My Left Moot

‘Sheathe your sword mate.’ Bridgerton, and the many dongs of modern Regency Romance.

It is NYE 2020 and according to Netflix pretty much everyone in Australia is watching Bridgerton.

Stubbornly ignoring a pandemic requires the kind of stoicism only displayed by pioneer women in those films where she has to like chew her own arm off to keep her children from going hungry, then announce with dry eyes and zero sarcasm ‘You go on and eat mamma’s arm now before it get’s cold.’

Tho the 21st century may not have equipped us with this sort of self cannibalising stoicism it has armed us with a different way to cope, and it’s called cheap escapism.

Enter the Netflix adaption of Julia Quinn Romance series ‘Bridgerton’.

Featuring- candle lit balls attended by colour coordinated guests! Garden parties! Pashing! Macaroons! Escapist buttocks!

It is the tale of Daphne Bridgerton, a newly debuted ‘diamond of the first water’ who everyone keeps insisting is flawlessly lovely but to me looked like a strawberry blonde Milhouse. Seriously, winner of The Worst Bangs of 2020 award. One wonders why the sharply dressed Duke of Hastings wants anything to fucking do with her.

As an anonymous but popular gossip mag columnist brands our heroine a dud, and the bonkable Duke ‘bonkable’, the two cunningly agree to pretend to be courting so that Daphne’s value on the marriage market will go up to Prize Hog at County Fair status, and the Duke will be left in peace by all the mamma’s haranguing him to find their daughters fuckable. A solid plan, and relatable content.

**WARNING. This bit contains spoilers about how fucking stupid the show is**

While walking around being smug about their plan, The Duke helpfully teaches Daphne how to masturbate and they of course unwittingly fall in love.

A bunch of dumb shit happens in between garden parties, and there are some sub plots and stuff, but the nitty gritty is they are forced to marry even tho he has told her he has sworn off marriage as he can’t have the children Daphne apparently so desperately wants.

Cut to the dukes digs where they embark on a good natured bonk fest until our innocent/ignorant heroine notices her hubby keeps cumming in to hankies and begins to suspect something might be a bit off. After a biology lesson from her poor maid she realises it’s not that her well shod Adonis can’t have children, it’s that he won’t!

He has in fact been wilfully withholding sperm from her.

Reason being -and the whole plot hinges on this so pay attention-he vengefully swore to his dying father that he would never carry on the Hastings line.

He’s dark and tormented see. Instead of marriage and love and all that he decided he would just like, walk the earth.

Fucking and cumming into hankies.

Anyhow, it turns out alright in the end. Daphne performs a controversial but elegant Finisher Move in the sack to hold on to his semen, there’s an argument, they make up, everyone lives Happily Ever After.

Was it all laugh out loud stupid? Yes.

Did my flatmate and I nonetheless inhale it like it was Chanel no. fucking 5? Yes. Yes we did.

As contemporary Romance was now ”cool” and we’re at a unique time in history where wasting time on shit is entirely permissible, I spent the next few rainy days of the new year perusing the hallowed halls of free online fluff on the hunt for more serotonin via cheap escapist bollocks.

The Beauty of Free Online Books You’d Be Too Embarrassed To Buy From A Human
Perusing the free e book selection, I knew I wasn’t after anything with a sustained story line. Any description that said ‘Gripping’ , ‘Emotional’ or ‘Realistic characters that live and breathe’ was out. Anything that included an impoverished governess, a duke with a tortured past, or a protagonist who was a shapeshifter, was in.

Or if the cover had lots of pastels on it.

If it was set in this century I wouldn’t even consider it, and reader neither should you.

I soon discovered that the genre of free e-book Romance is generally sorted in to Regency Crap, Victorian Crap, or Scottish Highlander Crap, with the most popular by far being Regency Crap possibly on account of everyone having seen at least one version of Pride and Prejudice, but wanting a scene where Jane Austen actually used an adjective or had her ”much loved” characters fuck.

The Good Old Days. Hand wringing? Check. Repression? Check. Social distancing? But of course. See? Old Skool.

And in 21st century Regency Romance, fuck they do.

