I Question The Location Of The Toilet Roll Holder
“I’ve lost every set of keys I’ve ever owned,” she admits.
Before you say it, yes, I know. I’m veering towards the catty. But the fact that it even exists possibly tells us something:
Laurie—who’s currently in a good place with her mental health and says she’s lucky to have found treatments that work long term—isn’t claiming that everything will be great if you could only just rearrange your house in a particular way. But she knows from experience there are alternative therapies and ideas that can help, in addition to traditional treatments. Including, but definitely not limited to, arranging your house in a certain way.
Specifically,
Laurie has heard that raw wooden surfaces and the presence of wood in the home can lift one’s mood, so she’s made sure to include wooden decor elements, from furniture to twigs, branches, and a dead tree she found on the side of the road she thought looked nice.
Perhaps she’s smashing bourgeois values via the medium of celebrity lifestyle features.
Can ‘Hello’ magazine be far behind?
Before you say it, yes, I know. I’m veering towards the catty.
So unlike you. 🙂
Does the dead tree have ‘serious healing power’?
Those pictures of her apartment leave me feeling despondent for some reason.
Does the dead tree have ‘serious healing power’?
I may need to retune my amulet to answer that one. And I’m still puzzled by the location of the toilet roll. It seems both needlessly inaccessible and perilously close to the shower.
Though I may be giving this more thought than is strictly necessary.
The waffle about healing powers and stuff is just a psychobabble take on ‘I made it look nice, and it makes me feel gooder’, and is thus expected given the context (the website would have edited that in irrespective of La Pennie’s input) and should be ignored.
The bit that catches my eye is that the overall message of the piece is someone asking for plaudits for living like a grown up.
“I found a place, furnished it and decorated it all by myself!”
That’s really quite telling.
The drugs clearly are working.
“Laurie found the medicine cabinet in the street and then upcycled it with decoupage.”
Looks more like duct tape. Spray-painted silver.
And I rather take exception to the use of the word ‘upcycled,’ which Google tells me means:
And the aforementioned toilet roll (“The bathroom is so small this is the only place she could fit the toilet roll holder!”):
Perhaps she’s smashing bourgeois values via the medium of celebrity lifestyle features.
She’s bringing down the system from the inside. 😀
I think she’s done a good job with the space. And I like the floors. Not sure about the guiding philosophy though. Or the risk of soggy loo roll.
Interesting that someone so keen to preach rebellion against work has a sign to herself saying: “Pay the bills you muppet!”
And I’m still puzzled by the location of the toilet roll.
Per the article, it seems most of her stuff came from IKEA which also sells this TP holder which can be put anywhere, or even moved.
The only conclusion, therefore, is that she is a booger eating moron. Oh wait, we have already seen that photo.
You can get better-looking stand-alone toilet paper holders by mail order. Catalogs like Miles Kimball and Walter Drake carry them.
I think she’s done a good job with the space.
I’ve no particular view on the décor, except for the aforementioned toilet roll intrigue.
Interesting that someone so keen to preach rebellion against work has a sign to herself saying: “Pay the bills you muppet!”
Well, that’s sort of what I’m getting at, the air of contradiction. In that our “riot grrl,” our self-styled “anarcho-communist,” the one who shouts, “fuck money!” and who claims to dream of living “in the rubble” of shattered capitalism… winds up doing what’s basically a lifestyle fashion shoot, which is pretty close to shorthand for the thing she claims to despise and wishes to see “on fire.”
I mean, are we supposed to admire her kitchen, or be burning it down?
[ Slides large Campari over to Joan. ]
are we supposed to admire her kitchen, or be burning it down?
I admire the kitchen and also her creative hypocrisy!
Although having said that, I don’t believe she really means or has thought through any of her positions. For example, she blathers on about the prison of marriage, the evils of right-wing conformity and the joys of polyamory, yet here she is on her tod in under 400 sq ft and with a genuinely tragic history of sexual abuse from the sort of predatory scum who hang around lefty groups preying on well-meaning and not quite bright enough girls like her.
You can get better-looking stand-alone toilet paper holders by mail order.
I am sure you can, but the point is rather than having a TP holder you either have to have a prehensile tail or stand up to use (which would create a rather unhygienic problem in of itself) she was allegedly already shopping in IKEA and there her solution stood.
