Hotties, Heat Lamps, Hoodies and Warm Hearts: How to Survive a Canberra Winter

It’s the middle of winter in Canberra, and it’s Darwinism, pure and simple.

Only the fittest will survive.

Here’s the top ten secrets of the Capital's winter-fit. Now, go and make it work. We've still got two months left.

10) A proper coat. Proper, here, meaning thick wool tweed or worsted, lined, finishing - at least - at your thighs, but preferably longer, with roomy pockets. A lesser garment than the above will be insufficient. If you are new in town, this is the first order of business after ANZAC day (which Canberra natives know to be winter’s unofficial beginning).

A handy hint: the best coats I have found have been vintage, my guess is because air conditioning was less functional back in the day. My particular favourite winter coat was a $45 steal at Narabundah Vinnies. It is my very greatest bargain shopping purchase of all time.

9) Heat lamps and/or heating in your bathroom. Why? Let’s imagine you’re in a particularly awesome hot shower. It’s steamy, you’re washing your hair. You’ve even shaved your legs.

Nice.

Imagine, now, turning the taps off. You’re naked, you’re dripping wet. You step into a frigid bathroom. The air temp hovers just above ten degrees.

Not nice AT ALL.

I have lived in old, cold, Canberra houses/apartments where this sitch was a reality for June, July and August (PhD scholarship ghetto years, yo). It’s a suboptimal way to start the day, but you can avoid it by judicial deployment of energy-guzzling appliances.

8) American Apparel tights. Enough said.

7) A million and a half recipes for soup, or a mother/partner/housemate/really really good friend who will make soup for you. Unless you have a Spartan constitution, you will get sick at some point before a Canberra winter is through, particularly if you’re doing the hot shower-cold bathroom hop (see point nine). When you get sick, you need soup – chicken soup, lentil soup, pumpkin soup, pho, broth, laksa – to get you back to full health. That, and a whole lot of boxed sets of DVD’s.

Gavin and Stacey marathon, anyone?

6) Hoodies, preferably from your alma marta. Australian Bureau of Statistics data released this week indicates Canberra’s population is the most highly educated in Australia. It’s a safe town in which to get your nerd pride on.

If you’re a very clever cookie and have studied at more than one institution, pick your hoodies according to international rankings. Canberra is the only place in Australia with a population who knows and cares about such matters - choose your hoodies accordingly.

5) Hotties (Hot water bottles). If you are no longer deriving perverse pleasure from doing the whole Orwelian down-and-out-in-a-freezing-cold-climate thing, the simplest solution to your problems is to get into bed with multiple hotties.

You can pick them up for $3 at Big W. Too easy.

4) Proper Gloves. Proper, here, meaning fine calfskin leather, lined with cashmere, in a colour that says ‘Hi, my name is Fabulous’ (my gloves are violet, AKA Fabulous). As with coats (point ten), a lesser garment than the above will be insufficient. Good gloves will cost you (unless you or someone you know is travelling to Florence – in which case they will still cost you, but slightly less). It is worth the financial pain, though, because chilblains and knuckles-so-dry-from-the-cold-they-crack-and-bleed-as-you-type are best avoided.

You need the best gloves you can get your hands on. Or in. Just get some gloves.

3) Excellent company. If you are going to make the effort to leave your heater and get out of your trackpants, the conversation had better fucking sparkle.

Canberran natives know this. It’s why we all become fascinating people in the winter months.

2) Multiple Cardigans. You need at least one for each day that you are at work, because, if you are working indoors, heating levels will vary throughout the day and you may need an extra layer to keep you snug.

Some people bring blankets to work. My advice on this issue is that because its cold doesn’t mean you need your blankie. You're a grown up, put on a cardi.

1) An iPod, full of cold weather songs, because listening to Bright Eyes transforms your twenty minute walk home from a cold and miserable plod to a beautiful, pathos-filled journey of wonder. We natives know that’s what a Canberra winter is really all about – cold hands, cold noses, cold toes…

And warm hearts.

In the interests of transparency…

Sartorial experimentation is a wonderful thing. At best, you discover new and different ways of dressing, and therefore being, that you very much like.

At worst, you look like an idiot. Which, incidentally, also has a transformative effect on your way of being – humility is hard to come by any other way.

