." Danielle Pender on Deborah Sussman.

This sublime canal boat in Little Venice, London. Who would have thought it possible to fit in so many modernist chairs, jukeboxes and vintage shoes? *Tongue hangs out*

An interview with Omar Sosa and Nacho Alegre, editors of Apartamento magazine.

Style

"I like the idea of an aesthetic and a style as not just something that applies to clothes, but something that's consistent throughout all your choices." Sheila Heti interview in Rookie.

A big pink coat and trainers. A good 'throw this on, it's the weekend' outfit via Canned Fashion.

Food

Breakfasts in literature. "If somebody is having toast and marmalade this morning, it is a safe guess that they had it yesterday and that they will have it tomorrow as well. For this reason, breakfast is the ideal barometer of normalcy, the meal that tells us who a person really is."

A love letter to the $1 ice-cream sandwich.

Listening

The Map That Made New York  

Groovy downloadable mixes from Manchester

Dance to this! Ask Me After Midnight by Glowing Palms

And some extra snacks

Too lazy to be ambitious.

Truth-bombshell from Durga Chew-Bose

Herb Lester's round up of Old New York.

This wonderful Tumblr, From There. 

Striking photographs of women tanning themselves.

Hack it off

Sometimes there's a great joy in paying somebody for a service which will be done very well. Taking a watch, for example, to be mended rather than leaving it to accumulate dust in one of those miscellaneous saucers which sit on shelves and contain safety pins and coins and other broken oddities. I guess if I was the sort of person who took clothing for alterations, then that too. There's joy too in going to the hairdressers on a Saturday once every few weeks. Having somebody swaddle you in a black gown and giving yourself up to that strangely intimate yet delicious ritual of having your scalp scratched and hair washed by a stranger. You can enjoy a complimentary coffee and one of those strange malty biscuits which only ever come with complimentary coffees and you can leaf through the magazines you're too cynical to spend your own money on and give in to convention and discuss holidays as you watch somebody snip snip snip away and then walk out, after handing over some money and really feel sorted. I think that so often it's that feeling of sortedness that you're paying for.

All of the above is true, but a little DIY should never be knocked, and sometimes just feels better for the soul. I've spent much of the past fortnight doing a lot of standing in front of the mirror and knocking my hair behind my shoulders to visualise a shorter length. We all do that when we're thinking about a haircut, don't we? Contort lengths from the front into fake fringe. Or pulling a ponytail loose to test a bob and realising that you just look like Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. To hack or not to hack?

In the end, I just decided to do it myself at home, which I haven't done since I got a 'proper job' last year and felt that being one of those people who has their hair foiled every 6-8 weeks is the right sort of person to employ. I was listening to Solange, no doubt it had something to do with Solange. You can't sing with gusto to an EP called 'True" without actually being true, and, you know, reassessing the financial implications of bi-monthly hair snipping. It's so damned rewarding to just grab the waste paper basket, twist locks and hack with a pair of scissors from the kitchen. Snip snip. Shit! Snip snip snip. Cutting your hair at home feels super good if you're a fan of instant gratification, feel you can conquer a straight line, or don't mind either way. Swish swish swish. You walk differently when you have a haircut you like and which cost you £0. Bounce bounce bounce, down the street- that saved haircut money just bought a cosy little caffeine kick and a trip to the cinema. Imagine yourself at the cinema, one of those up-close shots of your beaming face with light moving across, echoing the face of the universal cinema-goers reflected back to us from various screens. Your beaming face and that free blunt haircut. Money for popcorn or tear-jerking catharsis on a Sunday afternoon. Real joy.

