I am Amélie Poulain, if Amélie Poulain had to play charades in a personal banking meeting to make herself understood

Oh yah, so much nicer than Manchester.

So I'm here in France! 

Here, on this year abroad that I have railed against throughout my whole uni career, having led my own stroppy personal crusade against 'living in different countries' being the ultimate thing you could possibly do in your life. 

(Yes, great, you're living in Stockholm/Madrid/Tokyo for 6 months before you jet off to the next city. Now please tell me about the meaningful relationships you're going to make in that short amount of time and how much fun you're really going to have when you're in a foreign country, away from your friends and family from home, where you can barely speak the language.) (Or, alternatively, tell me about how your four-month holiday - yes it was a holiday - in Indonesia was just so horrible and difficult.) (Okay, I'm done, I promise.)

So it is with great shame and guilt that I report that so far (admittedly two weeks in), I'm having quite a lot of fun. As it turns out, wandering the streets of Paris with the sun on your skin, stopping off in a beautiful garden to eat a delectable pastry, and doing your shopping in a charming little market are all quite nice things to do. Also, as I've been on my own the whole time, there is nobody to stop me from giving in to pretentiousness while I stroll through the Métro to the soundtrack of buskers, preening and imagining that I look just like Amélie. That being said, I haven't started work yet - so yes, I am in effect on holiday in Paris on my own for two weeks. 

This holiday has, of course, been intruded on by Real Life Things, such as going to estate agents and opening bank accounts and having meetings with my new workplace and whatnot. Let it be known that even when I do these things in my native country, in my mother tongue, I feel constantly like a 13-year-old wearing an adult-shaped body suit. In France, speaking a language I'm half-comfortable with, dealing with systems different to those in England, I am useless.

Here are some things that have happened so far:

1. While opening a bank account, I realised halfway through a sentence that I didn't know the word for 'ATM' and ostentatiously mimed one by making a big square with my hands and pretending to take something out of it. The lady who was opening my account, bless her, not only understood (and told me the word) but also didn't laugh at me. I, on the other hand, spent the entire rest of the meeting desperately trying not to giggle as it sunk in what I had just done. 

On the plus side, it taught me that no matter how long it takes, you can communicate anything - you will get there in the end.

2. I retroactively realised that the man in a suit at the shopping centre entrance was not, in fact, a salesman, and was actually a security guard checking everybody's bag. Just a few days earlier, after they had obviously asked to check my bag and I had misheard, I had sailed past with a 'non merci'. Good thing I'm not a terrorist.

3. The worst of all: the other day, I met with the headmistress of the school I'm going to be teaching in. It was all going relatively well, I thought, until I asked if the children were sometimes méchant. This word was taught to me in school in the context of animals: a puppy who stole a shoe, for example, as far I was concerned, would be méchant. Turns out that, at the very least for people, it does not mean naughty or cheeky. Turns out I just straight up asked this lovely woman if her pupils were evil criminals. Lesson learned. 

I'd like to think that I'll be able to report back in another two weeks saying that I'm practically a native. If not though, hopefully at least I'll have another list of ways I've made a complete tit of myself.

currently feeling 21/11

Saw this photo on AnOther. Swooned. This is everything I want currently: everything in various shades of brown (down to the sepia-ish tinge to the picture), heeled knee-high boots, maybe even chandeliers (though probably, in my case, the sort you get at Tesco Extra). Also, I'm amused at how the man at the bottom left looks like his outfit is part of the show and he's just about to jump up onto the catwalk at any second. After all, it's not a fashion photo if there's not at least something ridiculous in the frame.

autumn vibes

As the leaves begin to tumble from the trees in earnest and frost begins to spread a glittering carpet over the pavement, I too fall back into autumn traditions which are far less noble and generally consist of getting overly excited about wearing orange and feeling the urge to consume copious amounts of red wine. 

All black is also a very viable option, and amber (or amber-ish) jewellery is perfect. I don't recommend taking up smoking for autumn in order to look mysterious; swinging around a carpet bag, wearing lots of eyeliner and listening to The National should suffice.  

muliebrity by seraglioe featuring a zip back dress 

These King Kennedy carpet bags are probably the epitome of rich autumnal luxe. And these descriptions of outrageous dinner parties of the 1800s are sort of second-hand satisfying the wine-drinking impulse. See: a pie, which when cut into, reveals a whole dish of jewels, iridescent fountains and 2000 'arrangements' of fish. 

