My Illustrative Life

NOTE: I’m basically still offline! But I wrote this, and transfered it to a computer that can get online, so, here it is.. for YOU.

>((Cross your fingers for me to be able to get my BSB colum up the day after tomorrow, huh?))

I used to watch Ocean Girl

Actually, I used to watch Ocean Odyssey, because I am Bri’ish. But the show was Australian, and in Australia it was known as Ocean Girl.

I read it, too; there was a cinemanga-style phoo story adaption thing in Girl Talk, which was my favourite magazine. The radest thing about going to the Big Bash in year six was going to the Girl Talk booth and talking to the editor, getting a goodie bag and my nails done.

Ocean Girl was a pretty good show. It was the kind of sci-fi where the speculative aspect of the genre is just an add-on to our current real life, and Australia and New Zealand (something in the air? Or water?) were apparently really good at those from about 1994-2005. According to wikipedia the show was “an example of deep-ecology science fiction” - it was about two boys (both named, as the captain formally addressed them, “Master Bates” I am not kidding) whose mother’s job as a marine biologist demanded that they move to an under-sea research dome lab run-like-a-ship thing. They have to learn to get along in their new environment, in the cramped quarters with the other kids whose parents are ‘on-board’, with having left their friends, with their dastardly father’s absence, blah blah.. but then they also meet Neri, who is magic.

Course, she isn’t just a wizard did it-style magic. She lives alone on an Island, and can talk to a whale (Charlie) and swim underwater for extended periods and is terribly curious about the boys’ world whilst also fearing outside influence. Pretty straightforward Pocahontas-arc stuff, only eventually it turns out that Neri is actually an actual alien, from space. By the end the elder boy and she fall in love.

When it’s written down like that it sounds like just my kind of thing. Emotional drama on a backdrop of futuristic science fiction, with no gratuitous tit-flashing (because, For Kids), with a basically ridiculous premise played straight. Dark Angel, The Tribe, Dekaranger, Buffy, Kamen Rider Anything, The Girl From Tomorrow, classic X-Men, etc etc. And the costuming was good too - Neri wore a dressthing made out of what looked like natural fibres and fishing net, which was perfectly evocative of ‘ocean’ and ‘girl’ and even ‘alien’, really. The boys (and the other kids on the station, who were the gang in the background for use when needed) wore variations on a basic lab-base uniform which got across the whole “suddenly trapped in a military-style world away from home, grasping for identity and personal connection” thing. But somehow.. somehow it never really became “mine”.

You know what I mean when I say “mine”, right? It’s the difference between being a fan, and just tuning in or picking up. You know what I mean.

It kind of bugged me, what was so-called ‘wrong’ with Ocean Girl. It did. It went off-air in 1998 and I think I stopped watching before it finished, but it stayed at the back of my head somewhere. I was curious! But I watched the first eight or so episodes recently, and I think I figured out what my problem was.

Wikipedia, again, says that the show was set “in the near future”. We all, I think, know how poorly vague that can be. But that wasn’t the point here - the point was that the show never contextualises itself that way. That’s not the whole point, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

In August 1994 I was seven, and as a seven year old it didn’t occur to me that underwater bio-dome laboratory stations didn’t actually exist. I didn’t know - I lived in inland England, and I was seven, and I had heard about Atlantis. I knew that science was pretty amazing, and that people had been to space. Sure, people could live underwater. Why not? With that as the only solid suggestion that the timeline on Ocean Girl and the timeline I was living on were out of sync - because I definitely never noticed any dates referenced the first time around, and I gotta say I never noticed any this second time around either - there was no reason for me to think Oh yes, of course, this is set next Sunday A.D. Of course! Culturally, things may be a little different!

That was a problem, because the hairstyles on the base-bound girls in this show were fipping wacky. I’m serious, I am fairly sure that this was the basic reason why I could never really get into OG’s groove. I can’t quite believe how small-minded that makes me look, either.

