Violet's Box Website Coming Soon... in 2012!

Not long now before Violet's Box's website makes an appearance. Here are some tasters of what's to come when the site launches in January...


First here's a sneakpeak at one of our wonderful campaign pics of Florence Brudenell-Bruce in an incredible Violet's Box tulle skirt shot by the BRILLIANT Andrew Farrar (way too many adjectives there but I assure you they're all deserved):

                                                          That's all yer getting I'm afraid...



NOW FOR THE CORSET AMUSE BOUCHE:

A STARTER OF KIMONOS:

A MAIN COURSE OF VINTAGE DRESSES:

Hey! Nice 'Beaded Fish Tail'

I'd be full up by this point as I don't have a sweet tooth and I gave you rather a lot for main... but I suppose you should have a little something to cap off this generous dinner seeing as it is Christmas:

                  For those over-eaters amongts you - some deer and butterfly eyelashes as the petit fours.

Ok I lied - that was merely the tasting menu...

SEE YOU NEXT YEAR @ WWW.VIOLETSBOX.COM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Anyone Who Owns/Runs A Train In This Country SHOULD Be Taken Out and Slowly Tortured THEN Shot in Front of Their Families.... BY Jeremy Clarkson

Just thinking about having to get on a train in this country makes my blood curdle into blue cheese AND THE WORST THING IS WE HAVE NO CHOICE!!!!!


Ok, so, the cost is extortionate unless you book 3 months ahead, the distance bears no relation to cost, they are alllllways late and if you forget any part of which there are about 73 (you need a small filing cabinet to keep them organised for any one journey) of your ticket, they not only treat you like a criminal but in no better words:


you're fucked.

Ok Worse Case Sinario: (no real need for this but I don't think using me as an example will get your sympathy vote) Imagine, you're a sweet old American lady and you've saved up your entire pension to make this once-in-a-lifetime trip to quaint ol' England. You decide to walk upon England's mountains green while you're there and book some tickets to Chester from London. It costs you and your husband (he walks with a stick btw, since the knee op.) around £42.90 return for the two advanced first class return tickets you've treated yourself to. 'Gee how reasonable' you think. 'What a treat!' 

Big mistake, BIG mistake. Right, from the word go, 1 of about 23 things can now go wrong. In fact very little can now go right. I'm just going to explain ONE THING that can wrong though...

1. -  You don't realise you have to print the receipt/ticket out and bring it on your journey. It's one of those new e-tickets. 

You tell the train assistant this as you get on the train but ticket collectors are trained in the fine art of bastard-ry and will totally discount the receipt you're showing them on your blackberry purely because it's not on paper. As far as they're concerned, they are blind and you are stupid, lying, and TOTALLY happy to spew cash out of every orifice. What will now happen is you'll say 'Oh dear. But is this receipt not good enough? My husband and I didn't realise you had to print it out.' And they'll say 'No, arm afraid not madam (they are not afraid at this point but getting extremely sexually excited by the prospect of fleecing you in seconds to come). 'Arm afraid Madam, you and your husband are going to have to buy a new one. And because you're buying it on the train arm afraid (There it goes again. No they're not. They're positively mind-wanking with pleasure at this point.) we're going to 'have to' (they don't have to at all) charge you the standard peak fare because you're not allowed to buy them on the train. That'll be £300 please.'

GASP!!! "Oh no!" you say, "but that's our whole budget for the weekend blown. And we'll have no money for that lovely spa hotel we've treated ourselves to when we arrive." 

