It’s good to know that growing old has some upsides, isn’t it?
White hot
I have recently been seen in public carrying a white handbag. I wasn’t carrying it for a friend, to the dump, or for a dare, which are just about the only circumstances I would have been seen holding such an object until about two weeks ago. I was carrying it with pride, even a certain swagger. I love my white handbag. It’s so cool.
I can hardly begin to describe what a shift in attitude this represents. Up until my recent conversion I didn’t just dislike white handbags, the way I dislike, for example, the music of Gilbert and Sullivan, the writing of Jeffrey Archer and the food of Colonel Saunders. I loathed them. I felt strongly about them.
It wasn’t even just that I considered them daggy, like a fleece zip top worn in the CBD. Or tasteless and tacky, like sheer lace trousers. I objected to white handbags at a deep moral level. I’m not quite sure why, but to me they have always been something that right-minded adults didn’t carry about. They were beyond the pale (whatever that is).
I voiced this point of view quite a while ago and somebody wrote to me and asked if she couldn’t carry a white handbag, what was she supposed to put with her white shoes? My instinctive reply would have been: do you really need your handbag on a tennis court? But of course I was much more polite: ‘Match your bag with the rest of your outfit, or if wearing an all-white ensemble, navy, red, or camel would all look very chic – just not black.’
Which was very restrained considering I feel exactly the same way about white shoes as I used to feel about white handbags. Beauty queens – and everything those two words stand for.
I still don’t quite understand what has changed my mind so radically, although Miuccia Prada had something to do with it, as usual. Quite a while ago her company started pushing the white bag as its new anchor accessory and I was horrified. What a waste of beautiful leather, I hufflepuffed, as people I thought had more taste paraded shamelessly around with small white pigskin bags over their shoulders, worked back with chic winter tailoring.
I thought they’d lost their reason in some kind of brainless mass obedience to any edict from the Mighty Miuccia (the Big Sister of high fashion), until suddenly – just the other week – I realised they had been right all along. White bags can be really chic – especially when worn in unexpected combinations. It’s precisely the surprise element that makes them work.
In my previous mindset I might have said that I could have countenanced a white canvas bag for the beach, but the exact thing I like about my new white leather shoulder bag is wearing it in the city. It just took a bit longer for me to get my eye in to the look than it did my more fashion-prescient colleagues.
But I would like to think that my conversion to the white bag is about more than them simply becoming highly trendy. Brazenly wearing something which I now realise I had been indoctrinated from childhood into thinking was a total fashion no-no feels thrillingly wicked.
Although I know I wasn’t on the first wagon train with this trend, I still feel like a fairly early uptaker and it’s quite a kick. Rather like wearing the outrageous New Look in 1941 must have been, or the first miniskirts in the 1960s. In fact, the last time I had a frisson like this would have been when I made my debut in Seditionaries bondage pants in 1977.
And things have moved on so much since then, with once-shocking notions such as topless sunbathing, lady tattoos, piercing, bare midriffs and visible bras and G-strings all becoming everyday sights, that there aren’t many fashion taboos left to flout.
Reckon I’ll be in white high heels by Christmas.
New carpet blues
As I blotted – not scrubbed – the spilled tea on the hall carpet with a clean, damp – not soaking wet – undyed dishcloth (those blue or yellow ones can transfer their colour and just make things worse), I wondered whether I had fulfilled that most patronising of Wilde-isms and turned into my mother.
Because apart from the constantly lost spectacles and the cries of ‘Is it hot in here, or is it me?’, one of the most vivid images I have of my mama is her on all fours, blotting stains from carpets. And quickly, mind! Before they set! The first few minutes after a spill are crucial, you see.
Many’s the time I have seen her breaking land speed records, weaving through the crowd at one of her parties, holding a soda siphon aloft. Fizzy water is marvellous for carpet stains. And if it was red wine, she’d have the salt in the other hand.
