In which there turns out to be a little rant, after all

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I know I have gone all Little Women on you just lately, but I suppose it was inevitable that I should have to have a small rant sooner or later. When I was a girl of eight, I used to use my hands to sketch extravagant shapes in the air as I spoke. My rather stern school did not approve of such Continental practices: at lunch one day, my headmistress insisted that I SIT on my hands to still them. Without my hands, I could not speak. I stared and wiggled and shifted back and forth, and eventually the hands, as if they had a life of their own, freed themselves, waved about in the air, and I could talk again. I feel rather like that now. However much I sit on my hands, they are inevitably going to escape.

So that was a long, throat-clearing way of saying I have a tiny something to add about Kate Moss. I really wasn't going to. I have the children's tea to think about. We have been out riding and the dogs came and are now covered in plough (there was also some very worrying rolling) so there may have to be bathing. At some stage, I should attempt to do some work. You are all discerning adults; you know what you think about patently wrong statements. I'm not sure I really have anything to add.

But oh, oh, OH, the idiocy. It makes me cross because I have always rather admired Kate Moss. I liked that she smoked and drank and went out with unsuitable men. I liked that she did not seem to subscribe to the airbrush school of beauty. I saw her in life once, and she was oddly unremarkable; not plain, or with bad skin or a crooked nose, but she did not stop a room; she just sat in the corner giggling and cadging cigarettes and you would not have looked at her twice. (On the other hand, I once saw Carla Bruni at a party and she is a showstopper in life, much more than in pictures.) I liked that fact that little Kate Moss from Croydon could become a global brand and still seem to have fun. And then she goes and says possibly the stupidest thing I have heard this year, only slightly less stupid than all those crazy right wingers in America who insist that Obama is just exactly like Hitler except without the moustache. She said, and I am so, so hoping she was misconstrued, and misquoted, and misheard: 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.'

My first reaction was to make a list:

Rare fillet of beef with potatoes dauphinoise.

Vichyssoise, hot or cold.

Quails' eggs with celery salt.

Chilled avocado soup at the height of summer.

Prawn and squid risotto with saffron and a dash of Vermouth.

A really juicy roast chicken with bread sauce.

Cavalo nero, dressed with olive oil and lemon.

My lovely little polenta chips that I cooked the other day in the manner of Jamie Oliver.

My mother's scones, the best in the world. I remember her always saying you must just crumble the butter and flour delicately, delicately, with your fingertips, and STOP the moment it is done, because an overworked scone is a sad thing. And you know, she was right. I went to the amazingly fashionable and expensive Daylesford Organic caff in the amazingly fashionable and expensive Westbourne Grove not that long ago, and a scone was ordered and it was not only flat and heavy and made not with delicacy and care but with hob-nailed boots and indifference, but it was so dry I thought it might have been stale. How very different from my old mum's light as air, hot from the oven, melting little circles of delight. We would eat them with whipped cream and the special tomato jam that she made in great vats with tomatoes from the greenhouse. And it's funny remembering all that, because there were bits of my childhood that were nuts, but there were also bits when there were homemade scones, and crumpets with Gentleman's Relish, and Chocolate Olivers for a very special treat, and getting up at dawn to go and pick mushrooms in the valley, and really moments of idyll.

Cockles with salt and vinegar, preferably from a polystyrene pot bought from a stall by a pier, with the smell of the sea in one's nostrils and the wind coming up off the water.

A pint of prawns, with mayonnaise.

And if you're getting fancy pants, throw in a lobster as well.

A really proper spaghetti vongole, preferably a white one, with fat clams and lots of parsley.

Soupe de Poisson, with its rouille. This of course can be a grey and slightly gritty thing, if made wrong, and I don't want to sound like a food snob, but I do start to think that really it is only worth eating in France, and preferably in Tetou, a little blue restaurant that sits on a beach at Golfe Juan. I have not been there for twenty-five years, but I once knew it well, and it did, in my youth, have the best soupe de poisson in the world.

A dark delightful sticky oxtail stew.

Watercress soup with croutons.

Scotch pancakes for tea. Or potato cakes (remembering of course to use floury and not waxy potatoes).

The beef carpaccio at La Famiglia, tender and full of flavour and the most outrageous colour so it looks like art on your plate, with its secret sauce.

The Hainanese chicken rice that you get in wet markets in Singapore, made by flinty old ladies who would rather kill you than give you the recipe.

