MRS TREFUSIS TAKES A TAXI

CHILDREN'S PARTIES

2012-02-02T15:04:00.001Z

When I was a child, birthday parties took place at home: my mother kicked off with children's party games - pass the parcel, of course, pin the tail on the donkey, musical statues - you know the drill - and then we'd have tea - cheese and pineapple hedgehogs, cocktail sausages, jelly and icecream and a home-made birthday cake. Then, at home-time, off everyone would go with a balloon and a slice of cake wrapped in a paper napkin.

Fast forward nearly forty years and this kind of party seems a rarity - clever mums play it as a retro-riff and get away with it, but once the infants are primary school age, it seems one is expected to make the kind of effort appropriate to offspring of Oligarchs, or to the launch of a new beauty product. A venue must be hired, with an entertainer - possibly two - or alternatively, one might do what a friend of Trefusis Minor does every year, which is to hire an entire cinema for a preview screening of a hot-ticket children's movie. It seems that these days the food must be kiddie-lavish too - I remember a splendid party where the children were presented with the tiniest possible smoked salmon sandwiches, vast amounts of quails eggs, and a croquembouche of Ladurée macarons, but I suppose that's West London for you. Don't get me started on the awesome contents of party bags - I swear the infamously high-grade GQ Men of the Year goody bag has nothing on some of those Trefusis Minor has come home with.

Of course, these kinds parties are very lovely and the children have a marvellous time: I'm sure that if we were very well-off we'd pull out the stops too but we really can't run to that kind of opulence chez Trefusis: I do wish that someone brave would come out with a Party Non-Proliferation Treaty, and we could go back to the low-fi approach of the 1970's.

I'm old enough to know that I don't need to compete with the hiring of a cinema, or having a flower-fairy themed party with 'real fairies' in a West London garden square and until now, we've had parties at home similar to the ones i had as a child. However, if one has to invite the whole class even something very modest gets shockingly expensive - now that The TT is about to turn five and every single person she meets seems to be her 'bestest friend in the whole world', I've had trouble capping the guest list at school friends only. I can't see how I can get away without hiring the church hall and the thought of trying to keep thirty children happy for a couple of hours with me as the 'mum-tertainment' fills me with clammy-handed dread, so there will have to be someone hired in for a side-show too. I can manage the food on my own, and bugger the party bags - they can have cake and a novelty pencil - but still, it's working out at about £100 per hour. Yikes.

Does anyone have any suggestions about giving a fun children's party without busting the budget or a blood-vessel?

SIX ESSENTIAL COCKTAILS

2012-01-29T23:15:00.005Z

The Grey Goose Le Fizz, made using proper cocktail equipment

I'm very fond of cocktailing: the very act of ordering a Daiquiri or a Manhattan in a smart hotel bar makes me feel as if I am, despite all appearances to the contrary, a heady fizz of Jazz Age glamour and Bloomsbury loucheness. Every sip contains the promise of an evening at Jay Gatsby's or an invitation to Mrs Dalloway's Party.
You see, it's the myth of the cocktail, rather than the sum of its alcoholic parts, that's so incredibly potent: More than an amusing way to drink alcohol, a well-made cocktail is a sign that you recognise the possibility of a more sophisticated, less frantic world - at least until you slide inelegantly off your bar-stool having forgotten Dorothy Parker's maxim: 'I like to have a martini,/Two at the very most/Three and I'm under the table/Four and I'm under the host.'

Anyway, whilst cocktailing at Claridges or The Connaught is to Town what Bunburying is to the Country, it's the kind of treat one ought to reserve for when one really needs it, in the manner of a peculiarly expensive yet speedy rest-cure. But perfectly acceptable cocktails can, and should, be made at home too: I don't think I've ever managed the full F.Scott.F experience in my own kitchen, but there's something I rather like about making guests a pre-dinner cocktail rather than cracking open the usual bottle of champagne.

People talk a lot about the genius of the mixologist - I'm sure this is true when it comes to conjuring up a spectacularly novel molecular something like they do at Purl, but when you're simply after something with a little retro-elegance and a strong kick, you need neither skill nor a vast selection of arcane ingredients - if you have a decent gin, vodka, a white rum and a whisky or bourbon, some ice and something to measure the booze with, you're off to a good start. You don't need sugar syrup - caster sugar does perfectly well as long as you get it dissolved in the alcohol or citrus, if you're using it, and nor do you need special kit: I used to measure the alcohol in an old baby bottle and shake over ice in a (thoroughly cleaned) Dolmio jar, with a spare lid punched with holes for straining the liquid from the ice. However, although this approach scores ten out of ten for resourcefulness, it does rather ruin the Mad-Men effect - far better, as the marvellously knowledgeable and very kind Dan Priseman of Bitters and Twisted pointed out, to have the proper equipment.

Anyway, here are six classic cocktails everyone should be able to make without going further than Waitrose for the ingredients.

The Claridges Champagne Cocktail

Angostura Bitters
Sugarcubes
Remy Martin VSOP
Grand Marnier
Laurent Perrier
An orange

Put the sugarcube on a paper napkin or bit of kitchen roll before dropping the Bitters onto it - I find that if you lob the sugar in the glass first, it's all too easy to end up with a great, overpowering lug of Angostura. Drop it into a champagne flute and add 2 teaspoons of Remy Martin and one of Grand Marnier. Top up with Laurent Perrier (Claridges house champagne), and then pare a slice of orange peel over the glass so the oil adds a tiny hint of citrus.

Chez Trefusis, we don't usually run to Laurent Perrier and so I've most often made this with cheap champagne - the kind on offer at a supermarket, and an own-label brandy: it's not Claridges-perfection, but then nor is it thirteen quid a glass. I've also used Cointreau instead of Grand Marnier, depending on what's in the cupboard. The slice of orange peel is very pretty, but I like to pop a maraschino cherry in the glass as well. Growing up in the nineteen seventies has left an indelible mark.

The Trefusis Whisky Sour

Trefusis Whisky Sour:
please excuse it being in the wrong glass

I love whisky (and whiskeys), and have a cupboard full of single malts: I rather loathe that hushed reverence that seems to be attached to the drinking of single malts - I want to drink the damn thing, not write a poem to it, but I probably wouldn't make a whisky sour with The Macallan, or one of the older Glenfiddichs - the very slight smokiness of The Famous Grouse, however, does marvellously well. Anyway, a whisky sour is a cold toddy, by any other name. I also ignore people who go on about egg white in a whisky sour - it's fine in if you're in a bar, but chez Trefusis, if there are any egg whites around they go straight into a meringue.

I call this the Trefusis Whisky Sour because I think I may be making it with the wrong proportions of whisky to lemon. Never mind, it works for me.

2 measures of whisky
1 measure of freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 tsp of caster sugar
a maraschino cherry

Stir the sugar in the lemon juice until it's dissolved, or at least until you can't be bothered whether it's dissolved or not, add the whisky, shake over ice, strain into whatever glass you have handy and add a marachino cherry.

I've also made this with Drambuie - I was given a bottle once and it's a very flexible cocktail ingredient. It's already sweetened with honey, so just add lemon and shake over ice.

Grey Goose Le Fizz

An incredibly refreshing alternative to pre-dinner champagne

35ml Vodka (Grey Goose, since it's their recipe, but again, unless you're a super-taster, I challenge anyone to be able to pass the pepsi challenge if voddie's mixed with other ingredients)
15ml Elderflower cordial
15ml freshly squeezed lime juice
60ml soda water (mostly when a recipe states soda water, I use sparkling mineral water, rather than leg it out to the nearest off-license, but I think I've established I'm not a purist)

Serve in a champagne glass.

Classic Daiquiri

When living in Cuba, Hemmingway would write between 8am and 2pm and then hove off to El Floridita for the first of a zillion Daiquiris. He liked them so much, he had his own made for him, the Papa Doble, but I prefer the original, which is deliciously sherberty.

60ml Bacardi (or any white rum)
25ml freshly squeezed lime juice
2 tsp caster sugar
Ice cubes
Crushed ice ( put ice cubes in a plastic bag between two teatowels and bash with a rolling pin)

Mix the lime juice and sugar together to dissolve the latter, add the rum, pour it over a combination of crushed and cubed ice and shake for about twice as long as you would normally. Strain it into a chilled martini glass.

Cosmopolitan

God, I hate Sex and the City for reasons too complicated and long-winded to go into here, but the Cosmo was made popular by the show and people seem to like it.

60ml Vodka
25ml Cointreau (I've also used Grand Marnier, no one said anything)
10ml fresh lime juice
25ml cranberry juice

Shake over ice, pour into a chilled martini glass

Gin Rickey

Ah, who couldn't love F.Scott.Fitzgerald's favourite drink? Apparently F.Scott loved gin because he thought it undetectable on the breath, which it isn't, of course. Anyway, the Gin Rickey is simple, exceptionally refreshing, very low calorie and after three I have no idea how he managed to finish writing The Great Gatsby.

60ml Gin
15ml freshly squeezed lime juice (call it the juice of half a lime)
Soda water (see above)

Put lots of ice into a tall glass (a Collins glass, if we're getting technical), pour in the lime juice, pour over the gin, throw in the squeezed out lime half and top up with soda water.

Old Fashioned

When Don Draper said 'Make mine an Old Fashioned' in series one of Mad Men, I thought, yes, to hell with your Roger Stirling martinis, bourbon is infinitely more devil-may-care and a lot more palatable than neat vodka with a hint of vermouth.
It's a cocktail that deserves a decent bourbon like Woodford Reserve: like a good martini, it's a drink that can't hide behind the other ingredients. Anyway, this is my favourite bourbon cocktail, possibly because of the Mad Men link, but also because of what it has in common with the classic Claridges champagne cocktail.

Sugar cube (or a tsp caster sugar)
Angostura bitters
60ml bourbon
Orange
Ice

Use a short, straight sided whisky glass. Put the caster sugar or a sugar cube into the glass and add a couple of drops of bitters. Carefully pare a long skein of orange over the glass so you catch the oils, then muddle (which is posh bar-man speak for giving it a good old mix around with a spoon or special muddling thingy), add bourbon, ice and stir.

There are, of course, zillions of other cocktails that are perfectly suited to making at home - the naffly named but delicious Flirtini for one, and the mis-named but easy-drinking French Martini for another. The cocktail I most often claim I want to drink is a Hemlocktini - invented by the lovely Waffle and I as an elegant solution to extreme situations - but since a martini glass rinsed with hemlock and filled with iced vodka would be as toxic as it sounds, it's just as well the Hemlocktini exists only as a metaphor.

But whether real or imagined, home-made or bar-bought, a cocktail is always a perfect treat: and as Fitzgerald expert and fellow cocktail-afficionado, Sarah Churchwell, is wont to remind me, 'cocktail' is also a verb. So then, when shall we next cocktail?

SEE SHERLOCK HOLMES & DR WATSON, LIVE AT THE SOHO THEATRE

2012-01-08T22:08:00.002Z

Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez are Holmes and Watson

Sherlock Holmes is having something of a moment - the second Guy Ritchie film was out before Christmas, of course, and if the twitterati were to be believed, it was merely a gun-toting amuse-bouche for the second series of the much acclaimed BBC series. I'm rather fond of the agreeable Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson - if you have yet to catch it, here's the first episode which aired last Sunday. But the vogue for everyone's favourite literary detective does not stop there - you can also catch more Holmes and Watson action this coming week at the Soho Theatre in an hour-long show.

Penned and played by award-winning comedy duo Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez, Max and Ivan are... Holmes and Watson has done something infinitely more daring than even the BBC's Aldiss and Moffat: rather than re-imagine Conan-Doyle's stories for the twenty-first century, they've written their own breathtakingly original and utterly hilarious final chapter in the Holmes saga. Taking up some rejuvenating years after Sherlock Holmes' final outing as a bee-keeping spy-catcher of the last Conan-Doyle story, Max and Ivan put our hero's famous powers of deduction to work in a prohibition era tale of revenge, whiskey and javelins set in Chicago's criminal underworld.

Quite clearly, this isn't a Holmes and Watson for purists, but it is one of the funniest thing I've seen live on stage for ages. It's quirky, witty, fast-paced and, whilst unmistakably irreverent, manages to tug its forlock in the direction of the Conan-Doyle creation on which it depends.

I first saw the show when Max and Ivan previewed it before taking it to the Fringe last summer: they are - as it says on the play-bill - Holmes and Watson, but they also play about eleventy-three other characters, including a rather chilling Voldemort-esque Moriarty, and the shifts between are deft, convincing and terribly, terribly funny. It's gifted physical comedy as well as cleverly scripted and I can't think of a better, quicker way of catapulting oneself out of the January slough of despond than to spend an hour in Soho watching this unique show.

If you want more Sherlock Holmes in your life - and really, can one ever have enough - then hot-foot it to the Soho Theatre : Max and Ivan are... Holmes and Watson plays from thursday 12th January to Saturday 14th and again from thursday 19th to Saturday 21st January. The show starts at 8pm and tickets are £10.

Max and Ivan are... Holmes and Watson, Soho Theatre, from 12th January.
21 DEAN STREET LONDON W1D 3NE
BOX OFFICE 020 7478 0100
Follow Max and Ivan on twitter @maxandivan

IN PRAISE OF RED LIPSTICK

2011-12-15T12:38:00.014Z

When I wrote about The Plankton back in September, it sparked much debate with friends about whether or not women over forty became suddenly invisible.

But every conversation about sex appeal - were we still desirable, beautiful, attractive, we asked ourselves anxiously - inevitably turned into a broader discussion about the forty-something state: Suddenly, I became appallingly paranoid that I would wake up one morning and discover myself wearing purple with a red hat that doesn't go?

'We simply have to work harder to make ourselves visible, particularly at work' said my friend Basista, and I think she's right - one does lose the effortlessness of youth in one's mid-forties. Sometimes it's the small things like having to think twice about wearing an A-line skirt with a chunky heel - what looks hip on a thirty year old can easily look frumpy on a fortysomething, particularly if you remember the look first time round - I mean, God knows what havoc the coming Thatcher-inspired trend will wreak. All I'm going to say is, if you're old enough to remember her as Prime Minister, steer well clear of the clothes unless you're achingly hip and very obviously working in fashion.

Anyway, sometimes it's also the bigger stuff, like realising that life isn't the rehearsal it once was, and you've got to get on with the Next Big Thing before it's Too Late.

However, since this is supposed to be a post about make-up, I shall stop myself segueing off into some psycho-drama about a dawning realisation of one's mortality/career shelf-life etc etc, because I've remembered that what my friend Basista went onto say - not entirely flippantly - about how the antidote to mid-life invisibility was to wear bright lipstick. She's right, of course but it's not just about making a bold statement, it's also about the subliminal sophistication conferred by a really good red lip.

Although I'm madly keen on my shiny Dior Addict one, if it's done perfectly, a red lip should be matte and it should also be expensive - not Tom Ford spendy, necessarily, but definitely something bought with due ceremony and sense of occasion from one of the more intimidating beauty counters in a department store. Chanel, of course, is the gold standard when it comes to sophisticated glamour and there are several marvellous reds in the Rouge Allure range, but I do wish they had Rouge Premier - a copy of the first ever red lipstick Chanel produced - as part of the permanent offer: it came out as a limited edition about ten years ago along with a killingly beautiful gold eyeshadow, and I only wear it once a year because I can't bear to think of using it all up.

Finding one's perfect red takes time and a lot of experimenting - it's all about nuance - I had fourteen at the last count (six of which are badly photographed below) in every shade of red from vermillion to crimson.

Now that I add up the approximate cost, fourteen red lipsticks is a rather lavish investment. But of course, I wasn't just buying a lipstick, I was investing in the whole idea of myself as elegant and well-put together.

I don't think the search for the perfect red is finished by any stretch of the imagination - I've yet to try the Bobbi Brown red that everyone says is a classic- and as I write this, I've just rummaged in my desk drawer and come across a very serious red I'd forgotten I even had (make that fifteen red lipsticks) - Dior Addict in Red Carpet. Possibly it ticks the 'get you noticed' box a little more emphatically than my everyday red (which I'm wearing in the Dior taxi), but that's all to the good.

Is Basista right? Is bright lipstick the perfect antidote to mid-life invisibility? It certainly seems to give one a much needed confidence boost. However, I'll offer one small warning: the distance between groomed glamour and looking like Bette Davis in 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane' is little more than a sharp jog of the elbow.

BAZAAR, BASTYAN & A SHOWSTOPPING DRESS

2011-12-12T23:15:00.002Z

At least half the fun of going to a party is in the anticipation: it's not just the hours spent getting ready, it's endless debate about what to wear.

The big event in the Harper's Bazaar calendar is the annual Women of the Year Awards - and the sartorial stakes are pretty high - I'm pretty sure we talked of nothing but party dresses for weeks beforehand. I had thought of wearing a very nice strapless 'MadMen' style dress I bought for a party not long after the Tiniest Trefusis was born until I came across this from my absolute favourite label, Bastyan. I hadn't thought of wearing long, but since it meant I didn't need to slather my blue-white legs in fake tan, it was pretty tempting, and as ever with Bastyan, the fabric drapes in a wonderfully flattering and luxurious way.

This is me at the party - it's not a very clear picture, but the mirror shows how nice the back is too

This is me just before we left - I've rubbed out the grim office from the background - magazine offices are much closer to The Office than they are to the Devil Wears Prada. One shoulder has a beautiful gold clasp, and the other is designed to drape - I wanted it slightly off the shoulder, so I stuck it in place with some tit tape (I'm sure there's a more elegant word for it - but you know what I mean).

The jewellery is from Carat* - they're simulated diamonds, but they're set so beautifully I defy anyone to be able to tell the difference - I wore the Pear Exquisite necklace, a pear drop tennis bracelet and an incredibly covetable pair of drop earrings, which shivered and shimmered and caught the light most gratifyingly whenever I turned my head. I don't seem to be able to find them on the website, but these are similar.

Sometimes partywear needs to be a bit of a disguise, doesn't it - it's about costuming oneself appropriately for the occasion: and for once, at Bazaar Women of the Year, I felt appropriate.

The Mormo Maxi dress I wore is on sale in the Bastyan pop-up shop on Regents Street - if you're in the market for a party dress (or a beautiful coat like this one - the tweed it's made from comes from the same mill as Chanel gets theirs from) then you must hurry to this oasis of loveliness and calm toot sweet because the stand-alone only exists until 24th December.

I asked Tonia Bastyan for her buys of the season - this exquisite lace 'Dia' dress [above], with jet beads that button closely up the wrists promises to be an heirloom piece: I can quite imagine putting it away after a few seasons and saving it for when the Tiniest Trefusis grows up - it's utterly beautiful and absolutely timeless. It has a very elegant wool crepe skirt, but the back is absolutely sheer lace - I've not seen anything of the quality in most Bond Street designer stores. I'm kicking myself that I didn't take a better picture. It's sold out online, however, there were plenty of sizes at the pop up store.

Tonia also picked out this pony-skin coat as one of her favourite pieces - as ever with Bastyan, the devil's in the detail - it has long woollen gauntlets under the bracelet sleeve - I don't know if they're detachable, but fortunately this is on the website so you can get a better look if you want. Here's my snap of Tonia with the coat.

London Bastyan Pop Up Boutique 288 - 294 Regent Street W1 Tel: 020 7323 5978

MRS TREFUSIS TAKES A DIOR TAXI

2011-11-13T00:03:00.002Z

I've had a life-long love affair with Dior - when I was a child, my father bought my mother a bottle of Diorissimo, and I thought that it was the most luxurious present imaginable. I used to sit and stare at it on her dressing table, admiring the - now iconic - houndstooth packaging and longing but not daring to take the beautiful glass bottle out of its case and dab it behind my ears as I'd seen my mother do.

