Gravity Sucks

by Alderson, Maggie

  When you’re spending that kind of money you really do need the test drive, because it doesn’t matter how schooled you are in the art of handbag-choosing – and I’ve had quite a bit of experience – you really can’t tell, until you’ve spent a day with it, walking around the city, trying to get things done, whether it’s a wonderbag, or just the weight of the world upon your shoulders.

  It’s one of many things I might understand better had I been less poleaxed by boredom during double physics at school, but some bags which feel quite light when empty become lead weights when you pop your wallet, keys, comb, lippie, mobile, Palm Pilot, several paper clips, a leaky ballpoint, three mystery business cards (who? where? why?), one boiled lolly and a newspaper into them.

  Others, which feel similar in weight empty, seem to distribute the gravitorial drag of the same contents in a way that just lightly kisses your shoulder as you stroll along, window-shopping. Tra la la. How?

  The other thing you can’t predict very precisely, until you’re out there with it, is a bag’s rootle quotient. This is the amount of time it takes you to find your wallet/keys/ ringing phone among all the other detritus therein, without tipping the whole lot out on to the pavement.

  Rare is the woman who buys more than one bucket bag in the same lifetime – they are the black holes of the handbag universe. But even those knicky-knacky bags which have handy separated pockets for the efficient filing of personal effects can become black holes for your wallet, while a grumpy taxi-driver waits to be paid.

  Some work brilliantly, enabling you to find and answer your mobile without even looking, while others seem to swallow possessions up like quicksand, and I’ve never found a way of predicting which will be which.

  I am speaking of all this from recent and bitter experience. Today was the maiden voyage of my latest investment handbag, and I had to put it on the ground to rootle for my wallet this morning, in exactly the taxi scenario described above. I do not care for crouching, in tailored clothing, on a busy city street, and I was not a happy girl. He was not a happy taxi-driver.

  Plus, I realised, as he drove off in snarls of exhaust fumes, the bag doesn’t have those protective little metal feet and in my confusion I had put it down in a damp, dirty gutter. It’s bright orange canvas – now murky on the underside – and will never be the same.

  Not only that, it also failed the load-bearing test, becoming impossibly heavy and awkward when I put my newspaper in it. Or, rather, crammed it in. What had seemed to be a perfect media pocket on the back of this enervating object turned out to be big enough only for a copy of Reader’s Digest.

  And that wasn’t the end of it. In the shop, the handles had seemed to have that all-important quality of being just long enough to sit nicely on the shoulder, while also short enough to hold comfortably in the hand.

  Out in the field, I found it kept slipping off my shoulder and made me feel like a long-armed baboon when held the hand way. So I spent the day like Margaret Thatcher with the thing looped over the crook of my arm, which is a very frumpifying look and not at all convenient for going through train turnstiles.

  I can’t take it back – it’s got gutter stains on it – so I’m stuck with it. Next time, I’m insisting on a road test.

  Family favourites

  We were like three sailors on shore leave: my mum, my sister and me, let loose in a really nice clothes shop together. And most importantly, it was just us, with no-one else waiting grumpily outside, or running around pulling all the carefully folded sweaters off the shelves, or wanting to go to the playground, or the pub, or just home, anywhere but a shop.

  It was utter bliss. We’ve shopped together more recently in all the possible variations of pairs, but I don’t know the last time the three of us have done it together – it could have been Biba, it was so long ago. But it was quickly apparent that despite the long break and a combined age of 180 years, none of us had lost our zeal for it. And being reunited in our favourite activity after so long made us almost giddy with excitement.

  Without even having to discuss it, we commandeered a row of changing rooms and between us we must have tried on everything in the shop, which had just the right balance of tasty items of good quality with non-silly price tags.

  There was a great swapping of items between cubicles – ‘can I try on that peacock-blue floral satin skirt when you’ve finished with it?’ – plus much parading of potential combinations, and regarding of self in another’s mirror, which somehow always seems better than the one in your own changing room.