Reader, I was shocked. Let’s just say we’ve come a long way from the hero standing 2 metres away from the heroine, clenching his fists and repressing Everything. Seriously, some are just thinly disguised porn with a half arsed storyline about some guy needing to marry by the age of 27 or he will lose his earldom. If you read some journo in a Guardian article referring to Julia Quinn novels as ‘witty,’ sue them. They are lying.

And I should fucking know. In one day I’ve read a story about a reluctant Earl who inherits a beautiful feisty heroine he’s supposed to marry off but decides instead he ‘must have for himself!’ another about a maid who thinks her beloved employer may be Jack the Ripper (wow) but it turns out the weird crates that get delivered in the dead of night by gnarly looking cockneys she thinks are full of murder victims, are actually **spoiler alert ** just full of his laundry, and lastly, one about a ”plain” girl who has the gift of shapeshifting.

Yeah look, reading this last one, I got a little too involved, knocked over my drink and yelled at my laptop at 2 in the morning – ”Oh my GOD dude. She just turned in to a fucking TIGER to save you from knaves, and you’re all ”We’ll discuss this matter later”. OPEN YOUR EYES COSGROVE!”

This is something that actually happened.

Three days in to the new year I have discovered that reading/watching escapist bollocks is bad for one. I walk past 3 pubs with a mate citing Covid as my reason for not wanting to set foot in any. I do not admit that I am secretly turned off each establishment because no one in them is carrying a sword.

Said mate gets impatient and goes home. Meh. I would care, but my opinion of his character has gone down after observing he doesn’t look like he could pin a cravat to save his life. Ya know? This is what happens when you read too much shit about dudes wearing knee high boots.

In conclusion, pop culture can suddenly rant about so called witty dialogue and the welcome departure from starched, repressed tradition in favour of celebrated and unashamed female sexuality, but no one is reading this shit for any of the above reasons. It’s the same old reason Barbara Cartland sold enough paperbacks to keep her in peroxide, Spaniels, and hot pink dresses till she expired- escapism. (Good looking people fucking in nice clothes in nice places. But like, with Romance.)

But you know, go forth and indulge because the world fucking sucks right now so it’s alright and that. But much like Crystal Meth, just don’t do it for too long.

*Pssst. You want to read something that will stay with you till the grave? ‘Kill or Be Kilt’. Victoria Roberts. Category: Highlander Crap.

PART IV-Turning A Pile Of Cinder Blocks Into A Quarantine Love Nest For One!

PART IV

Hello my dear paranoid friends.

I was running out of rooms to do (my cinder block granny flat is only my figurative castle, alas), when I figured, fuck it, let’s cheer up that hallway!!!

It’s not really a hallway per se, because hallway denotes something you walk down rather than something only big enough to take one, nice man-ish step through. But that wasn’t going to stop me turning it in to 36 inch x 52 inches of ecstasy.

So after all this business, I needed something that was going to BURN LIKE THE FIRE OF ONE THOUSAND SUNS!

It’s good and bright so that when I’m sitting in the lounge room in the dark I can switch the hall light on and watch it like it’s television. You may not be able to tell, but that’s our old pal Zeftron from Part II on the borders there. So like the same colour as the bathroom only the ”coral” colour of the hall is so ass bleedingly bright it makes it look darker, as seen below. Which is very interesting really if you’d like to have a conversation with yourself about visual perception. I do not.

I also thought that since it’s such a small space I should go grandiose and chuck a big fancy ass portrait of a snooty lady (more things I have ”laying around”) who will take up half the wall and regard me snootily if I go to the bathroom with the door open.

Like this!

Snooty lady, judgemental parrot-I am surrounded by assholes.

So the hallway kind of looks like a bad set in a Roger Corman movie. Or you know Danger Diabolik’s garage. Anyway, one of those.

PART III-Turning A pile of cinder blocks in to a quarantine love nest for one!

Hello Reader. It’s been a while between Part II and III. Not because I haven’t been decorating me quarantine nest, but more cause I’ve been spending too much time alternately on the internet watching the world burn, and staring out the window lacking the enthusiasm to do anything beyond squint. Which segues nicely in to my re do of the bedroom!

