TUES 25 MARCH TEA WITH MISS PIGGY
Miss Piggy was in London for the premiere of her new film and we are proud to have made her such lovely clothes to wear for it. So this afternoon we went to see her at her hotel where she had invited us for tea. Andreas had met her at the fitting so he introduced me. She couldn’t have looked more pretty in her ‘Save the Arctic’ T-shirt and her tartan mini kilt. We recorded our chat on video so we’ll all be able to see it.
A chat with Miss Piggy about politics and fashion (we made her wedding dress).
FRI 28 MARCH TRILLION FUND
Trillion Fund came to see us – Michael Stein and Julia Groves. They’re doing very well. Their aim is to open up banking and make it possible for people to invest in renewable energy: in effect, energy projects can be crowd-funded. Julia has been talking to government ministers (lobbying) and they have now agreed! Small investors will not be restricted; anyone can fund projects. Also we are going to get Green ISAs. Michael seems to know more about energy and energy extraction than anyone. Ask him a question – e.g. about the Severn Barrage scheme – and his face lights up (the scheme’s not necessary, disused Welsh harbours are better places to do this). Michael has simple solutions. One idea he mentions could be to work with France and the EU to lease desert in Algeria and Morocco, or Greece, who need the money, and build solar parks. We can use the same pipeline which brings nuclear energy from France to bring us solar. Indeed Trillion Fund could supply a plan for us to have energy security, as clean as possible, and very cheap once the investment is paid back.
No need to frack: Climate Revolution talks only sense for the environment and sense for the economy.
SAT 29 MARCH DINNER AT LIMA
Dinner at Lima, a Peruvian restaurant. Reunion dinner of we friends who went together to the rainforest, invited by Cool Earth. Treat to see journalist Deborah Ross. Plans.
APRIL 2014
TUES 1 APRIL IAN KELLY’S BIOGRAPHY
I had thought after all the work in March for two collections I might have a pause but, no, straight into one last print needed for Red Label and I must read the first draft of Ian Kelly’s biography of me and make some notes. One of the things I’m keen to get right are my motivations and what drives me. I have read half of the book and I think it’s good. There are a few surprises from people who love me, things I didn’t know or realise.
TUES 8 APRIL BIRTHDAY FLOWERS
My birthday. I don’t usually celebrate because I don’t fancy the fuss. At home, flowers arrive, beautiful, quite a lot by the end of the day. Thank you. At one o’clock Ian comes and we work through the book. He comes again on Thursday and we work from 10 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. In between the special events this month of April is taken up with some work for Red Label – mainly correcting and finishing the knitwear samples we received from Italy, fittings and fabric choice for Red Carpet. But no work on Gold Label – always left till last though it’s our most important collection. Cynthia is snowed under, working with Cindy on Climate Revolution; I manage to join in some of the discussion especially on our campaign, ‘We Need to Talk about Fracking’. I managed to attend only one of our weekly meetings of Q v. Q which aims to concentrate and reduce the size of our company and product. Any spare time is taken up with checking the first draft of my biography with Ian.
WEDS 9 APRIL TALKING ABOUT COMPUTERS
Morning: to Juergen’s place to discuss the idea for our next campaign – the most important aspect being who to choose as the model.
Evening: dinner with our friend Lawrence, and a colleague of his called John. They both work on a developement scheme linked to one of the cyber giants. As far as I understand it they locate social groups who could benefit from having mobile phones. Lawrence’s main aim is to empower women and phones are a tool for them to control and organise their lives, for example through banking and microfinance. He tells me about a woman who, through using her husband’s phone, found a program by which she taught herself to write, then taught other women in her village and is now the head of a communications company.
