Author Archives: ameliaflorencesimmons

DIY Project #1: Gold and black leather jacket

Posted in DIY by

I seem to enjoy starting most posts with a whispered confession, and today will be no different. What am I owning up to today? Well, brace yourselves. This is shameful stuff, the kind of thing that no one should admit – particularly not anyone over the age of 19. Here goes. I am 23, and I still watch Skins. I know. I KNOW. I’m a terrible person. If you’ve somehow missed the concept of the show, it essentially centres on a group of attractive and bizarrely dressed yoofs scampering around Bristol, taking lots of drugs and wishing that someone, anyone would understand the intense pain they’re experiencing, the pain of being young, attractive and the owner of a mild crack addiction.

Anywho, let’s gloss over the casual dependencies, the sheer misery, and the bizarre ‘Bristol’ accents, and look at something infinitely more important: the clothes. Ahh, the clothes. If you know me in person, you know I go slightly loopy over clothes. Possessive and all wide-eyed when I see something I want. The Skins wardrobe varied from the exceptionally odd (those lace cycle shorts that no one really wore) to the sublime (see my project below). In the third generation Skins – at least I think it was the third, I stopped counting, and they suddenly all seemed about 10 – I was particularly entranced by the wardrobe of one Mini McGuinness. That’s despite her wearing of the aforementioned ghastly cycle shorts, and penchant for Paul’s Boutique bags.

She was often seen lolling around in a jacket that I found particularly covet-worthy. It was essentially a black leather jacket, but seemingly sprayed with gold, so that the bottom half of the jacket was engulfed in glowing clouds of warm bright colour. I was sunk. It was glorious. I sat, rewinding and replaying any scene containing the object of my affections. I searched for a similar item, but it proved fruitless. Having a spare black leather jacket in my possession, I made some quick calculations. I assumed it had been spray-painted with some kind of hardy paint, but I couldn’t find any information whatsoever on it, or anyone who’d attempted something similar.

That was last year, and having stumbled across the jacket again, I finally decided to get off my lacy cycling short clad bottom (just kidding, calm down) and spring into action. I tried one more Google search, and there it was: apparently the costume designer had covered the bottom of the jacket in hundreds of sheets of actual gold leaf. Yes…well, sadly, I do have some semblance of a life, and the patience of Alan Sugar, so I chose not to follow this. I also have to say, I don’t actually think you can tell that, from the pictures above. I still think it just looks like spray paint.

Montana Gold spray paint

I hot-footed it to my local art shop, Saltmarsh in Tunbridge Wells, and purchased what I can only assume to be the Don of spray paints. Named Montana Gold, it was priced at something like £6.95, and I tucked it into my handbag feeling like Banksy. The girl in the shop informed me it would go onto ANYTHING, any surface, and that it was very long-lasting. I’ve Googled it, and I can see people have used it to paint their cars. It sounded perfect. I set myself up outside with a big dust sheet, some plastic gloves and a scarf over my face, and prepared to spray.

Jacket pre-spraying....

It’s VITAL to shake the can for about 3 minutes. If you don’t, the colour will be totally off, or it’ll just sputter some clear looking liquid out. After that, it’s the easiest thing in the world. The Montana Gold paint is a dream to work with. It goes on easily and dries quickly, and the coverage is fantastic. I was anticipating it would form a sort of ‘skin’ (see what I did there?) over the jacket, rendering the fabric really stiff and impossible to wear, but it didn’t – the jacket stayed pliant. The colour is beautiful, a really bright, glowing gold.

It’s up to you where you draw the line – I was very tempted to just drench the whole jacket in gold, feeling a bit Midas-like, but stopped myself as I was trying to achieve the effect of the Skins jacket. You could even mask the point where you want the gold to stop if you’d like a neater line, but I liked the effect of the scattered gold particles that settled lightly on the black part of the jacket. I also wanted an uneven line. I wanted it to look like the jacket had been dipped in a molten lake of gold, then pulled out before it was completely submerged.