But see, at seven one is old enough to know about “normal” and “weird”. Honestly I don’t think this is a parental-fail thing - parents don’t know about which trainers are cool, and my parents raised me to not see “cool trainers” as something I was entitled to, but I still knew which ones were cool and that people valued them based on that. I may not have been completely down with omgtrainers or omgcool, but I still felt the pull of cool trainers. Y’know? Am I sounding totally well excuuuse me princess about being a judgemental asshole (at seven)?

It’s nice to see that the [whatever they call character designers on liveaction shows] were doing their job, being creative, experimenting. It’s good that they tried to do a bit of extra world-building. But the script, alas, completely let them down.

In Dune, things are different to now and nothing is explained; it’s just written as if what’s everyday to the characters in their weird drugged-up space-future is everyday to you, the reader - and that’s cool, it’s good, it makes the story larger and realer and engages you all over the shop. But in Dune, it’s more than just “Paul woke up in his perfectly normal bed, put on his perfectly normal trousers and shirt, went through the perfectly normal automatic door to the bathroom and looked in the mirror at his COMPLETELY BATTY ENORMOUS SQUARE BOUFFANT WHICH LOOKED CRAZY. He mused on how utterly usual everything was, especially his hair, which he never mentioned to anyone ever.”

Do you get my drift Ocean Girl?

I’ll show you pictures, now.

Mark, please - there are three characters here. One of theme is batshit bonkers in the locks department, two are merely real-world unusual and what you might call bold. If I saw them alone, or in real life, I wouldn’t squint at them or wonder what their game was! I’d think, you rock that puff lady, right on. They wouldn’t unsettle or throw me out of a story in just about any other circumstances. It’s just the volume of unusual that’s here, all crammed together, never mentioned, discussed, spotlit or even lampshaded.. there’s a kid with a fringe cut in steps, too, and a boy whose details I have forgotten but who again alone would look interesting and individual, but packed with the rest makes/made me want to shout EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN! TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON because I know that that isn’t what you’d get if you just took a bunch of people!

It’s a SQUARE, just on her head. Why.

If you are going to evidence cultural shift, even ‘just’ visually, you need to note that your story is not set now or kids like me, who pick up on patterns but are too young to quite articulate or realise the questions forming due to them will just not be all that into your show. And it will bug them to all heck, maybe for twelve years.

Then I guess they’ll write a blog post about it, and maybe someone will read that and think “I remember that show, I loved it. I think I will buy the dvds RIGHT NOW” let me know if that’s YOU, so maybe my tirade is all in vain, and it’s actually a pretty good long-term marketing strategy.. ..?

It’s still really annoying though.

Happy watching, ocean girls and boys.

Going offline for the weekend (due to both a pain in my touch-pad hand and my gentleman coming for a visit), which will give YOU a few days to think about spending money to support concept-based music. Because if I was flush, I would - but I’m not, so you can be my surrogates.

Abney Park

They make music, they have a look, they have a whole parallel reality.

Buy them for me, buy them for you, whichever.

You know what I don’t enjoy? Vomiting. Ugh. I want to go to work! It’s rewarding!

Besides that, though, today I have been working on book reviews again. The Raven’s Gate one, and a new one where I share the knowledge I have stockpiled about which ‘marketed to look like The Da Vinci Code’ books are actually like The Da Vinci Code (spoiler: none).

But that’s like saying (spoiler: the princess gets the guy) about an animated Disney joyfest. So y’all will still want to tune in.

It’s pretty infuriating, reading interviews with authors. They almost always say something completely whackadoodle that makes me want to metaphorically smack them. Authors are just people, and people are pretty fallible. I just.. think that books deserve better than that, I guess?

Speaking of books-for-kids.. when I wear this jacket I’m paying silent tribute to that glorious style maven Claudia Kishi. Claire was standing by the wall, fists over her eyes for some reason, wearing a cream-silk blouse as a jacket. She looked fantastic. She had made it herself, by cutting the skirt from an old wedding dress, and she said the frayed hems were symbolic (I didn’t ask of what). It was really unusual, and anyone else might have thought it too over-the-top to wear at home on a sick day - but Claire had long ago decided that if you can see yourself, that’s audience enough. Thank you, unnamed narrator. I think you look great too, even if those leggings aren’t my style.

