Best. Quote. Ever.

However many revolutionary and inspiring lines I will hear, I am always going to stand by the simple yet infallible logic of the wonderful Elle Woods (Legally Blonde).

“Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands, they just don’t.”


Happiness is a complex issue and you can spend hours debating the best way to be happy. Actually, this over-analyzing tends to decrease your happiness. That's why I'll always turn to this marvellous quote, from one of my favourite films - which I'm actually extremely knowledgeable about since I wrote an A* graded essay on why Legally Blonde is feminist film at its best.

(Today I went for my first proper run. It was fun!)

thanks to enc for spotting the typo!

Creature Comforts

I absolutely love watching a fantastic new film, experiencing the thrill of not knowing what will happen next and relishing every moment, because I know I will never watch it again for the first time. Nevertheless, if I enjoy a movie, there is little doubt that I will rewatch it, probably within days. I always do this and I'm not sure why; maybe it's the ability to notice things that you don't observe the first time round, or knowing the outcome and sort of being able to relax rather than be all tense, or simply getting to experience whatever makes the film so great again.

My favourite films to rewatch are the ones from my childhood. I was never a fan of cartoons but I did love Snow White, Cinderella and Lady and the Tramp. Every time I watch them, my heart breaks because I instantly forget that inevitable happy ending. I don't think I've ever watched Lady and the Tramp without having to fast-forward the bit with the dog-catchers. Whenever I see Cinderella, I have always marvelled at her beautiful hairstyles and different costumes. Some things never change.

Equally beloved are the film versions of the wonderful Roald Dahl's The Witches and, of course, Matilda. No horror movie will ever be as scary as the Grand High Witch or Ms. Trunchbull.

And of course, there are the tear-jerkers. Whilst Titanic and The Notebook have both left me completely cold, I have never failed to be moved to tears by A Little Princess, Madeline or The Sound of Music. On a rainy day I can always turn to Dick van Dyke for some entertainment with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Mary Poppins and Grease is still my favourite soundtrack.

I may be able to appreciate the ethereal beauty of a film such as Picnic on Hanging Rock, or the cinematic accomplishment and phenomenal acting of the grand Oscar winners like There Will Be Blood. But I doubt I’ll ever watch these films more than once, maybe twice, unlike my favourite films from my childhood.

I know it's silly, but sometimes after watching a truly fantastic film, I feel sad, because I don't think there'll be another quite so perfect. But of course this doesn't matter, because I can always just watch it again.. and again.. and again. What are those films that you just can't help but rewatch a billion times?

Isn't it what's on the inside...

Isn't it what's on the inside that counts? As a girl, who is also a teenager, and interested in style, I do spend a lot of time thinking about beauty... as this blog may suggest. And whilst I am pretty much world renowned (amongst my friends anyway) for saying incredibly un-PC and shallow-sounding things, I am often just being my tactless and honest self. I really believe, and not without reason, they all place just as much (too much?) importance and spend just as much time pondering superficial pulchritude.

Gah, that paragraph was way too wordy. Basically we're all totally vain and obsessed with superficial beauty. But does enjoying beautiful beings, including super-fit boys mean that you can't enjoy spirituality too? Do we have to be completely and utterly detached from the outside to understand and value the inside? I am certainly much more content in those moments of life when I'm completely absorbed in a song or a book or a person. Whilst some of my greatest pleasures involve admiring beautiful, there's always that little twang, an unpleasant feeling which I suppose could be slight envy, coveting the unattainably beautiful. But it's all superficial isn't it? There is nothing magical about any of this stuff I covet. My friendships, the ones with the people who I don't mind seeing me in my scruffy colours, are magical and although they don't tend to get me access to the hottest parties they do create some of the happiest times.

This post is becoming terribly cyclical. It goes like this: Are we too shallow? No, it's only natural at this age. But shouldn't we try to be more spiritual? Yes - but we can still wear nice clothes. But - but - but -

OK, I'll make a confession. This post was basically just born out of a desire to post photos the linings of the clothes I wrote about here (they wouldn't load before). So yeah - don't you agree, it's what's on the inside that counts?