Working for Harper's Bazaar, it's hard not to be a devotee of Christian Dior - after all, it was Bazaar editor, Carmen Snow, who coined the expression The New Look in 1947, for the exquisite nipped in waists and full-skirts with which Dior created such an impact after the austerity of the war years.

I've always liked Dior for saying that his 'dream' was to 'save women from nature': never having had much truck with a 'natural look' myself, I'm more than willing to be rescued. What I like about Dior beauty is that sixty years on from the New Look, and fifty years after Christian Dior's death, the brand is still absolutely true to his original vision. It's all about enhancing, transforming and creating an incredibly feminine, elegantly made-up face.

With such a promise, it's no surprise my make-up bag is completely Dior dependent - these below are the products I use pretty much every day: I just slap more on to create an evening look. And Sali Hughes is completely right - a navy eye is incredibly wearable, no matter what colour one's eyes. This Dior 5 couleurs palette is particularly versatile.

my makeup, as captured by my utterly rubbish iphone camera

The Skin-flash primer is a work of complete brilliance - I swear it takes five years off me. Under foundation it just brings back that nice glossiness that one seems to lack after forty, and it's packed full of hyaluronic acid, which nicely plumps up fine lines and stops them looking so visible. The 'New Look' lipstick is absolutely the perfect red for me, and I live in terror of it being discontinued - it's all the things I thought were inadvisable in a red lipstick - sheer and shiny with a tiny hint of shimmer - but it really works and helps you avoid the 'all lips' thing you can get with a strong, matte, red lipstick.

I forgot to photograph my favourite mascara ever - Dior's Extase - it gives you vast lashes without going the full Pauline Prescott. There's a brilliant new one launching at the very end of January, which promises to be even better - 'New Look' apparently creates an 'unprecedented voluminous effect'. I can't wait.

Anyway, coming up for Spring is a whole host of beautiful, tempting new colours, all designed to save me from nature. But in the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy the Dior staples I have - here I am wearing them in Dior's specially customised taxi.

With Vincent Jeanniard, General Manager of Parfums Christian Dior UK, in the Dior Taxi

TREFUSIS MINOR, INFANT PÂTISSIER

2011-10-15T14:55:00.001+01:00

Three and a half years after starting at the french school, Trefusis Minor can now pass for a natural born têtard, slipping in and out of French and English without skipping a beat. All the tears and 'don't leave me Mummy's are a thing of the past, and he now reads more fluently in French than he does in English.

At home, only Mr Trefusis is permitted to speak french to him: if I offer a few words, or join in if the conversation round the supper table is in french as it often is, I get a look of withering scorn mixed with pity - 'Please don't try, Mummy, it sounds really horrible: tu vas casser mes oreilles.' he says. If Mr Trefusis sticks up for me (as he mostly does) and tells Trefusis Minor that my french is perfectly good, if strongly accented, Trefusis Minor will concede, begrudgingly, that I don't sound as bad as his English teacher, who really does 'break his ears'.

Anyway, the gallification of Trefusis Minor extends to extra-curricular activities too: after-school clubs are called 'Atelier' which makes them sound impossibly grand, quite as if he's going to come home and start pinning a toile on me for a couture frock. Hope springs eternal, I suppose.

But it's true, isn't it, that everything sounds more elegant in French - last term's Atelier was 'Jeux de Societé' which sounds like experimental sociology but seemed to mostly involve learning how to play Connect 4 and Draughts. This term, his favourite atelier is cooking: does he come home with the droopy peppermint creams, rock buns and butterfly cakes I remember learning in cookery as a child? He does not. So far, he has learned how to make a clafoutis, madeleines, financiers, and some kind of small savoury tart. I fully expect him to be working his way up to a croquembouche, or to suddenly appear with a selection of tiny macarons to rival Pierre Hermé or Ladurée.

I think this should be greatly encouraged - if he keeps it up, he'll be able to make the Tiniest Trefusis' birthday cake - in a few years, I might even be able to earn back the school fees by hiring him out for dinner parties.

ON INSOMNIA (2)

2011-10-05T17:19:00.001+01:00

I seem to have conquered the insomnia, for which relief much thanks. Someone suggested I might be hungry, which seemed an absurd idea, til I tried eating dinner very slightly later, and drinking some hot milk before bed, and then it was suddenly seven a.m. and I'd not woken once and all that day my synapses snapped and sang with delight at not having my thoughts mediated through a fog of dull exhaustion.

I am very much hoping I shall stay sleeping soundly from now on, and plan to read this wonderful Fleur Adcock poem every night in bed as a talisman to ward off further bouts of insomnia.

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.

SMOKING

2011-09-30T23:23:00.004+01:00

Brigitte Bardot, Terry O'Neil

I was nearly sixteen when I smoked my first cigarette, deep into the old gardens at school, under a tree. It was pouring down, as ever, and we went through an entire box of matches trying to light the damn thing, and even now the smell of smoke hanging heavy on cold damp air conjures the ghost of stolen pleasures.

The cigarette was Dunhill, which at the time seemed the apogee of glamour, filched by my best friend from her parent's cocktail party one exeat, and carefully smuggled back, hidden in a box of tampax. Neither of us had much idea how to smoke, which added to the difficulty of lighting it because it took us a couple of goes to realise that you had to suck in at the same time as holding the match to the end, and we shared the cigarette in a series of jagged, exaggerated puffs, wrists held stiffly like dowagers, neither of us inhaling, even accidentally. Had I inhaled, I'm quite sure I'd never have smoked again, but as it was, that first time had all the allure of the illicit, and we were determined to acquire the sophistication we felt sure smoking would confer on us. We may have been two schoolgirls huddled together, in our woollen kilts and gabardine macs in the clammy air, but in our heads we were Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle, Joan Collins in Dynasty, Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crowne Affair, Catherine Deneuve in Belle De Jour. Life had never seemed so daring. This was what it felt like to be a proper grown-up.

A little less than ten years on, when I was trying to give up, I realised that it was the pose of smoking I was addicted to, rather than the nicotine, or trying to stay thin, or the sheer habit, or the social smoking, or whatever other reason one usually gives for smoking. Cigarettes were less of a psychological prop than a literal prop: they simply complemented whatever role I was inhabiting at the time. I spent my mid teens smoking brightly-coloured Sobranie Cocktails, the perfect accessory for a New Romantic. At university, I imagined myself a left-bank intellectual circa 1968, and carried a pack of Gauloise around with my copies of Barthes and Baudrillard: Fortunately for my health and my wallet, I found them so revolting I could only ever smoke one a day. A little later on at university, when I was briefly a placard-waving socialist-culturalist-feminist, I smoked roll-ups in a print frock and clumpy Doctor Martins and later still, in my first job, I had shoulder-pads in my nipped-in, double-breasted, pencil-skirted suit, and in the pub after work I propped twenty Marlborough Reds on top of my outsize Filofax.

Anyway, I managed to quit, partly by curing myself of the need to be such a hopeless poseur. And an ex-smoker I remained until almost twenty years after that first fag when, on holiday with my Godbrother in Tuscany, sitting outside a chic coffee bar, espresso in hand, Prada sunspecs glued to our faces, he remarked idly that the only thing we were missing to make the experience truly contextual, was a cigarette. Did I demur, or point out that we were, at thirty-three, far too old and sensible to take up smoking again? I did not. 'We'll give up in the departure lounge,' I said, and promptly lit up.

Of course, we didn't give up at the airport at all but passed customs with 200 Marlborough Lights in a Duty Free carrier bag. I managed to wean myself off what quickly became a twenty a day habit by the winter of that year, but still scabbed a fag whenever I had a drink in my hand. I gave up properly when I realised I was pregnant with Trefusis Minor, but took it up again the minute I returned to work, keen to prove to myself I was still a bit of a rebel, not merely a pinny-wearing, carrot-pureeing mummy. But my heart wasn't really in it. And by the time the Tiniest Trefusis came along, smoking gave me up altogether - tipsy after a supper-party, I took a cigarette from Mr Trefusis' emergency stash, and it tasted so unutterably vile in a way smoking never had at anytime during the preceding twenty five years, I immediately ground it out, taking a huge belt of someone's after-dinner whisky to try to take the horrid taste away.

Of course, the thing about smoking is that one has one's first fag in an attempt to look more grown up, and by the time one is an actual bone fide adult, you realise that it's neither big nor clever. I don't miss smoking, but I miss the camaraderie of smoker's corner, the gang membership of the ashtray, and I never mind keeping a friend company as they shiver outside a restaurant or the office. But I won't smoke again. Not even if someone offered me a More Menthol, a la Joan Collins, or a Sobranie Black Russian, like a character from James Bond.

HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND

2011-09-22T05:06:00.002+01:00

I would have described myself as a good sleeper. All my life I've been able to drop off at a moments notice: I can sleep on aeroplanes, on trains, on sofas, in strange beds. I can go to sleep for an hour in the afternoon, or twenty minutes before supper, for ten hours of respite after the bone-shaking exhaustion of being awake with a sick child, or for seven hours common or garden beauty sleep.

Sleep is one of those things I've never questioned: however dogged by uncertainty I might be about my ability in other areas, I've always taken sleep for granted. It's true there have been times when I've craved more sleep -during finals; when I was young enough to cope with the physical demands of swotting furiously til 3am, or after the children were born, where dumb with tiredness from the endless night feeds, you find yourself putting your car keys in the fridge and the milk in the bathroom cupboard.

Those periods of sleep deprivation seem voluntary, self-imposed, temporary. But now, as I wave wearily at the bedside clock ticking past four, and yet again I'm stuck in the long dark teatime of the soul, and in the long dark teatime of the soul, all the sandwiches are stale, the scones crumble to dust, and the cake is always seedcake and never coffee-walnut.

I wonder, a little despairingly, if this bloody sleeplessness will ever end.

I've tried the usual things -a warm bath, a cup of cocoa, moving the pile of shoes from the side of the bed in case they were interfering with the feng shui or something. I've tried meditation, counting sheep and self-hypnosis. I've opened windows and tried different combinations of bedclothes. I've listened to The Goldberg Variations, which is my secret instant-calmer & usually works in any situation from childbirth to coping with rush hour on the Central Line. To no avail: I drop off fine, and then I wake up.

And what is it about the wee small hours that's so much more horrid than any other time of day? All the things you haven't done line up around your bed and start pointing at you, muttering about your inadequacies, undermining your ability to believe you can get on and finish anything. So the mind plays games, which is wearing, and the tiredness debilitates, and the jeering creatures around the bed peel off a layer of your skin, so that in the bright of day you're unable to face things with quite the equanimity they require.

Anyway, this four in the morning thing has been going on almost since i came back from holiday and it's driving me demented. It feels like a habit now too, which is even more peeving.

Any good suggestions for knocking it on the head and getting my sanity back?

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

2011-09-20T07:47:00.001+01:00

"This year, from Father Christmas,' says The TT, 'I would like a pony, a pink palace full of rubies and diamonds and pearls and treasure and a pink garden with loads of flowers: silver and gold flowers, bell flowers, sunflowers.'

'Oh,' I say, 'anything else?'

'A fan.'

At least she's given me three months to figure out either how to manage her expectations or discover how to come up with the goods without first winning Euromillions.

LOVE FORTY

2011-09-15T14:18:00.000+01:00

Writing the previous post on The Plankton, and reading the wonderful, incisive comments, has made me ponder a lot on the subject of women’s sexual allure as one gets into proper middle age, as opposed to middle youth.

I don't know how old the model is in this Marks and Spencers commercial - I'm guessing she has ten years on me, but she's bloody fabulous. Still got it? Hell, yes. I loved the comment made by anonymous about her late mother being ‘like Scarlet O’Hara at the Twelve Oaks BBQ’ when she was in her sixties. That, my lovely readers, is the example to which we must all aspire.

I do hope The Plankton is successful in her relationship quest: in the meantime, I’d like to remind her that Wendy Cope’s words are no less true at forty or fifty-something than they are at any other age.

Bloody men are like bloody buses -

You wait for about a year

And as soon as one approaches your stop

Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,

Offering you a ride.

You're trying to read the destination,

You haven't much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.

Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze

While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by

And the minutes, the hours, the days.

THE PLANKTON

2011-09-12T20:47:00.001+01:00

There is grey in your hair
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing

That haunting beginning of Yeats' Broken Dreams has been on my mind a lot these last few days, partly because wonderful Waffle, arbiter of all things new and interesting, brought to my attention a new blog called The Plankton, whose first entry begins

As a divorced woman the wrong side of 45 with a brace of kids, I am a plankton on the food chain of sexuality and the prospect of a relationship.
Women die long before they actually die.

It's an interesting blog: she began it - as she writes in her column for The Times - "because I felt it was about time to voice the unsayable: that women of a certain age such as myself (and there are a heck of a lot of us — divorced, never married, widowed, and alone) are at the very bottom of the food chain when it comes to romance, relationships and sex, and it feels like shit."

I've become slightly obsessed by The Plankton's blog: it does help that she posts at least once a day, and that she's unflinchingly honest in her despair in how difficult it is to find new love at a certain age. So unflinching is she I feel a little voyeuristic reading it, however, give it a go because I suspect, like me, you'll want to see where the journey takes her.

I do think there's a sense in which women don an invisibility cloak once they hit forty - there's that sense of contracting possibilities, of the winnowing of time and every time you look in the mirror you're caught between your internal midlife crisis and wondering what economies you could make in order to afford a vat of botox. Miranda Sawyer's piece in The Guardian says all I could possibly say on the subject of quiet midlife crises, only a lot better of course.*

Do I think that a woman of a certain age is inevitably at 'the bottom of the sexual food chain'? No, of course I don't, but then I'm not single, so haven't had to put The Plankton's assertion to the test, and I'm heartily relieved I don't have to. However, I can see that the dating field is hardly lush, green and ripe with possibilities once one is past forty. I know many beautiful, elegant, desirable fortysomething single women, and frankly, the single men of my acquaintance can't hold a candle to them, though they behave as if the dating world is their oyster.

The Plankton has had a lot of 'helpful' comments about getting a dog, or joining a class or going to therapy to boost her self-esteem, all of which is as dispiriting as it is well-meant. On behalf of all fortysomething women, I'd like to say, we're not dead yet - you can't stare the second half of your life in the face and feel like you've missed the boat, and none of us is ready for Saga magazine style activities. Mind you, when you do stare the second half of your life in the face, it takes you a moment to recognise whose face it is - in your head you still look just like you did at thirty, but the reality is the tiniest bit different.

Anyway, I was talking about The Plankton's blog with a single fortysomething friend earlier today.

Did she think she was at the bottom of the sexual food chain, I asked?

She looked at me thoughtfully for a while. 'Nothing would persuade me to call myself a plankton,' she said, 'But I would call the last six men I've dated pond life'.

*Thanks go again to Waffle for sending me a link to this piece.

Win a Champney's Pedicure courtesy of Wish.co.uk

2011-09-07T23:26:00.000+01:00

No matter how good my pre-holiday pedicure, I always seem to come back with appalling hobbit trotters: if your feet could do with some TLC, then send me an email atmrstrefusis@gmail.com and I'll enter you into a free prize draw to win a luxurious 55 minute pedicure at one of the Champney's high-street spas, courtesy of Wish.co.uk.*

Wish.co.uk is a new site, just launched in the UK, that offers a fantastic range of experience days, perfect for presents, or for treating yourself. From fast and furious driving days to relaxing spa experiences, Wish has something to suit all ages, interests and pockets: have a look around to see what's on offer.

*NB: 30th September 2011: competition is now closed

LA RENTRÉE

2011-09-05T14:17:00.003+01:00

St Benoit Du Sault, darkest France

I’ve worked out why New Year is such a damp squib for me: It’s not exhaustion after the effort of Christmas for all that New Year/New You stuff or a lack of enthusiasm for a Brave New Dawn when there’s only three hours of daylight, it’s that January is not my physiological, or psychological fresh start. No, my internal clock is set to start the year afresh in September, after the long summer break – well, a fortnight away from work – and whilst there’s still a glimmer of sunshine around to keep one feeling optimistic and encouraged. Long after leaving school, the imprint of the school year’s rhythm is still so strong that September always seems to offer a much more promising clean slate.

We spent our holiday in La France Profonde – it was so profonde that I spent my first fortnight in nearly ten years without an internet connection. Even my work Blackberry could only summon up one bar of signal if I went to the other end of the village, which was a marvellous excuse for staying out of touch with the office, and our only contact with the outside world was an occasional text from my mother. The world didn’t stop turning on its axis without Facebook or Twitter, but I did realise what a time thief twitter has been. I adore twitter, and there are few better ways to fritter away the idle minute, but fewer tweets could mean more time to spend doing other things. It’s no coincidence that I became a much more infrequent blogger when I joined twitter. Twitter has its place - and it's huge fun - but there are things which require more than 140 characters.

And so I made La rentrée resolution #1: see if life without twitter means a revival of the blog.

We spent part of our holiday in a very prettily restored 16th century town house in one of Les Plus Beaux Villages en France – the village itself is a walled medieval town, which despite its size, boasts three hairdressers, two butchers and three bakers. I love the morning ritual of going off to the boulangerie to buy bread, crisp and still warm from the oven, but if I ever see another baguette, it will be too soon. Between the baguettes and the vast quantities of wine I managed to put on six pounds to add to the ten I’d put on after a year eating cake and drinking cocktails, which wasn’t any the less depressing for being inevitable. If I don’t arrest the growth of my waistline between now and Christmas, I predict this blog will become nothing more than an endless series of whinging about not fitting into any of my clothes.

Hence, La rentrée resolution #2: Do the Dukan diet.

I’m not really a great one for punishing regimes – I lost the three stone I put on when pregnant with the Tiniest Trefusis by joining Weightwatchers, which was very effective, but I need something quicker and more ascetic. Two friends have done Dukan with absolutely amazing results too, which is quite encouraging. Anyway, according to the Dukan website, if I start now I’ll get to my goal weight by October 28th: sounds do-able. Hmm, I've just looked at my diary - I have a wine-tasting tonight and dinner with one of my very best friends on Wednesday, I think I'll start the Dukan on Thursday....

There were a few other tweaks and changes I decided to make too – but I think two main resolutions are enough to be going on with, and certainly the twittering and Dukan-ing will require daunting amount of self discipline. I shall let you know how I get on.

Update: 5th October - the Dukan does work - it's not a healthy long-term solution, I don't think, and certainly it's probably best if you have only a small amount of weight to lose, but it was easy enough to drop the few pounds that stood between me and a comfortable fit to my clothes.

LIFE THROUGH A LENS

2011-07-17T00:08:00.002+01:00

'When was the last time you read a book?' asks Mr Trefusis one evening, 'You used to read all the time.'

'I do read.' I say indignantly, but I know Mr Trefusis is right - I was once a book bulimic, devouring novel after novel, forever on holiday in someone else's imagination. But lately I've found it tiring to read more than a few pages at a time: it's started to take weeks rather than days to finish even a thriller. I've blamed work (too much of), twitter (distraction), Angry Birds (ditto), but really the truth of the matter is as plain as the lines that are springing up all over my forehead: I can't do without my reading glasses. If I try to, even reading Harper's Bazaar becomes too much of an effort, which seems a shame considering it's the magazine I work on.

'Presbyte' says Mr Trefusis, somewhat eliptically, 'that's what the French call you, from the Greek for Old Man.'

And so it is: as confirmed by my optician, I have the kind of long-sightedness that's inevitable after forty, and, although it's helpful of Mr T to contribute to my education by offering me the French for long-sight, presbyte makes me feel as if I ought to come over all Calvinist and start railing disapprovingly about the sin of vanity.

It's no good though: presbyte or not, I still want to look good. I want my reading specs to be fabulous face-furniture, rather than just something practical: I want glasses of distinction. What's more, I want glasses that scream an elegant protest against the presbyte diagnosis - I might be old enough to need them, but I am not so old that I want to entirely relinquish looking vaguely hip and moderately sexy.