Of course if were unadorned with some bog roll she probably just assumed it was a some Nordic version of a wide base walking cane.
Sixteen comments into a Laurie Penny post and no nose-picking photo. We readers are obviously falling down on the job. BTW, perhaps we should be less concerned about the TP location in order to help Laurie locate the Kleenex box.
OMG, she suffers from ADHD? I didn’t know. Is that some sort of deadly disease? I have no idea what..Oh look at that cat! It has a poofy tail! I like ice cream.
The bit that catches my eye is that the overall message of the piece is someone asking for plaudits for living like a grown up.
Precisely. All this stuff about having to organise the flat so that she can find things, as she used to spend hours every week looking for her belongings. The message is clear – I’m a fascinating eccentric person, but that comes with a heavy burden, but my ingenuity is helping me to lighten that load. Marvel at me!
I don’t think of someone who spends hours every week looking for her belongings as a particularly fascinating person. I think of her as an idiot.
Still, that’s a nice, bright, cheerful, middle class little space she’s carved out for herself.
Still, that’s a nice, bright, cheerful, middle class little space she’s carved out for herself.
That she’s had staged for the photoshoot, you mean. That’s not her real apartment, in the sense that it doesn’t look like that when it’s not being photographed for a lifestyle magazine. It’s been staged, the same way the living rooms in Ikea catalogs are staged. She wanks on about not being this perfectly, primly organized person but every bit of that living room was intentionally composed.
Those pictures of her apartment leave me feeling despondent for some reason.
Because it looks like a catalog. It doesn’t look like a real person lives there. There are no pictures of people, friends, family; no ugly knickknacks that have sentimental value; nothing that shows any uniqueness or personality. It’s sterile. (There’s that copy of Coup in the bookcase, but I’m betting she only owns it because it’s called “Coup” and not because she’s ever played it. For one thing, it’s upside down.)
I’m half convinced she didn’t decorate the place at all, it was done for her by the magazine.
Also, ADHD isn’t a real mental illness and she’s doing people who truly struggle a disservice by appropriating it so she can present herself as tragicompetent.
I call BS on the toilet roll holder too. And even if there are no other spots on the walls (don’t believe it for a second), Farnsworth showed the IKEA solution. They also sell ’em at Walmart here, so I am sure the UK equivalent store has them too. What a maroon, as Bugs Bunny used to say.
I Question The Location Of The Toilet Roll Holder
But does she roll over or under?
*runs away*
I’ve seen worse toilet paper holder locations. The part I find most disturbing was in the very beginning:
Philistine.
I don’t think of someone who spends hours every week looking for her belongings as a particularly fascinating person. I think of her as an idiot.
[ Another large Campari slides along bar. ]
It doesn’t look like a real person lives there.
A real person doesn’t.
someone asking for plaudits for living like a grown up.
She’s 32.
I call BS on the toilet roll holder too
It’s the guitar that does it for me. It’s way too high up on the wall for a munchkin like Laurie to access easily and it looks exactly like the kind of artefact that the Lefty acquaintances of my student days used to have lying around in their digs, which when picked up by any reasonably adept plank-spanker (*blushes modestly*) were manifestly unplayable, having not seen a new set of strings in five years, tuners that had seized solid and a neck which was bowed and warped, all out of sheer neglect and laziness.
She’s 32.
And earning over £3,000 a month from Patreon, plus writing fees, etc. Younger people earning much less, and from much more humble backgrounds, tend to own some furniture. It may often be crappy furniture, but still. If you’re in your thirties and don’t own your own bed, for instance, something sounds awry. Maybe it’s part of Laurie’s “precarious living” role-play and the theatrical disdain for bourgeois norms as “small, ugly ambitions.” Because being insufficiently together to own your own bed is keeping it real, baby.
plank-spanker
I see I’m going to have to dilute this Campari to make it stretch.
Sixteen comments into a Laurie Penny post and no nose-picking photo.
I was hoping only to have to allude to it.
I think of her as an idiot.
My motto is, “A place for everything, and everything all over the place”, yet I can find stuff, so not an idiot, as I said before, a booger eating moron.
It never gets old, though.
