Another simple thought, this time on bags. The space inside any bag I have ever possessed ends up being apportioned as above. 'Dross', helpfully defined by the OED as: 'rubbish, refuse, foreign matter mixed with anything', takes up the lion's share of the interior, whilst the 'useful stuff' is compacted into a quite narrow layer at the base of the bag.Somewhere at the bottom of that may be found house keys. It's positively geological. Attempts to be more organised, ie: the acquisition of bags with pockets, sections, divisions, seem just to result in each and every compartment developing a similar stratification. Which explains why I have, on occasional ill-lit nights, been forced to empty out the entire contents of the current bag on my doorstep in order to gain access to bath and bed.
(There is more, much more and much better material, on handbags (or 'purses', as they are known in the States), in Nora Ephron's very funny essay, 'I Hate My Purse', from her book, 'I Feel Bad About My Neck' (Doubleday, 2007).)
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Another experiment in infographics here, otherwise known as a graph, and jolly dull it looks, too. Obviously I need to work harder at my presentation. It plots the number of times any pair of my shoes (a total of 12 pairs) have been worn over the past two years (x axis), against the heel height of the corresponding shoes (y axis). The result is a parabolic curve- more precisely, a quadratic Bezier curve- clearly demonstrating that the higher the heel, the less often I wear the shoe. (Doh!) I spend most of my life sitting at a drawing board; the real question here is why I ever buy any shoe with a heel over 2 cm.
Note: The data represented here was meticulously collated by myself over a two-year period from 28 09.2011 to 20.10.2013, and does not include the use of flip-flops or slippers.
An old illustration here from my application (circa 1985) to study for a doctorate at Oxford University. My thesis was to have been provisionally titled, 'From Playground to Pudenda: The Sexual Politics of Play Equipment from 1919 to the Present', but was rejected by the university admissions committee on the grounds that the theme had already been exhaustively covered by the likes of Desmond Morris, Naomi Wolf, et al. That was, regrettably, the end of my academic career.
Infographics are all the rage these days, and I feel they could really help in clarifying many of my sartorial conundrums. Inspired by the work of illustrator and graphic journalist Wendy MacNaughton, the above is my first attempt at information design.
Note that 'sexy clothes' are on a different planet altogether.
As the year begins to fade, the falling leaves remind me of why I don't wear black so much these days. We should all have a personal gardener.
Aargh! Special forces have targeted this much photographed Tom Ford dress with the aim both of neutralising dubious taste in evening wear and countering asymmetric proliferation in couture design.
(With apologies to both Tom Ford and Roy Lichtenstein)
