Of chocolate, Horlicks, and furs

So, my son arrived home safely, via Virgin, and term has started again, and the days are getting a little longer, and slowly, slowly, the winter nights will move toward spring.
I am not good at the winter, but have been doing my best to see the bright side, after feeling (literally) under the weather. (Such a true expression, when the skies are low and grey.) A very kind friend brought me a large box of Celebrations and a jar of Horlicks, both of which are good. I've discovered that Horlicks Light is not the same as the real thing (you add water, yuk, instead of mixing a paste with milk, like in the old days), but Horlicks Original still exists, hurrah.
Have also been much cheered by I re-reading I Capture The Castle, and laughing about the episode with the fur coats. Chapter 6: Rose and Cassandra visit London for the day, after the death of their Aunt Millicent, who has left them her furs. This is a surprise, as Cassandra has always believed that Aunt Millicent disapproved of furs. Anyway, they go to pick them up from the storage department of a shop that sounds to me like Harrods as it once was:
'The pale grey carpets were as springy as moss and the air was scented; it smelt a bit like bluebells but richer, deeper.
"What does it smell of, exactly?" I said. And Rose said:
"Heaven."'

However, Aunt Millicent's furs are revealed to be very unheavenly: 'We shook them out and examined them. There were two very long coats, one of them black and shaggy and the other smoothish and brown; a short, black tight-fitting jacket with leg o'mutton sleeves; and a large hairy rug with a green felt border.
"But whatever animals were they?" I gasped.
The white-haired woman inspected them gingerly. She said the brown coat was beaver and the short jacket, which had a rusty look under its black, was sealskin. She couldn't identify the rug at all -- it looked like collie dog to me...'

All this from the author of The One Hundred and One Dalmations. I'd love to have had the chance to ask Dodie Smith what she really thought about fur... She writes about the desire for it (the fur department of the heavenly shop smells different, 'an exciting smell') and its ugliness, as well as its dark allure. She wrote 'I Capture The Castle' on the West Coast of America, at the end of the second world war, while terribly homesick for England; the Dalmations came later, in the 1950s. But where on earth did Cruella de Vil spring from? Perhaps not earth -- she is too Satanic... but I always thought it intriguing to discover that as a schoolgirl, Cruella drank ink.

Snow white and the mean reds

It's cold outside -- well below zero, and the snow on the ground has frozen into an icy mask -- and I am feeling anxious (I'm waiting for my younger son to fly home from New York tomorrow, and I wish he was here, home safely). My mind has been lurching all over the place, and in between pacing, I've remembered the bit from Breakfast at Tiffany's, when Holly Golightly explains about the mean reds. They're not the same as the blues, she says:
'No, the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is...'

I'm not sweating -- it's much too chilly, even with the heating on -- and I think perhaps I've got a touch of the dark blues, rather than the mean reds.
And no chocolate in the house, nor any Horlicks. Tonight I need Horlicks in bed, not Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Of snow and ghosts

More snow has fallen, and I ventured out this morning, wrapped up in more layers of padding than a Michelin woman. Aberdeenshire looks beautiful but unrecognizable from the place I first came to in June. Back then, I picnicked beside the loch that you can see in the second picture; or rather, you can't see it, because it's iced over and covered with thick snow.
The gates look like the ones that lead to Rebecca's Manderley, I think, although no ghosts are visible here in Tillypronie. True, it has a touch of the Gothic about it, like Du Maurier's 'House of Secrets', or Bly, the mansion in Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw', which is as much a part of the narrative as Manderley in 'Rebecca' -- set alone, far from any other dwelling, surrounded by woods and hills, and hidden from the road. But even though Henry James visited here, it's not as brooding as Bly. Nor is there any sign of the sinister ghosts that whisper in those houses. In fact, this house feels like a friend, especially when it's cold outside.
But if anyone is still brooding about 'The Turn of the Screw' -- as I am, after watching its dramatization on the BBC earlier this week, transposed from the end of the 19th century to just after the First World War (a fictionalising of a fiction that seemed to come to a dead end, at least for me, in a much less expert way than James' own narrative within a narrative) -- here is a passage from James' original novel; a single sentence that twists like the novella in which it appears. (Sadly, as you will have noticed from this blog, I don't possess a fraction of James' mastery of long sentences.) Although the BBC drama was spooky -- the governess particularly unsettling -- I still think the book is far more frightening; more ambiguous, closer to the edge of madness, and beyond into the darkness of the true unknown...