  We all quickly got into that state of retail euphoria in which, secure that there was always someone on handbag-monitoring duty, we felt free to wander the shop semi-clad, fossicking for ever-more enticing items. Really, we were like a pack of she-wolves bringing rodents back to our cave.

  Adding to the general heaven of it – apart from a shared understanding that we all place an equal value on the place of clothing in the scheme of our lives (high) – was the very unusual benefit of knowing that when you asked one of the others for her honest opinion, you would actually get it.

  Even with the best of girlfriends, you know she still always has one eye on herself in the mirror as she assesses your look. But when shopping en famille, there is pack pride at stake. I wasn’t going to let anyone in my pack wear that peacock-blue floral skirt, for example. The colours were way too Miami for our collective colouring.

  Equally, when I asked my sister to help me choose between the five dark brown cardigans I was auditioning, I knew I was getting a truly honest appraisal.

  ‘I like the feature detailing on that one,’ she said, regarding me with full concentration, ‘but the shorter length makes you look a bit square.’ Out it went.

  My mother was equally blunt in her comments. I was suffering badly from Kath ’n’ Kim muffin top syndrome that day, with my overtight jeans poojing all my midriff squashy bits up over the low waistband.

  ‘I feel like I’ve got a rubber ring round my middle,’ I said, regarding the resulting bulges inside yet another brown cardie in her cubicle mirror.

  ‘You have,’ she said, cheerfully, later commenting, in what was meant to be a positive rating on a heavier weight, dark brown cardigan: ‘You look quite slim from the back.’

  Finally, as we stood at the counter, marshalling our choices – a pair of navy pants for my sister, two long-sleeve, button-neck tops (one brown, one khaki) for my mum, and – guess what? – a dark brown cardie for me, my mother looked thoughtful.

  ‘Why do you think we all love shopping so much?’ she asked.

  ‘Because we all live in places where there aren’t any nice shops?’ I suggested.

  There was a pause.

  ‘How did that happen?’ said my sister, and we all fell about laughing.

  Acting your age

  Here are several reasons to be cheerful.

  A UK-based Scottish actress friend of mine is currently up for the lead role in a major new American TV series. It’s a huge deal and I really hope she gets it (maybe she’ll take me to the Golden Globes as her date, yahoo! Better start doing some sit-ups to get into my dress), but it’s also quite extraordinary.

  Not that my mate wouldn’t be great for the part – she’s a brilliant actress, beautiful and hilarious – but I was mystified as to why they were considering a Scottish person to play an American woman in an American production that is going to be filmed in Los Angeles.

  Of course, I had to find a tactful way to ask her that.

  ‘Why don’t they get an American actress?’ I heard my mouth saying, while my brain was still mulling it over.

  ‘Because they’re all so Botoxed they can’t show the range of emotion necessary for the part,’ she replied.

  Wow – that thrilled me. The first sign that the tide is turning against plastic fantastic beauty. And then the very next day after I heard that, the equally un-botoxed, non-liposucked, un-face-lifted Helen Mirren won the Oscar for Best Actress.

  It w
asn’t so much that she won the award – it’s well chronicled that actors generally have a better chance at that gong playing a role seriously at odds with their reality: disabled, bonkers, barely human, anciently old etc. And you can’t get much weirder than the British royal family, so while her performance was extraordinary, it was a great Academy Award role as well.

  What was thrilling – and important – about the whole event, in my opinion, was how she looked on the night: bloody gorgeous. She’s sixty-two. She claims she hasn’t had any surgery. And she wasn’t gorgeous in a patronising ‘good for her age’ mother-of-the-bride kind of way, either; she just looked fabulous, all other details irrelevant.

  Now, of course, Helen Mirren has always been ridiculously beautiful – and famously sexy. In fact, I used to find her quite annoying, the way people were always going on about it. Any interview you read with her, you could practically see the reporter’s drool on the page. And then there was that relationship with the young Liam Neeson, of course, which I still find it quite hard to forgive her for (please join me in a rousing chorus of ‘It should have been me’).