Of late, my sartorial experiments have involved a headlong dive into what I like to term High Casual. High Casual involves jeans, looser tee shirts and jumpers, and cardigans, but with understated jewellery, a subtle colour palette, and classically shaped bags and shoes.

High Casual is a little early 80s Slone Ranger - a look for which I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot – and a whole lot of it’s-the-weekend-and-I-refuse-to-think-about-anything-more-serious-than-my-next-e-purchase-of-american-apparel-tights.

In short, it’s a highly enjoyable way of being.

But, I’m one of those restless types, which means I stride, some would say fecklessly, toward further experimental modifications.

My forays into High Casual are no exception to further experimentation. Keeping everything else Slone-y and respectable, I’ve lately taken to flashing a bit of bra, and not via the usual accidental flashpoints of low necklines and flimsy shouldering.

No, my bra flashing has been of the intentional variety. I have been deliberately pairing a coloured bra under a light, semi-transparent tee or jumper. For example: royal blue lace Marks and Spencers bra/white linen blend Country Road tee shirt.

I readily confess mixed feelings about this increasing transparency (see above statement C/F risking idiocy).

On the one hand, I like the fact that there’s subversion here. An otherwise respectable outfit is roughed up a little, and I do love a bit of ruggedness to keep things interesting. There’s also something aesthetically and ideologically pleasing about the practice of exposing layers, an implicit acknowledgement that clothing, and life, is complicated. Less esoterically, peaches are best enjoyed when they are ripe, and I’m only going to be 25 once. These are The Years where, rightly or wrongly, I can Get Away With It.

On the other hand, I wonder if exposed underwear, in any context, is ever OK. How is intentional exposure through a flimsy tee or jumper any less exhibitionistic, obvious and déclassé, than exposure via a plunging neckline, a practice which I outgrew a long time ago? More worryingly, could my sartorial transparency cause offense to the general population?

I’ve spent the best part of this evening turning these questions over in my mind, seeing how they look in different lights. I’m still no closer to a definitive set of findings from my experimental research. But, transparency, and all the issues it brings to light, can wait for some other time. It’s Friday, the weekend is just beginning, and it’s time for all of us to enter a state of being where we think upon nothing more serious than our next e-purchases of American Apparel tights (or events that give you equivalent enjoyment).

Milk, Cookies, and Temporal Fractures

SPOLIER ALERT: in Men In Black 3 (completely awesome, I cried, go watch it), Agent O diagnoses a temporal fracture in the fabric of the universe via Agent J’s chocolate milk craving.

This is a tweak of what we all know elementally – that when adult life seems like a temporal fracture and we want to turn the clock back and be kids again, milk and cookies are exactly what we crave.

Don’t pity me and imagine that I had a culinarily deprived childhood, but milk and cookies together were not something I was fed as an after school snack by my domestic goddess of a mother. Cookies and tea, yes. Apple slices and cheese, yes. Rice pudding with jam, absolutely. But not milk and cookies, cool from the fridge and warm from the oven respectively.

I think it’s a testament to the power of our collective notions of childhood foodstuffs that even I, who cannot recall having milk and cookies as a child, feel the nostalgic pull of this particular combination. It’s in this spirit of embracing the platonic ideal-ness of milk and cookies that I offer you a recipe for the most perfect cookies to go with a glass of milk.

Fittingly for a post about childhood nostalgia - of the real and culturally imagined kind - this recipe is based on a recipe my grandmother passed to my mother, who passed to me. I have modified this recipe over the years to ramp up the chocolate chips and vanilla extract, because when I think about that platonic ideal of milk and cookies, the cookies are nubbly with chocolate bits and smell sweetly of vanilla. Comfort on steroids, after all, is the best thing for temporal fractures.

Choc Chip Cookies

Makes 25

125g melted butter
1 egg
¾ cup sugar
1 ½ cups SR flour
115g (half a packet) dark chocolate baking chips
125g (half a packet) white chocolate melting buttons, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons (yep, go with it) natural vanilla extract
Pinch of salt

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees and line 2-3 baking trays, depending on size, with baking paper.
2. Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl with a wooden spoon. The mixture should be the consistency of the cookie dough culinary amateurs buy at Coles – i.e., it should roll into a ball that holds its shape but is still pliable and moist.
3. Roll into ping-pong size balls and place on baking sheets, leaving enough room to for the cookies to spread.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 10-15 minutes, or until evenly golden.
5. Serve, warm from the oven, with a glass of icy cold milk, and, optimally, a quiet moment getting reacquainted with some childhood classics - Ann of Green Gables, anyone?