If you too were a BSC fan, can I rec you this fic and this blog? Yes I can. I just did. Happy reading,

Today I am wearing “mom jeans”. Ugh, saying “mom” feels so wrong to me. I AM ENGLISH! ENGLIIIISH!

The jeans of my mother, again. I forgot about them! And that they turned out to fit me pretty well! I don’t need to buy new work trousers, after all! I already have the means to teach the new generation about how to dress like a 1970s Tokusatsu secret identity.

The pictures are all effects-ed up because I couldn’t find the camera, so sister took these with the “polaroid” “app” on her magical future-phone.

Plus, as promised: some pictures from the Morris dancing in the town I was in a couple of weeks a go. Gosh I enjoy traditional Britain. We are a culture of tie-on costumes, arcane dancing, effigies and scary masks as much as any other, and (considered as a whole) we have not lost the dance-to-death spirit as much as our more toffish reputations suggest.

The face of the hobby horse:

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

I have a ton of story-seeds using Morris Men like pop culture uses ninjas.

ETA: Video!

Right now I’m wearing cut-off thermals which are the ‘my mum wore them as a necessity as a teen in the seventies and is horrified that I see any aesthetic positive in them’ kind of vintage and drinking hot orange squash, on my second sick day this week. I’m thinking about how much better I feel and that I will almost certainly be able to go to work tomorrow, and I just put two cleaned out milk bottles on the back step, out in the rain.

I’m feeling pretty good about all of these things.

I like this shirt a lot for reasons mentioned, but it is not perfect. It’s quite tight over the back when I cycle and over the chest if I keep the third button done up (which I need to, in school, because flashing is only professional if that is what you are paid for). I don’t mind the chest thing too much though, beause I think that the slight too-tightness makes me look like I am in jail, on a work party. Like I said - all I want from clothes are stories that I’d happily watch a movie of*.

Contrast -

*Not a 2000 movie.

This is the second summer workshirt, salmon chambray, but more importantly - it is a shirt that I can wear and think “Yes, I could be digging something up in the desert in 1922″.

That’s really all I want out of my clothes.

The fold along the center of my panama gives my silhouette a pleasingly pithy air, too. Just imagine that I am standing in from of sand, not bricks, okay?

I stayed in school after dinners were done to help take the five year olds on a walk. A really awesome walk; they all got to take their shoes off and play in a stream. On a school walk! That never happened to me! So cool! The teachers had their feet bare too and were leaping across the banks.. but I thought that, since I’m still pretty new (and ambiguously young), I don’t yet have the authoritah to stand muddy adventures and come out on a different, non-peer level. Major. Bummer.

I like the practical-practical 20s-30s archaeological-style adventure clothes but I also like the “..and here is a version for a lady“. Because, I am a lady, and I like to see if and how ‘lady’ stuff can work for me. So, la! Pretty pretty princess, undead spirit falls for her, she says “no thank you”, kicks sand in his face when he is not dissuaded.

I actually found it trickier than I expected to find example pictures of the kinds of stories my head is digging when I wear this way. I wanted to embed a section of the Appointment With Death Suchet-Poirot with Tim Curry, but youtube has it disabled! So. Here’s Diana Palmer from the 1996 The Phantom (a movie I own and will watch over and over; Billy Zane is a fun actor, and the lady friendship sub-plot is neat), Evie from the 1999 The Mummy (again, a multiple-watch film for me), and an older Diana Palmer, from this article from dailypop.

Peace out, comrades - I got history books to read.

Nuns vs bikers with good hair and neckerchiefs, in a battle of words, in the sixties, with an audience of boarding school girls. On a road trip.

That’s my kind of movie, baby! Dig it!

Went shopping. Desperate quest to find things I can comfortably, appropriately work in.

