Heroism

For a few months, when I was a teenager, I knew a woman called Eve Hall. My obituary of her appears in the Guardian, today:

One summer's afternoon in 1970, by the banks of the river Cherwell in Oxford, I went on a picnic and received a political and culinary education. Eve Hall, who has died aged 70, was the wife of my new boss, and she explained to me that the secret of a good potato salad was to use new potatoes and to toss them in olive oil while they were still hot. Sprinkled with finely chopped parsley, they seemed to me then, aged 19, the epitome of continental sophistication.

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As we ate, Eve went on to tell me, equally insouciantly, of her time in a South African jail. In a case that had startled the white community in the early 1960s, she was one of four women - "mothers and housewives" - sentenced to six months' imprisonment for a clandestine leaflet and poster campaign promoting the banned ANC.

Eve was born in Paris to a Jewish father and a German mother (her uncle was a famous actor in the Munich theatre). The second world war broke out while her father was visiting South Africa, and her mother was left behind to cope with a half-Jewish child under Nazi occupation - she refused to pin the yellow star on her daughter's clothes. In contrast, her sister-in-law, an opera singer, wore hers with pride, only to be taken from the street to an unknown death camp. Eve's paternal grandmother died in Treblinka.

Arriving in South Africa after the war to join her father, Eve later enrolled at Witwatersrand University, where she met her future husband, Tony. Together, they became, in their own words: "Gypsy journalists and development workers." Eve joined the ANC the day after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Four years later, after being listed as members of a banned organisation and prohibited from being published, the couple were forced to leave South Africa with their three sons and banned from ever returning.

Read the rest here

Thought for the day

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only. Samuel Butler

High heels

I have added a poll at the right-hand side - High heels: Empowering for women or the contemporary equivalent of Chinese foot-binding?

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below in support of your beliefs.

Designer Warehouse Sale, London

Next date, November 30

Bring sharp elbows

Hollywood Writers' Strike

I support. There's an old joke about the starlet who was so stupid that she slept with the scriptwriter. American tv is in its golden age at the moment, and that's because of the phenomenal quality of the writing. So pay for it.

Comrades, the massed ranks of the Society of Authors are behind you all the way.

Meanwhile, aspiring writers who think there's a living to be made from literature, should check this out.

Jellyfish

Last night I saw the second London screening of the film Jellyfish directed by my friend Etgar Keret and written by his wife, actress Shira Geffen.

They won the Camera D'Or at Cannes this year.

A young waitress whose boyfriend has just left her finds a little girl wearing nothing but a rubber ring around her body, wandering on the beach. A Filipino care worker, a long way from home, looks after the cantankerous mother of a busy actress while homesick for her own little boy. A bride gets locked into the toilet at her wedding reception, climbs over the top of the compartment and injures her leg, so they have to honeymoon at home. A beautiful woman has taken a hotel suite all by herself.

These stories play out separately, occasionally interconnecting. The sea, full of mysteries, draws all of them, vivid and blue. Full of longings, hidden pain, the legacy of suffering pervades this film yet it is charming and beautiful, sad and hilarious.



This is an ice cream seller on the beach. The actor is Etgar's father, and he's some story in his own right. He's in the hospital right now, but Etgar says he's getting better. Some survivor.

I dreamt of this film all night long.

The war within

I had a cortisone injection on my left ankle on Wednesday. Every since then my left foot has been contorted into an awkward position, hanging around my left ear, begging, wheedling, demanding, that I buy it these.



However the rest of my body has sent up a more deafening crescendo. 'Don't listen. If you buy those, you'll wind up looking like this.'




And furthermore the whole business might end up here.

Or worse, like this

The only kind of non-old lady slippers are red leather Moroccan mules, with artificially pointed toes, an Aladdin's lamp air about, them and preferably some gold around the toes.

Thought for the day

It's almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim you are beautiful. Edith Wharton

Items in the news

The great Hilary Alexander in the Telegraph reports that the Ossie Clark label is going to be relaunched, headed by Avsh Alom Gur, who has previously worked with Donna Karan and Chloe, at the next London Fashion Week. That's Clark, to the left, and his then wife , Celia Birtwell, in a double portrait by David Hockney which hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.

Last week Gap was exposed for using child labour. Seven days on and it's planning a new Sweatshop-free label

Yesterday, Gap's senior vice president, Stanley Raggio, flew from San Francisco to New Delhi to meet the anti-sweatshop charity the Global March Against Child Labour, to hammer out proposals to tackle child labour.

According to Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer from the charity, the US conglomerate set out a series of ambitious proposals including a move that would see it relabelling its garments to allow the consumer to directly track online exactly where they are made.

The system would closely mirror the highly successful RugMark programme which has largely eradicated child labour in India's carpet industry.

The Observer also has a piece on COS, which is an H&M owned label only available in Europe. When I was in Berlin a year ago, I noticed it really seemed to have take off there and the Regent Street store in London is always busy. I haven't bought anything quite yet, but the colours and minimalist shapes are very good. As Polly Vernon says here, it's excellent for affordable staples.