The Boudoir/Inner Spanktum/Rave Cave etc

So here’s a before shot eh.

For starters I wasn’t having any of this Almost Cream cinder block with mauve feature wall business. I decided to be boring and go for like, just one colour, and that colour was going to be PINK! Not a delicate ‘I can’t believe it’s not beige’ Pink either but the hardcore, bubblegum, unicorn type. It was from Dulux, and it’s called English Rose, which nicely conjures up images of women who look like Jane Seymour demurely accepting wedding proposals inside greenhouses.

Escapism!

I decided there was to be no method to the madness really, just a vague theme of ‘Girly as f*ck girls bedroom’. Which you know is always going to be fun, especially because a lot of pubescent lasses actually end up unwittingly creating unpretentious and inimitable monuments to kitsch out of their sad, suburban caves that are complete f*king genius.

I’ve found you can also just chuck a bunch of junk in a big ol’ pile, and as long as it’s vaguely colour coordinated it will look A-OK. You can see here the leftover remnants of my 70’s wallpaper used on my bonza bathroom cabinet in Part I of this design bloody odyssey. Not to mention some other very spiffy wallpaper off cuts I have found nowhere to put, along with some coat hangers, and a broken tambourine! (unfortunately cropped out) Also if you have OK looking clothes, you can pretend you have run out of cupboard space and just hang em off the window ledge and such like a big ol’ born-free, wardrobe- less wanker.

You can’t really accomplish the below unless you own a lot of plastic Madonna’s I suppose. You can however replace these with various other gee-gaws and doo dads, especially horrible twee shit like, I don’t know…thimbles? Plastic stuff from bubble gum machines, half empty nail polish bottles, kewpie dolls, plastic flowers…you get the little girl lost K-Hole I’m going down here.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that glow in the dark shit is tops. Especially in a quarantine setting. You can really waste a lot of time just staring at this shit. This, some whiskey and a well timed muscle relaxant, really is poor mans acid

Nice rug I’ve had for eons to cover up the weird carpet that totally doesn’t match with bubble gum pink. Not much does really. But yeah unsightly carpet you can’t get rid of? Just chuck something on top to cover it up. You know, like you do with your fears. Also check out the girly, Maximalist bullshit below. It’s a wonder I can even sleep knowing this Frankenstein jigsaw puzzle of shit is going on outside my bed curtains.

There’s some girly boho maximalist bullshit right there. How do I even sleep knowing this riot of shit is going on outside my bed curtains?

Obligatory Madonna print. Also more clothes that really could go in a wardrobe

IT LOOKS A BIT LIKE AN ENID BLYTON CHARACTERS BEDROOM. EXCEPT MORE HARDCORE COS OF THE CINDER BLOCK PRISON VIBE. SO, A PINK PRISON.

Monthly Horoscopes for April. See what the stars have in store!

Drawings (other than cover header image) by Kimmy Bronowski.

Pisces

An eclipse in your House of Domesticity may see conflict on the home front. All signs point to you locking yourself in your room with the last of your share houses hand sanitiser. A ‘Lord of the Flies’ scenario ensues.

Aries

Neptune gliding through your house of entrepreneurship will see you channel your unspeakable horniness into creativity. You will bedazzle your dildo.

Taurus

You will be forced to eat unpalatable cuisine. A long wait for any kind of financial aid will see you regret panic buying all that pizza and semi mid shelf wine at the start of the month.

Gemini
By mid month, your flatmates will crack and quietly consent to boning each other for the remainder of the lockdown season. You will call ‘Shotgun’ on the one who doesn’t have a dry cough.

Cancer

Your 24/7 live stream of yourself crying on to your cat will prove a hit with sadists and torture porn enthusiasts.

Virgo

Your insufferable fastidiousness and hypochondria will serve you well this month. Your over cautiousness will see you be the only one in your book club not to come down with Covid19 and you will figure out how to activate the microphone on your home computer for the Zoom meeting. High five Virgo!

Leo

‘Quarantine! My moment to shine!’ you say. Wrong Leo! The acoustic cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ you generously decide to inflict from your council flat balcony may well result in your neighbours cannibalising you.

