THE JILLY COOPER CURE

Imogen, my first Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper is my universal panacea - whenever the sky looks like it's falling in, I duck into one of her novels and shelter there for a while (rather than bolt off to tell the King like Henny Penny - the flight or fight instinct is not strong in me - I'm all about the hiding). I re-read Riders, Rivals, Polo, Imogen, Emily, Harriet, Octavian, even the lesser Jilly's of Jump! Score! and Wicked! (Let the exclamation mark be a warning sign) until I feel I can tackle whatever has sent me scuttling.

The comfort of Cooper has, of course, a lot to do with the way she writes within a conventional literary framework, rather than challenging it, and even when things look bleak for her characters, we know that the wheel of fortune will turn upwards again for them. Her language underpins this narrative certainty - things are larky, merry, jaunty - and one reads on, secure in the knowledge that the good will end happily and the bad unhappily, because, to quote Wilde, 'that is what Fiction means', at least in the cosy world of Cooper.

As a teenager, two authors kicked down the door to the magical, infinite riches offered by books: TS Eliot's The Waste Land was a poem which came with a free gift of a literary education, a Grand Tour of Western Culture, books upon which all sorts of other books are built: Dante and Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, The Bible and Baudelaire, Ovid and Virgil - an intellectual paradise. But Jilly Cooper took me to the books that nourish and sustain the soul - through her I discovered Nancy Mitford, Barbara Pym, Forever Amber, The Diary of A Provincial Lady, Cold Comfort Farm, Barbara Comyns, Mary Webb, Austen and Trollope. In her voice, in her characters and in her plots you sense the blissful influence of these writers, and if occasionally Cooper's love for them seeps into her writing a little too literally - a character in Harriet, confronted with a bawling, teething child, suggests it should go to the dentist and Red Alderton, in Polo, is given to sporting brightly coloured jackets, piped with a contrasting braid, both of which echo Cedric in The Pursuit of Love - it's more as a musician might use a sample than anything else, a reminder of her references, staking her claim to a particular literary tradition. 

But it's not simply Cooper's voice that led me down a primrose path of literary dalliance - she uses literary quotation to as a shortcut to describe character better than any other writer I can think of - sexy, temperamental, irresistible Rory Balniel is Young Lochinvar, you know Polo's Luke Alderton is a thoroughly good egg because he reads poetry - Martin Fierro and Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. Declan O'Hara, Rival's charismatic, irascible, tragic-romantic hero's great love is Yeats: he whispers to his faithless wife 'there is grey in your hair, Young men no longer catch their breath, When you are passing' and the quote so cleverly captures the drama of their relationship, I had my head stuck in Yeat's Collected Works for months afterwards. Cooper doesn't only feed the quote habit of her male characters - literary women abound, and nor is literariness a universal indicator of goodness in a character - Helen, Rupert Campbell-Black's first wife is given to earnest quoting as a sign both of her pretension and also a signifier of the mismatch in the relationship between her and Rupert, who believes reading anything other than Horse and Hound a monumental waste of time.

So, for thirty years, Cooper has sustained me, and brought me enormous pleasure, not only with her own books but with those to which she's introduced me. If T.S Eliot and Jilly Cooper are my formative literary experiences, and if what you read can't help but rub off onto what you write, then heaven help the Great Unfinished Novel ...

DARK SOCIAL

I was chatting to digi-guru Steve Thompson the other day about 'Dark Social.'  Apparently, much to the despair of marketeers who have leapt upon insta-tweeting as the dernier cri of free media space (sorry, I mean, 'earned' media), we are all eschewing conventional social media as a way of sharing cat lolz and 'you know you were born in the 1920's if' listicles in favour of sending links to stuff we like to our actual friends via whatsapp, and messenger (of various iterations from BBM to hangouts, or whatever Google Chat is called now it's trying to be a bit cooler). 

'Dark Social' sounds like it should be sexier and more exciting than that, I thought, feeling a bit short-changed, but then digital can often seem that way (look, look, I have invented this amazing shiny round thing which will revolutionise transport as we know it etcetc ). I used to have a bet with a friend at my old work about how many times we could get 'intimate offline social networks focused around key passion points' into presentations before anyone realised we were referring to groups of mates watching Rugger down the pub. 

