Four great food books

Lying in bed the night before I moved out of the East Village apartment, I glanced over at my left hand bedside table (nightstand), and was suddenly struck by the titles piled up there. No devotional reading, light bedtime novels, or volumes of bien pensees for me. No, I had a stack of books about food.

Since I discovered the cookery book section at Strand, my book spending habits have been out of control. Since Union Square is on the way to just about everything, I convince myself at least twice weekly that Strand, just a couple of blocks south, is equally en route.

Just a leeetle look, I mumble to myself, already pushing through the doors.

Thing is, not only do they seem to stock just about everything (Strand buys thousands of books every day, so the stock is continually changing), they also have great discounts on list prices (often cheaper than Amazon) and, in addition to the largest rare books collection in New York City, they also buy/sell secondhand books so there are treasures to be unearthed.

And, of course, I'm all about supporting independent book stores. Yup, that's why I spend so much money in Strand. Nothing to do with my verging on uncontrollable book addiction.

That pile next to my bed:
Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef by Ian Kelly.: Tales Near the Runway gave me this when she stayed over for last season's NYFW. Wonderful insight into the beginnings of the cult of the chef in the 18th & 19th centuries.

American Food Writing: An Anthology: With Classic Recipes by Molly O'Neill. At $40 I lusted after this book for months, stroking its covers and dipping into the essays whilst lurking in Strand's corners, before finally giving in. From Meriwether Lewis's pioneer treks across the country to Michael Pollan's food missionary zeal, this book runs the gamut of the American way of eating. Extraordinary.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution by Thomas McNamee. Extremely thorough & fascinating biography of a curiously unlikeable woman, which illustrates how this visionary overruled normal boundaries of common sense, politesse and feasibility to achieve her ends.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink by David Remnick. Ranging across memoirs, short stories, poems and essays from the life span of The New Yorker, this is a wonderful dip-in anthology from writers from all fields.(M.F.K. Fisher, Roald Dahl, Julian Barnes, Joseph Mitchell, Calvin Trillin & Adam Gopnik all make an appearance.)

Olivia Morris sample sale

Delicious shoes. Almost worth getting on a plane/breaking my shopping moratorium.

My mother

Sixty-three! Can you believe my mother, is sixty-three? Every day I stare in the bathroom mirror hoping I have inherited her preternatural youthful looks.

This photograph was taken in the West Village after her epic blow dry at Dlala a few weeks ago.(Some of you asked for photographic evidence.) I am coveting her Oliver Peoples Vanadis. (she also has immaculate taste) I've lost mine yet again. It's bizarre - I have a lot of sunglasses, yet the only ones I ever lose are my Vanadis. And that's it now: after three pairs I cannot justify replacing them again.

Lovely Lola's Manhattan baby shower

One of the pluses of moving to Manhattan was escaping the proliferation of infants amongst my friends. With the recent birth of Violet (congratulations Liv & Blakey), there's hardly one amongst us who isn't a parent in some way, and it's difficult being a single girl in London when your friends, quite rightly, are involved in bringing up their children. (Of course I adore my friend's offspring, and worship my godchildren). Speaking of which, this is my beloved Edward showing a proper interest in my shoes at Christmas.


And this is my adorable Amelia who is quite obviously going to be a fiend for fashion):
However I must admit that the lack of children amongst my friends here makes a baby shower in Manhattan a fun novelty. Last weekend was Lovely L's chic affair on the Upper West Side. She & her mother had filled the sun-drenched apartment with treats for the shower-ettes that played up L's Russian and American sides. We played present bingo, gossiped and ate a tea of breathtaking deliciousness, from Mariage Freres teas via caviar snacks to addictively scrumptious macaroons from Bouley Bakery.

The palm for most genius presents goes jointly to the ravishingly beautiful & insanely talented Royle sisters. Actress Abby

knitted a lovely white baby blanket with the baby's name appliqued across in blue, and artist Dorothy painted this exquisite picture for the baby's room.

I do think that hand-made gifts are quite the nicest.

The day I gave up style...

Having sworn I wasn’t going within fifty feet of a fashion show this season, I have relented in the case of a designer friend. She’s asked me to help style and do the run through of her first runway collection with her. (She’s showing with a group of young designers.)

I am about to leave for the run through wearing these on my feet.

This is how I know I have crossed the rubicon. Five years, heck, a year ago, I would have stuck pins in my eyes rather than leave the house wearing such remedial-looking footwear. And in the vicinity of fashion week! Looking like Gerry Halliwell in her Buffalo trainer-wearing days.

But my desire to wear a bikini when I hit LA is stronger and so I am now cruising around Manhattan in these monstrosities. Ladies ( and gentleman): I give you the Masai Barefoot Trainer.

Christ. I can't believe I am doing this. I blame the press office who sent them to me. At least I won't have to worry about brushing my hair or looking soignée. No one's going to be street-style photographing me today.

McQ by Alexander McQueen for Target

Please God no one in London dresses like this. Whatever. I thought the whole line was hideous. In my last job I attended a fair few of La Force + Stevens' Target press presentations. Being able to see the entire collections (rather than what was left on a shop floor) made it simple to judge the success or otherwise of a line. I generally thought the Target designer collaborations were excellent distillations of a label's sensibility with the mass market in mind. (Bar Alice Temperley's execrable effort.)

Jonathan Saunders' work for Target springs to mind, not because I admire his runway work and very much like the man but because it kept his signature and looked desirable. And the upcoming Erikson Beamon jewellery collaboration is beyond excellent. (Basically, if Vicky Sarge & Karen Beamon hadn't been standing next to me at the press view I would have been tempted to scoop the whole lot into my handbag.)

But this offering from McQueen said nothing to me whatsoever. (Apart from run, run in the opposite direction.) It felt cheap, ugly and tacky. The prints in particular are actively awful. Exhibit (a):

The cuffed & studded denim short shorts looked okay (for anyone under 20) and there was one high necked black coated cotton poplin mac which had some hanger appeal, but worn looked like something Nurse Ratched would have worn on her day off. Otherwise, there was a proliferation of thin, cheap-feeling jersey pieces (see exhibit a), and unflattering tailoring. Most regrettably, it fails in the scope of its ambition: this collection is unlikely to entice those new to McQueen to spend money on the real McQ pieces.

Visions of doing re-see appointments in the Alexander McQueen mainline showroom in Paris during the pret a porter shows kept flashing across my mind, and I found it hard to believe that a man who can produce such exquisite beauty could be responsible for overseeing such wholesale tackiness. Granted McQ is his casual jeans line & he obviously doesn't design it himself, but there's just no excuse for putting his name to such a lacklustre effort.

Last season's pop-up Target Bodega in Midtown was set up somewhat shortsightedly in a room about the size of my apartment. It was so popular it became the scene of some rather undignified fashion roadkill, a distinct contrast to this weekend's McQ pop-up shop in a vast concrete floored warehouse Downtown, obviously set up for an invasion of McQueen loving shoppers.

I understand that the preview on Friday night was rammed, but it was a ghost town today: I half expected to see tumbleweeds rolling across the floor. Exhibit (b): unmanned cashier desks:
Often these shopping preview events can be rather frustrating as all the good stuff gets snapped up at the beginning and by the last day there is nothing left. The shelves were rammed today, so I hope for both Alexander McQueen & Target's sake that this is because they over-stocked on purpose, rather than because shoppers were so turned off by the clothes.

Why the LA diet's not going so well...

This, my friends, is an apple fritter. A delicious twistage of fried dough, with cinnamon-y apple-y-yumminess oozing through it and an icing sugar/water frosting over all the whole thing. Do not be deceived by the small picture. It is bigger than my fist. And I inhaled it in about thirty seconds. I don't even have a sweet tooth.

Why, oh why is there a shop called The Donut Pub by our apartment?

