… eating roadkill is probably still a really bad idea.

The problem is that those punters are more in love with France.

Sure, they entertain the occasional dalliance with Portugal, have a guilty week in The Algarve, maybe a weekend of wandering the streets of Lisbon or Porto, not trying enough of the local food (there IS A SPLENDID book on the matter), but they always go back to their first love, France.  A gîte here, a plage there, and a good dose of hawheehawheehaw all over the place.

France is that boy who doesn’t love you.  He kissed you once at the school disco… but that was only for a bet.  He doesn’t even know your name.

But, Portugal, you are the specky girl who REALLY REALLY wants to be friends.  People kind of like you, but, christ, you’re just that little bit too insecure and cloying. You’re really clingy and too keen to impress.

Whenever, someone pays you a compliment, you tweet about it or stick it in a newspaper:

“Some celeb chef from Lithuania thinks Portuguese cookery is quite nice! Ooooooh”

or

“Somebody famous from another country said something REALLY patronizing about Portugal’s charms! Lucky us!!”.

Portugal, STOP IT.

When Jeremy Irons was here last month, what did you do?  Did you say “WHO HE?” and go back to your desk?… or did you send half the government to meet him for embarrassing press conferences.  For god’s sake, it was just Jeremy Irons, not God, or The Queen. He looked a bit embarrassed.

Portugal, STOP IT. STOP CARING.  AND GET MORE STUCK UP.  LIKE FRANCE.

What do you think France does when someone says something nice about his food, his weather, his landscape?  Do you think he goes all weak at the knees?  NO, HE JUST SHRUGS, in his French hawheehawheehaw way.   He DOESN’T CARE AND WE ALL LOVE HIM AND WANT HIM TO GIVE US BABIES.

So, Portugal, what are you going to do about it?

We’re a bit keen on the superhero flick in this house. The grown-ups, that is. I don’t think the girls care all that much.

I thought it was a very good film. I’ll tell you how good it was. The sporadic SSSHHHHHH-ings directed at children (who obviously shouldn’t have been there, it’s a 12 (here in Pt, at least), you know, not a 6, TWELVE you blithering fools, which doesn’t mean you should take two SIX year olds) were more heartfelt than I have heard in a long time.

A great many of us just wanted to watch the film and perve over Robert Downey Jr. (except for the too-controlled beard) and Mark Ruffalo (best Banner ever) and Cobie Smulders (slight girl crush, sorry) and Scarlett Johansson’s hair (WHY can’t I get mine that colour?) and Tom Hiddleston as a brunette… I’m sure he’ll be the new go-to Englishman for film baddies after this, with that grin. The visual effects were fabulous, the action gripping, the funnies (mostly generated by Hulk) were funny, and I didn’t care about the bits that didn’t make sense.  If only I hadn’t had to cope with the voluble eight year old sitting right behind me and his oh so kicky-kicky little brother who sat behind one of my girls, kick kick kicking incessantly and their mother who pathetically whimpered in agreement every time her children were shushed, the film would have been so much more fun to watch.

I came very close to standing up, clapping my hands and announcing very loudly that all children under the age of nine, and anyone else who had shopping bags that for some reason require loud exploration in a darkened auditorium, and anyone else who didn’t REALLY want to be there, should just leave, and that the rest of us would like the projectionist (or robot) to restart the film, and then making an example of the two brats behind me by picking them up by their necks (not scruffs of their necks, please note) and throwing them out myself.

Like I say, I fear one of us (me) might be arrested if my jangled nerves are exposed to another Saturday afternoon viewing of a blockbuster at our local multiplex (Almada Fórum).

IT’S A TWELVE, you buffoons.

You live in Britain. You speak fluent English.

You are in conversation with a similarly English-speaking British friend or acquaintance, when you say something like “…and I took out a fag and lit it.”

“You can’t say fag” says your companion.

“Excuse me?” says you.

“You can’t say fag anymore” says your… oh, follow the pattern

“And why the hell not?”

“Because you have to say cigarette.”

“No, I don’t.” (knowing exactly where this is going)

“But fag is rude.”

“It’s not. It’s just a word for cigarette. In English. We are speaking English.”

“Don’t you know what fag means?”

“Yes, of course I know what it means… in both British English and American English. I’m quite cosmopolitan like that.”

“So you know that fag is rude, then”

“No, it isn’t, not in the context in which I am using it AND in the context that WE ARE SPEAKING BRITISH ENGLISH WITH OUR FEET PLANTED ON BRITISH SOIL.”

