The danger with clothes shopping is that my chief style icons are Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning from 70s Doctor Who - yes, a mix of miniskirts, fluff, ruffles and velvet would keep me going just fine. Indeed, the Doctor full stop - I've always thought his costumes were adorable.
This means there's always a very real danger with me coming back with one of the following items:
Yes, Camden really does have those fine cricketing jumpers - though luckily for my finances, I've only ever found them in blue, not red. More dangerous is the velvet jackets, which are all reduced to £5 currently. Yet having been sent to find trousers, I set out for the latter.
Epic fail. I found lots of yellow, but none striped - and they were all skinny fit jeans. I'm not a fan of jeans at the best of times - but skinny fit just betrays a little known fact, namely that my hips are massive. "Surely not!" I hear you say, and indeed - when compared to the worlds' largest woman they probably look quite comely. And it's not like I'm so worried I'm going to exercise more or eat less - it's just a genetic thing, nothing to lose sleep over. Yet drainpipe jeans really do advertise the fact for all to see. After an hour or so, I gave up and walked back towards the Tube, hopping in and out of shops just in case. No joy.
I stuck my head through one door, and was about to leave when the owner insisted I look properly. I was feeling too glum to argue, so I pretended to rifle through the hoodies. After a brief moment, he loudly declared "trousers!", and ushered me upstairs two floors with his female assistant into this massive room of the things. Which was spooky enough, except then this young lady asked me what I was looking for, and before I could speak my eyes settled on that dream item - the yellow and black striped trousers I'd been seeking all day.
When I finally found a fitting pair (just so you don't think I was being all female-neurotic about the trouser thing, these are actually 16s), I asked the girl honestly whether they made my hips look wide. She replied that stripes are slimming, and she was right - despite the tight fit they looked far better than anything else I'd tried all day.
At that point, I could barely refuse. The weirdness of the situation was too much. And just so you know my Brehaut genes are good for more than making drainpipes look unflattering, I haggled the shop owner down from £45 to a slightly more reasonable £33 (well, £35, but I ran out of coins and he spared me the difference). About £10 more than I intended to spend, but they were exactly what I wanted, and buying trousers isn't something I do very often - I hope these will last me a while.
So that was that. Now I'm back at home, feeling slightly less bereaved than I did yesterday and working hard on my essay: beguiling, trecherous females in Greek myth. I'm trying a new approach - the previous three, I started by working things out, and then investigated other scholarship. I got criticised all three times for not citing enought, which was doubly frustrating - I just want to write the essay, not write an essay about other people's essays; I want to explore my ideas. Oscar Wilde has a line I can't quite remember about historians quoting each other.
True, I haven't done the research in Greece myself - but surely I don't need a footnote to substantiate the claim that "buildings fall down because they are old"? And in all three cases, finding useful books in the Maughan was impossible, as detailed before, which makes it hardly my fault. In any case, avoiding plagarism is impossible - you've got to cite when you use someone else's idea, but what if you come up with the idea independantly? So this time, I am putting as few as of my own ideas as possible. Instead, I am going to repeat what other critics have said, and see if I get better marks.
Doctor Who connection of the day: Pandora's box is naturally a famous facet of Greek legend, but in the original myth it was actually a jar. Pandora's jar doesn't have quite the same ring. It did, however, remind me of Curse of Fenric - in which the Doctor finds Fenric, an "ancient evil" of chaos and destruction, trapped in a jar. And it's the maidenly Ace who opens it, and releases all the trouble. Coincidence? Well, Curse of Fenric is obsessed with runes, vampires and Viking mythology, so it wouldn't suprise me if the connection was entirely deliberate.
Hmmm...maybe I should put this in the essay for extra credit?
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