Flick through the A/W 14 Next Directory and you’ll find awesome, editorial-esque images providing plenty of new season inspiration.
Who doesn’t want a hi-low trainer with smart coat ensemble?
I love you Joan Smalls
A tousled pony tail with a wear-with-everything shirt?
This jumper is £15!
To be able to look like Anja Rubik in a slouchy knit, pencil skirt and metallic flats? No one!
WANT.
But flick a page or two and Next majorly loses the plot.
Had the stylist had an embolism at the point at which the outfit with the grey skirt had to be constructed?
Er, no.
And would you believe that culottes are actually bang on trend for next season after the frankly ridonc blouse and high heel combo?
Old.
This is the problem with a store like Next: it tries to appease so many women that it routinely lets down all of them. I have many stylish things from there, not least a pair of leopard print slip-on trainers and some slim-leg cuff trousers. I couldn’t live without either but when I go into their stores I’m left cold.
So much comes down to the edit of stock in individual stores, which is why I’m willing to forgive the various branches near me. But the directory? C’mon Next, you have some awesome stock and you ruin it constantly with weird, never-been-fashionable-and-never-will pairings. And you have Joan Smalls, Anja Rubik and Jessica Hart modelling for you. Jeez.
P.S. Have you seen the array of awesome flats they have ready for next season? Yummy. I think the oxblood patent brogue is calling out to me.
Sorry, took a photo of the page cos I was so excited!
I think this post is sponsored by the rage I felt at seeing a bottle of Dolmio on sale at a WH Smith’s at the local hospital for a whopping £2.99. Why do people buy this stuff? It’s awful and doesn’t taste like any of the ingredients that are purported to be in it. Apologies if you very much enjoy a ‘Dolmio Day’ but any pre-made sauce, of any brand or supermarket origin, just feels like a waste because it’s very easy to make your own sauce.
So this is my fall-back sauce. I very much enjoy whipping up my bolognaise, a Nigella spaghetti with lemon and garlic breadcrumbs, or a walnut and parsley pesto, but when I’m hungover and/or starving, this “arrabiata” hits the spot.
An arrabiata is a tomato and chilli sauce, which this definitely is, but without any of the skill that it probably should be made with. But then again it’s very simple, and I’ve whipped it up several times when my head should be firmly on a pillow in a darkened room. Add a few more fancy ingredients and extra cooking time and this could probably be a dinner party dish….. or, y’know, a Tuesday lunch when working from home. Whatevs.
Anyway, you need the stuff below.
Extra virgin olive oil; chillies; white onion; garlic; tin of chopped toms
These are store cupboard essentials for me. If you don’t have fresh chillies then crushed chilli flakes will serve you just as well. I sometimes add some for an extra kick anyway.
Crushed chilli flakes
The one thing you definitely need is a food processor. This is the key ingredient, so-to-speak, of this sauce because it excludes the need for proper chopping and produces a smooth-ish sauce. A stick blender would probably assist and achieve a similar effect but you would need to chop the veg much finer.
Speaking of which, the chopping is very easy. Top and tail the onion, remove the skin and then chop into rough wedges. Top and tail the garlic and peel, then remove the stalks from the chillies and cut each in half. I use two red chillies but if you wanted an element of freshness then a green one would probably be tasty. Go mad if you dare! Just bear in the mind that the heat comes from the seeds of the chilli, which I don’t remove. If you’re chillis are small then you might want to think about removing the seeds but this is supposed to be a hot sauce.
Pour the chopped toms into the processor and start whizzing on a slow speed. Now add the veg using the feeder at the top and carry on whizzing until you have a slightly bitty looking sauce.
To cook the sauce, add a glug (roughly a tablespoon) of extra virgin olive oil to a pan – I use a frying pan just for a larger surface area so the sauce reduces slightly – heat the oil and add the sauce. A decent oil is good in this case because it’s going to contribute to the flavour as opposed to being just for frying purposes, so I use my supremely poncy organic Palestinian olive oil from Whole Foods. Oooooh, pretentious and pricey! But also tasty!
Morals taste good!
