Yoga Ga Ga
Several thousand years ago, last century, when I was sixteen, I met a woman I found very inspirational. She was at least sixty and I think I was at a party at her house because my sister knew her son – whatever, I took one look and developed an instant micro-crush. I can’t remember her name, but I can picture her as clearly as if I had seen her yesterday.
She had a head of flaming auburn hair and was wearing a full-skirted dress in an Indian print fabric – with bare feet. She wasn’t tall, but had a strikingly confident bearing, which gave her a distinct presence. Her face was animated, her eyes bright and interested, as though she was always ready to hear the next fascinating thing. I immediately vowed that when I was immensely old, I was going to be exactly like her.
She wasn’t beautiful like a film star, but she had a spirit that was immensely appealing. And although she was nearly four times my age, her body seemed more vibrant and energised than those of most people much younger.
Being inclined to ask people very direct questions I immediately enquired what she dyed her hair with. She roared with laughter and introduced me to the concept of henna. As for her vitality and upright deportment, I already knew where that came from – she was a yoga teacher. My sister had told me before we got there. That was the first time my interest in yoga was piqued.
The next was about two years later when I was gap yearing in London. Among other jobs, I worked in a pub, where one of the older barmaids was very striking – with the same animated expression, bright eyes and upright bearing as the yoga teacher. Something about the shoulders back, the sternum raised, head up; a bit like a ballet dancer, but more natural-looking. She also had hennaed hair.
One quiet evening we got chatting and she told me that when she was growing up in London’s East End, she had heard a radio interview with an actor who espoused the health benefits of yoga. Intrigued, she had taken herself off to the local library and taken out a book about it. She’d taught herself and been doing it ever since.
With that revelation, the benefits of yoga were firmly embedded in my young brain, but I didn’t get to a class for another few years. They weren’t that easy to find in those days. There weren’t glamorous yoga centres with class timetables online and special yoga clothes designed by supermodels. You had to scour for ‘evening classes’ in church halls that didn’t involve too much arduous public transport travel in the British winter. It was all too hard.
Eventually I discovered London’s Iyengar Institute, but while I loved the earnest atmosphere, the smell of vegetarian feet was so overpowering I couldn’t go back. So it wasn’t until fifteen years ago that I found the right class, free of foot emanations and convenient to my life and work.
Since then, it is fair to say, I have become utterly obsessed with yoga. I do at least two classes a week, although I prefer four. I’d go every day if I could.
While I would never claim to have anything approaching a ‘good’ body, it has certainly changed over that time. While I have a flabby stomach over the top, I have a feeling of strength in my inner core – roughly below the navel – which just wasn’t there before.
And without having to think about it, I realise I constantly adjust my spine and shoulders into alignment, to the point where I wonder, as the years go by, if I am not approaching something of the deportment of the barmaid and my sister’s friend’s mother.
It really feels possible that as old age approaches, I might look as spry as she did. On my sixtieth birthday I might even henna my hair.
Living Dolls
This may not come as much of a surprise, but my favourite activity as a child – apart from creating lavish outfits for myself from the dress-up box – was playing with my dolls and their extensive wardrobes.
(Although I did also create a lavish apartment for my Barbie, in a cupboard in my bedroom, roughly based on the one in Rhoda, which was an early indication of another of my adult preoccupations.)
In my middle youth I have joyously rediscovered this hobby. But not, as you might expect, playing with my daughter, who is maddeningly uninterested in dolls, just as she is in ballet (it’s all about bloody horses; I don’t know why). The glamorous mannequins I dress up now for larks are living humans. It’s so much fun.
One of my favourite living dolls is a proper grown-up lady who adores clothes and dresses absolutely exquisitely, but just can’t get her head round chainstore shopping.
When I walk into a branch of one of my mass-market meccas I turn immediately into a pointer dog, instinctively nosing out the best pieces. I can just feel my way to them. All she sees on entering are racks and racks of frightful tat, which makes her feel quite unwell.
