TMI

So many wonderful style blogs, practical and purely inspirational, it has never been easier to check up on the latest offerings or feel empowered by the sartorial majesty of someone who doesn't look like a model and shops on a shoestring budget. Whatever image I'd like to create or recreate, it's all here at my fingertips. But while I'm shopping?  Browsing through on-line shopping sites from uptown-uptempo to high-street brands, I'm shocked by how many commercial businesses offer me 'advice'. I can 'get inspired' by the style of celebrities I've never heard about on Matches, I'm told to have a pedicure before you wear our "pretty ugly" shoes (Clarks) and stay away from bolder prints (M&S). When did the store that wants my money start to think it's alright to dictate my grooming habits, what I should be buying and how to dress? If stores spent more care making sure their items didn't fall apart and a bit more time making sure their merchandise fit a human figure and less thinking they were the next Vogue advice column, we'd all dress a lot better and I might decide to spend some money with them.  

Ride that News Wave

Have you ever wondered why some news gets exposure day after day and some just disappears almost without trace? It's not because news is more fickle than fashion it's because of vested interests and need for sensational action. On United Kingdom's news channels Japan's earthquake hardly seems to create a tremor any more except the odd  update of the ever growing list of thought dead in the wake of the tragedy whilst Libya is never off the agenda.

Nothing gets the United Kingdom's press so excited as a new war or revolution, hundreds of willing participants to impart human interest stories and  plenty of mileage in the unpredictable sport, sorry war, of words and rockets. The BBC relish this hot-topic and have excitedly added it to their  never ending stream of Middle Eastern comment in what is an obsession about the region and surrounding area (you thought thought British mandate ended in 1948?) as usual lapping-up every skirmish with pronounced glee. While the Japanese go about putting their everyday lives together out of the rubble left behind after the earthquake, tsunami and potential nuclear disaster the rest of the world can fool themselves that they are witness to or about to witness the overthrow of despotic dictators.

I am glad for the people in the Middle-Eastern and North African countries, that through their strength and solidarity have overcome insurmountable odds and have optimism for their future but the Western media has made the revolutions look quick, painless and easy. In 1979 there was similar obsessive media coverage at the overthrow of the Shar of Iran, pictures of crowds of happy faces as the up-rising triumphed into revolution. Will the same amount of resources still be there when the fighting has ceased and the crowds have diminished and new dictators spring-up to take the place of those recently deposed and everyone picks up the pieces of their lives or buries their dead or suffers in silence as the Western world has moved on to something more exciting?