I spend a lot of time thinking I really ought to improve in all three of these areas, but not knowing how to go about it efficiently. However, I have come up with one idea which will cover all three: Only Drink Alcohol When It’s Free. Thus, whenever a drink is required, I must attend some sort of event such as a gallery or exhibition opening, or aftershow party (which will lead to networking), or else be playing music at a function which provides free booze (which will lead to financial gain, in addition to the money saved by not buying any alcohol).
The problem with this theory, of course, is that wine at gallery openings, functions etc. is often horrible. Therefore, in order to obtain good wine, only the opening parties of very high-end galleries and exhibitions must be attended (leads to networking with more influential people, although after a while they may notice that I’m only there when there is free wine, which might be bad), and only functions at which the wine is good must be played at (which either means that the people will have so much money that they can afford nice wine and also to pay the musicians more, or that they will have spent the entire budget on the wine and won’t pay the musicians anything. Hmm.)
The details need work, I think, but maybe this could solve three of my problems at once…
The phone rang. I answered it and a woman said, “Hello, is that My Button Dot Com? I’m on your website.”
“Erm, no..? Do you mean Button Jewellery Dot Co Dot UK?”
“Well I typed in My Button Dot Com and your name and number came up. Anyway, did you have a stall at the Clothes Show at the NEC?”
“No.”
“Oh right, well my friend got this necklace there and said it was from My Button. Are you sure you didn’t go to the NEC?”
“Yes, quite sure.”
“And you don’t know anyone who went to the NEC?”
“No. Which website did you say you were on?”
“Well I’m not actually on it any more, it was on my friend’s computer a few weeks ago.”
I typed in mybutton.com on my browser. It was one of those ‘domain is for sale’ sites.
“…anyway,” the woman continued, apparently still utterly convinced that I was the right person to talk to, “what I’m after is a necklace made from purple and lime green hearts. Do you make something like that?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t make anything like that.”
“Hmm. Well that’s very strange.”
Well, actually, given everything that had been said in the conversation up to that point, it really wasn’t very strange.
Eventually I persuaded her that perhaps the website she was after was onebuttonuk.com. I have no idea whether this website stocks necklaces made from purple and lime green hearts but it least it got me off the hook…
Just before Christmas I went to a partial family gathering / my mum’s birthday party near Dumfries: [these are phone-camera pics so not of amazing quality...] [After the pictures, by the way, there is some more writing.]
The pond. It’s heart-shaped because it was made as a Valentine’s present, so the story goes…
My mum experimenting with her new phone. And some lens flare. But that’s my fault.
Frozen puddles.
Beside the Solway Firth was an Unexpected Pram.
A very hairy hedge. There’s lots of lichen around this area – presumably an indication of the air not being very polluted.
This photo was taken at 11am. Note the Gloom.
These are some round bits of concrete at the edge of the sea at Mersehead Sands, which are possibly old bits of pipe. They get photographed rather too often by members of my family.
Some more 11am gloom.
A particularly good bit of gloom, I thought.
A barn being all Dramatic. In the Gloom.
The reason for the trip was primarily my mum’s birthday, and visiting uncle/aunt/cousins and generally Being In Scotland, which is one of my favourite activities. It was also, for me, in place of Having To Do Christmas. We spent said Nice Family Time with meals, walks and merriment in Scotland, without having all the prescriptive parts of Christmas, which irritate me. Aside from not being religious (which apparently isn’t a valid excuse for not celebrating Christmas) I don’t like having to eat specific things and drink fizzy wine far too early in the morning because it’s “traditional”, and particularly don’t enjoy the TV being on, the awful Christmas music that always finds a way in somehow, and the bizarre late mealtimes. However, I appreciate that some people do like all of these things. So rather than go along and complain and be grumpy and scroogelike, or attempt to convince everyone concerned that we should rebelliously not have turkey, but Thai curry, and should not turn the television on all day but instead spend the days listening to, say, the entire output of Rammstein, I opted out. I didn’t do Going To Visit Family For Christmas. I didn’t do anything for Christmas at all. In my house, we had a completely normal day, did some music work, ate nice uncomplicated food, and I was in an incredibly good mood throughout. My mum phoned me from another uncle’s house after she’d been for a Nice Walk, had a sherry and was about to help peel the sprouts. I could hear Christmas music in the background. She seemed to be having a perfectly nice time without me, but sounded a little baffled: ‘You mean you aren’t doing anything special today at all?’ But ‘not doing anything special’ felt somehow more like doing something special than actually doing something special would have done. If you see what I mean.