Paying for a 'service' is something I still yo-yo over. It seems like the right thing to do, the adult thing to do. But then I come back to thinking about the relationship between full time work and consumption and expenditures and just feel incredibly tired. I subscribe to the thinking that it's very convenient to keep people wanting more, consuming more, working more. And why is spending a great sum of money associated with glossiness and good upkeep? I always tell myself that if I came into a comfy sum of money I would buy myself a killer Saville Row suit, but then I think of my Great Aunty Megan who wore the killer suits that she had made herself 40 years previously. Has paying for frequent haircuts over the past year been worth it? Would I have looked scruffier at the office if I snipped my hair at home, or would I have been able to afford a couple more trips away at the weekend instead? (NB, Carrie Bradshaw; you have enriched my life in many ways but I wish you hadn't dulled the impact of a good rhetorical question.) Maybe looking scruffier at the office wouldn't matter so much if it bought me the chance to do more wonderful things at the weekend, to take a train to London and gently glide through the waters at the Hampstead Heath Ponds, buy a friend a bottle of wine to say 'I'm thinking of you' and pop some red tulips into the shopping basket at the last minute, just before the sound of "Till Number 3 please". I think I'll always quite enjoy exploring where to practice frugality and where it might be worth spending more. (HELLO sleeping at Stansted Airport before that early-morning Ryanair flight.) For now though, there's quite a nice smugness to doing it yourself. Hack hack hack, instant gratification.

Birthday Suits (or, feeling okay about nakedness)

Photographer Lucy Hilmer has taken a photograph of herself wearing nothing but a pair of comfy white cotton pants and some socks and moccasins on every one of her birthdays since 1974. This series- the aptly named Birthday Suits- is wonderful, chronicling the changes which in life are usually so subtle, but much clearer when captured in staggered succession.

Visible changes to Hilmer's face, and body and additions to her family tell of the life lived along the way. Nothing extraordinary; unless, that is, you count standing nearly naked at the roadside in Death Valley as extraordinary, which you just might. This is a body that isn't so dissimilar from my own when starkers, or it could be the process of ageing and perhaps a glimpse of motherhood that make them feel universal. This private view into the life of a stranger felt oddly familiar, like memories of seeing my Mum naked in the bath and how normal and comfortable that felt, even though I would unlikely see it now. Chattering and chattering away on the loo while she floated about in the water, or, when I was really little lathering up a loofah and giving her back a good scrub; really getting to the dead skins cells, to that part of the back that only gets tended to by other people. The part that translates as "can you do my back?" when on the beach.

Either way, these photographs have lodged themselves into my brain and have stayed since. It's because there's something about them that illicit an acceptance of the body.

I've come a good way overcoming body hang-ups in the last 4 years or so. I was never hugely body-conscious as a teenager. My Dad told me from a young age that fat was a horrible word. And my Granny- who supplied me with issues of Vogue from the start- once held an issue up whilst we were basking in the sun of her back garden and pointed at Kate Moss on the cover. "Look! Look at that," she squinted at her waist, "You do know this isn't real, don't you?" I can't remember my Mum saying much about bodies at all. But as soon as I hit 18 and grew hips and stuff and all of those nights during my A-Levels of going to bed and staying up late with a sweet heap of sugary granola for company started to show. There were moments of looking down at my body in the bath and thinking "huh. look at that roll," and for some reason this little niggle developed more by the time I went to university until I found myself having those negative body conversations with girlfriends over beers at the pub. Those conversations in which you sort of jeer each other on, moaning in equal parts about how you both wished you could be better. Resolutions about going to the gym, and self control that doesn't account for pragmatism or fun and only parades as stemming from self respect, and really, it all comes back to comparing yourself to a particular body ideal you feel obliged to follow. All of this instead of viewing a changing body as a cool, womanly thing and tummy wobbles as natural, so natural that the paintings of irresistible sirens in local galleries even have them.

