the whole problem with poetry

Behind the scenes at British Vogue with Lynn Barber:

"But this high dependence on advertising makes for what seems to me a shocking cosiness between editorial and advertising. Newspapers are always careful to keep a firewall between the two, but Vogue has an 'executive fashion editor' whose job is to check that advertisers get sufficient editorial mentions to keep them happy, and Alex [Alexandra Shulman, the editor] has to apologise if they get left out - 'I seem to spend my whole life apologising!' she laughs. 'But Vogue makes most of its money out of advertising - and it does make an awful lot of money - so we've got to have a good relationship with our advertisers. They're not going to place £100,000 a year and then say, "Feel free not to use any of our goods" - life's not like that. So although there is this feeling sometimes that creatively it's not pure, well - magazines are a business, you're not sitting there writing poetry'."

Thanks to Linda Grant at The Thoughtful Dresser, for the link - I hadn't seen a paper at all this weekend...

the moving finger writes and the moving picture... moves

So... the year wanes and we are left with not much to do besides reflect on the tunnel we're in - the one that runs from Dec 25th to Jan 1st - how we got into it in the first place and what the world might look like when we get out again. Will it look any different at all? Aside from the fact that I will be the size of a house?

Of course, I must be talking about the inner world. The outer world is making itself all too much felt, with Pakistan, the international economy and my lower back all on the brink of falling apart. Here in my little patch of London we will start 2008 with two local teenagers murdered - an unhappy new baseline for our otherwise-quite-peace-n-love neighbourhood. Largely thanks to the efforts of Martin Amis & his friends the intellectual debate on religious fundamentalism has become like a comic book, just when we need rational discourse most badly. I owe British Gas £98 and I'm not even with them any more. The weather is getting stranger; we're told we can't stop global warming now, no matter what we do, and by the way nobody's doing very much. Recycling a few tin cans? Sending gigantic trucks round to get the cans to recycle? I mean, okay, here's a little story for you.

By the big bins at the end of my block there is a mountain of discarded "bulk rubbish" - old chairs, mattresses, kitchen units. The council has apparently told our caretaker several times that they would come and pick the stuff up, but it's been a couple of months and it just looks like shit. And, you know, Hackney, rats... But one day a couple of weeks ago I was on my balcony talking on the phone and I happened to see a truck drive up, pull over next to the house across the road which had a small, neat pile of furniture items in its front garden, and pile them in. It took five seconds. Too late, of course, too late, I noticed that the furniture items were rather cute, especially a little commode stand or similar, with its little drawer liners still in and everything. But I couldn't call out, too far away, too slow. Then they drove away, leaving Mount Everest of Rubbish just yards further along. At the same time, the ex-Mr B has a sofa mouldering in his front garden, because the council have told him he's already exceeded his quota of three, or is it four, items for the year. I mean, he had lots of work done, of course he ditched some old stuff. I told him he could have one my my four call-outs, as I haven't called them out at all, but apparently it doesn't work like that.

But the thing is, these people are driving these trucks around, basing their work on "targets" and "quotas" and wasting fuel and money, and you just get the idea that nobody gives a shit. Having worked in a local authority, I can tell you: they don't. They don't even have the imagination to give a shit. What kind of environmental target involves driving trucks around and not even picking up the rubbish??

The famous Clissold Leisure Centre is re-opening, half a decade later and only about a zillion times over budget. I'll be excited in a couple of years if the roof hasn't caved in. And do they still have mixed-sex showers by the pool?

I don't know, I really don't. If you think about the stupidity of people you could just despair. So let's not think about it. In any case, we are Baroque hereabouts and thankfully not really all that intrested in the mundane elements of How Things Work. I do admire and even envy people who are really intrested in all that stuff, but I am just not one of them. And this is why I can never construct a plotline. (See, it is a serious shortcoming.)

So what will 2008 look like inside? What the hell was 2007 all about? Here in Baroque Mansions it was about, among other things, sickness and death. Sickness, death and movies. Three deaths, three spells in hospital, two operations, four months off work, two trips to the States. It was all about How Things Work. I lay on the couch a lot. I lost the pace that had been my hallmark for the past decade. (Thinking about it, it was probably the pace that made me fall over in Asda, Isle of Dogs, that time, and the time I fell down the stairs while carrying laundry and shouting at my kids over my shoulder, and down the other stairs in four-inch heels trying to leave a party last Christmas, and slip on the pea pod in Somerfields, and break my foot running for a 277 bus while wearing kitten heels, over cobbles... and spill countless cups of coffee running for other buses.) Will I get it back? (Tune in next year...) Does being slow make you old? (I do need to get it back; I have a lot to do and I'm backed up already. In fact, I seem to have done my back in, doing the Christmas shopping.)

