What on earth has happened to the cheap and cheerful lunch? A friend and I were looking for somewhere local the other day and there was nowhere to be found.
I am not talking about sharing-plates of roast cauliflower, with a starting price of £12. Nor, as a friend suggested, taking a table in the upmarket bakery Gail’s.
Gail’s is perfectly nice, and I buy bread there, but having a flat white and a pricey savoury while hemmed in by buggies is not what I have in mind for a jolly lunch.
Of course, there have always been countless expensive restaurants and there are several I will go to in the evening, but there were once also neighbourhood joints where you could grab a salad or bowl of pasta and maybe a glass of wine for £15 a head max and meet a friend for a catch-up.
Now the pleasure of lunch out is only for the wealthy and those on expense accounts.
The search for the Holy Grail of bags
When I left my job at Vogue, I was pretty sure that I had enough handbags to keep me going for life. Luxury fashion houses hand them out to magazine editors (or used to) like Smarties. But despite having so many, the fact is I’m still searching for that Holy Grail of the perfect bag.
The more bags you own, the more you can’t find things that you carry in them. The problem with having a multitude of bags is that everything gets lost in transition.
The eyeliner I had with me a couple of evenings ago, for example, didn’t make it into the bag I was walking around with yesterday when I badly needed it. My ear pods are constantly lurking in the corner of the bag that I’ve left at home and not in the one I’ve taken out to a meeting, which I only discover when I want to listen to John Le Carré on the Tube.
This is, you understand, the bag’s fault not mine! The bag should magically contain everything I need rather than fail to provide my phone, wallet, lipstick or whatever paraphernalia I need.
The bag should be a mind-reader, checking everything before I leave the house. If all those tech companies changing our lives weren’t run by men, perhaps this invaluable piece of kit would already have been discovered.
Pilloried So-Ha gets the last laugh
In Amandaland, the BBC’s new comedy, the central character, played by Lucy Punch, is forced to move from her smart Chiswick home to a terraced house in South Harlesden, or what she calls ‘So-Ha’.
In reality, the pilloried So-Ha is one of the up-and-coming areas of London, filling up with young families who once would have lived in Chiswick or Shepherd’s Bush. For, as rising property prices drive them further out, the poshness – or otherwise – of different areas is constantly changing.
My first flat (bought in 1985) was in North Kensington – at the dingier end of Ladbroke Grove.
But now, though still dingy, it is wildly unaffordable to any first-time buyer.
One winter, I had very bad flu and my parents asked their private doctor in Chelsea to visit me to check I wasn’t going to fade away. He dutifully arrived, albeit looking furious. ‘Where on Earth is this?’ he said, grimacing at the road outside my window with disgust before shoving a thermometer into my mouth. ‘Your mother told me you lived in Notting Hill!’
Trigger warning that went wrong
ONE of the best stage shows I’ve seen in the past year was the adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s book The Years. It has just transferred to the West End from the Almeida in Islington, along with the original trigger warning, advising of a scene that could upset some.
The night I went, the production was halted when some members of the audience couldn’t deal with this abortion scene and were helped out of the auditorium.
Such a fuss has been made about the scene that anybody booking seats must be aware of it. If they don’t want to experience it, perhaps they should go to see The Lion King. But in the unlikely event of them being unaware, the trigger warning itself and the anticipation probably creates the very reaction it is intended to circumvent.
Laundry rules have left me in a spin
If the eco-police monitored my household’s washing habits, we’d be the first to be locked up. Washing clothes frequently, according to a French survey, is entirely unnecessary and bad for the environment. Bras can last a week unwashed, jeans a month.
We wash almost everything after one wear – though perhaps not trousers or woollies. Everything is flung into the wash basket and replaced by something clean the next day. This isn’t because the clothes are grubby. In fact, they are not at all dirty, apart from some sweaty exercise clothes. It’s because they feel, and look, so much nicer freshly laundered.
A worn shirt might not be remotely sniffy, but it’s never as spick and span if it’s been shoved back in the cupboard five times.
And, yes, we are lucky enough to have Maria come and do our ironing. Without her, we would no doubt be environmental paragons resorting to the old-fashioned habit of a single washday a week.
Why author Ken goes by the book
Now that received pronunciation is wildly out of fashion, with different regional and class accents much preferred, I was interested to hear bestselling author Ken Follett’s views on writing dialogue.
Unless you are a writer of exceptional talent – perhaps a modern Dickens – he advises against ever trying to write accents in fiction.
He warns that the risk is sounding snobby if, for instance, you try a South London cabbie’s accent. Or being patronising and inaccurate if a white British woman attempts Jamaican patois.
Better to keep everyone’s dialogue written in middle-class Home Counties-style. And with the number of books Ken has sold, he should know what’s popular.