The first glasses I bought were the insanely expensive Bulgari pair you see sitting on the laptop in the holding shot of this blog. It's to my shame that I immediately went off them - they're fine, but - you know - they're a bit dull. Realising that it's deeply inconvenient only having one pair of reading glasses, I had some lenses put in a pair of Emporio Armani frames that were discovered unclaimed at the back of the fashion cupboard, but they're also a bit ordinaire. I mean, obviously I'm too grown-up to suddenly go all Hoxton, and sport statement frames like a self-consciously trendy architect or app developer, but there is a middle ground, surely, and one which doesn't necessitate eating baked beans for a month to afford the bill.

Reader, I think I have the answer - London Retro is a new range of vintage-inspired frames, seemingly designed with me in mind. Ok, that's a little solipsistic, especially when there's enough edge in the range to please my imaginary Hoxton dwelling architect, but really, all boxes ticked - cool and interesting frames and they come complete with single vision lenses for £99 with a second pair free, which seems astonishingly cheap in the context of the Bulgaris. I have Carnaby in red, which have a wonderfully 1980's ad agency feel to them and Camden with a tinted lens for reading outside (have previously felt very foolish wearing sunglasses on top of reading glasses).

London Retro Carnaby in red £99

London Retro Camden in tortoiseshell with a tinted lens-
there's an agreeably Wayfarer feel about them, which kind of reminds me of my yoof, and of the first time I read Money and Brideshead Revisited.

London Retro specs are only available online, but all you do is imput the details of your prescription into the right box and a couple of days later they arrive on your desk, all gleaming and fabulous - kind of like a net-a-porter for spectacles - and despite the price-tag, the quality is at least as good as my existing Bulgari and Armani pairs.

I'm slightly worried now that specs are going to replace shoes as my guilty pleasure - I love the Carnabys, and they definitely suit me, but I do also rather fancy something a bit edgier: these below are next on my acquisition list, just as soon as I've finished all 974pp of Belle du Seigneur to prove that I've really earned them.

Shoreditch - what do you think? Too cool for school, or could I get away with it, despite my advancing years? Being a bit bookish, I really wanted Fitzrovia, but my face is entirely the wrong shape for that kind of frame.

Of course, what I'd really like now that I've discovered trendy specs is a pair of bifocals - my reading prescription in the bottom so I can see what I'm doing, and plain glass in the top half so I don't fall over when I walk around still wearing them.

A LIFE IN SHOES

2011-05-23T23:20:00.003+01:00

About a zillion years ago, one of my favourite bloggers, Christina at Fashion's Most Wanted, tagged me in a shoe meme. It's taken me such a shamefully long time to pick up the baton, I can't actually remember the rules of the meme, other than one had to post pictures of one's favourite shoes.

This weekend, however, Mr Trefusis made me sort out my shoe cupboard, and I finally got round to taking some (rather bad) pictures. Like all women I have far too many shoes, yet end up wearing only three pairs, and those are either too worn or too boring to show here. My favourite shoes should really go in the bin - they're completely knackered but they're chocolate brown stilettos, with a very pointy Blahnik-style toe and schiaparelli pink detail and I completely love them.

These are Prada: Black kid with a natural coloured lizardskin and silver piping. Sadly, like their owner , they're getting on a bit and are a little tired and worn. Nevertheless, every time I slide my feet into them, I feel like Zelda Fitzgerald - without the dodgy alcoholism and mental issues, obviously - but in a jazz age kind of way that makes me want to perch elegantly on a bar stool and knock back a couple of Sidecars.

These are also Prada: fabric with ostrich: I fell in love with the print and the bright turquoise toes and heels. Like all Prada shoes they're very comfortable, but they're a little too distinctive to wear often and so, despite being ten years old, they're still in quite good nick.

Bottega Veneta and my most bargainacious shoes ever: they were twenty-five pounds reduced from £250, presumably because there was no call for orange shoes in London 12 years ago when I bought them. Twenty five pounds. More than anything else, they make me feel like Summer's finally arrived: I like to wear them with a pink linen shift dress and with watermelon pink varnish on my toes.

These are Kurt Geiger - satin with swarovski crystal studded heels and cripplingly uncomfortable - taxi shoes if ever there were any. They also upstage me terribly so, fabulous as they are, I've worn them about twice - once to a Harper's Bazaar party where I had to take paracetamol to be able to keep them on, and then once to a dinner party where I knew I'd be sitting down all the time. Are these what magazines call a statement shoe?

'No one would ever mistake you for my mistress in those shoes,' said Mr Trefusis, rather unflatteringly. I don't for one minute suspect him of having a mistress, but I do know what he means: you'd never slap a super-injunction on someone in Ferragamos. However, what they lack in vampiness, they make up for in sophistication and I love them passionately not least because they remind me of my honorary grandmother, who had immense style, and swore by cashmere jumpers, linen sheets and Ferragamos with every outfit.

I couldn't work out why these were the only flat shoes in the shoe cupboard - surely I must have other flats, I thought, casting around for evidence. I found a pair of Converse, a couple of pair of really beaten up ballet flats and (the shame) a pair of frog green Crocs: I seem only to wear flats to get from A to B, and then whip out the heels. I must have a terrible complex about being short, or maybe it's that unconsciously I think it's only worth spanking serious shoe money on what the Tiniest Trefusis calls 'heel-high shoes'. However, these glamorous gold Prada flats make me feel a bit Jacqueline Onassis. Is it just me, or do shoes have a transformative power for every woman? Is it the Cinderella thing all over again?

I couldn't photograph these to save my life - they're purple satin and very high and I wore them when I married Mr Trefusis, but that's another story for another time. They're Kurt Geiger.

My favourite shoes don't belong to me at all - the Tiniest Trefusis wore these silver Kicker boots not long after she first learned to walk. She's very much her mother's daughter - the first word she ever said was 'Shoe'.

TREFUSIS MINOR ON MONARCHY, REPUBLICANISM AND THE ROYAL WEDDING

2011-04-28T22:36:00.005+01:00

‘In France, Mummy, they have a President and we have a Queen’ Trefusis Minor said as we were walking down the street earlier today. ‘In France everyone thought it wasn’t fair that you had to be from just one family so a long time ago they cut a lot of people’s heads off and had a vote and now they have a president.’

‘And is that better than having a Queen?’ I ask, thinking Trefusis Minor seems to have a remarkably precocious grasp on current affairs.

‘It goes both ways,’ he says obliquely, ‘It’s not as fair to have a Queen, but it goes both ways’

I’m not entirely sure what he means by this, but I’m interested in where the conversation is heading, particularly since Trefusis Minor has already declared himself against the Royal Wedding – ‘it’s just two people getting married,’ he said earlier this week, with appealing understatement, ‘it’s not that interesting’.

‘We cut a King’s head off and had a republic in this country about a hundred and fifty years before the French got down to it’ I say.

‘Yes, but it didn’t really work. I think they got it a bit wrong – there was no fun, no singing, no sport, you had to go to church all the time, more than once a day*. It was really boring. We’re probably all right with the Queen.’ I do so love the influence of Horrible Histories on seven year olds - is the '1066 and All That' of their generation.

Sadly, the conversation then veered off down a ‘if-you-had-radiation-what-super-power-would-you-get’ cul-de-sac, but whilst Trefusis Minor was telling me I’d probably find it handy to be able to pick things up without having to actually go and get them, I started to think that his laconic ‘we’re probably all right with the Queen’ captured the reason why republicanism finds it so hard to take root in the UK - we're just not bothered enough to change. According to a recent YouGov poll, only 13% of Britons want the monarchy scrapped in favour of an elected president – and even in the emotionally charged wake of Diana’s death, three-quarters of us remained broadly in favour of retaining the monarchy.

Last month, I went to an Editorial Intelligence panel discussion on the Royal Wedding. On the panel were, amongst others, Rachel Johnson, The Evening Standard’s Sarah Sands, YouGov president Peter Kellner and the wonderful civil rights campaigner and republican Peter Tatchell. Tatchell is, by all logical measures, absolutely right when he says that the monarchy is profoundly unfair:

"This is an issue of democracy and human rights. The monarch is our head of state. The monarchical system is anti-Catholic, sexist and, by default, racist. Catholics are barred. For the foreseeable future, no black or Asian person can be our head of state. First-born girls are passed over in favour of younger male children....Our head of state ought to be chosen based on merit and public endorsement, not on the grounds of privileged parentage and inheritance."

Who can disagree? And yet, 66% of us believe that Britain will be still be a monarchy in 100 years time. How can one begin to sum up the general feeling of the nation? There’s an awful lot wrong with the monarchy, but we kind of like it, and we’re deeply suspicious of change? An elected system is also no guarantee of fairness – the great Republics of France and the US haven’t exactly yielded a representative sample of Presidents. As Peter Kellner said at the same debate, ‘For 123 of the last 174 years, we’ve had a female monarch… for how many of the last 174 years has American democracy produced a female president?’

As I drink my cup of tea from the fabulously kitsch Wills ‘n’ Kate mug Mr Trefusis bought me, I think I’m with Trefusis Minor, we're probably all right with the Queen. Unlike Trefusis Minor, I absolutely love a good Royal Wedding.

*Trefusis Minor's rather jaundiced views on life under the British Commonwealth seem mostly to have been sourced from Horrible Histories...

MR TREFUSIS IS UNWELL

2011-04-23T20:19:00.001+01:00

Strictly speaking, Mr Trefusis is not so much unwell as broken: A couple of months ago, he was happily free-wheeling down a hill on his pushbike and, having built up enough speed for things to really hurt, promptly hit an inconveniently positioned speed-bump and came off over the handlebars.

Thankfully, the first thing that hit the tarmac was his elbow: if the force of impact was enough to shatter his left elbow and dislocate his right shoulder, imagine what it might have done to his helmet-less head? I mean, I can't actually quite write that sentence without shuddering and sending up yet another silent prayer that he's still here so I can make pathetic jokes about my 'armless 'usband.

Of course, he's not literally armless, but he has been a bit 'elpless, and the road to recovery is long and hard. The dislocated shoulder was comparatively easy to treat with a spot of general anaesthetic and a couple of medical students standing on his chest to wrench it back into place, but the elbow has proved to be a bit of a brute - it turns out that Mr Trefusis has a displaced unstable comminuted fracture - I may well have those words in the wrong order, but in laymans terms, it means that his elbow is as buggered as it's possible to be and still vaguely connect the upper and lower arms. Of course, if you're an orthopaedic surgeon, buggered elbows represent a fantastically juicy technical challenge, and Mr Trefusis stuffed his up enough to warrant the attentions of a professor of orthopaedics, a senior consultant, a consultant and about forty five students for his five hours in theatre, and for the follow-up treatment, all working incredibly hard to give him back an elbow. And all for free, too: God bless the NHS.

Mr Trefusis continues to look as if he's auditioning for an AmDram Richard III, with his still-painful dislocated shoulder held slightly hunched and his broken elbow crooked.
Irritatingly, he refuses to launch into "Now is the winter of our discontent" as a party piece, which is rather unsporting: I daresay if I'd been through what he'd been through I'd resent someone trying to get comedy value out of it too. But six weeks on from the operation
the consultant has upgraded his prognosis from "will regain some movement" to "may regain full mobility", so perhaps that's as much cheer as either of us needs.

Update: a little more than six months on, Mr Trefusis is now back to doing forty press ups. I think the surgeon's prognosis of 'may regain full mobility' was something of an understatement.

MRS TREFUSIS REGRETS

2011-04-12T22:22:00.002+01:00

At least two thirds of anything I utter starts with the words 'I'm so sorry'. The remaining thirty-odd percent is taken up by the excuses that invariably succeed any of my apologies.

Of course - not that this is any real defence - I'm mainly apologising for sins of omission than commission. I find myself on the back foot because I am an abysmal time manager - chaotic and unmethodical, failing to differentiate the urgent from the important, or to prioritise the essential. I'm told there's a huge satisfaction to be had from writing 'To Do' lists and then ticking things off as they are done. I tried it and promptly lost the list. Then I found the list and had to add a dozen new things that had cropped up between losing the original list and finding it again. So I bluff my way through without a list, keeping some of the plates spinning in the air whilst trying to pretend I'm indifferent to the piles of shattered crockery at my feet.

This post is no different - it's all about the apology - for I am actually awfully sorry for being such a shoddy, infrequent, uninteresting blogger all year. It really wasn't how I started, honestly: when the world for me was shiny and hopeful, and I was less weary, I posted quite often. Few weeks go past without me resolving to write more often, but then a lack of time and imagination get in the way again, and before I know it, it's a month since I last wrote anything other than my signature on a stack of invoices and some terse emails, bashed out on a Blackberry on the bus. Like everyone else, I suppose, I keep buggering on, post-recession - in a world where we all have to do more, with less, and for less, and that's as big a time thief as any. Yes, being time-poor is a good excuse, but is it really a reason?

As far as writing this blog is concerned, if I continue doing nothing more than saying sorry and making excuses all I'll do is hold the snarling dog of guilt at bay.

I do wonder, though, if I say 'sorry' a little too reflexively: Am I using it away of acknowledging the things undone without including any of your actual, you know, repentence? What is the distance between rueful and contrite? I have a suspicion that if an apology is heartfelt, it should include more than guilt and remorse, and be all about a fervent desire not to repeat the error?

If I resolve to write more often, and actually manage to do it, at least I'll have resolved something. Who knows, it might show me that I could apologise less, and do more in other aspects of my life too. I'll give it a whirl.

WHAT TO WEAR FOR SPRING & A CONTINUING PASSION FOR BASTYAN

2011-03-09T11:17:00.004Z

Winter seems so interminable in London that I can hardly remember the last time I wasn't all rugged up in layer upon layer of black, like a woolly Matryoshka doll.

But now the thermometer is making a concerted effort to stay above zero, I start to long for new clothes. I want something that shows I've cottoned onto the season's new themes and trends, without being achingly fashion forward. I’m also not temperamentally disposed to buying an entire new wardrobe of clothes each season, even if I had the money to do it, which I don’t.

I won’t be able to face the vogue for bright colours until the summer – the spring light feels too weak to take it. Nor will the white thing work for me, since I travel everywhere by tube and bus and have skin the colour of skimmed milk. But I do rather love the way that designers have re-interpreted stark white by way of a Dulux ‘Natural Hints’ colour chart. I like white when it strays as far as buttermilk, or blush or a very pale camel. One might suspect it of not being white at all, but – whatever – fashion is all about the nuance.

The purchase of the scarlet dress pre-Christmas has turned me into something of a Bastyan zealot. Now in its third season, it’s an incredibly wearable label - I love the way the designs are cut for real women: if you have great legs but are less than keen on your tummy, there are lovely skinny trousers to team with embellished tops, and empire line dresses which work as well over trousers as with opaques and a great pair of heels. Or if, like me, you’re a pear rather than an apple, the dresses are incredibly flattering, with signature draping in just the right places.

Anyway, here are a few of the things which I’ve been admiring lately because they combine my kind of shape with a nod at the colours and trends of the early spring season.

Blonde leather dress £395

This butter-soft leather dress is a bit of an investment piece, but looks so beautiful.

Zip belt dress £220

I love the versatility of this dress: it's a cool update on the LBD, and is exactly the kind of thing that could take one from work to something more interesting in the evening just by adjusting the front zip at the neckline. I know we're supposed to move away from black for the S/S 11 season, but it's just so easy to wear.

Fine leather jacket £395

This jacket would be tremendous over the dress - its skillful cut gives one a nod to rock-chick chic without going the full Joan Jett.

Twisted drape jumper £130

I'm more inclined to knitwear than tailored jackets over dresses - and this is soft and modern without being too informal. Our office is so incredibly cold on a Monday morning, I'm always on the hunt for a chic cover-up.

However, the bottom line for me is that, when it comes to new clothes, a party dress trumps work-wear everytime. Esquire's 20th Birthday party at The Berkeley's Blue Bar was the perfect setting for this rather sophisticated navy Bastyan dress. Although it's very fitted (bless you, Spanx), the front of the dress is designed to gather and drape in a way that manages to conceal rather than reveal, thankfully, and the underwired camisole you can see is a separate piece, which adds some structure. Mind you, people did keep whispering that they could see my bra, so either they were fashion ignoramuses, or I need to work harder on how the dress drapes over the camisole.

The bangles I wore with it are actually coral rather than red, and were an impulse buy from Marks and Spencers (I think they were £8).

Bastyan Cowl-neck lace-cami dress £195

NOTA BENE: I've just noticed that Bastyan is offering a 20% discount on the S/S11 collection on their website - good news for my wardrobe, bad news for my bank balance....

THE STATIONERY ROOM AT LIBERTY

2011-02-20T00:43:00.001Z

I managed to resist the siren call of the new Liberty paper room for - oh, I don't know - at least a fortnight. It's been almost impossible - I have a fetish for notebooks of all kinds, and Liberty is a mere hop, skip and a jump from my office - and eventually the lure became too strong.

Sadly for my bank balance, it's an absolute mecca of glossy stationery, full of exquisitely chosen bits and bobs - there are shining gold pencil cases, Christian Lacroix notecards, a delicious new range of Pantone themed moleskines in all sizes, Liberty's own range of embossed leather-bound notebooks to which one can add one's initials for a small consideration, and a whole world of other paper-based loveliness.

I love it that Liberty is making a much wider use of its signature prints - these lovely pencil cases and jotters below would make terrific presents. I can't remember how much they were off the top of my head, but I remember thinking it wasn't demented.

In fact, the pricing is another thing Liberty have got absolutely bang on: Nobody wants to really invest in stationery - it should be all about spontaneous spoiling. There are some really luxurious things - the iPad and iBook cases, for example, but on the whole, it's the perfect place for a guilt-free retail pick-me-up when you need something to cheering after a tiresome day. I also saw a dozen things that might make thoughtful presents for friends, from the Archie Grand notebook series - Secret Agents I Knew & Liked and so on at £12 - to this gorgeous book, bound in gold metallic leather for £22, and Sarah Hough's urban notebooks at £6.95.

That being said, £5 to £10 here and there can really add up - I nipped in on the pretext of buying a quirkily elegant thank-you card for a friend, and left having dropped the best part of forty quid on a selection of treats for me. God knows what I'm going to fill these notebooks with - I wish I could say it might live up to their beauty - but fill them I shall, and then go back to Liberty for more. I particularly love the tiny notebooks based on the original designs for Penguin paperbacks. They're so lovely I don't even want to write in them, just keep them in my handbag as object of beauty.

Liberty. Great Marlborough Street, London W1B 5AH
Liberty.co.uk

SEVEN ANTI-AGEING SECRETS

2011-01-24T23:50:00.002Z

I'm still half-heartedly batting off middle-age. By which I mean, my efforts to remind myself that I'm not absolutely over the hill are certainly more vigorous than they were last year. 2010 was mostly characterised by my devotion to eating cake and feeling morose, and of course, by the time the New Year dawned, the cake had made my pants feel like I was wearing them back to front, and the moping around smacked too much of the horror of my fifteen year old self, when all I did was stay in my bedroom wearing an oversize black mohair jersey, writing bleak, sub-Sylvia Plath inspired poetry to a soundtrack of Kate Bush and The Dead Kennedy's.

There has been some progression, thankfully: the mohair has given way to a black cashmere polo neck (admittedly, I'd much rather the label inside said 'Brora' than 'Tesco Finest', but still), and the awful poetry has been replaced by this blog (less prolific, more self-conscious). Fortunately for Mr Trefusis, I only have The Dead Kennedy's on vinyl, and we no longer have a record player. But even so, the period of appalling self-indulgence would have to come to an end at some point, and God, January is a good a cut off as any.