I've found dancing, being naked with nice people and going topless on a beach in Croatia all things that have helped along the way, but I understand that being really confident about your own body when you're in your 20s is still a tricky path to navigate. Not for everybody, but certainly for myself and I know for many others. One of the nice things that comes with this stage of trial and error, comfort and discomfort are the mini revelations that can come along the way. The sort of revelations that women in their thirties and forties maybe don't think about as much as they did in their twenties. But they're the revelations that come with grasping the attractiveness of flaws and variety; of watching older women on the beaches with dimply arses and sprouting hair wading back to shore after an intense butterfly crawl in the clear. Or the lovely surprise of sharing or exploring a new body, and of how wonderful and powerful the female body can be whether it is strengthened through dance or exercise, changed and/or recovered through illness, pregnancy and life changes. They're ideas that all seem fairly obvious when you're feeling in a positive space about yourself, and standing in front of a mirror starkers and thinking "yeah!" but it's easy enough to have hiccups and forget. Usually induced by finding yourself in a changing room with a pair of trousers around your thighs, perhaps. (Or apply appropriate hang-up as applicable) These are the things I wish I had learnt at school, but which I realise I probably couldn't have; these things come with time.

In short, this photo series gives a good nudge in the right direction. Bodies are great, and I just wish I hadn't wasted so much time thinking otherwise, or feeling shy about doing cool stuff with my body, like dancing in PE lessons without shame. I hope these photographs can stay in my head and bamboozle those moments in which I still find myself counting down weeks to specific events based on my ability to lose weight; beaches or men or family events onto which I project a slimmer-chinned version of myself.

Outfit: Sandals for weeks

I'm relishing summer at the moment. Clammy and upper-lip-sweat-inducing sometimes, yes. But that ease of slipping your bare feet into a pair of sandals and living in them for weeks, or of leaving the house in the evening without a coat. Sleeping most of the night with the sheets kicked off and keeping a jug of cold water permanently in the fridge. Oh, it's good.

These are a couple of outfits I've been kicking about in recently. Special shout-out to the lilac hairclip, which I found on the pavement and have been sliding in when I want to cheaply imitate Margot Tenenbaum. (I don't smoke and I have all of my fingers, it's not going very well.)

Denim top, Warehouse. Stripy silk skirt, Asos White. Sandals, Urban Outfitters. 

Top and trousers, both secondhand. Birky Birkinstocks. 

The Weekend List: No. 7

Happy Weekend! This morning I listened to Bowie (I'm exploring the albums I've never listened to; starting today, with 'Pin Ups') cleaned my bathroom and swept my floors, recycled an accumulation of glass bottles and then headed around the corner to Takk, where I drank a latte and enjoyed being indoors with the door open whilst the rain clattered down outside. Being indoors, but being able to smell the outdoors, mmm the best place to be when it's raining. A quick thank you to you lovely people who donated a coffee to me; it really means a lot and blogging this morning was a much more enjoyable experience for it. 

The Weekend List

Culture

"Just because I achieved some microcosmic degree of success in a field that people romanticise, it doesn’t feel to me that I have to make a career out of it." Interview with writer David Shapiro on creative expectations, the art of choosing an alias pen-name and relationships with parents. 

"You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something." Why Louis CK hates mobile phones.

If you watched Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood' and you wondered which tracks were included on Ethan Hawke's post-Beatles 'best of the solo material' compilation mix then you're in luck; the tracklist is here.

Music

Wyatting. The verb referring to the act of taking a pub hostage through the playing of terrible songs on the jukebox. Ned Beauman wrote about it in The Guardian some years back. Deliciously mischievous or the work of a snobbish party pooper; you decide.

A song for your weekend: I Talk To The Wind (2) by Giles, Giles and Fripp.



Food

"The sort of thing that a college boy will shovel into his mouth before hitting a weights room that smells of Tuesday's socks" << Now that's the way to describe a lentil, mint and feta omelette. The Quadrille blog features recipes from their latest releases with opening gems like this.

Poetry

Pamela Anderson wrote a poem and posted it on Facebook.

"My peanut butter and jam both ran out in the same sandwich, so truly romance is alive in the world today." I went to a poetry reading in Berlin and was really bummed out to have to leave to catch a bus before Crispin Best came on. (Thanks to Harriet for the heads up!) Next time, next time. I thoroughly recommend watching this video of one of his readings a couple of years ago.

