unfashionablylost

I’m peeling. I always peel, because I never moisturize my forearms, which are the only part of me that is tanned after a holiday. ‘You should moisturize,’ my little sister pointed out helpfully. ‘Older skin loses moisture.’ Silencing my little sister with the type of look commonly deployed by women of my age (well-I have seen it used to great effect by the Lady Dowager in Downton),

I looked about my room for some moisturizer. I do have moisturizer, of course. I dutifully slather SPF about my face and neck (and sometimes my towel, depending on how much I have shaken out) every time I shower, and I have some possibly stolen or potentially gifted-to-me Eve Lom, which I dab about my eyes when I feel particularly hungover. What I do not have, it became rapidly apparent, is body moisturizer. I do not have body moisturizer because I firmly believe that the beauty market is a con. I do not believe that human skin, which can stretch to accommodate another human baby growing inside a previously normal-sized person, and keep your internal organs from getting wet every time you shower, has simply forgotten to moisturize.

Moisturising, now I think about it, is only the very tip of the iceberg. (Beauty manufacturers are very comfortable with icebergs, as this is where they get most of the water for their products. That, and those pockets of water found on Mars. I mean, they’ve never explicitly said as much, but I assume it is implied in the pricing of their products).

 Here are the 3 things you no longer need to do:

1. Exfoliate. (The human body is a self-regulating system which has developed and adapted over millions of years. I like the Body Shop as much as anyone, but there’s scant chance they’re smarter than evolution).

2. Tone. (I have no real idea what this is, but people tell me it’s something to do with pores. Until we all start greeting each other with magnifying glasses, I think you’re safe).

3. Moisturize. (I know, but I’m not certain you lot are listening).

I’ve just come back from Australasia. I’ve been very quiet about the whole thing (nothing worse than someone who keeps harping on about their tremendous holidays), so most of you probably didn’t realize. They’re having some issues with their Prime Minister in Australia. He wants to remove the World Heritage Protection afforded to Tasmania’s forests, for instance. This would mean that the forests could be used by the timber industry, and would no longer be kept faithfully preserved.

Your views on this are sadly irrelevant to this post- what I am concerned about is the faithful preservation of important locations. Here are my top five:

1. The corner shop where penny sweets cost a penny, and the shop owner didn’t mind if you changed your mind whilst spending your £1 pocket money(given only if you were well-behaved at mass).

2. The under-18 gigging space incongruously held in the grounds of a Kensington church. The site of more first snogs than I can begin to count (although I could conceivably simply ask my school friends, and get a pretty accurate ratio).

3. The ‘forest’ at the back of my grandparents’ garden. (OK, fine, some fir trees, but for a kid growing up with only a large communal garden in London, it all seemed tremendously magical. Also, that’s where a lot of the Easter eggs were hidden during the Easter egg hunt. My little cousins now have a tremendously easy time of it. Which is really the only reason I still participate in the hunt. For fairness.)

4. The airport restaurant at Tokyo airport. It is, like most airport restaurant, an all-you-can eat buffet with every conceivable type of food. (The sheer license that travel gives one is quite extraordinary. A friend of mine, who returned from NZ at the same time as me, still claims to be jet-lagged). I once ate 36 dumplings during a stopover there. I really like dumplings.

5. My little sister’s current bedroom. No matter how messy mine is, hers is always worse. Often, the state of her room forms a thrilling end to an otherwise extremely brief flat tour. Recent tourists have exclaimed, ‘But how can anyone live like this?’ Which has given me an excellent opportunity to nod sagely, something that occurs far too rarely in my daily life.

For those of you who are anti-deforestation, there’s a petition you can sign here:
http://action.sumofus.org/a/tasmania-forests-abbott/?sub=fb

In the interests of fairness, here is a petition you can sign if you are pro-deforestation:

I HATE NATURE

It’s just about the end of January, so the perfect time to talk about New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t think much of other people’s resolutions. Drink less, start running, read more- Me, me, me. I have one resolution: be nicer to my little sister.

