Mists and mellow fruitfulness

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

If I had to choose a season it would be autumn. I think summer is over-rated, all that vulgar sunshine and bank holiday traffic and the imperative that the weather must be fine or it's not worth the candle. Here in the north of Scotland, the last three summers have been dark dreich affairs, but as if the weather gods are kindly making it up to us, they send spectacular springs and autumns.

There is not yet the scent of cold and woodsmoke in the air that marks the official turn of the season. There has been no frost. But this morning there was a heavy dew, so that when I went out to walk the dogs the whole landscape glittered and shimmered in the thick yellow Italianate sun. (There is a quality to the light here that is very different to that of the south; it is denser, somehow; it feels like ancient Roman light.) Most of the country is still green, but the first leaves are starting to turn. The trees are putting out berries; the elders are heavy with black fruit; the roses have magically turned themselves into hard scarlet hips. It is at times like this that I wish I were one of those women who knows about preserving and making jams. My mother, who could do domestic goddess when the mood was in her, used to make a special delicious jam out of tomatoes when I was a child; I have a vague memory that she did this while wearing pearls, although this might be a fantasy. Personally I think one should wear jewels whilst jam-making.

Anyway, here are some pictures for you, to celebrate the greatest season of all.

The little yellow elder, the tips of its leaves just turning magenta.

A view of my autumnal garden. I planted that tree in the middle when it was two foot high.

The dogs, having a slightly regal moment.

The rowan and the elder and hawthorn hedge. When I first moved here, this entire garden was nettles and wild grass. A nice lady came and dug some great beds, put in some trees, and invented the hedge. Then I just started planting anything that took my fancy and hoped for the best. My idea was to make it look as if it all might just have grown naturally. Some people might call it a bit of a mess; I like to call it wild. It's a boho garden.

The marjoram, putting out its final flowers.

A spectacular elderberry.

The old-fashioned cottage rose, amazingly still in bloom, like an old lady remembering her glorious youth.

The mint, still going like gangbusters. Don't plant mint in beds, everyone says, it will take over. I ignored them and now it is everywhere and I adore it.

The rose hips.

These are possibly my favourite trees. I feel amazingly lucky that I have them in my garden. Even though they are traditional Scots pines, I think they look like something from the South of France.

A final, valedictory honeysuckle.

The avenue of old beeches. In a few weeks that whole line of trees will be dark red.

One more for the dog people.

A shy berry.

The first turning of the leaves.

The very splendid rowan tree, a great Scottish native. Look at the colour of that sky.

Judgement Day

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was going to call this piece ‘How we judge’; that was how it first came to me. Then I realised that there was no we about it; it is about how I judge. The WE is always fabulous, giving the illusion that every one of us is part of the collective unconscious, that the particular is, in fact, the universal. I am guilty of this in several discrete ways: I do it with women, Britons, writers. I like to think of myself as a student of human nature, but I have a fatal tendency to clump people into groups. ‘The French,’ I say, blithely, ‘the Italians, the Americans.’ ‘The politicians,’ I declare, without a second thought, ‘the BBC, the intellectuals.’ Often, I say: ‘The Women’. (Women always get a capital letter in my book.) I talk to Sarah down the telephone; I say: we must set The Women free. This is what Backwards is all about, in my mind. Sarah says, calmly: ‘You must never say that out loud, in public.’ All of which is a very long, tangential way of saying: there is no We here. This is all me, much as I might like to extrapolate until my ears fall off.

The thing of it is, I am a nice, ostentatiously educated, middle class liberal. I like to entertain the fantasy that I have no prejudice. I get furious and shouty when I encounter racism, homophobia, sexism, ageism, fattism; of course I do, what else would you expect? I spend a lot of my time pondering where bigotry comes from. I am excessively fond of imagining I am immune. And yet, and yet. I am suddenly, acutely conscious of how I make ruthless judgements, often based on thin evidence. This revelation did not come to me from reading Jung, or Kant, or TS Eliot. It was not the product of deep thought. I was watching one of the flashy American TV shows that I secretly like, and a character said: ‘That’s Bach. I love Bach’. He was a supporting character, thinly sketched. The writers had not necessarily made him loveable, or even three dimensional. On top of that, he was a Catholic priest, and as a feminist and an atheist, I should have some doubts about that. But the moment he said he loved Bach, I loved him. It was like coded shorthand, speaking to my deep heart.

But that is crazy, I thought, the moment I got the warm loving feeling. The Nazis loved Wagner. I am perfectly certain that sociopaths and bankers have been moved to tears by a Schubert quintet. It made me think how judgy I am, despite my fantasy that I am quite disinterested. It’s tribal, I think. It’s a lower order of assumption, not quite the irrational idea of putting people into groups because of their gender or skin colour or sexual orientation, but not so many millions of miles away. If someone knows The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, can tell me who Lady Brett Ashley is, has read the diaries of Chips Channon, watched Blue Peter in their youth, shamelessly adores the novels of Nancy Mitford, has Blonde on Blonde in their record collection, I am at once inclined towards them. If they think that the two greatest lines Bowie ever wrote are: ‘As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for your favourite party’, and ‘It was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor’, then I am their friend forever. If a person uses the words ‘human condition’ in casual conversation, I shall want to listen to them until the end of time.