Of course, the web has always been a social space, but what Dark Social reflects is, probably, people's increasing unease with the exchange of vast quantities of personal data in return for being able to talk to their friends (facebook) in an easily accessible, public space, or being able to offer your witty 140 character epigrams to like-minded strangers (twitter) like some digital Oscar Wilde. It's also useful because there's a whole heap of things that are better shared privately - controversial opinions, a link to a youtube clip of Nosferatu because it reminds you of your boss, emergency kittens whilst you're in the middle of a board meeting and so on.

The challenge for marketeers is that it's harder to advertise to you if you're out of the conventional social space - they can't push dull messages at you and pretend you're engaged with it, simply because it's in your feed. It means that every brand with a 'content strategy' needs to work much harder to earn your attention, and make it genuinely interesting and clever. Guess what, you actually have to earn it.

I'm now just thinking of the last thing I shared on 'dark social'. I'm ashamed to admit it was a picture of Cindy Crawford's nipple. I wouldn't pop that on twitter - what would people think? Or on Facebook- what would my mum think?

I GROW OLD...I GROW OLD...I SHALL WEAR THE BOTTOMS OF MY TROUSERS ROLLED

I can no longer pretend to be young. I celebrate my birthday in tacit agreement that no one will be so ill-mannered to enquire as to the particular anniversary, and Mr Trefusis has kindly taught Trefusis Minor to tell everyone that I'm thirty-five. But then, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, 'no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating'.

I've been gazing at my aging navel lately. Time slips through my fingers, yet winds itself around the body. I find I can no longer defy the signs of aging, despite the exortations to do so from the Olay adverts. Some of it is insidious, like the slow contagion of reading glasses amongst my closest friends: our book group has been meeting for more than fifteen years, yet in the last six months, I've noticed that as soon as we start talking about the latest book, seven pairs of spectacles are simultaneously repositioned on noses. Some of it is merely the inevitable triumph of comfort over style: no one my age ever bothers to try and walk anywhere in taxi shoes - we simply adopt a large enough handbag in which to hide the spare flats, and hop back into the heels round the corner from the destination. The list of aging evidence is seemingly endless. Oh, God - everything - modern music is just TOO LOUD, particularly in clothes shops, and I wore all the fashions the first time round. I even found myself looking longingly at a KitchenAid mixer in the John Lewis catalogue - the last time I looked longingly at anything in region of four hundred quid, it was a pair of killingly high raspberry-glacé Louboutins. Actually, I'm not dead yet: they're much nicer than a KitchenAid, and just as inaccessibly priced.

Until shamefully recently, I was rabidly anxious about getting older: I loathed the creeping lines on my face, and my white, skinny, Ancient Mariner hands. I hated myself for both being absurdly perked up by a shout of 'Oy! Darlin'!' from White-Van-Man and for resenting the fact that I was no longer the woman at the party the men wanted to talk to. I felt the missed opportunities of youth too keenly: I longed to get back the time when life was all potential, when it was still a rehearsal. I wanted to smash something when Kazuo Ishiguro said that it dawned on him that most of the literary masterpieces had been written by people under forty. So I pretended to myself that it wasn't happening: I grew my hair defiantly long. I had vats of botox pumped into my forehead. The effects were superficial: I was still the same person inside.

But lately, there has been rather a change. I am, for the first time in my life, genuinely bien dans ma peau.

What happened? Well, on the vanity front, money got tighter and so I gave up Botox. My self-esteem didn't fall the same distance as my brow and it made me ponder a while on the current vogue for a one-size-fits-all ideal of grown-up beauty (yes, Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Kylie Minogue et al, I'm talking about you), particularly after visiting an eminent cosmetic dermatologist for work and hearing about an experimental rejuvenating treatment involving sucking out your own fat, harvesting the stem cells from it and then reinjecting it into your face at a cost of nearly eight thousand pounds. Is it just me, or does that sound really quite horrid? It sent me scuttling into google to look at images of beautiful ancients. Lauren Bacall (above) is no stranger to sun and cigarettes, yet still manages to look rather fabulous. The face I want at seventy is one which reflects the wisdom and character that time has built, rather than the skill of a cosmetic surgeon.