So that’s my glam rock jacket! Good luck if you create your own….just be sure to do it in a well ventilated space (I did all of mine in the garden), and be sure to chuck a scarf over your mouth and nose. It’s potent stuff.  I’m going to get some better photos up of it, once it’s all dried and sorted, but these should do for now 🙂
Lots of love,

Amelia xx

 

Book Review #1: How To Be a Woman

Posted in Culture, Literature by

Aka, How Not To Be a Lady

How To Be a Woman was always going to be a challenging book for me. Put simply, I am a disgrace to feminism. I tend to go down the frightfully woolly line of ‘feminism is about choice for women, and I actually really enjoy cooking, cleaning and looking after people, so I choose that’. I was worried that the book would make me confront certain unpopular behaviours in myself. Namely, that the line most likely to make me drop my knickers when uttered by a man is: ‘don’t worry, beautiful – here, let me do it’. Closely followed by: ‘shall I carry that for you?’ and ‘god, you’ve got good legs’.

It isn’t that the feminist movement passed me by, as I lay in my pink painted bedroom on my silky quilted bed. Quite the opposite – I was fed on a diet of feminist literature and theory at university, and it was enough to turn anybody’s stomach. Sadly, the type of feminism we often encountered involved talking openly about certain parts of your anatomy, being really rather bullish when it came to getting your point across, and wearing –quite frankly – terrible clothes. Moran does actually address this in her book, stating that if you’re interested in any sort of fair judgement/rights for women, and you are in fact a woman, you’re a feminist. It’s unfortunate that the word has so many negative associations; I think most girls would be hesitant to align themselves with such a label.

Of course, there are degrees of feminism, but it’s the Nazi-like beliefs of some particularly militant groups (several believe men should be completely eradicated) that, in layman’s terms, ‘give feminism a bad name’. I had hopes for the book. I thought it was going to tell me that I could still wear my five inch heels and be remarkably empowered. It sort of does. Moran talks us through the issues facing women: fat, ‘fur’, naming your own anatomy, sexism, underwear…it amused me at points, but also left me faintly shocked. I also struggled with the fact that she frequently reinforces the very messages she’s trying to subvert.

Ultimately, I think I’m too repressed to properly engage with this book. I’d love to be able to stand on a chair and yell ‘I am a feminist’. I’d love to talk too loud, wear really big knickers and not wax. I’d love not to care. I’d enjoy naming my anatomy with particularly bizarre terminology, but I can’t. I am tightly and rigidly controlled, and my own belief system far too entrenched. The language in the book is, to coin a delightful phrase, ‘salty’ at best, and I was wincing at virtually every page. It appears I have the sensibilities of a Victorian maiden. I die a tiny bit inside when I read a lexicon of crude words for a woman’s body. I nearly fainted at the last few chapters (more on that later.)

It started getting better around the ‘Sexism’ chapter. And I shouldn’t imply that I hated the whole thing; I sat there laughing at points, cringing at others. I enjoyed Moran’s writing, up to a point. The ‘Sexism’ chapter rang true, and I was stopped dead in my tracks as she detailed her relationship with ‘Courtney’; a relationship she treated as a sort of ‘penance’. It so perfectly summed up that Dream Relationship vs. Real Relationship syndrome every girl has experienced at some point. You’re convinced you love someone, but you don’t actually like them very much. You stop being able to distinguish between the aching pain of love and someone who, quite frankly, is a bit of a tosser. The hint is, there isn’t really an ‘aching pain’ of love. It isn’t the 1800s anymore.

For a few chapters, I was flying. I chose to overlook the fact that comments on the sexualisation of young teenagers, bikini waxes and the size of underwear were massively hackneyed, and let myself get into the book. It was fine for a while, but then came the hugely graphic description of the birth of Moran’s first child. Trust me, women. DO NOT READ this chapter if you’re planning on having children. I, who masterfully conquered some of the vilest passages in American Psycho, was completely repulsed. I wanted to stop reading but couldn’t. It was all gruesome, heart-stoppingly horrible, and hugely similar to many an article in the Daily Mail. By the time we were at the chapter on abortion, I felt utterly miserable. I have to confess, I couldn’t even handle the final chapter, ‘Intervention’. I didn’t really want to read about how we’re all ‘dying, crumbling into the void’ very late at night.