Thought For The Day:

Dancing out of the sunroof. 16 seconds of goodness and only 86 views; the internet was made for small joys like this YouTube clip of a woman (aka my new hero) dancing in a moving car in snowy Cleveland.

Moving Moodboard

I think it's time for another moving moodboard. I've just returned from a splendid week-long holiday in Germany. Most of the time was spent in Berlin with a couple of nights in Leipzig too. One of my highlights of the trip was the V&A David Bowie exhibition which is currently showing at Martin Gropius Bau. I could have spent hours in there. Well, I did. But I could have spent more hours. I found myself absolutely enraptured watching some of Bowie's music videos; many that I've already seen before, but even more powerful when watched in the company of a small crowd drifting through the gallery, like a strange gig with the man himself everywhere but also nowhere. I've always been a big Bowie fan but standing in that gallery I found myself thinking 'Man. Bowie is everything. He is my Number 1.' (I don't think there were 'cult chemicals' in the air conditioning.) The Boys Keep Swinging video especially stayed with me; now I just want to master those uber-sexy Presley-pelvis moves for myself. 

So here's a moving moodboard, dedicated as ever to people and movement:

Step 1: Press play on Hubbabubbaklubb's 'Mopedbart' just above. 

Step 2. Press play on each of the video boxes, hitting mute at the same time, or experimenting with however much sound you would like from each. Scroll up and down, watch it all come together. 

Step 3: Enjoy David Bowie's pelvis, revellers at the pavement egg-frying festival in Oatman, Arizona, Sam Rockwell's screentest, a car spinning in the snow to a soundtrack of Burt Bacharach, Trisha Brown dancers in Shanghai and a zen fish tank.

Step 4: When it is all over, go on as you were.
Step: or, explore past moving moodboards here and here. 

The Weekend List: No. 6

Clockwise from left: Peckham Cafe by Stephen Leslie, eating the Italian way via the Rocket and Squash food journal, Ava's vegan Belgian food guide, Sunspel's Japanese flag cashmere jumper, fat marrows and such, The Bee Gees.  

It's the weekend again! My plans thus far include going to see Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood, re-stocking my fridge, 'spring' cleaning, getting stuck into one of the books I borrowed from the library this week and meeting up with friends.

I also wanted to take this moment to float an idea. After moving into my new flat, I'm seeing if I can survive without installing the internet. Given that so much of my life revolves around internet, it's a bit of a challenge, but at this time this decision is mostly based on financial reasons, seeing where I can afford to cut the corners (and testing the 'hey, read instead!' evening implications.) Instead, if I want to blog I've been staying later at work in the evenings to in order to write and use the internet. Here's the idea: if you have ever read something on Discotheque Confusion that touched you, or made you guffaw or that you passed onto a friend because you thought they might like it, would you consider buying me a coffee? This is a coffee that will enable me to blog in slightly nicer surroundings, enjoyed in one of my favourite cafes just around the corner from my flat on a Saturday morning, in a setting that isn't my office after a day at work. I'm floating this idea because I sense that this blog has a lovely community of readers who might be open to this idea. I've always been open to trying out different ways of sustaining the upkeep of the blog, and this seems like a karmically-good route, which doesn't involve me hawking Amazon products which in the past has earned me a teeny, tiny amount from click-throughs. (This also opens a whole new can of worms because I've finally decided that it's a company I do not wish to support, no matter how tempting and cheap the stock may be) I'm not trying to make a living out of this blog, and doing it for the love will always continue to be my philosophy, but if you've found something here that has kept you coming back and you would think "Hey! Have a Saturday morning coffee on me!", then that would be most wonderful. You can donate below depending on what feels right for you.

Without further ado, here are is your Weekend List. Happy Weekend!

Music- The Bee Gees special

Islands in the Stream; Fantastic piece by Bob Stanley on The Bee Gees and the phenomenon of the comeback.

