NOTE: I started this series of posts back in the Spring.  It had a promising start (seriously, read this post about Ludwig Bemelmans and you will be entertained and informed to the max!), but then life and stuff happened and I forgot about it. Yesterday, I decided that the time has come to resurrect this series. There’s something special about dark nights and curling up with a good book. I hope you enjoy it. Friday 5 November Weight: 9st 6 (but my skinny jeans still fasten so I frankly don’t give a fig), alcohol units: 0 (yet, though that bottle of Leffe in the fridge is getting more and more tempting), calories: approx. 700 – digestive biscuits are a source of wholegrain goodness, right? Number of minutes spent performing useful activities: significantly less than number spent vacantly staring out of window drinking tea. 3p.m My Flat Writing about Helen Fielding is not easy for me.  I don’t really know much about the woman other than what I can glean from ‘About the Author’ paragraphs and Wikipedia. She’s clearly very clever and an astute social commentator. I’m also in complete awe of her comic talent. That said, I have only ever read two of her books.  After much deliberation, I have established the problem – Helen Fielding is not my literary hero, a character she created is. The character is, of course, Bridget Jones. So far, so cliché. In recent years, Bridget has become a lazy stereotype of womanhood. She is pop culture shorthand for many things I can’t abide – the woman as a weight obsessed, squeaky voiced ditz; sobbing into her Haagen Daaz one minute and manically screeching along to Gloria Gaynor the next. But that is not MY Bridget Jones. My Bridget Jones has been a constant friend since[.....]

I have already decided what my ‘potty old lady thing’ will be – hoarding magazines. It is that or gin. I don’t want to hoard stuff like ‘People’s Friend’ or ‘Woman’s Weekly’. They would just remind me of being a potty old woman. No, I’m going to be the neighbourhood’s only 80-year-old with a subscription to ‘Pop’. My Grandchildren will be able to visit and build dens out of back issues of ‘Lula‘ and ‘The Gentlewoman’. I may even decorate the downstairs loo with pages torn out of ‘Amelia’s Magazine’. These are magazines that perform the trickiest of feats: you fall in love with them. They mess with the concept of ‘magazine’ by ceasing to be throw away items that cause merely passing pleasure and become something that you treasure and stow away safely. Magazines have always entranced me, be it my pre-tween piles of ‘Horse and Pony’ or the short fling that I enjoyed with ‘Nova’ when it relaunched (briefly) in 2000 (they are still stashed away in my parent’s attic). My back issues of ‘Vogue’ are currently arranged in date order on our bookshelves. I geek out over them. ‘Vogue’ is my constant, the magazine that I will never give up. I accept its flaws – it is elitist, fickle and, in the main, totally detached from reality. But I don’t care. Whilst Elle tries to trendy itself up with edgy page layouts and brooding cover shots, ‘Vogue’ refuses to be anything other than chic. After Vogue, there are the weird and wonderful high-end niche fashion and lifestyle magazines. By ‘high-end’ I mean that they tend to cost well over a fiver; sometimes because they are so ridiculously extravagant, sometimes because readership is so small that high prices are the only way to make them a viable enterprise[.....]

Reading: The back of food packets By necessity, not choice. I have recently been diagnosed with one of the most middle class, first world ailments imaginable. I have joined the 1 in every 5 US and UK citizens with Idiopathic Angioedema. It sounds made up, and to be honest I am still kind of dubious about it. According to a nice Doctor Lady, who was reassuringly eccentric, my body is pissed off with all of the chemicals and other crap that features heavily in western diets and has decided to freak out (note: that’s not how the Doctor phrased it, but you get the gist). She’s prescribed a highly restricted diet that I have to obey for 8 weeks. No processed foods, no salicylate, no azoate, no benzoate. I’m not even sure what these things are, but I bet they are tasty. (Note: I don’t have to start this diet for three weeks so if you see me with large slice of cake, let me be.) On the plus side, I CAN EAT CHEESE!!!! Providing it is organic. I can see this diet turning me into one of those ghastly hippy sorts who frequents Whole Foods and bans their children from eating anything fun. Meh, it was probably on the cards anyway. Watching: Arrested Development After actively resisting the geeky charms of Micheal Cera for several years, he has finally won me over. I still think that he’s a pretty one-dimensional actor, but he is the master of that one dimension, the king of the socially crippled yet weirdly charming geeks. Being able to tolerate Cera means that I can now watch Arrested Development, something that I have been doing with a near religious fervour. Within the space of a month I have gone from never seeing a single episode[.....]

Reading: Here’s my summer reading list, it does seem obnoxiously eclectic (sorry) : The Scott Pilgrim series – Bryan Lee O’Malley The trailer for the film looks incredible and I’ve heard lots of people with impeccably good taste in these matters rave about the graphic novels. I’m not your typical comic book fangirl, but Ramona Flowers is the woman  the 16-year-old me aspired to be (when she wasn’t trying to be Daria). Backwards in High Heels: the impossible art of being female – Tania Kindersley and Sarah Vine This book is like a stern talking to from your Nan. I mean that in the best possible way. It is no-nonsense, definitely not self-help, but still bloody good advice from two women who have thought a lot about life and concluded that it is whatever you make it. Candypop: Candy  and the Broken Biscuits – Lauren Laverne Yay! Teen fiction with an indie-pop twist. None of that broody Twilight stuff for Bookish Brunette! I want sassy, smart talking  heroines bashing out three chord bollocks on a glittery Gibson. The Language of Fashion – Roland Barthes I love a bit Barthes during my morning commute. He is the man who attached meaning to what we wear. He wrote about how these meanings can shift and develop. It also helps that he writes in an interesting and entertaining way. His writings about ‘Dandyism’ are particularly  intriguing when considering contemporary consumer fashion and the need for individualism. Watching: Rev Well, that was like the best thing I’ve seen on the BBC in ages! Whilst most of the world were busy raving about Sherlock and swooning over that Benedict Cumberbatch fellow (my verdict: his face looks like it was made from Play Doh), I was lovingly staring at Tom Hollander in a cassock. When the[.....]

Reading: Trout Fishing in America – Richard Brautigan This is the first time that a song has ever made me go out and buy a book. You may remember me posting about a song called ‘Have you ever heard a digital accordion?’ by a band called the Lovely Eggs. Well, you don’t have to be genius to figure out that ‘Brautigan’ kind of rhymes with ‘accordion’. After hearing the song, I became intrigued about this Richard Brautigan fellow and decided to look him up on Wikipedia. The description of his seminal work ‘Trout Fishing in America ‘ sounded so utterly odd that I had to read it. Now-a-days, books with weird titles like ‘Salmon Fishing in Yemen’ or ‘How to Drive Tractors in Ukrainian’ are common place. I have no impressive literary academic credentials to support my claim, but I’m fairly certain that the authors of such works are fans of Brautigan. The book is weird. Some bits are about trout fishing, other bits aren’t. I think he uses the act of trout fishing as some sort of motif (check me out, English Lit. A-level, back of the net!) to make profound comments on human existence. OR, he was completely out of it and just wanted to write something all trippy and weird to deliberately baffle wannabe intellectual/zeitgeisty sorts such as myself. What the hell, it is of a similar ilk to ‘On the Road’ by Kerouac. If you dug that, then you’ll probably dig this. It reads like it has been written by the offspring of a beatnik and a scarecrow. There aren’t many books that you can say that about. Go read it for that reason, if for no other. Watching: Gossip Girl There is truly something captivating about teen melodramas featuring overprivileged American youths. Mainly because they[.....]