If I am being finally, brutally honest I think that women who are obsessed with shoes are letting the Sisterhood down. I am suspicious of men who indulge in pornography. When someone tells me that they believe in free markets and Milton Friedman I at once have the thought that they might regard the poor as undeserving and single mothers as a blight on society. I have a mild and inexplicable suspicion of double barrelled names and anyone who owns a yappy lapdog and people who buy their clothes from the Boden catalogue. I am very leery of the wildly rich. Any columnist who starts their piece with ‘Why oh Why?’ or ‘Am I alone in thinking?’ is an instant joke to me.

The horrible truth is it turns out that I might have just as many knee jerk reactions as the people I casually mark as ‘prejudiced’. I may keep my notions to myself, and present a lovely liberal exterior to the world, but that’s not good enough. I am going to go away and work on it. I am, for the moment, putting myself in the corner, until I can work out the difference between reasoned opinion and irrational judgement.

Mrs Palin goes East

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

In Hong Kong for a speech, Sarah Palin matched the verbose Colonel Gaddafi in length if not eclecticism. But she did have her own controversies to offer. It was not out of control banks or excessively impenetrable derivatives or even original sin (pace Rowan Williams) that caused the economic meltdown: it was The Government. ‘The Government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who could not afford them.’ Damn right. There was Dick Cheney, at his secret location, on the blower to recalcitrant mortgage lenders saying: do subprime or else. ‘The marketplace,’ continued the former governor of Alaska, ‘didn’t fail, it became exactly as common sense would expect it to.’ Parse that, you lower 48 rubes.

Despite insisting that her talk be closed to the press, Palin did not account for the power of Twitter. She was live-tweeted by a character called cellomonkey. Sample lines: ‘Nukular!!!’; ‘wow, palin is lashing out against china "we hope for china to rise responsibly"’; ‘palin attributes asian economic prosperity to american commitment to security in the region’; slightly inexplicably ‘palin has found herself a spot on hu jintao’s to do list’; and, magnificently, ‘the guy next to me is reading a macro strategy report’.

When told of the length of the speech, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said: ‘Ninety minutes, my God, that’s half a Castro.’

Today's miracle: the human voice

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Ignore the crazy outfits; just listen to the music.




There are only two things I really want to know: why can't they spell human? And, who DID let the dogs out?

The old people

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Some of the old people are going. It has been happening, slowly, over the last two years or so. I go to funerals and memorial services, I write those awful condolence letters where you try your absolute hardest not to fall into cliché and then tumble into it anyway. I have been writing some today. They made me cry. I miss the old people; I wish they were not going.

I know the British have this thing about a good innings. When someone reaches a very grand old age, it is considered unnecessary to mourn them because they have had such a long life, a good shot at it. This is fabulously stupid. The longer they have had, the more of a mark they have left on the world, and the bigger the space will be where they once were, impossible to fill. One of the memorial services which made me cry the most was for a 96 year old. He had a good innings all right. I should have let him go gently into that good night. But 96! By that stage, the magical thinking part of my brain believed he would go on forever. He was like the Tower of London or the White cliffs of Dover. The idea of London without him in it was implausible. He had been there through my teenage years, when he took me to the proms and sent me box sets of Mozart, gently expanding my cultural horizons (not many concertos for two pianos in the horse country where I had grown up), and through my university years. When I could not quite get a first and had to settle for a two one, he wrote me a letter calling it a ‘very respectable degree. Never forget that men are frightened of first class women’. It was the kind of joke he really liked. So I don’t give a damn about the good innings, I miss him like hell.

The old person who has just gone was funny, generous, bigger than life. I remember him always smiling. He had been a respectable naval fellow, with his own ship, but he had a quietly subversive sense of humour. I did not see him so much over the last few years, but he was a big presence in my wild twenties and early thirties; holidays, weekends, always good conversation and excellent claret.

I am going to miss the old people. It’s not that I think there is anything wrong with the young people, I love the young people and think that they are not at all the feral creatures capable only of texting and fighting and saying ‘like’ a lot that some of the media like to frighten us with. But I like there being some people around who remember the war. I love the old people’s capacity for understatement and stiff upper lip. I love that the ones I know could present to the world an appearance of utter respectability while a burning flame of subversion flickered under their three piece suits. I love that they got through the Blitz and the three day week and the craziness of the eighties and still kept their dry wit and quiet elan. I love their blatant unapologetic eccentricity. I love that some of them were so much wilder than anyone now would dream of, running off to live in gypsy caravans or doing unspeakable things in Tangier. I love that they remember the days when you could have a good dinner, see a show, take a cab home and still have change from half a crown. I love that they really knew how to wear a hat. I wish they could live forever.

PS.

The picture at the top is of my grandmother, one of the greatest of the old people, painted when she was still young. She died in 1985, but I think of her every day.

Politically correct

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It's strange, the voices that linger in your head. The ones I keep hearing from this week are: William Shawcross, tremulous with emotion as he told Jenni Murray of his adoration for the Queen Mother, and an anonymous man, articulate, well-educated, crying out in disbelief, 'You can't even tell Irish jokes any more'. I wish I could remember who it was. It's someone you would not necessarily expect. And he was not being asked about the Irish, or jokes, or political correctness. It just sort of shot out of him, like a cork, as if all he had been yearning for was to tell some Irish jokes, and no one would bloody well let him, and he could not contain himself any more.