'The limit of this evil time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter’s morning, Peter Quint was found, by a labourer going to work, stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained—superficially at least—by a visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced (and as, on the final evidence, had been) by a fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the public-house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay.'

Happy New Year

New Year's Day in Aberdeenshire, and the snow is deep on the ground. I've never been to Scotland in winter until now, and it's astonishing for a Londoner like me to see the Highlands at this time of year. Icicles hanging from the rooftops, drifts of snow up to my waist when I tried to go for a walk in the woods (which look like Narnia), and last night, the most eerie moonlight at midnight. It was a full moon on New Year's Eve, and as we peered out into the darkness, it turned out not to be dark at all. At first, I thought perhaps I was seeing the Northern Lights -- for the first time ever -- but it looked more like Moominland, with the snowy peaks of Morven clearly visible in a strange green light. We could see all the way into the distance, beyond Morven, to the far hills that would usually be shrouded in velvety black. In such powerful moonlight, you could imagine werewolves coming down from the mountain, through the trees and into the garden; fortunately, the only creature that made itself heard was a chocolate brown cocker spaniel called Bill, who was snoring gently on his sheepskin rug.
It's snowing again now, but I am warm inside, and about to light a fire and eat some Bendick's Bitter Mints (particularly good on New Year's Day, I think, because they give the illusion of being refreshing.)
Here's a New Year thought from a local minister, who preached in these parts over a century ago, and he in turn provides an appropriate introduction to Lord Byron, who once walked the hills that I now gaze upon, all pristine and covered in snow. Byron wrote the poem in 1807, inspired by crags of Morven, as well as the curves of a female form. It's a bit gloomy in parts (well, Byronic, as to be expected), but less melancholy, I decided, than posting Thomas Hardy's 'The Darkling Thrush', which the poet dated December 31st 1900, striking a memorably bleak note for the new century.

"For the improvement of the human being himself much has been attempted, and it is to be hoped, something accomplished. In the departments of education and sanitation we have seen quite a revolution. Amid all these changes we trust there is one respect in which we have remained unimpaired – in the love of our kindred and love of our country. May the day be distant when the materialism of this cosmopolitan age shall so blunt the sensibilities of the youth reared under the shadow of Morven that wherever they roam their hearts should fail to be warmed by the strains of the youthful Byron, who sang so sweetly: –

Rev. John G. Michie, History of Logie-Coldstone and Braes of Cromar, 1896



When I rov’d a young Highlander o’er the dark heath,
And climb’d thy steep summit, oh Morven of snow!
To gaze on the torrent that thunder’d beneath,
Or the mist of the tempest that gather’d below;
Untutor’d by science, a stranger to fear,
And rude as the rocks, where my infancy grew,
No feeling, save one, to my bosom was dear;
Need I say, my sweet Mary, ’twas centred in you?

Yet it could not be Love, for I knew not the name, –
What passion can dwell in the heart of a child?
But, still, I perceive an emotion the same
As I felt, when a boy, on the crag-cover’d wild:
One image, alone, on my bosom impress’d,
I lov’d my bleak regions, nor panted for new;
And few were my wants, for my wishes were bless’d,
And pure were my thoughts, for my soul was with you.

I arose with the dawn, with my dog as my guide,
From mountain to mountain I bounded along;
I breasted the billows of Dee’s rushing tide,
And heard at a distance the Highlander’s song:
At eve, on my heath-cover’d couch of repose.
No dreams, save of Mary, were spread to my view;
And warm to the skies my devotions arose,
For the first of my prayers was a blessing on you.

I left my bleak home, and my visions are gone;
The mountains are vanish’d, my youth is no more;
As the last of my race, I must wither alone,
And delight but in days, I have witness’d before:
Ah! splendour has rais’d, but embitter’d my lot;
More dear were the scenes which my infancy knew:
Though my hopes may have fail’d, yet they are not forgot,
Though cold is my heart, still it lingers with you.

When I see some dark hill point its crest to the sky,
I think of the rocks that o’ershadow Colbleen;
When I see the soft blue of a love-speaking eye,
I think of those eyes that endear’d the rude scene;
When, haply, some light-waving locks I behold,
That faintly resemble my Mary’s in hue,
I think on the long flowing ringlets of gold,
The locks that were sacred to beauty, and you.

