1. Ensure you are prepared in advance by only washing a peculiar mix of items from wardrobe, leaving majority of respectable clothes on floor or in washing basket.
2. Lay in bed until last possible moment, telling self you are actually SAVING time by planning outfit in head rather than running around like headless chicken.
3. Get up with twenty-five minutes to do everything, but feeling very smug that out of nothing you have managed to assemble outfit of decent proportions using only imagination. Possibly MORE of an achievement than if you had limitless clothing budget and insatiable thirst for doing laundry.
4. Remember not only is it painfully cold but Britain is in the clutches of the BIG FREEZE – hence planned outfit is useless, mainly because heeled boots are rendered impractical, unless of course you are Nicholas Coleridge and have chauffeur-driven car. Wasted.
5. Decide warmth and safety are paramount and no one is going to look at what an intern wears anyway.
6. Put on ALL clean clothes from The Clean Pile – good combinations include different stripes together, jeans with broken zips, jeans with rips and don't forget the odd socks.
7. Tah dah! Admire very padded, very mismatched look. Congratulate self for totally channelling the Michelin Man crossed with Wurzel Gummidge look this season. SURE Lucinda Chambers will be doing same in A/W 10/11 Marni show.
8. Decide very wise to wear wellies to walk in, take suede boots to change into when entering W1 postcode. Upon removal of wellies, realise they are actually odd and one is wearing a green size 8 welly with grey sole, and one size 6 green welly with yellow sole. Laugh in public, as if a bit of a crazy. Curse damned dark under-stairs cupboard and pre-coffee brain.
9. Enter Vogue House, shudder, and vow to be better, prettier and more stylish tomorrow.
10. Repeat.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Going commuter crazy - a rant
As a recent graduate and newbie nine to fiver, commuting is a new entry in my top ten things to complain about. In fact, it is awarded the top spot, going straight in at number one. Until some eminent scientists somewhere figure out a way of teleporting me to work, and until I snag a multi-million pound city-style bonus and bag a chauffeur (both about as likely as each other) I must stick to public transport methods of trekking across London.
My bed is in East London and my desk is in the West; so I must make my daily pilgrimage and do so with as much patience and piety as I can muster. Both are difficult to find within one’s soul at 8am on a windy Wednesday, when all District line trains are cancelled and there are no seats left on the bus (a bus that may not even be headed in the right direction as far as you can tell.) There are many tests of faith along the way. A 7.52 train which may as well be renamed the 7.56; the cityworker and his crappy earphones that are leaking the tinny tune of his dubious music choice throughout the carriage; the two old women squawking in your ear about the state of the nation (all this fuss about the environment is a storm in a teacup, apparently) ; the bobble-hatted man who curtly asks you to move down the train and then almost knocks you over before you can pick up your handbag; not to mention the stifling heat that envelops you in its artificial warmth and makes you want to rip off your cashmere sweater and throw it out of the window onto the tracks, regardless of how many weeks of torture you had to endure to pay for it.
All of these trials and tribulations are there to try your patience: but the test is not whether you get internally agitated – that is a given, and even complaining is a required activity. The real benchmark is whether you can hold in all that aggression and remain remarkably restrained and collected, in that beautiful, essentially British way. Commuting is a test of endurance – forget half an hour on the treadmill pretending not to be out of breath in front of all those toned and honed gym bunnies; the real stamina test is whether you can keep yourself from hitting the lady who sits on your coat and won’t budge, or the guy who leaps on to the train at the last moment, jams the doors and leaves delayed devastation in his wake. If you flip, you’re the crazy lady who can’t cope. If you smirk, you’re just plain crazy. The only thing you can do is keep it all inside, stick your nose in your book, and giggle, writhe, seethe and laugh, completely unknown to your fellow rat-racers.
There’s one up side to the nightmare journey of course; compared to those waking horrors, when you finally get to work, bum on seat, eyes to the screen – by comparison it’ll all seem like a dream.
My bed is in East London and my desk is in the West; so I must make my daily pilgrimage and do so with as much patience and piety as I can muster. Both are difficult to find within one’s soul at 8am on a windy Wednesday, when all District line trains are cancelled and there are no seats left on the bus (a bus that may not even be headed in the right direction as far as you can tell.) There are many tests of faith along the way. A 7.52 train which may as well be renamed the 7.56; the cityworker and his crappy earphones that are leaking the tinny tune of his dubious music choice throughout the carriage; the two old women squawking in your ear about the state of the nation (all this fuss about the environment is a storm in a teacup, apparently) ; the bobble-hatted man who curtly asks you to move down the train and then almost knocks you over before you can pick up your handbag; not to mention the stifling heat that envelops you in its artificial warmth and makes you want to rip off your cashmere sweater and throw it out of the window onto the tracks, regardless of how many weeks of torture you had to endure to pay for it.
All of these trials and tribulations are there to try your patience: but the test is not whether you get internally agitated – that is a given, and even complaining is a required activity. The real benchmark is whether you can hold in all that aggression and remain remarkably restrained and collected, in that beautiful, essentially British way. Commuting is a test of endurance – forget half an hour on the treadmill pretending not to be out of breath in front of all those toned and honed gym bunnies; the real stamina test is whether you can keep yourself from hitting the lady who sits on your coat and won’t budge, or the guy who leaps on to the train at the last moment, jams the doors and leaves delayed devastation in his wake. If you flip, you’re the crazy lady who can’t cope. If you smirk, you’re just plain crazy. The only thing you can do is keep it all inside, stick your nose in your book, and giggle, writhe, seethe and laugh, completely unknown to your fellow rat-racers.
There’s one up side to the nightmare journey of course; compared to those waking horrors, when you finally get to work, bum on seat, eyes to the screen – by comparison it’ll all seem like a dream.
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