“But in American English it is a derogatory term for homosexual!”

“Did I not  just explicitly explain that, yes, I know what it means in American English?”

“So you can’t say fag, then”

Your head implodes.

… and… scene.

Wouldn’t happen, would it? (Or an equivalent version if you were American.)  No-one would expect you to stop saying fag or rubber or biscuit in a non-American context (biscuit isn’t rude, it’s just those crazy Americans’ name for the SCONE they give you with fried chicken which makes it a bit WRONG).  If someone DID say that you shouldn’t say some word that means something else rude in American, you would almost certainly tell them to fuck off or laugh pityingly at them, because they had surely lost their mind.

Now, go back to that scene above and swap all instances of English for Portuguese, British for European Portugal and American for Brazilian, and all instances of ‘fag’ for ‘bicha’, ‘cigarette’ for ‘queue’ and figure out something else to say about that queue rather than lighting it because that doesn’t work, huh?

Then swap you for me, and the other person for someone Portuguese that I know and you have an almost exact transcript of a conversation I had last week (and have had several other times with several other people). Except for the fact that the conversation was in Portuguese, obv.

In real life, I continued with a mini lecture on having some bloody pride in your own language.

Why would someone, or a whole swathe of people, effectively kowtow to an incoming dialect? There are a few thousand Brazilians here, and refrain from saying bicha to them if you like, but why would you censor yourself in general?

Is it just a way of showing off that one knows some general knowledge, a way of explaining that one knows what ‘bicha’ means in Brazilian?
Or is it more sinisterly a sign of the lack of self esteem the country doesn’t realise it suffers?  (More on that in my next post.) Fortunately, there are a good proportion of stroppy, strident Portuguese speakers who are pro-bicha and pro- any other word that you’re suddenly not supposed to say because your cleaning lady or grandmother saw it on a Brazilian soap.

So, get in the ‘bicha’ to fight the good fight

I spent my morning in the mammogram waiting room. Before you worry, there was nothing of note to be found inside these bloody bazookas of mine, this isn’t one of those posts, those posts that we all worry that one day we will find ourselves writing, those heartbreaking posts that we read from time to time in blogs and forums and twitter and facebook, written on the day when someone’s life becomes subsumed into the fight against cancer.

For the first part of your post-adolescent life, they’re a great sex aid and a glass holder. Then they’re quite useful for feeding things. Then they go back, eventually to being a sex aid and a good way for some men to avoid eye contact with you all together. Sometimes, they are a good conversation starter, and, if you are lucky, you can keep your phone, your fags, your lighter, your car keys, your house keys and your gin and tonic down your cleavage. They get bigger as you get fatter, they hurt, they are always in the way and bras adequate for the job are extremely expensive and when you find a good one that you like that doesn’t give you big round udderlike pendulums (I looked up pendula. it’s too archaic for me to use, apparently), they go and change the whole range.  And then, slowly and subliminally, as you start towards middle-age, they begin to feel like a terrible curse, waiting to catch up on you and carry you away.

Getting middle-aged is so liberating, some say. Arse, I say. Maybe it’s true that I don’t care so much about what people think of me and I feel freer to stick two, three or four fingers up at it all, but that feeling of freedom is undermined by the rest of the stinking pisspot of fear and paranoia that not being young any more can be (and, please, people in your sixties, please stop telling me I’m young. I’m three weeks off forty-two. I could be the grandmother of a ten year old if I had tried hard enough).

In the lead up to a breast exam, of course, everything goes through my mind, especially if the reason I’ve booked the mammo is because of subtle stuff and pains and changes that have happened recently and the fact that I’m supposed to do them yearly now that I’m in my forties (is that the case everywhere?) and it’s six months since I should have done it.  I don’t need to explain all those fears that go through my mind, because I’m sure you’ve thought the same things at some point, especially if you have kids or have had people in your life die before they should or have valiant friends who live with cancer (I have one who is a walking miracle, she’s been dealing with it for twenty years….wotcha, MLE, if you’re reading this)…i.e. you are an average Josephine.

In imminent-breast exam mode, I turn off the TV when there’s a news item about cancer or I watch it through my fingers. The billboards telling us to remember to get tested “because early detection is best!” have been everywhere this month in Portugal and I have to drive past six of them on the way to school. And of course there’s a torrent of breast cancer on twitter the day before my tests.  Of course, all of this is just confirmation bias or something… I notice it because it’s at the top of my current agenda.