Yet the day may arrive, when the mountains once more
Shall rise to my sight, in their mantles of snow;
But while these soar above me, unchang’d as before,
Will Mary be there to receive me? – ah, no!
Adieu, then, ye hills, where my childhood was bred!
Thou sweet flowing Dee, to thy waters adieu!
No home in the forest shall shelter my head, –
Ah! Mary, what home could be mine, but with you?

At midnight in the snow

I've just been for a midnight walk along the snowy streets, where everything is silent beneath the covering of white. There's no sound of cars -- the roads are too icy for drivers to get out -- and London is quieter than I've ever heard it. There is still a distant humming from faraway (of I know not what; but the city is never entirely still).
And as I was walking, I thought of the year that led up to this quiet moment. It began amidst the turmoil of great grief (for me, at least; although all the clamour of my sorrow is so small in this huge world), and is now coming to a close in a more peaceful way. If I have learnt one thing in the turning of the year, it is that however much one might want to be dull the pain of loss, it cannot be evaded; and yet unexpected joys can still appear out of nowhere, and a sense of blessing descends, even when you feared that the sky was falling down.
On Friday, I went to the funeral of a mentor, Paul Eddy, who I was fortunate enough to work for as a young journalist at the Sunday Times. The tributes were eloquent and moving, as were the words of the vicar, who said something very simple yet resonant: which is that at the end of a life, the most important thing is to know what it is to love, and to be loved.
He also quoted from a poet named John O'Donohue, an Irish writer, Celtic scholar and philosopher, who I hadn't come across before; and as is often the case, I then caught a few lines from the same poet on the radio a couple of days later (coincidence, or a chiming of the universe, or a blend of the two; the most potent magic of all).
So here is a poem by John O'Donohue; the Gaelic title is 'Beannacht'

Blessing

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

Advent Calendar

Last night I went to the Breast Cancer Care carol service at St Paul's cathedral, which was beautifully Christmas-y; and it felt like such a great privilege to sit within that inspiring church. As a Londoner, it's easy to take the city's grandest architecture for granted (head down, rushing through the streets, rarely looking up to the skyline) but whenever I emerge out of the fuggy darkness of the underground station at St Paul's, to be confronted by the graceful outline of the cathedral, I always feel glad to be alive.
I've been involved with the charity since 1998, after my sister died of breast cancer (I co-founded the Lavender Trust that year, which provides Breast Cancer Care's services for younger women); the carol service is one of many fundraising events through the year, and perhaps the loveliest. The cathedral choir sang like angels, and there were some wonderful readings, including this poem by Rowan Williams, read by Jeremy Irons. I hadn't come across it before, but thought it worth sharing with you.

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf's fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud's folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

· From The Poems of Rowan Williams, published by Perpetua Press

Shanghai Uncut

Here's the piece I wrote about Chanel in Shanghai in today's Sunday Telegraph newspaper. It was very deftly edited to fit the page, but I thought I'd also post the uncut version, in case anyone wants a bit more detail on history etc. There's also a good review of the show on style.com by Sarah Mower, an interesting writer who is always worth reading.

Front row at the Chanel’s first fashion show in Shanghai, and the view is very different to the usual one of poker-faced editors in dark shades on the other side of the catwalk. Tonight, the entire audience is facing in the same direction, perched in a giant glass box on top of a barge moored on the edge of the Huangpu River, overlooking the extraordinary skyline of high-rises across the water in the booming financial district of Pudong. The night sky is alight with neon – translucent, surreal, glittering in a way that Karl Lagerfeld described earlier this afternoon as ‘magical, with colours that look somehow different to Europe, and a kind of transparency about them’. Tallest of all is the Shanghai World Financial Centre, 100 gleaming glass storeys outlined in turquoise blue lights, its top floors occupied by the Park Hyatt, the highest hotel in the world. Alongside is the giant HSBC tower and the Aurora skyscraper, where ‘Chanel’ is flashing in black and white lights up its vertiginous walls; and other towers loom like 21st century pastiches of Gotham City, with edges jagged as cartoon monster robots, or intersected with giant pink pearls.

