So, things have been a little quiet here. There are a number of reasons for this - 1/ I am lazy 2/ I am poor and avoiding looking at things I can't really afford as it has started to make me a little bit sad and 3/ Life has got all serious and I don't really have the energy to think about the fickle world of fashion every day.
Last week I had a biopsy in a very uncomfortable place. Not that I think having an extra hole cut into you with an extremely large hollow needle is ever anything less than uncomfortable, but this was an especially difficult area of the body to have said procedure performed on.
I'm a tad wary of sharing very personal and gruesome information of this nature with total strangers, but I'm finding it quite hard to concentrate on much else to be honest, except feeling bad for not blogging or making any atempt to do more work outside of my actual work (if that makes any sense).
Although it has stopped hurting now, waiting for the results is almost as bad. I don't know how you're supposed to behave during these things, but when the doctor casually mentioned what he thought the problem might be (not cancer, so I feel like a drama queen for being so upset by something that is 99.9999% unlikely to be life threatening which isn't helping) I think I should probably have asked some more questions. Instead I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, go home and hide under the duvet with some cake.
Which I did.
I even managed to avoid looking up the thing he had said he thought it was on the internet for a few days. I was too distracted by the ouch, but also very aware that looking medical things up on the internet is a very, very bad idea. There are too many worst case scenarios, horrible photographs and distressing stories, plus a whole lot of misinformation. It doesn't help when your tentative diagnosis is for something fairly rare either. Especially when the doctor failed to mention that you may have to live with it for the rest of your life, that it can only be managed instead of cured and that it can seriously effect one of the key areas of your life that makes you feel like a functioning woman.
You may have worked out that I did eventually cave in to curiosity and do a cursory web search. I'm not going to tell you what they think it is yet - it's too personal a thing to share with the world especially before there's a proper diagnosis. Once I have that I need to know what it means and start to work out how I feel about it other than confused and a bit scared.
But, with all my closest friends far away right now, it is good to write about it. Although JFK is being completely amazing, beyond what I could have hoped for, writing makes me feel more in control - that I'm doing something productive instead of wallowing.
In the real world I am mostly trying to have fun, despite the money problems. On Wednesday my dad took me to see two of the greatest Roma gypsy bands in the world at the Hackney Empire, organised by the Barbican, which was rather wonderful. Tonight I am going to see the ballet-comedy Coppelia perfomed by the Bolshoi at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden with JFK, which will hopefully be a little bit magical.
I am still heading to the car boot sale every weekend too, and finding bargains continues to fill me with joy. I think I might start trying to share that a little bit more here.
Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading my blog. Please do get in touch if there's anything you'd like me to write about.
Showing posts with label ballet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ballet. Show all posts
Friday, 23 July 2010
Monday, 3 May 2010
Bad blogger
I know, I know. I am a bad blogger. I have been to all sorts of places, done all sorts of things and had some pretty heavyweight conversations in the past week, but I couldn't get my head around writing about them.
I apologise.
In my defence, I did get half way through a post about baring legs in the spring weather, but it started raining and suddenly the post seemed a bit irrelevant.
Anyway, here is where I play catch up. In the last week my relationship has gone to the edge and back. Maybe not quite all the way back, but back enough to be able to breathe. There have been some tears and some heart rending moments, but there have also been some pretty lovely moments for the two of us this week as well and things feel generally much better.
Moving swiftly on, I have a rather good story about getting eyed up by Orlando Bloom at the ballet. I shall hopefully be dining out on this for a while because it makes me feel rather better about myself that I have for quite a while.
It is rare that I get any good perks through work, unless your idea of fun is attending a lecture by a semi-world famous architect in your spare time, so I jumped at the offer of two tickets to the ballet at an evening hosted by Audi. Yes, Audi the car makers. No, don't ask me why they invited an architecture journalist to a performance of Cinderella, because I have no idea. But I am very grateful they did. I took JFK as my date and decided to get my legs out in my black Acne sack dress and Topshop heels with my hair scraped back into a ponytail, lots of black eye liner and red lipstick. I even ditched my glasses for the dreaded contact lenses.
We had amazing grand tier seats. We were surrounded by tv celebs of the nicer kind. There were canapes of steak on a single chip and crab cakes and champagne during the intervals and a lobster buffet after the performance, which was fun, but a bit patchy. The principal dancers, cinderella and her prince played by Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares, were very good in my humble opinion so I was thrilled that they came back to meet the celebrities meaning I could get them to sign my programme. She was scarily sinewy up close, he was a bit of an old-fashioned hunk of the type that belongs on the cover of a Mills and Boon bodice ripper.
And I am fairly sure Orlando Bloom eyed me up. And then gave JFK a wink. So either he is gay, fancied us both, thought I was a prostitute or just through JFK had done well. I'm plumping for the latter as it is much better for my ego. The upshot of all this is, although I have never previously fancied Orlando Bloom, I now have filthy dreams about him.
Last weekend I also had my feet nibbled by fish in a bucket in the name of smoother skin.
Possibly the weirdest beauty treatment I have ever tried, it simply involves plonking your feet in a bucket of warm water with lots of tiny cleaner fish in it which then proceed to eat the dead skin off you feet. It sounds pretty foul, but feels surprisingly ok, especially when administered by a man with extremely nice arms and that traveller-bum thing going on that is, occasionally, more than a trifle attractive to look at (as long as you don't start asking him about his travels because anything he says is pretty much bound to be completely tedious).
