Golly! When I updated the Manolo for the Big Girl facebook page (which I SWEAR I’m going to start using again. Scout’s honor) I had no idea I’d get so many messages about my outfit.

Okay, it was more like four, but that’s four more than I expected and because I love to love you babies, I thought I’d do a little featurette for those wanting to reproduce the Miss Plumcake at Villa Plumcake look at home.

I’m not shy by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t often do this sort of thing. It comes across as a little self-indulgent, even for me.

Also, just in case you were wondering, that’s not weird nipple action, I’m just pretty sure I had my keys in my bra. That’s right mijas,  it’s all glamor at Villa Plumcake.

Here’s how to get the look:

HAT This is the exact hat in the photo, a crushable, abuseable, practically indestructible white fabric and wire sunhat.

I removed the ribbon and adjusted the brim into more of a portrait shape for maximum Joan Collins effect and wore it almost every day.

>SUNGLASSES Admittedly this is a bit of Advanced Fashion as the non-ironic white sunglasses can be difficult to pull off, but I love my mother of pearl Clubmasters (I also have them in a caramel jasper treatment) and really, when one is wearing All White All The Time, darker shades just won’t do. The variations and pearlescence of the frame stop them from looking hipster and land them safely into 1930′s glamor.

JOURNAL My grandmother kept a record of her Grand Tour of Europe, jotted down in a neat little notebook of Moroccan red leather with the most over-the-top rococo gilt swirls embossed along the cover.

Determined to maintain the travelogue tradition, I picked up a small but sturdy handmade leather journal on my first trip across the pond and have used it exclusively for my travel memoirs ever since.

Though the actual journal in the photo is a simple one-off I bought for ₤20 at King’s Cross Station in London, this travel-ready notebook has the same feel.

PEPPER PEN I never went anywhere alone without my pepper spray pen within easy reach, usually tucked into the neckline of my dress.

No one ever questioned why I always wrote with another pen.

It was a handy way to feel safe when I was walking around alone without openly insulting the locals.

BOLERO – I can’t remember where I picked up this Jessica Howard bolero cardigan, but I wish I’d bought a dozen of them.

The Pacific breeze can get a bit nippy and this, alternated with my wrap. kept me nice and snug.

The dress is an inexpensive Mexican-style white cotton sundress with a surplice neck and crocheted lace detailing on the skirt I picked up for almost nothing at Ross and the bra is the original (now discontinued) Lace Plunge from Lane Bryant.

So there you have it: Miss Plumcake at Villa Plumcake.

Add your own oceanfront lovenest, hot Latin footballer, mezcal (no worm, thank you) and shake. Olé!

Due to unforeseen side effects, the Miss Plumcake Synchronized Belt Exerciser Class will be cancelled until further notice. The California schedule will continue as usual.

Nope. It’s not going to happen.

Appreciate, admire, regard…all that good stuff, but I just don’t like Pierre-August Renoir’s paintings and you can’t make me.

It’s like Jane Austen. I’m not saying they weren’t highly talented individuals very important to the this and that, it’s just that I’d rather go out to an antique store, find a telephone that actually has a cord and then hang myself with it rather than spend an hour subjected to their individual, or indeed collected, works.

BUT, I know how many of you gals liked the big girls in art feature and I’m always glad when I see plus size women painted beautifully in any style so I thought I’d offer you a handful of Renoir’s portraits, mostly from his later years 1914 and on, featuring some of his larger models.

The first portrait is of Austrian actress Tilla Durieux who at the time was married to a prominent art dealer in Paris.

Nice job if you can get it.

The second –and perhaps my favorite– is of his longtime muse Gabrielle Renard, who just so happened to be his childrens’ nanny and his wife Aline’s cousin.

I don’t know whether he had an affair with her, but can you IMAGINE the fights?

“Pierre, WHY is the nanny naked in the studio again? I thought you were doing landscapes this week!”

Next there are several portraits of the mysterious woman labeled just as Andrée. Could it be actress and Impressionists’ darling Ellen Andrée?