She can’t believe the finds I pick up chip-cheap, so a couple of years ago I appointed myself her official scout and I buy her a few chainstore pieces a year which I think are special enough to enter her immaculate collection.
It’s been good for me as a shopper, actually, as it’s made me much more aware of detail. I found her a fabulous fuchsia-pink ruched-front zip bomber jacket recently, but in the end I couldn’t get it because the zip pulls on the breast pockets were just too cheap-looking.
What’s so fun about it is that we have completely different body shapes, so I get to buy gorgeous stuff I could never wear. It was a real thrill for me to buy a backless, sleeveless jersey polo-neck top recently. I wouldn’t even have touched it if I’d been shopping for myself, but I had all the fun of choosing it and the satisfaction of seeing it look wonderful on her.
Of course having access to a beautifully dressable physique is one of the joys of playing with a living dress-up doll (although it is also an enjoyable challenge to find things for people with ‘difficult’ bodies, but that’s another story). The other quality required is appreciation and I get this in spades from my other dress-up dollies: my nieces.
They are all in their mid-twenties and absolutely glorious, in the full flowering of youth. And while they are very bright and pursuing interesting careers – a chef-proprietor of a ski resort restaurant in Bulgaria, a law graduate looking for a job in London and a newly qualified doctor in Belgrade – they are at that cruel stage where you have the great figure, but zero money to clothe it. Hello Auntie.
What pleasure it gives me to watch their faces as they rip open the shopping bags to see what I’ve brought them, which is usually loads. I do tend to max out on quantity over quality in their cases, assembling whole outfits with handbags, bangles and sunnies. The full dolly ensemble.
As I get older and more restricted in what I can wear myself, I think this living-dolly shopping will become more and more important to me as an outlet. In fact I have a fantasy that I will spend my retirement loitering in vintage shops buying beautiful dresses for the young women who come in to look but can’t afford them. You shall go to the ball! Ting!
Failing that, I will pack up my daughter’s large collection of barely played-with Barbies for my own future use.
Cool Running
What makes somebody cool? And I don’t mean air conditioners and slices of cucumber over the eyelids. I’m talking about the indefinable quality that puts some people in a magical realm denied to the rest of us, low-key fabulousness which follows them around like a trail of ectoplasm.
I’ve been mulling this over ever since my niece rang to tell me about her recent trip to Paris. It was a very satisfying conversation because unlike so many people to whom one helpfully offers travel tips, gleaned from years of visiting a place, she actually followed some of them up.
Thus it was most pleasant to discuss the joy of the hot chocolate at Angelina’s, followed by a wintery walk through the Palais Royal. Also the very special experience of taking afternoon tea at the original Ladurée on rue Royale, rather than any of the branded-up new venues. I was also pleased to hear that, like me, she favours a coffee éclair over the more obvious chocolate version.
Making this chat even more satisfying was the baton-passing aspect when she then handed her Paris tips on to me
– one of which was to stay at the hipper than hip hotel Mama Shelter way out in the 20th arrondisement, just inside the Périphérique ring road.
A bit of a hack in and out on the Metro, she said, but so worth it for an amazing Philippe Starck interior at an affordable price of just over €100 per night. Best of all, she added, it has a really amazing bar that was always full of ‘cool people’. Her choice of words.
I could immediately picture the scene, or more accurately, imagine the atmosphere. That special feeling you get when you have stumbled upon – or in her case, carefully researched – the place where the Cool People gather. A sartorial Narnia for grown-ups, peopled by fauns and centaurs of style.
And that really does get to the nub of what I am trying to figure out here, because while coolness is undoubtedly connected to appearance, there is more to it than that. It’s more of a mood someone gives off than what they are specifically wearing. Because you can’t dress yourself cool by trying. It’s not available off the peg, just by going to certain shops and buying particular things; there is far more to it than that.