Incidentally, on the way home from the Not-Christmas trip to Dumfries, I had an hour stop-over at Carlisle station and visited a tapas bar there which I have always wanted to go to. Here is the cup of tea that I had there:
Today saw the release of a new recording from Pillowfish – a completely new version of the song ‘The Ice Sculptor’, which was originally released on our acoustic album Common Knowledge in 2006. I decided to rework the lyric a bit, and we’ve also done an expanded arrangement.
We made the recording as a preliminary project before starting serious work on our next album, to test out some new equipment and techniques. We’re releasing it as a free download in a variety of formats, which you can get simply by giving us your email address. You can grab your download and read more about the song on the Ice Sculptor download page.
This is the state of the alley between my house and Sainsbury’s supermarket:
In a word, eek. Getting across this is like crossing a very bad, lumpy ice rink. It is snow-that-was-just-starting-to-melt-and-suddenly-refroze, which I don’t think there’s a word for. I have found a nice Wikipedia article on different types of snow, but disappointingly the type pictured above seems only to fit under the term ‘ice’. I was really hoping it would called something exciting.
Next time I make it across the rink to the supermarket I am considering making an extra purchase of a large bag of economy salt, and gritting myself a little path down the middle.
Occasionally within my ponderings here, I refer to a place called The Lace Shop. This was my two-day-a-week workplace for a year or so, several years ago, until I was suddenly given the ‘I’m going to have to let you go’ phonecall because the boss’s daughter wanted my job. I wasn’t actually that upset. Clearing out the images folders on my computer has presented me with some long-forgotten pictorial reminders that it was not a healthy place to spend any time:
This is the view of the front shop area. In the centre is a selection of polyester embroidered tablecloths and table runners. [Before working here I was actually unaware of the existence of table runners, and I still don't really understand what they're for.] All around the edges are very alarming porcelain dolls, teddy bears whose purpose is to adorn wedding cakes, and other such abominations. Particularly horrible are embroidered cushions with slogans on such as ‘If friends were flowers, I’d pick you’ – which I personally think is rather ominous and passive-aggressive, but a lot of annoying women would come in, read them out loud and say, ‘Ooh-isn’t-that-lovely’. Always in the same tone of voice.
This is the ‘Rear Showroom’. It did not, as its name suggests, contain any rears on display, which I suppose is either disappointing or fortunate depending on one’s viewpoint and the quality of the available rears. However, it did have yet more, even nastier dolls, some embroidered cushions, damask tablecloths and some lace pictures, mostly religious scenes. The latter were certainly a contender for Worst Thing in the Shop – I’m still undecided.
Some more dolls, including Henry VIII and some of his wives. A woman once came in and asked whether the shop sold any dolls of Princess Diana. I said that it didn’t. She was very put out. She stomped back through the door muttering, ‘Well, you’ve got Henry the Eighth… it’s not that unreasonable.’ She may have been a bit offended because I didn’t do a very good job of Not Finding Her Request At All Amusing.
This is the handmade lace. I was supposed to somehow insinuate that this was made in Nottingham, England, on the orders of The Boss. When it arrived in its packets, it smelt distinctly of patchouli and spices, and had Indian writing on the labels. So, er, yes, definitely made in Nottingham. I do not think. In the mirror you can see me taking the photograph, wearing the obligatory hideous maroon tabard.
After working in this place for a while I gradually became aware that actually the vast majority of the stock in this shop – mainly sold to tourists as ‘English souvenirs’ arrived in boxes that stated quite firmly that although the souvenirs themselves might have the name of the town I live in printed on them, they were made in China. The Boss told me that if the customers asked where anything was made, I was to claim ignorance.
This made me feel rather disgusted, both with myself for going along with it, and for the shop’s owners for enforcing this fabrication. American tourists who said, ‘I hope it isn’t made in China’ left the shop with ‘local’ souvenirs that had been shipped halfway across the world to be sold here.
It seems ridiculous that a town which used to be a centre of creation – it used to make railway engines, chocolate and various other things – now mainly trades in tourism relating to its history, while manufacture declines and “local” souvenirs are made on another continent. Of course this isn’t solely the fault of this town itself, and I don’t feel qualified to go into the complex national and global causes and effects which surround the issue. However, during the quiet, customer-free and boss-free periods while I was working in the shop, I wrote a song inspired by this. After my job there was transferred to the daughter of The Boss I was very tempted to post a CD recording of it through the shop door, but since it would be difficult to have it performed and recorded by Abba – the only music ever played in the shop when I wasn’t around – I don’t think it would have been listened to. It’s called ‘Tourist Trail’ and hasn’t been recorded in the studio yet, but here’s a live video from a Pillowfish gig earlier this year:
Somehow, despite having had at least four colds in a row about a month ago and then finally recovering into a veritable whirlwind of slothful curmudgeonry, I am ill again. I would’ve thought that I’d had most of the germs by now and become immune to them, but no, apparently not. They just had to mutate into a new variety and come and inhabit me gleefully, as if I was a theme park, or Butlins-for-Germs. Hmph.