Ultimately, I couldn’t escape the cynical feeling that Moran couldn’t sell her autobiography on the strength of her name alone, so she shaped it into a faux polemic on the state of womankind. Despite apparently being a book on feminism, no other feminist figures apart from Germaine Greer were cited. As far as I’m concerned, you could pluck out the most sexist, ill-read, beer-swilling of blokes, and he’d know that Greer is a feminist. It’s entry level. Where was the Andrea Dworkin, the Camille Paglia, Helene Cixous? If you’re going to write a book with feminism as the main subject matter, then perhaps it would be a good idea to, you know, read some feminist theory? The omission of anyone other than Greer led me to believe either that Moran simply hadn’t bothered to read anything else, or that she selectively chose just the tiniest portion of feminist ideology to fit with her own ideas.

I must also add that, to any man reading this book, it might appear a mite confusing. In the chapter addressing things like pole-dancing, Moran essentially seems to say ‘if we’re falling about having a laugh with our mates, it’s fine, but if we’re not, and we’re doing it for ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL, then it is WRONG and DISGUSTING’. Pfft. Women, eh? And also, I would have liked to see more of a discussion of how destructive women are to each other – it isn’t just men perpetrating myths about how we should behave, but women too. Women suffer sexism at the hands of female bosses too, you know.

The title is mostly a misnomer. It really is mainly a memoir, with a bit (a lot) of ranting tacked on. It should actually be called How To Be Caitlin Moran. Like I said, I think I’m just too uptight to enjoy it; next time I’ll just stick to my Collected Works of Nancy Mitford and leave this kind of malarkey to everyone else. It seems that in Moran’s world, it’s her way or no way. She makes snap judgments (rather like I’ve done on her book, I suppose) on what’s ok and what isn’t. Strippers bad, burlesque artists good. Katie Price bad, Lady Gaga good. I’m wrong for wanting to employ decent personal hygiene. On her grounds, I am wrong for so many things. It’s ok to be fat (ish), to be too loud, to wear cheap clothes. Fine, but what about the converse?

I know I’m more or less completely panning it, but I had such high hopes for it. Everyone seems to love it, and it’s won plenty of accolades. I suppose the crux of the matter is, while it might tell (some of) you ‘How To Be a Woman’, it isn’t teaching anyone how to be a Lady. And even in this empowered, enlightened, post-bra burning age, I still value being civilised and ladylike. I don’t go around saying everybody should be like that, or that people are wrong for wearing Doc Martens and dungarees. If you’re happy wearing it, then wear it and I’ll stick with my heels and 1960s minidresses. Just don’t tell me I’m wrong for doing so.

It was summed up perfectly by one review I read on Amazon:

“(It was) just a story about one woman who believes her life experiences are shared by everyone, and those who didn’t experience the same or who disagree with anything she writes are obviously oppressed by the patriarchy.”

Word. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to slip on my highest heels and continue to disappoint ‘the sisterhood’.

A note on not giving up, Part One

Posted in Positive Thinking by

Dreams are strange things, aren’t they? I’m not talking about the kind where you run, knee deep in treacle, away from some shapeless looming shadow, and then you’re late for work and have to sit your GCSE Maths exam while clad in just your knickers. No, I’m talking about the ‘goal’ variety of dreams. Since I left university, my life has been plagued by the following type of comments: ‘Well, what have you always dreamed of doing?’ ‘What’s your dream job?’ ‘Where do you dream of going?’ ‘That naked Maths GCSE thing wasn’t a dream, Amelia, it actually happened’. All of those kind of things. On and on. And It wasn’t that I didn’t have aspirations or ambition, I just couldn’t be that specific about them.

Until the age of 21, I’d dreamed of acting. Amongst the dying embers of my university career, I’d suddenly realised it wasn’t the right thing for me at all. My crippling fear of rejection and inability to take criticism being a mere two of the many, many reasons why acting wouldn’t have suited me. I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I effectively felt as though the proverbial artsy rug had been pulled from under my jazz shoe-clad feet, and I was left entirely bemused. I knew I could write, and I knew I loved fashion, but I wasn’t insane enough to think I could waltz into a job that utilised those skills, unless it was working on the shop floor in New Look. Safe to say, that wasn’t my goal.