Pixies that steal my possessions when I'm not looking

I’m trying to distract myself from the knowledge that there is a still a pile of stuff waiting to be moved in the corner of my old apartment in the East Village to my storage container in Chelsea. I’ve already shifted my day to day essentials, so the odds and sods there don’t seem to have any urgency about being moved, especially now that I’ve found my missing software and cheque and my beloved leather jacket turned up at CA’s lovely West Village place where I have occasionally been working during the day whilst she’s been in London. (How could I have left without wearing it? Am fool.) Although I would very much like to know where the hell my camera cable is.

Somehow I always thought that once I was a grown up I’d stop misplacing things and my life would come together. Sadly that doesn’t seem to be the case. Last week I managed to leave my Blackberry at JM’s and then, when I returned to collect it, managed to leave it behind again. Moron.

Television: yes, I do watch it.

My name is LLG, and I am addicted to American television. There. I’ve said it. I’m fed up with pretending to agree when people get all highbrow, telling me they don’t own a television, and aren’t interested in TV.

I say bollocks to all that. I just don’t believe them. As I have recently discovered, rather a lot of people without TV sets are happily (& stealthily) watching telly on their laptops. What they really mean is that they don’t make a date with the TV schedule, and they don’t watch all the crap.

And I’m with them there: I have never watched daytime TV, soaps leave me cold (sod off Dot), TV news makes me wince, and reality TV induces nausea but give me a good drama (historical or procedural) and I’m hooked. As are the TV naysayers who think their dirty little viewing habits don’t count if the shows they watch are released on DVD.

We can’t get the BBC iPlayer over here, but NBC, ABC, FOX & CBS all have their own free on-demand versions on-line. Frankly, there’s nothing better when you can’t sleep late at night than curling up under the duvet and playing catch up with your favourite shows. I just wish there weren’t quite so many.

My especial addictions: Life (starring RSC alumni Damian Lewis as an ex-felon Californian cop- bizarre, I know), Bones (FBI, forensic pathology and a healthy sprinkling of cheese), & CSI: NY (More crime scene action – & it’s set in NYC – what’s not to like?). But hell, I also watch CSI: Miami, CSI itself, Entourage, The Mentalist, NCIS, Cold Case, Without a Trace, House, and my new absolute favourite: Lie To Me, (starring a wry & dry Tim Roth as a facial recognition expert who solves crimes – he’s curiously sexy when he’s not playing psychotics).

I also have to admit to discovering the CW’s on-line player. Which means I also watch Privileged (I know, I know – it really is dreadful), the new 90210 and, of course, Gossip Girl. Always.

I may have a problem.

New York Fashion Week starts today...

New York Fashion Week for Fall 2009 kicked off this morning. And that’s pretty much all you’re going to hear from me on the subject. After working twenty hour days last season, belting around Manhattan covering nearly every big show, hot young designer appointment and the major advertisers’ parties & presentations, spending a day in hospital with an eye infection caused by overwork and getting drenched to the skin five times when my car got delayed, with the misery compounded by a disengaged editor and an inexperienced, inefficient and out of his depth assistant, I am actively engaging with not engaging with the whole kerfuffle this time round.

My inbox has been inundated with invitations but, as a freelancer, attending the shows is a waste of time. I’m old enough not to be given the traditional freelancer’s nosebleed seat behind a pillar, but I still wouldn’t get a great view (the first four or five rows are reserved exclusively for magazines and buyers). Frankly I’d see it all better on style.com.

And there’s little point in networking when there’s a hiring freeze across the board, and the whole affair seems like a wake for the fashion industry as we know it. Attending Fashion Week is stressful, time-consuming & expensive and if I’m not being paid to be there to report on it all or be nice to advertisers, I’d rather see the clothes on appointment later in the season. Because, after all, it is the clothes that are the point of it all.

How I'm avoiding Valentine's Day

So. Dating. As I explained a few weeks ago, I’m still not entirely sure if I’m into the whole relationship thing. Of course this could just be because it’s so long since I met anyone for whom I felt even the vaguest spark of well, anything at all. Maybe if I was continually meeting men who interested me physically I’d be all over dating.

Still, I persevere. At the very least it’s amusing. At best I’m meeting people with whom I like hanging out. The night Mrs. Mad rolled into town I took her for an early supper in the West Village (we went to The Other Place as everywhere else we tried was full – it was Not Good At All), tucked her up in bed, and hopped it to a blind date down the road at 930pm, promising I’d be back in an hour or so.

Me & my good intentions. After two margaritas with a most amusing Scottish gentleman, I rocked up back home at midnight. Next day I got an email suggesting hanging out in the future. Fine by me: There was no romance a-burning from what I cld deduce. Most importantly, I have been so successful in my American integration that I have precisely two British friends left in Manhattan and I need to replenish stocks. (It’s important to have people in one’s life who understand phrases like ‘bun fight’, ‘dog’s dinner’ or ‘mad as a box of frogs’.)

So it’s Fight Night tomorrow and we have what I would describe as an anti-date. We are avoiding all places that are pink cupid strewn, and/or dark & romantic and heading to a cellar to drink sake instead. I’ve made him promise to hoick me back up if I fall off my bar stool in a sake stupor and he has vaguely threatened to pin a pink bow in my hair when I’m not looking.

Upon resuming my life

So my mother has been complaining that my blog is way too downbeat. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I do know that my exploits have barely been exploits so far this year, more daily blah…After all, house moving and dull, dull, fiscal restraint do not make LLG full of fun and frolics. But hurrah! The sun is shining, (it was 55F on Wednesday. F&&k you snowy London), and I am turning over a new leaf.

Henceforward I will be social! Upbeat! Perky! Hmm. Perhaps not. I am not, never have been perky. But I am going to engage with a little more than my apartment. And I’m off to a rollicking start. Last night JM celebrated her, erm, 24th birthday a day early – it would be way too hellish to go out tonight and battle the bridge and tunnel crowds for our cocktails. (Happy Birthday my dear).

Given that in the two years I have lived in the East Village, I can count on my fingers the amount of times I have been into a bar there, (too many people/excessive drunkenness/fighting for seats. Think Shoreditch on a Friday night) I found a slight irony that JM’s drinks were in Alphabet City, a mere two avenues over from my old apartment, two days after I officially moved out.

Anyway, even given that we were drinking in student land, I dressed up good and proper. Well, I had to mark the fact that, apart from a few dates, it’s the first time I’ve been in a bar with friends this year. Quite pleased with general effect of super short black stretchy cap sleeved dress, these boots, my black wool cape, black elbow gloves and yards of black cashmere scarf shawl thing. And dangly earrings. Of course. (Look, it’s the depths of winter - colour is for summer and perky people.) I can’t really tell yet, but I think I may have lost some of the excess blubber, thanks to the Going To LA regimen minceur.

Anyway, a splendid evening at Rue B. I will draw a veil over JK and I troughing our way through cheese/artichoke/spinach dip and chips and the (very very small)9” pizza we shared, and focus instead on the remarkably restorative effect of vodka when mixed with blood oranges and gomme syrup.( I do like to take some vitamins down with my alcohol. It feels more virtuous.)

Tonight we celebrate JM’s birthday in style: we are hunkering down in her shiny new apartment, ordering in, watching movies and, maybe, doing some light wine drinking. I really wish I had one of these for the evening, but will content myself with my cashmere blanket instead. Oh for a whippet or a dachshund to stuff under the blanket.

Twittering

I do love new tech toys. I’ve always, always been an early adopter – had an iPod way before any of the boys, let alone any of the girls I know bought one - and, as a lazy perfectionist, I’m always convinced that new toys will make my life simpler, more streamlined. Hah!