In the dark waters of the river below, half a dozen police boats keep watch over the Chanel extravaganza, guarding the government officials inside the glass box who have been invited to see the show, along with the international fashion press and Chinese clients. Thus the official representatives of the People’s Republic of China sit side by side with Shanghai billionaires, while Vanessa Paradis (the new face of Chanel’s Coco Rouge advertising campaign) chats to Carine Roitfeld, editor of French Vogue. The proceedings kick off with a short film directed by Karl Lagerfeld, entitled ‘Paris Shanghai: a fantasy’, in which he imagines Coco Chanel travelling to the city in her dreams, and swapping her own couture jacket for a Chairman Mao jacket in the 1960s. The Chinese audience laughs, apparently amused by the idea; as they are by the scenes in the film that depict Chanel in the gambling dens and nightclubs of Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s, accompanied by the Duchess of Windsor and Marlene Dietrich. Thus the cultural references for the collection that follows are clearly delineated: little red dresses and little red bags (Chanel’s take on Mao’s Little Red Book); black transparent chiffon frocks glittering with red sequins (ready-to-wear for cocktails aboard the Shanghai Express); reinvented Chanel tweed jackets and suits in jade-green or Chinese red, accessorized with thigh-high boots, shiny as Oriental lacquer; white camellias and gold embroidery, reflecting the intricate designs on the 18th century Oriental Coromandel screens that Chanel collected, and which lined the walls of her Paris apartment and her suite at the Ritz.

After the show, phalanxes of policemen stop the traffic on the street outside the Peninsula hotel, as the audience stream into the Chanel party in the ballroom. Some of the government officials depart in sleek black limousines, guarded by dark-suited security men, but several hundred of the guests go straight from the catwalk to the Peninsula, along marble-floored corridors decorated with thousands of gilt Christmas baubles, past the brand-new Chanel boutique and its window display of handbags in bright pink, dragon red and emerald green.

This afternoon, even before the show began, the boutique was already doing booming business. It’s not the first in China – Chanel opened up in Beijing ten years ago – but it’s the biggest, selling to the fastest growing market in the world (currently galloping ahead at 20 per cent a year, with sales of luxury goods predicted to reach $12 billion in China by 2010, pushing Japan into second place in global consumption).

Less than 48 hours after opening, the Chanel boutique had sold out of the limited edition red handbags that Lagerfeld had created especially for Shanghai, and customers were adding their names to a lengthening waiting list. The price was 28,800 yuan – about £3000 – in a city where the average monthly wage is 2,000 yuan; but money seems to be no object to the girls who flit around the boutique, trying on shoes and jewellery with the practised alacrity of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Glossy haired and immaculately manicured, they flash top of the range mobile phones and diamond rings; and most of them are already carrying Chanel handbags from recent collections, while their mothers wear Chanel tweed jackets, and smile indulgently, enthroned on Louis XV armchairs.

If the Chanel opening in Shanghai seems emblematic of a new era in global consumerism – the most iconic of luxury brands expanding into the People’s Republic of China – there are precedents in the recent past, as well as in previous decades, when Shanghai was christened the ‘Paris of the East’. Lanvin and Valentino opened boutiques in one of the city’s glitziest shopping malls last month, while Prada and Armani will soon be moving into the Peninsula alongside Chanel. Louis Vuitton has also made its presence felt in the city this week, presenting ‘Hair Room Service’ at the Park Hyatt by John Nollett, a famous French hairstylist who works with Uma Thurman and Diane Kruger, amongst others, and styled Vanessa Paradis’s hair for the Chanel party, where she performed a sultry 1930s nightclub act. Meanwhile, the fashion designer John Galliano checked into the Park Hyatt in Shanghai a few days ago, overseeing David Lynch’s new ad campaign for Dior, which is being shot at different locations in the city.

You can see why a filmmaker like Lynch would be as drawn to Shanghai as a designer steeped in the history of fashionable Orientalism. For as Lagerfeld commented before the Chanel show, the city is as much an idea as a reality for the West, ‘a mysterious place that is a great inspiration, with its intriguing mix between the contemporary and past Shanghai.’ Lagerfeld’s film suggested as much, with its hints of the Duchess of Windsor’s notorious past in Shanghai (rumour has it that she honed her sexual expertise here in the 1920s), and its references to Marlene Dietrich’s 1930s movies set in the city (‘Shanghai Express’ and ‘The House of Seven Sinners’, co-starring John Wayne).

