Grey

I found my first grey hair when I was 23.

Meeting Rags Of Love

It’s been a long time since I’ve done an outfit post! But first: Belphoebe. The first time I discovered Rags Of Love I found a girl with a sense of humour with similar taste in clothes and an Angela Carter fan (like me) to boot. Times have changed; we’ve both left peter pan collars behind for pastures new (Bel has gone more neon Hackney kid, whilst I’ve morphed to mundane office twat) but the humour, intelligence and personality I first fell for are still very much present. Yay for Belphoebe!

Last Friday I met Bel for lunch at Exmouth Market and two hours of houmous and unadulterated #ootd photos later I skipped back to my office with a massive smile on my face. “Blogger” is a a bit of dirty word and I’ve personally found the blogging world to be a cruel place (aside from a handful of lovely individuals), so apart from replying to comments I don’t engage much. However, making new friends in real life such as Bel more than makes up for the crappy online world and bizarre self-aware system we met through and it is these happy thoughts I’ve been carrying around all week. I want to meet all of you in real life now! Whose next??!

You can thank Bel for these awesome pictures. You’ve seen generic going-out Laila and this is default boring work Laila – print dress, one of my three jackets (tragic) and lots of stuff shoved in pockets. My knees look sort of weird?! They’re quite scarred and misshapen in real life (bike accidents/muggings) so it’s funny you can see in the photos. I associate most of my dresses with boys I know; this one is the “Danilo dress” as the first time I wore it Danilo was wearing a check shirt in almost the exact same colours. My fake leather jacket is horrible but I’d genuinely rather die than wear real leather. I imagine in like 20 years there will be attractive fake leather options and our kids won’t have to walk around wearing crap clothes in return for having morals. Le sigh. What do you guys reckon?

Which bloggers would you like to meet?

Dress – Miss Patina. Jacket – market in Barcelona.
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Denbies II

I originally wanted to call this “Denbies through the Seasons” but I’m not entirely sure my real life cynicism, sarcasm and constant irony really come through on this blog and was worried people might think I was being serious. Anyway, these photos are from Denbies Wine Estate in Dorking. I first visited back on one of the first sunny days of the year, and it was lovely to visit again and see the changing colours of the leaves against the perennially golden fields.

If things look a little different, I’m trying out my new camera lens! This lens will take some getting used to as it has an incredibly shallow depth of field which is great for portraits as it focuses on one subject (i.e. notice how blurry and undefined the backgrounds are in the photos of me), but I do like taking shots that show detailed tableaus and this lens is not great for that (i.e. the banana sign is way clearer than the others, where as in previous posts those kind of flat detailed shots are very clear as I’m using my other lens – like this one).

I’m wearing my newish Orla Kiely coat (!!!) which was 65% off in their sample sale and then a further 35% off the marked sample sale price when I got to the till (isn’t that the best feeling ever?) and my new shoes which were £6 from New Look in the sale. One of the many perks of having massive feet is your size is always left over in the sales. I love mustard (both as a colour and a condiment) and have wanted a coat in mustard and gold for such a long time, so it was like a dream present to myself. Does anybody else have dream items in their mind which rarely seem to actually exist?
P.S. I’m going to be shutting down my Raccoon Circus Facebook page soon so please follow me here or here instead and I recently signed up to both LookBook and Pinterest, so you use those sites do let me know! 

Coat – Orla Kiely (sample sale), shoes – New Look (sale), dress – Miss Patina (sale), bag – ModCloth (gift), leggings – Tesco, socks – Monki