'Shake it off, Trefusis, and spruce yourself up,' I said to myself over Christmas, 'There's no point in waiting for your second wind, if you're still puffed out from the first, life in the old dog yet and all that.' I'm afraid I've never been one for covert, internal transformations - for one thing, if I'm going to make an effort to buck things up, I don't want it to go unnoticed and for another, I can't possibly change myself on the inside if the outside looks shabby - it seems so hypocritical, really.

It's not a new or original thought, obviously - about two thousand years ago, Roman poet Juvenal wrote that 'seldom do people discern/eloquence under a threadbare cloak' so now, as then, the externals matter.

Of course, after a certain age, there's no such thing as a five minute fix - one can't shrug off twelve months of intimate acquaintance with the Campari Spritz at lovely Polpo Soho or Red Velvets at Hummingbird Bakery overnight - and it seems to me that, after forty, everything, from reading the instructions on a new gadget to looking halfway presentable, takes an unreasonably long time.

But there are a few rules, I find, to making one look less of a natural disaster -

(1) Decent skincare
The effects of winter weather and central heating, as much as age, make skin seem grey, dry and dull. Harper's Bazaar's Newby Hands said Nubo's Diamond Peel and Reveal 'is the best we've tried for giving refined, clear skin'. It's the best I've tried too - it's like Mr Sheen for the face, getting rid of the dusty look and putting the fresh shine back. It's not a steal at £65, but it is wonderful, and a little goes a long way.
I also really like Clinique's Repairwear Laser Focus wrinkle and UV damage corrector (£35) - I'm a huge fan of serums - I've tried everything from Lancome's Genefique to Creme de la Mer - but this works even better than products I've used at twice the price. It makes my skin incredibly clear and soft, and has all but eradicated the finer lines on my face. I use it with another Clinique product, Youth Surge Age Decelerating Moisturiser (there's a day and a night cream), which again has a performance which belies the price - it's about £28, which is only a few quid more than Olay, and infinitely more effective. I'm a complete convert.

(2) It's all about the hair
Watch any of those make-over programmes, and it's not the zillions spent on botox/fillers/peels/surgery that turns the bags into beauties, it's the hair. Good colour and a decent cut work miracles beyond comprehension. My beloved Graham, who created the Mrs Trefusis hair (profile picture) and is King of Up-do's, has opened a salon a hop, skip and a jump from the office, so I need never let my roots admit what he tries so hard to conceal, that I'm very far from a natural blonde. Graham also taught me that a professional blow-dry is infinitely better value for money than a new frock if you've somewhere special to go.
Tilley and Carmichael, 5 Silver Place, Soho, London W1F 0JR. 0207 287 7677

(3) Until someone sensible brings vigorous corsetry back into vogue, exercise is unavoidable
I've tried, really I have. There have been a few half-hearted attempts at getting back into running, but really, it's been all about the Spanx and a push up bra since the Tiniest T was born. Apparently, exercise not only puts the zing back into your figure, it also makes you feel jolly. Three mind-boggling Zumba classes and some fiendish gym sessions, I'm still to be convinced, possibly because the programme was designed for me by an infant in trackpants, who talked slowly to me in a 'Does he take sugar?' kind of way, and said 'I expect the gym has changed a lot since you last came: it's all computerised now.'

(4) Bugger being young: be sophisticated.
(Actually, this is points 4, 5, 6 and 7 all rolled into one, partly because it's taken me a month to get round to writing this blog, and we'll be here all night if I go on much longer.)

Why bother to épater les jeunes when this season's ultra-groomed glamour looks utterly bonkers on the under 35's. If you try to do the current 'done' look, all blow-dried hair and proper lipstick, and you're in your mid-twenties, you risk looking like the Tiniest Trefusis after a raid on my wardrobe.

Ha! Quick, quick, Middle Youth, I call upon you to rise up: our fashion moment has finally come.

Anyway, the quickest short cut to sophistication is a bold lip, which seems to be very now, thankfully - Sali Hughes has it bang on in this lovely piece from the Guardian. Unconsciously, I've been working up to this moment for a while because at the last count I had fifteen red lipsticks, all different, but then with red lips, it's all about the nuance. It's not especially easy to pull off - a strong lip doesn't really work if the rest of you is a bit laissez-faire - but on the days one can be bothered, it's pure beauty prozac.

It's also probably time to develop a signature look, as recommended in one of my favourite books - Backwards in High Heels - I'm still working on this, but I'm told it's not only sophisticated, it's most youthifying.

I was also told the other day, by someone who knows, that fast fashion is over and it's all about 'considered shopping' - for example - no one needs three expensive handbags - invest in the one you really love and look after it. Don't buy six cheap white shirts, find the definitive white shirt, and so on and so forth.

But really, the apogee of grown-up chic is the ability to eat oysters. In my head, I am exactly the kind of woman who could perch elegantly on a high stool and lunch on a half dozen Duchy Natives and a glass of champagne - not only is this sublimely elegant, it's also only 4 Weightwatcher Pro-points, the same as a couple of slices of toast but infinitely more impressive. Reader, I have yet to manage more than two oysters, because secretly they rather revolt me, but I am practising hard, helped by the opening of fabulous new seafood restaurant, The Wright Brothers on Kingly Street in Soho - just walking in makes me feel impossibly stylish, like Alexis Colby, but in a good way.

THE SCARLET DRESS

2010-12-24T17:52:00.001Z

It's a long time since I was this obsessed by a dress. You know how it is - you see something in a shop, and you can't stop thinking about it. Every time you open your wardrobe, there's a great glaring hole where the coveted item should be, but isn't, because it's still in the shop. Every time you get dressed, even your most favourite outfit is diminished by not being the dress. And so it is with this scarlet frock from Bastyan. Red isn't a colour I usually wear, having very much a Ford Model T approach to fashion - any colour you like as long as it's black - but there's something immensely Christmassy about this particular shade of vermilion. Quite marvellous for Christmas Day, and New Year's Eve, and my sister's birthday, and, and ....you see what I'm doing here? Fashion maths. Fashion maths means you divide the price of some gorgeous object of desire by the number of occasions you think you might wear it. It always comes out as £1.22 per wear, and so it is that your brain says '£1.22? You can't even get a cappuccino for that' and it instantly becomes a complete steal.

It's not even especially expensive - it's currently reduced from £225 to £125, both on the Bastyan website and in House of Fraser, and it's silk too. What's more, Bastyan makes the most fabulously flattering frocks on the planet - Tonia Bastyan, the label's owner and designer, understands perfectly that when one is over 35 one doesn't want to be tugging things down to cover a less than perfect knee, or pinning a neckline to conceal the fact one can't get away with bra-less anymore. She uses luxurious fabrics and clever draping to drift gently over the difficult bits and enhance the parts that aren't quite yet completely disastrous. She's that all too rare thing, a designer that designs for, rather than against, all the idiosyncrasies of a woman's body, without sacrificing a strong design edge, and the net result is a collection which flatters, and is yet still completely on trend. The scarlet silk georgette goddess dress is a really good example of this, but there are many more. I could start to develop a small addiction.

Oh, see how I'm longing for it? Should I wait to find out if I get any money for Christmas? Should I brave the ghastliness of Christmas Eve at Westfield to see if they have one left in my size in case the yearning gets too great and I have to have it?

Addendum; Writing this post made the craving worse: I couldn't live without the dress. And not only did they still have my size at Westfield, my mother said that she'd get it for me for Christmas: evidently it was meant to be mine. I can't wait to unwrap it and put it on. Happy Christmas everyone.

UPDATE: October 2011 - I've just heard a whisper that the next Harper's Bazaar party is to have a black and red theme - guess what I'll be wearing? That's another nice thing about Bastyan - it's fashionable, but not so achingly on trend that you can't wear it for more than a season

COMFORT READS FOR CHRISTMAS

2010-12-16T14:28:00.002Z

Two terrific books to enjoy over Christmas

COMFORT and JOY. INDIA KNIGHT.

Clara Dunphy, Comfort and Joy's laugh-out-loud-funny fortysomething heroine,is determined to have the perfect Christmas - 'It's not that I want it to be perfect in the Martha Stewart sense,' she says, '- I don't even own any matching crockery. I just want it to be...nice. Warm. Loving. Joyous. All those things. Christmassy.'

As the novel opens, Clara is battling with the last minute Oxford Street crowds, on the impossible search for the most perfect of perfect presents for two of the most wonderfully drawn characters in her book, her mother, Kate, and her fabulous mother-in-law, not to mention the topping up of presents for the children, in case there's not quite enough - and immediately one is drawn in. One of India Knight's great talents lies in the way she very quickly establishes vast swathes of common ground with her reader, and Comfort and Joy is empathy central.

Comfort & Joy is set on a series of Christmasses, past and present, and is about, amongst other things, that very modern phenomenon, the blended family. It's India Knight's first novel, 'My Life on a Plate', ten years on, and I liked it so much I immediately had to re-read 'My Life on Plate' to remind myself of her characters backstories, and to get more of the witty, self-deprecating heroine and her extraordinary family. I read 'My Life on a Plate' aloud to my sister on a long car journey, like a kind of bonkers low-rent talking book, and we were screaming with laughter so much that once we'd arrived at our destination, my sister wouldn't let me out of the car until I'd finished reading. I think she's hoping for a repeat performance with Comfort & Joy.

Comfort & Joy is available from Amazon - although it's still in hardback, it's an extremely bargainacious £7.75

MY LAST DUCHESS: DAISY GOODWIN

Another delicious book is Daisy Goodwin's 'My Last Duchess'. Set against the backdrop of country house life at the end of the nineteenth century, it's a wonderful tale of the tensions between love and money, and between class and wealth. Cora is the beautiful daughter of an extremely socially ambitious and super-rich American mama, keen to get her daughter married off in Vanderbilt style to a title and Ivo Maltravers, the dashing yet broke Duke of Wareham, fits the bill perfectly.
If one were trying to sell-in the mini-series, one might say it's Wharton's The Buccaneers meets Downton Abbey - hugely enjoyable, glamorous, and a terrific comfort read to curl up with on Boxing Day.

Again it's on special offer at Amazon for £7.17 (what is this £7.17? I keep trying to work out the percentage discount off the list price but my tiny, sleep-deprived brain can't cope with it)

MEGAMIND

2010-12-15T20:54:00.001Z

'He wasn't born bad,' said Trefusis Minor of the arch-villain and unlikely hero of Megamind, 'He just ended up in the wrong place.' It felt like a curiously philosophical observation for a six year old, but in Megamind's case, it's literally true.

Megamind is, apparently, Trefusis Minor's 'best film ever ever', and I thoroughly enjoyed it too - Dreamworks see it as a technological breakthrough because it's the first time anyone's ever managed to make a cloak look convincing in a cartoon, but I think Trefusis Minor and I liked it for its super-hero vs super-villain derring-do, and the way that the good end happily, and the bad end - well - having learned in the nicest possible way that crime doesn't pay.

Megamind is on nationwide release.

THE ARCHERS YEARS

2010-11-26T21:50:00.018Z

The Archers Years are nearly upon me. I can hardly bring myself to say that without a moue of regret, but I think the evidence is irrefutable: I made a Christmas cake at the weekend, using the handy ‘Delia Smith’ bag of ready-measured ingredients from Waitrose, and this fit of middle-aged-middle-class domestic activity came hard on the heels of making jam to use up the plums from my parent’s garden. And whilst I can still concede a quiver of enthusiasm for Gavin Henson’s six pack on Strictly Come Dancing (oh God, I've been watching Strictly - pass the humane killer), the sight of Mr Trefusis loading the dishwasher or wielding the vacuum cleaner is far more likely to get my superannuated sap rising.

I'd love to reach for the glamour of 'Middle-youth' but it sounds a bit tiring, as if it requires me to do daily pilates, and take on a vigorous campaigning role on the PTA, and buy Cath Kidston or Boden. I'm feeling too past it for that kind of re-branding: my mental wireless is permanently tuned into Radio 4, my favourite iTunes podcast is 'In Our Time' and Marks and Spencer has suddenly reappeared on my radar as an interesting place to shop. I daresay that if I were to tune into the Archers, I'd completely relate to the storyline.

I suppose there are some benefits to the The Archers Years - I care an awful lot less about what other people think of me. I've almost stopped pretending to like stuff on the offchance it might make me look big and clever. I give up on books that are too worthy, dreary or gritty without a shred of guilt. I'm even prepared to wear comfortable shoes. I'm not sure whether it's increased confidence or being too exhausted to mind, but the net result is that I'm a little better at knowing what makes me happy - probably much the same kinds of things as anyone else - not that I intend to admit any of it when the government come round to measure where I am on their happiness index. Reading makes me happy, of course, and I no longer edit the books on my bedside table to try to reflect a more intriguing, intellectual, adventurous me - the first time Mr Trefusis stayed over (hem hem) he didn't even notice the casually placed copies of The Second Sex or Delta of Venus, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or The Four Quartets, and eight years later I suppose it's a great relief he doesn't judge me for replacing them with Bernard Cornwall and Ken Follett.

But the regret is still there, nagging away as I line my cake tins with a double layer of baking parchment. Middle-age might be desperate to claim me as one of its own, but I'm not ready to go without a tiny struggle. It's a quiet kind of mid-life crisis I suppose. I wish I could buy a Harley Davidson, or dye my hair an extraordinary shade, or start wearing inappropriate clothing and talking self-consciously about going to 'gigs', which at least would acknowledge the whole damn thing as a rite of passage. But I can't, and instead the whole thing becomes internalised as mild disappointment and missed opportunity.

Anyway, it's time to feed the cake its brandy. I might have a cheering tot myself whilst I'm at it.

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

2010-11-14T21:54:00.004Z

'I like dragons,' says Trefusis Minor, 'They can throw fire, they're quite like snakes and lizards and they can fly. And they're really quick. And they have armour. The most important thing about a dragon is its wings, its fireballs and its teeth.'

Trefusis Minor is obsessed by dragons. I'm sure many more experienced parents will nod wisely and tell me that dragons are simply the next turning on the left after dinosaurs on the map of boyhood. Mr Trefusis and I are not experienced parents - it's a case of the blind leading the blonde as we struggle to keep up with each new enthusiasm as best we can - though I think we're both secretly relieved we no longer have to remember that a compsognathus was the smallest of the carnivores, or struggle with the pronunciation of Pachycephalosauria.

Anyway, I asked Trefusis Minor why he thought dragons were so popular. 'It's because of St. George,' he said sagely, 'And St. Michael. Everyone likes dragons, even the bad ones.' And, really, that was as much as he'd say on the matter. But everyday he draws pages and pages of them: some have two heads and look ferocious, some are equipped with a terrifying arsenal of weapons, some look amiably bovine, but no two are identical.

Actually, I think the dragon fascination started with a trip to see 'How to Train Your Dragon', a film full of adventure and beautifully realised dragons in exhilarating flying, swooping, gliding and fighting scenes. The hero, Hiccup, is a young and appealingly useless Viking living on the beleaguered island of Berk, who defies tradition when he befriends one of his deadliest foes — the ferocious dragon he calls Toothless.

The film is inspired by Cressida Cowell's book of the same name, subsequently a huge hit at bedtime with Trefusis Minor, though he maintains he prefers the film - I hope his review, which I took down verbatim, makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in coherence.

'Hiccup is brave and very, very intelligent, he likes the dragons and wants to be friends with them. He didn't want to kill them. In the book he can speak Dragon Language: he can't in the film but he captures a Night Fury which is the best dragon there is and he calls it Toothless and he does find out by himself how to train dragons really well and he saves everyone from the Red Death.

In the book no one actually flies on a dragon but they do in the film and it's amazing when Hiccup flies on his dragon. In the book Toothless doesn't look very scary and he's a bit pathetic but in the film he's beautiful like a black flying snake with green eyes.'

Dreamworks 'How to Train Your Dragon' is out on DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow, Monday 15th November. It will almost certainly find its way into Trefusis Minor's Christmas stocking, and I shan't be sorry to watch it again either - I'm a sucker for films with unlikely heroes, and there are few as unlikely as Hiccup the Useless (later 'Useful') and his beautiful dragon Toothless.

And, as Trefusis Minor says, 'Dragons are actually in Real Life. they're different from ones in the films because they're Komodo dragons who can't spit fire or fly but they do have armour and they are dangerous because they can spit poison and they are big and scary and strong and can defend themselves'

HALLOWE'EN

2010-10-21T23:17:00.002+01:00

As a child, we celebrated Hallowe'en in a curiously pagan way - the spooky shrunken heads of the swede lanterns were only the half of it: most of the rest of the entertainment seemed to involve apples. We'd peel apples, trying to get the peel off in one long ribbon, and then throw it over our left shoulders - it's supposed to land in the shape of the initial of the man you'll marry. I've never gone out with a man whose name begins with 'S', let alone married one. We did a lot of apple bobbing too - I told Trefusis Minor about it: he looked horrified and told me sharply that it was too dangerous and someone might drown. He is still the health and safety officer in this house. And there was also a game involving hanging apples on pieces of string from the door lintel - your hands were tied behind your back and you had to try and take a bite.

I've forgotten most of the witchy stuff now - it was pretty tame, I'm sure, and probably involved yet more apples and some candle magic. We weren't allowed pumpkins - if they were even available in the north of England of the late seventies - and although we had heard of 'tricky treating'[sic], the idea was considered 'American'. Nothing more needed to be said for us to understand that it wasn't something we would be able to do. Looking back on it with the distance of thirty years, I take my black pointy hat off to my mother and aunt - it takes some genius to keep a houseful of the under tens occupied for a whole day with nothing more than a large bag of apples and a few wrinkly swedes.

The Trefusis Hallowe'en is a little more commercial - these days pumpkins are more easily available than swedes in West London, and an awful lot easier to deal with. And if the children want to dress up and go next door to beg for sweets, then it's perfectly all right with me, possibly because I know they have no interest at all in the 'trick' part of the equation. It also offers a brilliant hook for keeping the children entertained for a whole day without them once uttering the vile words 'I'm bored'. I may not be much cop with apples and root vegetables, but I'm a dab hand at making spooky soup, and spider cake, and playing games like 'let's turn Daddy into a Mummy', though this is, of course, a terrible waste of a roll of white loo paper.

The Tiniest Trefusis has already had a fabulous preview of Hallowe'en fun, albeit not of the home made variety. She and I were lucky enough to go along to the press preview of Harrods' Hallowe'en programme, which runs over the Hallowe'en weekend. Activities on the fourth floor (toys, children's designer boutiques, Junior collections etc) include Fiendish Face painting (not terribly fiendish in the Tiny T's case - she wanted to be a butterfly), Creepy Crafts (we enjoyed making a bespoke witches hat), and Marvin's Magic's Freaky Body Illusionist (12-2pm in the Toy Kingdom). There's also delicious frozen yoghurt with spooky sprinklings available at the new YooMoo frozen yoghurt bar just near Way In, not that Trefusis Minor or The TT are ever to be fobbed off with frozen yoghurt - they think it's a terrible swizz and won't accept anything other than proper ice-cream.
For children between 5 and 8, Waterstones at Harrods is hosting a series of readings of Terrifying Tales (sessions at 2, 2.30 and 3pm) with tricks and treats for all and for grownups, my lovely friend Michael Korel is giving personal Tarot readings, also at Waterstones. For more information see the Harrods website.

SHE STOOPS TO CONKER

2010-10-11T23:24:00.004+01:00

Autumn is easy to love: I think it's the slight faded quality the pale ochre light gives everything, as if in a thoughtlessly hung picture, colours all bleached in the sun. I like the quick sharpness in the air, and the hint of bonfire that uncurls itself the minute dusk falls.