It’s started reasonably well. I was in NZ for the first two weeks of January, for instance. Then I came home, tanned* and happy, and began my resolution in earnest.

Our flat has 3 inhabitants, and one bathroom. In this shared bathroom, we each have a black wicker basket, about the area of a normal-sized book, into which we are encouraged to put our toiletries. These baskets sit happily, side by side, at the ledge at the foot of the bath. What people put into their basket is entirely up to them. Which basket they put them into is not.

I have spent the last two weeks removing other people’s items from my own, carefully maintained basket. I am pretty sure (but not certain), that the products I am re-allocating are my little sisters. (As someone who tries very hard to use as few toiletries as possible, I am in a weakened position to judge the difference between male and female offerings, but it seems unlikely that my other flatmate shaves his face with a hot pink Venus razor).

I go into our bathroom at least three times a day. (Our toilet is separate, for those of you who are concerned about such matters). I go when I wake up, to peer at what has happened to my face while I was sleeping (‘What happened to my face while I was sleeping’ would be a very good sequel to ‘While you were Sleeping’) and to brush my teeth; I go sometime within the next hour to shower, and I go before I go to bed, to brush my teeth again. Three times a day, over two weeks, works out at approximately 15,00 times that I am irritated by my little sister’s inability to put her stuff in her own basket.

But, remembering my New Year’s Resolution, I say nothing. And my little sister, surprised by my uncharacteristic calmness (and unaware, thanks to the privacy of the bathroom, of my daily sobs of rage), is extremely nice to me. So perhaps the rest of you should re-consider your selfish New Year’s Resolutions- my own, self-sacrificing life has just become immeasurably better.

*Factually inaccurate

I snuck into the ballet yesterday. I don’t usually like the ballet, or possibly, I don’t usually understand the ballet in the way other people seem to. I was never one of those little girls who longed to be a ballerina- for a moment, aged 8 years I thought I did, but that was because I had read ‘Ballet Shoes’ by Noel Streatfeild and was thrilled by the idea of parents who danced, or played in an orchestra, and living in a crumbling old house in Pimlico (which I knew nothing about, so populated with images of rooms seen in my Mother’s Vogue).

What I was in fact enchanted by was being Bohemian, which had nothing to do with being a ballerina.

I snuck into the ballet because my great friend had worked out a secret passage between her own ballet class and the Royal Opera House. We saw the second half of ‘Giselle’ (the secret passage is, by necessity, circuitous), and during the performance I tried very hard to work out why I didn’t love ballet.

As a child, I was taken to the ballet several times, but there was nothing about being a ballerina that captured my imagination in the same was as being, say, an astronaut. The ballet meant having my hair brushed more than usual (which I hated, having a Mother who held no truck with ‘being gentle’ and whose method of knot-removal was to tell me sharply to ‘stop wriggling’), and having to share an armrest with my little sister (who still hasn’t understood that the polite thing to do in this situation is place both her arms in her lap), and being told to be quiet at all costs. My Mother’s conviction that quietness is next to godliness was never more in play than at the ballet, when we were made to unwrap every single one of our boiled sweets before we got there, in case we accidentally rustled. (I cannot impress upon you enough how disgustingly furry unwrapped boiled sweets become, when kept in the cardigan pockets of little girls).

‘The jumping is good,’ I whispered to my friend. ‘And I like the costumes, and the dramatic make-up, but honestly, what makes the ballet so special? Surely they could just-‘ ‘Ssh,’ my friend said, shaking her head. ‘Aha!’ I thought. ‘That’s it. All I need now are some unwrapped boiled sweets.’

I have a friend who gives a grade to each of her days. (Her birthday=A+, getting stuck at work = B- etc). I’m not great with numbers (and the thought of getting anything less than a A fills my over-achieving heart with panic), but I like the concept. I have decided to define my days with two words. (Unexpected windfall=bloody fantastic, running out of toilet paper=the worst). Here’s yesterday.