Inevitably the conversation passed to the evils of computers. I thought of Lila aged five who was sitting next to her mother (she had to bring her to work – with us), killing time before they could go home. Lila had a computer and her task was to organise coloured shapes. I never saw anything so ugly as the neat graphic on her screen. I said, ‘That’s really boring isn’t it? Anybody knows the difference between blue and red, or a star and a circle. I suppose it’s a program for a two-year-old.’ (God forbid!) ‘This is my favourite program,’ she responded, activating the standard game of Little Hero avoids or kills all the shit that comes streaming at him. Nadir of human experience, nothing of beauty or aspiration. If I’d been Lila I would have been reading or drawing.
Another inevitable discussion we had is how social media enables protest. This is good and we really need to build on it. And how useful are online petitions? WikiLeaks and other NGOs have revealed the difference between fact and propaganda. People don’t swallow the political propaganda so easily anymore. Is this a reason why some of them turn to racist political parties (or radical Islam)?
It’s very good talking to Lawrence. He asks the kind of questions that are important to me.
SAT 12 APRIL HOME TO GLOSSOP
After yoga we took a taxi to the home of my brother Gordon and his partner Geraldine and drove to Glossop in the Pennines where we were born. I took one of Geraldine’s books, which I began to read on the motorway, a biography of the ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev. We were on our way to our cousin Edith’s Golden Wedding celebration. I haven’t seen Edith for many years and when she phoned to invite me she told me something I had heard but forgotten. Her husband Ken had a stroke which paralysed him. For the last eight years, Edith’s life, except for a game of golf once a week, she has been looking after him. The way she puts it – ‘I have to sort him out.’ It must be harder for Ken, but how people love life despite difficulties, and of course I had to go. Edith told me that I (aged thirteen) and a little boy were the only two guests in the wedding photo who were still alive.
Rudolf Nureyev on the set of the ballet film Le Jeune Homme et La Mort with Zizi Jeanmaire, December 1966. I wrote a three-part profile of Nurevey for the CR site.
It was a lovely ceremony, a really good buffet and good speeches. We met our cousins and friends again. We were in the hotel for two nights. My cousin Hazel, her family and my old school friend Mike came to see us. I enjoyed being with Gordon, he’s full of information. And I loved talking to his teenage grandchildren – Leigh and Sky and her boyfriend Sean. I told them my philosophy of life, you have to follow your deep interest. I remember when I was at school there, the glamorous job ideas for girls were be a nurse or a teacher, otherwise you had to be a secretary or an accountant; it’s the same still. I suggested to Sky that she could study history of art.
My home countryside – around Holmfirth.
Andreas had never been to Glossop. He said he ‘did not know England could be like that’. It’s very beautiful and it’s my home. I think we all love best the place we’re born. The Longdendale Valley set amongst hills. From our home we could go in three directions and walk all day, all different: the green hills of the Derbyshire Peak District, the Cheshire woods, the Yorkshire moors. We drove Andreas over the moors to Holmfirth (Last of the Summer Wine), a one-time wool town, factories built amongst the hills in the middle of nowhere to access the water power.
On Monday we walked with Hazel and her daughter, Paula, through Swallow’s Wood and down to Devil’s Bridge, as we used to. The families would stay on the bank of the stream, picnic and talk, while the children played in the water. Andreas loved it and we came back ‘over the top’ where we were followed by a new lamb who wanted its mother and then found her. It was a boy, so he gets killed soon. Paula said she feels so sorry when the lambs are taken away, you hear the mothers bleating all night. Then we drove over the spectacular bare moors and back down to London
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FRI 18 APRIL BACH’S ST JOHN’S PASSION
To St John’s, Smith Square, for Bach’s St John’s Passion. Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. I don’t believe in God but I believe in the concept of perfection.
I was brought up in the Anglican religion. Some of the hymn tunes we sang are from this Passion but it’s impossible to match exactly which ones because the music is so full: the instruments, the choir with its descants, and the swelling base and culmination of the strains and overlay ever-changing and soaring; the music fills you, you can’t pin it down, you don’t want to, you’re just part of a world which is carrying you away and you’re riding up on the hypnotic rhythm of Baroque music. This is the difference between the Protestant religious service, filling yourself with song when you yourself sing with everyone, or the Catholic service and being carried away by the choir. In between are the arias, each different voice partnered by a different instrument and the story told by the recitateur. This one, Jeremy Ovenden, was the best ever. The clarity of his expression, voice and acting!