Most of all, I love the way autumn is packed with oddly pagan rituals, so deeply embedded in the folk memory it doesn't matter they've long since lost their meaning - Hallowe'en in our family involves chiselling out swedes rather than pumpkins for lanterns (try it - you can't get a fabulously Papua New Guinean shrunken head look with a pumpkin), drowning for apples, and candle magic, and much as I grew up in the country, there's an odd disconnect between celebrating Harvest Festival in West London and your actual proper 'plough-the-fields-and-scatter' harvest. Don't even get me started on Guy Fawkes - much as we've reinvented it as bonfire night, scratch the surface and it's hardly the most ecumenical of celebrations, as anyone who's been to the November 5th activities in Lewes will attest.

But anyway, my delight in autumn lies not so much in the big events but in the tiny quotidien joys - the glorious scarlet of rosehips against a miserable grey sky, finding a recipe for rowan jelly on this lovely website, making jam with the glut of plums in my parents garden, and laughing and laughing with my children, whirling around trying to catch leaves falling from trees to make a wish.

And of course, there's the endless trips to the park to collect conkers: they're so pointlessly beautiful - the gorgeous burnt sienna glossiness lasts about four hours before they start to lose their lustre. Every year we bring a bagful home and put them in a bowl to admire them - only a few every find themselves strung on a string for a conker fight - and within days they're all shrinkled. It's a shame.

This year, I've started to over-identify with the poor conker : the notion that I'm now autumn, and no longer ripe with the bloom of summer, has hit me rather hard. I seem to have developed a deciduous quality and I don't like it at all: One minute I was all shiny, happily passing for thirty seven, then I woke one morning to discover a chill in the air, my bloom dulled, and I looked every one of my forty three years. I do love Donne for writing 'No spring nor summer hath such grace, As I have seen in one autumnal face' but I stare at myself in the mirror and think he must have been blind.

And it's not just about railing against the physical changes that age brings, or at the invisibility of no longer being exactly young, it's also about the way my head won't adjust to being a proper grown up. And where does this idea come from that one's possibilities contract as one's days shorten? There are still twenty four hours - they are simply differently apportioned - and longer nights mean more flattering lighting, after all - but somehow the idea has taken root. I urgently need to find the notebook in which I wrote the list of people who had come up to the boil after forty, after a long and interminable simmer. I don't want to always be the watched pot.

As I look at the conkers gathering dust on the kitchen table, and at the autumn-hued leaves and berries Trefusis Minor has gathered for his school project, I try to summon up a sense of resolve: Autumn, with all its small pleasures and curious celebrations, must become my favourite time of life, as well as my favourite season..

MRS TREFUSIS TAKES A BICYCLE

2010-09-03T17:46:00.004+01:00

"If it all gets a bit much, don't be too proud to cycle on the pavement" says Mr Trefusis, kindly, rapping me on the top of my helmet as if to test its strength, and waving me off on my inaugural bicycle ride to the office.

Well, I say inaugural, but I do have form for cycling, albeit in the dim and distant past. Eight years ago, in the middle of a tube strike, I wobbled off to work on my monstrously cool yet entirely impractical Kronan, and I only did it because I had no alternative. The Kronan was developed in the Second World War for the Swedish army, weighs as much as a tank, and was once selected by Tyler Brûle as one of the most stylish design objects of the twentieth century. A bicycle less suited to a commute from West London to Carnaby Street, I can't imagine. Quite apart from its heft, it has no gears and only a back pedal brake, a distinct disadvantage when pedalling up and down the aptly named Notting Hill. As brutal as it is beautiful, I keep expecting to find it used as a murder weapon in an episode of Wallander. Anyway, it was a one off experiment and the Kronan has long since been retired, due to the hassle of getting spare parts shipped in from Sweden, as well as its other disadvantages. Until now, cycling to work has remained nothing more than a latent aspiration.

However, the ongoing Great Trefusis Economic Crisis, and the onset of incipient middle-aged lardiness has put commuting by bicycle firmly back on the agenda. Could I save money and get fitter at the same time, ideally without finding myself squashed between the 148 bus and a John Lewis delivery van on the Bayswater Road? I'm not convinced enough to invest in a bicycle of my own – and of course, that would hardly tick the money-saving box - so I borrowed an old one from my parents instead and bought the sort of luminous waistcoat that people on building sites wear. I figured that if I was to cheat death on two wheels, it was best to make my lack of cycling proficiency really, really visible.

On paper, or indeed by car/bus/tube, the journey to work is simple – turn right out of our road, turn right again, and keep going straight until one gets to Oxford Circus. But on a bike, going along Holland Park Avenue and then down Oxford Street feels like a route mapped in one's own blood. I plugged the postcodes into TFL's planner which came back with a route so circuitous and complex that it went on to two pages – God only knows how one is supposed to memorise a route like that, but I tried to keep it in my head by earmarking the familiar. It's roughly straight on West to East – how hard could it be?
Anyway, I set off, went straight, turned left at the Rug Company, ran behind Holland Park Avenue and Notting Hill until I passed Le Cafe Anglais, and then, not quite a third of the way into the journey, I promptly forgot the route, found myself back on the main road, inches from the thundering juggernauts. I remembered Mr Trefusis's pavement advice, but the pavement was, rather inconveniently, full of pedestrians, so I crossed at the lights and went into Hyde Park – what could be nicer? Trees, no cars, squirrels, loveliness and Parks Police. "Cycling is not allowed" shrieked the Parks Policeman, "can't you see the sign?". 'No Cycling' is written in two foot high letters at intervals along the path so I was definitely caught red-faced and red-handed. All I could do was dismount and walk my bike, head held as high as I could muster, to the nearest exit. Not being able to cycle in the park, parallel with the Bayswater Road, seems to me to be the most enormous swizz – Hyde Park is huge, with much wider pavements than the street, and could easily accommodate a small cycle lane. Boris should have fixed this at the same time as planting all of his bikes all over London. I overtook two Boris Bikes after that, just to get my pride back.

Actually, the journey from then on was relatively uneventful – I took a slightly idiosyncratic route north of Oxford Street, and then down through Hanover Square so I could 'wave' cheerily, hem hem, at Vogue House before arriving at work rather earlier than usual.

Cycling is moderately terrifying, I must admit, but the greatest dangers seem to be from other cyclists – those wearing earphones to cycle seem to lack an appropriate respect for their own personal safety – and Professor of Traffic Psychology (and God, who knew there was such a thing), Dr Ian Walker's insights seem to work, cars/buses/cabs and vans give you a wider berth if you're obviously a bit rubbish, your mum's bike and long blond hair worn loose are as essential a part of your Cycling Safety kit as a helmet and lights. As I write this, I'm about to don the fluoro waistcoat and swirly-girly helmet for my newly mapped route home, past Estee Lauder's head office, over Park Lane and straight on until I get to the cup of tea Mr Trefusis promises he has waiting for me at the other end.

THE BLOODY RAIN

2010-08-27T15:48:00.009+01:00

Is there anyone who can face this wretched weather with equanimity? Trefusis Minor is the only person I can find who's not complaining. He likes rain, idiosyncratic child that he is, and moaned loudly on holiday about wanting to be back in England because he was too hot and he missed the rain. Yes, I did explain to him that the Isle of Wight was actually England, but his personal universe appears to begin and end in West London. There are many who say that the current Prime Minister would agree with him, discounting little offshoots of his empire in Oxfordshire or Cornwall.

The British are by nature an optimistic people - we're the biggest market in Europe for convertibles, for example, which after second marriage is the most wonderful demonstration of the triumph of hope over experience. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we still expect our summers to be dry and balmy, full of days which have a nice country walk with a pub at the end of them, and perhaps a bit of messing about on boats if we're lucky. Every year, when the heavens open, the British mutter noisily about climate change and go around turning off the lights as a kind of totem against global warming-induced rainfall. We badly need to adjust our expectations and recognise that we get a few nice days in April, and a few more in September and as for the rest - well, it's worth investing in a good umbrella.

A little delving around the stats on the Met Office website -and some roving around the internets - suggests August has always been pretty rank, weather-wise. The August bank holiday was, apparently, moved back to the end of the month to give it a fighting chance of decent weather. If you take the years 1971 to 2000, August has a similar average rainfall to March, at 72mm, and who'd plan a barbeque for March? I couldn't find any aggregated stats for the last nine years, but I can't think it's improved any.

If this last week's weather has felt foully inclement, it's by no means untypical. What's more, it's hardly the worst August has thrown at us over the years. In 1912, seven inches of rain fell in one afternoon in Norwich, leaving it marooned in mud and flood detritus. The summer of 1956 was also one I'm relieved to have missed - a few years ago, Paul Simons wrote about it in The Times as being "an assault course of monsoonal rains, big floods, giant hail, houses set ablaze by lightning, howling gales and miserable cold". That August was the coldest and wettest on record.

I'm staring out of the office window at a lowering sky, and at an iPhone app that promises a fine afternoon, and wondering whether to fold this season's wardrobe staple, the ineffably chic Cagoule-Burkha, into its handy handbag-sized pochette, or just to put it on, ready to brave the journey home. Such is my desire to stay dry and avoid damp knees - the curse of a British Summer - that I really don't care what I look like. The rain has completely quashed my vanity and I suspect I'm rapidly turning into the kind of woman who will wear purple in the not too distant future.

However, my real issue with the bloody rain is that it works for me like a reverse pathetic fallacy - the weather doesn't reflect my mood, it dictates it. A little sunshine means outrageous fortune's sharpest arrows just bounce off me, but when it rains, the smallest slight pierces my armour and makes me dreary and depressed, as if life from now on was going to be one long wait at a bus stop in a downpour. I can't even default to my usual cheer-up option, a blowdry, because the merest hint of drizzle undoes the best hairdressers work. Shamefully, on re-reading what I've written I realise that the rain also elicits in me the most appalling self-pity.

Someone needs to start a bad weather self-help blog, or at least suggest some strategies for sloughing off a rain-induced fit of the glooms. Who's going to start the ball rolling? There's a YSL lipstick and a Dolce and Gabbana mascara (lovingly photographed by me on my iPhone) for the suggestion that cheers me up the most.

A LA RÉCHERCHE DES VACANCES PERDUES

2010-08-24T22:00:00.006+01:00

'I've turned into my parents, haven't I?' I said to Mr Trefusis halfway through our holiday, as I tuned the car radio into Radio Four and suggested we might stop to have a look at the view. I found myself parroting phrases like 'Just in case' and 'You can't trust the forecast' as I packed cagoules and cardigans, sunhats and suncream, and insisted on the children getting out to the beach even when it was far from warm for 'a bit of a blow'. Worse still, every time anyone yawned, I said 'Tires you out, all this sea air'. It's true: it does.

The piéce de résistance of my search for early eighties authenticity was dragging the tirelessly good-humoured Belgian Waffling down to the beach in a howling gale so we could enact the time-honoured British Tea Ceremony, Holiday Edition. I think we managed one cup each from the outsize thermos and a scone, crunchy with wind-whipped sand, before the charm wore off, but it evoked the requisite nostalgie de la boue. The only way we could possibly have trumped the experience would have been to drink the tea in the car whilst watching the sea and the lashing rain. But I think you have to be in Filey for it to work properly. I spent several summers as a child on the North East coast, and apparently I used to go swimming quite happily - God knows how I avoided hypothermia.

Even Mr Trefusis - who, like the Bromsgroves, came from a family that went Abroad for their holidays - fell for the charms of lovely Ventnor, even if he spent most of it pretending to be Alain Delon, hanging out in a fishing village somewhere on the Cote D'Azur.

Steephill Cove, our nearest beach, is the Petit Trianon of the British seaside. Tiny as it is, and accessible only by foot or by boat, it manages to boast not only the kind of rockpool action beloved of the Cappuccino Classes but also two of the best fish restaurants on the island, and café-cum-shop selling a mean espresso, Minghella's ices and cool retro sweets like Starbars, Fry's Mint Cream and Sherbet dibdabs. I muttered something about it being the new Dorset, and took Trefusis Minor and The TT down to the shoreline to build sandcastles and swim in the sea, leaving Mr Trefusis to 'watch' us from his favourite table, whilst simultaneously reading one of those 'The Girl with ..' novels and taking surreptitious peeks around his sun specs at the pretty girls coming in and out of the café.

Yet it wasn't all about trying to recapture the holidays of my childhood - as The Waffle's charming brother said as he took us all out on a boat, it's about making new memories too, even if some of them are inspired by old ones. 'I'll never forget the first time my dad took me fishing.' he said, as the mackerel lines were passed around. Fishing for mackerel off the coast of the Isle of Wight is infinitely more satisfying than catching crabs - the little blighters jump with lemming-like enthusiasm onto your hooks, and even The Tiniest Trefusis caught three, first time she dropped her line over the side. Trefusis Minor was less successful - he's more likely to remember his valiant attempts not to be seasick. We caught twenty-five mackerel in about ten minutes - and took them back to the lovely holiday house and baked some en papillotte with cider and onions, and froze the rest to take home after the holidays.

This morning, before leaving for the office, I made Mr Trefusis some mackerel pâté with the last of them (not as goddessy as it sounds - it's an insanely easy recipe, involving nothing more trying than mashing the ingredients together with a fork). I took the cooked fish off the bone by hand and as I sat on the bus on my way to work, I couldn't help noticing how appallingly whiffy my fingers still were, despite washing them several times. Ick.

Mackerel-scented fingers are too prosaic as a memory trigger and can hardly compete with Proust's madelines for romance, but all the same, I spent the whole journey wrapped in the comforting memories of a blissful fortnight spent in wonderful company, rediscovering simple pleasures.

THE TRAVELLING TREFUSII

2010-08-10T22:50:00.003+01:00

As a child I was deeply envious of friends who holidayed abroad, particularly the Bromsgroves who, every summer, would pack up their Volvo and drive off to the South of France, returning relaxed and happy, tan marks livid against Piz Buin bronzed skin. I wanted to be one of those families, off for a fortnight on a beach in Spain or France, the children left to their own devices way past their usual bedtime, whilst the parents got mildly wasted on Rosé or Sangria. But no. We went to Norfolk, or Dorset, or Devon. Our entertainment came straight from the pages of a Ladybird book, digging endless sandcastles and dragging shrimping nets through rockpools, punctuated by the odd trip to a National Trust house or the treat of a coca-cola and a packet of crisps in a pub garden. The sense was that there was something decadent - slightly degenerate even - about the Foreign Holiday: we were above such things, in the same way we were above having a pumpkin at Hallowe'en, and instead if we wanted a spooky lantern, we had to spend an entire afternoon hollowing out a turnip with a dessert spoon.

But now I'm a bona-fide grown-up and can choose my own holiday destination, do Mr Trefusis and I bundle the infant Trefusii into the Audi and head off for the fleshpots of the Midi? We do not. The early programming was too effective. Holiday heaven for me means the Great British Break and doing my best to repeat the highlights of childhood summers of the nineteen seventies. If there's a tea room to be visited, so much the better.

It means a spot of unspoilt coastline, preferably with a proper beach café. We have yet to try the crab tea, but I'm longing to.

My childhood memories are, like everyone's I suppose, all shiny and golden, full of endlessly balmy summer's days. I tell a lie, there was a holiday in 1982 which was mostly full of thermos flasks, anoraks and windbreaks, but mostly there was sunshine - I promise you it's a myth that the weather in England is unremittingly and uncharitably wet.

This year's holiday is no different. So far, we have honestly had very nice weather, well, mostly - today decided to be the exception that tested the rule and indeed, it was like this, and I wasn't the only one who was glad I packed the waterproof bhurka-style pacamac. Anyway, here is Mr Trefusis, the day after we arrived, trying his best to pretend it's thirty five degrees as he reads his copy of The Week.

Why is it that fathers can read the newspaper - every section, even the Review and the motoring bit - whilst also 'supervising' the offspring. I have to start breathing into a paper bag if I take my eyes off them for an instant: He's entirely unconcerned that the children are hurtling into the sea fully clothed.

We get on with the lovely business of poking at rockpools: half afraid, half hopeful a crab might nip our fingers, but ready to settle for finding a whelk or an untethered limpet.

And then spend the rest of the afternoon trying to execute an over-ambitious sandcastle

before working out that the water is actually really lovely after all, perhaps not quite lovely enough to swim in, although people were, but definitely perfect for paddling.

(with very many thanks to Belgian Waffling)

LOVE IS A UNIVERSAL MIGRAINE

2010-07-16T22:32:00.011+01:00

I am shockingly bad at writing prompt thank-you letters. I always mean to, and yet, I came across one loitering unfinished in my handbag the other day that really should have hit the post-box in early January. I've come round to the idea that a text or phone-call the next day is actually better than a letter that never gets sent, but still, you see, the guilt dogs me. It doesn't feel proper, somehow.

The reason I'm feeling twitchy about gratitude is that the ever inspiring Tania Kindersley has given me an award, an honour I'm quite sure I don't deserve, but for which I'm none the less touched and incredibly grateful, and I know that if I don't say thank-you now, it may well be months before I get round to it. Tania is the co-author of one of my favourite books of last year, Backwards in High Heels, a consoling and deeply satisfying book about 'the impossible art of being female'. It's a book one dips into again and again, coming away with fistfuls of gems that go on glittering at you throughout the day. It covers everything from developing a signature style to what it means to be a feminist, and if you don't have a copy I urge you to buy it (it's a complete steal at Amazon - less than six quid). Tania is working on a new book, but in the meantime you can find her terrific blog here.

The award, like all good inheritances, comes entailed with conditions - passing the award onto six other bloggers is the easy bit (see below) but I think another seven things about me hot on the heels of, um, nine things about me, might just end up being Too Much Information.

I'm going to offer you Seven Poems that Saved My Life instead. Coincidentally, the day before Tania told me she'd tagged me for the Beautiful Blogger, I'd found my old commonplace book tucked away at the back of a drawer. It's full of no end of nonsense - old vaporetto tickets, quotations, restaurant receipts and whatnot - and I'd written nothing in it since Trefusis Minor was a tiny wailing infant, but at one stage in its genesis I went through a phase of copying poems into it. They're mostly from a time when I was not very happily single, so if there's rather a relentless theme to them, do forgive.

1. Past One O'Clock. Vladimir Mayakovsky

Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.

The Milky Way streams silver through the night.

I'm in no hurry: with lightning telegrams

I have no cause to wake or trouble you.

And, as they say, the incident is closed.

Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.

Now you and I are quits. Why bother then

To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.

Behold what quiet settles on the world.

Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.

In hours like these, one rises to address

The ages, history and all creation.

When I was half-sick with unresolved love for that scoundrel Vronsky, I used to find the line 'love's boat has smashed against the daily grind' extremely helpful. See also Carol Ann Duffy's 'Words, Wide Night', and - later - 'The Art of Losing' by Elizabeth Bishop.

2. Celia, Celia. Adrian Mitchell

When I am sad and weary

When I think all hope is gone

When I walk along High Holborn

I think of you with nothing on.

I got that on a text once from Mr Trefusis' predecessor. It made me roar with laughter, which wasn't entirely appropriate since I was reading it under the desk in the middle of a hugely dull corporate boardroom love-in at the time.

3. Bloody Men. Wendy Cope

Bloody men are like bloody buses -

You wait for about a year

And as soon as one approaches your stop

Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,

Offering you a ride.

You're trying to read the destinations,

You haven't much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.

Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze

While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by

And the minutes, the hours, the days.

Few poets are as cheeringly witty as Wendy Cope, and this one was such a solace in the internet dating days.

4. Mrs Icarus. Carol Ann Duffy

I'm not the first or the last

to stand on a hillock,

watching the man she married

prove to the world

he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.

It's a matter of public record that I had a very short-lived 'starter marriage' when I was as young as I was stupid. The last time I wrote anything about it, he tried to sue me, so I shall draw a veil over the details. In any case, Carol Ann Duffy's poem says all that needs saying.