Hello @ 21.21

I have to apologise for being a truly unfaithful blogger. Around midday today, I got back from a moderated hiking expedition; I passed! I suppose that therefore the lack of posting yesterday and this morning is perfectly excusable, but I got home ridiculously early (did the hike this morning in a crazy 3 hours, without breaking at all! yay! I suppose it compensates for the 1 hour 'detour' we managed to take yesterday) and instead of resting, unpacking and writing, I immediately went back out for a spot of much needed retail therapy.

-Now of course I am completely and utterly cream crackered, and have not even written the history essay I was planning to. I think at a certain point it's simply impossible to get work done so I've resigned myself to those rambling off-to-bed posts which used to be semi-regular. Having said that, this is a Sunday night, as they were originally planned to be!

-What did I buy today? Surprisingly, no clothes. Thankfully, the sun came out for our trip, as did my cream trousers and summery florals in the hope of a last-ditch attempt at dressing for summer. This means that there weren't actually any clothes I was compelled towards; too sunny for the winter clothes my mind has already switched to.

-Anyway. Stopping off at Selfridges, I bought two books. One classic which I've been wanting to read for years and am planning to read alongside a group of friends next month: Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) and another which I simply couldn't resist for the adorable front cover and wonderful name. My favourite French word is pamplemousse.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Madame-Pamplemousse-Her-Incredible-Edibles/sim/0747592314/2
I like to think that my reading diet is well-balanced and varied. I also spent forever with a fantastic book about costumes in Hollywood (I think it's this one), all the way from the start of film history to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. I don't know why, but these things fascinate me so much. In general, I'm not a big fan of 'coffee-table books', finding them obscenely expensive and collectery. Does that make sense? At the till there was an obscenely rich buying I think three of these so-called coffee-table books, totalling around £150 which they paid in cash. Nosy, moi? I'm not even going to go into the hideously tacky ensemble of one of the lucky ladies for fear of sounding like a total bitch

-Apart from the books, most of it was pretty menial purchases; some nail polish remover because I am fed up of not being able to remove the two-week old paint on my nails, a lovely new fountain pen (to write my masterpiece..) and a sports bra to wear on my first ever proper run in a couple of days. Right...

-Ooh and I got my glasses adjusted and can now happily wear them. Phew! I was worried that there would be a sad ending to the spectacular story for a couple of days there. So, the moral of this post? Tiredness breeds intense materialism which is actually incredibly uplifting and helpful in forgetting about an unwritten history essay.

Spectacular Story

'Scuse the terrible pun. In case, with the punniness in mind you still can't figure out what this post is about, it's the story of my life, told in relation to my glasses (sort of similar to when I described my life in terms of hair but, if it's possible, even more materialistic). It's been a tradition for a few years now that every year, around July, I get a new pair of glasses. This year the transition has been a little late, but finally my lovely new lenses are resting happily on my nose.

It all started when I started wearing glasses around six years ago. I got the first pair which fit my mini face and soon realised how very much I hated them. Ever since I have harboured a disproportionate hatred for metal frames, which you'll probably notice in the timeline on the right. It's always been difficult to find nice plastic frames which sit well on my face (my current ones are still not perfect, they keep on slipping down and I think I'll have to have them adjusted) and the next brown plastic pair, though dull, fit the job. As a result, I actually bought these frames twice; they're the 2nd and 4th on the timeline. In between the brown glasses, I had a marvellous pink pair of Ray Bans which broke after about a month.

