I am not much of a sports fan. The only time I have been affected by WImbledon was in Primary school when we would return home to find that Bernard's Watch, or something equally wonderful had been replaced by a green square of grass on the television. We longed for Wimbledon to end to get CBBC back.
My ears did prick up at the mention of Maria Sharapova though. It seems that this year she has abandoned her cutesy skirt/dress and is wearing a masculine, menswear inspired kit with tailored tuxedo and shorts.
This is her 'warm up outfit'
I don't understand what the fuss is all about. The tailored tuxedo is smarter than the average court outfit, and is it really that shocking for a woman to wear shorts rather than a skirt in 2008?In the Metro Amanda Holden (Britain's Got Talent Judge and ex of Les family fortunes Dennis?) was quoted as saying;'women should wear feminine kits. They may play like men but they should dress like ladies'Does my memory deceive me or was it only yesterday, in the very same paper (thanks Bethnal Green distribution) that this Holden character was photographed in a tennis kit with her bum cheek hanging out, grinning like a goon? How lady like.
Check out my article: :
http://www.beautypopstar.blogspot.com/
Go stock up on products you lucky Glastonbury dwellers and spare a thought for me impoverished, watching BBC 2 highlights late into the night for yet another year
As a former English Literature student, I have been around the literary block. I have delved into the Medieval ramblings of priests, danced with Milton's devil, analysed King Lear's madness, cried with Keats and romanced with Jane Austen.
Becoming somewhat snobby about literature, you do not expect to pick something from a promotion table in Boarders and be inspired. Yet the mindless spending of an ancient book voucher gave me a unfailing companion, and allowed me to dwell in a time alternative to that 2008 London.
Faber's novel is more than 800 pages long, and even in paperback weighs the same as a small child (so I'd imagine), however I found myself lugging it to work in my poor straining bag because a tube journey would not do without an update.
The novel is written in third person and cleverly casts the reader themselves as a physical character in Victorian London. Faber guides the time traveler, advising whom to follow along the dark and dirty streets. This is just one technical aspect that involves you in the world; you are made to realise that the words in the book are telling just one narrative within a world that has millions.
Sugar is perhaps the main character; working as a prostitute she escapes working into the night on a fantasy novel, a novel in which she brutally murders her male customers. Visited by William Rackham a successful business man with an insane wife, she begins her journey.
It is not my aim to relay the plot, it is an intricately woven web that requires all physical 800 pages. I simply wish to state my admiration of this modern author writing about Victorian London. As a man unbound by Victorian sexual repression and literary censorship, does this book written in the 21st Century tell us more about the nineteenth century than Dickens could? Now there's a question for a dissertation.
Perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps all that matters it the effect a book has upon one, fact or fiction? As I closed this book for the final time, digesting the unsatisfying yet most satisfying ending I have ever encountered, I felt a loss; Faber's greatest achievement is undoubtedly the way the characters outlive the paper on which they are created. In a dull moment I still muse upon the fate of Sugar.
It is books like this that remind one that writing is not simply placing signified meaning onto a blank sheet. Yes words are mundane tools of communication, but if used by someone who understands they can transcend their basic purpose and origin.
The main reason I have been so lazy updating this is due to the fact that it takes me a lengthly amount of time to remember the correct font colour and size (I am a unashamedly aesthetic girl-perhaps the reason I was rejected from my chosen MA).
But the recent appearance of a phenomenon better known as 'the sun' has peeled back winter layers and fleshy legs appear down every London street. I have noticed a discrepancy that I cannot leave uncommented and as my notebook is already filled with self-indulgent whining what better way to convey my views than the 21st century 'blog'. So here this blogger has a bone to bear. How is it that every Londoner is tanned on the first day of Summer?
A primary flash of sunlight and bronze legs are a walking, in shorts and flirty dresses, poking out of leggings. Tanned legs before the sun has cast its rays? Impossible. Look a little closer, inspect the ankles and knees. Yes, an overcast shadow of reside. Fake Tan.
Some are admittedly most convincing, only the most observant (or in my case unstimulated) eye would detect anything amiss. However then there are the patchy. I can tell those holiday sun devotes a mile of, blotchy, pale orange, its just not realistic. Why is it more acceptable to be be a fake orange than a natural white Briton? I am no fool, I realise that my sallow stalks would look far more tempting under a natural bronze disguise, but if this can not be achieved conventionally it cannot be achieved at all. In the Victorian era tanned skin was a mark of poverty; Elizabeth Bennet was condemned by bitchy Caroline Bingley for her bronzed appearance in Pride and Prejudice, it was seen as the mark of the field workers who toiled all day with their skin bare to the light.
We are no longer in the Victorian era those I bother with my thoughts remind me (and also remind me that if we were, I would not be living in a grand country house but rather in London slums, probably with consumption); my point is that the idea of a tan is totally subjective. It is neither good nor bad. Lets not label it a trend, a positive asset to a life. It is simply an indication of how long one has spent outside, or ones skin type. Pale girls (and guys) do not conform! If you are an inside being, a naturally ghostly being, do not get out the fake bake or St. Tropez, it is fooling no one. And in the twenty first century there is always the comfort of the footless tight...
