Gravity Sucks

by Alderson, Maggie

  After I had done the necessary posing by my mantelpiece (covered with artefacts sourced, unearthed and found, including several witty vessels – a passion), I left them to it. ‘Do whatever you want,’ I said, as I breezed out. Biiiiiiig blunder.

  When the article was published, I was thrilled how super they made my house look. Much nicer than it actually was. But then I saw that in one shot my bedside table was empty except for a shallow vessel of water with flower heads floating in it. I cringed a million cringes. It made me look like such a pretentious git.

  My bedside table is always piled high with books, magazines, bits torn out of newspapers and scribble pads. Why wouldn’t it be? I’m a writer. That picture made me look like an empty vessel, more interested in the look of things than the sense of them.

  Hmmmm, maybe they were on to something.

  Do it yourself

  I recently saw a gripping British reality (whatever that is) TV program about a normal (whatever that is) family of four, who agreed to live without using a supermarket for a fortnight, just to see what would happen. Oh, how they suffered!

  Mummy Bear’s full-time job was actually on the checkout of a major supermarket chain, where she also did all the family grocery shopping – and I mean all. The household diet consisted entirely of frozen ready meals, with side orders of frozen chips and frozen peas, with frozen apple pie and ice-cream for pudding, all served piping hot (apart from the ice-cream) direct from mama’s microwave. The closest they ever got to fresh food was McDonald’s, and all these delicious repasts were taken on the collective knee in front of the television.

  By the middle of the first week Mummy Bear was ready to go into a nursing home, she was so exhausted and frustrated. It had taken her all day to source the ingredients for her first from-scratch meal since school domestic science lessons, and the resulting Lancashire hotpot did not make it onto the kitchen table until 10.30 pm.

  The expression on the Baby Bears’ faces when they saw it was priceless. A steaming plate of stewed sandshoes could not have provoked greater revulsion. It was hilarious. How I gloated!

  I could sit and scoff at them, in middle-class Vogue Entertaining self-satisfaction, because apart from Sirena tuna, I rarely buy actual food in supermarkets, considering such establishments useful only as purveyors of washing powder, bin liners, roach motels, pan scourers and light bulbs.

  In my world, you buy bread, cheese, tea bags, ham, olive oil and biscuits from overpriced but deeply committed delis, meat from one particular Italian butcher, and everything else from Macro Wholefoods. Which means I probably spend about 46 per cent of our household income on food (as the French do, apparently), whereas the average Brit family, like the one I was watching, spends something like 11 per cent. Most of it on artificial colouring, by the looks of it.

  But as I sat there, smugly sponging the last bit of designer olive oil from my plate with a crust of $8 bread, it occurred to me just how lost I would be without clothes shops.

  It would take a bit longer to reduce me to the flaming-cheeked and prickly-eyed frustration visible on Mummy Bear as she realised she had to go to one shop for the potatoes and another for the chump chops, or to work up to her fury at discovering, shortly before family tea, that bread dough has to prove for quite some time before you can bake it, but my first attempt at cutting out a pair of pants would do it.

  I hate sewing. Hate it. It’s so slow. I can’t bear things you can’t do quickly – or do something else at the same time. While bread dough is proving you can do the crossword, or weed a border. If you try to hurry sewing – or watch a Doris Day movie at the same time – you always end up with one sleeve on backward. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve jumped up and down like Rumpelstiltskin after carefully basting a hem up on the outside of a skirt.

  But maybe necessity would force me, over time, to become a handy home dressmaker and a natty knitter. By the end of the supermarket show, the Baby Bears were fighting over Mummy’s homemade bread, while she gutted a freshly caught fish.

  You may see me crocheting yet.

  Toddler chic

  The other night I bathed my daughter as usual. Dried her little cracks and crevices. Counted toes. Blew raspberries on neck. Then something terrible happened. She put on her own pyjamas. Just like that, with no kind of a warning, just boom – ‘Look Mummy, I dressed myself!’

