Gravity Sucks

by Alderson, Maggie

  It made me vaguely offended on behalf of the so-called elderly, because it sounds as though we pass through adulthood and then come out the other side as elderly, which has a less-than sort of a ring to it. As if on achieving elderly-hood you might have to give back your right to vote and order drinks in a bar.

  An image of the grandad from The Simpsons flashed into my brain. I could see him going into Moe’s Tavern and trying to order a beer and Moe asking him for ID.

  ‘Are you sure you’re under ninety-one?’

  Then I started wondering when exactly just being an older adult stops and being ‘the elderly’ starts? Middle age seems to start later and later, so ‘the elderly’ might not kick in until you are nearly a hundred these days.

  Is my mum, now well into her eighties, ‘the elderly’? I’m sure it’s not a title she would welcome. In fact, I know she would rage against it. It sounds so very frail – both in limb and mind – and while Peggy Senior might be a bit elderly in the hip joints these days, her brain is most definitely still Adult. She’s more clued up on current affairs than me most of the time, and a big fan of Celebrity Big Brother.

  So all these ponderings on the subject of age and the labels we put on ourselves got me to thinking that it might be time for us to redefine the Seven Ages of Man.

  These used to be: Infancy, Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, Middle Age, Old, Deathbed. I know this from the model of the Karmic Circle of Life in the window of the Hare Krishna restaurant just off Soho Square in London, which has long been on my list of the Great Free Sights of London Town.

  I think it’s time the Hare Krishnas did a new model (they have a sort of doll for each age, going round in a circle – it’s so interesting), along the following lines – and once I started, seven ages no longer seemed nearly enough. Looking at the childcare books, at not even four years old, my daughter already seems to have passed through four distinct stages. So here are my proposals for the new Twenty-eight Ages of Man (and Woman):

  Milk-fed Infant

  Weaned Infant

  Toddler

  Pre-schooler

  Properly Innocent Early Childhood

  Knowing Middle Childhood

  Pre-teen

  Early Teen

  Toxic Teen

  Mature Teen

  Youth

  Glorious Gilded Youth

  Youth in Excelsis

  Extended Youth

  Continued Extended Youth

  Late Continued Extended Youth

  Mature Youth

  Early Middle Youth

  Middle Youth

  Later Middle Youth

  Approaching Middle Age

  Very Early Middle Age

  Mid-middle Age

  Mature Middle Age

  Pre-maturity

  Maturity

  Still Marvellous for Your Age

  The Elderly

  I think that just about covers it. The London Hare Krishnas will just have to get a bigger window.

  Quilt of many colours

  I seem to be assembling a rag bag. So far, I have only used torn-off pieces of the old shirts and pyjamas in it for grubby jobs like cleaning paintbrushes, but some of the things in there really are much too nice for that, which made me remember the other thing people used to do with their rag bags – make patchwork quilts.

  I’ve got a lovely one myself which I found in a junk shop years ago. It’s not one of those beautiful American ones in a fiendishly clever tessellated pattern; in fact it’s more like crazy paving than tiling.

  But I love it even more for its rough-hewn quality; it’s much more personal than one of those perfect ones. With its quirky mix of fabrics and quite clumsy stitches, that quilt is almost like a book of short stories to me.

  I’ve got it over a sofa in the bathroom and I lie in the bath staring at it and wondering what tales it has to tell. There are so many disparate kinds of fabric there.

  There are quite a few pieces from what were clearly a man’s stripy business shirts. Was it one man or two? A husband or a son? A father, even. Then I wonder what kind of job he did to wear those shirts. Or were they just for Sunday best? Either way, I can see them going through a mangle, hanging on a line, and being pressed with a flat iron off the stove.

  Then there are pretty printed florals, which must have been summer dresses, and from the 1930s, judging by the style of the prints. I can see those dresses going on picnics and on charabancs to the seaside, walking along the seafront, eating an ice-cream on the pier.

  There are some fabric pieces with the same print in different colourways. So did she get some remnants from a fabric shop? I’m sure the dresses were homemade. I can see her in that shop, looking at the pattern books and feeling the ‘stuff’, as they used to call it in those days.

  There are other prints which look as though they come from children’s clothes. Little summer dresses and romper suits. How hard it must have been to cut them up to make the quilt pieces – or maybe she waited until they had been passed down and washed and worn so many times that it was all they were good for.

  Which makes me wonder how long it took her to assemble all the fabric for that quilt. It’s big enough to cover a double bed, with different patches on each side, none the same touching, which adds up to quite a metre-age.

  So was it made by an older woman from her rag bag when all her family had left home? A memento of her busy years, which helped to pass the time when the nest was suddenly empty (I’m starting to well up a bit, in the bath, by this point).

  Or did a mother give the rag bag to her daughter to make a quilt for her bottom drawer, ready to go on the marital bed, primed with memories of her childhood? (More welling.)

  Mind you, in the pretelly era – and we can’t be talking any later than the early 1950s here – people did have more time on their hands of an evening. Even a mother of young children might have liked a project to pass the time. Or maybe it was made in the war years. It certainly has that sense of thrift about it. Anything to take your mind off the waiting and the worrying.