Anyway, today I was on my way to the supermarket at the end of my road, in my pyjamas, in order to obtain some sick-person’s food [fresh tagliatelle and freshly made pasta sauce in little tubs, which are Expensive and Cheating so being ill is my main excuse for ever eating them] when I heard some raucous singing from high up. It came from approximately the same position as some whistling I’d heard the day before, which had implanted ‘We’ll drink a drink, a drink / to Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink / The saviour of the human ra-ha-hace’ irrevocably in my brain for the rest of the afternoon. Foolishly, I looked up. And immediately the owner of the raucous singing, a luminously-vested builder, yelled, ‘Cheer up! It might never happen!’
We will pause in this scintillating story now, in order to discuss the immense awfulness of this phrase. I don’t know whether it is a localised English thing [does it even happen in the rest of the UK?] or whether it happens further afield as well, but here it is used regularly, usually to strangers, and is accepted as A Normal Thing To Say.
Actually – we will pause within this pause in order to diffuse any assumptions that receiving such a statement from a builder is better than The Usual Sexual Harassment. Firstly, I have walked past a lot of builders in my life, and never once have any of them commented on my physical appearance, either in a complimentary or offensive manner. Well, at least, they haven’t done it within earshot. I am wondering whether its occurrence is actually an urban myth, or so much of a stereotype that they teach new builders during their training that they must never do it , because it embarrasses everybody. Secondly, I was wearing pyjamas, a duffel coat, Timberland boots, a large green scarf and my knitted hat with earflaps. There was not much to sexually harass. Thirdly, despite the fact that I find strangers commenting on my physical appearance – in any way whatsoever – Highly Embarrassing*, I’m not sure whether it would have actually been more offensive if they’d yelled ‘Nice Tits!’ or something. Because ‘cheer up! It might never happen!’ is offensive to me in so many, many ways…
For completely obvious starters, it’s really rude to tell a complete stranger that they look miserable. It is even ruder, and hugely callous, to mock them for it – generally speaking, people look miserable because “it” has happened. I don’t know how many people on receiving end of this phrase ever turn around and yell back perfectly truthfully that the reason they look miserable is, for example, because someone they know has just died. I mean, people die quite often. I imagine that if someone did actually respond this way, the ‘cheer-up-it-might-never-happen’-er would be somewhat mortified and apologetic, unless they really were doing it maliciously. Admittedly, I was only looking miserable this time because a) I was ill and b) that’s just what my face does, but still. It could’ve been for any reason.
The thing is, these people who say this thing aren’t usually doing it to be rude or offensive or unkind. They’re doing it because they consider themselves to be Amusing Cheeky Chappies. And they are somehow conditioned into thinking that if someone looks sad, this is the appropriate response. But the thing is, it doesn’t actually make any sense.
Annoying Person: “Cheer up! It might never happen!”
Me: “What might never happen?”
Annoying Person: “Um. It. Might never happen.”
Me: “But what is ‘it’?”
Annoying Person: “The thing that you are looking so miserable about.”
Me: “How can you presume to know why I am looking miserable, and whether the cause of the misery is past, present or future?”
Annoying Person: “What? Bloody hell, it’s just, like, the thing you say when someone looks miserable. I mean, calm down…”
Another example of these weird phrases is ‘What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts’, sometimes abbreviated merely to ’swings and roundabouts’. It is often used in conversations with seemingly no connection to the subject matter, unless you know what it is supposed to mean. Apparently this phrase relates to such situations as paying less rent to live in a house further out of a town, but then having to pay more money in order to travel into the town [possibly in order to work and earn the money]. But it still makes no immediate sense. What does a person lose on swings? And what do they gain on roundabouts? I have lost things from my pockets while swinging on swings. I have gained a grazed knee falling off a roundabout, once when I was six. And at a remote farmhouse in Scotland, I was able to obtain a mobile phone signal for half a second by swinging very high on a swing suspended from a tree branch. They didn’t have a roundabout there, though.