We did the charity shops first, of course - they’re cheapest, obviously, and sister has a list of movies she’s after and, as long as you don’t mind vhs (and we don’t; the quality is far more homely and the price jes’ cain’t be beat) there’ll always be something you’re after. If you share a similar taste, I mean. She was irritated to see three or four titles she bought last week on dvd - price differences of 49p vs £7. Bummer!

Since she was buying, having birthday’d last month, we found a treasure trove! CHECK THESE OUT:

I can remember HANKERING for these when the movie came out. Gosh I did! And then they were - FOUR, all for 49 pence each. Boggling. So we bought them all and re-donated the videos. If you want to own or watch Spice World (and really - why wouldn’t you? No seriously. It’s a flippin’ funny film), shimmy on down to the BHF in your local town and see if it’s the one we went to.

We’re keeping tea in them, by the way. Different varieties of tea. Very Bri’ish. Maybe not quite GIRL POWER, but, I am a girl! And tea gives me power. So, it works.

I did OK, actually. Shopping. In the charity shops I did appallingly, there was nothing. Well, no, actually! There was a really fantastic (baffling) Morris Dancing display, complete with GIANT (fake) MAN and a.. dragon thing? With a white cloth in its mouth, that could bite. And then a hobby horse with a SCARY FACE that did a truly invigorating dance. It was aces. Pictures and film to follow, look forward!

Shop-wise though I was despairing. Despairing so that when I saw a 60% off sale in GAP I went in. I really hope that they haven’t any horrible scandals that I’ve missed, because I found two shirts that look pretty great and lie pretty light, belting though they need. And the sale really softened the financial blow.. unpleasant, but not exruciating. You’ll see them sooner or later. I often forget that an important part of my personal dressing character is “explorer/archaeological adventurer”. Take more care to remember your full inner library, girl!

Also found a summer hat (oh man, I HEART SALES). Haven’t had one of those for.. too long to remember. Probably because this one is a men’s size L (L for LARGE).. small body, giant noggin! I should really look more strange than I do. It must be all the hair. But! Folding Panama! Yay! Why should a man-hat make me look so like a young French orphan girl? Perhaps I just imagine it.

Finally: a £1.99 loan from sister sorted me out with this - the perfect way to ease myself into being a little braver. A little material girl solidarity. Thank you Madonna! Thank you for the many trails you helped blaze!

Stella McCartney + Comic Relief 2009 Madonna vest via Scope, I think. There’s a Morcombe & Wise version going here, if you want it!

Shit, someone employ me once term lets up, please. No-one needs a dinner lady when nobody’s at school!

Here is the old (”Classic”) version; ‘the bathing suit’:

Here is the new (”boring”) version; ‘the Chick in early 90s gritty cartoon’:

And here is my (”I just drew this in Pixen whilst waiting for my communication technology to work”) version; ‘wrestling is a Greek thing, right?’:

Fathers Day!

Bikes in car, drive, park in layby, cycle, reach village.

You see, because I am a good and loving daughter, today I allowed my dad to menace and terrify me by exploring a village “Scarecrow Festival” together.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

The worst part is that these weren’t the worst part. Those Morris Dancers that go about covered in rags with their faces painted night-black and feathers on their hats? I don’t care how traditional they are, or that my beloved’s father occasionally partakes - these guys are FLIPPIN’ SCARY.

No pictures, because I am a big wussy.

X_X

Sometimes there are things which inspire and one admires and aspires towards somehow, without the specific desire to be/be in/be with the places, characters, wardrobes, movie. Sometimes a film will take you by surprise, and speak to you with atmosphere and colour scheme and attitude in a way that heightens your intent to do your thing your way, without actually being a film that you want to poach costume from.

Let’s learn about one such film, my fine comrades!

Let’s learn about RED SURF. A George Clooney movie with an 18 certificate, from 1990. Which according to imdb comments went straight to video!