It seems a good guess as Renoir definitely painted her often in their younger days, these portraits all show a voluptuous woman with a full, almost carnal, mouth. Other paintings and photographs of the actress show her to have very thin, tight lips.

Ellen Andrée would have been in her 60′s by the time these portraits were painted, not that any portraitist has ever shied away from shaving off a few years –or decades– from his subject.

Finally we’ve got some bathers.

You can actually blame the Hot Latin Boy for this post because it started with this painting.

Back story? Why sure.

The fella and I hadn’t seen each other in donkey’s ears and because your pal Plummy does like to make her entrances –I’m glad you all were sitting down for that shock– when I first appeared to him at Villa Plumcake it was at dusk, wending my way in white dress and gossamer thin shawl through a lovely shadowed garden.

I hadn’t seen him in months and I sure as heck wasn’t going to be stared at in the merciless glare of some fluorescent lights or, you know, the sun.

I plucked a single blossom of night blooming jasmine and stuck it behind my ear as the Pacific swallowed the last breaths of light.

He came up, put my hand on his heart so I could feel it beating (apparently that’s A Thing) and said:

“You look like a sílfide”

For any of you people who are, you know, normal, you would understand immediately that sílfide is a Spanish cognate for sylph.

I didn’t quite understand, so he tried to explain what he meant and somehow I got it into my head that he meant I looked like a selkie.

No, it didn’t occur to me that perhaps a not-widely-traveled Latin boy’s frame of mythological reference might not include little-known Scottish shape-shifting seal maidens, but it honestly seemed more likely than being called a sylph.

Still does. I’d make a damn fine selkie. Plus I could have a seal fur coat without feeling guilty about it and that would be swell because even Cruella DePlumcake can’t swing that coat.

Anyway, sylphs are to my mind quite thin and willowy as are nymphs so I was pleased to see Renoir’s 1919 work The Nymphs (also called The Great Bathers) featuring women who don’t fit the slender sylph model either.

I have a confession: the fine art and subtle science of wearing a shawl has always eluded me.

I can carry off a scarf eight million ways to Sunday, I can wear white mother of pearl sunglasses without looking ironic, I can even deploy a Spanish silk fan without channeling Karl Lagerfeld in the pre-tapeworm days –these are no small feats– but the shawl? Jamais!

Oh sure I TRIED to wear a shawl, but I was always like the White Queen from Alice Through the Looking Glass and got myself all tied up higgledy  –and on more than one occasion– piggledy as well. So in the end I’d just throw on a shrug or a seasonally-appropriate mink, depending on the time of day and weep bitter tears.

The problem was twofold.

The first fold is I’m not naturally shaped for most of the ways I’ve seen shawls worn.

I’m pear-shaped without an excess of neck, that means my delicious self is most naturally flattered by keeping everything from the waist up free from heavy visual clutter, like a broad swath of bulky fabric obscuring the loveliest parts of my body; my neckline and my waist.

Fold two, the most important fold, was that I didn’t know how to wear a shawl in a way that flattered me without being fiddly.

Then when I went to Mexico, something clicked. Call it the spirit of Frida Kahlo (did I mention no waxing services for a month? Just a further reminder that I am at any given moment no more than six weeks away from looking like Harry from And The Hendersons fame) but I finally GOT the shawl.

For me the best look is to drape it evenly around my neck, adjust the scarf over my shoulders and then taking each of the outside edges –about five inches below the elbow is comfortable for me– bringing them together in front and tying just those bits in a small square knot, pulling down on the bottom of the shawl to make a nice sort of hospital cornered look that covers my shoulders but keeps the neckline open and the bulkiness to a minimum.

I discovered this by accident, but if you’re smarter than I am –and let’s face it, that’s not setting the bar prohibitively high– you’ll check out this series of tutorials by fellow big girl Kathie Plaskiewicz for The Proud Peacock.