Anyway, I’ve written fragments of my life down on this blog before, and for the voracious readers among you (that’s you, mum) I won’t bore you with repetition. Ultimately, this is supposed to be an upbeat post that will inspire you. So I’ll skip ahead to the start of 2011, a year ago. After signing up to a slew of recruitment agencies, I landed myself a plum job just before Christmas 2010. It utilised my problem-solving skills, my communication skills, and it challenged me on a daily basis. I worked as part of a team, and yet independently too. Can you tell what it is yet, as Rolf would say? Yes, slice through the sheen of CV-polishing and what have you got? A job in a call-centre. The job that most sane people use as a byword for ‘the bottom of the pile’.

Now, I mean no offence to anyone who finds themselves in this line of work. It’s just that, no one is there for a good reason. Nobody goes in and says ‘I come from a noble line of call-centre workers, and I wish to continue in the family tradition’, or ‘Since I was a skipping, happy child, I’ve long since dreamed of working in a call-centre’. The people who interview you don’t even expect you to say this. They don’t care that you’ll be using it as a buffer between school and uni, or between uni and a proper job. There was a smattering of graduates, along with school leavers saving to go travelling, or the recently redundant over-30s. What I’m saying is, no one wants to be there.

The work itself was bad enough. We were essentially dealing with customer complaints for a particular shop, or answering inane inquiries about lost property or opening hours. Usually the complaints would revolve around this kind of scenario: Christmas eve, family all coming tomorrow, all presents ordered from this particular store, then the customer saw the courier company tip the entire lot into the open mouth of a passing dog. Most of the time, people wanted to call up and scream at a human being they didn’t have to look at, to counterbalance the bleak emptiness and shallow consumerism of their own life. Hey – that’s what I used to tell myself when I was shaking and sobbing on the long bus journey home. But ultimately, nothing made me feel better about the fact that we were there as aural punching bags. I was patient, polite and reassuring, as were many of my colleagues, but it made not a jot of difference. If somebody was angry at the company, then you were the one who was going to get hit.

So, that was the actual job itself. But more than anything else, I hated being a ‘call centre worker’. I dreaded having to explain to people what I was doing, hated the thought of doing the rounds with relatives at Christmas and trying to circumvent the actual details of the job. I was looking for other things while I was there, as I believe everyone else was, but I ended up spending two and a half months in battery hen misery. It was more than enough to take a huge toll on me.

You see, I’d had a fantastically protected upbringing! ‘Call centre’ wasn’t in my vast and occasionally Latinate vocabulary. Private school followed private school, then finally followed by my lovely, cosy middle class university. At each and every institution we were told we were special, elite, wonderful. We were going to go forth and do marvellous things! Donning a headset and getting screamed at was not part of the plan. In a way, the call centre and shop work I did was good for me. After all, most graduates do something like that these days, and it made me a bit more grounded. But at the time, I just felt like a huge failure. There were no guarantees that I would get a better job.

I remember meeting a friend who told me, honestly but kindly, that I seemed lost and pretty much directionless. She was right. My dreams were evaporating. I did little in my spare time: the angst of the job and sheer exhaustion from difficult commutes and hellish journeys combining to make me dull and uninterested in doing anything more. I didn’t read. I didn’t go to galleries or the theatre. It had been ages since I’d danced, or exercised, or simply been interested in something. I’d just go home and cry – yes, incredibly pathetic, I’m a disgustingly weak character with no capacity for menial work, but I like to be honest with you, dear readers.

By Christmas, I had no idea what to do. I hadn’t heard back from the one job that I really wanted, I was fed up of dark early mornings and long journeys, and I was going to scream the place down at the next person who called me to tell me their parcel hadn’t arrived. I couldn’t bear to be near a phone in my free time. You probably think I’m exaggerating, but there’s something about the strip lighting and row upon row of workers plugged into headsets with no control over answering calls that seemed terribly Orwellian. The one small glimmer of light I had was writing my food blog. I was terrible about updating it, and I don’t think many people read it, but I truly enjoyed it. Every few Sundays, I’d bake something, photograph it, and write down the recipe online. It wasn’t regular, but it was something that reminded me of who I used to be, before the Big Bad Real World intervened.

So to recap: this time last year, I was thoroughly miserable. I felt like I was going to be stuck in a menial job forever, and largely because I couldn’t even think of anything else I wanted to do. You’re probably wondering where this is going. You’re confused as to why I’ve dragged you here just to read about my misery for 1000 words. Well, I’ll tell you for why. Because a year on, everything has changed.