5. To His Coy Mistress. Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime

We would sit down and think which way

To walk and pass our long love's day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side

Should'st rubies find: I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the Flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Til the conversion of the Jews.

[text continues here - it's too long to scribe out on this post]

A terrible rake once seduced me by quoting this poem in its entirety. I don't think I've ever quite recovered.

6. He wishes for the cloths of heaven. W.B. Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams:

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

My lovely sister read this at my wedding to Mr Trefusis. We all cried. It's one of the few poems I know by heart.

7. Child. Sylvia Plath

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.

I want to fill it with colour and ducks,

The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate -

April snowdrop, Indian pipe,

Little

Stalk without wrinkle

Pool in which images

Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous wringing of hands, this dark

Ceiling without a star.

This is the very last thing in the notebook. I must have written it in the anxious, uncertain nights of new motherhood, when - if Trefusis Minor wasn't wailing - I'd send Mr Trefusis upstairs three times an hour to check he was still breathing, or, if he was bawling in the unrepentant way of newborn babies, I'd be out, pacing the twilight streets with him in a baby sling, in a futile attempt to march him into sleep.

And now it's my turn to have the very greatest pleasure in passing on the Beautiful Blogger award to the delicious blogs below - it's an edit of some of my favourite aesthetes.

She hasn't posted for a while, but this presents one with all the excuse one could ever need to investigate the back catalogue of http://monavismesamis.blogspot.com/. She writes so beautifully, and she loves AS Byatt, Molly Keane, Mary Wesley and 'obscure early twentieth century female authors' (isn't it funny how much one instantly likes someone who shares the same taste in books?). I also suspect her of once doing a very similar job to mine.

Do look at the blissful box of delights that is http://littleaugury.blogspot.com/ There are always exquisite pictures, and she loves Virginia Woolf, and Edith Sitwell, and Diana Vreeland, and Oscar Wilde - reason enough to point you in her direction)

I'm greatly in favour of http://easyandelegantlife.com/ - his latest post on the importance of 'distinguished' and 'dignified' says it all. What's more, he quotes one of my favourite lines from Baudelaire 'Luxe, calme et volupte'. Wonderful.

http://fashionsmostwanted.blogspot.com/ is such a lovely mix of culture and fashion, and always a treat to read. Christina tagged me in a fabulous meme about shoes, which I will do when Mr Trefusis goes away in a couple of weeks on one of his expeditions (I can't quite face justifying to him quite why I'm photographing all my favourite pairs of shoes, though I really want to and I keep making little jottings about the stories of those I plan to feature).

http://knightleyorelton.blogspot.com/ is my friend in Real Life, despite the fact that I am old enough to be his mum, so I hope it's not cheating to nominate him. He has the nicest manners of just about anyone I know and his blog, albeit new, always offers a fresh perspective.

http://afemmeduncertainage.blogspot.com/ is about France, and about fashion, but above all it's about the kind of elegant, classic style that comes with confidence and self-knowledge, and which never goes out of season. She mixes opinion with observation and includes terrific images. A paradigm of effortless chic.

MEME-ORIES

2010-07-01T23:40:00.001+01:00

I'm so sorry, the minute I wrote that heading, I planted a Barbara Streisand shaped ear-worm in my head (misty water-coloured memories of the way we were tra la la) - I don't even particularly like the song, but there it is, firmly embedded, and so, like this Meme, I'll pass the ear-worm onto you too.

Anyway, I have the beginnings of six blog posts in my draft folder, half of which have become obsolete since I started them, and since Real Life is conspiring against me getting any of them finished in the foreseeable, I thought I'd take the opportunity to do the lovely Foxymoron's meme, since she was generous enough to tag me.

What experience has most shaped you, and why?

If one allows oneself to be shaped by experience, one gets into all sorts of trouble - it implies one might learn by one's mistakes, which doesn't half take the fun out of things. I always say, if a mistake's worth making, it's worth making again, and again, and again.

However, that's no kind of an answer, is it, so I suppose growing up as an army brat is the defining formative experience. I used to envy people who'd lived in the same town all their lives and had friends they'd been at nursery school with, but there are advantages of moving every few years: it teaches you to make friends easily, and to be incredibly self-sufficient in the gaps between making those new friends - a skill I'm failing to pass on to Trefusis Minor and his sister, who won't play on their own at all. My parents also had to do vast amounts of entertaining, and my sister and I were always on peanut and crisp passing duty before we were scooted off to bed, and had to make lightly intelligent small talk with Generals and Colonels and their wives, and to be able to start a conversation with someone one has never met before. Curiously, this turned out to be incredibly good training for my career, but more of that another time.

If you had a whole day with no commitments, what would you do?

I'd write something moderately entertaining for this blog, and try to store up a stash of posts for when the gaps between work and life close down once more.

What food or drink could you never give up?

Cocktails, naturally - I'm devoted to a classic Daiquiri, which is one of the few cocktails that it's easy to make at home if you get the quantities right (recipe here). I also find the way Claridges make a champagne cocktail very cheering. It's a great restorative, and a lovely treat. I can't remember what they cost exactly - I think it's £12.50 - obviously not cheap, but infinitely better value for money than four Starbucks frappucinos, say.

Food? Well, I'm very fond of the marachino cherry in the champagne cocktail.

If you could travel anywhere, where would that be and why?

Venice is my favourite place on the planet, not least because one of my favourite people on the planet lives there and I don't get to see nearly enough of her, so if I could travel anywhere, it would always be there.

I've also a longing to go to Istanbul, so I can straddle two continents (ouch).

Who do you have a crush on?

Ha, I thought, I don't have crushes, how juvenile. I haven't had a crush on anyone since I had a massive crush on Julian Cope when I was fourteen, and kept the photo-set I tore from The Face under my pillow. And anyway, obviously, I'm far too devoted to Mr Trefusis to have a proper moony crush on anyone.

But then, what about Gene Hunt? Fictional character, very unprepossessing, makes me quiver with lust every time Ashes to Ashes is on the telly. Crushes on fictional characters don't stop with D.I. Hunt - there's Gabriel Oak from Far from the Madding Crowd [pictured above], James Bond, Maximus Decimus Meridius, Oliver Mellors, William in Flambards, Beowulf, Carrisford from A Little Princess, and, erm, Dracula. The list is a bit longer than that, but I don't want to get a reputation for being that sort of girl.

Lately, though, I realise my crushes run to the gerontophile: David Dimbleby, Bryan Ferry, Melvyn Bragg, A.C Grayling, even Jeremy Paxman. No one needs a doctorate in psychology to analyse my devotion to clever old men.

I also have a mammoth crush on my art teacher, who looks just like a superannuated Lloyd Cole. So consuming is my passion for him I am even able to overlook his horny toenails and Jesus sandals.

If you were leader of your country, what would you do?

Oh God, I don't know. Even David Cameron didn't know, which is why the last election in the UK was the one none of the candidates wanted to win.

I asked Mr Trefusis instead, it being his kind of question. This is what he'd do if he were your Prime Minister

Economics: pay down the debt and make Europe accountable [long tirade about corruption in the EU and subsidising european farmers.... I shall spare you the full version]

Education: pay teachers more, sack bad teachers, insist on higher standards in teaching colleges, allow people to open more schools.

Foreign Policy: work out what the hell we're supposed to be doing in Afghanistan, do it, and leave.

Culture: make sure there are tangible, long-lasting benefits from the money spent on developing the London Olympics. Remove all arts subsidies [I'm afraid there was a long pause whilst we had a mini row about that one...]

Immigration:"If you want free markets, you have to allow free movement of people. Any kind of immigration control is complete lunacy"

[There was more... I distracted him with a television programme about the Romans in Britain before he made me write him a Manifesto].

Give me one easy savoury recipe that doesn't include cheese.

Take one Boots Advantage Card, go into the shop and select a large packet of salt and vinegar crisps, open and serve.

Only joking.

Tagliata in the Nigella manner:

Put olive oil, the juice and zest of a lemon, a couple of handfuls of thyme or oregano, two crushed garlic cloves and salt and pepper into a deep sided dish.

Show a large rump (or sirloin - whatever's in Waitrose) steak to a searingly hot pan, longer if you like.

When you've given your steak a couple of minutes each side, put it in the lemon/olive oil/herb mixture and leave it to rest for at least five minutes each side.

Slice it into strips.

Put it on a generous pile of rocket salad, pour some of the marinade over it and season.

How many it serves depends on how big your steak was in the first place. Mr Trefusis complains if I don't offer him some kind of carbohydrate to go with it, preferably cubes of potato roasted in the oven with olive oil, garlic, rosemary and a lot of sea salt.

What did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

A Prima ballerina. Stop sniggering.

If you could spend just one day in someone else's body, who would it be?

Anna Wintour. With an option to morph into Grace Coddington if I can't keep up the froideur past elevenses.

Now, the way this meme works is that I have to add a question of my own, and tag three other bloggers.

Which woman writer - living or dead - do you most admire and why?

And my three bloggers are

Blighty: http://blightyworld.blogspot.com/

The Knackered Mother's Wine Club: http://knackeredmotherswineclub.blogspot.com/

and,

Perfect Welcome: http://perfectwelcome.blogspot.com/

SIGNATURE SCENT: PERFUME PORTRAITS WITH ORMONDE JAYNE

2010-06-15T18:02:00.007+01:00

Being romantically inclined, I had always been drawn to the idea that one's favourite perfume should be an invisible, unconscious signature - Chanel's unseen, unforgettable, ultimate accessory of fashion…. that heralds your arrival and prolongs your departure.

Finding a scent that perfectly describes you is no easy task: it seems to require an outrageously bold sense of self, or the kind of dog-like nature that constantly wants to mark its territory. For many years I opted out of the whole thing, and wore whatever I'd been given for Christmas: if you don't quite know who you are, how can you determine a signature scent, or a signature style? Even my signature at the bottom of letters and on cheques was a somewhat indeterminate scrawl.

Still, the idea persisted. It once took me all around Paris - to Caron, to the wonderful Guerlain boutique on the Champs-Elysee, to tiny perfumiers in dark streets off the Marais, in a Grenouille*-like hunt for the hit of recognition that would mean the scent was mine. But, although I discovered many delicious things on that trip - Jolie Madame, Shocking, Mitsouko, Narcisse Noir, Chanel No.22, Balenciaga's Le Dix - the perfect perfume eluded the imperfect me.

Many years later I've learned how to be happier with myself, and to accept my mutable nature. I'm no longer so obsesssed with there being one defining scent, and so I've ended up with a portfolio of perfumes which project different facets and moods. Mitsouko lends me a sophistication and glamour I don't always feel; I like to pretend I have it in me to be as mysterious and complex as Ormonde Woman; Diorella's bright, herby androgyny suggests a breezy efficiency that belies my default behaviour in the office. Most often, you'll find me in No.5: it reminds me of my Grandmother, whose influence on my life I didn't appreciate until long after she died. I like its rather old-fashioned elegance - bone structure over botox, if you like. Chanel No.5 may be the world's best selling perfume, but it's thankfully, it's not the world's most frequently worn, or there'd be the olfactory memory of a zillion Mrs Trefusis' wafting round the streets of London.

Ormonde Woman, Mitsouko, No.5 and Diorella became fixtures on my dressing table after a laborious process of trial and error. I can't imagine them ever losing their enchantment but they're surrounded by a dozen other bottles of scent I've tried a couple of times and given up on. I regret the waste as much as I admire the beautiful bottles, and looking at them makes me wish I'd discovered something like Linda Pilkington's Perfume Portraits at Ormonde Jayne rather sooner. The idea is incredibly well-conceived: at the Bond Street store - and at Harrods - Linda or one of her team will take you through a simple yet sybaritic fifteen minute process designed to take the guesswork and slog out of choosing a scent that's perfectly suited to you.

Perfume Portraits starts with a short questionnaire - likes, dislikes, whether you're looking for a signature scent or something for the new season and so on - before moving onto a blind test (blind sniff?) of twenty-one different ingredients from seven fragrance families. Linda notes your instinctive reactions as you work through, building up a portrait based on those you respond to, and the process ends in a choice between the two Ormonde fragrances that will suit you best. It confirmed me in my devotion to Ormonde Woman, and brought me to Frangipani, a fresh, beautiful floral that smells exactly like a Mediterranean garden at dusk.

Perfume Portraits at Ormonde Jayne

Ormonde Jayne - 12 The Royal Arcade 28 Old Bond Street London W1S 4SL To book your perfume portrait, telephone the Bond Street boutique on. +44 (0)20 7499 1100 or email. sales@ormondejayne.com

THE PRECOCIOUS ARTISTIC TALENTS OF TREFUSIS MINOR

2010-06-11T10:37:00.003+01:00

WINDY BEACH I, 2008.

Blustering through Abstract Expressionism:
an exploration of the early work of Trefusis Minor

It is tempting to interpret Trefusis Minor’s work, particularly that from his recent blue period, exclusively as abstract expressionism, but this would be wrong. In fact it would be to underestimate the sheer emotional power of the work and the interplay with langue et parole – the disconnect between what is seen and what is meant. Certainly, a painting like Windy Beach I, 2008, shares a surface similarity with Twombly’s later abstract works, but while Twombly draws on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of classical myth and allegory, Trefusis adapts from the world around him, creating a coloured tone poem from his experiences of every day life, yet inviting us to move beyond that, from natural drama into psychodrama, and to step from reality into the imagination with all the joyful curiosity of a child.

Of course, Like Twombly, Trefusis Minor has, at this point in his artistic development, rejected the figurative and representational – though for Trefusis this remains, perhaps, in the subject-matter – citing the line or smudge – each mark with its own history – as its proper subject. Trefusis’ work has echoes of Twombly’s romantic symbolism, but with a bolder, more direct – even confrontational – edge, inviting the viewer to collude in the mise-en-scene by offering a title that can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words, but then rejecting that interpretation.

Interlaced in an all-over configuration, without significant focal points, the bold, swirling brushstrokes of the painting generates dynamism and energy; a continuum so charged that it seems to expand beyond the picture limits, evoking an immediate sensation of boundlessness, an endless space that is the natural world.

Trefusis Minor’s success as an artist lies in his ability to evoke the big questions. How are we to evolve unless we see ourselves as rooted in the natural world? In a world where man feels compelled to impose order, what room is there for the spontaneity of nature? What role does faith and trust in a wider plan of the universe play in these godless times? These are questions that will linger with the viewer long after they have moved away from the painting. Above all, though, Windy Beach I – like much of his early work – leaves us with a much more personal message: experience is predicated on risk, and to avoid the opportunity to explore the boundaries is to avoid engaging with life.

Not long after Trefusis Minor, aged four, swabbed a large piece of paper with colour and produced the picture above, I spent a morning with the Abstract Expressionists at Tate Modern and came back and wrote this pastiche of grand art criticism as a joke to amuse a friend. I love the swirly-nothings that children produce before they have the requisite control over a pencil to painstakingly represent their worlds with stick men and spider-figures, and since all mothers see their offspring’s daubs as prodigious works presaging future genius, I’m sure there was a part of me that wasn’t entirely in jest.

As I write this I’m staring at a couple of Trefusis Minor’s latest works taped to my office wall – one is of Batman, with huge feet and very pointy bat ears, and the other is a rather fine Spiderman, with several arms, to indicate he’s moving very fast, much in the manner of the Russian Futurists. You see – I can’t help myself – even now, I’m convinced he’s part of a great art movement.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE MILK AND THE YOGHURT*

2010-05-06T11:57:00.008+01:00

There are many things that get lost in the insane juggling act that is working motherhood. One of them is the time to read novels, and somehow I mind this far more than the lack of a lie-in, or a absence of a discernible individual identity, outside that of wife/mother/wage-slave.

Yet, women are infinitely resourceful, and even in a schedule that resembles a duvet stuffed into a pillowcase, we find tiny oases of time to pursue the things that nourish our souls. Well, sometimes: Writing nourishes mine, and I've had no time at all for that recently. But reading? That's a different matter. I swapped the twice daily strap-hanging fight-to-the-death on the Central line for a seat on the 94 bus, which lumbers slowly East in the morning and follows the sun back West in the evening, and now have the best part of an hour and a half each day to sit and read, and delight in language, and narrative.

A novel is a wonderful thing - everytime you open the pages you take a holiday in someone else's life. I'm particularly fond of those where the good end happily and the bad, unhappily and have little patience with books offering page after page of depressing wailing and uncertainty and which cheat one of a satisfying ending. Spare us your misery, says Daisy Goodwin, and I quite agree: If I want Real Life, I'll take the 266.

Of course, hanging out at bus stops and journeying on the slow poke, you notice all sorts of things, including the advertising hordings. The Milk Marketing Forum ads are everywhere, though Gordon Ramsay and Pixie Lott are not the kind of cultural icons that would persuade me to drink more milk.

I can't help but think this earlier Milk Marketing Board campaign from the late 1950's, shot by Norman Parkinson, might have been more effective.

Postscript:

The title of this post is from John Mortimer - *"The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt."

I can't think this will apply to the wonderful novel I'm reading at the moment - Andrew O'Hagan's 'The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe', worth the price of the hardback for the language alone - he has Sinatra "clicking out words that shimmied over the great topics of the day". Isn't that heaven?

Norman Parkinson is at the Chris Beetles Art Gallery, Ryder Street, St James SW1, from 19th May to 12th June

TURN BACK THE CLOCK BEAUTY: MAKE-UP TRICKS FOR GROWN-UPS

2010-03-23T22:59:00.006Z

The last time I wore this much slap, I was fourteen and given to loafing around Miss Selfridge, endlessly trying on burgundy sweater dresses and corduroy jump suits and testing their entire range of cosmetics on the back of my hand. My make-up look was every bit as eighties as the Iron Lady after whom my favourite lipstick was named: electric blue eyeliner and matching mascara, worn with a heavily frosted magenta lips, stripes of peach blusher and beige foundation with the obligatory tidemark at chin level. I was bang on trend, but looked utterly dreadful. Thinking about it still makes me shudder and the current and entirely un-ironic eighties revival has done nothing to rehabilitate the look for me.

Still, in one's Miss Selfridge years, one cares less about looking good than looking grown-up and trendy. The best part of thirty years later, the situation is completely reversed: the Barbara Cartland experience has taught me that high-fashion beauty looks must be approached with caution and, since I no longer anticipate difficulty if I attempt to buy fags or booze, looking older than my years has very much lost its appeal.

So where was I? Ah yes, I had promised , back in January, to talk about anti-aging make-up tricks. I also remember promising to post more often, but Real Life got in the way. I can't offer any short cuts - make-up that works hard tends to be hard work rather than the kind you can jab into your eye on the tube - but it will take at least five years off.

[Apologies to anyone reading this who's either under thirty five, or a man - it'll most likely bore the pants off you.]

Anyway. The basic problem as one gets older is not the lines and sagging as much as the ghastly, washed-out, careworn and tired look that develops. It's as if the cumulative effect of several decades of late nights appears all at once, and no amount of plastering on Guerlain's Midnight Secret or Clarin's Beauty Flash Balm or Lauder's Advanced Night Repair seems to make a difference. Young skin, it seems, has something almost oxymoronic: even skintone and colour. Harrumph, I say, staring despairingly at myself in the mirror, I look knackered and slightly dusty, like something on a shelf in the Oxfam shop. Dear readers, if you feel the same, I'm afraid there's no alternative than to find yourself a decent foundation: unless you have some kind of genetic miracle going on, there comes a point when flawless skin cannot be faked without it.