Who’s That Girl

I’ve a well documented tendency to get seriously hooked on TV shows. Possible explanations for my disturbing condition include my mother’s Days of Our Lives habit, doing a BA (such limited contact hours! So much time for TV ‘studying at home’), and sharehousing with other likeminded folk in my early twenties.

The only defence I can make for my shameful viewing behaviour is that I’m fairly laid back when it comes to TV shows. Basically, I’m not going to bore you with senseless details of characters you don’t know and love the way I do. Unless you happen to mention Dwight K Schrute – in which case I will have no choice but to profess my undying love for him, my belief that we would have genetically superior offspring, and my overwhelming desire to be a beet farmer’s wife. And then you’ll have to excuse me while I throw myself through a cold shower.

I’m making one additional exception to my usual rule, though. Because New Girl, although it’s cheesy and American, is one of the best gosh-darn things you can watch right now.

New Girl is the story of a girl called Jess (played, beautifully, by Zooey Deschanel) who suddenly finds herself single in the most soul-crushing way imaginable (HINT: it features infidelity, a naked dance, and an oversized floor cushion. I wish I could say that these things happen only on TV). Jess finds a new place to live, complete with three new housemates, and goes about the process of mending her life.

So far, so schmaltzy, right? Except, you’re wrong. Because this isn’t a schmaltzy show. There’s something about the way New Girl is executed that’s inherently truthful which saves it from saccharine.

From Jess’s dorky sayings, to her housemates’ questionable personal habits, I challenge you to watch an episode and not find yourself nodding along in agreement, thinking of a friend, a brother, a past or present housemate, who does EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

But what really gets me about this show is how Jess moves on. Without going into too much detail (also, I don’t want to spoil the show for you, if you are yet to watch), New Girl offers an account of recovering from a hurt closer to how it really feels than anything I’ve watched, read or listened to. New Girl doesn’t resolve Jess’s broken heart by having her fall into the arms of one of her lovely-if-hygenically-challenged housemates, or the cutely compatible guy that she dates soon after finding herself single again (he buys her tickets to Paris for Christmas. These things, most certainly, happen ONLY on TV). No, New Girl doesn’t give a midtwenties break up the soft-lighting-and-vaseline-on-the-lense treatment.

Rather, New Girl shines a forensically-fluorescent-show-all-the-blemishes-and-scars light on the awkward fumbling that happens post break. New Girl tells it like it is - and thank goodness for that, because I was beginning to wonder whether I was the only one out there who has Hey Tiger conversations with herself in the mirror (youtube it, it’s brills).

I have an unfair advantage here, having watched the whole season of New Girl ahead of Australian broadcasting schedules, but I can say that New Girl is good, and truthful, and full-body-hugs-the-awkward right to the end. It’s because of this truthfulness that I’ve put myself out on an awkward limb in suggesting, no, imploring, you to watch New Girl, for your own good.

Also, Zooey Deschanel has inspired me to mix my prints. I hope she inspires you to do so as well.

Labels

As a classically trained sociologist, it’s my duty to rebel against Labeling and Labels as a postmodern, patriarchal, capitalist social construction.

Lately, however, I’ve been pondering the value of other sorts of Labels. No, it wasn’t as a result of a stuff up where two important Labels (Hons, Phd expected completion 2013) were left out of my list of qualifications.

Needless to say - Not a Happy Camper.

Rather, my recent pondering of Labels has come about as a result of wearing my first ever big Label garment, borrowed from Clementine Kemp. I’m going to be a tease and refuse to tell you what Label I’m referring to here. Suffice to say, though, it’s a good'un.

The true appeal of the Label doesn’t lie in any inherent property of the dress itself, although I appreciate the technical genius of the cut (it really is a marvel). The appeal of the Label lies in its very Labelness – that this garment signifies something over and above its garmentness, that it's special, significant.

To a Marxist, this is a classic illustration of commodity fetishism. But sometimes (and I can feel the ghost of Marx haunting me here) a little of a fetishised commodity is exactly what you need.

As Bill Cunningham writes: ‘Fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life’. Whilst no-one but myself and a few eagle eyed fashionistats would know, once it’s on, that Clementine’s dress is a Label, knowing makes all the difference to me. The Label makes me stand taller, pull my shoulders back, and look the world square in the eyes, because there is this deliciously potent secret sewn into the cloth that grazes my shoulder bone. Like Katniss Everdeen’s dress of flames in ‘The Hunger Games’, a Label can make you a Girl On Fire.

