My attention has been drawn to this article about OMG getting to 50 and growing old, which I'm actually finding quite annoying.

How many people can say, following a fall which (honestly) could surely have happened to anybody at anytime, like the moped/pedestrian crossing thing that happened to me in my 50s:
I’ve never regained an absolute trust ( Read more... )

Sort of generated by/riffing off a conversation between a couple of colleagues this morning, the general and recurrent WOEZing about the deleterious impact of the internet on our lives, and having people with whom my connection is solely in the professional sphere doing the cheek-kissy thing.

I am hesitant to suggest that there is any actual ( Read more... )

On the one hand WOEZ WOEZ WOEZ over the apparently unstoppable anxieties over body-image, pressure to be unrealistically slim like photoshopped models, etc - from which one is not even exempted by getting older.

However, on the other hand we should be tackling obesity.

Mixed messages much? though Barbara Ellen at least suggests that women can't win ( Read more... )

Interesting piece about the Burger Queen, beauty pageant with a difference:
to challenge the stereotype of fat people as "broken and unhappy".... Creativity is prized above all. For the fashion round, contestants make their own outlandish outfits.... combination of serious message and light-hearted presentation

However, we note 'the reluctance of ( Read more... )

What I'm really thinking: the Botox user: 'It does give me quiet satisfaction that I have this slightly shocking secret'

(This is a 'shocking secret' that can go right up there with Time Out's staff's 'guilty pleasures'. I.e., as it 'you don't get out much, do you?')

But aside from that
I could never tell my partner; he would hate the idea.... He ( Read more... )

Picked up at Oxfam in the first UK Penguin edition, largely because I had read Florence King's codslapping of Cozzens and this work in particular in With Charity Towards None.

It's not that bad. It's not that good, either. It is looooong and could have done with some heavier editing than it got, because there are extensive passages in which Cozzens ( Read more... )

Reading I have been doing since the last round-up post:

Non-fiction/academic (much of this text-book revision work):
Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-War Britain 1945-71 (2007) - some of this was a bit familiar (e.g. the discuss of The Gateways and club culture, the Minorities Research Group and Arena 3) - but ( Read more... )

Sunk into gloom by reading the following:

Lucy Mangan on Hot in Cleveland: 'a sitcom built round the premise of female obsolescence. Past 40, our invisibility to men turns us into desperate nymphomaniacs, whereupon hilarity must naturally ensue. Please sprinkle "apparently" throughout that last sentence as you see fit'.

Rowenna Davis talks to ( Read more... )

Thinking about exercise, as what between the virus and the hiatus during travels and other interruptions, I feel like I'm only beginning to get back into yoga and gym workouts.

After years of being off physical exercise because so much of it, at school, had been about being actually good at things even when it was not about being picked last for ( Read more... )

Intriguing article about Philip Larkin, which suggests - surprise! - that who he was with women might have been different to how he was among his bros such as K Amis (whose reaction to Larkin's lover Monica Jones does sound rather typically boyz-club-in-the-treehouse-ickee-gurleez, no? Also, have feeling there is less embittered-misogynist version ( Read more... )