  I’ll never know, of course, but I love to wonder. And it makes me think that instead of heaving everything into the charity bin, perhaps we should all make such a quilt. I like the idea of snuggling beneath my memories.

  Rock and rule

  The other day I was at the luggage carousel waiting for my bag to come off a flight from Melbourne when I realised I was standing next to the Rolling Stones circa 1968. Or Led Zeppelin in 1974. Or Guns and Roses circa 1988. Or The Verve circa 1997. Or Razorlight circa 2006.

  Whoever they actually were, even before the guitar cases starting chugging round the conveyor belt, it was blatantly apparent they were a rock band, because of the hilarious clothes they were wearing. Not to mention the surly over-it-don’t-look-at-me attitude. But why would you dress like that if being looked at wasn’t what you really craved?

  Anyway, I was blatantly looking at them. I was loving them. They were my kind of boys. They all had don’t-give-a-shit hair – which probably took some time to achieve – most of them were wearing silly sunglasses (indoors, remember) and one sported a denim butcher boy cap (Bob Dylan 1962) with the insouciance that can only be assumed when you wear a daft hat every single day. Another had on a T-shirt clearly picked up off a girlfriend’s bedroom floor. It was so too small for him there was a wide expanse of white, hairy belly between the bottom of it and the start of his too-tight faded hipster jeans.

  It was all classic rock gear and I so adored those young men for wearing it. They would have had no idea how happy they had made an old lady, because they reminded me how much I love rock style.

  I do really actually love it, but it also amuses me intensely. What I enjoy is the way every new wave of bands assumes this identikit rock ‘n’ roll style and then acts as though they have invented it, when in fact it has been going strong for over forty years.

  The attitude those chaps at the airport were copping, you’d think they were making some kind of big, dan
gerous, rebellious statement – look ma, no shoe polish! – when really it’s just a uniform. It’s as conventional in its way as a London gent in his pinstripe suit and bowler hat, or an Aussie bloke in his Blundies and King Gee shorts.

  In the same way, that guy Scott Weiland from Velvet Revolver had me absolutely hysterical with his posturing at Live 8, like he was the first skinny rocker ever to wear a catsuit and a stupid hat. David Bowie was doing all that – and much more – thirty-five years ago, yet Mr Weiland seemed almost in awe of his own brilliantly naughty fabulousness. There was a naivety to it that I found rather endearing (whilst also wanting to push him, fully clothed, into the nearest swimming pool).

  It reminded me of my nephew Chris’s mid-teen obsession with Marilyn Manson. He once forced me to watch a long documentary about Mr M, so I could appreciate how totally amazing he is, but while I do admire his intelligence (he made a brilliant contribution to Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine, if you saw that), I couldn’t find much truly original about his onstage style. But my nephew thought he was the second coming.

  I whispered my disappointment to his dad, my brother Nick. ‘That Marilyn Manson – there’s nothing new about him,’ I said. ‘It’s new to him,’ said Nick, which I thought was terribly wise.

  When I was a young rocker in the late seventies I can remember looking at pictures of Lou Reed and his gang taken ten years earlier and actively emulating their look of stripy T-shirts, leather jackets and skinny pants. And they were already channelling Marlon Brando in The Wild One from over ten years before that. Really, there is nothing new in the rock style canon. What’s new is the people adopting it each time.

  So just as each generation thinks that they have invented sex, each generation thinks they have invented rock rebellion, and therein lies the unbridled joy of it.

  Closet queen

  As a child I had a fantasy about being accidentally locked into Harrods one night and being able to play freely in all the departments – particularly toys, ladies’ shoes, children’s clothes and pets – before heading down to the food hall’s chocolate room to sustain myself. I would be found the next morning, I imagined, in an organdie-draped four-poster princess bed in the furniture department, several empty chocolate boxes beside me. A lion cub would be sleeping at my feet.

  In adult life this daydream has developed into a strong desire to perve at the wardrobes of the world’s chicest women. I long to see inside Kate Moss’s closets, for example. Apart from fingering the actual clothes and accessories, I would love to see how she stores all her gear. I can’t help thinking that it just might all be thrown in there (and I have seen inside one of her hotel rooms, when I was doing an interview with her many years ago, so I know of what I speak).

  Anna Wintour, on the other hand, whose closets I also long to throw open, I can imagine taking more of an archival approach. Is it all folded with acid-free tissue in special museum-quality boxes? Or hanging inside special mothproof canvas garment bags? Are there separate cedar-lined closets for summer and winter clothes? What are the hangers like? How does she store her handbags?

  I would also love to know how such a fashion icon keeps tricky things like scarves and gloves, so that they stay nice, but you can also see what you have. It’s very easy to forget a favourite silk square if it’s hidden under a carefully folded pile of others, which you don’t want to mess up scratching through them like a busy dog, as you’d only have to fold them again, which would make you late for work (or I would, anyway).

  Other wardrobes I long to get accidentally locked into belong to Loulou de la Falaise, Madonna, Amanda Harlech, Naomi Campbell, Victoria Beckham, Liz Hurley, Lil’ Kim and Cher.