2007 was the year in which Mlle B told me I dress older than I used to ("but I mean you still look younger than the other mums! Don't get all excited! Mummy!! What did I say??"), which of course I guess I knew.* You just don't want other people to notice it. Especially when you've lost your pace.

In many ways it was the Year of the Movie. Lying on the couch and losing your concentration means that although a lot of things may not get done, like very important letters to rights departments, you do get to watch a lot of movies. I watched things I had never seen before, filled embarrassing gaps (Taxi Driver - oh my GOD. It is so amazing), revisited old faves and caught up with new things. And there's still so much I've never seen! But I'm back at work now, and have to do the writing I wasn't doing before, so hmm... I also have to buckle down and do the admin or my book will never come out this spring. Crap crap crap. However I am already at work on the next one... the next two, maybe even. Or three, so says my taskmaster. And that's not counting the apocryphal novel.

And look at the time! It's 2 o'clock. Get dressed, Kate.

(Nb. This didn't work. However, am about to go out for a drink in a secret location with a mysterious Stoke Newington blogger of my acquaintance... it's a bit dark out now for the dark glasses, so I'm afraid we'll be rather recognisable. More later, if the Syndicate doesn't get me first.)

* There's a pair of platform sandals with rope trim around the edges, they are the only thing that goes with a certain skirt of mine, but last time I wore them I felt a little funny. Is it bad? Can I still wear them?

elegantly dressed spectacles - family visit special bonus

I'm waiting for my new glasses to arrive. They are going to be splendiferous!

Alas, I need about six pairs. The good news is that all of them are going to be equally dazzling, so much so that I can hardly wait for their arrival! (This is even aside from any advantage to my actual ability to see. I'm assuming there will be some.)

And I have decided to eschew the cheap lenses that Specsaver has been foisting on me for years, as if mere cheapness is in itself clever: my new (proper) opticians tell me they won't touch those with a bargepole. And my pencilled countertop calculations were heavily influenced by the fact that the ultra-posh Kodak (I think) lenses throw in a spare pair of glasses (with only one prescription in them) for free. Now, if there is one thing I've learned over the years, it is that a spare pair of glasses is really hardly a luxury at all. So I'm getting (adorable, rectangular tortoise-shell) posh distance-&-reading glasses; red rimless spare distance specs; small dark oval reading specs (my all-time favourite frames, given yet another incarnation); and I'm keeping my present reading specs to be my new computer specs (which is what I mainly use them for anyway).

Can you imagine: and I just bought a smaller handbag.

But! I have just today spoken to Gary the optician, wondering why I have not yet seen these wonderful glasses, which were supposed to be ready "by" yesterday. He tells me his glazing machine is broken. He says he can cut lenses but he can't put the groove into lenses for rimless frames. For some reason (his shop is on Highbury Corner) he sounds as if he is in the middle of the intersection; I can hear every car, truck, bus, passerby, more clearly than I can hear him, and indeed the line cuts out at one point. Sometimes Gary sounds as if he's underwater. He clearly - remember, last time I saw him he'd spent an entire day moving his boiler at home to a new location and plumbing it in, but he needed two small parts for it - he clearly just isn't getting a long very well with machines.

He continues: "this is of no use to you whatsoever, it will bore you, but it will do me good to get it off my chest. See, inside the machine there are these two cameras... they're so small you wouldn't even believe they're cameras!"

"Yes I would," I say.

"And one of them is broken, and I think it's coming tomorrow. But if it doesn't, then it'll be early next week... I was here till midnight the night before last!"

Meanwhile, here are my dad and his parents, circa 1941, in their glasses.

By the way, this picture makes clear to me something my mother has been remarking on for years and which anyway I have suspected: that I am the absolute spit of my Grandma. I have a treasure trove of pictures brought over by my indefatigable sister, and I'm sure Grandma will be reprised over the coming weeks. There's a hat & coat set you have got to see.

