OOTD: Office Christmas Party

On Friday December 15th, I went to one of two Christmas parties our Institute is invited to (the second will be after the New Year - keep your eyes peeled for an OOTD then!). Naturally, this was an opportunity for me to get my gladrags on!

Dress: Jane Norman

Ring: Accessorize

Necklace: New Look (I was going for a Carrie in Sex and the City-style aesthetic!)

Earrings: Topshop

Product review: KIND TO SKIN REFRESHING FACIAL WASH GEL (Simple)

Holiday in New York, 2017.

Earlier this month, I spent five days in New York City with my best friend Anna (the gorgeous lady who this blog is named after).

Here be a picspam of our time there (including a day in New Jersey) and some random non-sequiturs as and when I can be bothered to type!

Product reviews: BLUEBERRY BODY BUTTER AND PEACH BODY SCRUB (The Body Shop)

Post-Christmas sales, I treatment myself to two Body Shop items to make my daily showering routine a teensy bit more exciting. They were the blueberry butter and the peach body scrub, pictured below, both 200ml in quantity.

One aspect of both products that I can't fault is the design of the containers. I love the colours and the simplistic use of just one fruit on the front. After I've finished the products, I'mma keep the containers to store my jewellery!

Café review: FERNANDEZ & WELLS (Somerset House)

Fernandez & Wells is the café situated directly adjacent to where the Somerset House ice rink presently is. Given the attraction of the ice rink in the winter and the outdoor cinema in the Summer, Fernandez & Wells is guaranteed plenty of visitors which might explain the negligent running of the place.

Of the beverages offered, which include all of the standard hot drinks, my attention was drawn to the lemonades advertised near the tills, almost exclusively because of the funky packaging it came in (pictured above).

When I sat down to eat, I was horrified to discover that the only table that was free still had debris from the previous customer strewn across the table. This is absolutely unacceptable and inexcusable. Given how popular the café is (I visited December last year), the management really should have had the foresight to hire extra staff. If they were charing £3+ for the crap pictured above passing it off as a cake, God knows they could afford an extra pair of hands.

During my unpleasant time in F&W, I clocked two waitresses, both stood behind the till. This would have been fine if they were serving different customers too expedite the transaction process, but only one was serving; the other was gaffing about with the display. And the woman serving me had evidently never been told about the concept of 'service with a smile'.

Overall, considering how much they had the temerity to charge for a drink and cake, F&W didn't even try to give their customers an experience deserving of what they paid for it. Wild horses couldn't drag me back to this dive; insalubrious café society.

Grade: E

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This is my first café review. For my bar and restaurant reviews, click here.

Bar review: THE BIG CHILL HOUSE (King’s Cross)

Before testing out that disappointing Groupon deal last Saturday, I killed some time at The Big Chill House. I’d also been here just before Christmas after pizza with a few of my friends from my Masters, so my impressions on this place are probably better-informed than most of the places I review on my blog, where I write about them having only been there once.

OOTD: Belated work Christmas dinner.

Fish scales Dress: Vero Moda

Glasses: Red or Dead

Earrings (seen in selfie below): Accessorize

OOTD: Pink is the new blue.

What I wore to watch my team beat Bournemouth 3-0 on Boxing Day!

Glasses: Red or Dead

Scarf: Monsoon Accessorize

Pink thermal top: Uniqlo

Football shirt: Chelsea FC

Trousers: Marks and Spencer

Lipstick: birthday gift from a friend (hehe)

OOTD: He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice

What I wore to spend Christmas Eve with my friend Kieran!

Jumper: Marks and Spencer

Trousers: Marks and Spencer

Earrings: a Christmas present (ehehe)

Glasses: Red or Dead

Bonus pictures of us in our Christmas jumpers, so you can see the nuances of the photos that a Samsung S4 and an iPhone 6 take!

Kieran's phone, an iPhone 6. 

My phone, a Samsung S4. I really need a new phone, will probably get myself one for my birthday next year!

We didn't apply the Snapchat filter until after the photo was taken, so didn't know those little elves would come up. But I daresay the app was quite prescient in who they applied to who. 👻

A few bits of BBFC geekery when I was doing Christmas shopping yesterday.

From the DVD boxset of the final season of The Good Wife. A bit on the descriptive side!

From American Horror Story: Hotel's boxset. Notice the distinction between 'sexual violence' (i.e., rape) and 'sexualised violence' (the conflation of violence and sexual images, e.g. a stabbing during a sex scene).

Not gonna lie, reading this tells me I'm right in my convictions never to watch an episode of this scabrous show!

This is from How to Get Away with Murder. I was quite taken aback by this; all I know about this show is that Viola Davis is in it, and she is typically excellent. I was not expecting it to be an 18 cert! A quick glance over the American TV rating (TV-14), tells me that this might be the BBFC being weirdly strict.

Two other TV shows that I've noticed are TV-14 in the States and 18 over here are The 100 and Scandal. A telltale sign that a show is aiming for the TV-14 market when you're watching is extensive sexual dialogue and maybe even steamy sex scenes featuring nudity, but not once does anyone say the f-word (this also applies to many a TV-14 show that have gotten 15 over here, such as the aforementioned The Good Wife). 

I find it amusing that you can put quite a lot of adult content in a TV-14 and get away with it, but once you say 'f_ck', that's when you cross the line into TV-MA...

From Gotham's boxset. Again, I was just amused because of the juxtaposition of those four disparate classification issues.