I spend hours convincing myself there’s something to worry about and hours persuading myself that there isn’t.  I’m worried that if I persuade myself there’s nothing, only to be told there’s something, that I will fall apart and die on the spot, so try and come to terms already with there being something. On car journeys to the supermarket, I bargain with the fates. I remind them of my being only 41, my having kids, my not quite having ever had a house finished, until this one, which is imminent. I drive myself insane with superstitious nonsense about what I deserve if I think that I’ll be fine. Then I remember that I don’t believe in any gods or fates, only in the randomness of the universe, so that doesn’t help much. I barely slept last night and the few nights before that were broken.

Once I’m in the waiting room, there are all the other women waiting, doing a fine job, like I hope I am, at not looking anxious. I’m shitting myself, but I’m also calm, because at least now I’ll know. I’m 90% sure there’s something wrong. I don’t tweet that I am there.  That’d be extra tempting fate.

After a short wait, I have my tits squeezed to death in the outsized ham-slicer and am sent out to wait for my ultrasound. I wonder if they test for testicular cancer like this and am entirely sure that they don’t because no man would stick his bits into this monstrous machine.  During the hour that I have to wait, I drop my eyes whenever the girl who did the mammo walks past, because she will surely have seen the plates, and her expression might show pity and concern which means that one of us women in the waiting room has something to worry about.

A doctor came and did the ultrasound and announced kindly that there was “nothing in particular to see”, I relaxed a little and it was over.  I felt like a washed out plastic bag for the rest of the day, not elated, because I knew that this will be how it is forever now.  And if it’s not my boobs, it’ll be the other organs and glands and bits of me that I can be worrying about between mammograms.

There could be any part of my body that could come and get me, or any illness that might sweep me away.  But it’s the boobs that are here in front of me, always present, always reminding me. As I lie in bed writing this on my laptop, I can barely see the screen. It’s the boobs that make so many women prone to cancer and it’s no fault of their own. For such a useful bit of the anatomy, it’s a total bummer that it can also really fuck you over.

And this is what it’s like to be middle-aged so far.  I am quite good at pushing things out of mind for long periods, but oh boy, when the worries get me, they really get me.  This is what I have to look forward to isn’t it?

Now that we’re all obliged to at least try to live forever, the pressure is on us even more.  The constant drip drip drip of “this will give you cancer” and “diabetes is surely the next step after THAT cake” and “heart disease is the biggest killer” and all the maddenly badly understood “x% increase of death risk” statistics that not particularly bright journalists stick on the front page of the papers are probably not doing much for my mental health and blood pressure.  Oh, and, yeah, mental health and blood pressure are bad for you too.  I know we’re insanely lucky to have 21st century medicine and diagnostics (oh, and dentistry, don’t forget how lucky we are to have modern dentistry), but sometimes I’d like to forget that I need to be constantly monitored for catastrophe.  My imagination is just too catastrophe-prone.

Maybe I need to drink more.

I’ve been trying to write this as a coherent “I have a general point to make” post, but I have failed horribly, so I’m attempting a bullet point approach, although most of these bulleted thoughts are interconnected. Bear with me. I am incoherent.

1. Five months away from blogging won’t kill you.

I haven’t blogged since mid-November. I tweeted a bit but not enough to be considered habitual. I was tired, a bit depressed and felt I had little to say to anyone. I had fallen out of love with the internet. It was dawning on me that the relentless angst of staying OUT THERE and funny and visible and whatever, hoping for the retweets and the f******k shares, being pathetically pleased if someone superfamous tweeted something I’d done, enjoying brief spikes in views and comments and reactions and activity, trying to think up stuff that my e-friends would find funny, was really and subtly tiring. It’s not that visits and reader numbers are everything, but, since the early days of my first blog, which was pretty bloody huge considering (sorry. I’m British. It’s uncomfortable to say things like that. sorry, sorry), they created a hunger for more, or at least a maintained level of, (uber-low-level) notoriety (the easy kind, without paparazzi and autographs and cellulite), and so I have always kept going on and on, even through the dry spells when my head was empty, putting effort into something that doesn’t make any money, gets me some work sometimes but not remotely enough to live on, and, annoyingly, gets me plenty of requests to work for nothing (no). I decided that the internet could take a back seat while I tried to concentrate on our then imminent house-remodelling, which is now in full swing, but since no-one will let me near the plastering or the re-plumbing, I haven’t really had much to do with it yet.