The description of the diamond miners does, however, serve as a slightly sobering reminder of how somebody had to dig up all of those beautiful jewels. I'd be quite happy, instead, to settle for a slightly more innocuous inside autumnal meal like this indoors picnic via Polkadots and Vodka Shots (the former blog of Maja Hattvang). 

When I was about 14, I had the pink-wine-and-pavlova-on-shiny-blanket image saved in a folder of pictures that summed up a life I wanted to live when cool and grown-up. Now grown-up, albeit extremely uncool, I think I could just about manage an impromptu cake and wine picnic. Donning as black turtleneck, of course, and some amber jewellery. In an ideal world, it would take place on a beautiful Turkish carpet, but I'll have to make do with my rather less lavish Ikea version - I'm no Victorian billionaire, after all. And perhaps later, post-copious amounts of red wine, we'll go for a night-time walk through swirling leaves and mist and a delicate coating of sparkling, diamond-like frost...

Back to school

This time three years ago, when I was starting Sixth Form, I was scouring H&M and Zara, trying on suit trousers and dreaming of my fantasy professional wardrobe, which, if I recall correctly, contained satchels, fitted suits, and gratuitous use of brooches. I wanted to transform myself into an 80s businesswoman carrying four phones a la Kate Beaton, or, on other days, a vintage art student. I had plans far grander than my old, boring school uniform.

Naturally, of course, my neat, pretty little skirt suits and my clicky kitten heels and my carefully-chosen jewellery devolved quickly into a uniform of holey tights, the same scruffy, paint-stained velvet blazer, and whichever pull-on dress I could dig, crumpled, out of my drawer. It is not easy to dress stylishly when you get up every morning, without fail, half an hour later than the absolute latest you should have been up.

Of course, now at university I don't have a dress code. I can rock up to lectures in pyjamas for all anyone cares (and indeed, it might come to that - I haven't become an early riser in the past three years). I still, however, love clothes that catch my imagination and make me feel like I have transformed myself. Here are some looks with blouses, pinafores, turtlenecks and brooches, to wear if you want to feel like a cross between a 70s secretary, an eccentric art teacher and the Queen.

Photos are taken in the garden by my mum, of course; it is back to school after all. (Disclaimer: the glasses are genuinely needed. See: middle photo in which I am squinting, blindly, at the camera, like a pinafore'd badger.)

Outfit 1: Shirt: charity shop, brooch: hand-me-down from my mum, skirt: charity shop, shoes: Deichmann

Outfit 2: Shirt: charity shop, pinafore: charity shop, brooch: my mum's, borrowed, shoes: hand-me-downs

Outfit 3: Top: New Look,  skirt: Topshop, cardigan: charity shop, brooch: car boot sale, shoes: Deichmann, as before

Voutsa

Hand painted mural (via)

If I did happen to be choosing wallpaper for the millionaire New York brownstone apartment of my dreams, I'd definitely be giving Voutsa a ring. I didn't think that wallpaper porn was a thing, but Voutsa's multicoloured, water-colourish designs are absolutely gorgeous.

(pictured: Octopussi, Ballet Russes Mini on Flat White, Vagina Tree)

They also do lampshades, screens and clothes, in case you wanted to emerge from your beautiful apartment in an equally beautiful outfit.

While I'm sure my landlord wouldn't appreciate me painting all over the walls, I'm sure I could stretch to a t-shirt. Maybe not vagina tree-print though...

Sunday morning vibes

Above are images from different Sundays, but both nice ones. I feel like there two sides to the Sunday coin. One is getting up early, going on a pretty walk and feeling productive. The other is getting up as late as humanly possible, eating a labour-intensive breakfast and sitting around in the same room listening to music all day. Have a cup of tea, put on a good album, hopefully bask in the sunshine and have a nice Sunday.

Adventures in Adulthood: The Moving House Edition

photo mine. it's truthful.