"Returning you say?" says the ticket person rubbing their hands together warming them up for another mind wank, "Well you'll need to get a return then. It's cheaper though if you buy a return ticket (trying to sugar coat the dog shit at this point) but obviuosly we'll have to charge you the full onpeak fare as you're buying a onpeak ticket. That'll be £400 in total. " 

So you hand over your hard-earned pension, then try and find a seat but the train has been seriously overbooked, and because you didn't print your seat reservation out back in July, you don't have one. SO you walk down the train, falling onto the odd person who swears at you, until you find a little bit of filthy carpet space in a partition between two carriages and one small seat near an overflowing bin, outside a loo with a broken door which keeps opening and shutting, which you let your husband sit on while you stand (the journey's 2.5 hours). Moments later a trolley lady (with a particularly irritating accent) tells you you're not allowed to sit there because that space is only for people who booked first class tickets, forgot them and had to rebuy them, AND 'it's health and safety' (whatever that means). So off you move to another partition to find some more filthy carpet space to sit and get some diseases from a carriage down next to 2 drunk Northerners who are downing cans of Carling. (Luckily, because you're American you don't understand their accents but I can assure they're saying 'cunt' a lot.) You go and seat yourself on the floor next to them. At the next station, a young teeanger gets on and asks you to move so she can park her pram there, but this is somewhat of a relief because your limbs are going numb and you've heard the C-word 16 times already and are beginning to guess what it means.

You hit the halfway point - Birmingham - where your train gets stuck in a tunnel for 40mins, only metres before the station. The train gets very hot and smelly and everyone starts getting angry and larey so you queue up at the buffet to get some refreshment. Just as it's your turn they announce 'the buffet car is now closing' and then another anouncement informs the 1200 hot, angry, smelly, drunk larey people that there is a fault on the line ahead and because of 'health and safety', the train must terminate here where a bus replacement service will take over. The first bus takes an hour to arrive and when it does there's only room for one of you not both, so you have to wait for the next...

So by the time you arrive at Chester, it's midnight, the only free hotel is one you pay by the hour and your husband has had 2 minor coronaries and needs his other knee replacing.

So what could've been an romantic insight into English travel - watching the beautiful countryside roll by as you're offered tea and shortbread by the nice trolley lady while a jolly fat ticket man hole punches your ticket with a light-hearted 'ho ho ho' -  is actually tantamount to banging your head repetitively against a brick wall, employing someone to squeeze lemon into the wound whilst allowing those little dinosaurs, which look cute but are actually fervent pack hunters nibble at your feet - extremely unpleasant to start off with, gets worse as time goes on and will only cease to be painful when it stops or your die.

A DELIGHTFUL POEM BY GRACE PILKINGTON...

...written on the tube. I'm in love with it.

Oh you, you spacious disabled loo,
Rarely engaged and always bright, 
Like Bethlehem's star, on December's night.
... The other cubicles can't begin to compare, 
They offer nothing, not like you 
Oh you, you spacious disabled loo. 

It's Thursday and I'm going on a date, 
Running home would make me late,
I run into Pret, in a minor state, 
your presence will decide my fate.

Please be there darling disabled loo,
But alas, there is not one of you, 
Regretably I join the ladies queue.

Now it's a series of squeezes to endure, 
Oh no! my blusher has spilt all over the floor. 
I squeeze into my dress,
My hair an afro mess.
It smells horrid in here and on me it will stick,
I hear grunts outside 'be quick, be quick' 
I panic, checking my phone to see the hour
before I know it, splish, splash splosh. 
Yes it's taken my phone the evil loo. 
My mind drifts to memories of you. 

I make a promise then, 
Never will I cheat. 
I will always hunt harder,
And kneel at your feet. 

Oh you, you spacious disabled loo. 
You dearest, darling disabled loo. 

SO special you are to me with your warm embrace, 
Your large door handle winks - welcome grace. 

In your fold, I'll hide from the cold, 
And the hostile stare of other loo goers. 
Who cannot understand you, or me 
They are scared of you and think that I am sick 
But they should choose carefully the fights they pick.

With your handle bars and alarmed string, 
There's no end to the pain we could bring. 
I could do a ninja kick swinging from the bar, 
The string would get us back up from near and far. 