  On the male side, I’d like to see if Manolo Blahnik’s closets are as much like Jay Gatsby’s as I imagine. I do so picture neat stacks of perfectly laundered shirts and ranks of immaculate shoes. I have similar visions of P Diddy’s arrangements. But how does Mick Jagger store his gear? Bryan Ferry? Keef?

  But while harbouring these little flights of fancy I actually know that the reality of raking through someone else’s clothing does not live up to the dream. In fact, there is something strangely depressing about other people’s wardrobes.

  I have had the chance over the years to inspect the contents of some of very chic closets for professional reasons – usually because I was writing an article about their Fabulous Home – and far from revealing the mysteries of the well-dressed, checking out another person’s wardrobe can make you wonder how they ever get out of the house at all.

  Because even the most expensive and beautiful clothes look terribly sad and lifeless just hanging there. Without the colour or styling themes of a boutique, there is always the defeated air of the ‘nearly new’ store about it. Or of a wardrobe that must be cleared after a death. A musty smell hangs around any clothes that have ever been worn, even in the most immaculate households. It’s so disappointing.

  But while it is disheartening to acknowledge that even a rake through Madonna’s threads could be a downer, there are two notions that spring from this realisation that I find quite inspiring. Firstly, that any item of clothing, once worn, somehow takes on an indelible emotional trace of the person who has worn it. If you have ever found an old but unworn item in a vintage shop, you will know it doesn’t have the same poignant air as pre-loved attire. It’s quite strange. And the second understanding is that, in fact, clothes do not make the man – or woman – but that it takes a human personality to bring a garment to life.

  In a time where we are increasingly led to believe that elegance, along with all other aspects of fulfilment, can be bought off the peg, I find that rather comforting.

  Me Vintage

  I’ve written before about something I call Me Vintage.

  At least, I think I’ve written about it before. I know I meant to, but just this morning I couldn’t remember the name of the Duke of Windsor (‘You know, the one who had to stop being king, because he wanted to marry the divorced woman; no, not Prince Charles, the other one…’), so maybe I just meant to and never actually did. Really, my brain’s got more holes in it than a Bottega Veneta woven leather tote these days, so I can’t be sure of anything.

  Anyway, Me Vintage is when fashion does one of its little backflips and something you already have in the back of your wardrobe suddenly becomes totally right again and you can just pull it out and pop it on and everyone says, ‘Aren’t you marvellous?’ And you say, ‘This? It’s vintage.’

  Then you can just leave that notion hanging there, happy in the knowledge that they are probably picturing you in Didier Ludot in Paris, or Relik in London, rummaging through the rails next to Kate Moss. When actually you got your dark navy nautical jacket with gold braid trim – à la this-season Balenciaga – out of a black bin liner on top of your wardrobe. It’s positively fiendish.

  The other version of it is when someone says, ‘What tremendous bangles. I’ve been looking everywhere for some just like that. Where did you get them?’ and you smile quietly and say, ‘Oh, I’ve had these for twenty years…’

  Then you get a faraway look in your eye and continue: ‘I bought these four from a peddler on a beach in Mauritius; that one was a present from a Fendi sister – can’t remember which one – and I got the other one in Top Shop, back in the day. Or was it New York…?’

  I love that. It makes me feel like Karen Blixen, or Peggy Guggenheim. Old and weathered, but in a good way. It’s just about the only time I’m happy about being on the wrong side of forty.

  The Swan Moment

  I have written before about the terrible misfortune of being fourteen, but now I have a happier tale to tell. I have recently observed at very close hand a wonderful thing that happens to people shortly after they are fourteen – let’s call it the Swan Moment.

  A dear friend of mine is fifteen, very nearly sixteen, and I swear her Swan Moment happened overnight. I watched it like one of those pieces of time-lapse photography where they show you a rose un
furling. Except this was a Lily, which is the name of my friend.

  When I first met her she was fourteen and she was, well, she was pretty gawky. Although she had a lovely face and enviably long limbs, the face had spots on it and the limbs were sort of put on wrong. You know how Michael Caine’s arms can look a bit back to front? That’s how Lily’s long legs were.

  Then one evening I opened the door and this beautiful young woman was standing there. She didn’t have spots and she had wonderful slinky legs in a groovy denim mini, her hair was sleek and soigné, and I swear I did a real double-take, like someone in a cartoon. It was Lily. I didn’t say anything at first, as I didn’t want to embarrass her, but in the end I just had to blurt it out.

  ‘Lily,’ I said. ‘You’ve changed.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got all beautiful,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘It just sort of happened over the last few months and suddenly everyone’s noticed. My spots have gone.’

  But it was much more than that. It was like the spots moved out and the glamour fairy moved in. Just like that. Ever since, I have thought of that evening as The Night They Invented Champagne, as the whole thing was pure Gigi, although not so pervy (that film has always totally given me the creeps).

  I still see Lily most days, as she lives on my street and she helps me out with stuff like filing, but really because I just like having her around, and the amazing thing is that the Swan Moment just keeps on going.

  Every time I open the door she looks more lovely. There’s a gloss going on now, an added enhancement that is more than just an absence of spots. It’s like living in a fairytale, watching it all.