ASK MRS TREFUSIS: WHAT CAN I BUY MY HUSBAND FOR HIS FORTIETH BIRTHDAY?

Last saturday's Guardian came with a free copy of Jackie magazine. As a teenager I was an avid reader: I loved the ads for Miners makeup and for Rimmel- which then seemed the height of cosmetic luxury- and the photo-love stories, and pictures of hearthrob pop stars, but most of all I loved Cathy & Claire, Jackie's resident agony aunts (AKA the subs desk). 

Nowadays it seems that we're all too deeply sophisticated and grown up to be allowed agony aunts in glossy magazines - I suppose there's the wonderfully facetious Mrs Mills in Sunday Times' Style magazine - but really, Jackie magazine may have long ceased publication but has the angst disappeared? Or is it simply that the questions have changed. 

Anyway, imagine how much more fun Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and W would be with a column devoted to solving reader's problems? I was idly pondering the kind of questions that might crop up most often in the postbag when, in a spooky wiggle of Jungian synchronicity, the dilemma you find below pinged into my inbox. Some are born agony aunts, others merely writhe in agony: I'm not sure what I am, but have attempted to answer the question to the very best of my ability. 

Dear Mrs Trefusis

I am about to divorce my husband, but it's his fortieth birthday in a few weeks, and I feel I should really mark the occasion with a suitable present. How does one celebrate the 40th birthday of one's soon to be ex? What kind of present is appropriate?

Hmmm. It's difficult, isn't it. What does one buy the man who has everything.... except, um, his wife. For a fortieth birthday, one naturally wants to get something someone can keep, but then, if you're sidling out of someone's life, then the idea of proffering a permanent reminder seems to lack a modicum of tact. What one really wants to give him is a subscription to a good dating agency, so one can get him off one's conscience as soon as possible, but I can see that this solution may not offer the finesse you're looking for. 

I'm assuming - from the rest of your email - that you're parting on good terms and so I'd take a neutral but lavish approach: forty is still something of a watershed in a man's life - a time to put away childish things and shift gear from dilettante up to connoisseur. This is my round up of great gifts for a discerning chap on the eve of his, ahem, fifth decade.

Clothes: There are classics every man should own once he's old enough to look after them properly: Turnbull & Asser Sea Island white shirts, for example, Hermès ties - particularly the ones with the distinctive animal patterns on them, an Hermès belt, a decent jacket from Gieves, a cashmere v-neck. Non-comedy cufflinks. A pair of shoes from Loakes or Church's. A classic Burberry or Aquascutum trench. A good winter coat.

A watch: If he won't be troubled by a present that will show him how quickly time zips past once you're in your middle youth, a watch is a particularly appropriate fortieth birthday present. A man should own three watches: sports, work and dress. Remember, it's better to buy a good Timex than a fake Rolex.

Distinctive accessories: Every man should have something suave to carry his laptop around in, rather than one of those ghastly IT black things. Bill Amberg do the nicest, and they come in several sizes - the smallest works for a laptop, the largest for a weekend bag. The Medicine Bag is particularly good, offering a modern twist on the traditional Gladstone. 

Art: Signed lithographs don't have to be expensive. Photography is also becoming very collectable, and oddly, it's slightly less emotionally nuanced than art. I love this Terence Donovan print of Julie Christie, available from the Chris Beetles Gallery, who specialise in illustration but have a burgeoning photographic side.

Wine: After forty there's no excuse for not knowing your way round a wine list, and building your own wine cellar is an elegant refinement that doesn't have to be an expensive hobby. Berry Bros & Rudd do a terrific wine course as part of a cellaring package. 

Food: Men seem very keen at the moment to adopt some of the more traditional female skills - sadly this never seems to involve a taste for emptying the dishwasher, or cleaning up when the children have been sick in the middle of the night - if they want to do some cooking it seems to involve a trip to Borough Market in search of some rare vegetable or artisinal cheese which will then be presented at the dinner party with a flourish and its full resumé. Anyway, the using of every single pot and pan in the kitchen will soon no longer be your problem, so you can feel free to indulge his latent Gordon Ramsay without any qualms about having to spend decades clearing up afterwards.  Leith's do wonderful cookery courses ranging from week long intensive cheffery to high tech specifics: I'd hesitate to give Knife skills as a present to someone I was breaking up from, but it's apparently hugely popular with men.