I started very productively. I’ve still not replaced my phone (there was an incident, and now I don’t have a phone, and I have many feelings about this but the key take-away is that it’s not my fault), and so instead of an alarm clock I simply sleep in a feverish panic that I will oversleep, and bolt awake at 6am.

I pottered about for a bit, hurling instructions to my little sister about our dinner plans, scolding her for wiping her face on my towel, asking what she thought of Lord Carlile’s defense of Rennard. (I’m not usually awake at 6am. I have no real idea what the social etiquette is). At 8am, our cleaner arrived, and sent me off to buy unpronounceable and mysterious cleaning products. (It was not until I arrived in Waitrose that I was entirely convinced she wasn’t playing an elaborate practical joke on me, making me ask for naughty things in Bulgarian).

Fuelled by early-morning smugness, I did a little run, and went to my opticians appointment. (It is, I have recently found, quite possible to fill an entire working day with errands. Wait til I tell you about the new self-service machines at the Post Office).

After fixing myself a little snack (I used the sharp knife, reassured by my recent encounter with the optician, although as usual I ended our time together looking for a plaster), I sat down to write. ‘There’s something wrong with this,’ I thought. I looked back over what I had written with an expanding feeling of panic. There’s a very good book by David Lodge (I can’t remember the title, but most of his books are excellent, so happy reading!) in which one of the characters is an author who, having published his first two books to great acclaim, never writes again. Another character goes to see him. ‘Why don’t you write anymore?’ one character asks the other. (Re-telling this, I understand why characters in books are given names, but bear with me). The other character explains that there’s this program which tells you what words and syntax you use most. He ran it on his first books, and now he can’t write anything without being taunted by ‘grey, dreary, grey’, which is what the program synopsized his style as.

As I looked over my own work, two words thundered around my skull: pithy laughter. All of my characters are pithy, (at least in their own eyes) and all anyone does is laugh. I’d written the literary equivalent of Bring it On. Quickly, I messaged a friend, replacing ‘pithy laughter’ with another two words: help me. Which she did, immediately and generously. At which point, I wrote happily for the rest of the afternoon, until my little sister came home with popcorn and a movie, when I realised that the definition for my day was ‘thank you’. 

I’ve just returned from New Zealand. I returned on Friday, after a flight spent sandwiched between a woman who kicked the back of my seat continually, no matter how many times I politely turned around and glared at her menacingly (obviously the excruciating annoyance of her kicking was far preferable to the unimaginable embarrassment of saying anything) and 4 members of the Barmy Army, who took full and vocal advantage of the airline’s free booze policy.

Usually able to sleep through anything, I remained firmly awake. My flight landed at 3.30pm, and I was home by 5pm. ‘Hello!’ I said cheerily as I entered my flat. ‘Wake up!’ No matter what time it is, I enter my flat exhorting my flatmates to wake up. They are terribly lazy. True to form, my little sister poked her head blearily out of her bedroom. ‘What time is it?’ she asked. ‘5.10,’ I told her. (It had taken me several attempts to lug my suitcases and various paraphernalia up the stairs). ‘It is really not appropriate to still be in bed,’ I continued smugly. As someone who believes firmly in the moral import of getting up early, any occasion to berate my flatmates is coveted. Faced with my own moral high ground, my little sister began making her excuses. ‘I’m on nights,’ she said. ‘Well,’ I replied, somewhat ambushed but still fighting for ground. ‘It’s not good for you to sleep in the day. Look at me, fresh off a 25 hour flight. Do you see me in bed?’ My little sister mumbled something incoherent, glared at me in a way that made me remember home is where the heart is, and went back to sleep. I went out for dinner.

‘Aren’t you tired?’ One of my friends asked. ‘Oh no,’ I replied. ‘I don’t believe in jetlag.’ I could tell by everyone’s faces how pleased they were that I was home. I still don’t believe in jetlag, but am pleased to report that my ability to sleep through anything has returned, as I bypassed Saturday altogether. Luckily, both of my flatmates were away, so this dreadful lapse in moral over-lording went unnoticed. The moral high-ground and 18 hours of sleep? It feels good to be home.*

*Data on how everyone else feels about my return was not available at this time.  