Read Part Two (aka the bit where it all gets better) here: https://ameliaflorencesimmons.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/a-note-on-not-giving-up-part-two/

A note on not giving up, Part Two

Posted in Positive Thinking by

Things started to look up in January. I can recall having just one moment where I experienced the highly unoriginal sentiment ‘life’s too short’, for the first time. I’d trekked into work, suffered a 40 minute bus journey where I’d stood up all the way, surrounded by screaming children, terrifying looking chavs, and people who looked like they’d given up on life. I then jumped on a train for the remainder of my journey, which was delayed Every. Single. Day. I got into work, late, for a day of being screamed at over the phone by people I’d never met. And then I realised. Life’s too short to make a daily three hour round trip to a job in a call centre that made me miserable. Life is TOO SHORT to not be doing what I want, and to not even try.

And from then on, it just sort of clicked in. I began to engage more with life. I moved on from the call centre, heard back from the job I wanted in advertising, and I began to blog more. I started setting myself blogging challenges, focussed around doing things for other people, or trying something new. I enrolled in Race for Life and started running. I started organising events and trying to see a lot more of my friends. Slowly but surely, things started to change.

The main difference was actually something incredibly easy to do. I mentioned it in my post on New Year’s Resolutions: just say yes. I began to say yes to things, to different opportunities, to invitations, and suddenly my world opened up. Instead of just planning things and never doing them, I made it my mission to just get up and do it. My friend India and I talked about going to Latitude festival. In previous years, I’d only have talked about it, ultimately being put off by the idea of not having a bath for four days, and I’d never have gone. Instead, we saved up, booked tickets, and it was one of the best things I did all year.

I made it a policy to try new things. I’d never run to fundraise before, and entering Race for Life was a fantastic experience. In previous years, it’d always been that thing that I ‘really ought to do’. It was always on my To Do list. I would say things like ‘yes, I really wanted to enter Race for Life this year, but I just didn’t get round to it’. In 2011, I got round to things. I sat down, enrolled myself (it took less than fifteen minutes), and set up a fundraising page. I found that the more I ‘just did’, the more things I wanted to do. I’d set up a precedent now, and I wasn’t going to let myself down.

The other wonderful thing I found was that one thing inevitably lead to another. Through Twitter, I found out about a fashion festival happening on the Pantiles. The woman organising it runs her own online fashion magazine, www.LadyMPresents.co.uk, and I volunteered myself to be in it. Not only did I have the insanely fun experience of walking in the fashion show, but because Lady M herself liked my (somewhat bizarre) outfits, she wanted to write a feature on me. Fast forward a month, and instead of writing a feature, she wanted me to write my own column. Then suddenly, I was going to London Fashion Week to cover some of the shows. I’m now a regular contributor, and it’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done. I’d always dreamt of going to London Fashion Week, but never thought I’d get the chance. While I’m on the subject, I must thank Lady M for her unbelievable support – she’s a dream editor, and she’s made this past year so special.

I also started paying attention to my strengths and weaknesses, and applied my ‘life’s too short’ philosophy countless other times. The job I thought I’d wanted turned out to be incredibly wrong for me. I left with the goal of pursuing more creative pastimes, and so it was that a few months on, I began to design and make my own jewellery. Thanks to the support of friends and the extremely helpful videos you can find on YouTube, I’ve managed to design and build my own website (also thanks to Mikey for getting me out of a sticky spot), and I’ve never been happier.

Things have continued to happen – I became an ambassador for the Teenage Cancer Trust, which you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the New Year, and I’ve just got another ‘post’ doing PR, communications and general Girl Friday-ing for a fantastic local artist. A year which started with me working in a call centre is ending a million miles away. I’m excited about life again, I’m enjoying myself, and I’ve never worked so hard in my life.

But, look. This blog isn’t about showing off about my endeavours (well, not completely, anyway.) I wanted to use my own example as a tool, to show you that you shouldn’t give up. I know I wasn’t exactly in the gutter before, but I had no idea what I wanted from life. I was just coasting by, not really engaging with anything, feeling miserable. If you saw yourself in this blog, then don’t worry. Things can and will change. Just remember the following:

  1. Don’t ignore opportunities – you never know what they could lead to.
  2. Say yes to everything
  3. …Within reason – don’t be a doormat…
  4. Be an interesting person – cultivate your own interests. The arts, sports, books. Whatever it is, tap into your interest and find a way to pursue it. In many cases, you can do that for free.
  5. Use social media – Twitter and blogging, you never know what you’ll come across.
  6. Just get out – what good is sitting along in your room? Simply getting out and doing something can work wonders.
  7. Don’t give up – if you don’t feel things are going right for you at the moment, keep going. If you have the right attitude, you can make things happen.

