Style Notes

by Alderson, Maggie

  Then I heard the Pistols and they seemed to have everything to do with me. I might have been a middle-class girl from the provinces, while they were well’ ard working-class Londoners, but we were the same generation. The one my erstwhile mate Julie Burchill has called ‘the children of Thatcher and McLaren’.

  This is why I get annoyed when people dismiss Malcolm M as some kind of pop pimp who knew how to get publicity through shock tactics. There was much more to him than that. He was a cultural catalyst, who saw potential in the most unlikely people and put them together like jumper leads, and disseminated underground ideas through the medium of popular culture.

  He didn’t invent punk rock – or any of the other phenomena he spotted first, from break dancing to Vogue-ing (which he was on to long before Madonna), but he saw its potential and galvanised it. And in doing so he showed teenagers like me that we didn’t have to pay middle-aged millionaires for our music. We could make our own fun.

  Soon after hearing that single, I was going to live gigs every night, linking up with loads of great new people simply because we had the same hairstyle. They were all in bands, into cool stuff, and so much more interesting than anyone I’d met at school. I’d found my tribe.

  I couldn’t play the guitar, so I started a fanzine called Punkture, right after buying a copy of the original DIY punk paper, Sniffing Glue, and realising – just as all the garage bands did – I can do this.

  That stapled-together collection of photocopied sheets, bashed out on a manual typewriter and put together on my mum’s kitchen table, got me my first job on a magazine.

  Thanks, Malcolm.

  No Mini-Me

  I’ve been struggling recently to fully understand that my daughter is not me. I don’t need Dr Freud, Dr Jung or even Dr Spock to explain this to me now – it’s clearly a process that all parents have to go through – but I didn’t properly start to take it on board until the day I accepted that she doesn’t like ballet and I am just going to have to deal with it.

  She wants bloody riding lessons! I feel quite betrayed. She’s not supposed to like horses at this stage; that comes later (associated with polo players and hats for the races). At six, she’s supposed to like ballet.

  I had been so excited by the prospect of my daughter taking her first turned-out steps and loving it as much as I did, I couldn’t wait to get her into a matching leotard, hair-band and crossover cardie combo. I never had the cardie myself, or even a matching outfit, so was determined that she would. And a ballet bag.

  So, in the great tradition of mothers trying to resolve their own childhood disappointments through their children, she was all togged up when I first took her to the Bitter and Twisted Old Prune School of Dance, which has the reputation of being the crème de la crème where we live. If you like misery.

  I’ve had more fun in a dentist’s waiting room than I did in that claustrophobic hellhole of middle-aged failed dancer teachers and pinch-faced mothers, their baby ballerinas barely visible through the miasma of hairspray in the changing room. You had to get busy with the Elnett extra-firm hold. There was a $1 fine for stray hair, which came under the category of ‘poor grooming’.

  No wonder she didn’t bloody like it – I hated it. Dreaded taking her there, but always thought that the joy of the actual ballet part of the experience – pirouette! glissé! grand jeté! – would far override the ghastliness of the venue and the toxicity of the teachers. It didn’t and I had to accept it the day she simply refused to get out of the car and go in.

  Not even a trip to see Angelina Ballerina herself live on stage, with me hissing ‘Look at their feet! Look at their feet!’, while she was more interested in her friend’s bag of sweeties, made a difference. While I can remember every moment of the low-rent production of Coppelia which was my introduction to the dance – oh! the loveliness of it – she was not thus affected.

  My most treasured childhood books don’t resonate with her either. The 1950s quaintness of Teddy Robinson is lame, Paddington is a bore; even wonderful Winnie the Pooh appeals more as an American cartoon.

  I could particularly puke that she first encountered the land of Narnia in a horrid film, not within the pages of my own treasured copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I actively tried to shield her from the movie, but she saw it at a friend’s house and then I just had to accept that the book will never be the same for her as it was for me.

  And that’s when it really sank in. She isn’t me. She has a different genetic make-up and a different family structure, and was born in a vastly different era. She’s her. Trying to impose my own childhood preferences on her would be something akin to religious parents who force their children to follow their beliefs exactly as instructed, rather than letting them embrace them – or not – on their own terms.

  But there are compensations for these disappointments. My Uncle Is a Hunkle by Lauren Child, creator of the wonderful Charlie and Lola, is now one of my favourite books – and we discovered it together. So rather than seeing my daughter as some kind of nostalgic conduit back to my own childhood, I am concentrating on relishing every moment of hers.

  Failing the Taste Test

  Apart from her never-fail recipe for cupcakes, the thing that made me really adore Nigella Lawson’s books was her statement in one of them that ‘all children have terrible taste’, or words to that effect.

  Needless to say I can’t find the reference now, although I think it was in How to Eat, but her point was it is a complete waste of time labouring to create an elegant cake for your child’s birthday as they would much rather have a lurid one and will only eat the icing off it anyway.

  She is so right on both counts. The end of any junior birthday party is littered with discarded mini-sponge cakes, the iced tops gnawed off by tiny teeth. I’ve been known to slip a few of these sweet remains into my own mouth while clearing up. Unhygienic, but delectable as only illicit leftovers can be.

