When in Rome…

"Yes? Please - go on."

(If that means nothing to you, clearly 1) you are not a pubescent boy, and 2) you do not have a husband who spews forth Will Ferrell quotes like a bizarre form of Tourettes. In which case, you must go and watch Anchorman immediately. Go, now. I'll wait. Ok? Good. And speaking of Anchorman, good to know some things haven't changed.)

So, the Hubster and I are off to Rome this weekend, and I am more than a little excited. He got me the trip for my birthday (I got him a jacket for his – I totally win!). I intend to eat my body weight in pizza and lust over expensive Italian leather handbags. Obviously we will be checking out some art and history and stuff too, but not so much that it would compromise pizza-eating or handbag-lusting.

We are also going to see a football match, so that the Hubster can pretend to be an Italian football hooligan (the correct term, I believe, is an "Ultra"). I think this involves singing abusive songs in Italian and throwing mopeds at the players, but I'm not sure. Did I mention this trip was meant to be my birthday present? All I can say is there better be some seriously attractive players, or I will not be happy. I will not be happy at all.

Something like this would probably be ok.
Via designerscouch.org

Anyway, the burning question that has been mainly occupying my thoughts is how can I get into the players' dressing rooms what does one wear in Rome? The obvious answer is, of course, to dress as the Romans dress. But I've never been, so how do I know how they dress? I tried googling "Rome street style" but it turns out that, sartorially speaking, Rome is to Milan what Edinburgh is to Glasgow. In other words, Rome appears to be Milan's signifiantly-less-cool friend. Even The Sartorialist couldn't help me.

So, I am just going to freestyle. The main problem is that being a natural (not even highlights, honest!) blonde does limit the extent to which I can pass myself off as an Italian glamazon. There's frankly no point in trying. I might aim to pass for Scandinavian, because it's marginally more achievable and everyone knows the Scandies dress way better than the Brits. But then, who doesn't? (Well, there's the Americans. Or at least the ones that stride around Edinburgh in white running shoes and bumbags. Not a good look.)

I reckon pulling off a Rome-worthy look is going to involve wearing lots of black, and being all about the accessories. Like these bad boys:

Kurt Geiger Wentworth boots. Yummy.

What, not practical for tramping around cobbled streets in January for ten hours a day? Do you not see the shearling lining? The tank-like gripped sole? Would you rather I wore these?

Some Carvela monstrosities.

Thought not.

Now let's talk bags.

The luscious Mulberry Daria Satchel.

I am in love with this bag. I'm all about the functionality when it comes to handbags, so what makes me love it the most is not the goes-with-everything shade or the buttery leather - it's the fact you can have the strap long and wear it across your body (good for foiling Rome's scooter-powered bag-stealers) or clip it shorter and make it into a shoulder bag (good for when the stupid long strap gets tangled up in your scarf for the thousandth time and you finally LOSE. THE. PLOT). It's like two for the price of one! Although, I can't help but fear that the Mulberry logo may be a tad large. Is Mulberry becoming a bit… (whisper it…) tacky? No, surely not.

And how about a quirky statement ring to finish it off? Ok then!

Matilda ring, from £63, Jane Gowans

Of course, in reality, I will not be taking any of these covetables to Rome with me. Alas, the January budget (or any-month budget) will not permit such indulgences. And I am way too much of a baby to walk around in anything other than my comfiest, broken-in flats. Plus can you imagine if the scooter boys did manage to steal my Mulberry?? Trauma!

Sigh. I'm pretty sure nobody is going to mistake me for an Italian. But as long as nobody mistakes me for an American*, I will consider the trip a success. Alternative measures of success include amount of pizza eaten (by slice) and number of items ticked off in my Top Ten Things to See/Do/Eat in Rome book. I'm pretty easy to please, when it comes to holiday success. If only other successes in life were so easy to judge... but that is a thought for another day. Right now I'm off to check the weather forecast in Rome for the twentieth time and work out whether I can squeeze a few more grams out of my meagre Ryanair bag allowance to make room for an umbrella. If not, I think it might fit in the bumbag.