After that was a pair of very distinctive Joop! glasses which I got cheap at a co-op. I loved them at first but soon realised that I couldn't wear green any more without looking like a christmas tree. The glasses you see at the bottom were the pair I've been wearing up until today and I still love them very much and plan to continue to wear them sometimes, something I've never done before. Maybe starting to wear contacts helps because you don't get so fed up with the necessity of wearing them day in day out? Whatever it is, I'm glad, because they were pretty expensive for a relatively unknown but fabulous brand: ProDesign Denmark. But for a while now I've been wanting something a little more exciting, arty and I've also had a long-lasting hankering for some clear plastic frames. This was intensified after seeing the oh-so-cool Jeremy Darling on Dirty Sexy Money sporting a pair. But after trying on a ton of pair, I decided on something a little more detailed. Cue:

[pics deleted]

A Day in My Life

Last night I saw a performance of modern dance; Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray at Sadler’s Wells. It’s loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, transferred into the present. The infatuated painter Basil Hallward has been transformed into a lustful photographer and the mysteriously beautiful portrait of Dorian, locked into the attic is now this:

An advertisement shown on a large billboard, for a brand-new perfume; Immortal, pour homme. At times the set and dancing were beautiful, at times the actions and scenarios hilarious at times it was also very dark, such as in the final scene when Lady H finds Dorian lying dead and moments later photographers burst onto the scene to capture the fallen It-boy’s dead face. But at other times, they just failed to pull it off (mainly when a cheesy overscore started to speed up to illustrate the mounting passion of a scene).

In this respect, the events that occurred for me today, echoed the dance. It has been a strange day, one full of moments of complete serendipity jarring with the daily grind of school life. The lists have again started to take over my existence, after a wonderful month or so of banishment; I have been forgetting too much too often and have simply had to resort to listing it all.

Of course, once you’ve written the list and realised how much there is to do, essential pleasures such as relaxing for an hour with some nuts and an episode of Desperate Housewives become guilty. Today at school, when we stopped everything we were doing for one minute in memory of 9/11 for the first time in the day I wasn’t doing something, even those more inactive things which somehow still seem to sap the energy.

There were still plenty of little treats to help the day push forward, like bite-sized chocolates which give you an extra oomph, a burst of energy. The effect however isn’t very long-lasting because there is simply no time for basking in it.

Despite this the small pleasures in life are no less beautiful. Today, my teacher seemed to have lost track of time and let the class go 10 minutes early. On my way to the bus, I felt a strange urge to start running; co-incidentally I was wearing trainers, a backpack and a sports top and a little thing like breaking into a run was made easy, when any other day all sorts of niggles (wrong shoes, heavy shoulder bag…) would have arisen. So I did run, and as I reached the main road a bus arrived. One I would have otherwise missed. Elated, I got on the bus and by the time I was home, of course, not much felt special. A 40 minute walk, comfy new contact lenses, a surprisingly high score in a subject you don’t like at all and serendipitous event like catching an early bus may not last very long, but I’m going to enjoy them as much as I can.

Good Deed of the Day

I know that it's highly unlikely that I have a single reader who hasn't recently read WendyB's witty and exciting blog and already knows all about this, but I thought as my good deed (sort of balancing out the Harper's Bazaar I stole, um borrowed, from the art room at school today) I'd link to the auction held by witty, exciting, generous etc etc etc blogger WendyB.

CLICK HERE

As well as doing a good deed by winning, you'll be winning a better version of immortality. The type which doesn't involve seeing all the ones you love die, the world around you wither and suffer and change beyond recognition and your favourite Uniqlo jeans being discontinued. Plus you get free jewelry, and the knowledge that you did a good deed, in helping to raise some money for the Nielson family, who were recently severely injured in a plane crash (read what happened here on the New York Times).

Seriously though, I am really touched by the absolutely stunning generosity and non-judgemental attitude shown by the human, not just online community when showing compassion for strangers. xxxxx to all the wonderful people who inhabit the universe. Soppy, moi?

Aren't rules for breaking?

Hi. That's me, by the way, cropped artistically because my nose looked a little twisted, sort of like there was a bad smell under my nose. I wonder what that bad smell could be... maybe Trinny & Susannah's odourous rules???

Apparently, they have this fool-proof system, whereby you take out all the clothes in the colours you wear most often, 'put each item up against your face - and see what it does. Do your eyes look brighter? Your dark circles worse? Does your skin look radiant or does it go totally flat? You will soon know which shades of which colours are best for you'. Sound like totally ingenious, enlightening advice? You can click here for more.

