www.mausofelliott.com

Business first: in the words of Billy the Kid, I made you a promise, Mr Tunstall. And I've kept that promise. I've finally "finished" the first stages of MausOfElliott.com. Je te presente the hottest retro-90s, non-flash, plain-speaking, salt-of-the-earth website in town. If websites had accents, this one would sound like it came from Lancashire. I wanted to make the website they don't make websites like anymore. The url ends in in "html", no "htm" here. Not for us the browser-crashing ten minute flash intro sequence, no tinkly whalesong playing in the background here. Yes, the sophistication of this site begins and ends with googled javascripts, and it's even hosted by Geocities, such is my respect for historical accuracy. It does use stylesheets, admittedly, a relatively dramatic departure from my old unnavigable websites, where every page had individually hand-typed list of links across the top. Thanks to Tom for helping me out with the CSS. From now on updates will be happening on the new site. At Jane's request, I've kept the wallpaper.

Anything Else

MoE recommends...Interiors

The Lakeland site is one of the best I've seen. Order online.

Topaz: "rustic Mexican pine furniture". Sounds appalling, looks amazing. Costs a lot, unfortunately.

Laura Ashley: Try not to prejudge. Some of their household stuff is actually nice and there are sales on at the moment. Laura Ashley does sales properly.

The Pier

House Of Fraser: "aspirational products for stylish homes". Someone's got a superiority complex. Summer sale, however, although you won't find out much about it on their madly non-intuitive website that seems to be based on a blogspot template.

Angela Carter said "comedy is a tragedy that happens to other people," which is very much how I used to feel about interior design. That it was a tragedy that happens to other people. But, in small doses, it's not so bad. By which I mean, for example, my beautiful charcoal corner sofa, and not, say House Doctor's "just beautiful" juxtaposition of a round vase next to a candle and violently ugly wooden giraffe on a mantlepiece. According to House Doctor, the combination of the three shapes in a corner automatically jumpstarts Beauty, but I couldn't get past the fantasy that she had been trying to construct a surreallist sculpture of the 1939 World's Fair, with the giraffe standing for a kind of abstract Trylon and the candle representing the Perisphere. In fact, how much cooler would that have been? I'll begin work on one immediately.

Speaking of Dr Bizarro's wooden giraffe, who's been to The Pier recently? The Pier has a nice reassuringly prepositioned title, but that very preposition suggests something inappropriately precise. I mean, what pier exactly? Is it an ironic allusion to the capitalist game they must play, as if the attitude or ethic of this exotic homewares supplier somehow resembles that of pocket-money draining arcade machines? The place is stacked with thick coloured glass and things that might be for for food, or candles, or feeding candles...everything is latticed, "jewelled" or in jewel colours. There's a considerable amount of vaguely spiritual imagery going on, and a gigantic giraffes do make an appearance, I'm sure. Don't get me wrong, it's not all disgusting, but it works better apart than it does together. It's great at Christmas, for example, and superb for one-off presents, lights, and the odd simple piece. But as a whole, the eclectic clamouring shopfloor poses more questions than it answers, for example, which Indiana Jones villain's lair of illegally appropriated treasures have I just fallen into?


At some point in their lives everyone who is interested in these things realises they might have slightly overstepped a line, abandoned the ethical question, and dragged something innocent and natural over the sacred threshold into their own fragrantly carpetted home. What begins well as a kind of charmingly animated, bogroll-bound performing accessory, can too easily be turned into a dew-eyed hostage in the inevitable assaults that follow. You know no one understands that you didn't just buy that puppy to match your hat, and one day you will find yourself holding your child-substitute, all big trusting eyes, like a shield against accusations that you value style over substance or care more for colour co ordination than correct worming techniques.

When I was a student I bought two baby mice. "What will you do if they have babies?" by brother asked, "I don't know, take them outside and release them I guess," I quipped. "You would too, you're probably harsh enough," came the po-faced reply, as he spun on his cuban heel and marched out of my life forever. A little unfair, I think. Contrary to popular belief I don't think I am actually monstrous enough to wilfully advance the death of small innocent creatures, but I am nowhere near beyond involving the lives of any beast, not the cognizant innocent nor the idiotic, nor all the idiot savants that lurk between, to bring about what I would like to think of as a small victory in the war against unaesthetic combinations. What I'm trying to say is, I bought three goldfish today because there was space on top of the fridge that I couldn't work out how to fill...until I realised that it was just crying out for a large circular, slightly mobile feature. Our flat now contains three Interior Design Pets.