Moving into halls was far easier than I thought it would be. I was handed over a key, then handed over to somebody else, who walked me to my building and left me to begin the rest of my life. There were directions to the town and people in official hoodies waving signs and paperwork packs and about fifty billion emails, and even when my chair was broken and my internet didn't work, it all got resolved within a day.

A few months of living in halls, and I thought of myself as a Real Live Adult. I tidied my room without my mum forcing me to. I cooked meals for myself, and not all of them involved ketchup. (Although I did once, on a particularly grim day of essay-writing, perilously close to a deadline, buy just a packet of chicken dippers and a bottle of ketchup at Lidl. The cashier's response was 'we all have those days, don't we?'. I then proceeded to eat the entire packet. It was a low point.)

I was so very excited to get out of halls. The house I had paid a deposit for was a promised land, with a dishwasher and a double bed and peaceful nights, un-punctuated by the sound of the flat above singing Happy Birthday and banging on the floor for the fourth time this week. (How many birthdays can a flat of ten people have?!) 

Unfortunately, I didn't quite take into consideration how much students are looked after by halls staff. I live with two other girls, and none of us are stupid, but when we got into the house and saw the fridge and freezer wide open, we naturally assumed that new houses just don't have electricity. We rooted about in the cupboard under the stairs and pressed a switch, and the house alarm went off. We pressed the switch again, panicking, and the fire alarm started bleeping ominously. We decided it needed batteries, and went about unpacking with the equivalent of Chinese water torture as a soundtrack. 

Our landlord then arrived, and kindly told us that the electricity had already been on, and flicked the switch on the plug that was very obviously connected to the fridge. The beeping stopped. Peace was restored. We cleaned the house top to toe, hoovered the patchwork 70s carpets, and wiped the layer of stickiness off the kitchen counters. Thoroughly pleased with ourselves and feeling competent, we broke out the gin and tonics and settled down in front of 24 Hours in A&E (like the wild, crazy students we are). 

Then the bloody slugs arrived. There were two big fat ones slithering across the freshly-cleaned kitchen floor, and a few more tiny ones wriggling across the Artex walls. For some reason, we had anticipated everything going wrong except this. We'd assumed that naturally, the wifi wouldn't work. We'd discounted the possibility of having hot water for at least a week, and that we'd be living in the lap of luxury if the heating worked just once over the course of the year. But nobody walks into their kitchen and expects their foot to meet something plump and slimy. We had had a few gin and tonics, and we were absolutely traumatized. 

There it is: my experience as a student so far in a nutshell. Dodgy carpets, dodgy flats, dodgy food choices and dodgy TV. Oh, and alcohol, of course. 

on being long distance

image via tallulah fontaine @ tumblr

Since previous posts, things have changed. (As they tend to do when you don't update a blog for a year and a half.)

I have now moved away from my teeny tiny town in the middle of nowhere, and currently live in Manchester, which is obviously a bit more exciting. I have emerged from a year's living there so far with high expectations about public transport (there's a bus every thirty seconds rather than once an hour!!!!!), a paranoia about my so-called posh Southern accent, and a new-found appreciation for Greggs (who am I kidding, I've always loved Greggs).

I love Manchester, and how there's always something going on there. I love living away from home, and the freedom to visit people whenever I want and get in at 4 in the morning, and the technical ability to eat chicken dippers for tea without my mum clubbing me to death with the packet for cooking junk food in the house. I love living up north (everyone is friendly, it's cheap, and they call bread rolls barms which is really cool).

The only problem is that my boyfriend has moved away from home too, and now lives in, as far as Manchester is concerned, the arse-end of nowhere. The journey from Manchester to Cambridge, if you're taking the cheap route, is five hours long and involves a train and a coach: almost literally planes, trains and automobiles. It also requires money, and a lot of planning. Spontaneity is supposed to be sexy, isn't it? Sitting on National Rail Enquiries a month in advance is most decidedly unsexy, as is waking up at three in the morning to get the first train with unbrushed hair and dribble on your chin. Even less sexy is watching somebody be sick in a Tesco bag on the X5 bus and lob it out of the window into Milton Keynes Station. The X5 bus is not a place that fosters romance or elegance.