And I love on-line toys too. Plaxo is attached to my Outlook, my photos are on Snapfish, I signed up for LinkedIn, use iBackup, download new apps for my Crackberry. MySpace was addictive – played with my page, looked up bands – but then the novelty wore off when I realised only about three of my Friends were actually Proper Friends in the real world. But Facebook (which I wrote off back in 2006 as pour les enfants), suddenly became indispensible and yup, I’ve just signed up for Twitter. *

My better side knows that it would be unbearably solipsistic to Tweet as me (surely no one cares that much about my movements), but I think it’s a great adjunct to the blog. Although I have blogged remotely, I love that I can quickly post sidebars that are relevant to LLG in bite size pieces, and that it acts as Instant Messaging for the blog too) If you want to follow my tweets as Liberty London Girl, click on the link to the right.

* Twitter is a real-time micro-blogging site that users can post (tweet) to remotely (or fron the Twitter site), and follow other users' tweets.

Nearly done...

Well, I’m nearly, nearly moved. There’s still a big sack of laundry, two bags for The Salvation Army and one more load of random junk for the storage facility piled into a corner of the East Village apt which I should have moved out yesterday. But I lost the will to engage and spent the day crashed out in my new place, rearranging my knicker drawer and failing to get dressed until hunger drove me out the house at 730pm.

My excuse is that I have done the entire move on my own, up and down four flights of steep stairs in each place, and back and forth from each side of the island to the other over three days and by yesterday I had Had Enough.

I still do not understand where all this stuff has come from. Maybe it breeds. I don’t have any furniture here, bar three lamps and a mirror, and my kitchen equipment is limited to a Wusthof knife, three Globals and some cake tins. Everything else is supposed to be back in England awaiting the day I either move back or can afford to ship it all over.

Four huge black expandable nylon bags on wheels from one of the random shops on 14th street for $50 seemed like plenty. One was for clothes, one was shoes and bags (Holy crap – how can I have that many shoes?) one was the result of my addiction to The Container Store, and the last was for all the random shit I scooped up from around the flat. So far, so good.

But then there’s all the stuff I didn’t think about: duvet, blankets & pillows, piles of towels & bedlinen, paperwork, my portfolio, the printer, bottles of Champagne, Wellies, my case of summer clothes stashed in the hall cupboard, and on and on and on… and it all weighs a ton.

Although my container is about to start bulging like a gone-off baked bean can, if I do ever need to move away from New York, maybe half the contents can be given away or sold.

[When I left the apartment I was just going to leave all my storage behind, but then I thought, sod it, I have the space to store hundreds of coat hangers, shelving units, blah ,blah, & I’ll only have to replace it all eventually when I do find a new place on my return from LA. so all that good stuff is in there too].

And, I’m selling as much as I can right now in my great purge of unnecessary possessions. (I seem to head to the Post Office daily to post stuff to Amazon and eBay buyers.) That feels extremely good. Life Laundry here I come…

Off shortly to engage with laundry/bank/errands/charity shop. I think I'll leave carting the junk 'till tomorrow morning.

Sixes and sevens and eights...

I'm right in the middle of house moving right now, stuck in a hamster wheel of horror between my current place in the East Village, my new-but-temporary sub-let in the West Village and my new storage container facility by Chelsea Piers.

Pluses of moving in several stages over two days: I've got to be burning some serious calories. Minuses: Having to carry everything downstairs on my own from my fourth floor walk up is bloody exhausting. (I can't justify hiring movers when I have no furniture, & all I'm moving are clothes and books. (And beauty stuff. And magazines. And more clothes. And boxes of costume jewellery. Etc etc.))

Normal blogging will resume when I'm done, or when I'm collapsed with fatigue. Whichever comes sooner...

Blogosphere

God the blogosphere is mutable. One of my top blogs, Definitely Stopping At Two, has been deleted. I know she has been wresting with the problem that, as too many people close to her knew her identity, her ability to be forthright about matters important to her had started to be seriously trammelled. So, sniff, bye love.

Her disappearance does raise questions about anonymity on the web. I've written about this before, but I'm really not that fussed. After all, if you work in fashion it's pretty easy to work out who I am, and I've told enough people I write it. I just fear complete strangers rootling through my life via Google. Although I was a little taken aback yesterday to receive a (lovely) email from a rather senior editor asking if I was LLG, after she had seen her name on my blog. It was a salutory reminder that if you name people, they WILL find & read it, whether by accident or by design.

As this is a blogosphere post, I wanted to mention my two newest, absolutely favourite-est blogs, which started up in my break from blogging last year. Belgian Waffling, by Jaywalker is astonishingly open about the life of an Englishwoman, who happens to live in Brussels with a whippet puppy, two sons and her husband, in that order, it would seem. Although frankly, I suspect she could re-write the phonebook and make it sound interesting, such is her turn of phrase and facility with language.

The second is Mrs Trefusis Takes a Taxi which I read for reasons more than our shared love of Nancy Mitford, toasted teacakes & Wellington boots. She proves yet again that it doesn't matter what you write on a blog, as long it is written beautifully.

Temporary break

Slight hiatus in blogging as have spent today being ill-ish. Not really ill, just ill & crampy enough to go back to bed every couple of hours for a codeine-induced*, hot water bottle cosseted nap. I think it’s partly a reaction to sitting at my desk for nine straight hours yesterday, bar loo breaks, whilst I bashed out, sorry honed some copy for a last minute deadline. Anyway I have exciting news for tomorrow. I just can’t keep my eyes open long enough to type it. Good night loves.

*Can you believe you can't buy codeine in this country over the counter? Thank god for Boots at Heathrow & its handy supply of Solpadeine Max

Bugger

Oh God. I've just realised that I have precisely two months to lose 15lbs before I leave for Los Angeles. There is NO WAY I am putting my winter body into a swimming costume, let alone a bikini. NO WAY JOSÉ.

California Dreaming

I’ve given up on apartment hunting. It’s just too soul destroying. There’s nothing suitable out there and rents seem to be falling weekly. I’m better off waiting a couple of months and getting a better deal. I’ve decided instead to put my stuff into storage, (which is super cheap here compared to London), sublet something just for March and bugger off to California for the whole of April, more or less.

I blame Tales Near the Runway. After she persuaded me to go to Coachella with her through the simple device of offering to buy me a ticket, and I then realised that a cross country plane ticket costs about the same as a bog-standard Eurostar London-Paris seat, I thought sod it. I can afford a month away if I avoid paying rent in NYC for that month. So, no committing to a new apartment quite yet.

I plan to hire a car and go visit all my friends on the West Coast and do some sight-seeing. (I really, really want to go to Disneyland for starters.)I intend to pick up a few commissions from my UK editors and, at worst, I should break even. This plan is so cunning I could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.

Hero beauty products

Yes, you may have noticed that this is not a blog where consistency is the writer’s watchword. One day you get a blog where I talk about my depressing experiences flat hunting in Manhattan, the next a rant about gourmet food overpricing. Today you get some beauty hackery. Ah yes. Variety is the spice of life.

I’ve been on the receiving end of big fat packages of beauty products to trial and to write about since I was twenty-four, and I still remember my astonishment after my first external beauty launch. L’Oréal had sent a car to Vague House and, as my magazine hadn’t yet appointed a Fashion & Beauty director, I was paired up for the journey with the then frankly terrifying veteran Vague Beauty Director, Kathy Philips. Boy, was the neophyte editorial assistant out of her depth.

We were whisked off to a floating Chinese restaurant in Regent’s Park for dim sum followed by an interminable presentation (yup the range was Chinoiserie-themed. Nothing like the imaginative powers of the beauty company PR) and, on the way out, I was handed what can only be described as a bucket of beauty.

Inside was the entire Winter colour range – every single item from maybe twenty eyeshadows right through to more lipsticks than I could count, plus two beautiful plain black lacquer boxes (which I still have on my desk here in New York). That’s the moment when I realised that if I stayed in magazines, I was never going to have to buy make-up , or skin care ever again.