It gets better. Say you want something a little more personalised. Some individual guidelines, which stretch a little farther than 'see which colours make you look prettiest'. No probs! They'll divide you into one of three categories (yep, that's three whole categories we beautiful and unique humans comprise of) and give you your own personal colour palette from which you can build your own entire wardrobe!

I am WARM.

Warm

People who fall into this category are easy to spot. The majority have some red in their hair, from rich brown through to auburn or ginger - there may even be some strawberry blondes.

When women in this category go grey, they are desperate to have their hair coloured because it can take on an unattractive hue. Their eyes might be blue, but not that bright turquoise blue; eye colour is more likely to be brown, hazel or a duller green. Their skin tone might be a little sallow or freckly, but generally not dark or mid brown.

Yep, that's me, as the above picture clearly demonstrates. But hang on a minute, dear T&S are telling me my hair will look awful grey.. oh well, let's see what other kind and encouraging advice they have to offer.

This colour grouping looks truly appalling in black; it is their worst colour by far. Navy comes a close second...Grey is not great either, as it will totally wash out their complexion.

Great, so wait, does that mean I have to throw out 99% of my wardrobe and every single garment in my preferred colour of blue? Plus all the hot pink which makes me happy? Does that mean that I have to dress like a Boden lady 24/7?

I've come to realise that T&S, Gok and every 'Which ... suit my ...?' guide out there realised that we don't all want to wear wrap dresses and cinched in belts to 'accentuate our waists'. Come on, if I'm going to be following any fashion law it will be the Mean Girl's rocking rules.


(seriously, coolest. game. ever)

I want a pony

The truth is, I've never been particularly fond of horses and I've never asked my daddy for a pony. I once had a horse-riding party and it was horribly frustrating seeing how much better than me all the other kids were. I don't like riding in horse carriages because they smell a little dubious and I always feel so sorry for the horses being whipped. Riding hats are so itchy, and also hugely disgusting when you have to rent them... and don't even get me started on jodhpurs. Yes, the diluted Balenciaga version may have been fashionable at one point but they will never flatter me and you will never find me in proper jodhpurs either (I.E. purple leggings)


In fact, even the whole cute equestrian chic bordering on preppy look which you can buy pretty much head to toe from the infuriating Jack Wills which is doing the rounds doesn't particularly appeal to me; the closest to horse jewelry I've ever got is a sweet little seahorse pendant (which soon broke). With all this background information on offer, it may be a little easier for you to understand my shock when I started to notice a pattern in the boots I was being attracted to.

Clockwise from top left: Dorothy Perkins £70, Office £100, Belstaff £295, Marks & Spencer £79

Predictably, the Belstaffs are the most yummy (I know, 'yummy' should be strictly restricted to kids describing their nuggets and chips but seriously, would you not eat those if you could keep them once they'd passed through the system???) but also the most unattainable. The M&S pair are out of stock, the Office boots are a little too high and pricey and the DPs are likely to look crap in the flesh. For now I shall have to console myself by reminding me that normally horse riding boots actually have a tendency to look more like this:

Loving the Lining

What are the chances that I catch a stomach bug and then another one barely two months later? Well I did and this time I think it's even worse that last time; but now I think it's starting to get better (touchwood) and I thought about what I wrote last time:
And the silver lining? At this rate, I'll be looking like Kate Moss.
This time, I completely lost my sense of humour and my little sister had to remind me that 'now you'll be really skinny'. I actually think that I would rather be morbidly obese than ever have to experience stomach pains again, but it is nice to think that everything can have a silver lining. And in the throes of my misery yesterday, I thought of a way of explaining the unfortunate reason for my posting break without making it into yet another of those apology/filler posts which I fear are becoming all too common. I could celebrate my love of linings!

Yes, dropping a couple of kilos is a nice side-effect to illness, but my far preferred type of lining comes on the inside of clothes. This is my favourite jacket, not just because of the fit and pattern but also the stunning leopard print silk lining:


I had a couple of other photos of my beloved leather jacket and some pretty shorts with equally lovely linings. But my computer is playing up similarly to my gut, so I suppose I'll just post this before the whole thing goes wrong...