For the last few years I have written, drawn, photographed and produced STUFF that I put on the internet in one or more places, for other people to read and see and occasionally laugh at and show their friends. I have read and loved and laughed at their STUFF. I have found friends and heroes all over the world, purely because of my blogging. After several years in a small town in Portugal with small children I found the opportunity to find kindred souls, talk to people who GET me (there are some bits of me, my work, my humour, that even my closest friends here in Portugal will never get) because I went back to the internet. Blogging was a life and sanity saver. I tell you all this to make you understand that my blog and my blogging are precious to me, and how odd it was not to do it for so long.

It was, however, fantastically liberating. My blogger’s eye went on holiday. I didn’t sit in cafés or wander about or go on holiday or do Christmas while at the same wondering how I was going to blog it. I’ve even been painting/drawing a few more real actual paintings/drawings that can go on real actual walls.

My time away from the internet hasn’t killed me, knocked me off the planet, or made me lose my self-esteem.

2. Five months away from blogging for a non-natural writer like me makes. it. hard. write. again. 

It’s  easy for me to pick up a pencil again after a while, but a keyboard? Writing this has been like swimming through treacle.

3. Another reason I had fallen out of love with the internet: f******k.

(I’m going to come across as a horribly conceited twat in this bit, especially if you aren’t used to me. sorry. but I have to say it and get it out of my system. and I’ve been boring my IRL friends with it for months.)

My beloved internet, the version of it where I made new buddies and created “Brand Pepper”, is fast disappearing. The internet has now been overrun by EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Before you shout at me, I’m not pissed off that they’re there. I’m very happy that people can do what they want to do online, express themselves, find their long lost aunts, sell crap, read or write horribly biased product reviews because, oh my, doesn’t everyone have a badly thought through opinion these days? The internet, after all, is just another communication device, like the telephone, or pen and paper.

What I mind is that everyone else in the world has joined the internet age so they can be in the one place, f******k.
(My beef with f******k isn’t about the privacy and corporate issues, you’ve all got that covered.)

F******k makes it easy for anyone to join in, easily make “connections” with others, have a gatrillion imaginary friends, upload, download, play games, opine, link to stuff and press that stupid LIKE button. It has created an enormous vortex of vapidity, sucking everyone and everything into its stupid, lowest common denominator core. 350,000,000,000,000 people are in f******k talking about their bloody animals, their children or their hiLARIous piss up last night, or getting sympathy for the death of a 103 year old relative they never met, or putting up AWFUL artwork and having everyone else say OH HOW AMAZING, which only encourages them to keep going, which is the wrong thing to do, or collecting birthday wishes from 2,000 people they don’t know, or posting trite buddhistic aphorisms, truisms that make your heart bleed with the tedium…. and they all get a LIKE, good news or bad. I LIKE that you’re sad because your daughter’s guinea pig had a heart attack having eaten too many of its own offspring. This made me want to scream “SHUT UP!”, especially at some people I know and like in real life, who turn into fools inside f******k. Sorry. True.

Oh to be able to dismiss this alternate-internet.

I have been a member three times. I first “had a f******k” when it started, when it was still just Merkan college kids. I left straight away, as it wasn’t for me. I got sucked in again when it seemed it was going to be a useful extra tool in getting OUT there. I left after a while when I got sick of having to weigh up whether I wanted dozens of total strangers to be my bestie or not. I joined for the final time when I thought that we just all had to get sucked in because we’d miss out on visibility if we didn’t. It then sucked in every corporation, every TV show, every charity, every small business, every grandmother, every teen, all vying for likings and linkings. There are some entities that now only have an interactive presence on f******k, so if you don’t “have a f******k” you are f****d if you want to interact with them (although, usually, they are just marketing opportunities, so you’re not missing out on anything). I deleted my account for the final time last year. I couldn’t take the white noise of crap that it generated. I was liberated. Staying away from f******k won’t kill you. If anyone I used to know wants to find me, they can google me. If they’re too thick to do that, then that’s FINE.

Now that everyone and everything has been sucked into the f******k vortex, less and less time is spent outside of it. Readership on OTHER STUFF is down, so people who create “content” HAVE to recreate or at least link to their content inside f******k. People, not necessarily only professional writers and artists, who put thought and talent into what they produce, are having to fight for space inside the f******k black hole with EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD.