Like leaving a job, it's always satisfying to exit on such a high note that your successor will find it hard to live up to your standards. This may not be the last present you'll buy your ex, but ideally, it will be one that will help him remember the relationship with fondness, and irritate the hell out of the next incumbent.

FAIR STOOD THE WIND FROM FRANCE

"What should I say to the new French CEO - it's a breakfast meeting so nothing too formal, but you know - something that might make an impression," I asked Mr Trefusis, whose proficiency with the french language still gives me the Fish Called Wanda feeling, even after six years of marriage.

"Tu peux les toucher," he offers, somewhat idly.

"Hang on - he's the CEO - I can hardly 'tu toyer' him, can I?"

"Well, it might sound a bit odd if you used 'vous' when inviting him to cop a feel."

"Oh, yes, very bloody helpful. In fact, a brilliant career move, asking one's new boss if he fancies a quick grope. I doubt that's what he means when he says we should get down to business. Try again: I want to make a good impression, not listen to the rungs of the career ladder snapping loudly beneath my feet. "

After some arguing, mostly about Mr Trefusis's lack of confidence in my ability to steer a conversation away from difficult linguistic waters, we agree that he'll coach me to say 'Veuillez excuser mon français exécrable' with a perfectly patrician parisian accent, and then I'll switch back to English, leaving Monsieur le CEO with the idea that I am wonderfully fluent but deeply modest. It'll do. It's not a one-on-one, anyway, so I'm pretty sure I won't have to show off too horribly.

But actually, I'm fairly nervous about the meeting - as one ever is, I guess, when spending time with someone who has your livelihood in their hands. And, of course, in more affluent times, no one tried too hard to impress. These days it's different: staying in one's job isn't just about being good at it - with the spectre of redundancy looming over everyone, working is like a hideous game of musical chairs - you can dance and dance only to return to your place to find the chair is gone. I know very little about Monsieur le CEO, other than his recent career history. I know he must be pretty posh, the 'de' in his name being a dead giveaway. I know he likes cars, though I shan't attempt to add my five pence worth here since the workings of the internal combustion engine are a piece of spectacular magic to me and I can just about tell a BMW from an Audi. Other than discussing the business, I'll have to conjure conversational topics from nowhere and hope he doesn't ask me anything difficult. I'm not aiming for anonymity, however. I need him to know who I am.

I do know he likes pretty girls. It might not be an original manoeuvre, but one may as well attempt to be easy on the eye. I'm no Claudia Schiffer, obviously, or Carla Bruni, but you can't have everything and with an exhausting amount of effort I can scrub up fairly well. Unless you're a super model, good looks are 10% what you were blessed with and 90% good grooming. Look at any of those makeover shows on the television, and it's all about the hair. Get that sorted and you're most of the way. Add decent, subtle makeup and a flattering dress and you can hold your head up with the best of 'em. At the crack of, um can't be dawn, it's still dark, Mr Trefusis finds me in the bathroom wearing beige spanx and a push up bra, blowdrying my hair. To add to the ineffable beauty of the picture, the top half of my hair is in curlers (it's not just my breasts that deserve a boost). It's terribly hard on husbands - seeing one's wife get ready must be like going on set at a film lot, discovering that the beautiful buildings in the movie are just plasterboard façades, held up by scaffolding. But at last I'm ready, as soignée as I'll ever be, with an elegant little black dress so tight it immediately gives me indigestion and a pair of taxi shoes high enough to induce vertigo. I spray on some Mitsouko in an attempt to smell expensively sexy, yet sophisticated. I think I probably just end up smelling like my mum.

I arrive at breakfast - my peers have all had the same idea - every last one of us is LBD'd and blowdried to within an inch of our lives. Monsieur le CEO compliments me on my perfect pronunciation of exécrable and the meeting passes off without incident. And in these dark days, who can ask for more?

THE SACRED AND PROFANE LOVES OF MRS TREFUSIS

I can never resist a gauntlet, well, not when it's thrown down by someone I admire. So when the Illustrious Waffle put out the challenge to write about first love in all its gory detail, I seized the chance to tell the story of how I unwittingly put someone off worldly relationships for life.