The effects of the Label last long after the dress itself has been taken off. Typing this in my thirty dollar maxi dress, my worn out cardigan, and my woolly socks, I still feel that Label magic – taller, stronger. And this is why, I suspect, people will always be willing to part with more money than is decent for the privilege of owning and wearing a Label – this feeling of being lit up.

You’ve Got That One Thing

Hi, my name is Peggy, and I’m a One Directioner.

I know I shouldn’t be. I can’t help it, though. There’s something about those young lads that makes me pump up the volume when they come on the radio.

You see, it’s a struggle, being Cool. One moment loving Kings of Leon is a sure fire ticket to respectful nods and Meaningful Discussions about Lyrical Potency. The next moment, the same admission will be greeted with sneers, disparaging comments about Stadium Rock and Ghonnoreah, and iTunes suggestions that make you cringe (Nickleback. Yikes).

And, when Motion Banana Cycle Republic Indian Chinese Massacre get played on mainstream radio, you face the long process of starting from scratch with another band who have that same carefully studied unstudied air (C/F Bondi Hipsters – check them out on Youtube)

Digging deeper and deeper into the underground scene makes coming up into the light, bright world of POP! music a tantalising alternative to being Alternative. I blame my addiction to One Direction on this incessant quest further underground in the name of Cool. Yes, I know they are mass produced and stage managed (Simon Cowel is behind the whole thing, after all), but nonetheless, these lads have got that One Thing that makes me keep on listening.

And that one thing is that 1D are so wholesome and hopeful, in a time when pop music, indeed the world, is anything but. Yes, I know it happens as you get older (I turned 25 this year and am deploying the in-my-day’s with alarming frequency), but I find the relentless tits-and-arse of pop music traumatic. Songs about girls who don’t know they’re beautiful, or crushing on someone who has that One Thing, are just so darn Nice by comparison. And Nice is all the more valuable for being rare. Like a man who holds a door open for a woman, One Direction are a throwback to gentler way of being, and one I welcome in these sleazy and cynical times.

Just a quick thought: perhaps liking One Direction, or, more broadly, embracing Niceness, is symptomatic of being so underground that you’ve dug yourself clean through the centre of the earth and out the other side. In which case, 1D + Nice = Hipster Win.

Eating my Words: Big W and Coloured Denim

I bought a pair of coloured jeans yesterday.

I have been wearing them non stop (ok, not quite non stop, as I slept in my nightie, but pretty consistently nonetheless) since.

When coloured denim first blipped my radar a couple of years ago, my first response was: FART NOISES. I proceeded to ignore the trend, ostrich style. Head in the sand, baby. If I passed a hipster or seven wearing red, banana yellow, or sky blue jeans, I’d snort and proceed to denigrate them to my companions.

Last month, however, I noticed a rather fetching pair of electric blue skinny jeans in a Big W advertisement. I know, I know. I hear you. Big W?? Big Why-are-you-even???? And COLOURED DENIM? WHAT ABOUT THE FART NOISES??

I have written previously about the benefits of overlooking stylistic prejudices before, and, in a bid to overcome, decided to swing past the women’s wear section of The Dub before heading to home wares (cushion insert), hardware (3M hooks), and books (the Hunger Games Trilogy as a birthday gift).

WELL.

Aside from the decidedly budget change rooms, I found the experience a highly rewarding one. Big W Woden didn’t have the electric blue denims in stock, but that was fine, because I found a fabulous pair in the lushest shade of green (I believe the closest match is Juniper Green in Derwent pencils if you need a visual). I even loved the navy and gold print sleeveless blouse I had tried on, for arguments’ sake, with the jeans.

Better yet, the whole outfit, jeans and blouse (which I’m planning on pencil skirting tomorrow for work) came to LESS THAN $40.

And the store radio station played I Want To Know What Love Is immediately followed by Teenage Dream.

BELIEVE.

In the words of Elizabeth David, there are worse things to eat than your words. And when the reward is cheap-yet-awesome-and-versatile kit, I’ll happily eat a whole plateful, plus seconds.

In fact, I’m heading into the civic store next weekend. I’m mighty tempted by the aubergine pair…