But you know, he's got a point. I miss those Irish jokes. The gaiety of nations has suffered a hideous blow since you may no longer start a gag with: Paddy was digging a hole for his potatoes. And it's not just the Irish. Don't you hark back to the prelapsarian garden of delight where people could tell spic jokes and poof jokes and dyke jokes and kike jokes? It's amazing we have the strength to carry on. I especially miss the enchanting comic routines about the ladies, usually featuring mothers-in-law or hookers. I mourn the time when everyone knew that what was funny about us girls was that we were slightly thick or excessively hormonal. Remember the glory days when comics could riff about Sambo with his thick lips and his hysterical propensity for idleness? And then along came political correctness and dictated that no one could ever be funny again.

Actually, I have good news for that poor plaintive fellow. There are still lots of Irish jokes out there, it's just that now they are being made by Irish people. Lesbians make jokes about being lesbian; women make PMT jokes; Jews make jokes about Jews. Richard Pryor built an entire brilliant career on nigger jokes, which made white liberals a bit edgy (were they allowed to laugh, even though they were white?). Barack Obama made possibly the best joke ever by a politician when he was asked about Bill Clinton being called the first black president. 'I would have to investigate Bill's dancing abilities,' he said, deadpan, 'before I judged whether, in fact, he was a brother.'

If all else fails, those oppressed by the politically correct may go to racistjokes.com, a site so filled with insanity that I am still half convinced it must be a spoof ('if you're not white we hope you die') and laugh their unreconstructed arses off.

In which I get serious about race

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Sarah rings up over the Jimmy Carter flap. She is uncertain whether it helps anything at all. ‘It just turns Obama into the black guy,’ she says. She says her friend L, who is black, is uncomfortable about the whole thing, thinking it makes black people look victimmy, that they must have an old white guy riding to their aid. ‘Obama’s a big boy,’ she says, ‘he can look after himself.’ ‘And,’ says Sarah, who does not have any of the utopian visions that I am sometimes prey to, ‘why is it always gangs of white liberals who go on the television and get hot under the collar about racism?’

I take her point, even though I am a white liberal who gets hot under the collar about racism. I see that it is politically disastrous for Obama to have to talk about race while he is trying, against all the odds, to get his healthcare legislation passed. I understand that it is reductive and stupid for him to be just the black guy. But the fact remains that he is black, and there are white people who still, even now, in the shining 21st century, really, really care about pigmentation. I find it odd that people mind so much about something that is, literally, skin deep. I find it curious that racism is so ingrained, when we all started out black, it’s just some of us went to live in Finland, and there was a vitamin D thing which evolution had to sort out. But ingrained it is, and I think that is something that people should talk about. I think it should be spoken of because by letting the daylight in, a remedy might be found.

Most prejudice comes from fear and ignorance; it is much easier to hate someone if you know nothing about them. So throw up the windows; talk, instruct, argue, educate. I also think it should be spoken of because it is intellectually interesting. I could go all poncy and talk about investigating the roots of racism, and the psychology of it, the fear of the other, the Jungian projection of the shadow; I could talk about the forms it takes, the code words, the dog whistles, the soft prejudice and the hard hatreds. But really all I want to say is: why, why? I mean really: why? It is just skin. In pure aesthetic terms, it is much more beautiful than the pinkish often mottled stuff that Anglo Saxons got. As Martin Amis once wrote: who decided that white was best?

Yet it seems that the prevailing conclusion is, both here and in America, that it is unhelpful to talk about it. The British decided, fairly early on, that Obama was not really black at all. Not in the pejorative sense of not black enough that made him an object of suspicion among the black community in America early in the primary campaign, but in a more world-weary sophisticate pose. Come on, he wears sharp suits and talks his erudite talk and does not refer to women as hos; he falls into no stereotype, so let’s just get past the racial stuff and talk about something more germane. (Interestingly, this was rather the position that the candidate himself took, not wanting to put himself into an ethnic box, and he would have got away with it had it not been for the pesky Reverend Jeremiah Wright.) So now that President Carter has waded into the fray, the reaction on this side of the pond is very much Sarah’s. ‘It makes everything personal,’ she says. ‘I want people to talk about the policies, not about the man.’ The consensus seems to be: move along, nothing to see here.

I think this comes partly from an old British hangover of stiff upper lip. Despite the Jeremy Kyle Show and the rise of reality television, there is still an idea among the commenting classes that too much hysteria and letting it all hang out is a bad thing. But I also think it is because prejudice in Britain is a different animal than its American cousin. It absolutely exists, but in a more low key way; it is febrile and complex, prone to sudden swerves in direction, hard to get a handle on. Take the odd case of the Irish. There was a genuine hatred of the Irish from the 1960s, when boarding houses in Notting Hill sported signs saying: no blacks, no dogs, no Irish, to the 1970s, when anyone with an Irish accent was automatically assumed to be a member of the IRA. By the 1990s, the Irish were so lavishly adored, considered so much hipper and more glamorous and more romantic than the prosaic British, that Britons poured into Dublin every weekend, ostentatiously drank pints of Guinness, and listened to nothing but U2 records.