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Whilst the BBFC are playing hard to get with regards to their rating of Elle, for which Isabelle Huppert is gaining Oscar buzz (I know I haven't seen it yet but I really hope she wins!), their Irish counterparts aren't so coy, and have released it with an 18. Given that the two awards bodies more often than not align, I'm guessing that this will be my second 2016 release that I've seen of an 18 cert! I've been very lax with watching 2016 releases of this rating; the only other has been The Neon Demon.

By the by, I noticed in HMV yesterday that on the occasions when the BBFC and IFCO don't agree on a film, they just bung the British rating on the front (otherwise, they put both, side-by-side):

Eddie the Eagle is a 12 in Ireland and A Hologram for a King is 15 in Ireland. I think this precaution is sensible; you wouldn't want to confuse buyers!

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Finally, I have no intention of watching this, but, nice wall mural for Assassin's Creed:

This same wall has also hosted Star Trek art in the past as well!

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I adore BBFC geekery. My entire compendium of BBFC posts is here, check it!

Bar review: CUBANA (Smithfield)

I went to this cocktail bar last Thursday with my friend Rebecca before our Office Christmas Party. As we were in the Happy Hour time window (4pm-7pm), we had 2-4-1 cocktails, although such was the venue was so understaffed that it took about three times as long as it should have for us to order and receive our drinks.

Towards the back of the restaurant, there was a table that was booked for some time in the future, and the three waitresses working (far too few, given how packed the bar was around holiday season) spent most of the time fussing around that table (of which yet none of the customers had arrived) and stubbornly pretending not to see the many customers who did need their attention.

I got the distinct impression that the expected company must have been quite reputable (read: rich), and so they were bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves with them in the hope of a handsome tip, but arranging the tables should definitely have been a fait accompli, especially when there were so many expectant customers.

The quality of the cocktails were fine, nothing to write home about, but perfectly passable for their Happy Hour rates. The Long Island Ice tea did not scrimp on the portions of alcohol, so that was appreciated, given we were about to go to a party that involved dancing!

However, one final thing that really got my goat about this poorly-run establishment was that they helped themselves to a 12.5% service charge on the bill. What service charge was that? We had to hail the waitresses several times, and when I ordered the first drink, the woman serving me was so distracted she forgot what I ordered. When we wanted to leave to pay, nobody came to our table, leaving us to find the waitresses so we could pay them for their 'fabulous' service.

I understand the waitresses wanting to kiss the ass of old rich folk, #YouDoYou. But to alienate almost everyone else in the restaurant in the process, rendered their thirsty pursuit of this a rather pyrrhic victory.

Grade: D

OOTD: Office Christmas Party

Dress: New Look (bought back in 2009... oh how time flies)

Crucifix earrings: River Island

Boots: Forever 21

Bracelet: Bonmarché

Bag: Miss Selfridge

Glasses: Red or Dead

Bonus picture: the most glorious selection of mini-pies! The fish pie was the stuff of dreams.

A handful of photos I took when picking up my brother from University on Friday.

Coat: Miss Selfridge

Bag: M&Co

Leo in The Revenant-inspired earrings: Dorothy Perkins

Glasses: Twiggy for Aurora

The chaplaincy at my brother's college.

pretty Christmas tree.

From afar, the college has a touch of Wayne manor about it. Bruce Wayne's manor from the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, obviously, not the Snyder bastardisation.

We went on a ferry from Woolwich on our way back to cross the Thames back to Bromley, haha.

And, true to form, me and Tom had a proper sibling catch-up over our go-to junk food!

A pretty Christmas tree around where I study.

I'm just gonna bore y'all with photos of pretty Christmas decorations I see around London. #SorryNotSorry

Christmas lights around Somerset house.

And a bonus picture of the city looking pretty at night:

Review: Starbucks Gingerbread Latte

Continuing with sampling the products Starbucks have ‘specially confected’ (read: haphazardly adapted from existing drinks in order to cynically swindle more money out of gullible customers such as myself) for Christmas, I next sampled the Starbucks gingerbread latte.

On the positive side, it was much better than the fudge hot chocolate (although that was hardly difficult). The gingerbread-infused latte definitely tasted pleasant, and once you got used to the slightly unusual flecks of gingerbread inside your latte, that, too, gave the drink some character, elevating it above the bog-standard hit of caffeine. A calorie content of 330cals render this drink more waistline-friendly than other, more gluttonous drinks.

The negatives were that one of the ingredients they really plugged – the ground nutmeg – seemed to be suspiciously missing from my beverage, as well as the fact that I found the temperature of my latte a little on the cool side. And, for the money that you’re spending, it is still horrifically overpriced.

Still, if you’re going to waste money on the mega-corporation that is Starbucks with any festive drink, make it this, rather than the fudge hot chocolate (which I still have nightmares about).

Grade: B-

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All my product reviews are listed here.

I DO want to go to Chelsea.

...when their Christmas lights look this gorgeous.

Restaurant review: BRASSERIE MAX (Covent Garden)

About two or three times a year, I deviate from my questionable practice of dining at mediocre restaurants using Groupon deals (and then absolutely destroying the dumps on my blog, and give patronage to restaurants which don't need deals in order to get custom. Although such an act (of paying full price for a meal) doesn't strike most as out of the ordinary, when I do, I always feel like Charli XCX, in that 'I'm so fancy', and it means I've gotten to eat at some pretty awesome places.

I had the Thanksgiving dish, which, given the time of year, I felt was apropos:

Walking in an Overpriced Wonderland.

Review: Next warm handle snowflake and reindeer tights

This week, I cracked out these tights which I got in the sales earlier this year, and seeing as I haven't reviewed any hosiery products for over two years, I thought I'd share some brief thoughts on them!