Of course it hasn’t quite worked out like that. Sometimes I get given a product that is so good that I actually replace it by spending real money in a real store. These products are very few and far between as very little really impresses me. This entry here was pretty comprehensive on my hero skincare products. My hero colour cosmetics are Bobbi Brown’s Nude lipstick and RMK foundation. I added Lancome’s Oscillating mascara to the list last year. That’s it. Everything else is inter-changeable.

What I will add to my buy them myself skin care list are beauty serums. I'd been sent so many over the years and always gave them away. Then a couple of years ago I decided that prevention was better than cure for my thirty-something skin. The truly stand out ones I've tried so far are philosophy’s anti-oxidant when hope is not enough, Boots No7 Refine & Rewind Intense Perfecting Serum and Ole Henrikson's Truth Serum Collagen Booster, which is chock full of anti-oxidants & Vitamin C. And I'm actually considering stocking up on the philosophy product right now.

They all need moisturiser on top for proper hydration but they seem to make my skin glow the next morning. The Boots serum in particular actually makes my skin look softer & plumped out eight hours later. Extraordinary.

The September Issue

Of course, I shall go to see documentary The September Issue directed by RJ Cutler, about the run up to US Vogue's biggest issue of the year, which just showed in competition at Sundance. Just because I've been a magazine editor for years, and a Conde Nast one for a large part of my twenties, doesn't mean I'm not fascinated by how other publications work.

I'm also of the theory that La Wintour's decision to participate in this film means that her departure is imminent. The whole project has the air of a swansong about it. There's a sneak peak of her making an editor squirm here on swide.com

And, speaking of the bobbed one, I was Googling her last night for something else. Her Wiki entry makes fascinating reading: I hadn't realised how well, normal, her early career was & how contrastingly meteoric her rise was once that happened. Rather reassuring I thought for all of us with ADD resumes.

Who will edit Tatler?

Tales of the Runway & I love nothing more than a good industry gossip and we have been debating today who will take over from Geordie Greig at Tatler now that he’s been officially announced as the new editor of London’s prestigious daily, The Evening Standard. Of course, it’s been common knowledge in the media that this move was happening and his possible successors will have been jockeying for position for weeks.

It’s a difficult seat to fill: Tatler may often be derided for being the reading matter of society fluff, but as one of England’s oldest magazines, founded in the 18th Century, it often sets an interesting agenda: Tina Brown & then the glorious Mark Boxer made it a must read in the 80s, ex editor Jane Proctor recommended Liz Hurley to Estee Lauder and both Michael Roberts & Izzy Blow were fashion directors there. The writing often leaves a lot to be desired, (an old friend who subbed (copy edited) there told me that Tatler contributors were the worst writers she had ever had the misfortune with which to work - and the most precious), but it’s still surprisingly influential.

Names being bandied about for the position include:
Frontrunner: Emily Sheffield, current deputy editor of Vogue. Apart from the obvious advantages, she is David Cameron’s sister in law.

Sarah Bailey, ex. editor of British Elle, who was deputy editor at US Harper’s before moving to British Harper’s as Lucy Yeoman’s number two. Positives: widely liked, strong fashion - and therefore advertising - contacts, transatlantic kudos and CN MD Nicholas Coleridge loves to poach NatMags staff.

Given Coleridge’s liking of newspaper people, Catherine Ostler of The Evening Standard’s ES magazine & Michele Lavery of The Saturday Telegraph Magazine must also be in the frame. (The Sunday Times Style's Tiffany Darke is heading off on maternity leave imminently.)

Sarah Miller, current editor of British Condé Nast Traveller. Launched CNT in 1997, so due for a change by now.

Outsiders could include Giles Hattersley, ex Arena editor, now back at The Sunday Times, and British ex Tatler deputy editor Tina Gaudoin, now in New York at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.

Then again, Coleridge does like to appoint the unusual. Miller was an untested magazine editor in chief (she was features editor at The Saturday Telegraph magazine before CNT), as was Geordie Grieg who was a newspaper man through and through before heading to Tatler, albeit one who went to Eton & to Oxford.

What is certain is that in this market he can’t afford any mistakes. With advertising revenues for traditional media plunging through the floor by the month, he needs someone whom advertisers trust to keep both the content relevant and circulation figures steady.

Blessing counting

There is one blessing I am counting right now, through my waves of misery & torpor. My younger cousin S gave birth safely to baby Matilda on Sunday, the first infant of our generation. When I was attic rummaging at home, I dug out the wonderful flowery cotton sundresses with smocked fronts that our shared grandmother made for me when I was a baby, and who S never met. I had been saving them for my, hmm, mythical baby, but I'd much rather Matilda wore them. After all, I can always reclaim them if and when.

And, frankly, Little Sister & I are extremely grateful to S for taking off the pressure with Muv who has been known to warble about the lack of grandchildren. She is itching to get stuck in with Matilda.

Although Muv hasn't quite lost hope: I don't think it any mistake that the two English newspapers that she left behind last week both contained huge flagship features on How To Meet A Man. I wouldn't have minded quite so much if the articles weren't about dating when over FORTY. A birthday I assure you, gentle reader, that is quite some way off.

Eli Zabar and his astounding food mark ups

One of the benefits of riding out the credit crunch has been remembering that I can cook, rather than speed dial the Mexican taqueria. So, apart from the odd day like Sunday when I looked up from reading the papers and inexplicably found myself sitting at the counter of the Murray Hill Diner inhaling the Garden Burger Deluxe platter and an ice cream sundae and, um, Monday when I was so fucking miserable that I went and sobbed over the $6.50 lunch special at Thailand Café, I pretty much cook from scratch both lunch & supper.

I’ve learnt to avoid Whole Foods, and shop mainly in Chinatown, at the veg stalls staffed by the Indian guys in the street and at places like the East Village Cheese Shop where a huge slice of triple crème brie is $1.50 and a bag of pita is a dollar. Although, really, I've always shopped like this. I love bargains and do think that the amount we are asked to pay for food in the supermarkets is jaw droppingly high. Especially because I do cook, so I know just how much those meals cost and what the margins are on prepared food.

Soup is the most hilarious. A pint of minestrone is $6.99 at the fancy food store on Eight Avenue. I can make that for less than 50 cents in under twenty minutes.

This brings me to Eli Zabar, who owns several foodie destinations including The Vinegar Factory, & E.A.T. on the Upper East Side, where I had an shockingly inedible lunch with Muv last week; (that review is to come.) In the interim I wanted to bring to your attention a shameless, slobbering interview with Mr. Zabar in The New York Times which really plumbed the lows of journalism, where he tried and failed to justify the cost of the food he served.

“He has established himself as a master of recycling, giving unsold products new life by reinventing them as prepared foods. Focaccia becomes Parmesan toast…On the day after Christmas, I met Mr. Zabar at Eli’s Manhattan, where he charges $24.99 for eight ounces of that Parmesan toast…Talking to Mr. Zabar about his prices feels like confronting a teenager coming in past curfew: his cornered tone hovers between “How dare you” and “How am I going to get out of this.”

“That Crunch is 70 percent Parmesan cheese,” Mr. Zabar said, “which is $14 or $15 a pound. You couldn’t buy it and make it for that money.”

Okay Mr. Zabar: here’s my maths:

Parmesan toast $24.99 for eight ounces equals $49.98 for 1lb
Parmesan is $14 per lb, 70% of 1lb = $11.20.
Therefore his parmesan costs are $11.20 of $ 49.98

Which means the customer is paying $38.78 for already budgeted leftover bread plus packaging & labour/restaurant costs.

“You couldn’t buy it and make it for that money.” Really, Mr. Zabar. REALLY?