 Being in a long-distance relationship also makes me an extremely boring person. At home I was always confused about people who couldn't spend a day without their partners; being alone can be so lovely! Then I got into a habit of spending every evening on Skype talking about the inanest shit (for example, extreme interest in what the other had for tea), starting to miss my boyfriend after two days of not seeing him, and, worst of all, may or may not have fallen asleep spooning a pillow on more than one occasion.

As difficult and lonely (and expensive) as a long-distance relationship can be, however, there are silver linings. Neither the freezing walk to the train station at three in the morning, nor Milton Keynes Station, nor the X5 bus are particularly romantic. But running into the arms of the person you love the most, bags and all, on a sunny morning on a Cambridge green is rather cinematic. And curling up in somebody's arms after months of not seeing them, laughing in almost disbelief that they're real and you're with them, is probably one of the romantic things around.

Then again, I say this from the perspective of somebody who's home for the summer and is a fifteen minute walk away from the love of my life. So think of me next September as I slump on the 4:30 train with bird's nest hair, feeling as unenthustiastic and unsexy as humanly possible.

Writing experiments

image via tumblr - unknown source

Recently I found this list of writing experiments and am absolutely intrigued. I love the idea of writing about a single thing every day. I have recently rediscovered a list I wrote once of all my favourite things, including:

• the smell of cumin
• the amber colour of tea when the sun shines on it
• orange roses
• how legs look underwater
• recipes written without measurements

I am really tempted to start writing a journal about things I see from the bus, however, which I feel would be far more interesting. 

Coatspiration

image via

As far as I'm concerned, this year's pastel pink winter has been the most irritating trend since leggings-as-trousers. (Irritation at said trend may or may not be to do with the fact that I definitely participated it when I was 13 - oh god, the cringing involved in looking back on old photos!) Not because it's aesthetically displeasing, but because I'm ginger, freckled and generally unsuited as a person for wearing pink. There is a woman who lives in my town who has the most beautiful tailored pastel pink coat and since she is blonde (an AW13 free pass to looking nice) looks amazing in it. I will admit that I'm jealous.

Even if I can't wear pink, I'd still settle for a beautiful pastel coat. And I would very definitely nick the little boy's look: shiny shoes, white shirt and a gorgeous powder blue coat. Beret optional but preferred. In an ideal world the walk to school would not instantly muddify my shoes and my shirts would not always be creased and I would be able to look chic and tres parisienne in a beret... But then again, in an ideal world, I'd be pretty in winter pink.

(As for the artistic rebel on the left, a baggy white t-shirt dotted with random colour and a very simple necklace and something denim seems like a great summer option. Thank you, opinionated 50's ad!)

The problem with the future...

...Is that it's completely unknown. A room full of darkness. I am seventeen years old and The Future is something that I'm currently having to feel my way through prematurely, tapping on the walls and sliding my palms around hazy shapes of university courses and job opportunities. What you might think is shaped like an A-grade might actually be a C in disguise. The bannister of work experience that you brush your hand along might lead to a solid shape of Well-Paid Job but the stairs might vanish into an unemployment trap-door instead. It's a dangerous thing to do, mapping out your future. It leaves no room for disappointment.

Right now I (and most other people of my age) are being shot at with questions about the future. Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten years? What they mean by this, of course, is: Which job will you be working in? How much money will you have? Will your education have been worth it? Work, work, work.

Like many people, my answer is an increasingly-panicked I don't know I don't know I don't know! Some people take an exploratory squint into The Future and immediately stub their toe on a vocation. From there the work may not be easy but the planning certainly is. If you know that you are going to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a vet, it's easy to see yourself in five years or ten. Once the distant shape of success is obvious in the landscape of your life yet to come, it's easy to make a route to it. If you know what job you are going to have, it's easy to imagine yourself performing it, easy to conjure up images of somebody with your face in the appropriate uniform, frozen in industrious imagery like scenes from a children's reading sample. For people who know what they want to do, it's easy to present yourself via your job, because your dream job is part of you already.