The problem with EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD and what they put in f******k is that there’s no quality control, no self-imposed standard of quality. This is fair enough. Why should there be? It’s just a communication aid after all. However, in the marketplace that is f******k, the random chatter and blathering and gossip and “ooh, a rabbit” sits alongside the “content” that has had a great deal of thought and effort put into it.

Why would you want an elegant piece of writing that you put hours of work into, or some fabulous painting, or whatever it is that you do well, stuck next to a shoddy piece of crap? Because the shoddy piece of crap will get 88 likes and your piece will get nothing (for obvious sociological reasons: The shoddy piece of crap was made by your next door neighbour and will get a mixture of pity likes and genuine “OMG YOU’RE SO CLEVER” likes from other neighbours who have no talent in the arts AT ALL and don’t know yet that a fucking cup cake is just a SMALL CAKE. The well crafted piece of writing or art will be mostly ignored as its creator is obviously not in need of props or promotion. Also, many people won’t even look at it, because it’s “not their thing”). I’m hugely exaggerating, of course, but this is the trend that I see in f******k, and none of it would matter if the WHOLE WORLD didn’t feel that it HAD to be in there. But they do and they are, and if you want to grow any kind of presence on the net, a necessity if you are in any kind of business these days, be it media and the arts, or chimney sweeping, you have to accept that f******k will play a part, even if it’s only because somebody links to you from inside there.

When the blog thing happened BIG, it was the beginning of the nerdless social internet, when people who had only heard of html could take part. At the time, someone with a degree of brainpower could find somewhere on the net to write and, eventually, place bitmaps. But, to put in the modicum of effort of setting up a blog, finding your style as a writer of blog, deciding what it was to look like, creating your STUFF that entertained or horrified people (those were my favourite), you really had to have something to say, some kind of shit desperate to burst out of your head. Even if it wasn’t Pulitzer prize-winning stuff, it had SOME worth because EFFORT and THOUGHT had been put into it. There was no point in going to the trouble if all you had to say was, “hello! wanna see a kitten?” (yeah, I KNOW there have been plenty of successful KITTEN websites. I’m making a point, and I’m making HUGE, sweeping generalizations to get to that point, as I always do, and kittens make a great scapegoat. I swear I could never go on The Moral Maze or Question Time. I’d be torn to shreds for generalization (and using parentheses and asides in overabundance)).

What I wish is that f******k would become just a communication device for people who don’t produce “content” that has been thoughtfully created and that everyone who does create wonderful STUFF got the hell out of there and back into their own thoughtfully created webspace (it costs little or nothing).

Or better, that f******k would implode and we could start the internet all over again without it.

p.s. I only write f******k like this because it looks like fuuuuuck, and amuses me. I’m that infantile.

The best bit?  MY BLOODY HORRIBLE KNEES ARE COVERED.

More to come.  This is just me doodling.

(if you don’t know what this is about, pls read this previous post)

It’s the time of year that we normal-sized, post-children, post-forty, living-life-beyond-rice-cakes types can embrace proper shoes and tights again, no more trying to cope with flimsy sundresses or shorts and be constantly worrying about shaved legs and a mild case of the bingo-wings.  We can get back to proper dresses, with sleeves, cardigans, feeling comfortable because we don’t have to expose most of our flesh because of the heat.

I look at my wardrobe and despair.

I have dresses, of course. Most of them are getting on a bit because they are such rare finds that I have to treasure them. Some are very specifically “going to weddings and dos” dresses.  I need more dresses.  I really can’t spend another winter in trousers because I look horrible in most trousers (funny legs, square arse) and I don’t have nearly enough dresses to cope with the daily demands of making me look civilized, clean, powerful, sexy, artistic, respectable and interesting (which is the secondary objective of clothes, the primary, obviously, being to give us pockets to keep our phones in, no… wait, that’s what bras are for…).

So, I need to go shopping.  I have finally learnt my lesson about dress shopping in Portugal, so I haven’t actually left the house yet. Dress shopping in Portugal is a pointless exercise if you’re my size (in all directions) and you don’t like nasty frilly sparkly shit and looking really overdressed, so online shopping it is.  I spent a couple of hours yesterday trawling the sea of rubbish that is clothes shopping online and what did I catch?