Now it’s just a case of heating the sauce through. I like it to thicken so just keep it on a low heat until I can see where the level has lowered on the side of the pan. Or until my pasta is ready. The point is that it doesn’t need to cook per se so keep an eye on it and don’t have the heat too high. Feel free to season to taste.
I like this with white pasta spaghetti. I cook the pasta in a big pan, drain, pour back in the pan and then pour in the sauce to combine (you should always add pasta to sauce, not the other way around – Ed/Loz). Oh yeah, that’s the stuff right there.
Dinner/lunch/tea/supper/snack is served. My lunch today was particularly satisfying with a sneaky can of diet cola and some sautéed kale to up my iron intake and relieve some of the carb guilt.
Do let me know if you attempt this and how you fare – I would love to see snaps and your modifications. Samples of your own cheat’s arrabiata are always gratefully received!
Back in April Loz took me out for my, ahem, 22nd birthday. We lunched at The Ivy (posh!) and then decided to hit an exhibition. We ended up at the marvellous Barbican taking in ‘The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From Catwalk to Sidewalk’. If you haven’t seen it then you must immediately, especially as it’s ending on 25 August.
Many of you of a certain age will have had their first exposure to JPG from watching Euro Trash late on a Friday night on Channel 4. Even though I had an inkling of his impression on the fashion world, I was truly blown away by the exhibition. No, you’re not going to buy a frock from him and wear it to a fancy meeting or on a Friday night out, but his real influence has been from the incredible versatility of his designs from the pure avant garde couture aesthetic to fabulous stage costuming.
JPG can’t compete in modern ready to wear but I’m fairly sure he doesn’t want to. The upshot of this is that if you are a Celine bod through and through then you may not love JPG’s style. But for a glimpse through the couture looking glass, this exhibition can’t be beaten.
A quick word on the staging too: it’s brilliant. Faces are projected onto the heads of the mannequins and while this may be slightly creepy, it totally brings the clothes to life. The set-up is effective as you get to stroll through different stages of his work, including a look through his seemingly endless line of muses.
It’s best to take a little bit of patience with you as you will encounter people hogging the best bits, or just moving DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF YOU to see something you’re already looking at. Deep breaths are definitely required. But it is also a lovely way to while away a couple of hours, even if you can’t tell your JPG from your SJP.
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From Catwalk to Sidewalk, showing at the Barbican until 25 August 2014. Full info and tickets available at the Barbican website.
When the new store & Other Stories was due to open, it was like Christmas on crack for fashionistas. The newer, more high-end version of our beloved H&M was met with a crescendo of enthusiasm but sadly I, sorry little wannabe style-setter that I am, was, ahem, rather at the back of the queue. To be precise, i only visited last week.
When I got there I was indeed bowled over by the store, the aesthetic, and the promise of a more streamlined yet individual wardrobe. At a price. This girl has & Other Stories tastes on an H&M budget (despite what the website says, I still can’t equate a £45 polyester scarf with ‘affordability’).
I did, however, manage to snap up some sparkly socks for a fiver (which I’m going to pair with black sandals for my work Christmas party – oooh, daring!) and this rather wonderful scrub.
Reasons to love a body product from a fashion store? Let me enlighten you:
The packaging. I love the medicinal look for the jar and the label, almost like something your doctor might prescribe if they were concerned with aesthetically pleasing medication. Looks pretty nifty on ye olde edge of the tub (that is how the cool kids are talking, isn’t it?).
The smell. Citrus doesn’t sound like it should work with brown sugar but it absolutely does. The citrus notes come through first with the gorgeous richness of the sugar following on. If they could make this into an identical scent, I’d buy it.
The consistency. Lovely and rough, you know this will slough off dry skin like the proverbial hot knife through butter. Lovely for keeping your skin secretly soft underneath fluffy jumpers.
It works! This is a genuinely good scrub, and I have tried many low cost ones. I only really do low cost on body exfoliants because if I weren’t so lazy I would make my own for practically nothing, so why I would spent serious chunks of my beauty cash on a pricey number is beyond me. Stick with this: at £7 it’s a nice little bargain price, touching almost into what I like to call the ‘baby luxury’ end of the market. In short, you won’t be ashamed for people to see this, which brings me to my last reason…..