Thanks for reading, chaps. It’s been a pretty self-involved post, and I apologise for that. But if you get your own blog, you too can be marvellously self-obsessed.

Lots of love and a Happy New Year,

Amelia xx

The 8 People You Meet in Twitter Hell

Posted in Social Media by

I love Twitter. I do. I love it sooo much I want to take it behind the middle school and get it PREGNANT, as Tracy always says on 30 Rock. It makes me laugh. It makes me socially aware. It helps me network, and ultimately it stops me feeling like I’m all alone in this big bad world. Plus people post photos of puppies doing funny things. Of PUPPIES. Doing FUNNY THINGS.

Much as I revel in the deliciousness of this beautiful portent of joy, there are a few types of accounts that make my life hell. Nestled among the brilliant, funny people who I follow and who follow me back lurks a dangerous sub-species. Oh yes. The ones who spoil it for the rest of us. They use their Twitter accounts for evil, not for good, so you better watch out, you better beware…

Because these are the 8 people you meet in Twitter Hell.

 

  1. The Chronic Retweeter – aka, ‘I don’t have anything original to say’. Just a quick glance at the feed of this offender will tell you all you need to know. If they’re feeling really adventurous, they might even add a comment on the end of the retweet, like ‘<<<<<SO TRUE’. Look, we all love to retweet. It makes us look big and clever. But PLEASE, give us something else to work with.
  2. The ‘Mummy, look what I drew’. This is the name I give to those irritating individuals who spend all their time tweeting things like the following:  Why, for the love of god, WHY? Not witty, insightful, or at all worthy of a retweet. And yet retweeted is what they get. Big sigh.
  3. The Black and White Minstrel Show – this is when you follow a person you think is innocuous, even engaging in conversation with them upon occasion, and suddenly you see them tweet something obscenely racist or bigoted. Out of nowhere. You’re wrongfooted. But they seemed so….normal. You know what to do: UNFOLLOW.
  4. The Twisted Tweeter – aka The Pervert. He (mostly he, occasionally she) only follows attractive girls, and constantly harasses them through the medium of tweets. They’ll either have a profile pic of a random symbol, masking their identity, or they’ll have a rather vomit-inducing photo of themselves stripped to the waist, showing off their vulgar abs, and even worse tattoos.  Tweets will vary from ‘heyy, u lk well prity in ur pic’ to ‘you’re wearing stockings right now, aren’t you’.
  5. The Briefcase Spammer – usually has a bona fide sounding description, based around social media or helping you build your business. ‘That sounds helpful’, you think, following them back. Two days later and you’ve been bombarded with soulless tweets and an endless stream of links to their blog, or to websites which will ‘help you get 15000000052292903 followers in 15 minutes’. AVOID.
  6. The Underwear Spammer – like the Briefcase Spammer but easier to detect. Their tweets may not even relate to sex in any way whatsoever, but they’ve got a profile photo of a scantily clad girl with too much make up on. Or perhaps it’s a genuine account, and she’s just really, really passionate about you getting a free iPad 2 or a Starbucks gift card?
  7. The Clueless Small Business holder – aka the Full Throttle Tweeter. They just don’t get it. They’ve done some course on Social Media, or just read a paltry few articles on Mashable. They think in terms of quantity over quality. I sat back in awed horror as one person I followed proceeded to send FIFTY tweets in a row, each promoting a different item they were selling. They’d obviously employed some underhand Twitter tactics to help them send that sort of volume of tweets. This aggravates me more than the others, because they’ve totally misunderstood the point of Twitter. And, dear reader, I unfollowed them.
  8. Oversharers Anonymous – Look, love. This isn’t Facebook. At least on the Book of Face I’m mildly interested in stalking friends, because I’ve actually, you know, MET them. On Twitter, I couldn’t give a damn about your personal life. Seriously. It’s fine if you want to mention your beloved in a Tweet – ‘going for lunch with my chap’ etc. That’s just fact. But what REALLY DRIVES ME NUTSO is the people who retweet compliments their other half has given them, e.g:

  Retweeted by @imwithstupid: ‘@piglover2000 babe, you looked amazing today, I love you    sooooooo much, LET’S HAVE BABIES. NOW.’