*Just kidding about the Americans, really. A lot of them kick serious fashion ass.

I should probably stop talking about weddings soon

It's been over six months, it's getting embarrassing.

BUT first, can somebody pleeeeease get married in this dress? With a rocking belt and maybe a little birdcage veil? For £52?? Oh yes.

Butter milk lace dress, £52, ASOS

Do it!

Finding a safe mooring

When I first left home, nearly ten years ago, my mother gave me a recipe book. It was a dense, wire-bound book filled with crisp lined pages, into which she had sifted seventeen years of motherly love and fifty years of stirring, baking, chopping, burning, swearing, testing, tasting... It was filled with the flavours of home. How to roast a chicken and make Yorkshire puddings from scratch without having a nervous breakdown. How to throw together macaroni cheese when it’s grey and miserable outside and all you want is something simple, delicious and artery-destroying (it took me a long time to come to terms with how much butter goes into a cheese sauce. It’s a LOT).

 My favourite recipe was the one for apple pie:

Go to Marks and Spencer. Buy the nicest apple pie they have. Bake and serve with cream or ice cream. Delicious!

And, after all of her lovingly handwritten instructions, there were pages and pages of empty lines, just waiting for me to come along and fill them with my own tentative steps towards domestic goddess-ness. The sheer amount of blank space was slightly intimidating – did she actually expect me to be able to cook that many things? For the first year after I left home all I made were cheese toasties and Supernoodles. Ok, sure, I was amazing at making them (the addition of a wee bit smoked sausage makes anything taste better) but I couldn’t exactly write that down next to my nana’s trifle recipe.

More than that, though, those empty pages held the promise of all the things that were yet to come in my life. My mum sent me sailing off into the world, her first born, her wee girl, and in that book were not only the familiar comforts of my childhood but also an acknowledgement that I had a life to live away home, away from her. A whole world of measuring and mixing and whisking to discover for myself.

But the very best bit? Tucked away all through the recipe book were poems. Moving poems, funny poems. I would be flicking through recipes and then suddenly, in between the Victoria sponge and the yoghurt cake, there would be the wise, witty words of Spike Milligan. Or Wendy Cope would bubble up unexpectedly while I was trying to remember which layer comes first in a lasagne.

To my bitter shame, that recipe book - which came with me to every new flat, even to France for a year (when I added warm croissants and expensive butter to my repertoire), and ended up covered in bits of flour and sticky fingerprints and who-knows-what-the-hell-that-is - was lost at some point the last time I moved. I know. Every time I think about it, I want to cry. I was in denial about it for a while (like two years), but eventually I grew some balls and told my mum, who immediately agreed to write me a new one and didn't even try to make me feel bad about losing the first one. Legend. She hasn’t started it yet, but when she does, I’m hoping the poems will still be there in version two.

If you haven’t read any of Wendy Cope’s poems, you should.They’re wonderful. They’re hilarious, and obviously therefore not “proper” poetry*, but so pithy and so true. Lately I have found myself pondering one of her poems in particular. It’s called ‘Being Boring.’ At first I didn’t get it at all – gardening? Not going to parties?? Bo-ring!

But since moving in with the Hubster and getting married, I think I’m starting to see what she’s on about. A calm place to shelter from the storm (and in my life, right now, the seas are pretty rough). A safe mooring. And when it came time to choose a name for this blog, that phrase was what I finally came up with after everything else I thought of was already taken just seemed to fit.

I do still go to parties, though. I mean, I’m not a total loser.

I’ll leave you with Ms Cope’s wise words on Loss.

The day he moved out was terrible -
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn’t a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.

*On which, see 'A Poem on the Theme of Humour'. A masterclass in passive aggression.

All the beautiful images of Kyle baking are by my lovely friend Kristen of What Kristen Saw

Hi. I'm Kirsty

Welcome to my little corner of the world. Settle down, maybe pour yourself a wee glass of wine, get comfy. If you have a blanket, cosy under it. If you have a slanket, I don't want to know because I am jealous.