  I confess I hid behind her (sugar-pink) towel and wept. She even got them on the right way round and she was so proud of herself. I was simply gutted. It was such a poignant reminder that one day I just won’t be needed.

  Now, I do clearly recall what seems like just a few months ago, lamenting how hard it is to dress a young toddler who does not wish to co-operate. Especially when small buttons are involved. I likened the venture to trying to play the piano while holding an angry possum. That stage was very difficult, but it doesn’t mean I’m ready for her to start dressing herself.

  Especially as she is now – or was until just the other night – at the perfect stage of cuddly dressability. She co-operates so sweetly, snuggling on my lap with pointed feet and extending arms and then in a flash, we were over ‘helping mummy to dress me’, and on to ‘dressing myself’.

  I should have seen it coming, really, as her best pal Bella is exactly five months older and a living weathervane of the developmental changes that are just ahead for Peggy. For quite a while now, Bella has been putting on her own pyjamas. Sometimes at three in the afternoon. Because she can.

  And I should take note of what she’s up to and get prepared – possibly with locks on the wardrobe door. We were over there yesterday for tea and Bella changed her clothes five times. Sometimes she’ll tip a perfectly good cup of apple juice down her front just as an excuse to slip into a different look.

  The other shift now taking hold with Bella is towards strong opinions about what she wants to wear. The other morning her mum wanted to put her in black tights and she refused violently, stating, ‘Mummy, I’m blonde – I can’t wear black tights.’

  I’ve already had my first taste of this with young Peggy, when we were in a really nice little girls’ clothes shop looking for a special dress for her third birthday party.

  I found two I liked – a bold pink-and-white check number with a lovely sticky-out petticoat, and a really beautiful traditional white dress with pink smocking. I couldn’t decide which I liked best and, out of whimsy more than anything, I asked Peggy for her opinion.

  ‘I’m not wearing that,’ she said, with withering contempt, when I held up the one with the smocking. ‘That’s for babies.’

  I bought the checked one, because I really didn’t think I’d ever get her into the other one – and that was when I realised how short a time I have left to dictate what she wears. Judging by Bella, it can only be a matter of months before she is simply refusing to wear things she doesn’t like.

  This could very slightly break my heart. OK, my husband may be right when he says she is my dolly, but I have so adored choosing her little clothes – a whole new wardrobe each season, what a thrill! – and putting them together in little outfits.

  Not that I have ever wanted her to be one of those ostentatiously overdressed children. She has never worn Burberry, for instance. Equally, I’m not keen on those mini fashion plates, who are really togged up to accessorise the parent – I hate it when you see kids overstyled with bandannas and the like.

  So I’m just going to make the most of controlling her clothes while I can. Although, looking on the bright side, once she starts choosing her own outfits, I’ll have a lot more time back to devote to my own.

  Spoiled goods

  When, exactly, did I turn into Princess Pom Pom? When, for example, and why, did it become essential for me to have just about every item of laundry in my house – even tea towels – crisply ironed and folded? By someone else.

  I survived years of adult life barely touching an iron and wouldn’t have dreamed of paying somebody to do it for me. I would have th
ought it a profligate waste of money that could be spent on high heels and cocktails and the other pressing concerns of one’s sweet and twenties.

  Instead, I deliberately avoided clothes which required such meticulous attention and seemed to find unironed pillowslips and doona covers perfectly acceptable to sleep among. Now, though, the very thought of a bed made up in such an unkempt student manner makes me feel quite nervous.

  I can’t decide whether age has just made me unbearably bourgeois and suburban in my values (‘I have always so admired your whites, Doreen – which washing powder do you use?’); or whether it is a kind of greater discernment that has come with experience.

  Certainly spending a fair amount of my working life ensconced in fairly decent hotels and a few five-star resorts has upped my Pom Pom ante. You do get used to a good level of thread count if you stay in nice places. And to having fresh sheets and towels every day. And your undies and socks coming back from the laundry service ironed.

