THE KNOWN SOLDIER: IN MEMORIAM, LT BERTRAM VINCENT BROCKLEBANK

Hanging in the wardrobe at my parent's house is an aged dinner jacket. Smart, yet unostentatious, with grosgrain lapels and an elegant pleat to the trouser, it's the sort of dinner jacket worn by those in the habit of dressing for dinner. I imagine its owner enjoying a cigarette and whisky with water, perhaps a little hesitant in the company of women, and particularly shy of one, more dear to him than the rest, of whom he has hopes. I imagine him as diligent; modest about his successes and rueful of failings. I imagine him likeable; with a diffident charm. I imagine him with quiet ambition and irreproachable manners. I imagine him indulging his dreams for the family business, newly joined; his expectation of preferment and of Getting On and Going Far.

I may imagine all I like: the man for whom the dinner jacket was made, Lieutenant Bertie Brocklebank, a cousin of my grandfather, died on 31st July 1917, commanding No.4 Company, 2nd Battalion, Coldstream Guards. It was the first day of the campaign that came simply to be known as Passchendaele. He was twenty-five. Age shall not weary them.

The main offensive of the 3rd Battle of Ypres - Passchendaele - began at zero hour (3.50 am) on 31st July. By 9.30, Lt Brocklebank was dead.

A few years ago, my father went to the Guards museum to see if he could find further details of Bertie's death, and copied long-hand the operations report of the day. The 1st Guards Brigade (2nd Coldstream and 2nd Grenadier Guards), who were in support advanced at 8.50am to take their objectives but were held up by heavy machine gun fire, barrage and shelling and had to dig in 80 yards short of their objective. This is what the operations report has to say:

At 9.30 am the two parts of the Battalion began to consolidate and a contact aeroplane flew over the position. Flares were lit.

Unfortunately, at this moment, a German flew very low - about 100 feet - over the Battalion in a captured English aeroplane with a black cross painted very indistinctly on it. The position of consolidation was thus given away to the enemy and came under very accurate artillery fire.

There were many casualties. Lt.B.V.Brocklebank commanding No 4 Coy was killed and Lt. A.W.Kirk commanding No 3 Coy was wounded. 2nd Lt.L.C.Leggatt of No 3 Coy was killed leaving Lt.G.R.M.Caldwell as the sole surviving officer. By later on in the day, all the Sergeants had been killed or wounded.

Bertie was but one of 32,000 Allied casualties on 31st July, for an advance of around 2000 yards. I say a special prayer for him every Remembrance Sunday, not because he was especially heroic, or even a particularly close member of my family, but because every time I think of him, or see his dinner jacket, hanging there, I imagine what he, and every soldier killed in every conflict, might have become.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

LIFE IMITATES ART: CLAUDIA SCHIFFER & HARPER'S BAZAAR

The November issue of Harper's Bazaar featured a selection of exquisite portraits of Claudia Schiffer, created by some of the great and the good of contemporary art. In a unique and wonderfully ambitious venture, Bazaar commissioned Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gillian Wearing, Jason Brooks, Marc Quinn, Dexter Dalwood, Chris Bucklow, and Keith Tyson to offer their own interpretation of this platonic ideal of female beauty.

The pictures looked pretty extraordinary on the pages of the magazine, but begged to be hung and displayed properly in a gallery. So this Monday, Bazaar hosted a private view of 'Capturing Claudia' at the Colnaghi Gallery, attended by the muse herself, the artists who represented her according to their own particular vibe and vision, and vast amounts of wildly glamorous people from the art and fashion worlds, all of whom looked vaguely famous but who I was too dim and uncool to recognise.

Helpfully primed by all the pictures of her staring back at me from the walls, I did manage to recognise Claudia Schiffer. She looks so robust and statuesque in fashion shoots, yet she's rather fragile looking in real life, albeit very tall in an etiolated kind of way, like a plant that has been nurtured in the dark and grown lanky in search of a light source.

I'm afraid that when 'Capturing Claudia' myself, I used my iPhone, hardly the world's best camera, hence the rubbish blurry quality of this shot of her in front of Marc Quinn's flower portrait.

Here she is, slightly closer up. Not as close up as the Marc Quinn picture, which, though idealised in its composition, is un-retouched, and bears witness to her flawless skin. God, how few of us at thirty-nine could stand being scrutinised in close-up and displayed at such magnification?

Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hammer-Horror-meets-Hitchcock series is easily the least disturbing of anything Chapman Bros have ever produced, but no less stunning for that.

Jason Brooks' double-portrait appears at first to be the most conventional of the seven pieces, yet this starkly beautiful pencil drawing of Claudia's un-made-up face, in all its unflinching, photo-realist simplicity, relies on nothing other than the precision and skill of the artist for its power. It's a bold contradiction of the heavily re-touched, idealised and perfected images of celebrities we're used to.