And if there was an armed robbery in the garage store, 
I know where I would go - straight to your door. 
You'd let me in and keep me safe, 
And immediately restore my withering faith.
You wouldn't ask questions or hint for me to leave, 
Telling me tales of Narnia, Christmas, Adam and Eve

No, the other loos they're just not like you, 
You spacious, darling disabled loo. 

I would never expect priority over you, 
Like you have over me,
But if anyone asks, I'm dyspraxic 
And really need to pee. 

Crotchless Pants and a Hand Gun

Put this on RE-peat and try and concentrate on yer Friday afternoon spreadsheets!

Told you, you couldn't.

And the point is....

Damaris's BEAUTIFUL underwear OF COURSE

AND that you'll look a whole load better in it with a pump action shot gun.

Or perhaps that's got something to do with Liberty Ross' arse.

Tse.

OucH!

AND MIGHT I ADD....

... a fuck of a lot better than Tracey Emin's arsing bed.

Nicky Haslam's Bed

        Who else could have come up with something this fab and this impractacal but Mr Haslam?

Well, when I found out my bf, one of Nicky's design team Beata Heuman was involved, things began to make sense....

A giant gilded sea-bed stolen from beneath the feet of Botticelli's Venus with that all essential lethal carpet of oyster shells, complete with perfect flower fairy model children? But of course. 

And it's clear the point is not to make life easy for the upholsterers either:

What every girl should have in her room - one of these sequinned beer dresses created by desgin GeNiUsEs Rodnik. (Dresses I dream of... and they create!)

And if sold out - only a shark dress will suffice in place of a beer dress:

with appalling joke going hand-in-hand

We're moving house soon. Do you think if I just snuck this little number into our bedroom, put our usual cream and floral John Lewis never-knowingly-undersold bedcover on it and plumped up the pillows, my boyfriend would notice?

I think...

I could get away with it.

Yup.

No question.

Two Down, One to Go...

 Apparently I was always dicing with death Dad's informed me. He just sent this pic. of me in the lagoons of the Mississippi river, having clambered to the front after refusing to stay behind the safety bars so I could get a closer look. (It was even closer than it looks btw.)

                Just need me grinning innanely in front of the jaws of a Great White now. . .

Not sure that's going to happen though. I've promised mum to stop throwing myself into the jaws of death.

Turkish Delights!

Ok, I thought I'd had some weird and wonderful pets but it seems the Turks have outdone me. The excitement I got from each of these fascinating creatures really took me back to when I was young. Sadly that time has officially ended - according to National Rail.

From as far back as I have a memory, I longed for a pet like all my friends at school but my parents wouldn't let me have one so instead I kept ants, worms, newts, frogs, stick insects, catterpillas, white bait, hermit crabs, an imaginary fairy named Clatilda (she wasn't really an animal but she did ride on dragonflies for transport), a wild rabbit, (attempted a squirrel, which bit me) and a wild snake UNTIL FINALLY my parents told me if i did better at school or more specifically if I got less black dots for bad behaviour OR at LEAST wasn't the pupil with the most black dots for ONE TERM, they'd buy me an actual pet from an actual pet shop.

So at the end of term I managed to be 3rd rather than 1st for bad behaviour and when I got home there was a letter waiting for me. (Being 9, you don't get many letters, bills, bank statements etc.) When I opened it I saw it was a card in my mum's writing. On the front it read '1 voucher for' and inside she'd drawn a picture of a rabbit. I literally FREAKED OUT, i was so excited. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me in my life so far (in my opinion). So at the weekend, my mum took me to Pet City (the stuff of dreams aged 9) and we chose a beautiful silky coated black dwarf rabbit, who I named Millie. She came home in a cardboard box with holes in, she was teeny and her ears touched the ground.

BUT Millie, rather than satiating my fascniation with animals, only left me hungry for more (Gerard Durrel didn't help either), so whenever one died, another replaced it. I think in total I had 3 rabbits, 8 hamsters (I bred them at the end of my parents bed to their horror and they had 6 babies to their further horror), 2 rats and a budgie...