Now she has gone high-tech and has a wonderspray guaranteed to zap all stains dead with just a few squirts. The only problem is that it gives off such pungent chemical fumes I think it could have the same effect on small mammals, if not humans. And it probably has a half-life roughly equivalent to nuclear waste.
There was a whole area of her sitting room that we had to practically cordon off with HazChem tape after a Christmas wine spill, the wafts smelled so toxic. Couldn’t see where the claret had gone over, though. Oh no. Gone.
The thing is, I am now wondering whether to purchase one of these deadly chemical stain sprays myself. If I’d had it to hand I wouldn’t be constantly confronted by the memory of the day I left a full mug of tea on the floor at the top of the kitchen staircase, when I was rushing back down to answer the phone, and my husband, quite forgivably, kicked it down the stairs.
I got most of it off the flat treads of the steps, but despite an hour or so of dabbing and blotting, you can still clearly see the tannin trail down the vertical part of one of the stairs. It’s driving me tonto. As is the small round mystery mark on the landing outside the bedroom. What is it? And what bastard put it there?
Now it could be simple genetics that has turned me, with age, into a combination of Hyacinth Bucket and Howard Hughes, but I actually think it is simpler (and less insulting to my mother) than that. It’s having new carpet.
I’ve never had this much new carpet before (halls and stairs, top to bottom) and certainly not such nice stuff. And, looking back, I remember it was having her first really nice carpet that turned my mum into the sprinter with the soda siphon.
At no time, while we were living in my childhood home, can I remember her racing to the kitchen for her stain-saver kit. There must have been carpets in that house, but I can’t really remember them and they certainly weren’t special enough to warrant the soda siphon. I think they came with the house and four children were left to do pretty much what they wanted with them.
But when we all left home and my parents moved, they carpeted the new place throughout in 100 per cent wool carpet. In pale cream. That was when stainmania began and despite another move, to a house where she put in more sensible carpet, it hasn’t left her.
I think it must be something to do with choosing the carpet yourself, paying for it (ouch), and then the utter gorgeousness of it that brings this condition on.
So if I ever have new carpet again, I’m going to throw a mug of tea down the stairs on the first day and get over it.
Starting over
I recently had one of those twice-yearly change-of-season sort-outs. You know, when you go through all your summer clothes, marvel at why you bought most of them, sigh over a few tired old faithfuls, wonder how the rest ever fitted you – and then throw just a very small bag of them into a clothing bin?
This was a particularly thorough cull, though, long overdue, and I went through everything – undies, swimwear, shoes, nighties, accessories, even hangers – with a seriously critical and pragmatic eye. God, I’m bored with it all. What a lot of old junk most of it is.
It may not start out as junk, but clothing inevitably turns into it with wear and tear. Even your investment pieces conk out eventually. I sent my beloved Helmut Lang suit off to charity shop land last week, so if you see it, say hello (and advance apologies to anyone who seizes upon the jacket only to find that the trousers have been mutilated to fit my unusually stunted legs).
But while I was sad to ditch something that had been so useful and esteem-enhancing
in its time, the things that depressed me the most during this biannual audit were the nearly great pieces.
I’ve got a particular little section in my wardrobe of quite good jackets that I’ve never worn much. They really should go, but I just can’t bring myself to hurl things that still look box-fresh. Even though every time I look at them they are a reminder of a small failure of judgement, or of those days when you just have to buy something, even though you know it’s not quite right.
So there I was once again looking at the saggy black ‘shirt’ jacket from Paris and the shapely black DKNY jacket with the really annoying two-way zip and I thought – what if I just threw it all out? All of it. Even the sock collection and the archaeological dig of underpants. Wouldn’t it secretly be a relief?
Take the socks as an example. I’ve got loads of socks, of various vintages, most of them seriously on the dingy side. Mindful of this, I bought a whole new hosiery wardrobe when I was in Milan recently (they have wonderful shops for things like that there). With ten smart new pairs I really could chuck all the rest out. But I haven’t, because it seems ‘wasteful’.