This is what happened when music journo Pete Paphides asked The Bee Gees to record his answer phone message back in 1996.

Food

"The hook was that I was a white guy making ramen and people were going to come and check me out." The Eight Chapters of Ramen short video via Nowness follows Long Islander Ivan Orkin and the science of ramen.

My Top 3 food blogs at the moment: Tommy's blog. I've been following Tommy's various blogging incarnations for years now. There was the (now defunct) This is Naive, always a fabulous go-to for meticulous city guides paired with dreamy photography. Now I love to browse through this blog, where there are few words but pages and pages of delectable dishes. Often featured are laden bowls of goodness I can't exactly identify, but with piles of thick noodles beneath a roof of greenery and the odd egg yolk, the sort of bowls that bring to mind sheer happiness and a good fatty stock that always finds its way onto your chin.

Guac and Roll. Ava's vegan food blog is beautiful, but in a 'real-life' way that doesn't make you suspicious, or think yeah right! Lots of substantial lunchbox salad inspiration and special mention to her guides to eating vegan in European cities, like Lisbon and Belgium.

Rocket and Squash. A serious 'food journal' with grown-up illustrations of fat marrows and pumpkins, Rocket and Squash is has the appearance of The Paris Review for foodies. Recommended: the 'Supplemental' series, a merry digest of the various weekend food supplements. (A dessert to my very own Weekend List, if you will)

Culture

"He rode a bicycle with such confident pleasure, he leapt over tennis nets, and in one particularly memorable scene he joined Lucy's brother Freddy and the family vicar Mr Beebe as they cavorted joyously, nakedly in a lake on a hot day." Why I'd Like To Be Julian Sands in A Room With A View. Laura Barton, perfectly capturing that "I want to me a man" moment I often experience when reading about or watching really cool guys on-screen. 

Call Your Girlfriend. My favourite podcast of the moment. Earwig into this brilliant, hilarious, on-point skype catch-up between two long-distance friends.

Stephen Leslie's photostream. Martin Parr-ish, very British.

Why I Adore The Night by Jeanette Winterson. 

Tove Jansson and Island Life. A short feature on the ICA blog about Finnish writer Jansson. If I was in London I'd certainly pop along to the small exhibition which is currently on display in the reading room.

21 Movies About Weird, Kinky or Compulsive Sex via Playlist. Ah, who doesn't like a fantastically niche film compilation list? Also known as "If you liked Nyphomanic then why not try..."

Style

So far I have been doing pretty well in my current frugality mission but if I was living in an alternative universe where I was in a position to buy really very gorgeous cashmere knitwear then Japanese flag cashmere jumper from Sunspel this is what I would damn well go for.

Style Like U's 'Whats Underneath' project interviews women while they undress. It feels sort of like those Dove 'love your body' campaigns, but is far more likeable and more awkward and therefore a lot more like real life.

Sofa So Good

Photographs: Jasmine Deporta for Some Magazine.

The Kingdom of Matchy Matchy has been a place I've mostly veered away from; usually associating colour-co-ordination the realm of proms and heels and handbags and necklaces all dipped in identical lacquer. Or that girl who used to work with us at Topshop who once announced "When I does red, I does red." And she wasn't lying; at the next staff party she wore rows of beads, lipstick, bags, shoes and possibly even eyeshadow all in postbox red. It wasn't my cup of tea; there was a lot of red, but the idea of being brave enough to really go all out with one colour stayed with me and I always think to myself 'must try harder.'

