If you are anything like me, your curiosity knows no bounds. You will read anything. The back of the washing up liquid bottle or the National Enquirer. Virginia Wolff or Jackie Collins. Every magazine you can lay your hands on: from the luxuriously matt pages of the new Harpers Bizzare to the latest edition of the scrumptiously lovely Charlie and Lola comic.
I read and I read and I read some more.
And in all of it there is something to magpie. An idea or turn of phrase to squirrel away. A picture that turns my toe’s up in delight or a slither of gossip I can barely wait to share (I am the most outrageous gossip).
Mine is a voracious appetite, never truly sated, so when I saw magazines of the never spotted before variety I could not help myself but fritter away money I barely have on words that just might have an undiscovered part of myself unfurling. And so it is with both Oh Comely and (oh bliss) The Gentlewoman: both the delicious cross between independant zine and magazine and both resplendant with fresh new voices, very few adverts, art direction to die for and subject matter that bridges the gap between traditional magazine fodder and the very individual intelligent writing most oft to be found in the kind of blogs we all aspire to write.
Where Oh Comely is cutesy and fun (an article about what you can and cannot have delivered by Royal Mail really made me giggle) , The GentleWoman is unspeakably stylish and rather eccentrically combines traditional subject matter with avant garde women (Like Modern Housekeeping with Pearl Lowe), to glorious effect. While many will dismiss them as too “artsy” to become part of their regular magazine reportoir, others will be thrilled by the quirky, thought provoking content and enjoy the experience of reading something entirely new, because isn’t it essential to keep on stretching our personal boundaries? To keep dipping our toes in previously uncharted waters?
Oh Comely and The Gentlewoman are very different and perhaps neither will thank me for drawing comparisons between the two, but where both shine is in the offering of that which to those tired of the repetive noise intrinsic to most modern magazines, is music to our ears and giddy inspiration to our ever thirsty souls. Here in the UK both are available (to those of us mourning the demise of our Darling Borders) in W.H.Smith and elsewhere available for international delivery online…
I can barely wait to climb into bed with both and a cup of Tranquility this evening….
Sometimes I get a twitch. A need to know I know not what. Sometimes I take a look at my domestic life and I think could do better and award myself five out of ten. You see we aren’t born homemakers and our education doesn’t end when we flee the family nest to start lining…
Happy Saturday Honeybuns. Who fancies a teeny bit of ever so restorative retail therapy today? I am longing for Spring and swinging a basket over my arm as I make my way in to the village, peeking at the heads of tulips, snowdrops and daffodils forcing their lovely way through the last vestiges of…
A few days ago I found myself standing in the children’s aisle of a bookshop while Finley bemoaned the lack of decent books for boys his age and my eye wandered in search of something to delight either one of us. And there it was:The Adventures of Miss Petitfour. A book with a ribbon! (Oh how…
And so the first anniversary of My Mum’s death came and went and it was nothing and everything all at once. Perhaps too raw to explain yet. I meant to carry on regardless, but it turned out to be harder than I anticipated and I retreated for a while: seven days of enduring something none…
There is a wonderfully lyrical article over on Salon by Garrison Keillor today, forcing all us Christmas skeptics to re-evaluate Christmas in all its technicolor, tinselly, absurdly over-commercialized glory, and remember what it is about today, why we put ourselves through the sheer nightmare of it year after year, cursing what it has become and…
Windex Oh dear. I don’t know what to think. You see that bottle Linda Evangelista is holding? It isn’t Windex, it is perfume. What are we to make of this? Are we to guffaw and ho ho ho and appreciate the irony and sub-contextual post- feminism blah blah blah of pretending to spray ourselves with…
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They both sound delightful – there are many things that frustrate me about living at the bottom of the world (almost) and one of them is the lack of magazine variety… Thank goodness for the internet! Although, there is nothing like curling up in bed with a cuppa and something wonderful to read 🙂
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They both sound delightful – there are many things that frustrate me about living at the bottom of the world (almost) and one of them is the lack of magazine variety…
Thank goodness for the internet! Although, there is nothing like curling up in bed with a cuppa and something wonderful to read 🙂
Oh Flossy I can well imagine. How about I send you a copy of The GentleWoman? Email me if you would like a little gift Honey Pie.x