1.Foundation/Concealer
The trick is to find one with the right consistency: one that's not so thick it looks old-fashioned and collects in the troughs of all one's wrinkles, but which offers enough coverage to make skin look more even, conceals dark shadows under the eyes and glides over blemishes or incipient broken veins is key. Estee Lauder's Doublewear Light is the best I've found for the money (£24.50) - it doesn't settle in any lines, and nor does it need powder. I need something extra under the eyes (including on the outer corners, where there's some redness, and at the inner corners on either side of my nose: the blue shadows seem to have seeped up there too). Laura Mercier's Secret Camouflage is a product of great genius - you mix the colours to the right shade with a finger and pat it on. It's not drying, so it doesn't emphasise the, hem-hem, laughter lines. Use it after foundation, so you don't use more than you need. If you're still a devotée of Touche Eclat, get someone to take your picture with flash photography: reverse panda is not a good look.

Magazines will always tell you that foundation must be applied with brushes, or those odd triangular sponges. Nonsense: Fingers are perfectly fine. The secret is to put it on the back of one's hand, dot it over your face with finger tips and then blend lightly from the middle outwards.

A note on mineral powder: my guru in all things, India Knight, swears by it, but like Face Goop, I'm not convinced its for me.

2.Colour

I never thought I'd use bronzer, being pale and not always very interesting, and don't ask me why it makes you look younger, but it does. Swirl a very small amount round the outside of the face and take it under the cheekbones. You don't want to look like Kate O'Mara, obviously, but it warms everything up. Grin like an idiot at yourself in the mirror and put a pinky pink blusher like Bobbi Brown's Slopes (£16.50) on the apples of your cheeks, blending it all in. Voilá - most very extremely youthifying.

3. Definition
Ignore the Givenchy bleached brow - you'll see it touted by beauty editors this summer as a key trend, but thin, weedy, pale eyebrows are very ageing. Mine are white blond naturally, but where would we all be if we put nature in front of nurture? A strong brow gives the face definition and helps 'lift' the eye. I get mine dyed at Benefit and give them a little dusting over with a little mouse-brown eyeshadow, but even naturally dark brows benefit from a little additional colour - Laura Mercier's Brow Powder duo is wonderful and lasts forever. A tiny dab of very pale highlighter (subtly used) just under the arch of the brow also helps to fake a bit of brow-lift. Eyeliner, particularly the gel liner sort that stays put, should be worn inside the top rim of the eyelid, pushing it close into the upper lashes. This gives the illusion of lusher lashes, which sadly seem to have got a little weedier looking than they used to be.
The easiest anti-aging eye-shadow is pretty neutral - a brown smokey eye seems to be very now, but it can easily look muddy and tired. Amethyst grey - Giorgio Armani Shade 12 for example - makes a good alternative neutral, blended just above the eye socket, but under the brow bone (worn in the eye socket it makes your eyes look sunken - instant zombie effect). It goes without saying that products with a lot of sparkle or shimmer can emphasise any nascent crepiness. As for mascara, it's black all the way - all the Dior ones are fabulous, as is anything from Lancome, especially Hypnose and the new oscillating one. Wipe the excess off the brush with a tissue before applying - much as I love Pauline Prescott, hers is not the eyelash look to aspire to.

5. Other young stuff
Lip liner stops lip colour bleeding, and drawn carefully just on the edge of the lipline, can also make lips look fuller (full lips = instant youngness). Obviously, it's essential that if you're going to do this, the lip liner must match your natural lip colour exactly, and should then be smudged very gently with a finger so that you avoid the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane look.
Lip gloss is good - again it makes the lips look fuller - but I can't stand the way my hair gets stuck to it if the wind blows.

My other tip is to only ever be photographed in an extremely complimentary light, and ruthlessly delete any pictures don't show you looking fabulous. In years to come, you'll forget that wasn't how you looked every day.

Here is an absurdly flattering picture of me in my 'look younger makeup', though I've slightly over-done the blusher: I'm far too vain to give you a 'before' picture, but if you really want to see what I look like without the slap, click here...

WIGS ON THE GREEN

2010-02-24T00:08:00.009Z

First published in 1935, Nancy Mitford’s third novel, Wigs on the Green, was never reprinted in her lifetime. Although its plot - like all of Mitford’s novels – is essentially an exploration of love and marriage, and has all the trademark Mitford wit, brio, and strong autobiographical detail, it’s also a satire on British fascism.

Mitford wasn’t the only novelist to poke fun at the British Union of Fascists – I’ve always loved Wodehouse’s parody of Mosley, as Roderick Spode in The Code of the Woosters (1938), which makes him as ridiculous as one could possibly wish.

“The trouble with you, Spode, [says Wooster] is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

Whilst the satire is rather gentler in Wigs on the Green, Wodehouse didn’t have sisters who were infamously and intimately involved with the Fascist cause, and its publication went particularly hard with Diana, who was married in all but name to Oswald Mosley, for whom she’d left her husband in 1932. Although Mitford removed the three chapters that most obviously lampooned Mosley as Captain Jack, the leader of the Union Jackshirts, Wigs on the Green caused a rift between her and Diana that lasted almost until the end of the war. “But I also know your point of view,” wrote Nancy to Diana shortly before its publication, in an attempt to mollify her, “That Fascism is something too serious to be dealt with in a funny book at all.” In fact, Nancy later took her sister’s commitment to fascism extremely seriously, warning MI5 that she was "far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband" (Diana had married Mosley in a secret ceremony in Berlin in 1936).

Yet it’s not Diana who is caricatured in Wigs on the Green, it’s Unity, who at twenty-one was already under the spell of National Socialism, albeit some years from becoming the Hitler obsessive who shot herself in the head the day war broke out between England and Germany, with a pistol given to her by the Führer himself . In Wigs on the Green, Unity is Eugenia Malmain, ardent supporter of Captain Jack and his Union Jackshirts, and one of the richest girls in Britain, a perfect target for the attentions of the fortune-hunting Noel Foster and his disreputable pal, Jasper Aspect. It’s the adolescent aspects of the Jackshirt movement that seem to appeal to Eugenia most– the dressing up, belonging to a gang and rampaging around on her spirited horse, Vivien Jackson, with the faithful Reichshund at her side. The politics are full of fabulous rhetoric, bombast and nonsense – I’m particularly taken with Eugenia's definition of Aryan:

"Well, it's quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes."

“How about Siamese cats?” said Jasper.

Every joke – even a clever if light-hearted satire – has its moment: by the time Mitford’s publisher asked for permission to reissue the novel, in 1951, the world had changed. As she wrote to Evelyn Waugh, “Too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as…anything but the worst of taste”.

And so it remained out of print for nearly seventy five years. Next week, Penguin publishes Wigs on the Green alongside a new edition of Mitford’s finest novels – The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, The Blessing and Don’t Tell Alfred. It doesn’t have quite the same marvellousness of the post-war novels, which are so captivating one can’t help but read them again and again and again until the spines fall apart with love and delight– my first ever copy of The Pursuit of Love is now more sellotape than novel, really – but it is still a tremendous read. Wigs on the Green has sufficient Mitford hallmarks to have you roaring with laughter, but with the added fascination of having elements of a roman à clef.

Wigs on the Green, by Nancy Mitford, is published by Fig Tree (Penguin) on 4^th March.

NB: If you are new to Mitford, you should definitely start with The Pursuit of Love - as A Whirl in London says below, it is to Mitford what Pride and Prejudice is to Austen.

THE COCKTAIL PARTY: BAZAAR & LANCOME FETE KATE WINSLET

2010-02-22T18:38:00.003Z

On Friday, I had the good fortune to go to a cocktail party thrown by Lancôme and Harper's Bazaar to celebrate the BAFTA's and British fashion talent. Hosted by star guest, and face of Lancôme, Kate Winslet, and packed full of the great and the good of fashion and film, plus a lot of rising British talent, it was as glamorous an invitation as one could wish for.

I arrived seconds before Kate Winslet, and I was right next to the logo-board as she did her obligatory five minutes posing for the cameras - I took it as a perfect opportunity to have a really good stare at her, safe in the knowledge that she was too busy being photographed to notice me gawping like a star-struck teenager, something that I knew I'd be far too well-brought up to do when in the throes of the cocktail party itself. The photograph below is taken on my iPhone - hence the appalling quality.

I confess I scrutinised her very carefully -I don't know whether I've been corrupted by a lifetime of reading gossip magazines, but now find I can't look at a celebrity without thinking 'has she had work done?' or 'bonkers food regime, or nutty workout schedule?'. Kate Winslet has always come out strongly in favour of women accepting the way they look - she spoke out in 2003 against GQ's heavy handed retouching of hercover image, and last year successfully sued the Daily Mail for alleging that she'd, ahem, underplayed her exercise regime: having now seen her at close quarters, she's as much a poster girl for 'normality' as one could hope from an international film star. She's neither too thin, nor too worked out - I'd put her at a UK size ten, certainly no smaller: She obviously takes care of herself, but her slender shapeliness has a refreshing touch of achievability about it. I don't know why I'd expected her to be less luminously beautiful in the flesh - perhaps one's expectation is that Hollywood glamour owes an awful lot to good lighting and the art of the re-toucher - but she was utterly gorgeous. Her skin, particularly, could have sonnets written about it, and she's a wonderful asset for Lancôme. Mr Trefusis has always maintained she has fat ankles: I spent quite a lot of time at the party trying to take a surreptitious pic of her feet on the iPhone so I could prove him wrong, but failed miserably. He'll just have to take my word - and the images here - that her ankles are every bit as perfect as the rest of her.

Of course, film and fashion is an irresistible combination: the BAFTA's run slap in the middle of London Fashion Week and the combination of the two simply piles glamour upon glamour. It was a heady, scented mix of beautiful actresses in exquisite outfits, from Westwood to Temperley and Berardi to Christopher Kane, cheek by jowl with scions of fashion, from Testino to Bazaar's Lucy Yeomans.
Sam Taylor-Wood was a little more dressed down than most, but beautiful in a way that doesn't quite come over in photographs - in the flesh she looks at least ten years younger, and he a good five years older - and she and Aaron Johnson are so clearly wild about each other that only the most stony-hearted could fail to be moved by it or wish them every happiness.

There are much better pictures, particularly of the frocks, on the Harper's Bazaar website - I was struck by what a riot of colour it was - for a fashion party, very few people were wearing black, other than Kate Winslet, in Alexander McQueen, and Emilia Fox - reds, corals, purples, and golds were very much in play. I'm afraid I couldn't get my head round the dress code - 'cocktails and canapés' can mean anything from smart workwear to full on party frocks - I was too broke to buy anything new, and borrowing something was out, being too much on the wrong side of cake and chocolate for a sample size, so ended up in an unobtrusive black silk chiffon empire line dress that has nothing to commend it other than the way it allowed me to blend into the background so I could observe the beautiful people unobserved, and tweet away to my heart's content.

Bazaar's Lucy Yeomans wearing Berardi, with Kate Winslet and Harold Tillmans, Chairman of the British Fashion Council.

THRIFT

2010-02-14T23:16:00.005Z

I am practising household economy.

Mr Trefusis made an utterly delicious Five Hour Roasted Lamb for a supper party we had on Friday evening, and we've been eating what was left all weekend. This evening, in a fit of 'Make do and Mend', I made a proper shepherds pie with the leftover meat, and made enough soup for a week by liquidising the remaindered the vegetables and stock.

It's not simply that it all tasted incredibly good, thanks to Mr T's initial effort, but I can't begin to tell you what a lovely smug sense of satisfaction I got from recycling the left-overs. It made me feel like a cross between Mrs Miniver and Barbara Good- not only had I saved money by making a meal go an awful lot further, I'd used up food which might otherwise have been thrown away.

So now I'm all fired up by a personal war on waste, I'm keen to visit an exhibition that's just opened at the Imperial War Museum, The Ministry of Food, showing how the British public reacted to the stringent rationing that was introduced in 1940 and which continued for another nine years after the war had ended. My paternal grandfather worked for The Ministry of Food during the war, helping implement rationing in the north of England and so I've always known that wasting food in wartime wasn't just frowned upon, it was actually illegal. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have inherited a wartime talent for frugality.

Lately, however, some slightly more challenging economic circumstances encourage me to consider if I could be more thrifty when it comes to the weekly shop. I'm neither about to implement my own version of rationing, and nor am I ready for Lidl, but by heck, I can definitely do what my mother used to, and make the sunday roast do for more than just one meal.

I could probably do with extending my repertoire beyond Shepherds Pie, soups, risotto and chicken curry, though - any tips?

ASK MRS TREFUSIS: WHAT CAN I BUY MY HUSBAND FOR VALENTINE'S DAY?

2010-02-09T19:24:00.003Z

Everyone is immensely bah humbug about Valentine's Day - it's just something invented by marketeers to flog product, it's for kids, the increase in the price of roses is usurious, isn't it ghastly how couples book 'romantic meals' in restaurants only to sit there in uncompanionable silence etc etc etc.

But much as it's fashionable to moan about it, it's hard to avoid, and if you're in a relationship it's even harder to ignore. Mr Trefusis pretends not to set great store by it, but woe betide me if I've not made the effort to even get some kind of fancy card.

However, I do think that great romantic gestures involving complicated combinations of mystery journeys and treasure hunts and boutique hotels and flowers and handwritten poetry and specially devised champagne cocktails are best reserved for the bigger occasions - I'm happy to make a big deal out of a birthday or of a particularly notable anniversary, but Valentine's Day? Well, I think it's enough to mark the occasion. Or perhaps that's just me, comfortably taking Mr Trefusis for granted after nearly seven years of marriage.

I'm not alone in not really having a clue what to buy - I think men are quite hard to buy for at the best of times. Anyway, here are a few things that answer the brief of those who have asked me for my opinion on the subject....The images should click through to the online retailers and all items should be available for delivery on 13th February (if you're quick).

For Foodies
A friend of mine knew he'd met the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with when she bought him a copy of Larousse Gastronomique for their first Valentine's together. It's the ultimate encyclopedia of gastronomy and one no enthusiastic amateur chef should be without. The 2009 edition is available from Amazon for £33 - not exactly a snip, but it is the foodies bible.
I thought this box of treats from Rockett St George has a heart shaped cheddar cheese and cheddar and rosemary crackers and vintage beetroot and apple chutney. It's unashamedly romantic but without being mimsy or twee. £30

Scent
I've written about Ormonde Jayne, the Bond Street perfumery before - their signature scent, Ormonde Woman is a thing of utter deliciousness, and uses rare and unusual ingredients to create a scent that's as compelling as it is individual. The partner scent, Ormonde Man, is every bit as good as its female counterpart - it has many of the same intriguing notes, but in a more masculine composition. I think it's undeniably sexy, whilst still being very subtle.
Ormonde Man Eau de Parfum 50 ml spray £68

Described by Luca Turin as ‘soft and rasping like stubble on a handsome cheek’, Guerlain’s Habit Rouge has, for me, all the potent appeal of a man who means business, in all the rugged senses of the word. It's an enduring fragrance classic: masculine, yet reserved – I think it smells exactly like the kind of man who would take you to J. Sheekey's for dinner.
Guerlain Habit Rouge. Available in most department stores. Priced around £39

Tokens and keepsakes

On Valentine's Day of all days it's perfectly acceptable to go with the whole heart thing - this keyring from Ettinger comes in a range of colours, including red, but I think even a very blokey bloke could get away with this (Mr Trefusis will no doubt contradict me). Heart key-fob, £30

And this tiny photograph frame is also rather sweet - again it comes in several covers including a more masculine tan or black. A little bit schmaltzy to give it with a photograph of the pair of you already in it, but hey, it is Valentine's Day. Double heart frame £45.

A Love of Luxury
Bill Amberg creates some of the most beautifully crafted bags and briefcases around - I've written about his fabulous medicine bag before, but this simple, elegant and practical laptop case strikes me as being a thoughtful gift. The picture doesn't really do it justice - I think it looks very much better without the shoulder strap.

According to the website, it's on sale too - usually priced at £445, it's available between £134 and £267 depending on the style.

This uber-cool skull pashmina from Alexander McQueen wouldn't do for Mr Trefusis at all, but it would definitely float my hipster brother in law's Valentine's Day boat. McQueen's skull signature has become something of a design icon, and whilst the pashmina isn't cheap at £220, it's not something that will be a one season wonder.

Books

If your inamorato is bookish, one or other of these leather-bound Penguin Classics is sure to suit - The Great Gatsby or Brideshead Revisited would be my choice, but there are six to choose from, each priced £30. Love poetry is a Valentine's Day classic - you don't tend to find much Pablo Neruda in the anthologies of love poetry, but I think his lines are amongst some of the most beautiful written, even in translation. Isn't 'Twenty love poems and a song of despair' a wonderful title for a collection of poetry?

For intellectuals and classicists, Ovid still cuts it. It's also very quotable - 'Love will enter cloaked in friendship's name' and 'if you would marry suitably, marry your equal' still ring true today.

Unashamedly romantic

Don't eschew the hearts and flowers stuff - this print from Bianca Hall 'Life would be rubbish without you' looks pretty wonderful framed (also comes as a card, or as a ceramic tile). £40

And if you live in the kind of house that is made only more comfortable by the addition of more cushions, these from Graham and Green are rather nice. Jan Constantine cushions from £65

BEAUTY THROUGH A LENS: URSULA ANDRESS NUDE

2010-02-04T10:28:00.010Z

In the days before personal trainers, Madonna and Rachel Zoe-inspired no-sugar, no-wheat, no carbs, no-food diets, it seems actresses simply sucked their stomachs in for the camera.

I like it. Ursula Andress would've been in danger of asphyxiating herself if she'd continued to hold the pose, but she looks sensational, and frankly an awful lot sexier than half the lollipop-headed hard bodies that seem to be de rigeur in Hollywood today. Take a look at the picture and think about how it makes you feel about the one-size-fits-all, identikit take on female beauty that we’re all being sold these days.

The image is taken from a new exhibition of Terry O’Neill’s photography at Chris Beetles Gallery, Ryder Street, St. James. Between 17th February and 6th March, Chris Beetles will show a collection of unseen images from the iconic photographer. It’s also the very first time Terry O’Neill has made his vintage prints available for sale.

One of the many wonderful things about the work is the extraordinary access O’Neill was granted: From the semi-nude Ursula Andress above (pictured, aged 43, on the set of The Fifth Musketeer in 1979) to Michael Caine posing with his ‘Get Carter’ shotgun or Audrey Hepburn taking a dip in a pool between takes, O’Neill charmed his way into taking shots that would give today’s celebrity publicists heart failure.

Look at the images online here, but if you’re in London, don’t miss what promises to be one of the year’s great photography shows.

Chris Beetles Gallery, Ryder Street, St James, London SW1

Opening Hours: 10am - 5.30pm, Monday to Saturday

Image: copyright Terry O'Neill.

NB: An apology... the second part of the On Beauty makeup post will come... I'm just being slow and distracted.

TREFUSIS MINOR IS VERY EXTREMELY RIGHT-ON

2010-01-31T23:05:00.002Z

This afternoon, in an entirely unprovoked fit of idle violence, The Tiniest Trefusis took one of my chunky perspex cuffs and chucked it straight at Trefusis Minor's head. It caught him hard on the corner of his eye - unlike Trefusis Minor, the Tiniest Trefusis has quite a true aim - with an audible crack. Tears, shrieking, howls, wails ensued - you know the drill.

Anyway, since we have a firm 'No Fighting, No Biting' policy here at Trefusis Towers, Tiniest Trefusis went straight to the naughty step to consider her position, which I'm sorry to report was typically unrepentant.

After taking a couple of minutes to recover from the shock of a thwack on the head from a flying bangle, Trefusis Minor went to visit her on the naughty step. He crouched down to her level and took hold of her hands in his, saying, in his best lentil-botherer voice, 'I'm just trying to understand why you felt you needed to hurt me'.

He did his best to make eye-contact, fixing her with a look of one who is more sinned against than sinning, but the Tiniest Trefusis was having none of it, 'Go 'WAY,' she shouted, and turned her head to the wall.

'But why did you do it,' persisted TM. 'Were you trying to get some attention?'