The cover LIES, you guys! Yeah, even bargain bin dvd releases bother to photoshop their covers in an attempt to cash in on more lucrative, starry periods of their lead actors’ careers.

This is what George Clooney actually looks like in this movie:

Lulz!

The back cover was what convinced us to buy it, actually -

- the back cover’s picture of how George Clooney actually appears in the actual film. Why do they think people buy cheap-ass dvds? Either because they can’t afford expensive ones, or because they like sub-par cinema. Or both. Don’t lie to us. Don’t patronise people who know they aren’t at Blockbuster, don’t put off people who don’t want to be. That said, check out this alternate cover/poster, as well as this one (Check’em all here). What, can no-one in the world appreciate 90s grunge metal surf criminal drug choker George?

Apparently not, I guess.

So. In Red Surf. George Clooney plays Remar, man without a family, man without law, man without qualms about lying to his 90s-earnest girlfriend. He loves to play pranks like convincing his best friend his girl is cheating on him, then tricking him into thinking that they have accidentally murdered her. Fun times! Then they follow that up by going out on jet-skis (loaned from Gene Simmons, “the Doctor”) to collect drugs from the sea.

This is the apparently communal party drugs casual crime beachhouse, also home to sensitive hat-wearing girlfriend Rebecca:

(This is Rebecca, later in the movie:)

This is George Clooney/Remar feeding best buddy Atilla (actually? the movie’s real eventual hero) some delicious cocaine from his lap whilst driving. They love to weird out the squares!

Did I mention this was a movie about George Clooney, looking in no way how I imagine “George Clooney” to look? Acting the part of a leather-wearing curly hair having ex-professional surf bum large-scale drug dealer? Who is also able to get a sensible, on-the-wavelength multi-necklace wearing art-loving girl pregnant (again; implied abortion alert) and convince her that he will change and raise a family with her, through thoughtful gifts of guitars and well-timed fake promises?

Well, it is. WEIRD MOVIE.

Aaaanyway. Remar finds out Rebecca’s pregnant, and she tells him she wants to keep it. He’s all, “okay..” but when she tells him she wants to go to Portland to raise it with a friend of hers who has kids already, he starts getting protective and territorial. Promises her he’ll change, blah blah no more drugs and crime, more time for romance and kisses. She gets up for ice cream, and by the time it takes her to serve two bowls full he’s all *coffcoff*I really love drugs*coffcoffff*. Sadface.

Later, Atilla and Remar have a heart to heart about how Remar’s going to screw things up and lose lady & baby - Atilla is psyched at the thought of having a baby around - and Remar talks about how for the first year, you hope the baby won’t die, and it doesn’t, and then the second year it starts to hate you. And it hates you and hates you.. with this honest frightened bitterness. And he tells his buddy how he feels like he’s suddenly lacking control. There’s a later scene where Doc tells Remar to quit with the drug deals, and later than that Remar refuses, outright refuses with yelling and a pushfight, to take money from a deal that all his buddies planned without him with the explicit intention to set the couple & child up for a secure life. Why is it that movies with these real relationship scenes and true-person complexity get bargain binned? I have no idea what makes a “good movie”.

The whole thing keeps building - running big drug deals get you in to trouble, did you know? Well, Red Surf is here to tell you that they do. They have to fake a murder, and Remar misses doctors appointments with Rebecca, and Atilla becomes her rock (it’s really nice) and they talk about girl babies playing little league, and they have to send off one of their gangbrothers to save his life after he talks to the police. He cries! He’s the most annoying sort of character, that you just want to squash and yell SHUT UP!! at, but when he leaves his guys he cries and it’s sweet and sad. Bargain bin film. I don’t know. Then there’s more peril, and more apologising/lying to Rebecca, and the blabbermouth gets stabbed and then probably fed to wolves. The antagonist/drug partner lives in this decrepit ruined house with two guys in slacks and vests with big guns and slicked back hair, and he has a pit of wolves in his front room. Did I not mention that?