Vietnamese spring rolls, with mint and coriander and that mysterious sweet and sour dipping sauce, and which, for all my culinary pretensions, I shall never be able to make authentically.

Sourdough bread.

Those little steamed dim sum prawn dumplings that you get in Chinatown.

Salmon sashimi, with enough wasabi to make your eyes water.

King prawn tempura.

Irish stew.

Toast with Marmite.

You know I could go on, and on, and on. And I really shan't, because I know you all have things to be doing. Even in that incomplete list, which I pulled from the top of my head, there is not just gastronomic delight, but memories of childhood, great holidays, places visited, moments in time, little secret habits (the first thing I do when I come to London after months in Scotland is to go straight to Gerrard Street and eat as much Chinese as I can, just me and a newspaper and a Moleskine notebook, because I want to savour the moment of sheer, raging greed all by myself, to distill it to its most potent point). Food, whilst providing so much pleasure in itself, is often not just food: there are all those associations.

To deny all this for the sake of skinny is blatantly bonkers. I'm not going to go all po-faced about the moral question that must hang over affluent Western women purposefully making themselves look like poor women in third world countries who actually do not have enough to eat, because of drought or corruption or the harvest failing or just blunt lack of money. But I do want to know what skinny gets you. I admit that maybe your clothes hang a little better. I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to be one of the Elegant Women, and there can be a keen aesthetic pleasure in someone who can really work a little outfit. But to refuse food simply because you want the admiring glances of fashionistas seems to me a paltry bargain. And anyway, you can be stylish and curvaceous, it just takes a little more imagination.

So again, what does skinny get you? Does it make people love you more? Does it add to the sum total of human happiness? Can it console your friend whose heart has just been broken by a cad? Will it stop your lover leaving? Will it make your husband happy when he has just been laid off? Will it make your wife smile when her mother has been taken ill? I mean, seriously: what does it achieve? Food gives pleasure, comfort, delight. It can console. It is an expression of love. Does skinny do any of those things? I am going to be vulgar now, but this kind of thing makes me so cross I get vulgar: but if someone is having sex with a skinny person, isn't it rather disconcerting to be able to see the ribs and feel the hipbones digging into soft tissue and count every single vertebrae? I'm just asking.

What I know for sure is that no one will ever miss your skinniness. I've said it in Backwards and I shall bloody well go on saying it again until every last woman stops hating her body, which means of course I shall turn into the most roaring bore: at your funeral, no one is going to mourn you because you were a size eight. There are many things in life I do not know, but I know this: no single person will weep at your loss because they will never again see your skinniness. At your wake, no sentient human will speak this sentence in regret and nostalgia: 'Oh, and do you remember how skinny she was? How I shall miss that.'

We have such a short time. I can't bear the thought that anyone would waste a single second of it wanting to be such an utterly pointless thing as skinny. I can't bear that anyone who is not in need of strong medication would think that being unnaturally thin is better than delicious food. It's so fabulously, exuberantly stupid. (At which point the writer is removed, still ranting.)

The madness of beauty

Posted by Tania Kindersley.









Galvanised by the lovely LibertyLondonGirl, my fellow blogger and constant inspiration, I am going to get angry today about beauty.

Possibly the strangest thing in the contemporary world, apart from people comparing the clever, funny, pragmatic Barack Obama to the sociopathically mad and bad Adolf Hitler, is the current Western idea of beauty. It is: very thin, with stretched smooth skin, with a big head. The lollipop girls, they call those little starlets in Hollywood, who diet so hard that their heads look enormously large compared to their frail bodies. It is also frantically exercised. Madonna now spends six hours a day in the gym (I read it in the paper so it must be true), which means that she can have no time left to read Robert Lowell or make a frittata or gossip on the telephone or do any of the other twenty-seven things that make life worth living.

The strange thing about this accepted template of pulchritude is that you hardly ever see it in real life; it is in every magazine, all over the internets, scattered across the tabloids, so present that you are in danger of thinking that it is normal. I once did see the very thin, muscled, botoxed women in life. I was asked to one of those glamorous places, where the exceptionally rich gather – not just a nice Mercedes and a house and some land rich, but never again flying commercial rich. I was terrified that I would feel like a frumpy old hick, with my size fourteen and my hair dyed from a box in the bathroom and my cussed refusal to have a laser resurfacing peel. I am forty-two and I have had some fun and some late nights and one too many Lucky Strikes, and I have the marks on my face to show it. But when I saw those tiny polished women, with their identical emaciated frames and their stretched foreheads, they looked so sad and discontented and fragile that I wanted to take them home and make them soup. I thought I would feel intimidated by them, or judge them for their vanity and their frippery and their obsession with eternal youth. I just felt acutely sorry for them. They had managed to catch very rich husbands, but I saw no sign that it gave them any joy.