I didn't get to take any iPhotos of Claudia in front of Keith Tyson's enormous seven-headed portrait. I was standing in front of it, muttering like a bag lady about how little I understood why he'd represented her as a beautiful Hydra surrounding what looked like a golf-course, when I realised I was standing next to the artist himself. Gutlessly, I turned and fled, only to be pursued by a sense of l'esprit de l'escalier: turning over in my head a dozen conversations in which I had the courage to ask him about his thinking behind the portrait, without the attendant anxiety about appearing stupid or uncool.

There is something about contemporary art that always makes me feel deeply, deeply unhip, like a Friend of the Royal Academy that's accidentally wandered into the Turner Prize. I won't say I didn't feel overawed in the company of art made flesh, and flesh made art and I'm wise enough to leave the art criticism to those that can fashion a coherent opinion but, by 'eck, they were lovely pictures, and that Claudia Schiffer's right pretty.

PS: I've just been told that if you're quick, you can pop into the gallery and see Capturing Claudia for yourself

Colnaghi Gallery
15 Old Bond Street
W1
(opposite Gucci)
Free Admission
10am - 6pm
But be quick - it's only on until this Friday, 6th November.

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.

MARILYN MONROE: 50 CENTS FOR YOUR SOUL*. BERT STERN'S LAST SITTING.

The shoot that came to be known as the ‘Last Sitting’ was photographed by Bert Stern for US Vogue over the course of three days, a fortnight before Marilyn Monroe died.

In the first session Marilyn posed almost nude (see colour images below), but Jessica Daves, then Editor of US Vogue, feeling that the pictures were too risqu é for the magazine - and could hardly be described as fashion - had Stern reshoot. Fashion editor, Bab Simpson contributed elegant black dresses, floor length chinchilla coats, pearls, hats, veils and sequined gloves, and as the news of Marilyn’s suicide hit the headlines, the September 1962 issue was already rolling on the presses, featuring the 8 page fashion feature, of which this exquisitely sombre, sophisticated, portrait was the lead shot.

They were the last pictures to be published – indeed to be taken - of Marilyn, and the Last Sitting became part of the cultural mythology of Marilyn Monroe.

The Bert Stern sitting is the backdrop for Marilyn, Forever Blonde, a new one-woman play that has just opened at the Leicester Square Theatre. Marilyn, played by the extraordinary Sunny Thompson, confides her life-story to the unseen photographer. The script is scrupulous in using only Monroe's own words, with the occasional voice-over quote from, say, Joe DiMaggio, or Arthur Miller, to construct its compelling and necessarily tragic narrative.

I went to Marilyn, Forever Blonde last night, as the guest of Sarah Churchwell, author of 'the most comprehensive life of the iconic movie star' - The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, and an exacting critic.

It's difficult to write a successful, intelligent play about a cult figure, particularly one which seeks to offer its audience a portrait of the real Marilyn, yet Marilyn, Forever Blonde succeeds, largely due to the astonishing skill of Thompson, who does more than play Marilyn, she inhabits her.

Overlook the slightly naff title of the piece and go and see it: even if you're interested in, rather than captivated by, the Monroe myth, it's worth seeing for Sunny Thompson's performance alone - it's rare to see something so authentic, or so full of integrity and depth: It even passed muster with Sarah.

Yet, when it comes to a notion of a 'real' Marilyn, I can't help but think Truman Capote, quoted in Sarah's book, had it best.

I said well, she's a little bit like you, she wears her heart

on her sleeve and talks salty and Marilyn said fuck you

and said well, if somebody asked me what Marilyn

Monroe was like, what was Marilyn Monroe really like

what would I say, and I said I'd have to think about that.

Marilyn, Forever Blonde is at the Leicester Square Theatre until 18th November

0844 8472 475

* "Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul" Marilyn Monroe.

BURN THIS

Dubbed 'The Black Trinity' by Norman Parkinson and the 'Terrible Three' by Cecil Beaton, Terence Donovan, David Bailey and Brian Duffy redefined British photography in the 1960's, with their iconic portraits and revolutionary approach to fashion photography. Wildly successful and hugely glamorous, they also became a by-word for cool, swinging, sexually-liberated London - Bailey was even said to have inspired the character of Thomas in Antonioni's cult classic, Blow Up.

But it was Duffy who remained the most intriguing of the three, 'the mystery' as Terry O'Neill put it or, in the words of John Swannell, 'Donovan was the wit, Bailey was the creative one, Duffy was the intellect'. Yet after more than fifteen years at the cutting edge of the new British photography, he vanished out of sight, giving up stills photography completely to devote himself to big-budget, high-drama commercials. A rumour began to spread that he had burned his negatives.

The rumour was true: in 1979, Duffy decided to set fire to the photographs that had made his reputation. Fortunately, as he says, "The thing with negatives is they don't burn as fast as you think they will. I'd thrown them into this fire bin and I just had to stoke them and I was pouring white spirit in to try and keep it going. It was, to be honest, making pretty stinking black smoke." The smoke prompted a neighbour to complain to Hackney Council, who forced him to put out the fire, and the surviving negatives languished unharmed and uncatalogued in shoeboxes.

