Warning - promotional material follows...

So, Gentle Readers, here I am in the Golden West, enjoying the heat.  It was 40C here yesterday, but no humidity, so apart from a slightly baked feeling, I'm coping.  Previous posts have rambled on about the heat and how much I dislike it, but really, if you're wearing 3/4 linen pants, a singlet and an overshirt of the thinnest cotton, how bad could it be?  I also had a pedicure yesterday, courtesy of my Lovely Ma, as a bit of an early birthday present - and so my toenails are now bright red, and my feet have been returned to the pristine state they were in at my birth, apart from the bunion, the scars, and the tan lines from that day 2 years ago when I went out at lunchtime & my feet got sunburnt.  Did I mention I don't go out in the sun much?  


Anyway, this probably segues nicely into Maggie Alderson... Maggie writes wrote a lovely column for the Sydney Morning Herald, full of interesting observations about fashion, people and clothes, which in my mind is not the same thing at all as 'fashion'.  Fashion, for mine, is that rarefied world of Parisian catwalks, tall skinny women wearing impossible creations of organza and silk, ridiculously high heels and hideous hair, and short fat men coming out to bow happily to audiences who know that perhaps 300 women world-wide will ever have enough money to buy these fashions.


The rest of us do department stores, little boutiques, chain stores, online shopping, vintage shopping, raid our mother's wardrobes, steal our husbands/boyfriends shirts... that's clothing, not fashion.


Anyway, Maggie has always had this eye, she makes observations about clothing that, when aired, you and I might go "Oh yes, now I see it", but left to our own devices, we could see but never really identify and analyse, much less talk about in an amusing and entertaining way.  So, the bods in charge of the Good Weekend magazine, which comes free with the Saturday edition of the SMH, have decided to revamp it, and Maggie's column has been dumped after 12 years.  I think I'm going to cancel my subscription, because frankly, Gentle Readers, apart from the travel section (in which the same places appear again and again, slightly reformatted to trick the less observant amongst us into thinking it's new), there's not so much in there that I want to read now.


On the up side, that's quite a lot of paper out of the recycling bin.  And, (note, sentence starts with a preposition, must be important...) Maggie sent me an email (shall I say that again, Gentle Readers, just for emphasis???  Maggie sent me an email Maggie sent me an email Maggie sent me an email Maggie sent me an Email) to say that she has a new blog, Maggie Alderson Style Notes so I can still get my Saturday fix.  Something else worth getting out of bed for, and with Maggie's help, out of the PJ's.


And now, because it's only 6.30am here, I'm going to have a nap.  


Ciao!