I am not anti-beauty. I am not one of those mythical feminists who are fabled to insist that anyone who plucks their eyebrows or shaves their legs is in hopeless thrall to the patriarchal conspiracy. I exfoliate. I love a good fire-engine-red lipstick. I get a keen pleasure when my eyes fall on a pretty face. When I was younger, I could not wait for the new edition of Vogue. But as a good unreconstructed liberal, I am all for moderation and the middle ground. Extremes alarm me. And it seems now that there is something excessive about the narrow emphasis on physical appearance. Certain newspapers make it their life’s work to mount rabid attacks on famous women for any signs of imperfection. Kate Moss was recently seen with a couple of wrinkles on her forehead and a faint acne scar on her chin. The tabloids went crazy. Otherwise serious columnists felt compelled to rush into print on the matter, as if it were a thing of national importance. A few weeks before, Elle McPherson was photographed with a small stretch of slightly saggy skin on her left leg. There was a frenzy of speculation; the offending area was blown up, with great red lines circling it, so it could be examined in minute detail; doctors were called in to talk about muscle tone and diet and the ageing process. I do not know Kate Moss or Elle McPherson, but they seem like perfectly nice women to me. They have both built successful careers from a standing start. As far as I know, they do not insult old ladies for fun or drown kittens in sacks, but from the media reaction you would think they had been out selling crack in kindergartens.

The biggest beauty push now is towards youth. Everything must be ‘anti-ageing’. Rush rush rush to stem the evil tide of time; defy nature at every turn; erase those crow’s feet or any chance at happiness will be ruined. God forbid that you may look as if you have lived a little; any sign that you may have once smiled or frowned must be wiped clean. At first, you can do this with a good cream and drinking your eight glasses of water a day. But there comes a stage where, if you are serious about having a blank face, only serious intervention will do it. So there is the Botox, and the restylane (‘banish those give away lines’ says the website; give away of what? I think – being human?); there are the chemical peels, the fillers, the lasers, or the whole hog – have your face sliced off with a scalpel, pulled tight, and stitched back into place. The absolute irony of all this is that, in almost all cases, the treatments do not so much make the women look younger, even should you decide this is a resolution devoutly to be wished, it just makes them look as if they have had work. When I am not thinking about the human condition and the roiling subject of geo-politics, I like to watch crappy commercial American television shows. One of my favourites is Alias, where Jennifer Garner gets to save the world whilst wearing a serious of fabulous outfits. In one series, they had Faye Dunaway as the guest star. I had not seen her on screen for a while, and I was absolutely mesmerised by her appearance. I remember her in The Thomas Crown Affair; I knew she must now be in her sixties; but there was not a mark on her face. I shuffled right up to the screen like a six year old, looking for clues. There was nothing: no wrinkles, no laugh lines, just a smooth expanse of white face. And yet, she still looked her age. Was it her neck, I thought, or the backs of her hands that gave her away? No, nothing there. In the end, I realised that it is the very quality of the skin that changes with age; there is a sort of thinness to it as the collagen goes, a delicate fragility, an intimation of mortality. No matter how much you get it stretched and pumped and resurfaced, that quality cannot be hidden. People don’t think that you look thirty when you are fifty, they just wonder which surgeon you are using.

At the end of all this, what I really wonder is: what is the point? Why are so many perfectly intelligent, discerning women being convinced that beauty is the great goal? The beauty bombardment is so constant that even I, determined feminist that I am, have occasional moments when I wonder what it would be like to look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But say one of these wonder creams or science fiction treatments or magic pills actually worked. Say that you too could look like Julie Christie if you really tried hard enough. Then what? What does beauty actually get you? It will get you the smiles of strangers; it will get you the benefit of the doubt; it will get you tables in overcrowded restaurants. You may take some pleasure in knowing you add to the general aesthetic. But beauty has its dark side. It can get you commodified – you are A Beauty, and that’s it. Soulless men will try and make you their trophy wife. Other women may warily keep their distance, afraid that the blinding light of your perfect looks will cast them forever into the shade. In the end, it seems to me that the only real goal in life is to love well and be loved in return. Beauty does not get you that. Great beauties get left and heartbroken and disappointed, just like everyone else. Their dogs die, they go broke, they are not immune from disease. Their friendships are not more profound, their lives do not magically become a festival of laughter and good times.