So, I'm Kirsty. That's me and my husband Fin over there on the left. I'm a creative soul trapped in a corporate world, repelled by incorrect apostrophe usage and ugly shoes. That pretty much sums it up, but if you want the extended version, by all means read on.

So, what's with the blog? Well, I recently started to notice a bit of a trend going on among the young, bright, talented women I know (and somehow I'm lucky enough to know a lot of them). We've powered through school, university, training, job-hunting, flat-hunting, boy-hunting, engagements, weddings...  it's been exhausting, but now we've finally got it all, we can just kick back and enjoy it, right?

Er... not so much.

Turns out that being in your twenties is not all it's cracked up to be. Thought being a teenager was confusing? Thought you were under pressure when you were a student? Try setting a pattern for how you intend to live the REST of your LIFE. That is some scary biscuits. On top that I'm a newlywed figuring out what it means to be a wife in the twenty-first century (although Meg's pretty much got that covered) and figuring out how to deal with a serious illness in my family (believe me; nobody's got that covered).

So this is basically a place for me to muse about work and cancer and other Big Life Stuff. It's also somewhere I can lust after shoes, get all wistful over the wedding, inject a little creativity into my daily life, and try to figure out what exactly comes next (be warned: if you tell me babies come next, I may punch you in the face).

To hear more about why I started blogging (and frankly who wouldn't want to hear more about that), go here. Wondering about the weird name for the blog? Wonder no more!

I would love to connect with other lovely people out there who are maybe feeling kind of the same way. For more of my random ramblings follow me on Twitter, or see what's currently inspiring me over on Pinterest. I heart emails (and I ALWAYS reply), and if you leave me a comment I will love you forever. I'm serious.

Images by the lovely Lucy Stendall Photography.

How to keep your husband. Also, shoes.

So, I’ve been blog-lurking (blurking?) for a while now.

 

It all started with the odd wedding blog, after the Hubster and I got engaged (ok, maybe a liiiittle while before we got engaged – what can I say, I like to be prepared).

At first it was just the pretty ones – a lovely table setting here, an edgy photographer there. Then I got into the smart, sassy ones (hello Team Practical). And then all of a sudden my blog reader was filling up fast with all these amazing ladies and their insightful thoughts, their witty vignettes, making me laugh, making me cry, making me GREEN. WITH. ENVY.

See, if there’s one thing I learned from wedding planning, it’s that the Day Job (think suits, lengthy reports, recording what I'm doing every second of the day - in fact, just think *grey*) is not quite cutting it, creatively speaking. Chic and crafty DIY stationery isn’t really an option when the only event you’re throwing is a board meeting. And it seemed like everyone else was out pursuing a life of fabulousness, while I quietly stagnated in my dull little corner of the world with only the Hubster to listen to my woes (which, I’ll be honest, he was really starting to not enjoy...).

But it transpires that I’m not alone. There’s even a name for it. Apparently, I’m having a 'quarter-life crisis'*. And so is EVERYONE I KNOW. Turns out that being in your twenties is hard – we’ve finally dropped off the end of the school-university-find-a-good-job conveyor belt, only to discover that the factory has shut down in the recession. Or started making something completely different from what we were expecting. And don’t even start on the boyfriend-marriage-mortgage-babies-death thing. Do NOT even start.

So, this wee blog is my way of trying to bring something creative back into my life, and figure out how to be a twenty-first-century twenty-something without completely losing the plot and/or my husband.

Also, there will probably be shoes.

Whoops, started already.

*Please don't judge me for linking to the Daily Mail. It was just the most recent/relevant article I could find. I won't make a habit of it, I promise.

Images: 1. Gratuitous and not-particularly-relevant wedding photo by the wonderful Lillian and Leonard 2. The great unrequited love of my life, Monsieur Louboutin. Via Browns