And here's a bonus from about ten years later:

elegantly dressed Jessica Mitford

Jessica Mitford with her second husband, Bob Treuhaft

I know, I know: if you're talking about elegantly dressed Mitfords you think you deserve, at the very least, Nancy, if not some astonishing family photograph of the 1910s on a spreading lawn (all the young gels also in spreading lawn), or even some morbid picture of Unity, who shot herself for Hitler's sake... After all, Jessica is hardly known as the glamorous one: as her quip goes, & I paraphrase from memory here, "Nancy is dressed by Dior; I am dressed by JC Penney."

Jessica - known as Decca to her friends - admitted that she never noticed how things looked, but nonetheless she did get in trouble with the Communist party in California for wearing hats and gloves as she handed out their leaflets from door to door in the suburbs. "What on earth is the point of Communism," she said when hauled up on it, "if it means no one can wear nice hats?"

There are more anecdotes about this glorious woman than I have space to tell (though I might just allude to the game she invented as a child, gently shaking her father's arm as he drank his tea - preparing him, as she said, for the palsy he would surely be developing before long). Or describe how, when she eloped with her cousin Esmond Romilly and went to live in Rotherhithe, she was so clueless she had no idea how to wash the dishes, and she washed, rinsed, dried and put away each dish in its turn. To this day every time I see or hear mention of Rotherhithe I think of Jessica Mitford at 17, so brave and passionate... so plucky yet incompetent... it is a thrilling story.

Esmond went off to fight in Spain and got killed. Their infant daughter Constanza died of meningitis in America not long afterwards. Unity, of course - the sister Decca had been closest to in childhood - shot herself and never recovered. The rift with (another sister) Diana Mosley was never healed. And what did our Decca do? She brushed herself off, remarried (very happily) and got on with it.

She was a woman of facets, inner steel and great humour - three essentials for elegance, I think.

The best thing you can do is read her childhood memoir, Hons and Rebels. (The h is pronounced; far from being anything to do with "honourables," it is a corruption of "hens.")

And here, for your delectation, are two very different reviews of her letters, now out in enormous (and garish; who designed that ugly cover?) hardback.

1. Victoria Glendinning
2. JK Rowling

another reason to love westwood

Vivienne Westwood has apparently shocked the respectable journalists of the Guardian with her Hay-on-Wye antics. You can understand that: she's kind of a long way from your usual Hay type, the Sebastian Faulkes or even Mariella Frostrup.

And while she was shocking them with her fashionable strops (not that kind of strop - please! Or you'll be shocking the rest of us too) she was also recasting herself as a 'thinker'. Well, I don't see why not. She is definitely an artist. And while artists are notoriously not always intellectuals, they are at the vanguard of cultural life. So let her be a thinker.

Here's what she says (taken from an article in the Independent):

"In Active Resistance to Propaganda, she called on people to eschew trash television and magazines and encouraged them to read and visit galleries and concerts instead. The human race had never appeared as ugly to her as it did today, she said.

"It must be to do with mass marketing that is producing a whole sea of clones across the world," she said. In her lecture, No Art, No Progress, she identified two social evils: "organised lying" and "non-stop distraction", which she described as filling people's minds with rubbish so that no one could think. But by viewing the world through culture and by becoming more cultivated, people would become more human."

I can only applaud that. That Westwood prizes civilisation above all else is evident in the gorgeous cutting of her garments, the way she has taken the celebration of human form which is high fashion and made it something new, strange and wonderful. At 66 she is still alarming, and that is as it should be.

The most interesting thing to me about Westwood's above-stated position - aside from the fact that I agree 150%, and aside from her wonderful turn of phrase regarding distraction - is how similar it sounds to what Philip Pullman - who really is an intellectual - was saying the other day.

Pullman is talking specifically about the decline in children's television programming - both in quantity of non-commercial programming and in the overall quality, and in fact the intention of it. This is, in one small area, exactly what Westwood is talking about on a more macro level.

Pullman says (I quote from the Observer):

"'Children are regarded by broadcasters as a marketing opportunity at best, a dangerous and feral threat at worst, and an expensive nuisance otherwise,' Pullman said. 'This social poison goes much deeper than broadcasting, of course, but it's particularly visible there....

"But Pullman is concerned the damage done to children's television has gone too far to be corrected without more effort. 'The ideology of "profit before everything" in children's television is toxic,' he said. 'When young audiences are regarded as customers to be separated from their money as quickly and efficiently as possible, there is no chance for life-enhancing work to flourish.'"

