hi welcome back 2 FMH!!! This week/fortnight/whenever I have finished typing & managed to click “publish” we r not only discussing The Big Topshop and what it meant to softgirls across the nation, but also I am announcing the first FAX ME HARDER MERCH!!! They are, in truly 21st Century-traditional fashion, baby pink and black berets with leather Fax Me Harder patches <3 I love them and if u love them too you can buy them RIGHT HERE!! There is also some poems, and maybe a recipe - I haven’t decided yet heheheh. let’s get to it, shall we xxxxxx
I know that before, I talked about my most romantic lyrics of all time but I didn’t get to my best love songs of all time - which I think are equally as important, if not more. One of them is A Case Of You by Joni Mitchell (of course by Joni, how could it not be by Joni), which is topped only by Love Is A Losing Game by Amy, our Amy. I’m inexorably stricken by her performance of it at the Mercury Awards, in that pastel neon dress, looking as though it might tear her in two as she sings it and looking immediately bored when she finishes singing. It’s fucking devastating. The full range of what we’re capable of feeling, concentrated into barely three minutes. Fucking haunting. Most of us will never even know what it is to feel any feeling like this, never mind to feel and then write it down and sing it into a melody and to pour your fucking guts out on stage to a room of bored trendies texting their dealer about their after party, splitting yourself open for nobody’s sake but your own, and to close yourself after, like a venus fly trap folding its spiked petals in on the beating heart of the fly and the red flesh of its own inners. Amy is a total fucking genius, and Love Is A Losing Game is a masterpiece not only of music but of sentiment too. It makes me cry to even think about it - the greatest love song of all time.
I don’t know why I’m writing about love songs, or how I think I’m gonna segue into the next bit after writing about Amy (heheheh actually I do; all of us loved Amy and loved Topshop when we were 14 year old girls. And continue to now, and forever, if we’re even a tiny bit honest). But I do know there’s something in both about expressing yourself, and about nostalgia, and romance, and aspiration and idealism and straining to be better than you think you are, and about the meaningless becoming meaningful. It’s a stretch to draw comparison between Amy and Topshop, and I won’t, but there’s something I loved in both and something I wanted to write about in both today. You know?
Increasingly I’m trying to dress like I did when I was 17, when I was truly fancy free and A Big Stress in my life was whether I’d make it into the canteen at college quick enough to get a hash brown in the morning. The hash browns there remain, for what it’s worth, the best hash browns I’ve ever had. De-briefing on the night before’s meaningless adventurettes with a hash brown wrapped in an oil-soaked napkin blanket in my hand, shit cup of tea in a very not environmentally friendly polystyrene cup, feeling as though this was IT (Is This It?). I just re-bought a sheepskin jacket, you know the ones that are like just over hip length and suede, with sheepskin collars and leather piping round the seams? Like a dell boy coat, but we’d already repurposed them as vintage and cool by the time we were 17, so now I spose they’re either past peak or coming back in. Either or will do for me. I bought it off ebay, and I spent ages selecting just the right one because I don’t really need another coat and then at the last minute I bottled it and bought a different one that was £20 cheaper. And of course it’s not quite the right cut, and it doesn’t look like the one I had at college, and it doesn’t make me feel fancy free. I still can’t shake the feeling that the other one would have. Always longing, always wistful, always over an insignificant and inanimate object. Almost as if a coat can’t transport u to a higher plane ??? Weird, tbh.
Some of u might have seen this coming from the above paragraph: we’re talking about the big Topshop, the Oxford Circus Topshop, the Topshop that’s already being or been gutted and emptied whilst we profess our existential love for it in emails (truly, it is 2008). Probably the stock’s all for sale on Roman Road market now, but I’m not interested in actually buying the clothes. I’m interested in what a fucking spectacle it was. What a fucking spectacle!!! You don’t need me to tell you that I think Philip Green is despicable, he is mortal and moral trash, but perhaps for one instance we can allow millennial womxn the leeway of separating art and artist that we allow so many for film directors, musicians, designers, etc etc etc. The big Topshop was metaphorical; it represented an ideal in its every form. When I first moved to London (a FMH theme, u might notice), I used to go to the big Topshop on Friday evenings before I’d made any mates here and wander round every floor, gazing at all the clothes and occasionally buying one pair of socks (all I could afford after the next part of the sentence) and often splurging £4.50 on a frozen yoghurt from their truly insane ground floor fro-yo (shoot me) bar to eat outside while I called my mum once I’d left. To me, it was some place to go and not feel alone. Because nobody cared if you were alone; everyone was alone, and no one was alone. You can hide behind rails and rails of out-of-your-price-range clothing and feel safe (which incidentally I also did a million times at my then job as a buying assistant). Everyone in the big Topshop was living their main character fantasy, on their own time, not looking outside of their head. You know in Gatsby one of the characters says “I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy” ? The big Topshop was my large party, and I’ll miss it in spite of its misdoings.
There’s some poems this week that I didn’t realise when I wrote them are a series of Whys, which is actually v fitting. They’re kinda sad but kinda jokes, I hope u like them either way. We watched Moonrise Kingdom this week which is maybe why I’m feeling a lil more Wes Anderson than usual <3
I decided to write the ingredients for my favourite comfort food, in memory of all the times I went home and made this and only this and ate it alone in my little box room after being at Topshop, and how sad it was but how happy this pasta still makes me xxx
spaghetti
olive oil
garlic (loads)
chilli (fresh if u can, flakes if not)
salt
pepper
and that’s all there is to it. see ya next time <3 !!!!