Or: is it to do with going backwards and forwards on a swing, and rotating on a roundabout? You gain the forwards and backwards motion on the swing, yet lose the arguable advantage of also being able to rotate. On the roundabout, you can go in wonderful circles until dizzy, but will no more be able to go forwards and backwards and up and down in a lovely sweeping arc, as you did on the swing. Is this what it’s about? Am I close? Do people who actually use this phrase think about the meaning of what they are saying? I really, really hope so… But. Hmm.
Most interesting drink: gin and tonic with frozen peas. Concocted last Saturday when gin and tonic was required, but no ice was present. We initially added the peas to cool the gin and tonic, but the flavours actually went together quite well. Gin soaked peas are quite tasty to eat at the end, too.
Most exciting purchase: Pack of 10 dishbrushes from eBay.
Greatest achievement: writing a new tune (in 11/8).
Favourite quotation from Wikipedia: “Cuttlefish eat small molluscs, crabs, shrimp, fish, octopuses, worms, and other cuttlefish. Their predators include dolphins, sharks, fish, seals and other cuttlefish.”
Best fantasy moment: The Beatles helping me with the housework. Ringo sorted out the recycling; George vacuumed everything; Paul sat in the corner noodling on the guitar in a helpful sort of way; and John dusted the ceiling, naked (despite instructions to sort out my Pile Of Documents That I Don’t Want To Deal With, which are still in a pile in a box in the corner).
Bad Supermarket Check-out Experiences: 0. Nobody asked me any intrusive questions or talked too much about my shopping – possibly because I have started avoiding the staff who I know will do so. It’s made my life a bit nicer.
Time zone: Body appears to have reverted to Bermuda time. Again.
I know that I am by no means a fashion blogger, and that my knowledge of fashion in general is reasonably scant. However, I do know one thing: there’s a difference between high fashion and high street fashion. It is alleged that this difference is that high street fashion is wearable and comfortable, whereas high fashion is art that features live human beings somewhere within its construction.
Given that this difference is present, one would imagine that high street fashions would actually be comfortable. Why would people regularly wear something that isn’t comfortable? If comfort were no issue, wouldn’t we all be trying to obtain the finest high fashion outfits available (well, cheap knock-offs from New Look, anyway, for which the headpieces are Ikea lampshades rather than an exclusive one-off lighting design made by Picasso on a rainy Sunday afternoon)?
Maybe I am excessively fussy, but I find an awful lot of high street fashions too uncomfortable to get involved with. Most of the time this is in one or both of two main areas: footwear, and temperature.
1. High Heels.
As I was typing that just now, I managed to make the typo ‘high hells’ which is pretty much my point. Yes, I know they make legs look more shapely. I sometimes put them on and decide that they are a good idea for this very reason, but as soon as I go anywhere wearing them I realise they are not. I have a friend who used to regularly make this mistake when going out to nightclubs. On the way home she was always carried for part of the way and walked the rest in bare feet. I mean, I know some people wear them every day, but – how do they stay up? Are their knees not destroyed? I have even seen people doing ceilidh dancing in stilettos and keeping them on for the entire evening without falling over. How?
Possibly my problem is that I am freakishly tall, therefore a) have no need to wear heels for extra height (except: they do make legs more shapely) and b) I cannot balance in them because my head is too far away from my feet.
2. Shoes That Will Not Stay on Feet
Within the genre of high heels, there is the potential for strapless high heels, to make walking even more difficult. I own a pair of these, which I bought in a sale eleven years ago and have worn twice. Both times for about an hour at parties, before deciding bare feet were more comfortable. I am selling them on eBay now, because the problems within their innocent-looking, beautiful burgundy leather forms are not worth the space that they take up on my shoerack. As well as the balancing-on-a-pointy-thing issue, there is also the shoe-may-fly-off-foot-at-any-moment problem. It is almost as if wearing shoes has become a test of endurance and skill, such an army training obstacle course. To be accepted as a proper woman, one must apparently demonstrate the ability to wear completely impractical articles of footwear as if they were normal, everyday items and absolutely no hindrance whatsoever. I once asked a friend how she would advise me to keep these shoes on my feet. She told me to get a piece of double-sided tape and put it on the heel of the shoe, thus gluing my foot to it so it wouldn’t come off. Which is a completely ridiculous thing to do, but I did it.