As for black Britons, attitudes towards them are hard to pin down. Young black men are disproportionately likely to come from broken homes, fare badly in education, and become involved in crime. They face bigger barriers in the employment market than do white Britons, pointing to lingering prejudices that trace their roots back to Windrush and the race riots of 1958. On the other hand, Britain has the highest incidence of mixed race marriages in the Western world, ‘voting with their squishy bits’ wrote Hugh Muir in The Guardian. The number of black MPs, while small, reflects almost exactly their proportion of the population - 2% in each case, which is much more impressive than the percentage of women members – 17% in parliament, 50% in the populace. Trevor McDonald is a Sir, a pillar of the establishment, a national treasure, and consistently voted the most trusted newscaster in Britain. It is tempting for me, as a hopeful white liberal, to look at the admired black faces in British life – Lenny Henry, Adrian Lester, Diane Abbott, Dame Kelly Holmes, Marianne Jean-Baptiste – and think of them as living proof that we are all fine. It is easy to remember only the good parts of race relations in this country: the passionate fervour among students for Nelson Mandela at the height of the struggle against apartheid, the two tone craze in the eighties, the moment in the early nineties where all the white kids in Notting Hill felt that the height of cool was to act black (whatever that meant). I have never walked down a city street and been regarded with suspicion simply because I am a certain colour, so I may be talking out of turn here, but for all the stains on our history – Stephen Lawrence, Handsworth, stop and search, the nights when Brixton burnt – I still feel that anti-black sentiment in this country is less visceral and less violent than that which exists in America. I could be completely wrong about this, but my suspicion is that it is for one central historic reason: there were never slaves picking cotton in British fields. The British enthusiastically embraced the slave trade until Mr Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury came along and spoiled the party, but it was a distant, unseen thing. There was no equivalent of Thomas Jefferson and his plantation. There was, most crucially, no parallel here of the American South.

It is because of Jimmy Carter’s pedigree that I think he should be taken seriously. He is a son of the south; he remembers segregation. Yet, in many areas of the American media, he is being treated as an out of touch old man who knows not of which he speaks. His words have been twisted back against him: he is apparently shutting down debate, playing the race card, tarring all of Obama’s honourable opponents with the racial brush. It seems to me entirely uncontroversial to say that prejudice still exists in America, and that some of it is directed against a black president. Oh, say the critics, but we elected a black president, and he got a 70% approval rating as recently as January, so that knocks that argument on the head. They conveniently forget that people candidly admitted to news reporters before the election that they could not bring themselves to vote for a black man. They ignore the posters of Obama as a witch doctor, as a monkey, eating watermelon. They gloss over the insanity of the birthers, who claim furiously that Obama was actually born in Kenya, and is therefore an illegal alien who should be deported. The people who still insist that Obama is a secret Muslim and that they want their country back are not doing it because they dislike his plans for healthcare.

Sure there is racism in this country, says the strange and bullying Joe Scarborough on his MSNBC morning show, in the same tone of voice as if he had said ‘sure there are traffic jams in this country’, as if racism was a fact of life, a minor inconvenience, something that people just had to learn to live with and not bitch about. Scarborough, who frequently talks of America as the greatest nation on earth, then goes on to say that this opposition to the president is not racist, and that to call it that just shows that those crazy liberals have lost the argument. This is an oddly common conflation: a liberal points out that there are racists who do not like Obama because he is black, a conservative immediately says that the liberal is calling all opposition to Obama racist and therefore the liberal has got nothing better to say than ‘ooh look bigots at six o’clock’, which, of course, liberals always do because they are genetically programmed and can’t help it. Scarborough then circles back to the clinching circular argument: America is great, America elected a black president, only America could do this, therefore America cannot be racist. Joe Scarborough is on the moderate right wing. On the far right, in the addled minds of men like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, it is Obama himself who is the racist, with, according to Beck, a real ‘hatred of white people’, and the poor white people can’t say anything about that, because if they do the ‘liberal media’ will say they are all, every last man jack of them, drooling haters of black people.

Race is complicated in America in a completely different way than it is here. It provided one of America’s finest hours with the civil rights movement, the I have a dream speech, the brave freedom riders, the men and women who walked across the burning bridges. It also, within living memory, revealed America’s darkest heart, in segregation, lynchings, Jim Crow, Klan rallies. There was a moment of giddy hope when Obama was elected that he alone could symbolise a glorious post-racial future, that the better angels would prevail. A young black woman was interviewed just after the election, and told the reporter: now I can tell my son that he can be anything he wants to be and mean it. It was one of the most moving moments of the entire campaign. When the man who stands as that glittering role model is depicted in crude posters as a monkey eating a banana, what conclusion is that same young boy to draw?

Sarah is right (she is almost always right) that there is danger of putting Obama into a nice neat little corner labelled: the black man. She is correct that there is an absurdity to seeing tormented white liberals agonising over race, although I would rather see that than white conservatives saying that there is nothing to worry about. But I do think President Carter was also right, and if the shining city on the hill is ever to be built, the fetid bog at its foot must be drained. Politely not mentioning it will not make it go away. Surely this is the time when everyone should be talking their heads off?

The Eye of the Beholder

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have been thinking this week about beauty, and the images of it that trap women. Scooting around the internet I have learnt that Saudi women long for nothing more than a nose job, Japanese women are having unspeakable things done to their eyelids, Jordanian women are ashamed of their olive skin and are buying skin whitening products by the bucket, and every last American woman is on a diet. All the fashion insiders are saying, in the wake of the magazine-shows-woman-with-actual-stomach affair, that the idea of models getting any bigger than your little finger is a funny joke.

