It was not a good look, but as he was fond of joking, at the time he did them, with the end of his bayonet and some India ink, he didn’t expect to live another day, let alone another fifty-eight years, so he wasn’t really looking at the long-term picture. So that was his excuse, but why have I gone and done it? For laughs, really.
I’m in New York at the moment (omigod, it’s the best place on earth, it’s been five years and I’d almost forgotten) and it just happens to be Pride this weekend, which is their version of Mardi Gras, with the big parade and everything, and I just got swept up by it all. One minute I was walking along Eighth Street, on my way to get a good parade pozzie, the next I was in the tattoo shop getting my mark made.
I think it was partly wanting to join in, show solidarity and be part of the gang, because everyone I was passing seemed to have tattoos and I felt rather left out. And I suppose it was also an act of bravado to make a middle-aged woman feel a bit young and reckless, as I used to be for real when I hung out in New York in the 1980s.
I hope it ends better than my last such desperate expression of youthful rebellion, when I had the gristly bit of my left ear pierced, just before my thirty-fifth birthday. That outing led to a week in hospital on turbo-charged painkillers and an antibiotic drip, a missed holiday and an ear that now sticks out rather more than the other.
So do you want to know what I had? If I had gorgeous upper arms I would have had one of those Maori bicep rings, but I don’t, so I went for something smaller, but still in that location. Ankles are all very well, but I’ve always felt the bicep was the classic tattoo spot. I like the retro associations of 1950s bad boys with their T-shirt sleeves rolled up, like the sexy one in Grease.
My first choice of design was the word ‘Princess’ topped off with a cheeky little tiara over the first letter, but the script wasn’t quite camp enough, so I went for something more graphic – two entwined black Cs; that is, the Chanel logo.
I don’t apologise for finding this intensely amusing. I also like the fact that not everyone will understand the reference, because I know all my friends will and mocking laughter will ensue. And even if people don’t get the joke, it’s an elegant symbol.
So that’s me and my tat. I’m destined to be branded as a luxury goods item for the rest of my life. Well, no actually. For two weeks only. It’s not a real tattoo; it’s a pretend one done with black henna, but it will look fairly convincing while it lasts, and I intend to get maximum mileage surprising and horrifying friends and family with it when I get home.
Teenage dirtbags
I have been making a study of teenage boys. It was prompted by the arrival of a friend for dinner, who is the mother of a sixteen-year-old chap. She was in a state of shock. Her beloved son had turned overnight from her best pal into a foul beast.
‘It’s so awful,’ she said, tears in her eyes. ‘He used to get into bed with me and talk about poetry. Now he slams his bedroom door in my face.’
I really felt sorry for her, but I was able to offer a crumb of comfort: it won’t last. I know this from my studies.
What I have recently observed in two young men I have known since they were just days old – a nephew and the son of a friend so dear he might as well be a nephew – is that boys do emerge from the adolescent horror period, just as girls do. The whole process just happens a little later. Girls seem to go into the tunnel at about thirteen and emerge at sweet sixteen, whereas boys go in at fifteen and come out at eighteen. From what I’ve seen, you could almost set your clock by it.
The processes are also different. I have described the girl version already as the Swan Moment, when a lumpy, bumpy, painful adolescent girl suddenly transforms into a beautiful young woman. With the boys it’s not so much the ugly duckling as the Very Hungry Caterpillar. They certainly have appetites comparable to that voracious bug.
I couldn’t believe it when I had a sixteen-year-old nephew to stay (who was so deep in the zone at the time, I had practically kidnapped him for a visit, to save my brother’s sanity and possibly prevent a murder in the family). Man, could he eat. He could get through a whole packet of cereal at one meal. Gallons of milk disappeared. Fistfuls of pies.
So he was a Very Hungry Teenager, but the other similarity is the chrysalis stage. Whereas girls in the teen tunnel are gawky and awkward things who look as though they have been put together from some ill-matched spare parts, boys are simply monstrous. They really disappear entirely into their new personas. They usually have pimples, they adopt an unflattering (and usually unwashed) hairstyle and wear frightful baggy clothes – preferably the same ones every day. Plus trainers of terrifying fungal rottenness. Really they are just festering mounds of hormones. It’s terrible to see. Especially when you have dandled them on your knees, when theirs were still dimpled.
And that’s just their appearance. On top of that you have the stun-gun attitude to deal with, plus the incomprehensible caveman grunting that passes for speech and a universal terrible sniggering laugh. Which is why that American cartoon Beavis and Butthead, about two appalling teenage heavy metal freaks, is so hilariously perfect. They’re ugly. They have dreadful hair. They communicate entirely in grunts and sniggers. And their only interests are very loud, screeching guitars, humiliating each other, and breasts. It’s practically a home video, it’s so spot-on.
At one point my friend’s son was turning into such a Butthead I was quite worried about him, but his aunt – who had observed the syndrome in three younger brothers – told me to keep the faith.
‘One day he’ll suddenly turn into Cary Grant,’ she kept telling me. I didn’t believe her – but it turns out she was right. Just a few weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, he’s cut off his dreadful curtain of filthy hair and done something serious about looking for a job. He’s also delightful. ‘Do come in for a cup of tea,’ he said to me, the last time I gave him a lift home. I nearly fainted.
