The Best of 2012

Remember last year, when I did a brief look back at the year just gone? You do? Super, because we’re doing that again (spoiler: I didn’t get a dog – boo).

My word for the year? Easy. It’s ‘lipstick’.

Alexandra Burke’s ‘Lip Boom’ red lipstick from Superdrug is The Shit.

Listen. You could walk away from this post right now because that’s the major take-home from this whole thing, kids: dinky tubes of pigment, wax, oil and emollient. I discovered lipstick in a big way in 2012: I wore it everywhere, from the office to lunch and /or dinner to getting the paper on a Saturday afternoon. It is a mood elevator, an outfit-put-together-er and also, basically witchcraft. I am only angry I discovered it this late in life.

But there were other Things of Greatness in 2012, and they are listed, right after the jump.

• Disclosure’s somewhat miraculous track Latch:

• Jessie Ware’s record, but especially Sweet Talk
• Frank Ocean’s D’Angelo-esque yelp at 3:19 on Sweet Life
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which had me doing Hollywood gasps in the silence of my flat
• The very funny Spicy Eve
• Sally Hansen nail varnish in Wholesome Earth and Barry M Gelly nail paint in Blood Orange
• Learning how to put my hair in Marley braid extensions (note the cranberry lipstick, please)
• Scandal, Magic Mike (and that Pony routine, y’all), The Good Wife, Ben Whishaw’s face in The Hour
• Starting regular columns for Comment Is Free and the New Statesman
• Teaching a classroom of teenagers actual journalism (I made it, Ma!)
• Solange’s. Entire. Existence.
• Simple toner and The Body Shop’s Vitamin E serum
• Black Girls Talking and their pretty splendid podcast
• Green tea (Twinings’ apple and pear flavoured version is The Jam)
• Favourite blog posts of the year: Girls In White Dresses (September), Black Girl Feels (also September), In Praise of Girlfriends (April)
• Favourite Graun pieces of 2012: CAPS LOCK DAY, Hunger Games: race and fandom, African women making Tartan in Scotland, and – sigh – Girls, mainstream feminism and intersectionality

Okay. Time for a quick Cute Interlude:

To Do List 2013

• Do excellent, interesting work
• Ovary up sufficiently to tell at least one of the two guys I have crushes on that I would like to kiss them squarely in the face
• Get a new laptop – the treadmilling hamster that keeps this one going is asthmatic and weary. I’ve my eye on a MacBook, and am open to alternative ‘payment plans’. o_O
• Go to many more parties
• Learn how to do a perfect cat’s eye flick with my felt tip liner
• Decide once and for all what my ‘signature scent’ is (DKNY Be Delicious? [Ugh, that name] or Michael Kors Women! It’s the tuberose, see.)
• Wear more dresses
• Go to New York and/or LA
• Higher cake consumption
• Punching every last person who says ‘female’ – when they should be saying ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ – in the crotch
• Blog more
• Bring back blue eyeshadow, like, in a big way:

I have one more post on the blog this year (an end-of-year post-Crimbo Festival of Joyous Perving, since you ask) and then that’s it till 2013. Have a happy, safe and warm Christmas, chums. I am grateful you decided to stop by this year and I hope you’ll continue to.

Besos!