I felt a bit bad about it, then I thought of a line my hero and master of the meaningless maxim, Woody Allen, delivers in the eponymous film. Whenever Jerry (who in real life is Jason Biggs in American Pie) complains about the brash unpredictability of love and pies, the paranoid but witty old Jew character who in no way resembled Allen replies, "But y'know...It's just like anything else" and everyone in the cinema stands up and cheers. I'm bad because I'm using animals to solve an interior design problem. But it's just like anything else. Obviously not in the sense that I'm Christina Ricci and I'm cheating on Jason Biggs with my doctor. That was in the past. What I mean is I'm not alone. Everyone who cares about something will walk a fine ethical line to get it. Unless what they care about is in itself ethical, I guess, in which case they will probably position themselves on one or other side of the line. I think goldfish are the ultimate interior pets. They do very little, but look fabulous. And they wouldn't know an ethical line if you drew it on their brain with indelible marker. I imagine.

What Not To Wear

Sorry if the screen went a bit wobbly there with the X Files post, I guess I'm justifying it to myself as an unconscious attempt at a diversion from the stresses of global terror and sudden hijacking of our obsession with Primark by the national press. Hopefully back on track now with this issue, but who knows? Blogging is a dangerous game, and the power goes to one's head. As one BBC website reader says, "Did it occur to any of these bloggers that no one really cares about your thoughts and opinions? The harsh truth is that not every thought that pops into someone's head is worth sharing." In principle, I agree. But the power has already gone to my head, and I can't help resenting the fact that their comment got printed on the website when my email about blogging being an unwelcome baroque flourish on the classical frieze of the literary tradition was ignored. Obviously I wasn't talking about this page, because I refuse to accept it is a blog.

What a day. I had already started that annual trauma, bracing myself for that emotional rollercoaster ride, that day of crying and laughing, of counting your cards and counting your wrinkles. But wasn't it unusually warm for November? And where were all my cards? What do you mean I don't usually get any? It slowly dawned on me that it was, in fact, not my birthday, despite Trinny and Suzannah coming back into my life with typically disturbing hands-on advice for "What Not To Wear On Holiday".

How do we feel about T&S? I think it's fashionable to say they have something of the anorexic transvestite and carthorse about them (Jo Brand of course)...but that's selling them short. They may be bullies. They may have less of Mama Natur about them than Ageing Gay Man. They are certainly sloanie-posh. They may be trying to dress every dumpy housewife in suburbia up like crass pastiches of themselves as the first phase of their plan for total world domination. I don't care. Whenever I'm watching them I can't suppress the Bad Thoughts, can't help but think, to hell with the consequences, I'm tired of living in rags and making my money sweeping chimneys. The adoption papers are in the post: here, Your Honour, are my new mum and dad.

But love them as I do, with their funny faces and Hollyoaks hair, Trinny's extraordinary jewellery and Suzie's pastel two-pieces, there were a few things in that episode that even as a doting newly-adopted daughter I cannot excuse. In Legally Blonde, Elle Woods uses the exquisite phrase, "As sure as I am that no one looks good in paisley." Believe what you like, but an unwise word never fell from Elle Woods's lip. In many ways she is the noble savage of Harvard Law School (now there's a piece of research I'd do for free). Anyway, paisley appeared twice in this episode, on the same poor woman. The large butch "triangle shaped" lady got two permutations on the same white jacket (long and short), which felt like cheating somehow, and save me from the unholy alliance of unflatteringly clingy dayglo turquoise tops with long skirts in the same colour. Although it did mean that when they brought out the sandals made from burnished-metal disks my eyes were already watering so much that I wasn't in any direct danger of being turned to stone. I tried to enjoy their efforts to straighten her hair and put her in a skirt, but could never quite shake the sense that there was something not only rather surprising, in our century, but also profoundly ethically questionable, about attempting to "feminise" a butch lesbian (even if she's not "out" yet, even to herself).

I can't help noticing the £2000 doesn't stretch to many outfits. How about a T&S in Primark? Overdue, I feel. On the plus side, and this is hard for me to say, the kaftan/jeans combo on Claire looked excellent and was slimming. But the kaftan already had a weird and unnecessary kind of embroidered medallion mess on the front, did she really need that necklace that repeated the shape almost exactly? Look at those picture and imagine my delight when, at one point, Suzie says "what's with the hair, Crystaltips?" Another surprising success, I felt, was that bloody Colleen skirt again, slightly taken up, for Marie, almost making up for the criminal use of paisley with the swimming costume in the other picture.

