Plan C - A Bag of Icks
Monthly missives from someone on to Plan C
Hannah Ewens and her great column Ickbait for The Face – serially explores an individual’s “ick” - this is my favourite kind of column. I inexplicably love any of those back page magazine short question features, like inside handbags, inside fridges, last 5 books read, desert island anything – I simply love them.
She writes that the societal obsession has root in our life being now largely behind screens:
“The concept has gone viral in the past year because so much of our dating experience is mediated behind a screen, and now when we’re confronted with an unedited personality and the gross, heaving reality of a human body that wants to see you naked, we short-circuit. It’s an unbearable sensory overload.”
I have been pre-occupied thinking about the ick since my friend Ciara asked me if I was “doing a bit” in the way I charged down the escalator at Walthamstow Central looking like “a giraffe was wearing your clothes”. We were hurtling to be on time for a show we promised to just politely sit at the back of to show support to a friend but we ended up somehow inviting ourselves to the afters and getting all involved. We then managed to take precisely zero photos where both of us look like functioning humans who can control their faces. We have concluded this is just not a possibility for us and resigned to having no photos with the other in it unless it is deemed “funny” by both parties.
Here we are putting in the ick in photogenic.
This is the best we have ever managed and it largely involves us not knowing the picture is being taken. she also looks better in my dress than I do and I have had to accept this pain.
What I am saying is that I am never knowingly composed and/or chic. My limbs are large and pale and mostly out of my control. I let them do their own thing and try to keep out of their way for the most part. I talk too much. I get weirdly into something specific for about 45 minutes and then forget everything for another sudden wild enthusiasm about 9 days later.
I own so many coats and have taken zero steps to prevent my inevitable death under 1000 coats falling on to me like when Principal Skinner gets stuck under the newspapers in the closet. I relate real life things to The Simpsons which is deeply tragic.
I am a giant and a nerd and only really like drinking incredibly sour alcoholic drinks, I am a vegetarian which is neither ethically superior or nutritionally wise. I used to read real books now just lament about the state of things. I have never knowingly worked out. I think espresso martinis are overrated and it’s just vodka Red Bull for pretend grown-ups. I shamefully like it when people call them expresso martinis because it feeds into my pathetic need to feel clever on petty matters. I can only describe my movements as “clattering about” or “elegant like a pig on roller-skates”. My feet are truly terrible and everyone has to be cool about it.
I really fuck it up on history and sport rounds in a pub quiz but I do know a weird amount about Lindsay Lohan to make you question my credentials as a reasonable human in the world.
I am very prone to typos, socialist monologues, hypocrisy and dyspraxia. You’ll find me looking like a white IKEA Billy bookcase brought to life as though I am one of the cursed staff that were forced to become bits of household items in the castle off of Beauty and the Beast (1991). I am viciously unable to provide words of affirmation if that is your love language – I will always, even if entirely inappropriate, reach for the joke.
I am a weirdly persistent, barely audible, Geordie in London, I spend all of my disposable income on hedonism and then swinging back to sensible in violent overcorrection Monday 8am-Thursday 6pm and then doing it all again.
I am a prisoner to my phone but I don’t have Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat. So literally what am I doing? I don’t actually know. (I do, it’s Twitter which is very unchic but I cannot quit it).
I live in East London and all of the tropes this embodies. N/S except at weddings where I smoke to kill time. I have all vaccinations but am constantly one heavy weekend away from a debilitating cold that I will not treat but forcefully plough on and elongate the recovery process. I can keep most plants alive but consider doing anything but the absolute bare minimum to keep them going is actually very needy and high maintenance behaviour on their part.
My Spotify is a shambles of obvious indie music. I only like to write in felt-tip (I know this is insane but I cannot not stop), I have owned 4 leather jackets in my life – so far – and I have looked like Ryan from The O.C rather than a chic French woman every single time. And yet I will buy a fifth one and continue to talk about it like I AM UNIQUE AND INTERESTING. This is a pending purchase. I don’t wear my glasses unless it is absolutely necessary so really I am a burden and can’t see which number bus it is.
My very specific ick is men who sing loudly along to the “duh duh duh” bit of Chelsea Dagger. It makes me hermetically seal up. The full lyrics to the song are also mad and crap and puts me in a place in time that confirms I still own more than 2 scarves with skulls on them like it is 2006.
In summary, I am a walking ick. But then so are you.
So, maybe we’re all fine? More news as we get it on this important matter.