SAT 19 APRIL MARK SPYE’S BIRTHDAY
Mark Spye’s birthday. Mark has worked with me since he was a kid, and now for many years as a main designer. He began as a machinist, then managed our Davies Street shop. We still have customers who remember the days of Mark, who still wear the beautiful clothes he organised for them. Great stylist. His friends organised a surprise for him – we all came. He had a lovely time.
SUN 20 – TUES 22 APRIL AT JOE’S IN CORNWALL
To Cornwall, staying with my son Joe. Family members try to meet around Easter to celebrate the memory of my mother and father. Dora died at this time of year. I finished writing and choosing three excerpts from the Nureyev biography, which I’m posting on the Climate Revolution website. I was still reading it on our way down, driving in Andreas’s car, which he hardly ever drives but lends to friends. I wish we could stay another day but we have to get back. It’s lovely where we are, talking round the fire, cooking. It’s more luscious than the Pennines – I never saw primroses growing when I lived there as a child – just the odd violet and lots of bluebells – but here the banks along the hedgerows are fairy gardens.
With the family in Cornwall: Ben, me, Joe, Joe’s friend Faye, Gordon, Andreas.
SAT 26 APRIL SARA’S PARTY – HENDRIX AND UKIP
Sara (Stockridge) had a house party for her friends – who happened to be our friends as well. We gave her a little scarf, others brought cakes and wine. She had cooked so, so good curry dishes! We all stayed in the kitchen, talking and eating until finally Sara got us upstairs to the living room where we could dance if we wanted and where Cobalt was making cocktails. Cobalt is Sara’s husband; his band, Zodiac Mindwarp and The Love Reaction, still gigs, though he works in information security. He gave me his favourite guitar to hold. It was so heavy, I couldn’t have held it for more than a minute. I said, ‘Hendrix was the greatest R&R Star. Ever.’ (That includes Elvis) ‘The best,’ agreed Cobalt.
No wonder Jimi Hendrix threw that guitar around, slung it away from him so that it lost its weight, then pulled it back like a dancing partner; no wonder he set fire to it like it was his loved one. They say he wore the guitar constantly. I saw a documentary – Andreas called me up to watch TV – but we didn’t watch it all because we didn’t want to hear about when he died. These stars who only live to be young. I lived all my life as if I’m young but now I’m old I realise not just that youth is precious but that it’s actually something else. Jimi was beautiful. And the way he dressed! There was nothing like it at the time, the way he looked and played and moved and sang; he had a method of singing then talking as he breathed – he sang like the wind, Jimi Hendrix.
Something unexpected happened. Our friend Robert got drunk. What was unexpected was what he said. ‘Vivienne, we have all got to vote UKIP. If we don’t we will have Sharia law in this country.’ Nothing we said could make him see the disconnection between these two things. So one by one we ignored him, he slept there and in the morning he told Sara that he wasn’t going to vote UKIP. How could he think such a thing when drunk? In vino veritas?
The very existence of UKIP is the fault of the two main political parties run by the pathetic Cameron and Miliband. People don’t believe them when they say that things will get better. UKIP is the same as these two main parties, the same old formula that is heading for disaster, except it has given us an enemy. Capitalism runs on war mentality, an enemy real or constructed is necessary (read 1984). Hate and nationalism are the last things we need if we are to save ourselves: not competition but co-operation, a global solution.