• A gamtrillion tarty, above-the-knee dresses for knitting needle shaped pre-adolescents.
• Horrible polka dotted shirt dresses in polyester for old ladies.
• Outrageously expensive, very beautiful, elegant clothes for “real” women, undoubtably helped to look beautiful by an insanely beautiful six foot tall amazonian, who is not particularly “real”.  I need “real” clothes for “real” day to day living, that don’t cost a “real” shitload of money.
• Mary Portas’ horrible clothes (part of her crusade to make over forties look good) are good, for anyone over forty who is as thin as Mary Portas, and wants to look exactly like Mary Portas. I DON’T WANT THAT HORRIBLE ORANGE BOB, MARY.
• Vintage dress shops that regard the eighties (and all the nasty crap they entailed) as vintage.
• A shitload of leopard skin.
• Websites for euphemistically “curvy” ladies full of photographs of positively un-curvy ladies modelling ugly flowery dresses, or enormous sweater dresses and those shapeless bin bag shaped dresses… and one hell of a lot of BLOUSY.
• Dresses touted as “vintage style”, ie. 30s, 40s, 50s…. which are as vintage as my breakfast…. they are almost all ABOVE THE KNEE.  I’d like to remind them that knees were significantly well covered until the 60s, and it’s not just a pathetic attempt at an old fashioned neckline that makes a dress “vintage”.
• Jersey and knitwear dresses for big women, we, the big women who need holding up and holding in bit being sold a stretchy bag to chuck ourselves into.

I could go on for hours hating all the crap I found.  But I’ll sum it up here:

• If you can afford to spend £250 on a day dress, you’ll probably be fine. Carry on.
• If you are a size between “stick” and “perfect”, carry on.
• If you are a bit chunky (by which I mean, you have boobs, curves, a tummy, an arse or any combination of these perfectly normal body parts of a normal woman who doesn’t have the time nor the excess vanity to dedicate most of her time to getting rid of them) you will find plenty, as long as you want to look tacky, frumpy, fatter than you are, shorter than you are or blousy. Carry On.
• If you have good taste, need to look reasonably smart but different (for god’s sake, please, different), but have a few bits of your body that really need to be covered up and/or held in, because we cannot help but be judged unfairly when we are surrounded by images of models who have all recently died of starvation…. THEN YOU CONTINUED TO BE UTTERLY SCREWED.

The reason for this state of  affairs lies in part with us laydees with racks and botts and thighs and tummies, who don’t want to look like curvy blousy tarts or baked potatoes in a sack, for not shouting loud enough.   But we have our real lives to be getting on with, and it’s not exactly “chain yourself to the railings/throw yourself under a horse” important, and we have other priorities, like keeping everyone fed, clothed and getting some work done.

The bigger fault lies with the retailers, the advertisers, and of course, the designers, who, it seems, are all conspiring to make you and me look like shit.

I’m going to let you into a little secret.

Fashion designers aren’t ALL woman hating shitheads (though, I’m seeking some statistics to prove that), they just aren’t very good at drawing.  Nor are they very good at puzzles.  If you have a modicum of artistic talent, it is extraordinarily easy to draw a stylized thin doll-like thing, far easier than it is to draw a normal shaped woman.  It is easier than that, even, to draw stylized clothes onto that skinny stick creature…. and for those clothes to look “good”.

Here, i’ll prove it, with a drawing that took me about twenty three seconds to do.  I could smear a streak of poo across one of these “models” and it would look “good” as an outfit.

Now, try drawing something onto this following model (very VERY loosely based on me).  It would take more than twenty-three seconds to do something interesting, elegant, artistic, edgy, different or fun, wouldn’t it?

I’ve threatened this a dozen times, but now, I’m going to get on and try to do it this time.  I’m going to design a set of dresses for proper shapeful women, i.e. me,  that won’t make them, i.e. me, look shit.  I’ll make the clothes (yes, I do know how), then get them properly photographed (already booked!) and if anyone else likes them, I’ll sell you the pattern… or even the clothes. Let’s see.  This may be a bit of a pipe dream, but, goddamit, I’m fed up with being made to feel like a worthless member of the world, when actually, I’m not, I’m brilliant. This will all take a while, because I’m up to my ears, but I hope that by next autumn, I can stop complaining about having nothing to wear.

read also:

http://lucypepper.com/wpr/2009/09/fashion-designers-are-vacuous-idiots/

http://lucypepper.com/wpr/2010/10/banging-on/

(sadly without their comments, which were lost in the latest move)