And a review of the third volume of John Richardson's biography of Picasso:

Picasso with an immaculately svelte wife on his arm was an indefatigable socialite, always present on the sidelines of the innumerable mock battles staged by Parisians in this era of brawl and counter-brawl, pillow fights at fancy-dress balls, turbulent first nights, openings disrupted by Dadaist punch-ups and Surrealist reprisals. Politics passed Picasso by. So did the bleak realities of social and financial disintegration in postwar France. Even the final throes of the 1914-18 war seem to have impinged on him chiefly as a tiresome inconvenience that cut off supplies, detained friends at the front, and interfered with Diaghilev's ballet bookings ('German and Austrian troops had broken through the Italian lines, so Rome was out; the third battle of Ypres was going badly, so Paris was out...').

Thought for the day

Photocredit, The Sartorialist

Style is not something applied. It is something inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. Wallace Stevens

Scent

Miller Harris perfume (the one in the picture is not the one I wear)

Wedding dress made out of toilet paper

This is the winner of a contest for the best wedding dress made out of toilet paper.* I have no idea whether the dress as going to be worn on the actual Big Day (what if it rains? was the sensible point made by English recipients of the email in which I received it.)

I think this toilet paper wedding dress thing comes from American bridal showers. Still, I find something touchingly heroic in the enormous amount of time, patience, ingenuity and imagination given by the contestants to this pointless but almost poetic task, like the baffling hobby, popular in England in the 1950s, of building models of Salisbury cathedral out of used matches.

* with thanks to Susan Paley who sent it to me

Thought for the day

Think of dress in every light
'Tis woman's chiefest duty:
Neglecting that, ourselves we slight
And undervalue beauty.
That allures the lover's eye,
And graces every action;
Besides, when not a creature's by,
'Tis inward satisfaction.
John Gay 1685-1732

Something UK shoppers should know about

Fashion Confidential

Tales my mother told me

Some time ago, I was talking to the daughter of a Most Distinguished Intellectual. ‘I had a very difficult relationship with my mother,’ she told me. I was astounded. Nothing could have pleased me better than to have grown up in Hampstead, in a political, book-lined home where they read the Guardian over the breakfast table and discussed its contents; where it was taken for granted that you would go to Oxford, and where there was no pressure to get married, have children and make your mother a grandmother.

What was wrong with her, I asked. ‘Oh, you know, she was very angry with the Nazis for stealing her childhood, she could be very bitter. But she did teach me some important values about opposing oppression, and feminism of course. Are there any lessons your mother taught you that have stayed with you, Linda?’

We were driving through Swiss Cottage at the time, held up at the traffic lights. I tried to think. My mother was not an intellectual, she read the Daily Mail, lived for shopping and what-will-the-neighbours-think and was also a difficult woman, but for different reasons altogether. But indeed, I suddenly realised, she had taught me an important lesson and it had not only stayed with me all my life but I could consider it a defining part of my identity.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She taught me that a good handbag makes the outfit.’

‘I wish my mother had taught me something useful like that.’

Two days after the 7/7 London bombings, understanding that if I didn’t get on the tube now, maybe I never would, I set off on the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus. Police with heavy weaponry milled about on the platform, the passengers were jittery. Rescue workers were still trying to retrieve bodies in the deep tunnels below us. I got out at Oxford Circus, into a profound, sunny morning, high blue skies and walked up to Selfridges. Inside I passed a man from Liverpool on the phone: I’m alright, Mum, there’s no bombs, I’m just trying on a Paul Smith jacket, I’ll ring you back.’ When people shop, life goes on.*

In the January sales in Harvey Nichols a few months earlier, I had bought a purple DKNY coat, and on the way out passed a cream/pink Furla handbag which was one of those coup de foudre, fall in love encounters frustrated by my bank balance. Now, in Selfridges, seven months later, it was the very last day of the summer sales, with an additional 10 per cent off to lure in terrified Londoners (because that’s what terrorism’s goal is, not merely to kill but to terrify those who survive). And there it was, my bag, patiently waiting for me, reduced from £330 to £93.

That bag was later stolen, recovered by the police with most of its contents gone, its leather subsequently ruined in a very heavy downpour in Budapest but I can’t quite throw it out because it was, in its time one of the best bags I have ever owned. It made every outfit I wore it with.

Eventually I replaced it. This came about because of my historic (for me) meeting with Anya Hindmarch and her wares when Alexandra Shulman sent me off to her Pont street shop after a fruitless five-day search for a brown day bag. Buying bags is about finding the best one you can possibly afford that is a classic - that is not a bag that you have seen in a magazine on the arm of a celebrity (which she got for free, 'gifted' by the designer) and which will be out of date in three months. A magazine editor told me that 20-year-old girls on £14,000 pa are buying £1000 handbags and going into crippling credit card debt to pay for them. Bags they will be ashamed to be seen with in a year.

