Feeling Punky Today May 27, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Fashion.Tags: Fashion, goth, punk, rock
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Feeling Punky by LaurenEACooke featuring military style hats
I go through different style moods, all the time. One day I rather fancy myself in vintage 1940s, the next day I want nothing more than a giant hoodie and comfy jeans. At the moment, I want to dress like a punk. The urge is strong – I want layers, and rips and tears. I want bright colours and rich blacks, and awesome scary-ass shoes. I want multiple piercings in my ears, tattoos, and black hear (check!). I want to be edgy, but sexy, and cool. I definitely do NOT want to be cute. I want smudged black eye make-up, and tousled hair.
I think I could just about pull it off.
On painting and passion May 26, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Art, Family, Photos.Tags: art, arts, creativity, painting, peonies, peony
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Been paintin'
My mum has always said that I need a creative outlet. I need some form of self-expression that gets the gremlins out of my head, that pauses the whirring thoughts and ever-twisting cogs, letting me calm down, relax, stay as the me I know and love.
You see, I’m naturally quite a creative person, and yet at the same time I have a rather large side to my personality that is built on logic. The stubborn side, the realistic side, the part of me that doesn’t like getting carried away with my whimsical Piscean ways! The two sides, although obviously both pretty large components of my personality, can clash, and when that happens I can mentally work myself to the bone, with neither time to breathe nor recharge.
The only was to fix this fragile frame of mind is to make sure I give myself a release. I can do lots of exercise, I can write a story, or as was the case last night, I can sit up late into the night and paint until my heart’s content. Hence the painting above, a peony, for a particular someone in my life (who I doubt will mind it ending up on my blog first). And you know what? After sitting and painting until way past my bed time, I had the best nights sleep I have had in months.
It just goes to show – mothers are always right.
What will be will be. May 23, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Life, Chatter & Politics.add a comment
I dropped a bowl today. It slid from the edge of the shelf, and before I could catch it it had shattered on the floor. Most of the pieces I could gather, collecting them together into a semblance of the bowl they had once been. Still, there was plenty I couldn’t. Tiny broken shards, slithers of paint and china, crumbling fragments so small they fell to mere atoms beneath my grasping fingertips.
Do you know what I realised today? Though I sometimes feel it, I am not broken. In fact, I am completely, totally, wonderfully whole. In myself I am happy, on myself I can truly depend. My flaws, my indulgences, my reckless belief that life will work out in the end – all of them are things others should be happy to embrace. Sometimes things come along that have the potential to be fabulous, but that they don’t work out isn’t my fault. The fragility of others is not a shattered reflection in the mirror, just something to be accepted, regretted, and walked away from without a backwards glance.
In short, what will be will be.
Books every child should read! May 17, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Books.Tags: best children's books, Books, books for kids, l books all children must read
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My humble list of books that every child should read, based on my somewhat unusual collection of childhood reading…
- The Lorax – Dr Seuss
The Lorax
Dr Seuss can probably be attributed as the single most important literary experience of my life. The reaction to this sort of comment (in the UK, anyway) almost inevitably results in some sort of muttering about cats in hats, but if you look away from that irritating stripy bugger then you actually find a creative world littered with morals. The Lorax is the best of a great bunch, and my copy is tattered, and loved so very hard.
- Oh The Places You’ll Go – Dr Seuss
Not as good as The Lorax, but this book shows kids that they can do and be anything – and it is the book I bought my friends at home when we all went our separate ways to explore and experience the world.
- The BFG – Roald Dahl
“The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.” It sounds scary, and at times it can be, what with the bone crunching and the child eating. However, the ending is a touching one full of dreams and excitement.
- The Witches – Roald Dahl
Another Roald Dahl, but this one with the explicit intent of scaring your kids. In the same way that I believe kids should eat a bit of mud and fall out of trees as often as possible when they are little, I also feel they should have a little bit of fear instilled in them from an early age. And what better way to do this than with bald witches turning you into mice?! Once you’ve read it head down to Newquay and scare them silly with the building it was filmed in!