That was made clear to us all right back in high school, wasn’t it? When acquiring whatever thing it was the cool ones were carrying at that particular moment (David Bowie LPs in my day) did not guarantee membership of their elite. We’ve all wasted hard-won babysitting money trying that out.
No; while I think you can buy glamour and possibly even elegance, with the right advice (and enough money), you definitely can’t buy cool. Indeed the people who care the most about it and kill themselves to live in the right part of town, dine at the hotspots, carry the right phone and so on fall farthest from cool’s catchment.
In fact trying to be cool – and really actively caring to be perceived that way – is the most certain way to be uncool. No wonder it’s so torturous being an adolescent.
Taking a mental census of Cool People I Have Known, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s an inborn quality, and then instinct naturally guides the coolster to situations and environments that increase it. Coolsters have a radar for finding their own kind, who can be picked out just by the way they carry a bag, or even sit in a chair. There’s a relaxed quality to it.
But in all of this, what I am really most thrilled about is that my 2 5-year-old niece – and her boyfriend, who works on one of the world’s most certifiably cool magazines – still use the ancient term. Cool is still cool and that’s cool with me.
The Grooming Police
Next time you are driving through the city look out for a large notice hanging over the highway, saying: ‘Maggie Alderson Personal Grooming Enforcement Team: Now targeting FLOSSING.’
I always think of those NSW Police alert signboards as I find myself obsessing on a particular aspect of body care. The FLOSSING initiative kicked off after I’d seen one of those extreme makeover TV shows where the female subject had a mostly empty mouth, with a few blackened stumps where her teeth had once been.
It was absolutely horrendous and the difference, once she’d had a new set of gnashers installed by a Michelangelo of a dentist, was a miracle. Took at least ten years off her age. And she must have found people a lot more willing to talk to her at cocktail parties as well. I can’t imagine what the hum would have been like coming out of that black cave of decay. Could take your eyebrows off, I should think.
Anyway, what really made an impression on me was that when they went back to see how this lady was doing six months later, she allowed us to witness her new dental care routine. Where before she hadn’t even cleaned her teeth (too busy fitting in the sixty-a-day fag habit which had helped to make them so awful) she now flossed her new – fake – teeth, three times a day and used those mini chimney-sweep brushes to get right up between them.
I was astonished; I hadn’t realised you were supposed to floss pretend-y teeth. I’ve got six fake choppers in my gob, and I’d always rather assumed they could look after themselves. They are porcelain crowns and I always thought the greatest risk to them was chipping, like a Sèvres tea cup. So I never put them in the dishwasher. Ha ha ha.
Anyway, I was so freaked out about this flossing revelation, I headed straight over to see my dental hygienist, who assured me that it is essential to clean every single thing in your cake hole. To quote a dentist’s gag I once heard: you don’t have to floss all your teeth. Just the ones you want to keep.
She also reminded me that more teeth are lost through gum disease than tooth decay and that the best way to keep that at bay is to stop the dreaded plaque building up where teeth and gums meet – especially that really difficult bit right at the back. Aaarrreeeuuuurrrggghh.
I left the dental surgery armed with two thicknesses of floss, plus a pack of the mini brushes, and stocked up on a bottle of mouth wash at the nearest pharmacy. For several days after I reckon my mouth was so clean you could have performed open-heart surgery in it.
I brushed for two minutes, according to an egg timer, then flossed assiduously, switching denier depending on the size of the gaps in different parts of my dental rack. I followed up with a quick chim-chimeny with those hateful brushes, which really set my teeth on edge, ending with a final swill of palate-searing mouthwash. It was quite a performance.
It was all going well until I had to hand-wash a lot of woollies and found myself suddenly in a severe cuticle crisis. The one on my right middle finger was so dry, it had cracked and was at risk of turning septic – it’s amazing how painful a tiny body part can be – and the rest of them were as crispy as a plate of prawn crackers. So all my attention immediately switched from gums to fingernails, which have to be lavishly rubbed with unguent several times a day.