And I've been begging Charlie to let me get a tortoise for a while now but he won't approve it so I"m biding my time...

Anyway, during my trip to Turkey, we encountered some WONDERFUL creatures I'd like to share with you...

Every one was unexpected!

Look who came to visit during breakfast in our hotel Atelya, in Antalya? 

Charlie fed it grapes until it spat one out. Do they eat grapes?

Next on the menu was a white rabbit but INFURIATINGLY i didn't have my camera. I was shown it by the restauranter who cooed at it, stroked it, let me stroke it, then he offered to cook it. 

Here's a picture of a similar bunny for those unimaginative among you...

I didn't eat it, in case you were wondering

One of 6 kittens hanging out on a restaurant roof terrace. Fortunately this wasn't offered up as part of our Meze.

This monkey belonged to a very fat grumpy Turkish man staying on the same sucluded beach as us in a tiny coastal village called Ecincek (pronounced Ekinchek). He had the little thing on a lead attched to him at all times, and it was forever biting at the lead and trying to escape. I've never felt so sorry for an animal. We couldn't work out which region of Turkey he was from and had to admit we hadn't seen any clambering through the trees on our way down. Finally someeone managed to translate what fatty grumpy Turk was saying - astonishingly it turned out the monkey'd been shipped all the way from Indonesia.  

As soon as we walked over to look at it, it immediately jumped from the man's back onto Charlie's arm and refused to return to its owner, who got very annoyed and thought Charlie had prompted ir to do so. (Charlie's laughing because the man is getting angrier and angrier and the monkey refuses to move.)

AND FINALLY for one of the most awe-inspiring creatures I have ever seen that made my heart leap into my mouth and stay there for several mintues.....

...this surreal and beautiful prehistoric-looking creature,  'the giant turtle'. It was around 5ft in length, and over 80-yrs-old; it swam incredibly fast and came up to snap at the dangling crab our boatman was offering him. With a mouth that looked just like a dinosaur's, it made a sound like a carraca as it snapped. I was mesmorised...

....and typically I couldn't stand back and just watch so I launched myself over the side to get closer to it. Here is a picture below of me stroking its head as it snapped at the crab just before it swam off into the deep.

When we got back to the hotel, we sat drinking delicious Efes beer and looking out to sea while I googled more about the turtles. 

One fact, we'd not banked on was that after the great white and the alliagator, these turles have the most powerful bite in the world....

Great.

Someone's Been Reading Bloggy bloggy bloggy

AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!

FOOD PORN

Do you remember what you had for lunch last week? Last year?

Well, in my case, I never forget what's launched into my mouth because if it was worth remembering, I record it.

This is something my boyfriend discovered early on in our relationship and it has taken him a while to get used to and accept over the years. I've always thought it entirely normal. It's not just my food, but his food, other peoples food, food at dinner parties, sometimes people in restaurants' food, food I see on the side of the road, or in a shop, it all gets photographed - nothing escapes the net - food that's still alive or that looks repulsive, even better phallic (this of course is normal and also extends to plants, vegetables, sweets, furniture well anything really that's looks remotely like a willy and is therefore hilarious).

Generally, food that looks wonderful and appears in large quantities excites me. I think because I am one half Naylor-Leyland one half Lambton, and as far back as I know, we have all been extremely greedy. My grandfather ate scalding hot melted cheese with a fork (i wish he'd used a spoon because it always went all over my head); my grandmother whipped cream out of a brandy snap cornet; my brother ate half an entire brie once (yes those Frence ones, 12 inch in diameter), hallucinated for 8 hours, cried and thought he was going to die (but didn't I'm glad to say); I have on more than one occasion been taken to the doctors with suspected appendicitis (which turned out to be indegestion - unbelieeeeevably embarrassing); my father has had the Heimlich Maneuver administered on him on various occasions due to swallowing without chewing; and I don't think my mother would ever speak to me again if I told you what she got up to when no one's in the kitchen.  So my obsession with food is actually not my fault but can be blamed on genetics, or just simply and fairly, like everything, on my parents.

