THE STATIONERY ROOM AT LIBERTY

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

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

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

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

'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

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

'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'