  But I think I can get over it now, on account of the role model she has become for young actresses – and women in general. And men too, come to think of it. Any way you look at it, beautiful Helen Mirren, her face cross-hatched by quite deep lines, is a win-win for all of us.

  So if she’s not having surgery or paralysing injections, or even colouring her hair, what is she doing to hold on to that beauty and to that legendary sex appeal, so far past the age when it is supposed to be possible for women? I’ve done some research and she doesn’t have a personal trainer – she claims to get her exercise walking her dogs – and I can’t find any interviews espousing cranky diet regimes or hothouse yoga.

  Studying the pictures, I reckon she is fortunate to have been born with a very warm skin tone and a naturally defined waist. The key things she is adding to these attributes at this stage is the steely grey hair – so much more flattering than a desperation dye job – and wonderful posture. I think the posture is a large part of it, so we’d all better do some Alexander Technique quick smart.

  But most of all, I think it is her attitude to ageing – which was clearly ingrained in her from childhood. She quotes her own mother telling her this: ‘Don’t worry about getting older; nature has a wonderful way of maturing your mental faculties so that you don’t mind the physical side of ageing.’

  Young actresses everywhere, listen up.

  You couldn’t make it up

  Here’s a question: Who won the Oscar last year for Best Hair? And for Best Make-up? (And I mean in an actual film, not on the red carpet.) Bet you don’t know – I certainly don’t, or for any other year for that matter, which is wrong, because the right slap and bouf makes an enormous difference to a film. It must do, because bad hair and make-up can totally ruin one.

  To wit, the movie version of I Capture the Castle (one of my top five all-time favourite books) was destroyed for me by the stupid wig that the actress playing Rose was forced to wear. Likewise Hermione’s ridiculous thatch in the early Harry Potter films. The B-52s’ classic track ‘Wigs on Fire’ is all I could think about when I watched those movies. (It goes like this: ‘What’s that on your head? A wig. Wig! Wig! Wig! Wig!’ It’s legendary.)

  The thing is, if a wig makes a person’s head look as large as a kewpie doll’s and if it has a tell-tale, hide-the-join fringe, you can forget the subtleties and nuances of acting. All you can think is: Wig! Wig! Wig!

  Then, just last night, Cold Mountain was completely wrecked for me by Nicole Kidman’s fingernails. Which was quite an achievement, considering that I am now so in love with Jude Law I might have to desert my family and devote the rest of my life to stalking him.

  The irony is that his hair and slap totally make the film. You thought he was a cutie as the clean-cut rich kid in The Talented Mr Ripley? Well, in my (possibly hormonal) opinion that was nothing on him down and dirty, scarred and bloody as a wounded Confederate soldier. Hoo-wee, pass my fan, Scarlett. You could smell the dirt and sweat on him, and I’m first in the queue to… Oh, never mind.

  Anyway, so there’s Jude looking thrillingly filthy, those sensitive pale blue eyes madly emoting out of his unshaven face (oh GOD), and along comes Nicole with a perfect manicure and totally ruins the climax of the entire film. I won’t destroy the plot for you, in case you haven’t seen it, but it’s fairly common knowledge that the story involves Ms Kidman – or Ada Monroe, as she is called in it – living off the land for several years, to survive the American Civil War in a remote mountain settlement.

  So she’s a-diggin’ vegies, a-milkin’ cows, a-choppin’ wood, a-killin’ hogs etc with her bare hands. Yet she has perfect nails – with top coat. Not much to eat up there in Cold Mountain during the killin’ an’ the fightin’ an’ all, but clearly an excellent supply of Jessica nail products.

  She already had me offside in the opening scenes for wearing copious amounts of eye shadow, eyebrow pencil and mascara, which I really don’t think they went in for back in 1861. Especially if you were the refined daughter of a preacherman. But it was the nails that really did me in. (Possibly, also, because they were touching Jude Law.)