As a result of having no clue what I want to do, my answers are all slightly unorthodox. My visions of my future self all seem to revert to frivolity. I know I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a vet. I know I'd like to see what living in a city is like. I see my twenty-seven year old self as a red-headed figure in heels coming home from an unknown job to a flat with books and house plants and a cat. I see, perhaps, a wedding to a man with a greyed-out face. Children who look like me for lack of any other factor. I want to be successful enough to shop in Waitrose on a regular basis, for lack of better job description, but that isn't as such an acceptable answer.

I want to study English and French at a good university (with old buildings and trees), and I want to write, and my vision of The Future doesn't stretch any further than that. A satisfactory answer for now, perhaps. But when I see myself in five years, a girl with my face but different clothes on, the one thing I know for certain is that this answer will not suffice anymore.

On paleo mothers

image via ren-hang at flickr

Recently I have gone on a crusade of healthy eating, which is partially due to a desire for slim, tanned summer wholesomeness and partially due to the crippling guilt of a recent impromptu lunch of pizza and ice-cream. As a result, I have been joining in with my mother in smugly declining bread and cakes in favour of salads.

My mother has been Paleo for a few months now, and the rest of my family has somewhat got used to it. There was the initial shock, of course, of the banning of orange juice and cereal and puddings every day. Pasta became a high-risk substance, sugar in tea became the work of the devil and talk of sandwiches was met with dirty looks. Suddenly chocolate was something furtive to sneak into the house wrapped in a jumper or stuffed into a bag, like attempting to smuggle alcohol under the nose of my parents, only ridiculous. My mum spent days on end reading health articles and constantly updating us on what she'd eaten and how it made her feel and the state of her health. Every conversation was warped by her into a discussion on her eating habits. It was as if she had become devoted to religion overnight, obsessing constantly about cauliflower rice and the Omega 6 content of almonds, rapturously quoting food statistics like Bible passages. Instead of urging miserable people to find Jesus, she would proclaim that all their problems could be fixed with a Proper Food. We (my brothers and I, that is) were her reluctant converts, rebelliously chomping crisps and sausage rolls in the Tesco car park as a sort of sullen refusal to conform, our vanilla version of dyed hair and tattoos. Blasphemy was confined to two words, always spoken with a definite capital letter at the beginning and a slight impressive whisper: Grain, and Rancid Fats.

It is only now after the fervour of resistance that I am perhaps realising that food as a form of rebellion is not necessarily the best thing in terms of health. It is a trap that I have fallen into before. As a child, my mother, ever well-meaning, was determined to feed us the best things she possibly could. And she did. We ate organic vegetables and cooked breakfasts, home-made dinners and whole-fat milk. Cereal was strictly banned if the of which sugars section on the packet was over 10g, and Nestlé was exiled from the house after a political incident. She worked her fingers to the bone keeping us well-fed. Not a single ready meal passed my lips my whole childhood; she never stopped working even for a night. And now, of course, I am incredibly grateful for her efforts, even though as a child I was blind to them. I longed to fit in with the other children, you see, particularly in primary school. This combined with a natural sweet tooth made my daily packed lunch a nightmare. I would pull out my squashed hummus and carrot or cheese and onion brown-bread sandwiches out of my lunchbox with weary distaste, gazing longingly at my classmates slurping milkshakes and munching on chocolate bars. My small tupperware box of nuts and dried fruit would never quite compare to the crumpling of packets of Wotsits and Skips. My dream was to be able to open crisps at lunchtime by squeezing the ends of the packets - POP! - like those in the lunch hall with effortless cool, the sort I thought could be obtained by eating the right things for lunch and wearing the right hair accessories. More than once, I have been met with the cry of 'Urgh, what's that?' upon biting into a radish, which was hell for a self-conscious wallflower such as myself.

Luckily these days I am more likely to have an impressive lunch if it unfalteringly healthy rather than the other way round, and hummus sandwiches and radishes are more likely to evoke the envy of my crisp-crunching coke-sipping friends. And while I am still reluctant to completely give up Grain, Sugar and Rancid Fats, I respect my mother a great deal more for her efforts to get us to eat healthily.