  So she’s spot on for kiddie cakes, but I found myself thinking about Nigella’s comment in a more general context recently, when my daughter expressed distress over my choice of swimming towel for her PE kit. It was, as life goes, one of the smaller moments, but very telling.

  I was packing her school bags ready for Monday morning and as I folded her smart navy-blue towel – her smart navy-blue Ralph flipping Lauren flipping Polo towel – her little face crumpled. Did she have to take that one?

  I was baffled. I’d chosen it specially as the star of the family towel collection. It goes perfectly with her navy-blue school cozzie and has a discreet designer logo on it. I thought it was a treat. Wrong. All her friends have pink princess and Barbie towels, she explained. Hers was too ‘boyish’. And then the clincher: they had made fun of her about her horrid towel.

  After the inappropriate urge to beat said fun-making children had faded, I could reflect that this little incident was yet another reminder that a child’s aesthetic sense develops quite independently from what they are exposed to at home.

  My daughter was dressed in witty combinations of muted colours from birth. Her bedroom walls are Wedgwood blue, not sugar-pink. Not because I really wanted a boy, but because it looks better in that particular room, in my opinion. She has adorably faded and scuffed vintage children’s furniture. All selected on the assumption that being exposed to what I consider to be tasteful would cause her aesthetic sense to develop along similar lines. Not.

  From the moment she could express an opinion about what she wanted to wear, play with, sit in, sleep on, or look at, all the items in question were rudely pink and preferably sparkly. Darling classic teddies were eschewed in favour of iridescent polyester fluff Pegasus-unicorns with lilac horns and sparkly wings. Groovy Girl rag dolls were ignored for pneumatic Barbies (I drew the line at Bratz mini-whores).

  So far so normal, but what I don’t understand is where all this sits in the nature/nurture debate. She certainly didn’t learn this preference for the vulgar at my knee, which leads me to wonder if it is
innate.

  Are all females born instinctively liking bright pink sparkly things and only develop an appreciation for taupe and faded chintz after years of exposure to civilising influences? And if it is inborn and instinctive, as it appears to be, whatever is the survival advantage? Were the most nutritious berries on the Neolithic savannah pink and sparkly?

  Or, if this taste, which is common to children and less sophisticated adults, is innate, is the preference for taupe intrinsically superior, or just an artificial learned behaviour?

  Perhaps it is as unnatural to like muted tones of beige, as it is – in my crass opinion – to like opera. And I do have some evidence for this theory: music is one area where my daughter and I entirely agree. We both adore disco.

  Dressing by Numbers

  Anyone else who was young in the 1970s will remember a really dreadful book called The Dice Man. It was something that you had to pretend you’d read (just as my best friend V and I spent our entire time at uni pretending we’d seen The Rocky Horror Show live, to our continued mutual hilarity), if you wanted to be down with the cool guys.

  I did start reading it and was so appalled that the very first sentence lightly involved the word ‘rape’, I threw it across the room (I’d read The Female Eunuch all the way through), although I continued to nod along knowingly when other people were enthusiastically discussing it. I never inhaled.

  While I still hate the fact that the first decision the Dice Man takes with his dice is whether to go and rape the woman who lives downstairs, or not, I have always found the fundamental concept of the book interesting.

  The idea was to explore what would happen if you abandoned free will entirely and made every decision, be it the choice of lunchtime sandwich or whether to commit a crime of sexual violence, on the random throw of the dice.

  I’ve been thinking about it recently as I am currently dressing by a similar method. I’m always in such a ferocious rush and weekday mornings are a whirlwind. I race about like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia marshalling breakfasts and kit for humans and animals, and usually the very last thing that gets done is putting any clothes on my own body, or into my bag to dress post-yoga.

  The latter arrangement has led to some unusual outfits, particularly on the occasions when I’ve managed to leave out one crucial part of it. Like the pants. When that happens I tend to stay in my yoga kit, working a Flashdance ‘just come from class’ look for the whole day. I try not to leave the office.

  But even on mornings when I get to dress at home there is such a minimal window of time to do it in, I have to surrender to my random sartorial fate. There’s a bottom, there’s a top, there’s a jacket, there’s a shoe, out the door and how do you do? Some days this works out better than others.

  I know I could – and ‘should’ – assemble my outfit the night before, but that rarely seems to happen. Always too busy watching babies rollerskating and pugs doing cute things on YouTube. (Have you seen the one where she’s fallen down the loo? Borderline animal abuse, but look at that little fat face … )

  The best results are when my wardrobe filing system is up to date, because then at least singlets, short-sleeve Ts, long-sleeve tops and cardigans are all on their dedicated piles and I can pick off what I want in one swift supermarket sweep. It’s like speed dating for clothes.

  Adding another layer of serendipity to all this is that circumstances have forced me to take a similar approach to buying clothes. I never get the chance to do serious planned destination shopping any more, so I just buy stuff when I see it.

  In the spirit of the glass half-full, I have decided to embrace this, Dice Man-stylee, and take a perverse pleasure in kitting myself out for a friend’s wedding, or a holiday, with only what I can find in the very few decent chain stores nearby, plus op shops, vintage emporia and designer sell-on shops.