Libra

In your trademark bid for fairness, balance and beauty, you will fashion yourself a swanky mask, but be undecided as to what to wear it with. You will draft a small essay on the aesthetics of contagion. As you are also a massive wanker.

Scorpio

As we all know Scorpio, you are ruled by your dong. An eclipse in your 5^th House will unleash your competitive streak, and you will jealously horde all the dildo’s you secretly panic bought back in February. Like the dragon Smaug from The Hobbit but sitting on a big ol’ pile of dildo’s instead of gold.

Sagittarius

Venus gliding through your House of Luck will see you being able to pull off a ‘Finisher move’ while playing Witcher 2. This generally depends on the chance of being able to perform an effect of ‘’stunning’’ a character. It is unclear whether this will be achieved by using the Aard Spell, but either way, you will be able to stun an opponent, and stylishly eliminate your foe.

Capricorn

Venus sashays into your House of Love and Passion! She is however muted by a frustrating trine with an ever retrograde Mercury. So although the Centrelink queue will prove a movable feast of impoverished hospo babes, social distancing will see you unable to seal the deal. Never mind Capricorn. While your bank account be empty, your spank bank overfloweth.

Aquarius

You will be undecided on whether to be fastidiously paranoid or cavalier about health matters this month. You will smear yourself in hand sanitizer and shoot off a few late night ‘Wass up’s?’ to only the more hygienic seeming contacts saved to your ‘Totes defo’s dead set root’ list.

Part II-Turning a pile of cinder blocks in to a quarantine love nest for one!

Welcome Reader.

Here’s a nice before shot of a wall in Not Quite Yellow, though I guess you call it ‘Cream’, with some kitchen cupboards and shit in it.

Oh and then here you go. Slap on a big fuck off mural and ta-dah!

I purchased this mural on Etsy from Aurora Wallpapers. https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/AURORAwallpapers?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=602120676

On my credit card.

Way the fuck back when I didn’t realise I’d be needing my credit card for such luxury items as food. I have however, no regrets. I lean toward escapism in general, but if you’re going to have to spend a lot of time in a place, it’s important it feels like…somewhere else. So you know get yerself some kind of mural where every time you see it you’re like, ‘I’m not in my pensioner parents granny flat, hiding from them so I don’t give them a deadly virus! I’m like, an ant or some other kind of exotic insect, rooting around in a twee fkn fairy jungle. Fuck yeah!’

Japanese tea pot placed for scale and to give homely feel to the photo.

Reader, you can find a lot of these kind of murals on Etsy for varying prices, depending if you want to customise the size, and some come in this ‘peel and stick’ vinyl which you don’t have to use glue for. You can just peel it off if you decide you might want to put it on another wall tomorrow because you’re feeling claustrophobic and you need to change it up, but that kind is more expensive, and no I didn’t get it.

Some more disguising of the cinder block with plants and mirrors and shit.

I spend a lot of nights in taking photo’s of my plants in sexy poses. Check out those stems!

This is a fairly poor, filterless shot of the inside of the inside of my kitchen cupboard. The stained white plastic or whatever it’s coating is kind of depressed me, so I taped up some old Russian and Italian newspapers I had. It’s good to save this kind of shit in case you ever need to tape it up to the inside of a cupboard during a pandemic. It cheers me up.

I like having these guys greet me when I go get a glass.

” Na Zdorovie comrades!” I say. Then we drink.
Together.

Turning A Pile Of Cinder Blocks In To A Quarantine Love Nest For One!

A little while back I realised I couldn’t afford to live in the city any more, so moved back to the folks. As well as being more fiscally responsible, it’s just nicer to pay rent to your pensioner, no-money-in-da-bank parents (who will spend that money on food to put in their disgusting, crinkly, old mouths), rather than give it to your fuckhead Sydney land lord. Who will spend it on coke.

But I digress. This is not after all a social commentary on the evils of Capitalism and the importance of redirecting money out of the hands of corporate interests and back in to communities and ethical investment. This is about Design!