I’m delighted to say that the same transformation has taken place in my nephew, who is suddenly an extremely affable and handsome eighteen-year-old.
Beautiful butterflies, the pair of them.
Unshopping
Oh, you should see all the beautiful things I didn’t buy today. Racks and racks of gorgeous clothes, shelves of shoes, swathes of scarves and massed ranks of other accessories; it’s really a marvel what I didn’t bring home.
After such a wonderful day spent scoping out two of London’s leading fashion department stores floor by floor (Selfridges and Liberty & Co, which have both recently been fabulously upgraded), I have come to the conclusion that unshopping is almost as much fun as the real thing.
In fact it’s better, because you don’t have the terrible post-buying depression to deal with the next day, when the euphoria wears off and you just feel incredibly guilty about wasting money on sparkly purple shoes when so many people in the world don’t even have clean drinking water.
I have always thought that such unshopping is mid-way on a daydreaming scale between Breakfast at Tiffany’s-style window shopping and that slightly creepy thing of trying on things you know you can’t afford and have no intention of buying, which is a bit too Talented Mr Ripley for my liking.
All unshopping consists of is a completely harmless stroll through the store, picking up things to admire them, feeling fabric between your fingers, maybe slipping a foot into a tempting mule, or holding an earring up to your face. It can be enough just to turn a hanger on the rail for a better look at something. Even with such a brief encounter, that garment becomes a tiny part of your history.
For in that instant when you imagine how it would look on you, whether it would go with your other clothes, or fit into your lifestyle, you own it, in a way. In a moment you have all the pleasure of the garment without it turning into draggy baggage – metaphorical or actual. And you don’t have to pay for it, either. It’s like wine tasting – the experience without the consequences – and the most exquisite pleasures are always ephemeral.
Uns
hopping is also exactly the part of shopping that most men don’t understand. My husband calls it ‘daundering’ when I waft about looking at things. His attitude is: we’ve come in here for a hairbrush, let’s get the hairbrush and leave. He really cannot understand the point of looking at things you already know you are not going to buy. But to me, a really beautiful shop is almost like a museum; it is an edifying experience just looking at the lovely things, I don’t need to take them home as well.
And it seems I’m not alone in my love of virtual shopping, because while I was cruising around Selfridges’ designer salons having the best time fingering clothes I had last seen walking down catwalks in Paris, I noticed a newspaper cutting lying on a cash desk. Using my well-honed skills of reading upside-down (essential for any journalist), I saw that it was about a new breed of shopper that has emerged in London who are taking unshopping to another level. They called them ‘shopping bulimics’ in the article, and there were interviews with women who go on wild sprees in London’s designer stores, then take all the gear back the next day.
It wasn’t that naughty thing of buying something expensive, wearing it once and taking it back – these women hadn’t done more than try it on in their bedrooms at home, if that; it was just the buzz of the buying part that they enjoyed.
I can see it would be fun to pretend to be Posh Spice for a day and go on a mad Gucci spree, but it’s not very honest and it’s not real unshopping. You know you are a proper unshopper when you can look a sales assistant in the eye and with all sincerity say, ‘I’m just looking, thank you.’
Hanging out
Absolute waterfront. Seven beds, seven baths. His-and-hers walk-in closets. Teak decking. Family kitchen. Original floorboards. Fifty-metre swimming pool. Sauna and spa. Gold dolphin taps. Guest cottage. Separate staff quarters. Jetty. Helipad. Private airstrip. Bigger than the house next door.
All that fantasy real estate stuff is well and good, but sometimes I think all I really need to be happy is a washing line.
There’s nothing like hanging your wash on a line to dry, especially if there’s a bit of sun – but not too much – and a brisk wind that will blow your clothes to the perfect stage of ironing-dry, faster than you would have thought possible.
And you’ll have no need for those poncy lavender laundry rinses (although I confess I have quite a collection), because washing dried in the open air has a smell all its own – and fresh is the word for it.
It’s not just the energy efficiency of it – wind power – that pleases me; it’s also so much better for your clothes. Tumble-drying, or nuking, as I call it, actually strips fibres from them (that’s what that hamster bed stuff you find in the lint-catcher is) and if you don’t liberate the load at exactly the right moment, your clothes come out looking like one of those Iron Age chaps they find preserved in peat bogs. All nurdled.
When I dry my nighties on a washing line I don’t need to iron them. The wind presses them and I can picture one of those swollen-cheeked cherubs you see on old maps as the West Wind, huffing and puffing until they are smooth.
I also find clothes hanging on a line aesthetically pleasing. I love the picturesque charm of those washing lines strung between buildings in Naples, which are as much fun to read as supermarket baskets.
Some nappies, a row of tiny undies lined up like ducklings, little shorts, a frilly best dress, a man’s shirts and working trousers, four white blouses, a black dress and some aprons. One look at that and you can see the whole family, including grandma, heading off to Mass.