I have recently been a houseguest. I like to think of myself as a good houseguest. (Well, in reality I like to think of myself as the best houseguest, but my new year’s resolution is to exaggerate less, after an unfortunate incident recently when I told a small child that I was ‘the best diver’, and was then roundly beaten by her 6 year old brother). Being a good houseguest is an invaluable skill, but one that can be very easily learnt. Here are some rules:

1. Be great at small talk. Some people think that small talk is the exchange of tiny portions of unchallenging information. This is not true at all. Small talk is a cut-throat, merciless division of people into ‘interesting’ and ‘boring, avoid at all costs’. Good initial questions include: in your opinion, who in this room is most likely to go to prison? And what for? (The answers to this will also be extremely useful when approaching other guests for loans etc).

2. Play with any local children. (‘Local’ has a very specific designation in this case. Do not go trawling the neighborhood looking for children to play with). Playing with the children not only impresses their relatives, it also offers you the chance to gain invaluable information about the other houseguests. Children are famously indiscreet. (And short, so look down when walking about the house to avoid stepping on them. This will undermine all good work done during playtime).
3. Don’t offer to help. Everyone offers to help. Simply take it upon yourself to do something helpful, like pouring drinks, or re-organizing their knicker drawer.

4. Bring a gift. The best gifts are attention-seeking, luxurious and enormous. A life-size paper-mache elephant head, or a fluorescent weather-vane ought to do the trick.

Although by almost everyone’s standards, I am a fully-fledged, actual grown-up, my Mother often feels the need to just quickly continue to bring me up. ‘Darling,’ she said when we met last month. ‘It is important always to be on time. And when you are invited out to lunch, don’t order the most expensive thing on the menu.’ Tidbits like this are more confusing than instructional, to be honest, because they assume a puzzling level of ineptitude on my behalf. ‘Right,’ I replied with the perfect level of teenage sarcasm I often employ around my Mother, ensuring that she realizes how grown-up and mature I have now become. ‘Good advice. I’ll be sure to stop turning up an hour late and ordering the chateaubriand.’ ‘Good,’ my Mother replied unperturbedly. ‘Now, if you finish your mains, there’s chocolate ice-cream.’

A few weeks later, I’m meeting my friend’s mum for lunch. ‘I’m terribly early,’ I text my friend, who lives in New York and doesn’t reply. ‘But obviously that’s much better than being late.’ Ignored by my friend, I comfort myself with the fact that arriving early is much politer than being late, except in cases of the sex.

‘Hello!’ I say cheerfully to the restaurant greeter. ‘I’m early.’ ‘Your guest is already here,’ she points out. ‘Oh,’ I reply, my chance to prove excessive politeness snatched away from me. Soldering on, I sat down to lunch.

I was meeting my friend’s mum firstly because I hadn’t seen her in a while, and secondly because she had invited me, and I love invites. All in all, I was set for a lovely lunch. ‘You’re early,’ I began accusingly, as she stood up to hug me. ‘Yes,’ she replied, somewhat confused. ‘Luckily I was early too, so I suppose it’s OK,’ I continued graciously.

‘Let’s order,’ my friend’s mum suggests. ‘Perfect,’ I think. ‘Here I can really shine.’ ‘I’ll have the salad,’ I say. ‘Oh no,’ she replies. ‘It’s very small. Get something more filling.’ ‘OK,’ I say, resolutely only looking at the very top part of the menu. ‘How about the soup? I love soup.’ (I do love soup. I’m not sure I love the soup on offer, which contains mascarpone, which often makes my tongue swell up, but I am following my Mother’s recent instructions to the letter).

‘Well,’ my friend’s mum says briskly. ‘You are certainly not being taken out to lunch by me and only having a soup. Get the steak.’ Sometimes being a grown-up is terribly difficult.