The best thing of all - that Westwood was so much more eloquent!

This post has been brough to you as an elegantly dressed Wednesday special*

* I say special - that could also be The Specials...

elegantly dressed Tuesday

The baroque EDW is brought to you early this week, in response to the news that Isabella Blow has died, suffering from both cancer and depression. Poison is suspected.*

It just didn't seem right to wait a day.

There are people who bring a new dimension to fashion, for whom it is a state of being rather than just an irksome moment in front of the wardrobe. In daily life they often get on people's nerves: "I'm sure a nice suit from M&S would be perfectly good," we say to them (not that I have ever said this to anyone).

Isabella Blow was one of those people, and the rest of us should realise that they are a gift. First of all, they point us to things we would never have thought of. Secondly, we can live vicariously through them, even when afflicted with the most sensible shoes in the world. And most crucially, there is nothing like a person walking into the room** wearing, say, a tiny hat with a veil, or bright red lipstick and a perfect satin*** coat, to make you realise you are being incredibly lazy in your approach to life.

I am the first to admit that I can be very lazy about these matters - you should see what I wear around the house - and indeed my knees can be a bit dodgy for serious shoe-wearing, though I think falling down the stairs at a party in four-inch heels last December pretty much established my credibility there! Still, one can do one's best. Right now I am wearing dolly shoes - that is, ballet-style - with a big bow in the front, made of what looks like antique tin foil. Never mind that I got them in Office. (I've always wondered - when they opened that shop, why did they think anyone would want to buy shoes in a shop called Office?? Surely "The Mandarin Pleasure Garden" would be more enticing.)

I used to wear hats, and indeed I used to have an entire wall on my landing hung with all kinds of hats. Well - not all kinds. No Philip Treacy. They were mostly a bit beaten-up, but of good quality and all vintages, including a rakish satin-crowned hat from the 1910's, with a moulded brim and an ostrich feather. I spent £18 on it in 1988, and my then-future husband said (I'm sure, trying to be encouraging etc) that we should go somewhere nice so I could wear it. I still remember the sinking feeling that I was perhaps snapping, when I said: "Wear it?? I'm never going to wear it! That's not the point." But maybe I should have.

Isabella Blow bought Alexander McQueen's entire graduate collection. He was trying to sell her a coat, and she bought the lot for £5,000, which took her - I forget where I read this - some considerable time to pay off. I really admire that. It's a lesson to the rest of us.

What Isabella Blow realised is that it's not really about whether you look "perfectly good" or even "pretty": it's about whether you've bothered. We all know you get out what you put in, and that goes for pleasure and beauty too.

The Daily Mail quotes Anna Wintour, surely one of the scariest women in the universe:

"In a world that's largely driven by corporate culture she was a joy to have," Wintour added. "She was not too good at getting to the office before 11am, but then she would arrive dressed as a maharaja or an Edith Sitwell figure.

"I don't think she ever did my expenses but she made life much more interesting."

And this anecdote, in today's Guardian obituary, sums it up:

"At a lunch with Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast, she wore a pair of antlers covered in a heavy black lace veil. When he asked how she would able to eat, she said: 'Nicholas, that is of no concern to me whatsoever'."

But the final word must go to Isabella herself:

"Fashion is a vampiric thing," she says (in an interview with the Observer in 2002). "It's the hoover on your brain. That's why I wear the hats, to keep everyone away from me. They say, 'Oh, can I kiss you?' I say, "No, thank you very much. That's why I've worn the hat. Goodbye."















* This is impossibly elegant, however sad. The saddest details of Blow's life are also some of the most elegant ones (this could be the beginning of a whole new train of thought, but I'm not going to indulge it). According to Tamsin Blanchard in the aforementioned Observer piece:

"Although her family has lived in Doddington, a castle in Cheshire, since the 14th century, and owned 34,000 acres of land at the turn of the century, her grandfather, Sir Jock Delves Broughton sold most of it off to pay gambling debts. After his flesh-eating wife left him, he moved to Kenya where he was accused of the White Mischief murder of Lord Erroll. He was acquitted, but eventually committed suicide. Isabella's father, Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, ran off with another woman and disinherited Isabella when he died in 1994, leaving her just £5,000 of his £6m estate."

** or even just a picture of someone walking into a room... and that, my dears, is just what EDW is about!

*** although satin is in fact the stuff of the devil, in its unwearability.