Girls who hate girls

image via cryybaby at etsy

Today, an acquaintance of mine announced in a conversation about one girl notorious for doing fairly nasty things: 'All girls are bitches'. A female acquaintance, that is. With one disparaging sentence, she condemned half the population, leaving the rest of the girls in the conversation to raise eyebrows and glance knowingly at each other. There will always be girls who hate girls: girls who are frightened of other girls, girls who don't want to be 'like other girls', girls who believe that other girls are weak or silly. I think that this particular specimen was a mixture of all of these things: a girl of the 'ladette' variety, fixed in the belief that other girls are drama-spewing mascara machines.

It's never entirely clear what the word 'bitch' actually means, and from what angle she was approaching it. Was she referring to cattiness, the assumption that a woman can't meet another woman without planning the right moment to stab her in the back? Or did it take on a slightly weaker connotation, the idea of a 'man's bitch', a criticism of the audacity of girls to have boyfriends and sometimes cry and occasionally get emotional about shopping? Either way, she deliberately isolated herself from these so-called 'other girls', casting them as a generic hair-flicking chocolate-guzzling mass of mood-swings and betrayal.

Aside from the obvious offence I took at being directly called a bitch merely on account of having two X chromosomes, I just felt sorry for her. Because if there's one lesson I have learnt in the past few years, it's that girls need girls. Oh, I believed precisely the same as her, even as recently as last year. Long story short, a drawn-out adolescent drama occurred which left me temporarily minus a group of friends. We were all very young, we were all hopelessly attempting to grow up, and none of us were particularly well-tuned to the feelings of others. Angry, frustrated and most of all confused, I found myself isolated from Girl World. Around me, friendship groups seemed to weave tighter into each other as I approached. I discovered flirting mostly out of desperation and to my utter wonder I found myself having easy conversations. Boys were just easy to be around, I found - no need for anything complicated, to feel guilty for not having organised a shopping trip or to wonder all day about slightly ambiguous remarks. No-strings attached, quick-and-easy friendship. The sort of friendships that were the equivalent of a pot noodle over a roast dinner, perhaps, but I would rather have eaten metaphorical pot noodles for the rest of my life than starved.

Months passed. I acquired a boyfriend and started talking to his friends: an instant, blow-up friendship group. Suddenly I was instantly invited to events and my social life picked up again. I was determined to be a real part of the group, to slot in perfectly. Embittered, I savagely convinced myself that I hated my girlfriends. I was determined for them to be boring and air-headed, not worth my time. That I had Real Feelings and Real Emotions, whereas they had pale imitations of the real thing. I truly believed that I had poetically suffered loneliness and therefore had bragging rights to some sort of tragic eccentricity. From afar, I watched them have sleepovers and worry about calories and discuss the events of Made in Chelsea, and thought them shallow. I, however, had substance - I was Not Like Other Girls, I was different and special!

Only, of course, I wasn't, and I'm not. Not unlike other girls, that is. After growing up a little, I discovered the astonishing truth: that all girls have emotions just as strong as anybody else. Real love, real hate, real happiness. Even girls who are nothing like me at all: even girls who have modelesque looks, even girls who play four different sports and go running for fun. As it turns out, they were sad that I'd disappeared from their lives and I was actually completely deluding myself about this so-called hatred and I discovered the truth: that having sleepovers and counting calories doesn't make you any less of a human being, and that actually, I was no less lonely in my attempts to be a girl in a group of boys.

Sisterhood is an anguish-ridden thing that utilises those Real Emotions in the best and worst ways possible. It's a feeling of belonging, of knowing that there's no possible other place to be. Of secrets and the sharing of secrets of varying importance. Of terrible competition and debilitating jealousy and sometimes absolute infuriation, and the most ridiculous, inextricable fondness. I still haven't watched an episode of Made In Chelsea, but I'm not entirely sure I need to.

a first post

Follow my blog with Bloglovin I am a 17-year-old girl living in Britain with an penchant for writing and a love of vignettes. I like girl power and the fauvism movement and charity shops (and the smugness that goes with a good purchase). Sometimes I wax poetic about 60's clothing and showy costume jewellery and fully believe that fashion is the best way to pretend you're somebody else. Though mostly, when I'm not rambling self-indulgently, I have a fairly dull life mainly consisting of cups of tea and over-usage of Tumblr.

So - welcome to my blog then, I suppose.