If the best bag you can afford is an Hermes Birkin, buy it. If it’s a Chanel 2:55, buy it, if it’s an Anya Hindmarch Carker, buy it, if it’s a Furla buy it. It’s not a pet, it’s not a Xmas tree decoration, it’s an accessory. It’s designed to be right for the occasion, whether it’s going to work or going to a party, and it’s designed to pull together the rest of your outfit. Were I have to surrender all but three bags from my own collection they would be: my brown Carker, a red suede Fendi baguette, and a sequined evening bag inherited from my mother.

When she died in 1999, we put in her death notice in the Jewish Chronicle, ‘She taught us to respect others, that a bowl of chicken soup can cure almost anything, and a good handbag makes the outfit.’ I’ve worn her evening bag to Vogue parties thinking of the day, sometime back in the Fifties when she bought it, little knowing that from suburban Liverpool it would one day be held with pride and affection, with no jealousy at all of what Kate Moss had on her arm (Pete Doherty, as it happens.) It makes the outfit every time.

Norm has something to add

A small but important addition

To my very small blog roll I have added the site of my friend Lisa Goldman. The Thoughtful Dresser is not a political blog but from time to time it does reflect some of my wider interests. Lisa is a Vancouver-born Canadian-Israeli journalist, now based in Tel Aviv. Building up to the summer of 2006 she worked to make contact with bloggers on the other side of the sealed border with Lebanon. When the war started and the bombs fell she insisted on doing everything she could to maintain contact with the ordinary individuals, bloggers and journalists like herself, who were supposed to be her enemies. She insisted on not accepting the demonisation and dehumanisation which is a characteristic of this conflict. She embodies for me the quote from Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate, on the sidebar (a book which at some point I will write more of): 'The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and his right to these peculiarities.'

Prohibited from entering Lebanon because she holds, in addition to her Canadian passport, an Israeli one, she nevertheless went there this summer. The discovery, after she left, prompted a scathing editorial in the Beirut Daily Star accusing her of being a spy. The hundreds of emails and comments she received from Lebanese civilians thanking her for her visit, proves Grossman's maxim.

There are evil people in the world, but most of us merely struggle from day to day to find joy in whatever interests us, in love in friendship, in clothes or football. Flawed and often failing, we must nevertheless do what we can to live our lives in the circumstances, societies and political systems in which we find ourselves and sometimes we must struggle to change what is intolerable about those societies and systems. But mostly, we just live. And being alive is a unique wonder of its own.

Thought for the day

Now I'm trying to decide: Do I care more about clothing or about literature? There isn't any great difference. I respect clothing because it is literature. Wayne Koestenbaum

If you can't go shopping then read about shopping

In The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping which has arrived in the post today from my publisher. It contains, amongst many literary treats, an extract from my family memoir, Remind Me Who I Am Again, about a shopping trip with my mother when she was unable to remember who I was or how we were related but still managed to pick out a Ralph Lauren suit for herself.

Guilt

There is currently a riveting discussion on BBC Radio Four's In Our Time series about guilt* and particularly the difference between guilt cultures and shame cultures, which some say has a bearing on contemporary political disputes, particularly in the Middle East. The concept of honour and shame, in fact was a characteristic of much of the past European millenimum, particularly amongst the English upper classes, but was much pretty much left for dead on the killing fields of the Somme and Passchendale. Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori. You can hear it on the listen again link on the site or download a podcast.

* How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? None, I'll just sit here alone the dark

What do these three men have in common?

A few years ago, I was having lunch at Moro in Clerkenwell Market with the then women's page editor of the Guardian. Sitting at the next table were a group of adoring acolytes hanging on the every word of a flat bloke with a blonde bristly head like a pig, dressed in combats encasing thighs which oozed like over-ripe Camembert sluggishly running off the edge of his chair.

That, said my lunch companion, is Alexander McQueen.

And a spasm of pure rage passed through me. Who was this fat bastard to tell women that they were obese if they couldn't fit into a size 10? To make clothes that half the population couldn't wear? I am tired of fat men telling non-skeletal women that they don't exist. Granted, McQueen, like Lagerfeld, with the assistance of the finest trainers money can buy and no obligation to prepare family meals three times a day, have slimmed down, or in the case of Lagerfeld, turned himself into his own corpse, but fashion is full of fat men (sorry Alber, I really love you in every other way) giving normal-sized women an inferiority complex.

I had my picture take a couple of weeks ago to go with a magazine piece I'm doing . There was a photographer, a picture editor, a make-up artist and the manager of Hobbs all involved in this operation, and after the make-up artist had bemoaned that she couldn't find a pair of trousers to fit her in Zara, the photographer said that one her friends was a plus-sized model. 'What's plus size?' I asked. It's size 12 (US8) she told me.

Myself, I'd put every man in fashion who weighs over 150 pounds on the Atkins diet. And don't come back until you can fit into skinny jeans.