Soooo eventually Remar dies. He gets machine gunned and blown up on a jet-ski. Atilla and Rebecca set him on fire and push him out to sea for burial. But not before he tells Atilla he loves him, when Atilla is trying to convince him to let the boys do the run so he can stay safe for baby! BARGAIN BIN MOVIES. He literally says “I love you”.

Atilla doesn’t take too kindly to his friend being all killed and such so he goes off to infiltrate/murder the antagonist/partner’s (..okay, just antagonist by this point) gang. With Doc Gene Simmons, who was in ‘Nam. I really, really want a video game out of that scene. Or all of this movie. He kills them all and avoids the wolves (not everybody else does, om nom nom) and hurray, he wins!

There’s actually a very nice, assumably realistic ‘person unused to machine-gunning has to use a machine gun’ scene. Atilla wears his heat on his sleeve!

By the closing credits, Atilla and Rebecca look to be starting this super-sweet, semi-awkward, adorable take-care-of-each-other romance. He follows her to the train station as she’s leaving, bereaved, for Portland and.. it’s sooo cuuuute. I was completely satisfied by the progression of this film. My beloved and I both had that “no wai, for reals!” expression of surprised enjoyment - for £2.99, in a village shop, we’re used to expecting Jaguar Wong or “Richard Harrison IS.. a ninja“. Not an honestly watchable, variably heartfelt, fun movie. With George Clooney in a bandanna with a crack pipe.

This is my favorite George Clooney movie. Of all time.

No Rebecca, really!

All the clothes in this movie are so worn-in. they look like they’ve been walked over by the whole cast, and have sand ground in and the colours worn out. Nobody’s constrained by what they wear - comfort first, expression of wild-life values second. Honestly I’m not sure if I like it so much only for itself, or for the fact that it has such an un-George Clooneyish George Clooney. I mean, that’s a compelling element, right?

But I think a fair part of it is that it’s that 1990s grunge-metal-taste-of-hippy aesthetic that’s so present in a lot of films & shows I really love but completely divorced from the music that made the scene. This is what I know about music in the very late 80s - early 90s: Patton-era Faith No More and Primus existed (excellently). Also, people liked the bands they namecheck in Bill & Ted and Wayne’s World. THAT’S IT. I guess Nirvana happened some time around there..? I’ve made no secret of my hatred for music journalism and I find the sartorial guidelines hard to use as an entry point to the sounds because as far as I can tell there was an extreme gender divide - dudes wore baggy t-shirts and loose trousers, girls wore leather bras, spandex and hotpants. Neither of these looks have really worked for me, as yet, and for some in-brain reason that really impedes my investigation and understanding of the knots of bands and sub-genres that make up the cultural era. And that failure to break through the bubble surrounding my perception of the music scene means that I feel inauthentic approaching the dresscode with increased zeal. It’s a vicious cycle! Of ignorance!

A movie like Red Surf though, which I assume has no budget to source big soundtracks and which only broaches the question of “what do you listen to” with mostly-covered t-shirts and easy to miss flyers pasted on bedroom walls in scenes where character tension is high, doesn’t make me feel like a double outsider. I can assimilate the costume apart from the intimidating musical context.

Here’s a question that Red Surf raises for me - what’s so wrong with me that I’m suddenly not finding 90sgirl hats completely, ultimately ugly?

Wanna know a secret? I wrote this entire post saying “Lisa” instead of “Rebecca”. Yeah, she doesn’t get that much autonomy. I still have this film a ten out of ten on IMDB.

BONUS: Here’s the pretty shitty trailer! With really awful sound quality!

Ever done a workout video? I have. Just one.

The lesson here, is “always check the charity shop VHS stocks when roaming town with your romantic object”. This cost us twenty one pence, I think. That or twenty four. A difference of three pence isn’t that much.

Here’s a section of the video!

Honestly, it’s a really good tape. At one point she goes a little overboard with the “being sedentary is bad because you get fatter” rather than “being sedentary is bad because it makes you feel less vital”, but - overall it’s a really nice, Jessica Fletcher-y pro-you 50 minutes about how to feel generally better about yourself. And! Having done the full workout today, I feel.. miles better, physically. Less stiff. THAT’S EMBARRASSING I’M ONLY YOUNG.