Nearly thirty years later, and after almost two years of painstakingly archiving the surviving images, Duffy will display his photographs for the first time at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London. The exhibition will contain sixty virtually unseen portraits, including this of the incandescently beautiful Grace Coddington, now Creative Director of US Vogue and co-star of the documentary film The September Issue,

and fashion photographs from agenda-setting magazines, like this of Verushka - the extraordinary model and star of Blow-up - for Queen

Emblematic sixties fashion figures - Jean Shrimpton, as seen at the top of this page, for example - and personal portraits of the famous and infamous are all Duffy classics from the 1960's, yet it was in the seventies, a few years before he quit stills photography altogether that he created one of his most celebrated works - the cover shot for David Bowie's 1973 album Aladdin Sane.

With such an pivotal part to play in documenting British culture, it seems fitting that, at 76, Duffy is not only the subject of a new BBC film and involved in a major new show, Beatles to Bowie: The Sixties Exposed, at The National Portrait Gallery, but has his own exhibition at the Chris Beetles Gallery where his works will be available to buy for the very first time. As Duffy himself says, "What's happened over the last twenty years is that photography, which was a trade, has now become art."

The show is on at Chris Beetles from 14th October until Saturday 7th November: The images are for sale in limited edition runs of fifty, signed by Duffy.

Chris Beetles Gallery

8&10 Ryder Street

London SW1Y 6QB

020 7839 7551

www.chrisbeetles.com

Duffy: www.duffyphotographer.com

Images courtesy of Chris Beetles Gallery. Not to be reproduced without permission.

THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF THE WHOLE

I'm hardly alone in being beguiled by Venice. I fell in love with its tenebrous beauty long before I ever visited, when I first watched Nick Roeg's eerie and terrifying film 'Don't Look Now'.


To see Venice at its best visit in Winter, between the middle of October and before the claustrophobic squalor of Carnevale in February. The days are short, and you have to plan carefully to catch the Titians or Raphaels or Carpaccios in the churches, often closed for restauro, and in which the light is appalling at the best of times. But the compensatory magic of dusk falling to meet the fog rising off the lagoon, the poetic, mystical wilderness of Torcello and the lapping lull of the canals as you fall asleep make up for any inconveniences of winter opening hours, or the occasional acqua alta, and the weather is mostly kind enough to let you enjoy the real beauty of Venice, which lies not in its museums or churches but in walking and walking and walking, deliberately allowing yourself to be lost in its unnavigable calle and canale.

I admit to a preoccupation with Venice, bordering on obsession. Before Trefusis Minor and his sister were born, I would visit a great friend of mine there at least once a year. But Venice is hopeless with small children - at least, the Venice I enjoy - and it's hard to negotiate a Bunbury there without them. So I dream and I read anything from Peter Ackroyd to Donna Leon and sometimes the longing for the place gets so bad that even a whiff of bad drains is enough to transport me back to a favourite square in Cannareggio, bordered by narrow washing-line festooned alleyways.

But now I've found something to alleviate all of this hopeless yearning, somewhere that evokes Venice so beautifully it's a source of deep consolation. What's more, it's so close I walk past it every day on my way to work. Polpo, on Soho's Beak Street, is modelled on a Venetian bacaro - the kind of place tourists leave to the real Venetians, where people go after their passagiata for a Spritz or an ombra and a plate of cichetti, a kind of Venetian tapas. Polpo is more than a bacaro really - I assume one can pop in after work and sit at the terribly inviting zinc-topped bar for a glass of one of their carefully sourced wines (mostly from the north of Italy, with a proper emphasis on the Veneto) and a plate full of delicious bits and pieces - but Polpo is more about the current vogue for restaurants which serve small plates of things to share at lunch and at dinner.

The team behind Polpo have an impeccable pedigree: it's the first independent venture for Russell Norman, previously Operations Director for Caprice Holdings and its head chef is Tom Oldroyd, previously at Bocca di Lupo, who has worked closely with Russell to create a menu of simple and authentic small plates and cicheti. Classics like Salt Cod, Bigoli, Polpette and Cuttlefish in its ink sit alongside some of Tom’s own dishes, like Roast Belly of Pork with Radicchio and Hazelnut Salad, and Mackerel tartare with cucumber, horseradish & carta di musica.

Curiously, unlike anywhere else in Italy, it's possible to eat abominably badly in Venice and pay handsomely for the privilege: there's a very clear delineation between restaurants designated for tourists and those beloved of locals. If you're visiting, avoid anything within striking distance of San Marco, or the Rialto, and move further afield to Canareggio where there are some gems near the Strada Nova as well as some good, if unprepossessing looking restaurants on the Fondamenta Misericorda. Or to the area around Campo S.Barnaba and the Frari. But in the Venetian enclave that is Polpo Soho, you need have no such fears. Not only is Polpo exceptional value for the quality, it's somewhere that will charm locals and incomers alike. Its reservations policy is refreshing too - the bar and around half of the tables are available for those who lead more spontaneous lives, but one can also book in advance to avoid the ghastliness of arranging to meet a group of friends and arriving to find there's no room at the bacaro.

Polpo
41 Beak Street, London, W1F 9SB
Telephone: 020 7734 4479

Twitter: @polposoho

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.