I suddenly wanted to look at women who did not look like models. I am not anti-beauty. I smile when my eye falls upon lovely Audrey Hepburn, or ravishing Ava Gardner, or bewitching Julie Christie. I have a tremendous penchant for those outrageously stylish ladies of the fifties, like Babe Paley. I came of age in the eighties, when the supermodels were truly super, and Helena Christiansen and Tatjana Patitz and Christy Turlington were in their pomp. But the modelliness of models is now so self-referential that it has started to eat itself, and the actresses, sadly, are following in their wake. There is a sameness to the pictures of today's beauties that feels thin and meaningless. If 'beauty' is all there is to see, then horizons narrow and views warp. I suddenly wanted to cast my eye on women who did not look as if they belonged in a magazine.

So I found these. Some of them are anonymous. Some are famous. One won a Nobel Prize. One revolutionised American cooking. One is a supreme court judge. I like them because they look real to me. Sometimes, authenticity is its own form of beauty.

Something to make you go Ah

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I hate to do this to my non-Blighty readers, for whom the BBC iplayer is a ruthless no go zone, but there is something on there which I think everyone who can see, should see. It is episode two of Stephen Fry's Last Chance to See: The White Rhino. I am not a mad fan of nature programmes, possibly because of having seen too many in my youth. My school thought it educational for us to watch every last episode of David Attenborough that was ever on ever, even though generally they believed television was the work of the Devil. I remember loving them at the time, but once I grew to adulthood the thought of having to see one more fruit bat, or a fellow puffing about in the African bush, or someone doing a special whispery wildlife voice just became too much. So it was in a desultory nothing-else-is-on mood that I sat down to watch this, and only really because it was lovely Stephen. And sure enough, there was the whispering and the puffing about and the fruit bats. But it was all quite fascinating and there was a bit of Congo politics thrown in and some interesting little interchanges between Fry and his conservationist friend, and I learnt the difference between the White Rhino and the Usual Rhino (nothing to do with colour; shape of the mouth, apparently). So I kept on watching. And then, at around twenty-one minutes in, something so unexpected happened that it actually made me cry tears. I am a terrible old weeper, especially over animals, something I inherited from my sentimental Celtic father, but I don't think my reaction was just sentiment. I think this might have been the most confounding and emotional moment I have ever seen in a wildlife documentary. Or maybe I am just a soft old fool. Well, watch it and see. Whether you weep or not, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mvbbx/Last_Chance_to_See_Northern_White_Rhino/

Who is this woman and why does she matter?

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I was having a nice quiet Sunday, browsing around on the interwebs, listening to a fascinating programme on Radio Four about how the Celtic Tiger got caught by the tail, eating cold sausages, and thinking gentle thoughts about autumn, when I stumbled upon the name Rachel Zoe in Miss Whistle's blog. I felt rather like one of those old crusty judges from the 1960s: 'Who ARE these "Beatles"?' (Answer, always: 'A popular beat combo, m'lud.') Luckily, the enduringly considerate Miss Whistle, who is much more well-informed but just as baffled as I, had put a link to a New York Times article about the lady.

As I read it, I had a vague sense of memory. I had read about this person before. I remember thinking that her story was so dull and marginal that it never encroached beyond the edges of my consciousness. There is only room for so much in one brain. The great, drunk, talented John Barrymore would never learn his lines when he went to Hollywood to make films after a long careeer on Broadway; hapless underlings would have to contort themselves with idiot boards. David Niven once asked him why he did not just memorise the damn things, and Barrymore said something like - 'My mind is filled with beauty, the Queen Mab speech, Hamlet's soliloquies, why would I want to fill it with this garbage?'. My mind is not quite as crammed with beauty as Barrymore's was, but it has enough beauty in it for me to give up reading Tatler. I admit to occasional unseemly interest in the odd famous person (for some reason, I am riveted by the opera that is Brangelina) but a story about a stylist has me turning the page.

When I first read about Rachel Zoe she was just blasting into the public square, for a very sad reason. She got thin famous people, and made them thinner, and then told them what to wear. From my lofty perch on the moral high ground, I thought this a poor thing. There is a fabulous running sketch in the current series of The Mitchell and Webb Show, one of the funniest comedy programmes on the BBC (go to the iplayer and listen for yourself) where they have a panel of old ladies asking people to explain what their job is for. This week the old dears got in a futures trader. 'How does it help, dear?' they asked. 'Wouldn't you rather open a little shop?' I felt rather the same about Rachel Zoe. How does it help, exactly? But now she is not just a liminal figure familiar only to those in the know, she has a television show and the kids love her.

Reading the piece in the New York Times, my mouth actually fell open like that of a cartoon character. I felt even more antiquated and out of touch than those old Beatles judges. The money quote: '“It’s such a racket,” said one head of publicity at a major studio, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of angering any actresses who work with Zoe or other top stylists. “During awards season, when you are nominated or presenting an award, then it makes sense to have a stylist. But now, B and C list stars are demanding stylists for everything. The level of insanity is very high. But the bottom line is, if you don’t give them what they want, the actresses say they won’t do any press, that they won’t appear at the premiere. Sometimes I feel like saying, How difficult is it to just go out and buy a dress?”'.