So here goes with the most exciting food encountered (and where necessary explained) by me over the past 18 months. It goes in a kind of 'Yum to Yuk' order:

WILTSHIRE:

The argentinian way to eat/crucify your sheep, yet this was on someone's lawn in Wiltshire. Deliciously succulent, not dry at all and rather beautiful even if it did remind me a little of an ovine Jesus.

TUSCANY, ITALY:

My egg and bacon salad for 10

The close up

UMBRIA, ITALY:

These magnificently voluminous sugary bosoms I discovered at the front of a Pasticceria in a hilltop town in Umbria. It took some persuading me not to pack them in my suitcase as presents. In hindsight I may have been well advised.

They sure were!

LONDON:

A delectable jean stand at the Village Bicycle boutique in London

Its close up. Think I used to dream about swimming through this as a child.

BANGKOK, THAILAND:

Wonderful little pastry cakes I found in the Siam Centre in Thailand just before it was blown up by rioters

Now time for some less ravishing but no less fascinating looking food photogrpahy...

This dainty dish below was a type of Thai fondu we foud on the side of the road (at a street restaurant just outside the night market in Bangkok). Although it looks a bit terrifying, it was in fact delicious and an ingenious alfresco type of cooking I'd not come across. You start with a dense lump of pig fat which is placed at the top of this grated pyramid, underneath which are red hot coals, then as it melts, it coats the pyramid in fat ready to receive your first bit of meat or fish.

Then came the slightly terrifying bit - the buffet choice! 

Up at the buffet table were rows and rows of little iced tupperware boxes filled with every type of meat and piece of fish you could imagine and a hell of a lot we couldn't. Slices of beef, lamb, chicken, pork, squid, prawn, octopus, puffer fish, pink fish, bits of fish still with eyes and some terrifying objects that looked like the innards of an octopus but were we 'think' tripe - going by the gesticulations and noises of the resuranteur's sons who tried to explain by pointing to their stomachs and made a sound that sounded a bit like a moo or an oink... might've been a eeyore and a whoof, but we sort of blocked that possibilty out. 

Either way, we were squeamish - and tried it all!

Here I am, living up to my reputation - eating so quckly I'm actually blurred

About 15 dips and sauces were available and as we found out, the best plan was not to ask but to try, although one was so hot I had to ask for something to cool my mouth down. Gesticulating, 'it's hot in my mouth -help!' by panting and waving your hand in front of your mouth, whilst your eyes and nose are watering, evidently doens't mean the same in Thailand though, beacuse they looked puzzled for 10 minutes then finally went off to the kitchen and brought another little bowl (which i hoped might contain some soothing yoghurt or milk) of chilli.

The best part was the moat at the bottom, which had been filled with water to begin with and became a delicious bouillon by the end. Although by that point 'you've made your bed/bouillon, you've now got to  lie in it/eat it' sprang to to mind.

Charlie tucking into his 2nd 'Chicken Ceasar Salad Hot Dog' also from the Siam Centre, Bangkok. He thought he'd found heaven. 

Disgusting boy. Wrong wrong wrong.

Right right right

Now for the less than appertising....

MISCELLANEOUS DESTINATIONS, EARTH (believe it or not):

These were alive and jumping. Fresh - I'll give them that.

Alive also - these giant clambering toads I found next to the veg and fish stalls in a little Thai village market. Perhaps they eat them like jacket potatoes over there...

AND LASTLY, food that's so repulsive it makes you laugh...

This was our Thai Airways breakfast, which tasted as bad as it looked

These delightful little 'soft' baguettes were being sold packaged on the dry shelf (NOT EVEN REFRIDGERATED - gahhhhhh!) at a Japanese food fair in London. So so digusting looking, give me a frogcket potato with baked beans and cheese anyday.

Suitably repulsed?
My job here is done.