To find the tale's beginning, we must return to the time of tory boys, and fire up the Ashes to Ashes soundtrack. Matthew Fitzgerald, as we shall call him - naturallyI have changed the names to protect the guilty - was my first foray into the tory boy type, though he was much more rebellious and less tweedy than later examples. He had the requisite wedge haircut, nice manners and the wherewithall to buy a gin and orange, but with added Bad Boy qualities - a shocking reputation for breaking hearts and being unrepentantly late with his homework. Usually, tory boys were bard boys, given to slipping scrolls of tortured adolescent poetry into your pocket at the bus stop, but with his brooding way of turning up the collar of his Crombie against the rain, and of curling a sneering lip around a Players No. 6, Matthew had swallowed the anti-hero manual. His name was doodled on every exercise book, girls missed several buses home trying to catch the one he was on, most break-times were spent discussing what it might be like to be kissed by him. Truly, he was the Byron of Birkenhead.

I wouldn't say I was immune to his charms, I was just more realistic: I'd seen him loitering in cool record shops with a copy of The Face. He wore peg top trousers like David Bowie in his 'Let's Dance' phase, and winklepicker shoes. Rumour had it that he'd even been to London to hang out at The Wag Club. Not in my league, I thought. I'd content myself with the mild literary flirtation of the bard boys at the local library.

But as chance would have it, and after not very long at all, we ended up on the same dancefloor of some sticky carpeted nightclub in a forgotten corner of Birkenhead, gyrating to New Order's Blue Monday, the longest danceable tune ever to chart in the UK. Prevented from close physical contact by the outrageous pointiness of our respective winklepickers, the synthpop-fuelled tension built between us until, close to the six minute mark, we lurched into a fierce, compulsive embrace, the braces on his teeth bruising my lips with the force of his passion, my long hair catching painfully on the parallel rows of buttons on his shirt. By the time Blue Monday had given way to Duran Duran, we were off the dancefloor and snogging for England. In the argot of the day, we had 'tapped off'.

Reader, I'm sorry to disappoint, but this great lothario kissed like a carwash. So drowned in spittle was I, I kept having to break off to rub my face affectionately on his shirt. Did I let this put me off? I did not. I was filled with all the exultant triumph of a 100 to 1 racehorse romping home against all expectations in the Grand National. He could have had the breath of Baal and the personal hygiene habits of a Gruffalo for all I cared. The prize longed for by my entire class was mine: Love might be a drug, but victory is more potent and addictive. I let him wait for me outside school on Monday and contrived to appear chilly so he'd put his blazer around my shoulders. I let everyone see his self-consciously romantic gestures like lighting two cigarettes and passing one to me. He bought me Joy Division's Love will Tear Us Apart in 12 inch vinyl and I'm ashamed to say I didn't hesitate to bring it to school to parade in front of everyone.

But I'm afraid that Mr Fitzgerald was a better trophy than he was a boyfriend, so quite how he was so prefixed with mystique, I have no idea. His dating M.O mostly involved coming round to mine on the pretext of helping me with my latin prep but I never saw him get Cicero out of his satchel before he pounced. I can't say that I was immune to pouncing, being young and extremely curious, but his brand of pouncing was so horribly inept, featuring more carwash kissing, and vigorous rummaging under my school shirt, all sweaty palms, doggy tongue and orangutang arms. Within days he was pressurising me to 'go all the way', making so many irrepressible assaults on my virtue I knew exactly how Clarissa felt fending off Lovelace. Actually, scratch that -there is no literary analogy worthy of his persistence. I felt like a leg to which an amorous dog had become attached: he was unshakeable. Had the technique been more honed, and the execution more adroit and less enthusiastic, perhaps I would have succumbed, but at last, bored by my rebuffs, he decided to finish with me.

The Conversation took place on the platform of Hamilton Square tube station in Birkenhead after a visit to Probe, an incredibly trendy record shop in Liverpool run by Pete Burns of Dead or Alive, who looked rather different in those days. He'd been silent for the whole journey, and hadn't launched himself at me once, which was welcome, if unusual.

'We need to talk' he said, in that fabulously original way that such conversations always start.

'Ok' I replied, refusing to be drawn and having read enough Cosmopolitan to know what to expect from such an opener.

'I don't think we should see each other anymore. You see, I've got my exams coming up and I really need to get some work done. Oh, and I'm entering a seminary in September: I'm going to train as a priest.'

'Like, as in Catholic priest?' God I was slow on the uptake.

'Um, yes. I've been called.'

'Well, I can see that having a girlfriend might be a little surplice to requirements.' I regained my composure as best I could, taking refuge in silly puns. I left him on the platform, thinly disguising my high dudgeon, and took the bus the rest of the way home.