Craigslist amusement

Okay. I’m feeling a little, just a little chirpier now. The studio I wanted so much turned out to have been rented before I even saw it.(Grr.)Somehow, having the decision taken out of my hands has calmed me down. Then the apartment viewing I had in Chelsea at 645pm turned out to be with a charming & lovely designer (and a fabulously fat & squishy pug called Ollie) who, although I think I can’t afford his immaculate, boutique hotel-worthy room, restored my faith that there are normal people out there looking for roommates for normal apartments.

One of the reasons the whole rental process here is so aggravating for me is because it works completely differently to London. Whereas in London the only person paying agent/broker fees is the owner of the property, here the tenant has to fork out a LOT of money, sometimes even six month’s rent as a finder’s fee to the broker. The tenant is also required to undergo a through credit check and often provide evidence of regular annual income at least 40x the monthly rental.

When you think that it’s difficult to find anything live-able in for less than $1400 a month per room, you can see the inherent problems for a freelancer trying to find a home. The only other alternative is to get a friend or parent to stand guarantor – and that requires them to file evidence of their fiscal standing for the past two or three years from mortgage to pay slips. Which is hardly an option.

Hence the sub-letting rental market that has sprung up on Craigslist where people post details of fee-free room shares & sub-lets literally by the minute, sorted by geographical location. It’s also quite common here to sub-let a place fully-furnished by the day, week or month - which comes in equally handy for people who travel a lot and for tourists visiting the city, who can stay in a proper home for a fifth of the price of a hotel.

But god, trawling through the entries is a full time job in itself. 90% seem to be in Harlem, which is miles away from the area I want to be in Downtown, many require first & last month & a month’s security deposit upfront which is too much cash for me to have tied up, and an unfeasible amount have crappy loft beds hacked together out of random lengths of timber or are partitioned off living rooms masquerading as bedrooms. (Hello credit crunch.)

And then there are those with, hmm, unusual requirements. I came across this today:
“The market rent for my apartment is $4,500 per month. Your share of the rent is only $485.00. including all utilities. We will share the apartment including the master bedroom.”

And this one is quite special:
“I got this idea from an article in Time Out New York that I read a while ago… I live alone in the East Village, and have an empty bedroom and a lot of space. I am offering the empty room w/private bathroom for only $130 a month. Here is the catch...of course there is a catch. I'm a white late 20's guy that works in finance. I work A LOT and therefore my social life has become nonexistent. So, I want to add a little bit of excitement to my life. I would like to rent the room to a woman between the ages of 18-27... I would like you to be a slim attractive girl who is OK with occasionally walking around or hanging out in her underwear <---yes...that would be the slightly crazy part.”

Shall I? Hmm. Perhaps not.

Apartment hunting

I am so thoroughly and comprehensively fed up with the horror of trying to find a new place to live. My not small single person's budget goes precisely nowhere in Manhattan, unless I wish particularly to live with those whom no one else wants in a grubby six floor walk up with a concrete floored shower. Even places out in Brooklyn: Park Slope, Fort Greene and the like aren't much cheaper and the odd taxi I'd need to take home would soon swallow up any fiscal difference - and I'd still be stuck out in Nappy Valley. I think people sometimes forget just how much more complicated everything is when you are on your own: the expense - no splitting of cab fares or rent, and the having to live with room mates. Gah.

LK hasn’t been getting many responses to his ad for my current sub-let and there is no future tenant in sight. I am fed up with paying for a room I don’t need any more – I gave a month’s notice on the 22nd Jan, but apparently that means I am liable for rent not until 22nd Feb, but until 1st March. Who knew? – and I want to move asap. Most annoying of all is that this morning I found the perfect place to live, a stupidly cheap studio that would change my quality of life here enormously, but I can’t take it before LK finds a roommate or 1st March comes around, so I'm pretty sure I'll miss that boat.

As I have got older my living environment has become the single thing that keeps me rooted, happy & sane. When that is in flux, I tend to go a little loopy. I am generally fairly Pollyanna-ish about life, a cup half full person, and so I am not enormously good at picking myself up when I get low. Right now I can’t seem to stop feeling really bloody miserable. I know I should count my blessings la la la, but I can’t and I don’t want to. So there.

Marc Jacobs billboard, West Village

Marc Jacobs commissions a new painted mural each season at the junction of Seventh & Greenwich Avenues in the West Village. On the way to view an apartment this afternoon I caught sight of these two guys hauling themselves up the outside of the building to finish off the top.

Manhattan's media freefall

Friends in England don't seem to take me seriously when I say that the media industry over here is in freefall. Stories like this in Gawker showing the risible amount of ads in the most recent New Yorker illustrate just how bad it is (not that the New Yorker has ever been stuffed with ads, but still...) Not to mention Domino folding this week, 600 layoffs at Time Inc., and Page Six magazine going from weekly to four times a year with the loss of 23 staff.

Scrubbers ahoy!

I'm afraid that this is only going to be funny to my British readers. This is a sign from a New York Subway platform somewhere in Manhattan.

(TR - scrubber is an offensive word for a low-life woman who puts it about, so to the English mind this implies that the room is for the purpose of shagging.)

Makeovers

Brilliant, brilliant Caitlin Moran has written a piece for today's London Times on the transformative power of the make-over which made me hoot with laughter. I also rather agreed with her.

Getting to the point where I believed in make-overs has taken me at last ten years. I once pissed off a make-up artist on a shoot by commenting tactlessly that I was past the age of believing that make-up could make me look wondrously transformed. Bad mistake because she then made all my models look like crap. But what I really meant was that I didn't believe all that magazine guff that tries to convince me that if I just had access to the right tools and the right product I would be thinking daily, wow I could shag myself I look so hot.

In my experience, given access to a big box of make-up tricks generally you just look like a less scary version of your day to day self. And, once I'd had several make up jobs from pro makeup artists for various portraits and events, I gave up thinking that I would emerge from the studio dazzling everyone with my new-found beauty.

Then I was given the works at the Christian Dior artist suite at the Cannes Film Festival for a premiere I was attending one year and suddenly I understood why everyone made such a fuss about make-overs. Granted, my transformation was aided by huge fake eyelashes, a crop sprayer of hair lacquer and an inch of slap, but God I looked well, almost, gorgeous.

(I would have looked even better if I hadn't had a huge spot on my chin, which, looked particularly fetching blown up on the huge television screens tracking our inching high heeled progress up the endless red carpeted stairs at the Palais des Festivals that evening.)

But at least I now know that, given at least three hours, a bunch of fake hair & eyelashes, and the world's best make-up artists & stylists, I too can look pretty damn good.

Dangly earrings: my obsession

I love what my father calls dingly danglies: earrings that flash & sparkle through my hair. My main criteria is price: I lose one of every pair I ever buy. Three singles on my Christmas trip to London alone. So, beyond thrilled to discover a stand at the back of the ground floor of ABC Carpet & Home selling dozens of these papier mache Indian earrings for between $20 & $30. You can also pick them up in Manhattan in the Indian shops around Murray Hill in the East 30s, and in Jackson Heights in Queens where they are definitely cheaper, but not quite as easy to get to as Union Square. This pair were from Banana Republic last November for about $24. I do think Banana's jewellery is fantastic. Great prices and unusual too.

Desert dancing

I am desperate for sunshine and for a holiday. It's not the relaxing I need, just the getting away from it all. Which is why I am currently worshipping at the feet of Tales From The Runway who is buying me a ticket to Coachella. And it's in the desert in California. There is nothing I love more than dancing in fields.

Yup, I have wonderful friends.

And she's just sent me the line-up. The Cure! The Killers! Morrissey! Franz Ferdinand! Groove Armada! My Bloody Valentine! Sheer aural bliss.