On one holiday in the south of France we stayed in a charming little stone farmhouse that had a washing line among the blossoming cherry trees. I took more photographs of our laundry hanging on that line – such a pleasing mix of white linen, blue and white stripes and the odd red sock – than I did of any of the local sights.
But even apart from the look of it and all those energy-saving advantages – that’s my own energy, as well as the kind that falls under the Kyoto Protocol – there is, for me, another great advantage to line drying. I love the actual pegging-out bit.
There’s something immensely grounding about going out into the garden and hanging out a basket of freshly washed clothes. Bringing it in again, folding it as you take it down – with the odd pause to bury your nose in the wonderful smell – and putting the pegs back into their special bag is truly satisfying. A job completed.
A friend of mine, from one of those fractured modern families, with about three stepmothers and all kinds of half-brothers and sisters, once told me he felt the same way about shelling peas, and that sitting in the garden one warm afternoon, shelling peas with his father in anticipation of a family dinner, is one of the happiest memories of his whole life.
I can relate to that. Because a particular morning hanging out washing in my mother’s garden is one of mine. The sun shining down. Fresh air. Blackbirds hopping around on the lawn. God in his heaven and everything right with the world.
You really don’t need that six-car garage. Sometimes the little things in life really are enough.
Thirty-five and under
A friend arrived for the weekend and brought me a beautiful vintage silk Liberty scarf as a hostess gift. She knows I have a ‘thing’ about old scarves, having witnessed me hyperventilating in junk shops as I uncover a cache of them in a nasty old cardboard box in a corner, so it was top gifting.
I immediately knotted it at my neck in the style of a Parisian artist and it entirely cheered up my smart casual ensemble. Its jewel colours in graphic blocks are perfect for this season and it instantly became my accessory du jour.
Later on I tied it around the crown of my navy canvas hat, which was another hit. The next day when we raided some garage sales together (she is equally afflicted with junkophilia), I knotted it around the handle of my junketeering mini-backpack (hands free for fossicking, notes and coins in separate zip pockets, it works a treat). Result, result, result.
My next move with the scarf was to tie it over my head in the haute hippy manner – low on the forehead, pointy ends tucked under the knot at the back, tied ends trailing. A little bit Woodstock, a little bit Celia Birtwell, it’s a look I have worn from time to winsome time since I was about seventeen, and it has always made me feel somewhat up myself.
But when I checked myself out in the mirror today, the strains of Kate Bush singing ‘Babushka’ rang loudly in my ears. Not so much Talitha Getty as her distant relative, Kosovan Grandma.
So that is one styling manoeuvre I realise I will now have to put aside until I really am a grandma. This is a very great disappointment to me and yet another of the constant little reminders of ageing which make the process so irritating. All right, all right! I want to shout at the heavens, I’ve got the message, tempus flipping fugit, you don’t have to keep rubbing it in!
Since this latest disappointment, I have been doing a mental catalogue of all the other sartorial quirks that are now lost to me as the mists of time roll over my life.
Many of them – such as micro-minis and backless dresses – cease to be viable because you no longer want to unleash large areas of naked flesh on the general public, lest a wobble or dimple should offend.
After a certain point, you also discover that an overabundance of vintage and op shop attire looks whimsical on the young, yet clownlike on the older person, and there are other garments, such as chunky cardigans, which look rulebreakingly cute on a younger gal, but instantly frumpy on her older sister.
So, with the intention of helping those who are still young to make the most of them while they can, I have assembled a list of Thirty Things to Wear Before You Are Thirty-five:
Hotpants.
Micro-miniskirts.
Skirts to the ankle as daywear.
A sarong as daywear.
Halternecks.
Anything strapless or backless.
Sheer.
Kooky hats which fit close to the head.
Vintage hats of any kind.
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br /> Hair ornaments.
Thigh boots.
Some wildly over-the-top high-fashion statements.
Something hilariously oversized, be it a sleeve, a pocket, a flight of buttons, a trouser leg, a bag or a platform shoe.
Something you have run up yourself in a couple of hours for a party.
Something milkmaidish.
Head-to-toe op shop ensembles.
Complete outfits from a particular era.
Very heavy feature make-up as a party look.
Very cheap clothes.
Vintage dresses.
Plaits and pigtails.
Triangle bikinis.
Crocheted dresses.
Stripy tights.
Patchwork.
Very kitsch op shop finds in terrifying man-made fibres.
Toe rings.
Ankle bracelets.
Really seriously drainpipe-y jeans.
Super low-rise jeans.
Wearing it out
I have long been an advocate of investment dressing – which is the principle of investing blocks of capital in a few superior garments which will last longer and make you happier more often, rather than making multiple smaller unit purchases of cheap tat you will have to sling after two outings. In short, the cost-per-wear system.
But recently I have become aware of another form of investment dressing and I’m feeling a bit conflicted about it. Mainly because it’s not really investment dressing so much as investment clothes shopping.
Or more accurately, buying clothes as investments, the way some people buy fine wine or artworks. Not because they make their hearts beat faster, but because one day they will be worth more than they paid for them, so they’ll be able to flog them off and pocket the profits. Gimme gimme gimme.
Gravity Sucks Page 14