But really? I must confess [snigger] that I was a little put out. What can one make of it? That I was so fabulous that only God would do next? That my failure to acquiesce to his base desires confirmed his vocation? To this day, I've not really managed to get to grips with it, and would be grateful for any theories offered.

And as for Matthew Fitzgerald, he didn't become a priest, but a monk, tending the apple orchards at Ampleforth, teaching and such like, or so I'm told, but I didn't trouble too much with keeping up with him. I'm hardly likely to make him my friend on Facebook.

First love? Pah. Overrated. Get it over with for practise. Romeo and Juliet is just a story, and I think there was a dodgy monk in that too.

THINGS AIN'T WHAT THEY MEME

I'm not one for memes. I am really quite a tiresome person, so the idea of a questionnaire in which I let you know even more dreary drivel about myself than I already write here fills me with dread.

However, what are rules if there are no exceptions? And so, when one of my all time favourite bloggers, Mothership, tagged me in a meme, it felt only courteous to follow her request.

As if to add insult to injury, I've taken terrible liberties with the original meme. I hope that Motherhood the Final Frontier will forgive me for having bent the rules. It's probably an enormous sin in the blogosphere and I'll have to go to confession. But not this one, I hope.



Anyway, here's the meme. Or, ahem, my version of the meme....

What's your favourite piece of writing?
I'm afraid you'd get a different answer to this question every time it was asked. Writing is a little like clothes, so much depends on your mood. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford made a great impression on me when I first read it at eighteen, and I must have read it at least every decade since, possibly because it has one of the boldest opening lines of any book - if you start your first chapter 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard', you're setting the bar very high.
But there's a passage within it that struck a chord with me then, and it still resonates, for reasons I'm not prepared to go into, not being a confessional blogger.

We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
So, for a time, if such a passion comes to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows across sun-dials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will have become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned to many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

What's the favourite thing you've ever written?

Ha. I can hardly go from Ford Madox Ford into hopelessly amateur Mrs Trefusis, can I? Worryingly,I am still quite pleased by 'THE DUST ON A BOWL OF ROSELEAVES', though it's horribly pretentious. But the four part love story, in which I meet Mr Trefusis is rather better and infinitely more readable. It begins with LOVE IN THE TIME OF INTERWEB, but continues into Espresso Bongo, Love's Labour's Lust, and finally, Love in a Foreign Language.

What blog post do you wish you'd written?

Just about anything by Belgian Waffling, but particularly this gorgeously dark Stella Gibbonsesque post from earlier this week. The Waffle is a genius and can turn 200 words about house dust into something compelling and meaningful.

Choose a favourite quotation

'I like people better than principles, and people without principles best of all'

Oscar Wilde. It always is, isn't it.

Three favourite words

Lambent, idiosyncratic, tenebrous.

Just like the way they sound. But I also like velleity, a word I hadn't heard until yesterday, when Sarah Churchwell mentioned it on twitter. It means 'a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it.' I think I suffer from velleity more often than I'd like.

Do you have a writing mentor, role model, influence or inspiration

Hmm, I'd like to say it's someone very grand, like George Eliot, but it's not. I'm ready to confess that my greatest influences are probably Nancy Mitford and Jilly Cooper. The highbrow stuff is mostly me showing how unbearably affected I am.

What's your writing ambition?

To avoid very obvious spelling mistakes, and to always use the apostrophe in an appropriate manner.

And now I'm supposed to send it onto three people.

I choose Joad Raymond, who writes a very good blog called Miles to Go Before I Sleep , but now he's unable to run, he needs something new to write about, and it may as well be this since he's one of the best read people I know.

And The Age of Uncertainty. This blog, mostly about antiquarian books and the stories they unconsciously tell, gives me such enormous pleasure: I urge you to seek it out so you can discover its delights for yourself.

And last but not least, Helena Halme, an ex-pat Finn whose wonderful story about her English sailor is serialised on her blog. Start at the beginning and I'm sure that like me, you'll be hooked, and desperate to follow it to its conclusion.

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

YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW

My favourite cinematic seduction comes from Vittorio di Sica's 1963 comedy, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Ieri, Oggi, Domani), beating by a narrow margin the heartbreakingly lovely scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don't Look Now.

The on-screen chemistry between Sophie Loren and Marcello Mastroianni is undeniable, and it's a terrific moment in a highly watchable film.