Manhattan's Museum of Art & Design

Last Sunday Muv & I visited MAD, the Museum of Art & Design. It’s received surprisingly little fanfare considering it’s a major new museum in the middle of Manhattan. It opened last September bang on Columbus Circle (that’s just by the bottom left corner of Central Park in Midtown) in a neat, self-contained, ex gallery building, with a shiny new external & internal makeover. (Swarovski (is there anything they don’t sponsor?) have placed a whopping great chandelier in the entrance and Tord Boontje’s ravishing Blossom chandelier hangs in the gift shop.) The museum itself is small, but that means it doesn't overwhelm. A restaurant will open later this year on the top floor.
The emphasis is on craft, rather than industrial design as at London’s excellent Design Museum or Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, so if you go expecting Dyson vacuum cleaners and Ty Nant bottles in the permanent collection you will be doomed to disappointment. If however you love pottery by Bernard Leach and Lucy Rie, admire modern glasswork techniques or have a thing for the evolution of jewelry in the 20th century, then this is the place for you.
From top:
Harumi Nakashima, (born 1950) JapanStruggling Form ( From the Ecstatic Series) 2004. Stoneware
Derek Bencomo (born 1962) United States Gift From the Rainforest, 1999 Kamani Wood
Meryll Saylan (born 1936) United States Tribute to Hans Coper, 2001 Wood, paint, dye

Regressing

I bought my London flat in 1999 – a three bedroom ex-council place in a very lovely part of North London, just by Hampstead Heath, at a time when such a thing was a (just about) affordable project on a starter salary. (I'd never have done it tho if I hadn't been prodded by my little sister who knows about finance.)

Over the time I lived there, I gradually re-did most of the rooms. I designed my dream kitchen (thank you Ikea & Habitat) – a seven foot metal edged counter top for plating up, huge deep drawers under all the counters for my equipment, more power points than were strictly necessary, steel shelving with my collection of glass along one wall, a slate grey (faux) Dalsouple floor and an extendable dining table that could seat 14 in a pinch.

My bedroom had fitted cupboards with glass handles from the Night market in Bangkok, with special shelving for my handbags and shoes, and the bathroom was all shiny & new. There were bookshelves everywhere, even over the door lintels, and one wall of the pale grey painted, south-facing living room had black self patterned wallpaper. There was a 1950’s walnut cocktail cabinet with lacquered legs in one corner, and huge cream sofas in the middle of the room. There was even a proper linen cupboard in the hallway, which I filled with piles of crisp, starched bed linen, napkins and blankets for the winter.

I loved my flat, & spent way too much money I didn't have on making it look beautiful. It's on a quiet, grassed estate, which belies its looks (I've never felt safer living there), with wonderful neighbours who kept an eye on things for me when I was travelling. Inside was a haven of secure calm. My friends called it the Tardis (From Doctor Who: it means tiny on the outside, huge inside). It’s now rented out to three Chinese architecture students.

Preparing it for rental was brutal. My little sister & I worked to empty it in five days; I’m a terrible squirrel & hadn’t realised just how much stuff I had accumulated in eight years. She had to continue disposing after I went back to America, about which I still feel awful. I had to strip the black wallpaper, paint everywhere white, Freecycle the contents of the kitchen, and get rid of my bedroom furniture, from my beautiful Victorian bedstead to the chandelier on the ceiling: apparently the Chinese believe antique furniture is a bad thing.

When I last did a landlord check, there was a neat pile of shoes at the front door, the living room was an architect’s office, with drawing boards and Auto-Cad stations around the walls & the kitchen looked bare. In a way, it’s easier than if it looked like my home. And in this market I’m glad I have tenants who can cover my mortgage. I don’t make anything from renting it out but at least I still have a toe in the property market somewhere.

Going from proud homeowner to impoverished sub-letter does make renting here in NYC something of a trial. When I was earning shiny pounds in 2007’s boom, they stretched forever in Manhattan and I could live pretty much where I liked, but now the pound has crashed and the American dollars I earned last year do not go very far. At All. As it is, I basically have to live in a room in someone else’s apartment, with all my possessions therein. I can be fiendishly untidy, and that’s difficult when you are sub-letting in someone else’s space. Books become a luxury, as there is nowhere to keep them, and even an ironing board becomes an optional extra when there is no cupboard for one.

And now I’m moving again. This is not something about which I am wreathed in smiles. But, for the space I currently inhabit I could pay less elsewhere and, given the state of the media market in Manhattan, (Condé Nast’s Domino folded this week), I think retrenching is sensible. But oh it’s making me depressed. Not least because I love super-intelligent, literate & French LK, my current roommate. I was so lucky to find him and can’t imagine any other roommate will be as interesting and as fun to live with. Gah.

PS If anyone is interested, LK needs a sub-letter for my lovely sunny furnished room in his apt in the East Village, between 1st & A, just by Tompkins Square Park. Email me.

MS research breakthrough

This is such encouraging news for MS sufferers.

Some of my favourite things!

In the hideous mess of the garage attics back home are also more than a few of those big tartan print laundry bags into which I scooped the contents of my linen cupboard, under bed storage, bottom drawers and wardrobe shelves when I emptied my London flat for my tenants.

After two years however I've become increasingly detached from these stray possessions and finding it easy to give, throw or donate away much of them. I have emptied twelve huge bags now (after all - do I really need an entire bag of knackered towels just in case I go to the beach or have a dog to dry?). I'm working on the theory that if I really need something I can just buy it when I need it. For example: one good beach towel as opposed to a space busting bag-full of crappy ones.

I also found these hot water bottles in a bag full of the contents of my London linen cupboard and they so came back to NYC with me. (They are quite difficult to buy here: my last trawl took me through SIX drugstores. Not like in blessed Boots where they are practically a centrepiece display. Then again homes are generally newer & warmer here, and central heating is a lot more efficient than in the UK).

The bottle with furry sheep cover I've had since I was a child, the chic heart was a Christmas present from my aunt, and the little fish was bought for me by darling J. She's a movie AD and she came across them when costume gave them to actors to keep their hands warm on set. She trawled London for one for me thinking I'd find it useful on outdoor shoots. She is such a star.

Shopping in my wardrobe

My general desire to purge right now has some added benefits. At Christmas I also addressed the huge storage bins in the garage attics at home in England where I keep out of season clothes and pieces I swear I'll be thin enough to fit into one day, (as opposed to the other ancient attic I cleared out here).

Although I donated lots to the local Hospice, one of the additional benefits of actually sorting through everything is finding cool pieces to resurrect and keep me from shopping. I dug out these leopard stilettos which I think must be from 2004 or 2005 and which came straight back to NYC in my luggage. Now I just need the ice to melt.

Show Me Your Wardrobe Showmeyourwardrobe.com

I was itching to write about my gorgeous ex-NYC partner-in-crime JD's website Show Me Your Wardrobe all last year, but being barred from blogging made that impossible.

It's a site of quite brilliant genius: she photographs her stylish friends & colleagues in the creative industries in their favourite outfits. Models, stylists, art directors, publicists: all get their shot in the sun. It's so neat, so simple that it's hard to believe that no one thought of it before clever JD. Sure, we all know the blogs that shoot people on the street on their own clothes, but SMYW posts posed shots of creative people in a series of outfits taken specifically for the website.

Take 2 models closes

Whilst indulging in a little of the procrastination at which I am so skilled, I saw on Tales from the Runway that Take 2 Models in London was closing its doors after over 25 years in the business. Amongst others, they represented Jasmine Guinness, Maggie Rizer, Lisa Cant, Hye Park and Esther Canadas.

Until I stopped crossing the Atlantic to style campaigns back in England & elsewhere at the beginning of last year, I had booked models through Take 2 since 1997 and dealt with founder Gabriella through all that time. Always incredibly professional, efficient, & with an eye for great girls and boys (although the men’s division shut down some years ago), especially in the key commercial but not cheesy sector, I probably booked more models for my money jobs through them than through any other agency worldwide. And when I was at a big UK mag in the 90s, many of our cover girls came from Take 2.

