Men are supposed to think about sex every 12 seconds. I suspect women think about sex just as often, only they call it something different, as in … “I’m checking if my hair looks ok”… and two hours later, “just checking if my hair still looks okay”
Another giveaway is lying on your back on the floor to wriggle into your jeans.
Or simply - wearing high heels. Why go through the agony?
“It’s to make myself look taller.”
Why do you want to look taller?
“So that I look slimmer?”
Why?
“So that I look more attractive.”
To whom?
“No you’re wrong, I do it for myself alone.”
…Further excuses to taste.
Nobody with any respect for their metatarsals wears high heels, if they are going to see nobody all day.
How do you create a fashion brand?
Went to the opening party for Jane Ashley’s exhibition – Photographing Laura Ashley – at a jewel box of a museum, The Fashion and Textile Museum. Cocktails and talks about the establishment of a brand, with Philip Meech, photographer for Prada and Laura Ashley contrasted. Saw beautiful photographs, films and some of the actual vintage clothes. Exhilarating!
Fashion and Textile Museum, www.ftmlondon.org
THE QUAY is one of Jane Ashley’s beautiful publicity photographs taken in the late Sixties, at the start of the family firm, Laura Ashley PLC. On exhibition until 25th February 2012, 11 am - 6 pm
Dazzling entrance to The Fashion and Textile Museum, currently also exhibiting “CATWALK to COVER, a fashion exhibition.”
Why do women MPs wear scarlet jackets?
The scarlet women want to look different, to stand out in that sea of ill-pressed dark suits. Do they want to look like holiday camp hostesses? Or do they hope to look like Virgin air hostesses?
They wish.
Seduction by Tweet
Many moons ago, online, I would intend to check something on Wikipedia and, two hours later, find myself on the brink of buying a penthouse in San Francisco.
Tweeting is even more seductive. In fact, I’ve spent my entire working morning reading other people’s tweets.
I’ve narrowed my favourites down to three. What are yours?
- Best Fashion: Karl Lagerfeld @Karl_Lagerfeld
- Best Author: Ken Follett at @KMFollett
- Best Political Writer: Andrew Rawnsley @andrewrawnsley
Dullest Tweeter: Sarah Brown, wife of our fallen leader @SarahBrownUK
Lazy Cook
Fruity Muesli
(serves one)
Can be multiplied for more people.
Prep time 5 minutes (for me).
This is made the night before, so useful for when Mum can’t or won’t cook breakfast. (Sunday morning?) It can be customized to fit what’s left in your fridge and fresh enough on a Friday night.
Ingredients
- About 2 oz any soft clean fresh fruit, or 1 peeled finely sliced banana and some quartered seedless grapes (don’t peel).
- A few chopped almonds
- Half a cup of apple juice
- 60g / 2 oz porridge oats or one packet Quaker Oats quick porridge. Ignore instructions on packet.
- One tablespoon natural yoghurt.
- Salt to taste (I use 2 pinches) maybe a little clear honey.
Method
- Roughly chop the fruit and put in a DEEP bowl. Add almonds, apple juice and stir.
- Add oats, mixing thoroughly. Stir in yoghurt. Cover bowl with a plate and stick in fridge overnight.
- Next morning, stir well and taste. Add salt and drizzle honey to taste. Serve.
How to avoid BURNOUT
Stress makes people yell at each other and it’s bad for the complexion: lines and frowns. And too much stress is bad for your health.
In Sweden the illness M.E is called burnout, because that’s considered the main factor. However much you’re doing – it’s too much for you.
Flameout
From New York I hear that business women are burning out by the age of 30; they are called FLAMEOUTS because they burn brightly before falling off the corporate ladder. According to McKinsey research, over half of corporate entry jobs go to women but because one woman in three is a drop-out, the percentage rises to 37% for mid management roles and then drops further to 26% for senior management.
Back in Britain, 25 year old Josephine, married with twins, has a terrific job as a fashion journalist juggling blog, twitter and London Fashion Week but is about to drop from exhaustion. What should she do?
LESS. This can be tougher than a New Year Resolution.
Superwoman
Once long ago, I wrote a book on how to minimize housework called Superwoman: my definition of a Superwoman is not a women who tries to do everything, but a woman who knows her own limitations, firmly sticks within them and makes sure everyone else – husband, children, boss — knows what they are.
Also, I founded the Work Life Balance Trust. As soon as you work out what work-life balance means, you ask yourself whether you’ve got it, and the answer is NO. But you’ve just worked out why you haven’t got it.
Psychologist Dennis Friedman told me that the main rule is: one hour overtime needs one hour extra rest. One week of overtime needs one week compensation rest.
Flexi - time suits all
The aim of the Trust was to alter the timetable of the British workplace, which hadn’t changed since the Industrial Revolution. This was achieved by introducing flexi time. There are twelve different sorts of flexi time, one specifically for seasonal heavy workloads to suit postmen, pressurised lawyers and accountants just before the end of the tax year.
Backing down Memory Lane
About 100,00 British authors are published every year, and they all long for their publishers to pay for a publicity tour.
SUPERWOMAN, my book showing how to minimize housework, was published long ago in the summer of 1975. My publishers were a tiny Dickensian outfit in a Bloomsbury attic, and they hadn’t had a bestseller since before the first World War, when it was poet Rupert Brooke: they had little money to spare for publicity.
Poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
One Sunday morning the publisher woke me at 7am and said in a disbelieving blow-job-crescendo voice, “YOU’RE NUMBER ONE! YOU’VE BEATEN WISDEN!”
“Who’s he?”
“Wisden’s Cricket Annual. Now you must go on a publicity tour!”
I agreed to provide my new estate Citroen – a friend’s gift – so long as the publisher insured it and paid for a chauffeur.
So I spent most of my payment-upon-publication on clothes – the sort of clothes that might be worn by a country bookshop customer: tweedy skirts and jackets. I was advised to buy something flashy for Glasgow, so I got a scarlet velvet, mermaid-clingy dress with a low neck-line.
The Tour
Cut to tweedy me, signing books for an appreciative small crowd at the back of a bookshop, when there’s a commotion at the front. My entire small crowd speeds off like lemmings. Blonde film star, Diana Dors appears wearing – at teatime! – a white, satin topless gown shrouded in white fox fur. Immediately, I realised that booklovers do not want to meet an author dressed like a bookworm, but one dressed like a Christmas tree.
My next gig was TV in Glasgow and, as we sped northward, I realised that my driver was the worst driver on the planet. The red velvet dress was a success on TV but afterwards we found that my suitcase had been stolen from the unlocked – so uninsured — boot of my now-battered car. Goodbye all new clothes.
Red velvet for breakfast
My media schedule was crammed as full as a baby’s first Christmas stocking – TV studios, radio stations, local newspaper office and functions such as the Yorkshire Literary Luncheon. There was no time to stop ‘n shop, so I wore the red velvet for twelve days from breakfast TV to bedtime. I grew to hate both it and the publicity tour: had I wanted to talk endlessly in public, I would have been an actress.
One wet and windy night on the way to Norwich, the chauffeur smashed my new car, the last in a six-car pile up. My driver had forgotten to insure the car. My first publicity tour cost more than the sales revenue it was supposed to promote.
Chips off the old block
A young Sebastian and Jasper
I raised my sons to look after themselves: Jasper cooked his first business lunch for me when he was twelve (yes, he was paid) and when Sebastian married, his wife was delighted to find that he could sew his own shirt buttons and recycle his socks. Here’s an early view.
Notice Sebastian’s posh prep school accent. In the Sixties, he switched to a Liverpudlian accent. Now, he talks Normal with a hint of Thames Estuary, like Prince William.
How to undress
Ever wished at night that you could press a button and be undressed and in bed? Here’s the next best method.
If you hang your clothes up at night, theoretically the creases drop out because of your retained body warmth. To get yourself to do this, get four spare hangers - one for pants or skirts. Open the wardrobe door and undress in front of it, hanging clothes as you advance to nakedness.
My ex daughter-in-law, Georgina, says she follows a similar method which consists of simply opening the wardrobe door and dropping her clothes inside it.
Hangers
For me, the best hangers are from Practicalprincess.com. Nothing seems to slip off; the pants are gripped but not indelibly so; and the hangers don’t take up too much width room in my wardrobe. I purchased £50 worth of hangers: they make me feel pampered. I’m going to buy some more.
Wardrobes
Who has the best walk-in wardrobe I’ve ever stood in? Shared first place - because neither of them have ever been second at anything - goes to best selling novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford and journalist Felicity Green. Barbara’s designer produced a walk-in of pale polished wood, with indirect lighting that made you look ten years younger. There was a place for everything, including belts, bras and brooches. Everything seemed to work at the touch of a button: doors glided open, the drawers slid sinuously.
Savile Row
Felicity, whose entire writing archive is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, never buys any article of clothing that doesn’t go with everything else in her wardrobe: that’s because nearly everything is black, white or grey with an occasional touch of scarlet and everything is colour coded, so to enter her walk-in feels like stepping into a Savile Row tailor.
Felicity’s flat had two bedrooms but as there’s only one Felicity, she knocked down a dividing wall to create a walk-in wardrobe that you enter from the end of her bedroom. There are no cupboards. Instead Felicity fixed rails
wall-to-wall. Instead of cupboard doors she has pull-up linen blinds. On the floor stand cheap wire Ikea-type storage baskets, for sweaters and underwear, with a small space for suitcases. Above these, hang coats, shirts and trousers. Above, bags sit on a high shelf that runs around the room. There is one small area for long clothes. On the back of the door to the landing, is a full length mirror.
Fashion or style
Felicity isn’t interested in fashion but in STYLE. “My icon is Audrey Hepburn, although she was twice my height and half my width. Her clothes were simple classics that could still be worn today. If you buy clothes that are your style, they are never fashionable or unfashionable: I have things over forty years old.”
To discover your own style, look at the clothes you wear regularly and write down what they all have in common, advises Felicity.
Want to do a little bit for the Big Society?
We’re a financially illiterate nation, so it’s not surprising that we’re not yet half-way through a financial crisis that will take ten years to resolve (my guess).
Which is why every child needs a financial education, and this should be a compulsory part of the school curriculum. To make this law, financial writer Martin Lewis has organized an e-petition; please join me in signing it.
Martin’s petition already has over a 100,000 signatures, but more are needed in order to get the government action. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/8903
Goodbye
“Here’s my vision of you preparing your first blog,” writes ex-daughter-in-law, “I have given you a boob job - only a slight lift - a string of pearls and a martini glass - Love Georgina ”