What do you mean “going to have to”?
“And I’m still puzzled by the location of the toilet roll. It seems both needlessly inaccessible and perilously close to the shower.”
Speaking of which…
https://photos.app.goo.gl/UXph6GxDEV4wffju9
Needless to say I soon learned to take my own toilet paper with me to the loo.
Is this an apartment she rents, leases or owns? Because that place has some serious money in it prior to her “budget furnishings”. And that place was professionally staged prior to the photoshoot.
She rents.
She rents
Well, she’s got some very nice digs where the landlord has clearly put it upscale, contemporary designer touches and probably charges a healthy monthly rent for it.
Ah…the advantages of capitalism. Heh.
Needless to say I soon learned to take my own toilet paper with me
I see it’s one of those powder rooms you can just hose down afterwards.
If she’s raking in that much bank per month just via Patreon, plus her speaking fees, writing, etc., but is only just now getting ’round to owning furniture at her age, i.e., only just now play-acting as a grown-up, I can only presume that either her parents or her manager or someone is putting all that cabbage in a trust for her (like a spendthrift trust in which she ain’t the trustee).
Either that or her entire nebbish, mentally ill, can’t be bothered with bourgeois things such as money shtick is a put on. And shirley that can’t be so.
Those pictures of her
apartmentleave me feeling despondent for some reason.This needed to be done.
And I’m still puzzled by the location of the toilet roll.
There are those of us who hold toilet roll holders to be irredeemably naff, and quite unnecessary.
There are those of us who hold toilet roll holders to be irredeemably naff, and quite unnecessary.
And potentially hazardous.
Dark Basement:
And that place was professionally staged prior to the photoshoot.
The books in the bookcases are the giveaway. People who actually read and use their books put them vertically in a bookshelf, for easy access to each one. Stacked in random horizontal piles makes it impossible to grab just the one book you need, because now nearly all your books are underneath other books. Designers do that to break up the rigid rectangular visual of a shelf full of books and make the space look more organic.
“Either that or her entire nebbish, mentally ill, can’t be bothered with bourgeois things such as money shtick is a put on. And shirley that can’t be so.
Indeed. Sure, the place has been tidied up, but it would take a gang of tradesmen about a month and a hefty five-figure sum to get mine looking even close to that. And honestly, I’ve been in flats round this way that aren’t far off it. People do live in rooms “like Lewis’s window”, as my gran used to say. But they’re not downtrodden revolutionary enemies of capitalism.
“There are those of us who hold toilet roll holders to be irredeemably naff, and quite unnecessary.”
Bung it on the cistern and move on to more important concerns.
Bung it on the cistern
Outlaw! I bet Sam has a motor bike.
There’s that copy of Coup in the bookcase, but I’m betting she only owns it because it’s called “Coup” and not because she’s ever played it. For one thing, it’s upside down.
I bet that guitar is an ornament as well.
Ah, Lancastrian Oik beat me to it.
I couldn’t help but notice in the photo Geezer posted that Miss Penny hasn’t been able to figure out which end of a chair seat cushion goes to the back, what with her being our intellectual superior and all.
Our toilet paper holder is the only one of its kind—my woodworking father made it. It’s got some kind of special varnish on it to keep the bathroom humidity from warping it. Seems to work.
Long time lurker just doing a drive by comment, is 370 sq feet really plausible for that? That’s around 34 sq metres. A friend lives in 28 sq metres in Paris and it’s basically one room, able to fit a single bed and some small items of furniture and a tiny kitchen that fits two people with difficulty. For that extra 6 square metres of space Laurie seems to get two decent separate sitting spaces, a reasonable size kitchen, an entrance hall and a separate bedroom.
I know sizes are hard to judge from the photos but it looks more like 50 square metres or a bit more.
Back to lurking. Love the blog btw. Consider your change bowl tinkled.
It looks like a lot of AirBnBs I’ve stayed in. International hotel chic, with forced touches of “personal style”.
I suspect Francis is right. A separate bedroom requires at least 45 sq m, and that leaves a much smaller living space than we are seeing.
Horizontal books say one of three things. Posed to look good, posed so you can read the spines and know how awesome they are, or too tall for the shelf. We have some horizontal books at home for the last reason.
So do we.