So, a big thank you to all the bookers & models I worked with over the years. And good luck for the future.

What to wear in a New York winter

Statcounter, known as Statstalker in my household, can tell you which keywords drive people to your blog. One of the most popular Google searches is something along the lines of “What to wear in NYC in February”. Judging by the weather this January the answer is simple.

Layers. Many, many layers. It’s dehydratingly hot inside nearly every store & home and bloody cold outside. It’s like Lucy hopping into frozen Narnia from the nice warm, fur-filled Wardrobe every time you run an errand.

We’ve already seen the mercury dip to -20C (-4F) in the past fortnight, and last night it snowed again. Weather.com tells me that there is only one day in the next ten where the temperature will not drop well below freezing (32F). [Look I do realise that if you are reading this in Wyoming or Nebraska then you will think me ludicrously wet. But bear with me: to a soft Londoner, used only to crappy perma-rain and one snow storm a year, Manhattan in the depths of winter is an inclement place.]

I so admire the precision of the weather forecasters here who, yesterday, announced that it would start to snow after 9pm and would result in several inches by morning. And, yup, I was wrenched out of my silk-clad, snuggly duvet bliss at 7am by the sound of plastic snow shovels scraping across the sidewalks. We had at least three inches overnight but already it is sleeting and we now have a few days of klutz-baiting ice to look forward to. (I seem to spend a fair proportion of the winter on my arse.)

This is because it’s so bloody cold here that the snow just stays around getting icier and more dangerous. Gah. I’m relying on my rubber Hunter welly boots to keep me both upright and warm, as they have deep, rugged treads and I can fit the holy trinity of woollen tights, woollen over the knee socks and my cashmere bedsocks inside them. Uggs & the like are pretty useless unless they have magic water-repelling qualities, & there’s no way I am ruining my beautiful bespoke black leather Selve leather boots in the salty slush.

As for the rest, my daily uniform consists of a camisole – not thermal as experience tells me you just roast once indoors, a cashmere twinset, a just below the knee black wool bubble skirt with petticoat underneath, a DKNY black merino Cozy wrapped Ballerina style around my body and a knee length beige fur coat on top. The whole lot is topped off with those magic ear muffs that lie hidden under your hair, rather than sitting on top of your head like ludicrous furry headphones, and the biggest, softest, blanket-y cashmere shawl in my possession folded and wrapped around my neck and chin. Oh, and cashmere lined leather gloves. With the silk liners that I use for skiing inside if it’s really parky. I’m still searching for the perfect tam o’shanter, so I don’t wear a hat at the moment.

This all works beautifully: jeans & trousers get uncomfy, bulky & sweaty with tights etc underneath. Plus a skirt seems to trap more hot air and keeps my knees warm. Once indoors, all I have to do is remove my wellies and knees socks simultaneously, replacing them with heels or ballerines, unwind & discard my Cozy and hey presto: a normal outfit.

It bags, and why I hate them

Why, why, why did we covet It bags? The large, shiny logo clad bags that supposedly proclaimed the wearer’s innate fashionability and flush bank account. Looking back over the years since Mulberry’s Gisele bag hit the shelves, it seems as though we have been lost in a frenzy of self-regarding accessory purchases. Shoes I can get, generally they are timeless, their purchase driven not so much by fashion as desire. But bags, big clunky, hardware-heavy bags seem to speak only to the wearer’s bank balance rather than their taste.

Of course, it’s easy to track the reasons for the trend: the collusion between magazine editorial and their advertisers (for most It Bags were produced by the heavy ad spend houses,) the huge margins for the houses, the enormous global sales volumes if a bag caught the imagination, the easy brand identification and the subsequent status conferred on the wearer.

I can feel smug now and say that I never fell into the status bag trap. In fact during the peak of the bag-hype years, I didn’t actually have one. Although it wasn’t that I didn’t want one exactly, more that I never found one I really liked. And I was subconsciously repelled by the idea of investing so much money in something every other woman seemed to be carrying, and which would be marked as fashion road kill within a season. Maybe if I had had more spare cash I would have fallen. Who knows?

I bought my first proper everyday bag in 2005. By the shockingly talented Janet Collin, it was a textured stone leather, had lots of pockets with clever hidden magnetic clasps, a little leather clad mirror hanging from the perfectly calibrated strap which fit just so under my arm and, best of all, it whispered rather than screamed raucously from my outfit. To me, it said everything a bag should. That is, nothing at all to the random observer, bar an impression of chic and style.

So, I’m not averse to bags by designers, bags with labels. But I want bags that will last, that are timeless, simple and, preferably, unrecognizable to the woman on the street. Since the stone bag, I have kept my day bag acquisition to a minimum. I bought another, simple, Janet Collin bag in black leather in 2007. I inherited my grandmother’s brown alligator bag. For grown-up affairs, funerals and the such-like, I have a black suede Lulu Guinness sample sale buy.

For weekends, my mother gave me a timeless tan men’s Mulberry satchel with a broad canvas strap for Christmas a year ago to replace her 1960’s leather one I carried for fifteen years. That same Christmas, at my request, my sister gave me the perfect dark brown satchel from The Celtic Sheepskin Company which fell apart in six months. (There’s something to be said for investing in a good bag after all.) And I have a small black nylon Prada satchel bag (a maternal present from the Milan Prada outlet), which I use to carry my prop kit on shoots (with the logo facing in).

I have to admit to one screamer of a bag: the Michael Teperson Toaster, which arrived as a gift from his atelier in Milan in a huge FEDEX box, stuffed with tissue and good wishes after I had interviewed him for a mag in 2006. And I do carry it, consoling myself with the knowledge that I love it for its clever design and not for any conferred status, or because I saw it flaunted on the arm of an actress in a magazine.

My current favourite bag is as low-key as they come. I found it in the Comptoir des Cotonniers concession in Galeries Lafayette on the boulevard Haussmann when I was at the Paris shows last October. I liked its super soft black calf leather, its clever simplicity and the long body strap, but popped it back on the shelf, thinking that 150 EUR was too much for a bag from Comptoir.

Of course, I saw it again two days later in the window of an agreeably pretty CdC store as we walked through the Marais, indulging in a spot of leche-vitrines. And, so it was bought.

I have worn it everyday since, slung across my body. It’s the perfect size, just big enough for a paperback, with two interior pockets, and a couple of zipped security ones. I can’t say it’s worn very well: rather than becoming agreeably battered, close up the soft leather now just looks like it’s been run over. But the $50 it will cost to get it renovated is well worth the money for I can’t think of a better bag to wear right now.

Medicinal Theatre

It’s funny how, just when you’ve had a thought about the world, one so often then reads somewhere a quote or idea that exactly echoes your feelings.

Reading Cate Blanchett’s interview in this month’s Vanity Fair, her theatre director husband Andrew Upton says about his and Blanchett’s work with the Sydney Theatre Company:

“The most important thing to achieve will be generational change in the audiences. From the older generation there’s a slightly medicinal quality to the approach to culture, which is that it’s good for you and will make you a better person, which I think is a kind of turn off. We’re hoping to take a more joyous approach.”

Exactly what I was trying to say below. Although, I prefer not to lump myself in with the ‘older generation’, I was brought up with that ‘medicinal’ approach to culture. So, it’s always wonderful when a production such as The Bridge Project's The Cherry Orchard playing now at BAM proves that classical theatre can be wholly enjoyable whilst still delivering its message (the sugar-coated pill, so to speak.)

[Of course, if this were Proper Journalism and not a blog, I would immediately re-write the entry below. But blog entries are supposed to stand as written at the time (although I must plead guilty to the occasional re-jig of an infelicitous sentence or piece of clumsy syntax), and a complete re-write is not the Done Thing.]