It’s from & Other Stories. C’mon, would you have read this far if I said it was from Poundland? OK, maybe you would, but the product is inherently more interesting because it comes from a store with genuine cache. And let’s face it, if you haven’t got the dosh for their wonderful neoprene clutches and £45 polyester scarves, then a £7 punt on a body scrub is going to afford you a bit of purchasing pleasure.
Yummy – but only for the bod!
*This product was purchased and used entirely without the endorsement or request of the brand in question. Pity Party will only review products we genuinely like, although we can be bribed with food to say silly things about celebrities. #justsayin
I stumbled across a quote from Oscar Wilde on Pinterest the other day that read, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.” Aside from my first reaction, which was disappointment at reading this on a social media site as opposed to a dusty tome (that’ll be the middle class pseudo-intellectualism coming out…), I felt the truth of the quote running through my like a modest wave of recognition.
Because that quote is so bloody true! Between the struggles to earn a living, look after family and try to carve a life out for ourselves, the time we actually spend to experience and feel is limited. Living is the joy, the rush, sometimes the fear or the pain, but you know it when you do it. After the recognition came a beautiful current of electricity when I realised that I have had moments of truly living, which was a relief as my default setting is rather moribund and depressing on the subject of my own achievements.
So allow me, if you will, to share these more recent moments with you. What are yours? I’d love to know! A lovely little follow-up could be on the cards with some shared moments. How nice!
Helicopter ride
I turned 30 in 2012 and my mum bought me an experience voucher for a helicopter ride. It was only a twenty minute affair in a small craft at a local airfield but I LOVED IT! The exhilaration, the fear, the James Bond-esque delight when I walked under the propellers… The fact that I got my husband on the same flight as me for twenty quid was just smashing too.
Swimming in a waterfall
2012 was clearly a good year for living as this was also the year I went to Goa (where I did so many wonderful things I really need to do another post) and swam in a waterfall. Small confession: I didn’t swim right underneath it, but I did get close and the falls themselves were beautiful. I felt brave, empowered, and in awe of nature. Marvellous.
New family
In 2006 I discovered that I had an older sister and niece that I’d never known about. It was the single most maturing experience of my life, being both wonderful and scary at the same time. My sister Ginny is a mythical beast of intelligence, humour, and pure shopping ability, and she was my sister from the moment we first timidly spoke on the phone on an August evening nearly 8 years ago. She has since been my bridesmaid along with my niece Kate and has shared in various life events, as well as providing a place of solace and much wine with her home in Swansea. Beautiful and real are some of the best words to describe my sudden family explosion.
Wet ‘n’ Wild in Mexico
Last year me and my husband went to our first ever wedding abroad which also became our first ‘proper’ holiday with friends ever. And it was very cool! Imagine the happy vibe of a wedding for a whole week at an ultra all-inclusive resort in Cancun…. Doesn’t get much better really! One of the best days was the group trip to Wet ‘n’ Wild where we not only got to party on a boat on the way over, but got to play in an awesome wave machine once we got there. My husband and I have a particular fondness for waves and took turns in dragging each other in a rubber ring to where the waves hit hardest. It was pure unadulterated FUN and I think it should be prescribed on the NHS.
Offspring gig 2009
Big sis Loz has opened my cultural horizons on many occasions but none more so than my first proper gig experience at the Brixton Academy to see The Offspring. Everything fell into place: a couple of bottles of beer got us on our way at dinner before the music started and the venue is one of the few to boast a cloakroom, allowing for maximum dancing potential without being a danger to fellow music-lovers. We danced, we drank, we stuck out heads out the train window screaming into the night on the way home. Although we’ve enjoyed Gogol Bordello, Metallica, Green Day, and Linkin Park since, that gig was the best of my life so far.
Wedding Day
I have never known time to go so slowly and yet so fast as on my wedding day. The walk up the stairs to the ceremony room felt like it took a year but then the ceremony was over in seconds. The moment I felt more connected to the soul of the universe (sorry – the memory makes me come over all unnecessary) was when we started to recite our vows and my now-husband turned to me to look me in the eyes as he pledged himself to me forever. I have never meant it more than when I said, with every ounce of being that I had, that I would love him forever, and that connection is one that has not been matched since. Which is surely a good thing seeing as it was my wedding day n’all!