  Really, after intense exposure to all that, I can see how someone like J.Lo, once just Jenny from the Block, could have become over time such a Thread Count Tyrant. It’s in her rider, allegedly (the list of conditions promoters have to agree to if they want her to show up), that all bed linen in Miss Lopez’s vast suite must be at least 300 threads per square inch.

  I’m sure her mama didn’t teach little Jen Jen about thread counts back when she was still from the block. It’s just not something you encounter until you drift up to quite a lofty plane of consumer karma – about the same level where you can spot the difference between real Champagne and mere sparkling wine, just by the speed of the bubbles in the glass. And identify Krug from Moët with your eyes closed. You can’t just buy that level of discernment; you can only acquire it with experience.

  So I am inclined to think my Pom Pomism is adult-onset learned behaviour. Or in simpler terms: it comes with age. I certainly can’t claim that my aversion to such déclassé items as man-made fibres is a result of a childhood wrapped in cashmere, Irish linen and pima cotton. Rather, I grew up during the height (depth?) of the space-race era, where anything made from plastics was considered vastly superior, and ‘natural’ translated as backward and primitive.

  I remember homemade dresses of terrifying textiles so dense and unbreathable you could have used them as shower curtains. And for many years I slept between brushed nylon sheets, which were pretty much like flocked cling film. Not pleasant on a hot summer night, but if you didn’t know anything else you just got on with it. And I can certainly see why my mother embraced them so enthusiastically. Sheets that came out of the washer almost as dry as they went in must have seemed an unbelievable bonus for a mother of four.

  But despite growing up with all that, I can now spot a trace of polyester in a sheet at fifty metres and recoil from it like a vampire from a head of garlic. I have been known to check out of a hotel just because it had poly-cotton bedclothes.

  Yet, while I am at times slightly nauseated by my own Princess Pom Pom standards, I like to think of it as a form of connoisseurship. Otherwise I might have to face up to the fact that I’m just plain spoiled.

  Size matters

  You know those surveys they do every few years which reveal that 90 per cent of women are wearing the wrong size bra? I reckon they could broaden them out and find that 90 per cent of us are wearing the wrong size clothing too.

  I have only recently fully understood how crucial an issue choosing sizes is in looking – and feeling – your best. And I’m not just talking about those horrendous moments when you discover you have gone up to the next level of hell with one of your regular brands; there’s more to it than that.

  While those horrendous ‘Oh, so I really am fat’ changing room epiphanies are just about the only thing that could ever put me off shopping for very long, there are other, less obvious pitfalls.

  These might not be such a tangible boot to the self-esteem as discovering you are now barely squeezing into size 14 Country Road pants, but they can quietly chip away at your confidence at an almost subliminal level.

  One of the worst is buying clothes that are too big. Trust me on this. Because I have had several periods in my life when I was approaching full Fat Bastard status, when offered an array of T-shirts from Extra Small to Extra Large, I will reach for the Large every time, because I just assume I am at the tubby end of the scale.

  There is, of course, also the issue that I would rather try something on and find it is too big than find it is too small. But while starting with the bigger sizes is OK with a skirt, or pants, because if they’re falling off you it’s pretty obvious and so you try a smaller size, with T-shirts, knits and dresses it’s all a bit amorphous.

  As long as you can get it over your head, any size of T-shirt ‘fits’ and in the 1980s I recall that very oversized ones (with the sleeves rolled up to your armpits and a pair of stretch leggings below) were very much the go. But that was then. Now you want a T-shirt that fits you neatly, but I keep buying them too big.

  I did this last week and while I loved my new Splendid top, once I got it home I knew it didn’t look quite right. The shoulders were funny, it was way too long and it kind of stuck out at the sides, which wasn’t terribly flattering. In fact, it made me look fatter than I am. But it took me a while to realise that this was because it was actually too big for me. A smaller size might have revealed the odd sausage of fat around my middle when I sat down, but it would still have looked better than the hanging shower curtain effect.