This wonderful editorial from Jasmine Deporta for Some Magazine has got me thinking about colour again, of picking a palette and twinning a peachy jumper with a pink skirt, or waking up and deciding 'TODAY WILL BE SAGE THURSDAY" and going for herby colours and mermaid green nail varnish. Matching yourself to your surroundings, as in this editorial is also appealing. Remember Zach Braff in that shirt and wallpaper combination in Garden State? Even if being a normcore furniture chameleon isn't actually that practical when you're on the move, being better with colour, with interesting and 'off' shades, is something I'm aiming for. When I was visiting my Granny's house in Bristol last weekend I kept noticing lots of accents of pink dotted about the place; a chair she'd found on the street, uber-camp and fluro, a wooden foot-stall which looked like it had been dyed with magenta ink and the spray foam loft installation, poking out from corners as the attic undergoes a renovation, was the colour of strawberry ice-cream. She always has a fantastic eye for small details and colour is one of them; the ability to slot items and clothes in delicious tones into her life. 

It also strikes me that paying attention to the colour make-up of an outfit is a good way of fielding out the impressions that we take from the photographs, the art, the adverts, the music and the films that we come into contact with on a daily basis. Last weekend I was in London and, as ever, left each gallery I visited with a few more jottings in my journal. I often wonder what the purpose of these jottings is; I'll write down the name of paintings that I love and come back to them perhaps at a later date, but often not. It's more often about being struck by colours and composition and allowing yourself to be sucked into that wonderful moment of quiet and slowness that comes with walking around a gallery. The notes come from being terrified of forgetting what it was that was affecting in the moment. A bit like the days of listening to the radio before Shazam and pricking ears and shushing anybody around in order to hear the track title from the presenter. So these jottings, a painting by Duncan Grant, a striking landscape by Graham Sutherland, could be the starting point for drawing colour into a wardrobe, of taking the yellows or purples or greens from one of Roger Fry's omega designs and finding a way of wearing them together, of justifying that scribble in the moment and pronouncing "when I does yellow, I does yellow."

Outfit: A Saturday Gander

What I wore: smock top from Urban Outfitters, a jumper 'borrowed' from my friend Cai (he may want it back at some point), shorts from ASOS, 'Good Egg' badge from Parish Council and espadrilles from a charity shop. 

Last weekend was my first in the new flat that stretched out ahead of me, free of the chore of having to move boxes from one side of the city to the other or scrub bus pollution from the windows. I woke up early on Saturday, the place all to myself and proceeded to play out that faithful weekend routine- eggs- but this time in my brand new place. I pottered and played music and cooked the eggs. Tabasco and coriander and salt and pepper and a cafetiere for one.

The best bit about having moved to the centre is being able to leave the house and walk 10 minutes to Manchester Art Gallery. I did this in the startlingly bright sunshine, quickly realising that I wouldn't need knitwear and went to see the newly opened Ryan Gander exhibition. The gallery was nicely cool, good for counteracting that sweaty hairline which is always a feature of the hot summer days you long for in the depths of February. I loved the exhibition, which included a wall filled with perspex paint palettes depicting abstract memories, the tantalising opening into a magical forest trapped behind glass, and a pair of mechanical, blinking cartoon eyes. I found it much more loveable than the way his work came across on his recent profile on The Culture Show. That profile featured Ryan Gander discussing his output in a typically pop way and emphasising the value of productivity as a tool for making art, and in turn, a lot of money with great speed. He showed Miranda Sawyer around his art-studio-cum-production factory where pretty young things tapped away at laptops and spoke down the phone to the craftspeople, the stonemasons being commissioned to mould his ideas with their own hands. He had a cockiness which had been absent in the interviews I'd watched in the gallery, which I had found to be clever and refreshing. Here, being filmed for television he wore a flat peak cap with the awkward mannerism of a teenage boy who has bought a new item of clothing especially for a non-uniform day at school and doesn't yet feel comfortable wearing it. Part of me wondered if it was a joke, then a greater part decided that maybe we give artists too much credit for being pranksters when really, we could accept that you can enjoy somebody's work without liking them per say.