Yet, it's not just about conquering my besetting sin: I think the revolution about the way I feel about myself has had an awful lot to do with the therapeutic qualities of writing this blog (and lovely twitter, to which I'm still addicted). It's not only that it's given me an identity outside the - admittedly lovely - ones I already occupy as wife, mother, career-kind-of-person, but it's also introduced me to the whole glorious world of the internets - the burgeoning blog-roll down the side of Mrs Trefusis is testament to the quantity and quality of fascinating minds out there in the ether.

And most of all, I hear the words of Virginia Woolf echo in my head - 'One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.' - and feel reconciled and content.

THE LONDON BUNBURY

The art of Bunburying, when perfected, can enable a person to follow their whims without fear of backlash from meddlesome friends and precarious family obligations.

My taxi driver sensibly dropped me off on Porchester Gardens, right outside the private entrance to Le Café Anglais. If I'd had my wits about me, I'd have stepped out of the cab, and into Café Anglais’ private lift and found myself cocooned in elegant luxury in a trice. Too intent on looking glamorous in an enormous pair of Prada sunglasses, I tottered straight past the lift, and found myself stranded in the middle of Whiteley's shopping centre.

It's slightly counter-intuitive to put a very smart restaurant at the top of a rather less smart mall, and it's greatly to the credit of Le Café Anglais that it manages to overcome the experience of actually getting there. Having finally stumbled upon a public lift, I found myself alone with a Mohammed Al Fayed lookeylikey, who pressed me lasciviously against the lift's buttons, breathed hotly on me, insisting I was 'beeyootifooll' and that we must go for a drink together immediately. It's at times like these I realise the extraordinary disadvantages of being middle-middle class: DidI hit him with my capacious handbag? Did I cry 'Unhand me sir' in a ringing tone, pressing the alarm? No, I did not. Appalled and disconcerted, yet unwilling to appear impolite, I merely squeaked, 'Sweet of you, but I'm meeting friends' and scuttled out of the lift in heart-pounding relief as the doors opened not a second too soon.

I still couldn't find Le Café Anglais. I asked someone in Yo Sushi! who sent me to Cafe Nero. Had I not still been wearing my dark glasses, I daresay I would have arrived at the restaurant an awful lot sooner. When I finally got there, I had to spend several minutes outside, trying to recompose myself, partly to shake off the sweaty horror of my enthusiastic lift companion, but mostly to try and conquer my embarrassment at my own navigational incompetence.

Only a fool - me - would think Le Café Anglais difficult to get to. The upside of the story is that it's such a bower of bliss, I could have walked barefoot from Acton along the Westway, and it would have been worth the pain.

The interior is astonishingly beautiful - all art-deco detailing, floor to ceiling windows, and double-height ceiling. It has a wonderful understated opulence about it, cleverly excising all trace of the MacDonalds that once occupied the same space.

But it wasn’t to stare admiringly at its design or drool at the enormous menu that I was there: co-founder Charlie McVeigh had invited a cabal of twitterers to a lunch, with nothing more taxing on our agenda than a hedonistic afternoon of delicious food, wine far better than my ignorant palate deserves, and vast amounts of gossip – real life twittering, perhaps.

Proper restaurant critics have reviewed the delights on offer far better than I ever could– you may read them here and here – all I shall say is that the menu is cleverly composed of all the things you most want to eat in the world, and some things that you might hesitate to try but are works of staggering genius – like the parmesan custard with anchovy toast, which I’d rather feared might taste like a pair of superannuated socks, but is such heaven I’m salivating as I write, wondering when I can contrive to go back so I may eat it again.

An afternoon like this is my version of Wilde’s Bunburying – a miniature holiday, carefree and without a to-do list or pressing agenda – the London equivalent of a lazy day on the beach with a not-very-improving novel, and with all the transgressive appeal of stolen time, though I hasten to add, in case anyone from work is reading, I have a properly completed holiday form for anyone who'd like to see it.

And really, despite the fact that the lunch gave onto drinks and then dinner, before ending shortly before midnight, it was a very restorative Bunbury indeed.


Le Café Anglais, 8 Porchester gardens, London W2 4DB tel: 020 7221 1415 info@lecafeanglais.co.uk
http://www.lecafeanglais.co.uk/

NB : there are many beautiful pictures of Cafe Anglais on the website, but I took the one above as we were coming to the end of lunch : a reminder of an affable and convivial afternoon