When a publicist at a movie studio, where reality is a faintly elastic concept, says 'the level of insanity is very high', you know that madness has run off the scale. I have been thinking of September 11th over the last few days, as have so many people. I did not write about it here, because it is almost impossible to give it words without sounding portentous or sentimental or filled with platitude. Before that, I was thinking about the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. I was thinking a lot about the Poles. No one can think about the big things all the time, not even me. Even I, with my irredeemably poncy sense of being a femme serieuse, have to wonder occasionally whether all the stories about Jennifer Anniston are true. But when a woman who makes nothing, says nothing of interest, writes nothing, produces nothing, gets paid $6000 dollars a day for dressing very thin people, I start to think that something might have gone a little awry.

A walk in the woods

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Over at The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan has a lovely feature called The View From Your Window. Readers of his blog send in snapshots from wherever they are, from Tokyo to Montana, Bogota to Berlin. The pictures are not always terribly good, but they carry a curious fascination and power, as if they are opening up the world before my very eyes, one snap at a time. I am not in writing mood today, but a glorious Indian summer has descended on Scotland, as if in gentle apology for the rotten actual summer that came before it, so instead of an essay on world affairs, or people's stomachs, or horses I have loved, or recipes I have cooked, I am giving you some views from my walk this morning. (This goes with especial love to my ex-pat readers in California, where the wildfires have been raging: a cool draft of the clear north, to remind you of dear old Blighty.)

Do you see the moon is still up? And the colour of the sky? Sometimes there are no words.

The view right up into the branches of the oldest and gnarliest and most bent of the great horse chestnut trees.

Someone left a table out. I can see no clear reason for it. But it looks rather glorious, abandoned out there in the long grass.

The burn, with the dogwood in full fig. I remember when that dogwood was eight inches tall.

And, of course, one of the dear dogs, because a blog isn't really a blog unless it has a dog in it. Look at her, all ready for her close-up.

In which I am entirely self-indulgent

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have several secret vices. One of my most secret is that when I am in need of reassurance I get out my old racing videos and watch Desert Orchid beating everything in sight. It makes me wildly happy for some reason. It all happened twenty years ago, and yet it never feels old to me.

I was doing this yesterday, and trying to work out what exactly it was about Desert Orchid. He was not the most beautiful horse in training, ‘this woolly thing’, his jockey Simon Sherwood once called him. He did not win everything; there were days when he got beat out of sight by horses whose names are now forgotten. He never went anywhere near the Grand National. And yet he struck a chord in the heart of the nation; crowds would flock to distant courses to see him run; hats would fly in the air on the days when he roared home; hardened commentators gasped when he stood off two strides too soon over his fences. ‘It’s the courage, the courage of the horse,’ one of his fans (he actually had an actual fan club) once said.

It was many things. It was his bold, front-running style. It was his colour, the bright grey that made him stand out. It was the fact that he ran with his ears pricked, which is rare in racing. It was the way that he would give away lumps of weight to other horses and still win. It was that whatever the odds, or the going, or the competition, he would never bloody give up. Sometimes I swear you could almost see him gritting his teeth with determination in a close finish. It was something about his character – the quality that the racing people call, with easy admiration, ‘genuine’. It was, mundanely, that he was around for a while, six long seasons, from his wild novice days, to his seasoned King George triumphs. It was, more fancifully, that he seemed to know, perhaps more than other horses, that he had won, and what that meant. It was that he leapt over his fences like a stag, while others laboured.

He did not come along in a depression, or after a war, like Seabiscuit or Phar Lap, when a weary public needed lifting. It was not exactly that combination of a complicated time and a simple horse. But it was the eighties. It was an era of the rabid free market, of greed is good, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The hard conservative ethos had won the argument. Barrow boys in red braces had taken over the City. Money was everywhere, and conspicuous consumption ruled. The internet age was yet to arrive, and mobile telephones were still the size of bricks, email was hardly dreamt of. Yet there was the suspicion of the globalisation and technology age that was about to dawn; there was the sense of that. Perhaps there was something about the sheer, uncomplicated goodness of this brave white horse that took people back to a simpler time. He was not paid a million pound salary, or troubled by notions of sponsorship, or trammelled by politics. He was what he was; he carried conviction, simplicity and the heart of a lion. He would battle through the mud and the rain to do what he was trained to do, without asking a single question. He held his head high. Perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist that responded to that. The British knew that they could not afford to go back to the dark days of the seventies and the three day week, where bodies lay unburied and rubbish strewed the streets. At the same time, there was a faint sense of contamination in the new age of raw greed and naked free markets; money was growing into a god, and it left a faint aftertaste that no amount of Chardonnay could wash down. Could it have been that this glorious, blazing, grey horse reminded Britons of a simpler, better time? They knew that time only existed in their imaginations, but they craved it still. They needed something to represent it; they needed an icon. Desert Orchid was that icon.

And beyond all that, a truly great horse only comes along once in every three generations. The old racing people, who have seen it all, will usually give you no more than three or four true champions after sixty years watching the game. Almost all of them will say Arkle. They might talk of Mill House. And then they will say Desert Orchid. He was great because he won over hurdles, in a flat gallop; he was great because he won over fences, in a collected canter. He could go over two miles, in the sunshine, and over three and a half miles, in the sleet. The story was that he hated going left-handed, but he battled up the hill at Cheltenham to triumph in atrocious conditions, to take the blue riband of jump racing, the Gold Cup. He made history, by winning the King George Chase four times, even when the doubters said he could not make it. He seemed to delight in proving people wrong. He won 34 races and over £600,000 in prize money. All this counts, and yet that was not quite it.