But as Lagerfeld also observed, much of old Shanghai has disappeared, except in the imagination of romantic Westerners. True, he gave a dinner on the evening before his show at the Yongfoo Elite Club in the French quarter of the city, a former consulate decorated with authentic 1920s furnishings. Outside, the streets are still lined with plane trees planted by the European colonials, and a maze of traditional Chinese lanes is hidden behind the Art Deco facades, testament to the co-existing worlds that have existed in Shanghai since the end of the first Opium War in 1842. After the British attacked and invaded the city, they demanded that it become an open trading port, with a colonial settlement within Shanghai that was run entirely under British law; similar treaties were enforced by the French and Americans in 1844. Thus a westernised city evolved, but local poverty was far from eradicated. J.G Ballard, who was born to English parents in Shanghai in 1930, described its pre-war days as ‘90% Chinese and 100% Americanised’, with an international colony of about 50,000 people. ‘It was celebrated as the wickedest city in the world, though as a child I knew nothing about the thousands of bars and brothels. Unlimited venture capitalism rode in gaudy style down streets lined with beggars showing off their sores and wounds. Every day the trucks of the Shanghai municipal council roamed the streets collecting the hundreds of bodies of destitute Chinese who had starved to death. Partying, cholera and smallpox somehow coexisted with a small English boy's excited trips in the family Buick to the countryclub swimming pool.' He witnessed 'young Chinese gangsters in American suits; beggars fighting over their pitches; a vast firework displayed celebrating a new night-club while armoured cars of the Shanghai police drove into a screaming mob of rioting factory workers.' Open sewers flowed into the river and the whole city 'reeked of dirt, disease and a miasma of cooking fat from thousands of Chinese food vendors. Anyway was possible and everything could be bought and sold.'

After the Japanese invasion of the Second World War, Ballard was interned in a camp in Shanghai with his parents, witnessing some of the horrors of those years. When the Communists took over in 1949, they deemed Shanghai to be decadent, and its trading activities became dormant, the majestic mansions and banks requisitioned. Closed to the West, and decaying, it did not emerge until well after the modernizing reforms of Deng Xiao Ping. But the city has been growing at a dizzying pace since the early 90s, its air filled with the dust of demolition and construction; the grey clay churned over and over in the building of new six-lane motorways and monumental bridges; shanties bull-dozed for hundreds of new sky-scrapers and the 2010 World Expo, a vast international exhibition site taking shape alongside the Huangpu river.

Shanghai is as famous now for its pollution as its rampant economic growth, and the streets are filled with traffic jams, crawling beneath giant hoardings for Mercedes Benz. Some murmur that the boom will go bust, that the skyscrapers will crack with subsidence. And yet you can still sense the same vast appetite that Aldous Huxley described in the 1920s. ‘Nothing more intensely living can be imagined,’ he wrote, feeling the city to be so ‘tenaciously alive’ that it would last for ‘a thousand years hence’.

Whatever the modern contradictions that are apparent in the city today – and there are many – it nevertheless continues living at a fast and furious pace; a throbbing hub of trading where Jimmy Choo’s new line for H&M’s flagship Shanghai store sold out in minutes last month, and was being hawked for twice the price on the pavement afterwards. The overwhelming sense is of a young consumer population, fast becoming fluent in the language of Western celebrity culture, as well as their own. They read Chinese editions of In Style, Cosmo, Elle and Vogue, and are adept in the A to Z of European fashion, from Armani to Zara; they watch American television shows and listen to Lady Gaga. ‘Madonna is over,’ says a Chinese journalist from In Style, when I ask her about the current celebrity stakes, ‘Gossip Girl and Twilight are really popular now.’

As for the affluent Chanel customers: they shimmied at the after-show party with the same enthusiasm as they had shopped at the new boutique. Two of the most glamorous girls there – one in a new-season black Chanel dress, another in the label’s signature pearl-trimmed jacket – chatted to me about their love of fashion. Both had grown up in eminent government families; both were now regulars in the pages of Chinese Vogue. The girl in the pearl jacket introduced herself as Bao Bao Wan, the granddaughter of Wan Li, formerly vice premier of the People’s Republic of China, later chairman of the National People’s Congress. She had studied photography at Sarah Lawrence College in the US and French literature in Paris, where she attended the Bals de Debutantes.

What would her grandfather make of the scene at the Chanel party, I asked her, as we watched Vanessa Paradis sing to a whooping audience in the cream-carpeted Penisula ballroom? “He’s very open-minded,’ said Bao Bao, with a charming smile. And then she sashayed off on her high-heeled gladiator stilettos, to dance the night away in the warm scented air of Chanel no. 5, but with a confidence entirely her own.