I’ve inserted a break, so I don’t take up my entire blog with this post…
Chocolate and Sweet Potato Cake May 15, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Foodiness.Tags: cake, cake recipes, chocolate and sweet potato, recipes, torte recipe, vegetabel cake recipe
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I thought I would publish a quick recipe for my chocolate and sweet potato torte – the single most complimented cake recipe I have ever made. The method is a little peculiar (it is adapted from the Hamlyn 200 Cakes and Bakes book), but the resultant culinary goodness is all sorts of sweet, deep, rich and spectacularly moist.
Ingredients:
- 7oz Self-raising flour
- 3 150g plain chocolate bars
- 1 tsp bicarb
- 6oz butter (I used salted, rebel that I am…)
- 6oz light brown sugar
- 3 eggs
- 13oz sweet potato (peeled and diced)
- Milk
Method
- Boil the potatoes until ready to mash
- Drain, and mash with a good hefty dash of milk (NOT skimmed)
- Chop up the butter and melt it into the hot mashed potato
- In a similar vein, break up the chocolate into little chunks and melt through, stirring until you get a mushy yet smooth red-brown mix that smells kind of horrible, yet yummy… add some vanilla essence (the posh kind) if you have any around, and I always like to add a dash of chocolate extract too)
- Beat the eggs, and then stir into the mix
- Mix sugar, bicarb and four together, along with any cocoa powder if you think the cake needs it (personal taste is a bitch)
- Stir the potato/chocolate mix into the flour. Really bash it all up so it is all beautifully mixed.
- If you want, add extras – like hazelnuts, or crystallised ginger. Go crazy!
- Pour into a very well greased cake tin (well worth greaseproof papering the based, this is a dense cake) and bake in a pre-heated over on around gas mark 5 for approximately 30 minutes to an hour. You are looking for it to be risen and brown, and for a skewer inserted in the middle comes out with only little bits clinging to it.
- Frosting time – the book recommends chocolate/crème fraiche, I prefer a sinfully rich ganache…
The Power Of A Compliment May 13, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Inspiration, Life, Chatter & Politics.Tags: compliments, flattery, Happiness
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I have written about the importance of a good compliment before. However, I feel it is a topic that needs reiterating, as often as is physically possible. Saying something nice to someone, particularly when entirely unprovoked, can be the make or break between having a good day, or a bad one. It can make an average day into something special, and it can put a smile on even the most unlikely of faces.
Today, for instance, my day was brightened up pretty much from the moment I stepped from the house. I am wearing a simple Fever dress and a Sgt. Pepper jacket – I felt slightly pretty but no more. However, as I rounded the corner (concentrating wildly on remaining upright in my heels and navigating the angle without crashing into the wall) I bumped into a temporary local who I know only as “my builder”. He’s a nice chap – always chatty, a bit flirtatious but in the most obviously harmless way, just generally a good bloke who likes to tease me about being posh.
Today he seemed particularly chatty – he stopped me as I navigated the path to check how I was and what I had been up to. Then, completely without warning, he proceeded to ask me how I managed to get more beautiful every morning? How wonderful is that?!
Sometimes people can be quite wonderful. They seem to sense when you are starting to get self-conscious, when your self-esteem is teetering on the edge of a sheer drop, and the world can go one of two ways. It can kick you swiftly up the ass so that you plummet further, or it can choose to remind you just how fabulous life is really. In this case, a quick compliment reminded me that I at least look reasonable. I still feel a little overstatement was used by a guy looking to take me out for a drink – but I am really not going to complain.
Go forth and compliment!
Forgotten along the way May 11, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Depression.9 comments
OK guys, gear yourself up for an insecure blog post. My morose sessions have become so occasional that I almost feel bad posting my whiney posts, but it is my blog after all!
So, one of my big things in life is working out if I’m likeable. People seem to get on with me in a crowd, but when it comes to one on one conversation I think I am lacking. I think I have some intangible quality that means people just aren’t that bothered about being a close friend – I belong on the peripheries of a group. There is that beautiful line – I spend my life on the outside looking in.