We need new politics. We will get them if we apply:
This is Climate Revolution of course. It is also the agenda of the Green Party. Our politicians are too frightened to change their politics, which support only big business. The trouble is the general public is scared as well. We have been trained up as consumers for two hundred years. Free market capitalism depends on consumption. We agree that business should make unconscionable profits because that gives us ‘growth’ – no matter that it doesn’t trickle down to people. We have to change our values – then we’ll have true value for money.
SUN 27 APRIL MAHLER’S SEVENTH SYMPHONY
Barbican: Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. I asked Andreas what I should write. He said, ‘Who doesn’t know him should try to get to know him. It is an incredible experience every time I listen to him. I really think it adds something to life. The first time I heard him of course was in Death in Venice, Visconti’s film from the novel by Thomas Mann. I was very young. Has anyone ever seen anything better? You would hear talking on the beach and the children playing and the music would take over – that was Visconti.’
MAY 2014
WEDS 14 MAY PRINCE CHARLES
The first draft of my biography has to be in by mid-month so it takes up any spare time I have between my regular work. I’ve been checking, and sometimes meeting Ian, who comes to my home. Now the first draft is sorted and Juergen did my portrait for the cover. I don’t know how he does it, he shows me myself.
Evening: with Andreas to the Almeida Theatre to see King Charles III. I love the journey: direct tube from home to Angel, then walk up Upper Street. The Screen on the Green cinema is still there, opened by Roger, who became our friend soon after we began Let it Rock. Malcom recommended him to do a Brigitte Bardot season but he could only get a couple of films; no one had kept them all because they didn’t think they were any good. My favourite shop, no longer there, sold lingerie.
I went to see the play because I am a big fan of Prince Charles; he has done much good in the world, for example The Prince’s Drawing School. Drawing is the basic skill necessary to all expression in the visual arts; it is like seed corn and visual art cannot flourish without it, yet this is the only school because skill in art is unfashionable today – that’s why art isn’t happening.
Charles campaigns to save the environment and the planet. His position does give him prestige. He uses it to have a voice and people listen. He is criticised on the principle that he is not supposed to voice opinions that might influence people.
How will Prince Charles manage when he becomes King Charles III? How will he cope with having to rubber-stamp the introduction of laws he doesn’t agree with? Why does he want this job? This is the matter of the play.
It makes psychological sense to me that the monarchy do this job from duty. The Royal Family must see it as an overriding good. Otherwise who would want this slog of a job? A job where you can’t make decisions. The monarchy has value. It gives stability and provides social cement and national identity. This is possible because the monarchy is hereditary. Its preservation depends on it having no political power or voice: this is the deal with democracy.
In the play, even before his coronation, Charles tries to persuade/threaten the prime minister to drop the first bill he will be required to sign, a bill which supresses press freedom and protects the government. The prim
e minister refuses and the action is set up for constitutional battle: to win Charles will need the support of his family and the public. The play is really impressive, with a feeling of importance and of Shakespeare – it is written in iambic pentameter which gives weight. Staging and costumes fit perfectly and the acting is completely convincing. Tim Pigott-Smith playing Charles is super; they all are. The plot is gripping – until, in the second half, for me the psychological truth fails with one phrase. Charles says he wants to be ‘the best king ever’. This doesn’t ring true. I don’t think the Royal Family do the job for personal aggrandisement. If the play kept to the one motive of duty then Charles’s decision between signing away people’s freedom and risking the end of the monarchy would have real drama. The idea that somehow he wants it for personal vanity weakens the dilemma. And Kate Cambridge would not have needed to be cast as ambitious and scheming, wanting the monarchy ‘for George’.
One last thing. The play gets really Shakespearian with the threat of civil war. I don’t think civil war today would get further than the newspapers and the internet. We’ve begun to swap participation for virtual reality.
THURS 15 MAY RANKIN
To photographer Rankin. Photos of Andreas with me as accessory They are needed for a profile Deborah Ross did on Andreas for The Times. I’m glad. I want people to know he’s a great designer, doing as much work as me. Also, Love magazine wanted a photo of us kissing. O.K.
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