Later I left the gallery and walked around the corner to where it backs onto Chinatown. I bought the ingredients for the week ahead and sesame sauce, glass noodles and bottled hoisin to fill the empty corners of my food cupboards. I asked the woman behind the counter where I could find honey and she pointed me towards the jujube honey. "It's very good to spoon into hot water and drink when you're on your period," she told me. It contains strange fruit, with a consistency like soaked hazelnuts and a taste like figs. I wasn't on my period but there's always something appealing about having older women in shops telling you the right way to go about things. Especially when you live far away from your Mother, Granny or Aunt. It has the same appeal as being fitted for a bra in Marks and Spencer or having somebody come to fix your broken boiler when you haven't been able to figure it out or going occasionally to the GP and telling them why something down below doesn't feel quite right and just feeling so much better when you shut the door behind you and leave even though you're almost 23 and you still don't know how to name your own genitalia in front of a male medical professional. The strangers who help you get shit done and figure things out, often we never see them again.

The rest of the afternoon was spent mooching back at the flat, making lunches for the week ahead. A sweet potato and peanut soup distributed amongst tupperware and frozen in bulk and a sugar snap pea salad which contained a far too much garlic. I listened to Canned Heat and coverage of the Tour De France from a Leeds radio station which I would never otherwise listen to and moved around my little kitchen with the buses travelling down below my windows and farting out their pollution, the hairline at the back of my neck still damp with summer and plans to meet new friends later in the evening.

How to be excited about going on holiday without wanting to buy new things.

I've booked a holiday. After months and months of closing my eyes and visualising Greek Islands and Majorcan lemon groves and tentatively asking my friends if they fancy popping off somewhere for a week (understandably resounding "no"s because they all either wait tables or work in kitchens or find themselves in post-graduate skint-dom) I've gone and done it. I'll be going to Berlin for a week where an actual friend already lives. This is all very exciting, I feel tired and I'm ready for a to-do list that consists of restaurant choices rather than artwork specs.

There's a funny thing about booking a holiday though. You can be canny as anything when it comes to unchecking boxes and hidden costs with your budget airline ("Skis? Nope. Car rental? No. Health insurance?....") but the notion of a holiday wardrobe eternally beckons. Like a hot, naked siren the holiday wardrobe is eternally attractive even though, in reality it's another indulgent tickbox that can be spared. That's what I'm telling myself this year, anyway. After moving into the flat and booking the holiday itself I'm on a tight budget. I'm on a mission to learn how to be excited about going on holiday without wanting to buy new things.

I was lying slapbang in the middle of a grassy patch in Piccadilly Gardens recently, absorbing as much Vitamin D as possible on my lunchbreak. There was a toddler creeping closer and closer, she was about two years old and wearing one of those strange headbands that some parents think are adorable. They're in the same category as piercing your toddler's ears and unnerving to the extreme. But this child remained lovely bar this parental mishap and spent a lot of time handing me an apple, taking it back and then hiding it in my straw bag. I lay on my back and talked to my Aunty on the phone. Eighteen years older than myself, Mary has always been a big part of my life. When I was 15 I started taking trips to London on my own; her flat was the base from which I learned how to use the underground, and would return to after attending surreal but wonderful fashion week parties attended by Chloe Sevigny, Carine Roitfeld and Mario Testino, when this blog was more fashion-orientated and getting me invited to cool, strange places. Now she lives in Bristol, just around the corner from my home and has two small children. We catch up less often because we're both occupied with our different daily lives but I always feel inspired and very happy after our phone calls. We egged each other on with the subject of frugality. We talked about how easy it is to get caught up finding the perfect pair of sandals or denim A-line skirt ahead of a holiday and allowing these wants to become a part of how we visualise our week away. It's really easy to do...