The Tiniest Trefusis mulishly refused to be understood. Time-up on the time-out, she wriggled off the stair and sidled off, without either explanation or apology.

I'm quite interested in his response - his sister brains him, and rather than smack her back, he simply wants to get to grips with her motivation.

Trefusis Minor has always been a bit odd like that: He's not one for a textbook response to any given situation. I remember taking him to the Lyric Hammersmith to see some kind of children's theatre production consisting of a gigantic Calder-esque mobile from which various actors were suspended, calling 'Hang on' to each other at dramatic intervals. It was very striking, entirely narrative-free and popular with the entire audience of under-fives. All except Trefusis Minor who, whenever one of the actors appeared to be a little casual in the way they hung from the mobile, would leap to his feet, shouting 'Get down! It's too dangerous' at the stage, like some demented juvenile health and safety officer.

[Part two of 'On Beauty and Looking Younger' will be posted in the early part of next week]

ON BEAUTY AND LOOKING YOUNGER (PART ONE)

2010-01-28T14:24:00.001Z

A two part post on make-up for grown-ups

'What have you done to your eyes?' Asks Mr Trefusis, staring gloomily at me as I'm on my way out to a party, 'I assume it's fashion.'

Whenever Mr Trefusis says 'fashion', it's always as if there are vast inverted commas around the word, making it sound as if it's something I've just invented to tease him.

Trefusis Minor adds his ten pence-worth: 'I like your lipstick, Mummy, but not your eyeshadow.'

And with that, my self-esteem hits the floor: why couldn't he say 'You look beautiful, Mummy, like a beautiful shiny star, twinking in the night', like he did once when he was four. Ok, so that was a peculiarly extravagant compliment, but one can usually rely on Trefusis Minor for a positive comment whatever the occasion. Not this time, apparently, though in fairness, it's sweet he's trying to be tactful. Trefusis Minor has quite firm views on makeup - I came home from work one day and got changed to go running and he ran after me to tell me that I should take my lipstick off before I went out because 'Red Lipstick is only for glamorous parties'. He's quite ahead of the game, even if I am a little concerned that he knows rather more about beauty than is usual in a boy of his age.

'It's deeply fashionable,' I say, naturally on the defensive, 'It's the last word in fashion, actually. They're Dior's new colours and I've copied the look from Harper's Bazaar. Blue is back.'

'Hmmm,' says Mr Trefusis, an eyebrow vanishing into his hairline, and goes back to playing with the cursèd Wii.

I tuck my sparkly clutch firmly under my arm, and flounce off grandly into the taxi waiting to take me to some work do or other. Yet I no longer feel quite so fashionable. I squint into the tiny mirror above the door of the cab and am slightly aghast: The bold drama of a pale cobalt eye with an equally colourful lip looked amazing when done by Aaron de Mey for Bazaar, but looks decidedly Barbara Cartland on me. I'm just wondering whether to tone it down a bit by scrubbing at my eye with an old bit of tissue - probably the same one I spat on earlier that day when removing nutella traces from the Tiniest Trefusis's face - when I arrive and forget all about it.

A few days later, it comes back to me. Mr Trefusis was right - perhaps these kinds of directional looks are like very up-to-the-minute clothes - only the very young or intensely trendy can carry them off. If you are neither, then probably one should bite the bullet and go for make-up that makes the best of what you've already got, rather than spoiling the lily with a hefty gilt impasto.

And frankly, the very best kind of makeup at all is not the edgiest runway look, it's the kind that takes years off you, like in the picture of Julianne Moore on the cover of February British Harper's Bazaar (above). She's had a little light airbrushing but I have it on good authority that in Real Life she looks utterly amazing for 49 and has eschewed the dark arts of the cosmetic dermatologist to boot.

Christian Dior once said, “I dream of saving women from nature”, and that seems to me to be the essence of beauty. I don't want to appear in front of anyone in the same dishevelled, unmade-up state that greets me in the mirror every morning, natural as that is: I want to make the best of myself, even if that's doesn't immediately scream that I'm au fait with the latest Moschino eye, or the Bottega Veneta brow. Most of all, I want to look young(er) and fabulous, not like an old has-been try-hard.

This post was going to neatly segue into a list of tips and techniques for turn back the clock make-up, but I've run out of time somewhat. However, in the very next post I promise to impart everything I've picked up whilst working with make-up artists and with some of the very best magazine beauty editors.

THE GLORY OF THE INTERNITS

2010-01-22T17:30:00.007Z

I'm delighted to report that the Tiniest Trefusis and I are now nit-free - we tried a combination of the wonderful suggestions that came pouring in (thank you, internits!). I was particularly interested to try the mayonnaise cure, but Mr Trefusis finished the last of the Hellmann's on his sandwiches before I could annex it for nit-smothering purposes.

However, it seems that constant vigilance is the key in the war against the horrid little pest, and lest I let down my anti-nit defences, I'm going to invest in this cautionary print from the fabulous Jason Freeny and display it prominently chez Trefusis.

In case nits aren't your thing - though from the number of comments on the last post it's hardly a niche interest - take a look at the equally wonderful Gingerbread Man Dissected.

Many thanks to India Knight for sending me Jason's Cootie picture, and to Jason himself for kindly giving me permission to reproduce his work for this post: do visit his website and have a look for yourself at his clever and quirky prints.

NIT FAMILY TREFUSIS

2010-01-19T22:00:00.004Z

Every morning, at about half four, The Tiniest Trefusis climbs into bed with Mr Trefusis and I. Still more than three-quarters asleep, she clambers between us, and welds herself to me, head pressed against mine, a hot arm thrown round my neck, icy feet jammed into my side. Her snuffling breath blows stertorously into my ear, keeping me awake, but I don’t mind. She’s my baby, my last child, and the more Trefusis Minor grows up from infant to boy, each passing week ushering in the wilful independence of six, rather than the boyish neediness of five, the more I cling to the fleeting babyhood of Tiny Trefusis.

So really, much against the better judgement of Mr Trefusis, I can’t quite bring myself to put her back in her own bed. We both crave the comfort of each other still, listening as the intense intimacy of mother and newborn baby echoes back at us over the intervening years. Every time she hops in it reminds me of those precious weeks after her birth, when we seemed to spend most of our time in bed together, she dozing at my breast, and me too awed by her fragile beauty to go to sleep. We’re both caught in the no man’s land of toddlerhood: she reserves the right to be simultaneously ‘a Big’ and a baby, and I can’t bear to discourage her.

However, now that she is on her way to being three, and has started Montessori, this physical proximity has its disadvantages. I waved her off on her first day, and not a week later, as I sat one afternoon at my desk, I started to feel a tell-tale prickling on my scalp, behind my ears, and near the nape of my neck. It quickly became more than a tickling irritation, and I found I could no longer suppress the urge to scratch and furtively shoved a plastic fork underneath my hair and wiggled it about, scraping about the roots as gently and subtly as I could.

Nits. The Tiniest Trefusis had given me nits.

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.

As the afternoon wore on, I could find no relief in a little light fork therapy: I locked myself in the ladies lavatory and gave into an ecstasy of scratching; scarlet fingernails whirling dervishes underneath my hair. Oh, the rapture. The elation of being able to sate the insane itching. I emerged to look at myself in the mirror. Any vestige of a once elegant coiffure excised by the beserker action of my fingers, I looked as if I’d had a particularly enthusiastic run-in with a live cable.

The relief was short-lived. As I travelled home on the bus, I had to sit on my hands to stop them going to my hair. To keep myself sane, I focused on the image of the rather ancient nit comb rusting at the bottom of the medicine chest in the bathroom.

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.

I gathered the Trefusii together, larded them with the only conditioner I could find – an extremely expensive Kerastase hair masque, rather too fit for purpose, and ignoring their screams as I pulled heartlessly through tangles - Mr Trefusis the loudest of the protestors, naturally – I de-nitted them. Astonishingly, Trefusis Minor and Mr Trefusis were entirely nit free and in a fit of pique I threatened to send them down the road to the Glaxo Smith Kline laboratory to see if they had any special immunity that could be bottled and patented as an expensive anti-nit vaccine. It could make us rich beyond our wildest dreams - I’d pay, wouldn’t you?

The Tiniest Trefusis had six proper nits. Nits so big, you could give them their own sideshow in a flea circus, and they didn’t appear to bother her remotely – not a surreptitious scratch or poke into her still downy baby hair. I started on my own. I’m secretly immensely pleased with my hair – it’s very long, and very thick, and the greatest treat I can think of is a visit to Graham the Hair God for a re-blonding, or a blow-dry or for one of his more elaborate confections should I have something exciting to go to. It’s a devil to get a nit comb through, though. I think it took me a full thirty minutes to comb the Kerastase through the lot. And if I wasn’t as badly affected as The Tiny T, the little buggers were certainly in there. On the upside, of course, we're the shiniest-haired family in Shepherds Bush.

Of course, the problem with treating nits is that you have to keep it up – one session with the nit comb and the conditioner isn’t enough: I’ve been taking the family through the nit ritual daily, and in the case of La Princesse Pou, twice – once with conditioner and once with a special evil battery operated comb which is supposed to condemn the nits to death by electrocution. I’ve developed a whole range of severe, scraped back Let-Me-Be-Your-Stern-Mistress hairdos – the nit comb conditioner trick takes so long in the morning I don’t have the time left to blow dry it, and I’m pretty keen to keep my hair up and out of everyone’s way until I have the nit all-clear, particularly given the amount of air-kissing that's obligatory in my line of work. It also means I can poke hair pins at the itchy bits mid afternoon, on the pretext of tidying my 'do'.

I’m very over all this – how long do I have to keep doing it? Do you have nits? Any cunning ways for getting rid of them that I don’t know about, short of making the Tiniest Trefusis wear a bedcap so she doesn’t keep on sharing her nits with me at night?

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.

THE FEMME FATALE

2010-01-15T06:55:00.002Z

I’ve always yearned to be a Femme Fatale: oozing mystique and an exotic allure, instantly enslaving every man who claps eyes on me. Perhaps not like Salome, who was a little, well, perverse, not to mention wicked, more Zuleika Dobson, a femme so truly fatale all the Oxford undergraduates hurled themselves to their doom in the Isis, for unrequited love of her.

In truth, I’m not sure I have it in me – I’m too blonde, too British, too married. I haven’t the sophistication to be heartless, which seems to be an essential femme fatale ingredient, and I suppose I’d probably rather be stouthearted and loyal, than full of wiles and enchantment. After all, with the exception of Zuleika, who is last heard of boarding a train for Cambridge, literary femme fatales tend to come to a Bad End.

It’s not without regret that I admit my lack of femme fatale-ness: don’t all women long to be beguiling and mysterious, and to entrance and ensnare, just a little?

But perhaps there is a way to embrace one’s inner siren without having to go the full Morgan le Fay: scent. The subliminal olfactory message of exactly the right scent is able to hint at something complicated and intriguing beneath a prim and rather proper surface, and perhaps even transform one from housewife to houri with a mere spritz from a magic bottle. Such is the alchemical power of perfume.

Mitsouko does this for me, which is possibly why I don’t wear it that often: it feels somehow too intimate, too revealing, as if I’ve said too much. So in the office I tend to wear another defining Chypre, Diorella, which doesn’t have a hint of femme fatale about it, in my opinion.

And so there I was, content to just dabble timidly in femme fatale territory on special occasions, by means of a dab of Mitsouko -which is, after all, one of the world's most divine scents - until I made an extraordinary discovery: Ormonde Woman, a smoky eye of a perfume, thrilling and novel, yet subtle and intriguing.

Lured in by the promise of Black Hemlock as a key ingredient – and anyone who knows Waffle or I will testify to our predilection for offering each other a Hemlocktini, when times are tough or tedious - I tried it only to be instantly and utterly seduced by its exquisite unconventionality.

I don’t think I’d ever smelled anything like Ormonde Woman before – India Knight - whose opinion on scent I’d trust even above the great Guru himself, Luca Turin – described it to me as ‘beautiful yet sinister’, and I can’t think of a more apposite description. Hemlock – an unusual and expensive ingredient when used in this kind of concentration – immediately roots one’s expectations firmly in femme fatale territory (do I need to mention Socrates? I thought not). Its siren song is the spice-market top notes of cardamom and coriander that create instant allure, before ceding to a more conventionally feminine heart of violet and jasmine absolute.

It’s subtle, yet hypnotic, and even now, more than five hours after I last sprayed it on, I keep raising my wrist to my nose to breathe in the beauty of its base notes. These are uncompromisingly masculine - vetiver, cedar wood, amber and sandalwood – and I think that’s what makes Ormonde Woman so astonishingly sexy: It’s such a seductively feminine scent, but then leaves you with these complex and beguiling, yet somehow male, traces of wood and incense.

You see – the more I write about it,I’m more under its spell: it’s not simply about bringing out any latent femme fatale in me, Ormonde Woman is itself the femme fatale: an original, beautiful, enigmatic temptress, and above all one that is wonderfully confident and wholly uncompromising. Wouldn't you love to be like that? I absolutely would, which is possibly why I'm mad about it.

I should stop evangelising before you gently suggest that my enthusiasm is bordering on zealotry: So tell me, what perfume makes you feel like a femme fatale?

Ormonde Woman. Eau de Parfum 50mls £68

Ormonde Jayne - 12 The Royal Arcade 28 Old Bond Street London W1S 4SL T. +44 (0)20 7499 1100

PANTOUFLE EN VAIR

2010-01-10T23:32:00.010Z

What is it that's so alluring about a high-heeled shoe? I'm particularly drawn to those with viciously pointed toes, and a sharp heel, so much so that I can empathise enormously with the step-sisters in Grimm's variant of Cinderella, Aschenputtel. It's a rather harsher, more visceral version of the tale than Perrault's, or Disney's, but in all the stories, the Prince identifies his future bride by means of a shoe (because, of course, just remembering her face would be too much of an effort, right?). Anyway, in Grimms story, when the Prince announces that whoever fits the 'small and slender' golden slipper will be his bride...

...Then the two sisters were very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it, for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed her a knife, and said, “Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will never have to go on foot.” So the girl cut her toe off, squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince.

Whenever I read Aschenputtel, I'm reminded that it doesn't take a handsome prince to make a woman go through this kind of pain these days - fashion alone will do it: seemingly we're all penitents on a fashion pilgrimage, offering up our suffering as sacrifice. I've spent many happy minutes playing hookey in the fashion cupboard at work, trying on the dozens of glorious shoes that come in to be photographed for the magazine, each more exquisitely agonising than the last. I remember a pair of cranberry coloured glacé kid Louboutins which were so high they immediately hurt my knees, so heaven only knows what they'd be like after an hour, and a mouthwatering pair of Yves Saint Laurent Tribtoo shoes with a skyscraper of a platform and a needle heel that just screamed 'broken ankle'. My own shoe cupboard is full of beautiful high heels - and there are a fair few that could really do with me amputating a toe or slicing off a heel to make them anything like wearable.

There was a time when I didn't care about the fact most of my shoes made me feel as if I were walking on sharp swords like the Little Mermaid. The loveliness of them far outweighed their purpose and made walking to the end of the office without wincing seem like an indulgence. Part of me still feels that way, and now I've put Party Feet in every pair I own, and have reined in some of my ambition when it comes to heel height, I still like to sit and admire my feet in a nice pair of Ferragamos or Louboutins or even in the petrol blue Kurt Geiger shoeboots I'm wearing today.

However, the weather and the recession have instigated a recent change in Trefusis footwear policy: when I started this blog, it read 'Mrs Trefusis Takes a Taxi...because she eschews sensible shoes'. Well, um, what can I say - for the sake of veracity, I've had to remove that promise. I no longer eschew the sensible or the comfortable. Partly it's because taxis have become something of a luxury rather than a necessity - and let me tell you, I'm absolutely delighted to have discovered the bus; nearly as good as a taxi in Central London and only £1.20 a journey with an Oyster Card. Really, too marvellous. But mostly it's because that when it's wet or snowy or icy underfoot, heels just don't cut it. It's not simply that I don't want to wreck something that costs more money than I could ever admit to Mr Trefusis, it's that I'd rather remain on terra firma. I'm afraid I bought UGGS. God knows, I swore I never would, but I can't tell you the loveliness of always having warm and cosy feet, being able to walk fast - especially if I can see the right bus is coming - and of having toes and heels and insteps that no longer beg for mercy. I do call them Ugh's, because no one can deny they're works of infernal hideousness, but I'm definitely prepared to sacrifice style for comfort - at least out of doors.

But perhaps I haven't strayed that far from the Cinderella myth: according to Wikipedia, in Perrault's version, Cinderella wore fur boots - 'pantoufle en vair' - but when the story was translated from the French, vair was mistaken for verre (glass). So Cinderella was, at least in one account, a sensible girl too - and right now, in snow-bound Britain, a fur boot trumps a glass slipper, prince or no prince.

A WORKING MOTHER'S DILEMMA

2010-01-07T14:00:00.001Z

I had an email from a friend this morning, confessing that she’d been so frazzled by the long Christmas break, she’d created a trumped-up emergency at work requiring her urgent presence, left her children with her husband and escaped to the office. She wrote a few desultory emails for form’s sake – nothing that couldn’t have been done from the Blackberry– and spent the rest of the morning pootling round the sales before returning, refreshed, to the fray and whine of a winter’s day with under-fives.

I can absolutely understand how she feels. I didn’t have enough holiday to get me the whole time off, so had to come in for a morning between Christmas and New Year and, God, the bliss of sitting at my desk with Radio Four on, drinking an entire cup of tea whilst it was still hot, rather than coming back to it half an hour later after some Ben 10 induced trauma, to discover it topped with the white bloom of cold milky tea. Having children has taught me that, with practice, the taste of microwaved tea becomes perfectly acceptable.

But, oh, the crippling guilt of longing to be at work: I admit it seems rather transgressive to discover there are times - and a lot of them - where one wants to be away from one’s children. It seems so terribly ungrateful, particularly if one has worked hard to have them in the first place, or had them rather late in life, like me. I think of friends who are still struggling with IVF and feel like a wretched ingrate – really, I’m so very blessed, I shouldn’t find two weeks at home at all wearing, but the most glorious Christmas present of all.

Ho hum. I’m afraid I’m no plaster saint: the myth of working motherhood is that one must want to spend every available moment – every minute one isn’t at work or asleep, that is – with one’s infants, engaged in some cosy ‘Listen with Mother’ type activity, or cosily cutting and sticking beautiful collages or baking or collaborating on a jigsaw, before pausing to offer them a cold glass of milk and a home-made biscuit.

The scene, illustrated as if in the Ladybird Peter and Jane books, is so clearly etched in my head, I’m astonished the reality is so different.

Erm, obviously, I love being with Trefusis Minor and his sister, but I will also confess there were several times when I was at home that I had reason to fantasise wildly about the extraordinary bliss of having a bath without having a tiny creature pull off all their clothes and hop in with me, or the hitherto unappreciated bliss of reading a book all afternoon. All of these treats must, necessarily, go by the wayside when the children are small. Partly it's the idiocy of the theory of quality time: young children don't really give a stuff about quality - they want you in quantity. And when they know that any moment you might hop off back to the office, they attach themselves like limpets and demand - rightly so - the entire and whole of your attention. And perhaps that's the conflict - you know you owe it to them, and your heart wants to be with them, but sometimes, you're just a little bit knackered and would like a nice, quiet sit-down.

So, no matter how different the reality, no matter how often one sticks Peter Pan on the dvd just so you can buy enough time to push the vacuum cleaner round, no matter how one feels inside, the idea remains that any time you have away from work is not discretionary time, and doing anything other than stuff with the spawn feels like cheating. And hence, the office represents the only Get Out of Jail Free card a working mother has - here are very few legitimate escapes from childcare, and work is one: no wonder men tried to keep women out of the workplace for so very long.