BAM: The Cherry Orchard

Some years ago Miss P & I finally got round to admitting how much we preferred to musicals to straight plays. Growing up, I went to the theatre a lot: my school was only an hour from London so there were frequent trips on offer, & I went on most. It never occurred to me to question whether I was actually enjoying the plays I saw: I just saw playgoing as an essential part of being cultured and engaged with the arts.

Now that I am older, I realise that what I really want is to be amused and entertained, taken out of my life, rather than having a mirror held up to my inner fears as the best play writing does. Of course I can appreciate the message behind Journey’s End (& cry my eyes out watching it), or thrill to the rhetoric in Julius Caeser but, frankly, I prefer to read serious, thoughtful plays than see them on stage. That’s not to say I want to watch bedroom farces, (which I loathe), but I just that I prefer some spectacle on stage which isn’t connected, for example, to eyes being put out (King Lear), or Romans killing each other (Coriolanus)

Friday night, against my better judgment, we headed to BAM in Brooklyn to see the first production from The Bridge Project, Sam Mendes' plan to bring together English & American actors in one company, that would play on both sides of the Atlantic. (At the Old Vic in London.)

Amongst others, The Cherry Orchard stars Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Ethan Hawke and Rebecca Hall. Refreshingly Mendes has resisted the temptation to transfer the mise en scene to the Deep South of the 30s or Nazi Germany, leaving every angle of the production from costume to set firmly in late 19th century Russia, as Chekhov intended.

The acting is superlative, reined in, and the more effective for it. Rebecca Hall’s stage presence as Varya is extraordinary, even when she is still, observing, and her acting effortless, matched only by the tour de force that is Russell Beale’s wholly sympathetic Lopakhin. Ethan Hawke was a surprise: he is very good, holding his own against some of England's most experienced actors.

And, most of all, the modern rhythm and vernacular of Tom Stoppard’s new translation keeps the action moving, avoids longueurs, and wholly engages the audience. The play is relevant, interesting and full of a sad humour. And I'm glad I was persuaded to attend.

Best blow out in NYC

Bar a two year hiatus somewhere around 1994/5, I have always had long blonde hair, with no layers or fringe (US: bangs). To put it simply, I do not represent a challenge to the hairdressing industry.

But, easy hair or no, I am also incredibly spoilt: frequently I get my hair cut by session stylists on shoots and, more often, for free in extremely expensive salons by stylists who know, if I am happy, I will recommend them to other editors, to friends and maybe write them up in print from time to time. Of course, like most editors, I am usually strapped for cash (we get paid little, and rely on the emollient joy of the freebies that enable us to present a groomed front,) but even I can afford the hefty proportional tip that comes with freebie haircuts.

The flip side is that when a free hair cut isn’t in the offing, and my over generous use of the curling iron is making my split ends a thing of horror; I have no idea where to go. I worry about butchers with scissors in cheap salons and, equally, can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars for a simple haircut.

This brings me to Mariko at dlala on Avenue A in the East Village. Scooting past on the way to the Post Office, I clocked both the Japanese stylists and the extremely reasonable price list. I trust Japanese hair stylists: I like the precision & thoughtfulness they bring to cutting, as much as the head massages they always give.

She fitted me in as a walk-in, sat me down in the window for a through consultation - something that doesn’t seem to happen as often as it should, and then gave me not just a clever cut, but the best blow dry I’ve had in this city. (And I've been everywhere - from the Polish salons on 1st to Rita Hazan.)

I dropped my mother off there yesterday to have her hair blow dried– chuckling at the juxtaposition of Uptown, Birkin –toting, black-clad, Chanel-loving mother and Downtown, rainbow-striped dress-wearing Mariko. When I saw her forty minutes later, my mother looked like she’d had a pro make-over. Again, quite simply the best blow out she’s ever had.

And, yes, we both paid.

Mariko Roberts @ Dlala.
149 Avenue A, NY10009. Tel: +1 212 777 5252
Blow outs from $35
Hair cuts (incl. blow out) from $60

New York with my mother

My mother is in town for five nights and so it falls to me to provide the entertainment schedule. I am nothing if not her daughter and so, generally, we are on the same page; although I draw a very firm line regarding spending Saturday afternoon in Macy’s with the hordes.

We tend to eat often and well, go for mani-pedis & massages, and whisk around museums and galleries. ABC Carpet & Home, Strand Books, and Walgreens are always on the list, as are theatre & cinema trips. We saw The Cherry Orchard on Friday at BAM, and Slumdog Millionaire & Benjamin Button are scheduled for Monday & Tuesday when most of Manhattan’s museums remain firmly closed.

Today we are headed to Chinatown Brasserie on Lafayette for dim sum with JK (to thank her for lending me her flat last week) then, having persuaded my mother last trip that a subway journey was unlikely to result in mugging, disorientation or violent death, we will hop the 6 train uptown to the Guggenheim, Met & MAD. Later I shall cook supper and I suspect that we will eat it sitting on the sofa with a bottle of good wine & the New York Times lying scattered & ignored around our feet, whilst we watch Cold Case on the telly.

New York in the snow

Pearls

There was a heavy snowstorm last week when so I left my suitcase behind at JK's apartment in Soho when I returned to the East Village. When I went round to pick it up, these beautiful long double strands of freshwater pearls were waiting for me as gift from London from JK and from BA who had found them whilst BA was showing JK all her favourite stores. I love the lustre: I am a very lucky girl to have such good friends.

Soho House New York

I went to Soho House for drinks & a proper catch up last night with beautiful L who, to my shame, I haven’t seen since before I hopped it back to London last year. In the lift, on the way up, I started chatting with two guys and an observer commented that everyone in the lift was English. “Well, not that surprising: we are in Soho House”, I replied. And he (English too), rather grumpily muttered, ” God It’s all a bit sad.”

I really don’t understand this attitude. Soho House is a series of grown up private members’ clubs in England and in America, founded in London, still based in London, which offers reciprocal membership of its rather nice NY offshoot to its English members. (In NY, it is also a hotel, albeit a very expensive, sexy one, so English guests aren’t exactly a surprise.)

Anyway, it’s hardly unexpected that if one pays for membership, as I have done in England for ten years, that we will want to use the club here and its numerous facilities generously. His implication, I guess, is that there’s something demeaning and sad in English people gravitating to an English club in NY, when there is so much on offer in this city.

But, here’s the thing. It’s not an English club for English people in Manhattan where they can sit about and discuss the price of sausages in Myers of Keswick (the UK grocery store in the Village.) In NY, Soho House is an extremely good international establishment catering, in the main, to its American clientele. Sure, if you ask nicely, they will produce a huge jar of Marmite from the kitchen at brunch, but there’s no effort to make it English, unless you count imaginative interior design, good food and delicious cocktails as the sole preserve of the English, and I think we all know that’s not necessarily true.

I loathe the idea of the ex-pat bubble too: I have made great efforts to have a circle of American friends here, and not just hang out with other English people in Manhattan. It’s incredibly easy to never talk to a single American, bar service staff here, and I don’t want to become of those people. Otherwise, what would be the point of moving to America? And that’s why the arrogant git in the lift judging us all annoyed me so much.

Inauguration Day

I’m glad we went to Washington: I would have made more than the eight hour round trip to be there for the seventeen minutes of Obama’s speech. It seemed as though the vast part of the crowd was African American, and those standing around us were openly crying, tears rolling down their cheeks whilst he spoke. Standing behind us were three girls who had travelled from Kenya to be there and who couldn’t contain their excitement, screaming with joy.

Of course, like many of Obama’s campaign speeches, it was a masterpiece, long on rhetoric, short on substance. It’ll take at least a year to have any firm idea if he can put his money where his mouth is, but judging by the crowd’s reaction, his supporters are willing to wait. The emotional elderly gentle man on the train on the way to DC put it best: “He’s not the Messiah and I worry that expectations are too high. He’s only a man. But I have faith.”