The main problem I had with this particular pair of shoes was that the only time it was appropriate to wear them was at parties. At parties, one is often supposed to socialise with people one does not know very well or at all. This requires vast amounts of mental energy and concentration. If I am having to concentrate on my feet and not falling over, I am not going to do very well at socialising, because I will not have a large enough partition of my brain dedicated to it. In fact, I think at one of those parties I may have said several of the stupidest things I’ve ever said at parties, but that might have had something to do with my consumption of some punch containing unknown ingredients, rather than my shoes. Fortunately I think everyone else had also partaken of said punch (my enduring memory is of the hostess shoving her mother’s accordion into my arms at 4am and demanding extremely forcefully that I play it. Even though I don’t play the accordion) so hopefully they have forgotten.
Anyway, it’s not just shoes with heels that will not stay on feet. Since I don’t want to wear heels to parties or other dressed-up type occasions, I wish to own a pair of flat, comfortable, pretty shoes. Are these abundant? No they are not. There are lots of flat, pretty shoes, but they are not comfortable and do not stay on my feet. I have to do a horrible uncomfortable foot scrunching thing to keep them on. (Maybe because my feet are freakishly narrow and shallow and really long and therefore nothing fits them anyway.) There are flat, comfortable shoes in existence, such as my favourite olive green suede moccasins, but they aren’t exactly pretty and can’t be worn with skirts.
The worst and most uncomfortable of all shoes, ever, in my opinion, is the thong-sandal. Flapping about all over the place, huge effort to keep in contact with your foot, and you have a piece of plastic digging in between your toes. Yet people claim these are comfortable? I do not understand.
Fortunately it is winter now, so I can wear boots with everything. That is my short term solution, but I am still stumped on the medium-temperatured months.
3. Things which are the wrong temperature, always:
a. Semi-off-shoulder asymmetrical tops
If it’s cool enough to have one shoulder covered, it must be too cold to have the other one bare. One side is always going to feel wrong.
b. Ballet pumps with leggings
If it is warm enough to have bare ankles, it must surely be too hot to wear a tight-fitting shoe on the rest of the foot?
c. Ugg boots and tiny skirts and bare legs in the middle of summer. Or winter. Or any other time of year.
I don’t think this actually requires an explanation.
d. Pyjamas with long trousers and strappy tops
On the average sleeping person, the legs are to be found under the duvet. They will probably be more likely to stay warm than the shoulders, which are close to the edge of the duvet and may become chilly. Or is it now fashionable to sleep with one’s head under the duvet, and feet sticking out on the pillow?
e. Going out for the evening wearing skimpy clothing with no jacket in February, or, in fact, at any other time of year.
This was an immense struggle for me when I was a student. I refused to do it, and thus ended up being The Only Person With A Coat in nightclubs, which meant I had to either queue for the cloakroom (on my own, or with someone who was keeping my company slightly resentfully) and pay a quid (which was a lot of money in those days) to have the coat looked after – or tie it round my waist and be uncomfortable and stupid-looking for the entire evening. A friend once told me that his answer to this problem was to buy a cheap, warm and not-too-awful-looking-but-disposable coat from a charity shop, and wear that when out for the evening, and just hide it in a corner of the club somewhere. If it got stolen or had anything spilt on it, it didn’t matter. I decided the best solution for me was to stop going to nightclubs because I didn’t actually like doing it anyway. Ho hum.
There ends my list of uncomfortable garments, at least for now. I will probably discover new ones as new fashions develop.
I don’t know whether I’m excessively sensitive to physical discomfort, or whether I’m just not putting enough effort in. Do most people practise wearing these things, so that they get used to them? Or can they somehow adapt to new environments very quickly, so that when they purchase an asymmetrical off-shoulder top they are able to rapidly grow a thicker layer of subcutaneous fat on one of their shoulders? Maybe modern teenagers have evolved into beings with internal ankle warming systems.
Thankfully the new fashionable thing appears to be enormous knitwear, which I am very pleased about. It’s approaching the time of year in which the only thing I care about is maximum warmth. I don’t consciously try to be ‘fashionable’ but am aware that fashion generally dictates what is abundantly available. If what’s available is large and woolly in an appropriate season then I’m extremely glad the high-street-fashion-dictating people have finally made a sensible and practical decision.
Right. Now I am going to bed. In an asymmetrical-off-the-shoulder pyjama top, strapless high heels and a skirt made of safety pins.
I spend a lot of time thinking I really ought to improve in all three of these areas, but not knowing how to go about it efficiently. However, I have come up with one idea which will cover all three: Only Drink Alcohol When It’s Free. Thus, whenever a drink is required, I must attend some sort of event such as a gallery or exhibition opening, or aftershow party (which will lead to networking), or else be playing music at a function which provides free booze (which will lead to financial gain, in addition to the money saved by not buying any alcohol).
