How to Heat Wave in '25
How long- voluminous should shorts be? What is Business-Sunny? Which colour pedi? + The new rules on sweat patches, bikini waxes, not wearing a bra… And: oh yeah! My Toxic Neighbour.
I seem to have got myself entangled in a pettily dramatic Mid-Life Mean-Girl, Real Housewives of friggin N19 situation. Oh, I am seething. A neighbour - someone with whom I’ve never bothered because toxicity oozes off her like sickly sweet vape smoke - referred to me as “That old woman who tries to look young”. Because bad news and bitching travel fast - she said this to some bloke, who told someone else, who told someone else… who told me.
And I was having such a lovely day.
I don’t know what to do next. I ache for vengeance.
Oh I know, I know: this woman is Just Jealous. It’s not my first rodeo with her bile, which is generally ageist in nature, which is weird because she’s easily early 40s. When you’re being ageist in your 20s, it’s really dumb: you’re only slagging your future self off. But when you’re doing it at her age? You’re slagging yourself off, right now! Also, no one, however physically beautiful, however stylish, however beautiful their body, has the right to stand in judgement of how any other person looks… But her? Nah, mate. She really doesn’t. (Hypocritical I realise, that statement rather stands in judgement of how she looks BUT COME ON! SHE STARTED IT. )
The first time I became aware of her existence, she’d said, to a male friend of mine, whom she’d spotted laughing with me in the street:
“You can’t help yourself with her, can you? You know she’s pushing 50? I suppose it’s because she’s got no kids. No baggage.”
The second time, she caught me chatting to another male friend in a coffee shop, interrupted our conversation to say to me: “You like the boys, don’t you? You’re always talking to that Italian one. Where does he live again?” Which I suspect was an attempt to suggest to the bloke I was talking to, that I was also sleeping with The Italian One, that’s how I know where he lives - except I don’t know where he lives, and I’m not sleeping with either of them.
(More’s the pity.)
(I don’t mean that.)
The third time was just now.
And yeah, yeah, she’s just a terrible twat whom I should ignore; she’s fixated on me - a virtual stranger - and presumably many other women too, as the embodiment of a load of things she feels she lacks, is attempting to diffuse our perceived threat by being mindlessly, pointlessly mean. And yeah, yeah, her life is terribly small and terribly empty, slagging off other women is the closest she gets to a good time… And also? It’s literally JUST THIS MOMENT occurred to me that, she says the things she says about me, either to men, or to me, in the presence of men, which rather makes me think she’s trying to diminish me in the eyes of all the men in the neighbourhood which is very curious.
Ah, what you gonna do? Twats gonna twat.
Plus it is gloriously sunny all of a sudden! I’m good in the sun, it’s my chosen state. I just know what to do with it, clothes wise, skincare wise, behaviour wise. Plus I live really near an outpost of St Martin’s Fashion College so get to people watch the students and their fashion choices. You know. For added input.
A new influx of sun, in the context of a new year, demands new rules on all of the above. Want to know what they are? OK!
My first big summer 2025 decree concerns jeans shorts - how long, and how.