It is funny. I actually rather like myself, in a
Sometimes I feel that this natural tendency means I am forgotten. Noone invites me to things, noone ever wants to meet up with me for coffee. I hear about this constant meeting up everyone else has, and I just float by, spending night after night alone and completely behind on the gossip. If I do try to organise things, like nights at the pub, noone ever comes, and it has got to the point where I am spectacularly paranoid about anything I try to organise. I haven’t tried to organise anything in months, only breaking the pattern because I thought my leaving do would be important enough for people to feel guilty if they couldn’t be bothered to come.
Maybe I’m reading too much into things. But this feeling? This feeling lingers anyway.
10 Years On – Remembering the Foot & Mouth Outbreak May 10, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Life, Chatter & Politics.Tags: 2011 foot and mouth disease, epidemic, farms, foot and mouth disease
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Growing up in rural Devon, there was no way I could miss the devastating effects of the foot and mouth outbreak on the farming communities that are so important to Britain. The months, nay, years, of traumatising tests, culls and disinfecting have stayed with me, and 10 years down the line I thought it was time we looked back at such a ridiculous and horrendous time in our modern history.
Beginning in February of 2001, Foot and Mouth spread violently from an Abattoir in Essex, and despite a nationwide halt on transport of all animals, soon started cropping up in farms and abattoirs all across England. It was a farmer’s worst nightmare – an illness so quick spreading that once started it was hard to stop, and of which the consequences were undoubtedly going to be horrible to deal with.
Living in Devon, we watched as the news, and the disease, crept its way ever closer. And then, before we had really got our heads around what was going on, it had hit. Farms were no go zones, the world was suddenly replaced with buckets of acrid disinfectant. Everywhere you went you saw a sea of plastic bags over shoes, of bright red hastily scribbled warning signs, and the drawn pinched faces of the farmer’s whose livestock were so terminally threatened.
It was terminal, you see, although not necessarily as a result of the illness itself. The choice made by the government at the time was between vaccination, and culling. For a myriad of reasons, much questioned nowadays, the chosen answer was culling, the immediate execution of any stock that showed foot and mouth symptoms, or which had potentially been exposed to the illness. The consensus nowadays, generally, is that a combination of vaccination and culling could have been more beneficial, causing a less immediate destruction of otherwise healthy assets.
Still, culling it was, and all around the nation great smoking pyres of burning bodies were erected. Despite the fact the virus can be transmitted on the air, the unfortunately cloven hoofed animals that were destroyed were burnt, and my strongest memory of that time of my life was the stench of death that seemed to hang so cloyingly in the air. The sight of pale grey smoke enveloping your car, the terrifying glow of the flames licking their way through the pile. Even now I can’t smell a meat-heavy BBQ without my stomach turning in disgust – it smells to me of death, pain, and misery.
It wasn’t a pleasant time, with Farmer’s losing their livestock and businesses, and some never recovering. People like to cite the compensation that followed, but sometimes money can’t heal. Many, many animals lost their lives, and so many of these animals were members of meticulously crafted and much loved groups, or of breeding stocks. I think it is the sort of event that needs to be remembered, even in passing.
Lovely Lyrics May 9, 2011
Posted by Lauren Cooke in Music.Tags: laura marling, lyrics, Music
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But you’re no god.
You’re no god.And you will never leave this place,
And you will always feel alone,
And you will never feel quite clean
In this new skin that you have grown
Until you old and broken bones
Are laid into their resting place
Just like the rest of human race.Til I fall into my place,
Just like the rest of human race.
Til I’m laid into my final resting place,
Just like the rest of human race who’ve done it.
Without complaining all the way.
Song of the day – I’d forgotten just how beautiful Laura Marling’s lyrics could be,. I’m currently re-listening to “Alas I Cannot Swim” at work, and these lyrics always put me neatly back in my place.