It’s the same with undies – why don’t I just bin all the grey whites and the charcoal once-blacks that used to be great and buy seven new pairs in each colour? Wouldn’t it be a lovely fresh start?
And why stop there? Couldn’t I really just throw it all out? Of course you would want to keep a small core of recently purchased, current favourite pieces – ie the ones I actually wear – but the rest really could go, couldn’t they?
Occasionally a garment has a comeback to rival Tony Bennett’s, but it’s so rare, it’s hardly worth keeping the wardrobe in the spare room full of clapped-out old clobber for.
Imagine, by contrast, the joy of opening a wardrobe that wasn’t stuffed and overflowing, where you could see everything and know how it worked together.
It would make getting dressed easier, it would make packing easier, and it would make staying tidy easier – three things that exercise a lot of my energy over a year.
Imagine also, once you had cleared your space of all the dross and guilt pieces, the fun you could have filling it up again.
Style swap
How gripping is that TV show Wife Swap? I find it fascinating. Mind you, I’m a total sucker for all those reality lifestyle programmes. If only they’d combine them all into one. Dirty Holiday Home DIY Decorating Disaster Husband Swap Idol would be perfection.
It would be about a couple swapping partners and then going to find their dream holiday home at the perfect price in the best location, location, location. Then they would have just one day to renovate, while losing two stone, getting a new fashion look, showing how filthy their lavvies are and cutting a single. And we, the viewers, would get to vote them off while they were doing it.
Anyway, that’s just my little fantasy, but I did once have a mini-adventure of my own along the life swap line, when I was very young and silly. I was on holiday in Greece with some of my best uni gal pals. One of them, Jane, is just about the only person I know who is even shorter than me, with the same silly dolly-size feet. One night this gave us an idea.
We were sharing a ‘cabana’ (grass hut) and as we were getting dressed for ‘dinner’ (binge drinking) we decided to swap clothes for a laugh, to see if anyone noticed.
This was pretty funny because then – as now – I was a bit of a op-shopping city-slicker fashion victim and Jane is your classic Pommie Sloane Ranger. Back then, in 1985, she dressed like Diana Spencer, when she was still Diana Spencer. Jane even wore her string of pearls on the beach.
But that night she ended up wearing a black-and-white stripy singlet (like I said, it was 1985), with a black miniskirt, a black silk vintage pyjama jacket with white piping, and an armful of Nancy Cunard bangles. And I wore her drop-waisted pastel floral dress with puff sleeves and a Peter Pan collar, with ballerina pumps. Really.
I probably wouldn’t have remembered the details quite so clearly, but I still have a photo of us taken outside our hut that night. Looking at it again now, I see we are even standing in each other’s characteristic postures. I have my feet turned out at ten to two, like a ballet dancer, which is the way all Sloanes stand, for some reason. And Jane is standing like Henry VIII, with legs firmly planted, which seems, unfortunately, to be the way I stand.
Our friends nearly lost it when they saw us. They just couldn’t believe how different we looked and they also pointed out that in a funny kind of way we actually looked better in each other’s clothes than we did in our own. Jane is a ravishing brunette dusky maiden and she looked seriously great in my outfit, and I have to say – looking at this here photo – I was a passable English rose in that godawful frock. It was so weird.
The funny thing was, neither of us really behaved any differently that night, because while we dressed so differently, we were pretty similar in most ways, sharing a fondness for a white wine, a disco dance and a crude one-liner. (We still do; we’re still mates.)
But while I didn’t start behaving like a demure finishing-school debutante, I did have a glimpse of a different life in that outfit, because of the way people reacted to me. They were nicer. Sometimes I think life might have been easier as an English rose than it has been as a Darth Vader fashion victim.