Back in the real world, where Trinny and Suzannah are not my parents (and Richard and Judy are) we're still trawling the shops looking for the perfect this and that. Jigsaw have some of the prettiest things I've seen, but only one of each. I wonder if there's one withered hermaphrodite chained to a cobwebby chaise longue in a cordonned off changing cubicle, just sewing, sewing. I'm slightly suspicious of their shopfloor with all the victoriana and beadwork, the museum-case arrangements and leather pews. I'm reminded of china dolls that want to talk to me and tea sets that come to life and all the other supernatural untrustworthiness I'd expect from an upmarket version of Oasis. But pretty they are, and I'd cross dayglo turquoise seas and acres of sequinned deserts, with burnished metal-effect suns beating relentlessly down on my Hollyoaks head if someone told me there was one glimpse of prettiness at the end of it all.

I want to believe

Very belated post, I do apologise. It seems like the second I sit down to do this stuff I get some ridiculously large commission that I can't refuse. However, I finished the main one this morning, and maybe once the other one's done I can think about putting the M.o.E website up.

Meanwhile, my on/off relationship with Oasis is back on, after I discovered an excellent "army style" shirt dress in there this week. I think shirt dresses are one of the best ideas of recent times, making people like me with slightly boyish sense of casualwear, who nevertheless need to find a way of cooling their legs in the summer without resorting to pirate shorts, feel less like they're "wearing a dress" and more like they've been cast in the lead role of a cross-gender wartime production of A Christmas Carol. (Something that has always been a dream of mine, and I can't be the only one)...More girly girls might strike lucky in Gap, who have a great sale on summer dresses at the moment, in fact so much has been knocked off the price that they have started to cost almost what I'm prepared to pay for them. There's a very pretty, simple dress in there at the moment with a lined skirt making for that irresistably annoying 50's rock 'n roll swoosh. Despite the Hoxton hipsterness of 50s styling, I'm pretty much a postwar housewife these days and if I can dress the part without resorting to polkadots, I'll be as happy as a Sandra D.

Of course like all the most responsible columnists, I'm nothing but topical, and suppose I must mention the appalling events of last Thursday. How better to address it, I thought, than via an assessment of Scully's outfits through the first five series of the X Files. I hope it doesn't come across too negatively, I do like to think of Scully's style as a vital slice of the 90s, a constantly surprising visual time capsule, and a warning to us all about tapered trousers.

Scully had some serious problems with her hair style right until late in series 5. Here we see Gillian Anderson pretending to do something to an alien, in Series 1. I really have thought about this a lot, but the more I think about the more sure I am that her hairstyles were never quite in fashion. I was a teenager in 1994 and I had a symmetrical bob, but Scully's bob was never quite symmetrical, always kind of kicking out on one side and rolled under on the other, sometimes massive, sometimes less so, always slightly too long for her face. In this picture you can see the brief attempt at a fringe that only lasted for a few episodes, and that it seems she never quite got over losing, always spraying her hair into alarming shapes around the crown to try and compensate for the short-lived forehead bangs - something you get a sense of in this series 3 episode:

Hair aside, however, Scully's outfits underwent some much more subtle transformations over the years the show aired. The top photo I've put on this page clearly shows the "layering" she favoured during her "heavier" early days. Scully just wore too many clothes. It's no secret that shortish, broadish people don't need shoulderpads...but boy did no one tell her stylist. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that at some point in the early/mid nineties it was actually fashionable to wear clothes that were too big for you. In his ill-fitting suit season one days, even Mulder's surprisingly high arse couldn't save him.

My iBook's a bit broken at the moment, keeps saying "My mind is going, I can feel it, Dave" etc, and I don't want to tax it with screengrabs, so you'll have to trust me that Scully's worst clothing moment involved a gigantic green blazer with gold buttons. Finally, in the interests of objectivity and balance I must say that I've just stumbled across this ridiculous page which contradicts pretty much everything I've just said. Includes the line, "Hey, you know this is going to be an interesting Scullywear ep when she starts off with a tangerine blouse under the usual black skirt and jacket!"
Fish in a barrel, seriously.
Oh look, I found a picture of Scully's "Alan Partridge" moment...

Your pictures paint a word (thanks Flickr)