  I’m well enough stocked up on essential basics (those oft-mentioned fetish brands of T-shirts, jeans and cardies) that there is always a reasonable foundation for an outfit. Then I find the arbitrary acquisition of the rest of it creates an enjoyable piquancy.

  It’s a great way of getting yourself out of your dull comfort zone – something the original Dice Man would have approved of. Even though he was a monstrous creep.

  Amateur Hour

  Why do so many people live like amateurs? I just don’t get it. You’ll meet a perfectly nice adult person, with no large stains on the front of their shirt, but when you go to their house you find that their doorbell is broken and you have to step round a large pile of recycling to get into the kitchen.

  I can’t bear this kind of babyish behaviour. It’s such a sign that they’ve never moved on from the student mindset and continue to live an ‘It’ll do/I’ll do it tomorrow/it’s bourgeois to care about it’ lifestyle. It was funny in Withnail & I, it was hilarious in The Young Ones; in real life it is ineffably dreary.

  Of course, money is a factor. Not everyone can afford baize-lined cabinets, or – my own little fantasy – send all their sheets to the laundry each week. But basic babyish behaviour, such as the following, is totally avoidable.

  Babyish behaviour:

  Down-at-heel shoes

  Cartoon socks

  Curtains that are hanging off their poles

  Paper lampshades

  Broken appliances of any kind

  No reading light in the guest bedroom

  Cupboards that disgorge their contents when opened

  Cars you have to wade into

  Running out of petrol

  Posters

  Kettle here, coffee there, mugs … who knows?

  Half-used bottles of shampoo all over the bathroom and tiny slivers of soap

  Empty milk cartons in the fridge

  Too much Ikea

  Paper napkins

  Using a kitchen knife as a screwdriver

  Never having a stamp

  Now, having put the boot into many of my dearest friends and several members of my immediate family, it is time for me to make a confession. I care so deeply about where the kettle is in relation to mugs, etc, I am beginning to suspect I might have borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  I know my oldest pals make fun of me about it behind my back. Just the other day Jane asked, in relation to her forthcoming first visit to stay with me and my partner, ‘Is he very neat?’ The twinkle in her voice as she dwelled cruelly on the word ‘neat’ told me everything I needed to know about my reputation as an anal retentive.

  Jane and I shared a house for several years. She and our other housemate James used to caper around me, cackling wildly as I folded T-shirts and refiled my bedside table. Their own rooms looked as if they had been recently visited by Cyclone Tracy.

  This concern about my mental health has prompted me to draw up another list of telltale signs.

  Signs you might be overly anal:

  Your CDs are arranged alphabetically. Including the singles.

  You know where your bank statements are. They are in date order.

  Your guestrooms resemble hotel rooms.

  You fold all your towels by three and three.

  Martha Stewart is your role model. Make that patron saint. (Oh, what is a little insider trading when your linen cupboard is filed in sets?)

  You store your bed linen in sets, tied up with ribbon, all tucked inside one pillowslip of the set. (Just got that idea out of Martha Stewart Living’s September issue – reckon it’s a top tip.)

  You put time and thought into the arrangement of your shampoos and bath preparations in their Balinese basket, at the end of the bath. (Okay, I confess.)

  You have a dedicated drawer containing screws, nails, picture hangers, etc, sorted into separate zip-lock baggies. (Guilty as charged.)

  You oil your secateurs after each use.

  You are always good for a stamp. Of several denominations.

  Anyone need an airmail sticker?

  Wear and Tear

  I have spent the past week doing the great seasonal cl
othes changeover – that twice-yearly moment when you realise it is time to put away the cozzies and get out the cashmere, or the other way around. You know the time I mean – the urge usually comes upon you just before an autumn heatwave or freak snow in spring.

  Anyway, it’s taken me a whole – and very stressful – week this year, with great vile heaps of random garments strewn around the house in all manner of inappropriate places en route between trunk and wardrobe. All my winter clothes were on the stairs at one point, which was most inconvenient for everyone except the cat, who had a lovely time snoozing and shedding on my best black boucle wool suit, which now looks more like Donegal tweed.

  The enervating length of the enterprise this time around was brought on not by the sheer volume of clothes (although I can’t believe quite how many T-shirts I seem to own), but because I could never find enough uninterrupted time to get all the piles of clothes physically out of one storage venue and then neatly sorted away again in the other one. I had to keep leaving it to do other things, like eating and making a living.

  Really it requires the best part of a day, because there is a lot more to it than just swapping over the neatly folded stacks and hangers of clothes. It’s a very important bi-annual clothing review, when I muster edited piles for the clothing bin, to wash before storing (very important for deterring the moths), to mend, to alter – and a few things for the duster bag.

  It’s always a revelation of how clothes age. There are some things which just go on and on – I can never believe how perky my tailoring looks when I get it out each year. I’ve got coats I’ve had for fifteen years which look as good as new.

  The aforementioned black wool suit looks box fresh, yet I’ve had it and worn it hard for at least five years. In that case it’s quality showing. It was a serious investment purchase which has paid off in wear, especially as the jacket and the skirt can be called into separate usage.