I did my penultimate day in this set of multiple run days today…
…which involved a step up to five laps. Another five tomorrow, and then I will be taking a break from multiple run training for a few days, before building it up again from midweek onwards.
I’ve had a fairly quiet day otherwise, just getting on with a bit of work and admin, and am now relaxing with last night’s Diamond League athletics. Really happy it’s the weekend! Will post my usual running vlogs over the next couple of days and update again on Monday.
Bit of a flashback image for today as WordPress is refusing to load any new pictures. I took this photo of my bracelet collection in the early days of this blog. Still have them, still never wear most of them!
Today’s earworm playlist:
Oasis – ‘Roll With It’ The Midnight – ‘Crystalline’ Matthew Wilder – ‘Break My Stride’
Yeah, so that turned out to be a bit of a waste of time, given that I threw 90% of them out today.
When I was packing up the old house, I knew that I’d end up chucking quite a lot of stuff out to make things neater, but I didn’t expect that I’d end up being so ruthless with my clothes and accessories. The thing is, I’m just sick of the hoard. The hoard is everywhere, I’m currently spending my entire time sorting through it and tripping over piles of it and moving boxes of it about so that I can access more boxes of it, and it’s causing me a lot of anxiety and stress, especially on ‘sorting days’ like today when my hoarding nature means that I have to go through every single thing and devote mental energy to agonising for a few minutes about whether I should keep it.
And with jewellery and hair accessories it literally is EVERY SINGLE THING I’ve ever owned in my life, because you don’t outgrow necklaces and scrunchies the way you do clothes, so my collection genuinely dates back to when my parents first decided they needed to tie my hair back in 1987:
New baby bro scheduled to arrive next month, gotta raise my style game.
Yes, I still have those green tartan ribbons. Of course I do. They’re not being chucked out (they’re in an inaccessible part of the hoard right now, so I couldn’t even if I wanted to), because if it dates from the ’80s, it obviously stays. (What, you thought I’d been cured of ALL of my issues?)
Thankfully, I’m coming to the end of the ‘sorting days’ as far as my wardrobe is concerned, but next month, there will be the study. Oh dear god, the study. Boxes and boxes and boxes full of old correspondence, and schoolwork, and the first fumbling childhood steps in my lifelong fiction-writing habit, and the most painfully private diaries and poetry – all of which will need to be carefully scanned and then frantically shredded (and ideally burnt, but I’m not sure the atmosphere could cope). Mounds of receipts and paperwork and keepsakes, which will need to be sorted and filed. Piles of old broken electronics, and the manuals for the old broken electronics, and the twisted and tangled mess of connector cables for the old broken electronics. Artwork and other wall decorations that I don’t like any more but have been dragging with me through approximately five house moves. Cassette singles I bought in the early ’90s, which I won’t throw out, but will instead stare at wistfully for ages, marvelling at their glorious age and endurance, remembering a different century, wasting time when I’m supposed to be getting on with the hoard.
I know I’ll get to the end of it sometime. It just feels like such a mountain to climb. A literal mountain of stuff.
But I’m going to climb it, because there’s no other way through for me.
There have been a few periods in my life where I’ve tried to fit in with the prevailing fashions of the day, but in all honesty, I’ve never really succeeded, and when I look at photos of myself during those periods, I always think I look uncomfortable and not quite right. The style of the ’80s has always felt ‘correct’ to me; it gives me a strong sense of ‘these are what clothes SHOULD look like’, and later fashions just look dowdy and unstylish to my eye. I’m not sure whether I just internalised it really strongly when I first came into the world, or whether I’ve just come to love that aesthetic by chance, but thirty years later it’s still what I’m drawn to, and I think I always will be.
So, my history of being an ’80s fashion throwback, then. I don’t think it counts as being a ‘throwback’ when you’re still in the actual ’80s, but that’s where it began, and clearly my toddlerhood was the best dressed era of my life:
Check out that lookbook! I will never come close to being this stylish ever again.
I wore so many different (and AWESOME) outfits during this era. I guess most toddlers go through lots of different clothes, due to the whole rapid body growth thing, but looking at pictures it really seems like in my five short years spent in the ’80s I wore more clothes than in the rest of my life put together.
Shame they couldn’t all have grown with me. Especially the moon ‘n’ stars nightdress in the bottom right corner, my favourite nightdress of all time.
The ’90s, meanwhile, were probably my most difficult decade fashion-wise. Due to a combination of hand-me-downs from family friends, thick curly hair that utterly refused to be browbeaten into the poker-straight trend it was supposed to be following, and a stubborn fully-developed taste that meant I was already gravitating towards the styles of the ’80s, I spent the whole decade doing the awkward ‘dated by quite a few years, but not enough to be retro or vintage yet’ look:
Looking a bit ’80s in the ’90s.
Jeans, especially, I found so awkward – I was drawn to high-rise straight-leg styles, but as the decade went on, they became more low-rise and bootcut – that it put me off them for a long time, and nowadays I don’t own any blue jeans at all. When I reach my target weight, I’ll maybe give them another go.
The ’00s were better (not in general fashion terms – I think the trends of the ’00s were the absolute nadir of fashion in my lifetime so far – but for me personally in terms of style). My teen years, 1998-2004, coincided with the first big wave of ’80s nostalgia in pop culture (The Wedding Singer! The BBC’s I Love The ’80s series! The accompanying CD that I got for Christmas in 2001! Bergerac repeats on BBC2 every day while I was on school exam leave! Websites such as Like Totally ’80s starting up! ’00s indie bands aping ’80s indie bands…now I’m nostalgic for a period of nostalgia. I’ll stop there), and so it was then that I first became conscious that I loved the ’80s so much – that the music was better, the films and TV shows were better, the fashion was better. (I also had a brief flirtation with the early ’70s due to my love of glam rock. You can’t beat a pair of silver glitter platform boots.)
2003 was also the year I became goth. Goth is a wonderful subculture for ’80s throwbacks of a certain style, because the look has basically stayed the same since 1978, and all the clubs play lots of post-punk and synthpop. Utter bliss.
These two pictures illustrate my point; both were taken in 2004.
Which brings us to the ’10s. The less said about the first half of the decade, the better – I was uncomfortably overweight and spent most of it hiding away in leggings, baggy t-shirts and hoodies – but now that I’ve lost most of the weight, I’m starting to remember how to have fun with fashion again, hence my recent interest in cultivating a vintage ’80s wardrobe.
’80s-inspired looks that I’ve worn out to goth clubs recently. Those old Claire’s Accessories beads are still going strong!
I know – from reading stuff by people who are into mid-century vintage – that as time goes on, ’80s vintage stuff won’t always be as readily available and affordable as it is at the moment. As such, I’m making the most of it, with the aim of being able to dress in clothes from my favourite decade for the rest of my life. I hope I’ll be lucky and long-lived enough to be eighty or ninety years out of date one day!
I went through my bracelet box this evening. I have several hundred bracelets that I never wear, largely due to a teenage addiction to Claire’s Accessories. SO MANY JELLY BRACELETS. I used to wear them with neon fishnet armwarmers and matching plastic beads, all of which I also still have. My taste in jewellery has always screamed ‘1980s’, though these days it’s a little less early Madonna and a little more OTT power bling. Maturity and all.
Plastic, plastic everywhere.
Anyway, I’ve organised them into vague colour groupings in the hope that they might actually get worn more often. We’ll see.