 Give me a break. No, actually, give me an axe, a sick bucket, and a blindfold so that I never have to endure that kind of thing again.

So there we have it, folks. Have I missed any? Maybe you fall into one of these categories. If you do and you want to harass me further, find me @ameliafsimmons.

Happy Tweeting.

Amelia xx

Party up

Posted in Music by

The lights on the Christmas tree are starting to sputter out, the decorations are gathering dust, and there are pine needles all over the floor. That being said, it’s nearly New Year’s Eve, which means it’s still party time. Whether you’re going out or staying in, I’ve chosen a few tracks to get you in the mood.

Warning: may contain atrocious music.

1. Man Like Me – Peculiar Fantastically annoying in the best possible way, this will most definitely get stuck in your head. Seeing the video is a must.

2. Sparks – Beat the Clock An 80s classic (well, 1979, actually), and we all know how much I love THOSE. Worth listening to for an insistent beat and lyrics like: ‘Entered school when I was 2, PHD’d that afternoon, never entered any sports, didn’t look too good in shorts, got divorced when I was 4’. Great.

3. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince – Boom! Shake the Room No, don’t argue. You will be a hero for playing this. Trust me. Go back up now, and give a brother room!

4. Peaches – Boys Wanna Be Her Thumping beat, true glam rock flashback, and the perfect song to get you in the right frame of mind. The boys wanna be her, the girls wanna be her, the boys wanna be her…don’t you?

5. Santogold – You’ll Find a Way Santigold/Santogold is one of my favourite acts of the last few years, and sadly overlooked as a performer. It might be because she keeps changing her name, or because she tends to do a lot of producing. Anyway. Listen!

6. Laura Branigan – Self Control A bit of cheese, but you know you love it. She lives among the creatures of the night, she hasn’t got the will to try and FIGHT.

7. Crystal Fighters – Xtatic Truth To be honest, any Crystal Fighters track would do the job. I was torn between this and ‘With You’, but ultimately Xtatic Truth won because it lulls you into a false sense of calm with strange Basque sounds, before working itself up into a frenzy, and also due to the ‘We were born to be alone’ segment. I heard these guys at Latitude last Summer in a shack in the woods, in the rain, at night. They were ace.

8. Devo – Mind Games Yes, Devo. There’s nothing wrong with that, ok? This is from their latest album, which was pretty much panned from all angles. I don’t care, Devo will make your life better in various ways.

9. Foster the People – Call it What You Want This is just beautiful, and makes you sort of effervesce with excitement from the opening bars. Get it down you!

10. Empire of the Sun – Tiger by my Side It’s my policy to always include these guys on a party playlist, and you should do so too. 

11. The Kingsmen – Louie Louie This needs to be done. Ours is not to reason why. 

12. Calvin Harris – Merrymaking at My Place A party isn’t a party without Calvin Harris. At least, that’s what he told me to write. Quite frankly I’m getting a bit fed up of him turfing up with a bottle of vodka and expecting me to look after him, but whatever. 

13. Dizzee Rascal – Dance Wiv Me This never seems to get old. Just pop it on when people are flagging a bit, and you’ll be amazed at how many of your middle class acquaintances start ‘rapping’ along to the: ‘you’re all over there on your JACK JONES’ bit.

14. David Bowie – Pallas Athena David Bowie always finds a way onto my Spotify playlist, and this is a bonkers little track that will penetrate your head. 

15. Hot Chip – Over and Over Everybody loves Hot Chip. Hush now, I said everybody.

So there we go! A few tracks to get you started. Sadly I couldn’t include everything I wanted, so The Vaccines, Rick James, Foals and Sigue Sigue Sputnik (yes, really) are all unfortunately absent. What are your ‘go to’ party tunes? And don’t even bother telling me I have appalling taste in music, because I ALREADY KNOW.

Lots of love and happy listening,

Amelia xx