I often associate memories of particular holidays with the clothes I wore. I think we all do; memories and clothes are forever intertwined. There was the time I visited the Italian Lakes with my Dad, my Stepmum and my younger siblings. This was the first holiday we'd all taken together. We stayed in a mobile caravan on a park full of children and those kid-sized picnic tables and marginally relaxed parents. I shared a bedroom with my younger brothers, aged 18 or 19 and tucked up along side them thinking how bizarre it all was. It was lovely in parts, we took a boat out onto Lake Garda together and it was novel to be in the company of each other all at once. I wore a pair of brown Jesus sandals and a thin cotton smock. I felt like Jane Birkin and one day, at the end of my tether with then four year old Hector's constant whining, I hired a bike and cycled out of the village, along a river. It felt cool and romantic but I did also spend some of the time worried about getting raped on the empty path. That may have had something to do with the fact that I spent the evenings outside the caravan reading American Psycho, the pages were all clothes hangers in the wrong places and dark pavements as I sat eating cubes of dark chocolate whilst the kids slept inside and my parents had a drink together in the village. Then there was Jamaica where everything was caked in a thin layer of sea salt and suncream and sweat and maybe some Red Stripe but that just made everything better and I wore this little white crochet shirt over everything.

Those memories are great but they're not items of clothing that I had to buy especially. It's really sort of silly if you're on a limited budget and you start to view those things are pre-holiday necessities. "It's really not about a pair of Birkinstocks that you don't yet own, it's about how good that feeling is of warm, tanned legs and being in a new place. With more money to spend on seafood," Mary said on the phone, or words to that effect as the toddler stood above me apple in hand, conveniently blocking the sun from my eyes. I also find it helps to imagine Phillip Green cackling atop a pile of his own money somewhere in Monaco because I got suckered into the "Holiday Shop" section at Topshop.

I permanently veer between finding frugality very seductive and just really enjoying the feeling of buying a fantastic new outfit. Of wearing it over and over and walking along the street with that slight 'I'm in a music video" swagger. Like Richard Ashcroft in Bittersweet Symphony. Of course it's slightly different if you have genuine 'holiday holes' in your wardrobe. I have swimsuits older than at least two of my siblings. But come on, we all know that spending an evening having a dig around your wardrobe and trying on some of the things you always passively look past can fill in those gaps. It's true, and that's coming from me who always eyerolls at suggestions of 'swap parties with friends'. (I can think of a lot of less awkward ways of saving money on clothes. Do swap parties ever work? Do they ever not involve one person scoring 5 great things and everyone else feeling like it's Christmas and having to fake-gush over an old H+M dress they don't actually want?)

But I digress. I've given myself the following semi-rules in order to avoid falling into the pre-holiday money trap: 1. Avoid online shopping. 2. No clicking on those tempting emails from Cos telling you about their sale. No browsing Topshop Boutique (I've turned that into a link to test your resilience and I will know if you click.) 3. Start visualising yourself doing a sassy music-video walk/ Ursula Andress sea-exit in clothes that you already own. 4. Break down the cost of the things you want to buy and convert them into the delicious meals/ gallery admissions they will buy you once on holiday. 5. Consider how good the phrase to "Live within ones means" sounds and the fact that you've always dug it but maybe not practised it as much as you'd like. I am completely projecting my Alvin Hall-insecurities onto you. 6. Remember that the allure of the pre-holiday shop is mostly a conspiracy designed to make you spend your money. You are completely allowed to, but don't buy new clothes because you think it'll make you look more attractive/better/"holiday ready". I'm a non-smoker and I constantly visualise my holidays as a sexy smoke-filled scene, all tanned arms and espadrilles and lungs full of Camels. So it's okay, you can have a sexy holiday visualisation that just stays in your head and never gets played out.

So far I've been doing well. God knows I want those Peach Melba Teva sandals I saw the other week more than a lot of things right now. But I'm enjoying the stubborn battle with myself, and of succeeding one day at a time. *Imagines a calendar full of red crosses, harp plays* For now my holiday fantasies consist less of shiny new sandals. Instead it's all about lying on the sands of Lake Wansee with a Patricia Highsmith novel, pausing occasionally to stop the gradual slide of sunglasses down a sweating nose or to take a swig from that bottle of beer which was, for a short time icy and now sits quite rightly on the happy hummock of a beach tummy.