So my personal signboard currently says: ‘Now targeting CUTICLE CARE.’ I’d love to keep it all up at once – the flossing, the nails, the sit-ups, the cracked heels cream, the face packs, the facial exercises, but like the police force, you have to choose your priorities and just hope it all hangs together.
Measure for Measure
‘Act your age, Mama, not your shoe size.’ It’s one of my favourite lines in pop music (from ‘Kiss’ by Prince), but it always throws up a question for me: what the hell is my goddamn shoe size?
If only they measured adults’ feet for shoes the way they do children’s, my life would be so much simpler. You would think that someone with my extensive experience of buying footwear would be better at it by now, but still I snap up gorgeous shoes and boots only to discover once I’m home that they are way too small, or too big, to wear.
Too big is worse somehow. If shoes are too small you simply can’t wear them because of the hobbling pain and the risk of permanent toe-crumpling, and the best thing you can do is take them straight to the nearest clothing bin so they don’t sit and mock you from the wardrobe.
But when they’re too big there is the tantalising notion that you can still wear them and while it’s not so much a pain factor, it can be humiliating to the soul to slop around in too-big shoes. It gives you an Orphan Annie feeling.
I have a cringe-making memory of a seriously major job interview to which I had managed to wear a pair of smart, new, too-big shoes. As I followed my interviewer down the corridor to her office, the shoes slapped against my feet like flamenco clapping. Shuffle smack shuffle smack. At one point she turned round to see what the noise was.
I was so mortified I blew the whole thing. All I could think of was whether I would be able to get noiselessly out of her office again holding them on to my feet with scrinched-up toes. It didn’t work, I didn’t get the job and, frankly, I blame the shoes.
What I don’t understand is how I manage to keep buying the wrong size. It’s not like I rush a shoe purchase. In fact, I usually drive shop assistants nuts trying on every style in the shop in several sizes and strutting around extensively to get the feel of them.
I can clearly remember doing that last year in my favourite Paris shoe shop (Charles Kammer, if you’re going over) with regard to boots. What I was after was a really great pai
r of walkable yet glam brown knee-highs and they had a plethora of choices.
I tried them all on – about seven styles – methodically eliminating them on grounds of comfort, heel height, exact shade of leather, star sign etc until I found the Perfect Pair. Then I tried them on in several sizes until I was satisfied. Because even in a shoe emporium where you are a frequent flyer, as I am in there, you can’t make any assumptions about which size to buy.
Firstly they vary wildly between styles. I’ve just been comparing various pairs from that shop and there is a good half-centimetre difference between shoes of the same ostensible size. So it’s not all my fault, is it?
Then you have to consider climatic conditions. I have strappy sandals from that shop in size 36 which fit me only on very cold days, like the winter morning I bought them, and Mary Janes in size 37, bought at the end of a long summer day pounding Paris pavements, which swim on me in any other conditions. I also have one or two pairs that fit.
And somehow even after all that research I still came away with the wrong size of boots that day. In fact they are so big for me that even with thick socks and three sets of insoles stuffed in it’s still like walking in waders. Very tiring – and even more disappointing.
No wonder I spend most of my life these days in Birkenstocks. I’m always a 35 in those.
Make Do and Mend
I’ve got a problem with the ‘Credit Crunch’. Well, obviously we all have a problem with it, but I don’t just mean the terrifying economic tsunami bearing down upon us, I’m talking about the actual phrase. It’s too upbeat. It sounds like a breakfast cereal with an exciting loan offer on the packet: ‘Credit Crunch – the bite-size snack that keeps you paying all day!’
And this seems to be a widely held attitude to the financial disaster that is upon us – that it’s an exciting new trend. Rather fun, really. The latest hip phrase I’ve heard associated with it is ‘recessionista’, which is what fashionistas are now that we can’t get credit to buy things we never could actually afford. Down on our luck but still faaaabulous.
Style Notes Page 9