But the crunch came when it was time to hit the dance floor. I just couldn’t dance in that dress. I had to go back to the hut and put something black on. So life in florals might have been a less bumpy ride than it can be in urban fastwear, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.
Saving string
A sense of dread gripped me as I read the ‘letter to parents’ on the nursery noticeboard. ‘Think Before You Throw It!’ was the heading, followed by these terrible words: ‘Please save your loo-roll and paper-towel centres, yoghurt pots, egg boxes, washing-up liquid bottles, wrapping paper and ribbon for our craft projects. You’ll be amazed what we will do with them!’
They would be amazed if they knew what an apparently harmless request like that could do to me. By the next day my utility room was less of a laundry and more of a sorting office. Different carrier bags were festooned from an array of hooks, for maximum filing efficiency, on the following lines: cardboard cylinders, assorted; egg cartons, various; yoghurt pots, large and small; miscellaneous items with possible craft potential.
The reason I had managed to amass such an impressive collection so quickly was that I was able to repossess many of the items instantly from my large recyling area, just to get the crafts materials projects off to an encouraging start. Did I also slightly go round the bins in the house looking for other possible items? Well, maybe I did.
Certainly when I worked in the Sydney Morning Herald offices, I used to go through my colleagues’ bins at night, re-directing all the paper they had carelessly thrown into the garbage into the paper-recycling bins, and the padded envelopes under my own desk for future use.
I’ve got quite a collection of padded envelopes now in my home office. It’s about the size of a large sheep. And sometimes I can hardly get to my desk for the paper-recycling system, which runs as follows:
Printed both sides: recycle now. Printed one side: use other side for printing rough work, then recycle. Printed one side, but crinkled: make into shopping list pad, or toddler art pad, with bulldog clip.
Then there are the great termite mounds of magazines that I still need to go through for charming pictures of animals for the collage I am going to do on my daughter’s playroom wall. One year. A large area on the bookcase behind me is taken up by my collection of used stamps, which I am gathering for charity.
This was another endeavour that saw me fossicking in Sydney Morning Herald waste bins after everyone else had gone home. I used to bring them back from all the invitation envelopes I received in Milan and Paris for the fashion shows, too. And I’ve got my mother saving them for me. In fact, I would probably run across a five-lane highway at 8 am on a Monday morning to save one franked stamp from g
oing to waste.
And that is what all this neurotic behaviour is about – I really can’t stand waste. Lord knows, I’m not tight with a dollar, it’s not that I wouldn’t shell out for a new padded envelope, it just seems wrong to crack open a fresh one, when an old stager could do another turn.
Indeed, some of my envelopes have been round the world several times, back and forth between me and like-minded hoarders on other continents, so at least I know I am not alone in this obsessive-compulsive recycling.
Just the other night a friend told me that she is still incapable of chucking out a loo-roll middle that could be craftily fashioned into a spaceship, a snake, or a sausage dog – and her daughter is twenty-five.
I take comfort in the belief that this neurosis is fundamentally an environmental issue for my age group. Our generation certainly doesn’t have the war as an excuse – unlike the elderly gentleman I once heard about, who had been left so anxious about scarcity by living through the Second World War that he had a box in his attic labelled: ‘String, too short to use.’
But then again, couldn’t it have made charming fur for a loo-roll-inside shaggy dog? I might have to start another carrier bag…
Getting branded
I’ve got a tat. As in a tattoo. Just like that, on a whim, I went and logged into one of the style crazes I have despised most in the past ten years.
I hate tattoos. Whenever I look at my little girl’s perfect skin I pray to the fashion gods that she won’t ever besmirch it with one of these foul blemishes, and now I’ve got one.
Of course, they can look great on smooth young skin, especially brown skin that is tightly spread over taut muscle, but I remember all too clearly what my grandfather’s arms looked like when he was in his seventies and the tattoos he’d done himself in the trenches during the First World War were blurred blue smudges on his crepey skin.
Gravity Sucks Page 13