The stall with the nibbly fish is in the newly opened and revamped stables market in Camden. Not what it once was, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I quite liked it. There were some interesting stalls and it had a nice atmosphere and I may even go back. Could this be the re-birth of Camden?
Although Camden makes me feel old, and brings back a disturbing mixture of memories from my teens and early twenties, I do hope it does have a renaissance because I am very fed up of East London.
On Wednesday I attended a Science Museum Late which focused on the issue of beauty. Aside from meeting some very interesting people, including the editor of marieclaire.co.uk and the curator of the museum's new gallery of sustainable fashion, the event was also unexpectedly fascinating. Sponsors L'Oreal assembled an impressive group of speakers for a round table discussion on why beauty matters and what beauty is.
Sadly, the panel neatly sidestepped some of the more interesting audience questions about skin lightening in india and the use of parabens in cosmetics, but there was a lot of talk about the importance of self esteem and identity that got me thinking. No talk about the flip side of course, the feelings of inadequacy beauty can engender in both the young and old, the frankly sinister spectre of plastic surgery or the fact that my little cousin feels that without a thick cake of make-up she is invisible.
Fashion and beauty have also always gone hand in hand, and there was no discussion of how our notions of beauty have changed with fashion or why. But it certainly got me thinking, and I shall be coming back to this at some point in the future.
Other things that have happened - I gave my cousin a make-under and she gave me a make-up, the result being that she looked like a less intimidatingly perfect version of Gwen Stefani and I looked like an oompa loompa that had an accident with the blusher. And today I went to the final day of the Dover Street Market market and spent too much money. More on this tomorrow. I promise.
I apologise.
In my defence, I did get half way through a post about baring legs in the spring weather, but it started raining and suddenly the post seemed a bit irrelevant.
Anyway, here is where I play catch up. In the last week my relationship has gone to the edge and back. Maybe not quite all the way back, but back enough to be able to breathe. There have been some tears and some heart rending moments, but there have also been some pretty lovely moments for the two of us this week as well and things feel generally much better.
Moving swiftly on, I have a rather good story about getting eyed up by Orlando Bloom at the ballet. I shall hopefully be dining out on this for a while because it makes me feel rather better about myself that I have for quite a while.
It is rare that I get any good perks through work, unless your idea of fun is attending a lecture by a semi-world famous architect in your spare time, so I jumped at the offer of two tickets to the ballet at an evening hosted by Audi. Yes, Audi the car makers. No, don't ask me why they invited an architecture journalist to a performance of Cinderella, because I have no idea. But I am very grateful they did. I took JFK as my date and decided to get my legs out in my black Acne sack dress and Topshop heels with my hair scraped back into a ponytail, lots of black eye liner and red lipstick. I even ditched my glasses for the dreaded contact lenses.
We had amazing grand tier seats. We were surrounded by tv celebs of the nicer kind. There were canapes of steak on a single chip and crab cakes and champagne during the intervals and a lobster buffet after the performance, which was fun, but a bit patchy. The principal dancers, cinderella and her prince played by Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares, were very good in my humble opinion so I was thrilled that they came back to meet the celebrities meaning I could get them to sign my programme. She was scarily sinewy up close, he was a bit of an old-fashioned hunk of the type that belongs on the cover of a Mills and Boon bodice ripper.
And I am fairly sure Orlando Bloom eyed me up. And then gave JFK a wink. So either he is gay, fancied us both, thought I was a prostitute or just through JFK had done well. I'm plumping for the latter as it is much better for my ego. The upshot of all this is, although I have never previously fancied Orlando Bloom, I now have filthy dreams about him.
Last weekend I also had my feet nibbled by fish in a bucket in the name of smoother skin.
Possibly the weirdest beauty treatment I have ever tried, it simply involves plonking your feet in a bucket of warm water with lots of tiny cleaner fish in it which then proceed to eat the dead skin off you feet. It sounds pretty foul, but feels surprisingly ok, especially when administered by a man with extremely nice arms and that traveller-bum thing going on that is, occasionally, more than a trifle attractive to look at (as long as you don't start asking him about his travels because anything he says is pretty much bound to be completely tedious).
(Nibbly fish)
Although Camden makes me feel old, and brings back a disturbing mixture of memories from my teens and early twenties, I do hope it does have a renaissance because I am very fed up of East London.
On Wednesday I attended a Science Museum Late which focused on the issue of beauty. Aside from meeting some very interesting people, including the editor of marieclaire.co.uk and the curator of the museum's new gallery of sustainable fashion, the event was also unexpectedly fascinating. Sponsors L'Oreal assembled an impressive group of speakers for a round table discussion on why beauty matters and what beauty is.
Sadly, the panel neatly sidestepped some of the more interesting audience questions about skin lightening in india and the use of parabens in cosmetics, but there was a lot of talk about the importance of self esteem and identity that got me thinking. No talk about the flip side of course, the feelings of inadequacy beauty can engender in both the young and old, the frankly sinister spectre of plastic surgery or the fact that my little cousin feels that without a thick cake of make-up she is invisible.
Fashion and beauty have also always gone hand in hand, and there was no discussion of how our notions of beauty have changed with fashion or why. But it certainly got me thinking, and I shall be coming back to this at some point in the future.
Other things that have happened - I gave my cousin a make-under and she gave me a make-up, the result being that she looked like a less intimidatingly perfect version of Gwen Stefani and I looked like an oompa loompa that had an accident with the blusher. And today I went to the final day of the Dover Street Market market and spent too much money. More on this tomorrow. I promise.
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