  Funnily enough, her wigs weren’t too distracting and I liked the way that, even at the beginning, before the war, her hair was a bit flyaway and imperfect, so you got the idea that she – Ada, not Nicole – had done it herself.

  So what I don’t understand is: how could they get that right and the make-up so disastrously wrong? Especially as no other woman in the film seemed to be wearing it.

  The wonderful, wacky Renée Zellweger looked like she had been sleeping with the hogs throughout the film and I sincerely hoped she would run off with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.∗

  Or at least, Best Supporting Make-up.

  ∗She did.

  Hair way to hell

  My partner P. suggested the subject of this column: The Three Stages of Haircuts. His descriptions of them made me laugh so much I decided to have a go at it, although hair traumas are really his special subject. He has suffered very badly with his hair since he was a teenager. It is jet-black, dead straight and thick and likes nothing more than to stand up on end like an Olympic gymnast.

  Growing up in communist Yugoslavia in the 1970s, they didn’t have much in the way of hair gel (and the film Something About Mary hadn’t come out yet), so from the age of thirteen onwards, when girls and therefore hair suddenly became hugely important, he developed his own method of taming it.

  After washing his hair, he used to pull one of his mother’s stockings, with a knot tied in it, over his head while it dried, to make the disobedient hair lie flat against his head. Then he had to hide around the house for several hours in dread fear that a schoolfriend might see him.

  I would give almost anything to be transported back in time to see this vision, but the nearest I can get is a photograph of him, aged about sixteen, with shiny black hair clinging to his scalp like cling film, the parting a rather erratic crazy paving path across his head. This, he admits, was a problem with the stocking method.

  The irony of this is that at the very time he was creeping about like a drag queen yet to apply her wig, I was trying every manner of gloop to make my soft, fine hair stand up on end in the style demanded by punk rock fashion. If only he had been living in Birmingham, rather than Belgrade, his hair would have been his pride and joy. In fact, I had a boyfriend when I was eighteen who I liked simply because his hair stood up in such a brilliant spiky thatch.

  I tried everything from the newly emerging species of ‘high hair’ products to strong solutions of sugar in water to achieve a similar effect, but the only thing that made my hair stand up even a little bit was several days of dirt and about three cans of extra-strong hairspray. My apologies to the ozone layer.

  I have to admit that later in life I have come to give thanks for hair that lies down and behaves itself with fairly minim
al effort, but P. still suffers terribly with his. Any important outing requires careful planning for the timing of the hair wash. Once achieved, the wet hair requires special vigorous drying with a hard towel, then combing and parting preparation followed by a special hairdo nap, when he will lie first on one side, then the other, to make it submit to flatness.

  Finally comes the application of the gel and artful combing, after which he has the most lovely straight, floppy hair and you would never know about the crisis of mohican crest which has been averted. After these preparations, I am not allowed to touch his hair in any circs.

  He suffers also with haircuts, as he has to train hairdressers intensively to understand the wilful nature of his barnet, so from this life-long study of hair trauma, his theory on haircuts is as follows:

  Stage One. You’ve had the haircut and you hate it.

  Stage Two. It settles down and looks great. This is a very short period.

  Stage Three. You start to look like a wild and woolly Visigoth, until the day when you book another haircut, when it looks perfect in the few hours preceding the appointment.

  The sequence then begins again.

  The irony of all these follicular agonies is that apart from a very nice black cashmere poloneck, the thing that first attracted me to P. across a crowded party was his beautiful, glossy straight hair.

  The Twenty-eight Ages of Man

  During a recent bout of foul chest infection lurgy, I was checking the small print on my medication when I was struck by the instructions relating to various ages. These were divided into ‘children under five’, ‘children under twelve’ and then ‘adults and the elderly’.

  It was the last one that made me stop and think. Why would ‘adults’ and ‘the elderly’ be different? Surely ‘the elderly’ are also adults? I couldn’t see why they would make that distinction, unless there were different implications for a) adults and b) the elderly in taking the pills.