Whenever I am casting about for meaning and perspective and the truth of things, I imagine what happens when we die. I think of the moment when the mourners come. At your funeral, I guarantee that no one is going to cry because they will miss your sculpted cheekbones. They will weep because no one ever again will make them laugh quite like you did. They will miss your quirky conversation, your fascination with obscure subjects, your sudden moments of kindness, your ability to listen, your special trick with chicken soup. At the wake, they will not discuss your peaks of perfection. They will talk of what you might have thought of as your flaws – it will be your little freaks, your curious idiosyncrasies, your moments of screw-up that will make them laugh. Balzac said that we love people because of their flaws, not in spite of them, and he was right. It is your failings that make you human, and being human is what makes you loved. That is true beauty, and you cannot get it from a knife or a jar.

The art of ease; or, the state of the female nation; or, my rant for the day.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Here is what the women do: make it look effortless. (And when I say The Women, I obviously mean every single one of Britain’s 25 million ladies, because I would never fall for the evil art of generalising.) I can’t quite work out whether this is a fatal tendency, or not. It might be a marvellous, tremendously British, keep buggering on attitude. It might be verging on the Churchillian. It could be something that people should be writing anthems about. My fret is that it means that not enough people stop, every once in a while, and say to the ladies: bloody well done.

Here is what most women are: worker, bottle-washer, shrink, household CEO, cook, shopper (the lavatory roll must never run out, or dark things will ensue), mother, daughter, friend, dog-walker, domestic planner, teacher, nurse, and, quite often, accountant. On top of all this, they are expected to be informed, imaginative, and elegant. The magazines would very much like them to be a certain size and shape, and for them to keep their hair preternaturally glossy at all times. (It is no coincidence that the expression ‘bad hair day’ has gone into the lexicon.) If they can keep up with fashion and become a bit domestic godessy, that is a bonus devoutly to be wished. The spurious rumour that females are biologically programmed to multi-task – that hideous, managerial collocation – means that women rarely get credit for the many things that they do all at the same time. The talk of juggling fades into so much background noise, so that it is only noticed in the breach – ripples of shock when someone actually drops a ball. The endless articles about work-life balance take on a hectoring air – you are getting it right, aren’t you?

And so, the women, because they don’t want to make a fuss, because they are, after all, British, just get on with it. They do not moan or whine or go on strike or take to the barricades; so the appearance of effortlessness is born. Somehow, the work is done, the children are taken to school with the correct shoes and the right sporting equipment, the husband’s socks are daily located, the supper is cooked, the deadlines are met. Even those who write subversive pieces and blogs about how they are more domestic slattern than goddess do it in such a funny, self-deprecating way that the notion of ease is still somehow there. Women make jokes among themselves about how they must make the transformation from bug-eyed troll into glorious party creature with no more than half an hour, an eye pencil and their native wit; yet they still manage to leave the house looking fabulous. They will occasionally tell horror stories of being woken three times in the night by a small vomiting person, but they still get to work on time.

The absolute personification of this swan-like tendency – serene on the surface, tiny little legs paddling very, very fast beneath the water – is Kate Moss. This might sound a fraction counter-intuitive. But just stop and think about it for a moment. There she is, out every night, still managing to look glamorous even when emerging, dishevelled and slightly bleary, from a taxi at three in the morning. In her life, rather than in the tabloid depiction, she must guard her business affairs, invent new fashions every time she leaves the house, do some actual modelling, field endless requests for endorsements, go out with edgy musicians, design a clothing line, and talk to Philip Green (I imagine not the highlight of her day). It’s not splitting the atom or working the night shift in an NHS hospital, but that’s not the point. You try being a global brand. Everyone takes it for granted, because, you know, she’s just little Mossy from Croydon. But to go from Croydon to household name takes some serious paddling. To stay at the top of such a febrile profession for twenty years is quite an achievement, whatever you think about fashion. To do it whilst giving the appearance that all you do is go to parties is oddly miraculous.

Women don’t want to be put on a pedestal, besieged with bouquets and excessive congratulation. Most of the hundred things they do, they do because they choose them. But just because sometimes it looks easy on the outside, does not mean it should be taken for granted. Just occasionally, I wish someone would give the women a round of applause.