Although I can’t imagine anyone even owning, much less using a scrunchie in public, what with it not being 1994 and all (an elasticated or drawstring bracelet is a chic-er choice) she gives you a whole mess of ways to wear a shawl, very few I’d seen before. What’s better is since she’s a big girl, you can see how these folds and knots look on someone of more, as Alexander McCall Smith would say, “traditional build.” Enjoy!

As many of you know, it is the hap hap-happiest time of the year; the beginning of premier league Proper Football all over the world, and as I’m organizing my fantasy team and plotting my Saturday mornings (and afternoons, and potentially evenings if I keep getting these mezcal hangovers) from now until the end of May, it occurred to me: Fat Fighting is a sport, and all girls –almost all girls– are expected to play.

Women are encouraged to follow, worship and obsess over the Fat Fighting the way men are over sports. Somewhere along the way, it was decided we were supposed to care about some actress’ visible rib count the way some men worry about their favorite baseball player’s RBI.

Like any sporting fan, there’s pain involved. Teams are fickle, players disappoint. There are drunken midnight promises made to God and self that get called off the moment your side scores a miracle or loses the penalty shoot out. You devote time, passion, money and so, so much emotional energy to what…some men kicking a ball? Some number no one else will ever see, much less care about?

No one understands you, no one cares.

No one wants to sit next to you at the bar because you’re just going to go on and on about points and weekly whatevers until someone –quite possibly you– gets stabbed in the eye just to break the monotony.

Still, I understand the appeal.

It’s not just suffering –unless you support Arsenal, then yeah, it’s pretty much suffering, but that can also be enjoyable in a martyred sort of way– there’s also the elation when your side pulls it off.

I accidentally broke a bar stool when Madrid scored a penalty kick against Barcelona last season, and we all know someone who did a victory lap when they finally fit into the dress that needed a shoehorn and some axle grease just a few months before.

And then of course it becomes a compulsion.

Skipping work to watch the Clásicos (no, I’m not prepared to talk about the Supercopa yet…give me time) spending money you don’t have on tickets, whiling away your Saturday mornings getting drunk in an expat bar even if you’re not a journalist. Where, precisely will the madness end?

I think about the Diet and Beauty industry and how easy it is to get lured in.

We learn it from our parents, from our friends. We support a team because it’s the one we’ve always been around. It’s a way to bond with our social group, or expand the one we’ve already got.

But what if we just don’t LIKE that sport or at least don’t want to go to EVERY game?

Obviously we can choose not to engage, but at what price? Do we lose community? Is it a community we mind losing?

I’d be extremely interested in hearing about the experiences of any of you who had been heavily (er, you know what I mean) into the dieting/obsessing/calorie-counting lifestyle and come out the other side, or anyone who feels their unwillingness to follow that particular “sport” has caused them social woes. Put it in the comments!

Once upon a time which may or may not have been a few weeks ago, a dear and highly respected personage who is not me (and unlike all the other times I say someone is not me, I actually mean it) told me a story of how he and his beloved daughter had spent a golden afternoon –it might have been a golden long weekend, I can’t really remember, whatever it was, it definitely had the Au luster happening– at the familial lake house and, upon reaching home got a telephone call from a little hotel down the street from the lake house. The hotel, it seemed, was in possession of an object that looked like a bolster pillow and acted like a Kalashnikov rifle but revealed itself to be Pepper, the Highly Respected Personage’s dog, who had been accidentally left behind.

All of which is  long-winded and PETA-provoking way of saying Manolo gave me two weeks’ vacation and no one managed to tell you guys.

Oops.

The good news is tomorrow we’ll be back with your regularly scheduled delightfulness.

In the meantime, how have you been keeping yourselves busy? Put it in the comments!

Reading: Absalom, Absalom
Watching: East of Eden
Hearing: Suzanne Vega
Smelling: Cedre by Christopher Sheldrake for Serge Lutens
Loving: The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service
Hating: I’m out of my favorite mascara
Wanting: Caviar
Buying: Cora Dress in Teal from LucieLu