In 1994, for the less successful Prêt-à-Porter, Robert Altman brought the two co-stars back together to reprise the famous scene. I was looking for Ieri, Oggi, Domani on You Tube, and was delighted to fall across this rather clever splice of the two films.

Thirty years after Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Loren, at 60, and Mastroianni, 70, still set the screen smouldering: I particularly like the wry humour of the scene's end.

IN THE SWIM

The ghastliness of summer is full upon us, and unless you've spent the last six months in the gym, or have the kind of self-control that means you never say yes to a Malteser or a second glass of wine, your self-esteem will join mine on the floor at the very thought of having to remove vast amounts of clothes in favour of The Swimming Costume.


Bikini season ought to come complete with a special prescription of Prozac, to anaesthetise one against the pain of putting on show a non-photo-shopped body. And if you've had children, then perhaps a side-order of hemlock might go well with the SRI's, because the words 'bikini' and 'post-baby body' don't appear to belong in the same sentence together. Not for me, anyway.


Unless you're Natalia Vodianova, pregnancy takes its toll, if not physically, then at least on the way one feels about oneself.


But what's the answer? Does one just resolve to try not to care, to get over it? Or does one opt for a punitive diet and a rigorous gym routine - though, frankly, who has the time? Or perhaps a 'Mummy Job' is the answer, taking a surgical route to restore one's body to its ante-partum glory? Tempting, but in truth, if I had several thousand pounds lying around I'd have the bathroom done rather than my boobs, it being on show a lot more often than my embonpoint.


Fortunately, there is a fourth option: decent swimwear. I'd heard friends rave about Heidi Klein, but couldn't quite bring myself to part with the money, until a tempting discount on their Facebook page, and the trauma of a forthcoming holiday, made me wonder if a well cut costume could be the swimwear equivalent of a pair of black opaques. Reader, I can't tell you the joy of the Delfi one-piece (pictured above, in espresso brown, which is very flattering if you're extremely pale like me). All thoughts of hiring a Victorian bathing machine, or of taking up mountain climbing in an attempt to avoid the swimming pool/beach moment, vanished: the fabric is thick enough to smooth one's stomach enviably flat, the clever halter-neck and well-thought out stitching under the bust cheerily re-perks my boobs, and the gold thingywhatsits on the straps can be moved up or down, depending on how deep a cleavage one is willing to show.

Mothers themselves, Penny Klein, and her business partner Heidi Gosman, know exactly what women go through when the holidays are looming. The success of their range is partly to do with the quality of fabrics used, but it's also about the way its designed by women for women, with the express purpose of making real bodies look and feel fabulous, on the beach, in the sea and by the pool.


The website is extremely good, but I love the store experience even more- there's one in Notting Hill, and one in Chelsea, and each offers a complete pre-holiday experience. Not only are the staff utterly expert in finding the perfect bikini for you, but you can also have a spray tan (everything looks better brown, and since I start off pale blue and don't get much darker, a professional fake tan is my number one holiday essential), a fab pedicure, and find gorgeous cover-ups to take you from beach to bar for pool side cocktails, great jewellery to dress up bikinis and casual beachwear, sandals and those ultra cool hats that look so effortlessly chic on a beach-side Elle Macpherson.

I'm not a fashion writer, but even I can see that there are some ultra-clever figure fixers in the Heidi Klein range that would work particularly well for the post-baby body: The bottoms of the Antibes fold up or down, an ideal fix for a mummy-tummy.

If you're small-breasted but in need of a boost, or generous bosomed in search of support, its top has sideboning and can be tied both behind the neck and at the ribcage to raise the bust and lengthen the torso. What's more, the Antibes top - and several others - go up to a G-cup.

Although I've been a life-long devotee of the bikini, I find it's not as practical a solution as it once was now I'm chasing after two infants, one of whom thinks it's hilarious to pull down pants or pull up bikini tops. How we all laughed. I love the Delfi, but had I been in need of a little more support up top, I'd have gone for the Bamboo one piece, which has sexy low back with self-ties, so you can adjust the fit to offer more support around your rib-cage to lift the bust. It's also very chic, and shows just enough skin to be alluring, yet leaves enough to the imagination to maintain the illusion that all is just as it should be, and in aubergine, it's a colour that again works well if your skin tones are a little too celtic for fashion.

At around £140, I'm not going to pretend that it's a particularly frugal solution. But when I think of the money I've spent on buying several less flattering outfits, and how much more attractive I feel when pool-side, it feels like money well spent. And, unusually, so does Mr Trefusis.