It’s basically a series of stretches and flexes (some involving a towel or a windowsill), tips like “don’t feel guilty about doing relaxing tasks like watering flowers, wondering round the garden or sewing!” and “in the morning, rub yourself and thing positive thoughts” and “take tea! It’s nice!” (and who doesn’t love to be validated in regards to this stuff?), topped off with about ten minutes of “free movement”. Which is enormous fun. Georgia and the Ace Gang, as my sister remarked, would definitely do this tape.

How’s this dress with this overdress, then? The sweaterdress itself is too short to wear in public. It also ends just as it’s passed the exact widest part of my thighs, which looks interesting and “unflattering” in a private way. But it’s perfect to wear under the apron-thing - form-fitting so as not to distract or get too blousy, cotton to keep cool, long sleeves for contrast. Is the blocky black-grey-white too stark vs the broderie anglaise pretty-pretty?

And why do things I wear so often end up making me think “the sixties!”? Ah sweah, it’s not intentional. Or maybe even apparent to anyone but me.

Pee Ess checkout my snax! Delicious

Watching Pulse, now, BBC3 (hence “bodyhorror” tag!). I like it. I like it quite a lot. Hope it gets picked up!

Yeasterday I said:

And today, I DID IT!

Yeahh, I am as “good as my word”.

Actually to be truthful, I have no caught up on Freak Angels BUT - as yet, there has not been time. So I’m still good!

Cycling in skirts is actually surprisingly easy. Even in a big, long, gathered, pannier-pockets skirt -

You just have to take the middle of the hem at the front and the back, and tuck them up under your bum on the seat. You end up with some puffy pantaloons, basically. It’s not guaranteed modesty, though, and they do come down sometimes. I spent a fair portion of one particular country road hitching about my crotch trying to tuck all the fabric back safely. Which really? Is not that admirable or fun. Kind of funny, but not the sort of thing you want to find necessary all of a sudden.

So, bloomers. Wardrobe essentials from my more active days as an egl community member - useful for feelin’ pretty, avoiding flashes, and keeping temperate in slightly breezy/sunny weather. I don’t feel it inappropriate to show them here, because I wore them specifically to be a piece of bicycle-gear rather than Victorian-style underwear. I’m not doing anything more than wearing a visible vest, really. So don’t you go getting ideas!

I love this skirt. It is so always-appropriate and comfortable! It’s not too heavy, it’s not too light, it’s got these MASSIVE STATEMENT POCKETS, and the stripes/apron combo is interesting enough to still be interesting in muted colours. So I can wear it with anything. Even hand-me-down beater sweaters that, if I could, I’d tweak the colour and fabric of.

I was going to ride in my sandals but I think that the pedals would mangle them horribly. And they are precious. When I got home though..!

Mmmhmmm I am going to keep posting pictures of my feet in these shoes, until I have gone through every pair of tights and socks I own. I may not be a compulsive shoe-buyer, but GOSH can I appreciate the heck out of a pair once I ‘ave ‘em.

England is still beautiful, by the way. I might ride out again tomorrow, I passed a pretty great church that was calling out “sketch meeee” and several fields that gave me the picnic-eye.

The beef I ate was chili to this recipe. It’s good, honest!

Now, back to this guy?

Click the picture to swing by my May column on British Style Bloggers if you want to give me a boost or if you’re currently in exam-revision hell - the theme is keep calm and carry on, and I’m speculating on what best to wear when what you really need to be doing is buckling down. Expounding on one of my favourite topics - house clothes! With wardrobe from Corina Corina thanks to Ella in Warwick, and a peek at my mum - see if you think I get my looks from her, hmm?

Actually, speaking of family resemblance, check the chick above. Little sister, little sister. She wanted me to give her a beard too, but agreed that it would be too cluttered.