I figured my efforts to isolate and not bring Covid19 in to the house and literally KILL my 73 year old mother (LOL!) served as a nice excuse to transform the FUCK out of the granny flat, where I would be spending literally all of my time!
Alone.

So check it out!

We’ll start off with a fairly ugly wall bravely painted in not quite yellow.

I donned a face mask and got me to a Mitre 10, where I bought one of the cheapest semi gloss tins possible. (It’s called ‘Accent’. Fuck Dulux it was like literally a million bucks more.) Colour wise I chose the dubiously named ‘Chloride’, and the more enchanting sounding ‘Magnetic Magic’ for the border things. So i got home, washed my hands for 10 minutes and got painting! With my father. Who I gotta say by the end of the day I didn’t give a shit if he got COVID19, I really didn’t.

Ta dah! Check out this twee looking shit. Tissue placed for context and gravitas.

It’s not enough to paint it but, you gotta add some life props, and let me tell you, kitchen wise, you’re never too old to have a bunch of mismatched tea cups hanging off hooks like some twee Wes Anderson loving arsehole. You’re really not.
Also that booze is the result of panic buying and one fancy bottle of Lillet was a gift. I don’t usually have prop booze laying around. And don’t worry I have ten more bottles of really cheap wine stashed under the sink. Liking mint green doesn’t mean I’m a fucking idiot.
Down to the distasteful matter of coin. The starburst mirror was 20 bucks on FB marketplace. The art deco side board I got for a measly $40 from some nice putz who referred to genuine antiques in excellent condition as ‘this old shit in my fathers garage I’m trying to get rid of’.

(Note: all this loot I scored off marketplace a few weeks ago. You know, before we were afraid to shake peoples hands. If I was getting this shit now I’d be wiping it off with metho for fear of Corona cooties. As you should too dear reader, as you should too.)

Da Pisser

Yeah here’s a before shot

As I’ve always lived in rental houses, I’ve never been allowed to paint a room before and have had to live with your general share house wall colours, which seem to be ‘Bright, No Bond Back For You’ White, ‘Is that mould or the actual colour?’ Grey, and another one that cannot be referred to as anything other than ‘Phlegm’. Reader, I took full advantage of my new found powers, and went bright!

Check out them under the sea vibes. The shower under the sea.

I’m no different to the next arsehole who lends sea theme colours to their bathroom, as though the ocean and their toilet water are inextricably linked. Which I guess they are. By sewerage and whatnot.
This colour was called ‘ZEFTRON’, and the guy at the hardware store mixing the paint said ‘Wow that’s an inappropriate name for this colour. It sounds like something out of science fiction!’ and I went ‘Ha ha. YEAH!’ because I didn’t know what to say.

He was right though.

Here is the shelf in the bathroom.

I basically ripped out the middle shelf, cleaned out the cockroach crap, and sticky taped in some old vinyl wallpaper I had lying around. Because that is the kind of thing I have lying around. You know, in lieu of important things, like toothpaste and phone chargers, and money.

There ya go. I’d call it ‘low key groovy’ now.

You can try this at home, but it obviously won’t look as good if you don’t own a bottle of 4711.

Upon reflection, instead of writing ‘I basically ripped out the middle shelf, cleaned out the cockroach crap, and sticky taped in some old vinyl wallpaper I had lying around.’ I should have written something more …design-ey. Like ‘I decided on removing the middle shelf to allow for a more practical, visually spacious area. Taking a damp cloth I worked it along the surface, removing any dirt or debris. After drying, I carefully measured and cut a piece of genuine 70’s wallpaper I had set aside. The orange and yellow will give a lovely, contrasting ‘pop!’ against the blue when one of your guests open the doors to snoop in your cabinet post quarantine. Holding it along the inside of the shelf, I smoothed it down to ensure there were no wrinkles and air bubbles, then used ordinary, poor persons sticky tape to secure it. I. Am. SO. Clev-ah!’

Yeah look the bathroom is a work in progress. But I have added this lovely old piece of enamelware to perch precariously/uselessly on top of the shelf I just fkn ”upcycled”.

Stay tuned for more erotic adventures in Upsycle-ry.