There was something rare and remarkable in him which set him apart from the herd, and made him such a joy to watch. I remember laughing out loud, when he would put in an extra stride and take off outside the wings, so far away from a fence that you could not believe he would land safely on the other side. I remember yelling my head off when he won his final King George. When he finally, miraculously pulled ahead up that endless Cheltenham hill, I cried like a girl. There was something extra in him, which drew tears from the flintiest of eyes. The x factor, that indefinable thing that put him above the rest, was, I think, in the end, incredibly simple. It was that he loved it.

In which one stomach does not change the world

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I feel I should roll myself up into a crazed ball of words over the Lizzie Miller affair. Everyone else has, after all. It’s a subject on which I feel strongly. I am not famous for being short of an opinion. I am a mouthy feminist. And yet, and yet, I am tempted to say...nothing.

It won’t happen of course. The last time I said nothing was sometime in 1979 and that was because I had bronchitis. But for some reason, I am tempted to say: so what? Here is what happened, for those of you who have been too busy following the murky Al Megrahi business or the increasingly strange debate over American healthcare reform: a very small picture of a pretty model with a slightly protruding stomach appeared in the back pages of Glamour magazine. The readers of Glamour wrote to the editor saying they were very happy to see a photograph of a real woman. The newspapers picked up on it, and decided that it was the end of fashion as we knew it. The model herself, a beautiful 20 year old called Lizzie Miller, added a footnote about the hall of smoke and mirrors that is the magazine business, reopening the airbrushing debate that has been chugging along for some months. In an added twist, it turned out that Miller was too large to model so-called plus size clothes, despite only being a size twelve herself. The headline writers had a nice time: ‘flabulous’, screamed one. The columnists piled all over each other (one tried to be controversial by stating that if women did not have perfection to aim at, what else were they going to do with their time?). The message boards lit up with every variety of comment. And the world said: excusez-moi?

This is my subject. I loathe and abhor the bizarre dictates of the fashion and beauty industries. I get very sad when I see successful women growing thinner and thinner before my very eyes. I feel a tinge of melancholy whenever I think of how hungry Victoria Beckham must have been for the last five years. I refuse to go on diets, because I am too greedy, because I love food, because I will not be told what size I should be. I should be out there shouting with the best of them. But for some reason, I find the whole thing an absurd storm in a silly teacup. India Knight, who is exceptionally good at sailing through hype and hyperbole with a true compass, made much the sanest and most adult point in the acres of type generated on the subject when she said that fashion is theatre, and it should not be confused with anything else. It seems to me that the fevered debate about Lizzie Miller and her little stomach has rather missed the point. One photograph is not going to change an entire zeitgeist. The very same newspaper which ran a banner headline celebrating ‘The Wobbly Bits that Shook the World’ had a long feature only three days later headlined ‘Why I’ll suffer any pain to be beautiful,’ describing the writer’s long, painful odyssey through Botox and Restylane. All the columnists who are celebrating the appearance of a real woman work for newspapers and magazines that constantly push the latest diet, the newest cosmetic miracle, the hottest anti-ageing concoction, the makeover that will save your very soul. In those same pages, unrealistic, airbrushed models wander freely like rare creatures moving across the savannah. Perhaps it is the phoniness and hypocrisy to all this outcry that makes me want to say: move along, nothing to see here.

Lizzie Miller, for all her galvanising honesty, is not going to change anything. Many of the very same writers who were lauding her little stomach last week will be going out to dinner this week and refusing the bread (Yeast! Gluten! Too bloating for words, darling!). Designers are not suddenly going to send size fourteen girls down the catwalk. The diet industry is not going to pack up and go home. The magazines will not put away the airbrush. Real women are not going to be set free by a small photograph on page 194 of one glossy; they will not be liberated by a scatter of over-excited headlines. True liberation comes from stepping away from the spectacle. I love nothing more than a heated debate, and yet I think this latest one is not particularly helpful, because it is too hysterical and too shallow. It does not, in the end, mean much.

I think we all have to do the heavy lifting ourselves. I think we have to work out where true beauty lies, and understand that it means something quite different to everyone. For real freedom, women have to go to the profundities, far away from vociferous commentary and one-dimensional aesthetic imperatives. It is a question of priorities. To love and be loved, to contribute some small thing to the sum total of human happiness, to fulfil your potential: these are the things that matter. Real beauty comes in many forms: the ability to laugh at yourself, the talent for listening, the trick of making really good chicken soup. Random acts of kindness are more lovely than a flat belly. It’s not a snappy headline, but it is true.

A brief visual interlude

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Still ill. My nieces say: four days. They come and see me, making cooing noises, take the dogs out, and whirl away again. I adore them.

Seem to have lost the ability to type, but you know I like to give you something, so here is a little visual treat. Lartigue is one of my favourite photographers in the world. When I very first began collecting, I bought two pictures, without quite meaning to (I had wandered into The Photographers' Gallery, in those days in Great Newport Street, quite by mistake): one by Lee Miller and one by Lartigue. In those days, no one had ever heard of him and he was dirt cheap. Now he is no longer a little fishing village but a global conurbation and you must hock your diamonds to get an original. But in the meantime, feast your eyes on his lovely muse, Renée. And tomorrow I shall have retrieved my facility for bashing away at a keyboard.

