I have a new obsession. A friend taught me to crochet last week and now I'm, ahem, hooked. Much in the same way that I can rollerblade but not rollerskate, it seems that I've finally found an exception to my general failure at yarncraft (I'm a truly shit knitter) and I now can't stop.

There was a very silly article in the very silly Sunday magazine of the Age this weekend which banged on about the heavy demands on today's women to be beautiful. Oh, lamented the author, it's so hard, you must work work work to be gorgeous, sacrificing all your spare time to pluck and tan and bleach and buff, in a way that previous generations didn't have to. Here's a direct rip with my emphasis on the silliest line in the whole article:

The other day, as I had my toenails pedicured as I sat in a vibrating vinyl chair, it occurred to me that three years ago, most Australian women didn't do this, save for special occasions. Today, it's not an option not to. Neither are leaving eyebrows untamed or skin un-honeyed. One friend lamented that she only had one day off a week now. "Saturday is spent attending to beauty catch-up," she said. "Our mothers were allowed to go grey at 35. And garden instead."

Seems I am simultaneously advanced for my age and terribly anachronistic.