  The thing is, if you are currently a little over your fighting weight, clothes that fit more closely on the body are actually much more flattering than capacious volumes, especially if the larger items are clearly too big on your shoulders. It’s all about proportion.

  Even if you are seriously in the Mama Cass range of figures, baggy clothes are not necessarily more becoming. They don’t hide your girth, they attract attention to it. And just as a sea monster looks more enormous swimming about in the briny depths, your undefined body mass will appear greater beneath the tent-like folds.

  Really, it’s much better to just come out and declare ‘This is my shape, I have a little poodge issue right now, so deal with it, OK?’ and wear clothes that upholster your girth, rather than swamp it. Not in skin-tight, shiny spandex, but in clothes that simply fit you.

  So in this spirit, I’ll be taking my Splendid top back and changing it for a Medium. Hurrah.

  Fashion physics

  Maybe I should have listened more in physics at school, but throughout my school years it was my class of most suffering. Even maths was more fathomable, Latin endings a mere irritation by comparison.

  The only thing that was bearable about Double Physics (Thursday afternoon – I will never forget it) was when Mr Boland, the lovely chemistry teacher from the neighbouring lab, let his miniature Yorkshire terrier puppy – Tuppence – escape. A jet-propelled ball of toffee-coloured fluff would go charging round the physics benches, yapping. Oh, how we cheered. I always suspected he did it on purpose to lighten our days.

  Apart from that, I cannot remember a single thing about those lessons, not even the name of the teacher, who might as well have been speaking in Klingon, for all I could make of it.

  Anyway, this has all come back recently as I have only just realised that physics has an impact on clothing.

  Perhaps if our Klingon teacher had mentioned the effect of combining fabrics with a nap, or pile, with knits in one outfit (Alderson’s Theorem), my brain might have shifted out of standby for a moment and downloaded something. But oh no, he was far too interested in cogs and levers to tell us anything really useful.

  Anyway, so I don’t really understand how it happens, but if you combine as above – say, a pair of crushed velvet pants with a long-line cashmere jumper – the knit top will sort of walk up the velvet and gather at your waist in a most unattractive fashion. It’s a kind of living Velcro arrangement and can quite ruin your evening, as I found out the hard way.
r />   The reverse syndrome involves shaved legs and hosiery; the tights walk down the stubbly hairs to gather in Nora Batty pools at your ankles.

  Another horrible experience I have had due to the inadequate teaching of fashion physics at my school is of wearing certain kinds of unlined skirts over tights. Some kind of friction between the two fabrics – and it doesn’t always happen – causes the skirt to become balled up between the legs, dhoti-style, as you walk. This is extremely humiliating.

  Of course, the way to be certain these things won’t happen is always to wear a slip beneath your skirt, but petticoats cause all kinds of problems of their own, particularly that style of silky jersey slip which is usually bought to wear underneath sheer evening wear.

  These have a strange way of growing from the shoulder straps as you wear them, so that they sit ever lower on your upper torso, to the point where I have looked down at many a black-tie dinner to see my bra on full view through my top, with the slip slung hammock-like beneath it. Mortifying. You spend the rest of the evening putting your hand down your cleavage to yank it up, which must look very unusual, if not borderline psychotic.

  I have taken a certain comfort recently in knowing that this doesn’t affect only me. A quick camera pan to an audience member at a recent awards ceremony broadcast (think it was the BAFTAs) revealed a woman sitting in her special red-carpet outfit, quite unaware that millions were scoping her rather ordinary bra while her slip took a holiday somewhere around her waist.

  Less embarrassing, but extremely irritating over the hours of a day, is a strange thing that happens involving the two silver bangles I always wear on my right wrist and lightweight knit tops. With knits of a certain gauge, the sleeve gets caught between the bangles and they somehow haul it down, fire-bucket chain style, so it gets longer and longer until it sticks out of the bottom of my jacket sleeve, like a little boy wearing a he’ll-grow-into-it school uniform. Drives me nuts.