Word of the day; or, in which I talk a lot of nonsense

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

My word of the day is actually Oof, because this is the sound I am making every five minutes. I have a low level virus. Nothing as proper as swine flu, just the bog standard everything hurts bug. Both my nieces have had it; it is going round the compound. It consists of: pain all up and down the back, as if one has been kicked by a cross Shetland pony; eyes like boiled sweets; general sense of anomie; glands up like steel hawsers in the neck. I have a little grumble about it on Twitter, and the entire enchanting community rises up like one big mamma and sends me every possible remedy, from whisky to golden seal. I take seriously the suggestion from my friend Miss Whistle, who is herself surviving smoke inhalation from the California wildfires, to add some cayenne pepper to my ginger tea. 'If you can stand it,' she says, unwisely, not knowing that even when filthy ill my competitive spirit will not resist a challenge. So my second word of the day is Aaaahhhh, as I drink the spiciest tea I can bear. I cannot tell whether it is doing me any good, but it is so hot that it diverts the pain from my back to my tongue, giving an impression of relief.

Anyway, none of that is the point. I think there is a point, but my brain in fuzzy. Oh yes: I was wandering listessly around the interweb, because I can't concentrate enough to read a proper book, and my muscles ache too much to allow me to doze, and I must do something to distract myself, and I happened upon an article by the interesting academic Sarah Churchwell about how her students were having trouble with the English language. This kind of thing always makes me sad, and I try to pretend very hard that it is not true. It started me thinking about grammar and language and rules and what matters and what doesn't. Her initial complaint was that none of her students could tell her what a complete sentence was. The Greeks or Americans would be able to tell her in a heartbeat, apparently, but the clueless Britons just mutter 'subject, verb, object'. Oh dear, I thought, that is exactly what I would mutter, and I am a writer. I get all lyrical about the semi-colon. I went to a highly-regarded university in the days when you had to sit a separate exam to get in. Could it be true that all these years I have got it wrong? Yes, says Professor Churchwell, and she has the chops to tell me right from wrong: she teaches at East Anglia, she has been on Newsnight with Martin Amis, she is a serious academic. She says that a correct sentence is: subject, predicate, complete thought. Bugger. I am so fucked.

What is worrying about this is that not only have I been wrong about sentences for the last twenty-five years, but that I may also have been wrong in my central, endlessly repeated idea that you must know the rules of grammar in order to break them. When I thought of writing good English I thought of Picasso, and his blue period. I would wager that not that many people know a huge amount about the blue period, Pablo is so famous for his modernist, deconstructed, back to front paintings. When we think of Picasso we think of Guernica, or those great portraits of Dora Maar or the demoiselles of Avignon. (Memo to self: please try and retrain brain not to use editorial we. Memo back to self: much too ill to think of that now, go away.) The correct, almost classical blue period paintings do not shout Picasso. But my theory was: he had to do those to understand everything he could about perspective and how to use light and the way that oil lies on a canvas, and then, once he knew the serious rules about everything, he could bust out and go wild and put people's noses behind their knees if he wanted to. So my theory went that since I knew everything about grammar, I too could go crazy and create knees with noses behind them. I liked to think of writing like jazz: I wanted to improvise and riff about a bit and, you know, play with the form. (My friend the Man of Letters says a day is not a day unless you have played with the form.) I am not as playful as I would like to be, especially not in non-fiction, not as antic as the late great Stan Gebler Davies or the very much with us Caitlin Moran or the enduring Christopher Hitchens. But the idea was there. And now I discover I was working on a false premise because all the time I did not know what a bloody sentence was.

This, interestingly (or not) is still not the point. That was just a sideshow I was allowing myself because my head hurts. The point was, I got to the end of Professor Churchwell's interesting article and there was the word 'apraxia'. Look it up, she says, I had to. No, no, I thought, not me. I may not know grammar from a hole in the ground, but I know words. Words are my bread and butter, my daily oxygen, my swallows flying south for the winter. Apraxia clearly means something to do with suffocation. I know that. In the end, sheepishly, I looked it up. It means the inability to execute voluntary movement, due to some failure in the cortex. Double bugger and arse.

So I thought: all right, let's get a word of the day thing going on the blog, because even I can't know all the words, in their right order. Probably Martin Amis does not know all the words. Although Will Self clearly does. I'll find a nice little word of the day site and paste it in or something, I thought. An occasional series, I thought, I like those. And I went to the Dictionary.com word of the day, which was just what I was looking for, and it said: Carom. Carom? I said. Come on. There is no way that is a word. Someone is having a laugh. They mean careen, surely. It's not even one of those technical terms with very limited use referring only to a particular moment in the moon's waxing or waning. It means, apparently: a glancing off, or, to strike and rebound. People do it in snooker all the time. I used to play snooker with handsome boys in louche pool halls at the wrong end of Westbourne Grove in the days when Westbourne Grove had a wrong end, and not one of them ever used the word carom. They did not say: 'Good lord, that ball is caroming about today.' I shall not tell you what they did say, for legal reasons. So now I don't know what to think. I suppose that Carom must be my word for the day, but I think that chagrin might be more appropriate. I think that snookered might fit the bill better. I think that I might have been better off if I had just stuck with oof and been done with it.