For several months now I have had a Marks and Sparks voucher. This week I finally got to the huge flagship store in Oxford Street in order to buy winter slippers - as the local branch is very bad on slippers for some reasons (the ones I got there last year do not keep my feet warm, point thahr misst) - and make up the amount in socks and knickers ( Read more... )

This week it feels like I am spending money like a drunken sailor.
That is, if the sailor in question was having dental work done as the result of first visit to dentist in 2 years, finding themself having to pony up for new glasses as the result of eye test, etc.
Okay, maybe the boots (but probably not going to see what was in Ecco's online sale ( Read more... )

Today I wore for the first time a pair of shoes that I bought in a sale some while ago (on account of snapping up Ecco shoes in my size and a style I like should I see them in a sale) and which have been sitting at the back of the wardrobe ever since.
The heels have started disintegrating and leaving a trail of black blobs.
Fortunately this is a ( Read more... )

Somebody on my rlist was posting the other day apropos of the informal, but very marked, dress code pertaining in their new workplace.

This gave me to think about the anthropology of dress in my own workplace, which is a large building which holds, besides the various kinds of library people, corporate financial types, IT bods, certain types who ( Read more... )

What I'm reading

Cressida Connolly, The Rare and the Beautiful (2005), about the extraordinary Garman siblings, who make the Mitfords look tame, and 'Sanger's Circus' in The Constant Nymph like staid suburbanites. I have a few obscure fact niggles: I don't think the National Vigilance Association had anything to do with adoption, but I give the ( Read more... )

Hadley Freeman on that claim by Christian Louboutin that
[W]hat is sexual in a high heel is the arch of the foot, because it is exactly the position of a woman's foot when she orgasms. So, putting your foot in a heel, you are putting yourself in a possibly orgasmic situation."

to which she responds, quite justly, that
[U]nless you are intimating ( Read more... )

Errrr: wrong way round there, surely? Strauss-Kahn attempted rape case investigators examine claims: a law professor opines
[T]he number of lies she had told prosecutors would make it hard to convince the jury that she is a credible witness.... My hunch is that if he wasn't such a high-profile figure, these charges would have been dropped already ( Read more... )

Because I am a bit baffled by this:
I am a 54-year-old widow, with four adult children. My husband died suddenly of a massive heart attack two years ago. My problem is in coping with my decision, as a practising Catholic, to remain celibate for the rest of my natural life; I cannot be the only person in this position. I thought as time passed this ( Read more... )

It dawned on me this evening that I was not only wearing navy blue shoes...

but that they were suede, or a near approximation of same.

(A pair of Eccos that I bought in a sale some years ago and had stored in the back of the wardrobe until one of my other pairs finally, er, turned up its toes, which it did, rather inconveniently, the day I went to ( Read more... )

Experience: I was a bully. While he positions his moment of enlightenment as down to the Civilising Influence of Womanhood, I do think that other boys saying 'So not cool' would also have worked. But perhaps there are Male Dynamics there that I wot not of. And someone else who is all about the 'harmless fun' defence of bad behaviour: Fashion ( Read more... )