C x
Good Words
Eva Wiseman (nominative determinism in evidence) responding fairly to a woman struggling to get over a ghosting for British Vogue.
“Something that particularly bothers me about ghosting (a relatively new game, let’s not forget, one enabled by apps) is the way it reveals how quick we can be to dispose of each other, chipping away at our humanness in the process. In the same way fast-fashion waste mountains made up of Christmas jumpers and going-out tops collect in a Chilean desert, so do people, discarded by someone they thought they might almost maybe love. There lies Maria, wondering if Chris had an accident. There lies Andrew, sifting through all the things he might have done wrong, and Pat, weeping at 4am at the realisation that they will never know.
There’s no perfect way to end a relationship, but there are a hundred ways less bad than this, a method so rude, so dehumanising and disrespectful that it leads to you emailing a part-time agony aunt when everyone else is asleep. So: I’m sorry, it’s rotten, it’s not your fault.”
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Ella Risbridger Is Therapy Worth The Expense? I think the answer to the this question is always, yes. Also, for British Vogue.
“One of the most stressful things I have ever done – in a lifetime of stressful things – was to add up exactly how much it has cost to keep my mental health in the black.
Of all the luxuries I would like to spend money on (holidays! ethical dresses! geranium hand soap!), a disabling mental health condition doesn’t even make the top 50. And yet, here we are. After rent, it is my single biggest expense. It is, frankly, the reason I am renting.
If you add it up (and the NHS has covered a bit of this, and my family, too, in the early days) my mental health has cost about the same as a deposit on a small two-bed flat in Kent. Not a fabulous deposit, to be sure, and not a fabulous flat. But a deposit all the same.
Sometimes, when I think about my terrible therapists (the praying, the humming), I wonder whether – in the long run – the stability of owning a house might have been more mentally soothing than all the therapy. Then I remember that, without therapy, I would almost certainly be dead.
It’s embarrassing to talk to a stranger about your feelings. It’s embarrassing to have to pay to talk to a stranger about your feelings…
…Here’s a rule of thumb I find useful: have you had the same conversation about the same problem with the same outcome more than, say, four times? Then you should go to therapy, not least because you’re probably killing the vibe at parties.”
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How the 5-minute face became the $5000 face
Read lots more clever and interesting words on this matter by Jessica DeFino and her newsletter The Unpublishable. She has changed the way I think about my own motivations for purchasing skincare and make up – which I do see as necessary rather than luxurious because I am deep in the belief that I must not look how I actually look. Go figure.
Anyway, to have your boastful expensive clean girl aesthetic you’re going to need to spend and you are going to have to be beautiful by genetic birth because this shit is doing next to nothing but covering you in goo that makes you look a bit wet.
The lie is that your face is minimally done and this is dressed up as wellness and self-care and the joy of routine. But you need 9 expensive pieces of skincare and 10 expensive pieces of make-up to do it. And you need perfect skin. And no lines. You can claim to have a swipe of colourless Dior Lip Oil (or something more clean, more niche, more obscure for your credentials) but only if your lips have been smoothed and plumped through filler first. You need full eyebrows. You need eyelashes that could be draft excluders. You need high cheekbones and smooth skin before you even start.
We have to pay to buy a skin tint that looks like skin because your own skin is simply disgusting and you are an embarrassment for existing, babe.
Wanton Consumerism
I need a new book to jump start me out of my reading lull. Any suggestions please send my way. I largely like plotless meandering studies of people just coming to well-written realisations. Or as my pal calls it “that suffocating domestic nonsense you like” but even I am “soooooooo bored of books about thin pale girls who have confusing sex” as I read on a now deleted Twitter post.
This dress from Rouje so I can fulfil my fantasies of being a mysterious woman in a red dress at a wedding. (In this fantasy I am also a completely different person not prone to calamities.
Or if you want to spoil me for existing and giving you absolutely nothing the following is my shopping list:
Anything from Reformation
A £1200 raffia tote from Prada
This polo shirt from the Gucci x Adidas collection
This leather jacket that I keep trying to work out how to purchase without guilt or looking like I need to sort out some low stakes business in Chino
Any and all weirdly large and experimental trousers from The Frankie Shop
Bon Mot
From the woman who collated Everything She Knew About Love… and concluded that your female friends are the answer - Dolly Alderton. A reminder that love should not make everything else feel meaningless that is actually powerful intoxication and in my experience always ends in tears and a very undignified storming out of the house holding a leaking coffee machine that you can laugh about now.
