FAT IS AN ECONOMIC ISSUE

Months of misery eating and drowning of sorrows have taken their toll. I have eaten enough chocolate to recession-proof Sir Hans Sloane and Cadbury - the latter offers rather better consolation. As in fiction, so in chocolate: Jilly Cooper is a guilty pleasure in a way that Proust could never be, and Galaxy will always comfort where Willie Harcourt-Cooze 's tiny dark blocks of Venezuelan 100% cacao can only exhaust one with its self-conscious artisanal craftsmanship. There's no wanton hedonism in something that could be considered improving - I want chocolate to have the potency of cheap music, and the anaesthetising effect of soma.

And it's not just the chocolate: as bad news hit at work - whether of redundancies or just the daily grind of doing more with less or hunting around in search of business with all the efficacy of a badly trained truffle pig - I hit the bottle. Not - I hasten to add - in an inelegant, or health-threatening way, although a piece in the newspaper on middle class binge drinking gave me cause to count units and flinch - but in the way that nothing feels really quite so ghastly after a couple of cocktails or a nice bottle of wine.

But of course, all good things must come to an end. One must always take the consequences of one's errant behaviour. And so, mid-May, as I found myself struggling to get into my summer wardrobe, I swept the dust off from the scales only to discover with horror that I've put on nearly a stone since Christmas. The anguish! The recriminations! The self-berating!

Nothing for it: what looks fabulous on Mad Men's Joan, only serves to shatter my amour-propre. And so it was that I marched straight to WeightWitches, to begin my penance for my season of indulgence.

Yet, as I was on my way back to the office, in possession of a points counter and stalwart determination, into the inbox of the Blackberry pinged an email link from the Guardian- a fascinating and salutory interview with 'Bodies' author, Susie Orbach, forwarded by my clever and beautiful friend Sarah Churchwell.

Orbach is most famous for 'Fat is a Feminist Issue' which, as Aitkenhead writes is 'a ground breaking work, the thesis of which was so simple that no one who read it could dispute its logic...diets make us fat by distorting our relationship with food'. More than thirty years later, Orbach asserts that we're more disconnected from our bodies than ever before: we can't get past our indoctrination by a plethora of media images that celebrates an exceptionally narrow definition of female beauty. Intellectually, we know this is wrong - the paradigm we want to have reflected back at us in the mirror every morning is an artificial construct - a fantasy achieved by a few, and then only with abject self-denial, vast expense and the aid of an army of assistants from plastic surgeons to personal trainers to airbrushers.

Yet somehow, smart as we think we are, and no matter how fervently we assert that the route to sanity is self-acceptance, when we deviate from this 'ideal', it's deeply troubling. The anxiety of not fitting in, of not conforming, of not being acceptable, surfaces again. Feeling 'fat' recalls all those horrid childhood memories of not being picked til last for the netball team, of being cast-out from the clique for not having Caran d'Ache colouring pencils, or some such stupidly trivial badge of belonging.

Like many women of my age and class, I've struggled with my relationship with food - 'normal appetite becomes pathologised as the enemy'. Fortunately, it's many years since I accepted that aspiring to eat nothing at all is not only time consuming (how the throught of food and its denial inhabits one's every waking hour), but also utterly bonkers. And actually, it was Weightwitches which de-pathologised my relationship with food, and re-taught me what a normal meal looked like. Yet in the office, the women talking about the new and seriously expensive diet drug Alli are not those with the required BMI of 28 - like me, most of them would need to be a good 28 pounds heavier to qualify - they're women who, again like me, struggle with this modern paradox. Whatever we might know and believe and subscribe to, and however much you might hear us praising the gorgeously voluptuous Joan, we still berate ourselves for not being Betty Draper.

But for me, the renewed commitment to a sleeker physical aesthetic is economically, rather than politically or even psychologically motivated: I simply can't afford a new wardrobe. I either drop the 13 lbs and wear last year's summer clothes, or I'm reduced to two or three rather ugly items in the wardrobe, one of which I last wore when pregnant. And it's also about time that I knuckled up to the harsher, more demanding world out there, rather than medicating myself with sweets and treats.

I can't pretend to have addressed any of the psychological issues that make me crave to maintain a weight that works for fashion. Nor can I pretend to have reconciled the contradictions around the distorted way women see themselves. Yet somehow I feel Orbach would support the breakthrough I've made in identifying the relationship that exists for me between troubled mood and disordered eating. Sometimes one needs to create a watershed moment in order to realise that one has both the courage and tenacity to square up to it and solve it.

THE FUTILITY SCHEME

As the recession bites, the cogs in the corporate machine bite harder. One spends ever longer slaving over a hot spreadsheet, trying to create magic formulae that will stop the numbers leaking off the page. Incessant demands rain down from on high for yet more strategies and even cleverer ideas. Vast swathes of time are laid waste sitting writing reports on what one would be doing if only one wasn't forced to sit and write a report about it.

And now that the series of measures designed to reduce the cost base has been implemented, one has even more work, because there are fewer people around to help you do it. Broadly speaking, one has to work triply hard to stay standing still, and I like nothing more than being left alone to make use of the idle minute.

So when another meeting is scheduled in the boardroom to discuss trading - or to 'share ideas' - my heart sinks even lower in my Pedro Garcia shboots. Two hours carved out of my day, sitting round an enormous table drinking bad coffee is its own particular kind of hell.

I've long since given up wondering if these Kafkaesque examples of corporate comradeship were secretly scripted by Martin Lukes, as colleagues discuss amiably whether they have the required bandwidth [tr: enough people ] or if something's actionable [tr: we can get on with trying to sort it out, as opposed to get the lawyers involved], or suggest escalating an issue. I spent a lot of time drawing confused doodles in my Smythson notebook before I realised this had nothing to do with making things worse, but simply meant it should be pushed upstairs for someone higher in the food chain to deal with. One is tempted to feed in bonkers stuff, exhorting people to 'get the potato on the fork', though in this environment the response would no doubt be that they were following Atkins.

In truth, meetings here are - management-speak aside - remarkable for the rational, open, professional and timely way in which they're conducted, with plenty of emphasis on debate and frank discussion.

But lately, and particularly in the wake of the recent issues, the tenor of these meetings has changed. People no longer speak out, or up. There is no more debate, or disagreement, or sticking of the head above the parapet. There's a new meekness, a subservience, an interest in toeing the party line. But what was more astonishing than anything was the dramatic sartorial shift: at least three-quarters of the attendees were wearing suits. This is a magazine company, not the civil service: employees are used to expressing themselves through their clothes and having the freedom to wear what they want when they want, whether it's 'trying incredibly hard' high fashion or dress-down friday chino-chic. The lines between 'home' clothes and 'work' clothes had become eroded over the last 15 odd years to the point where people no longer had a work uniform. Jeans were commonplace - albeit those with a hefty price tag, and worn with fabulous shoes.

And yet, overnight, the dress code has changed, reflecting a new, cautious, serious mood.

It's not just here, it's all over town - reports suggest that even at the top end, bespoke tailoring has never been more in demand: it's one of the few fashion categories that's in double digit growth. When you're a hedge fund manager and your fund is making pots of money for the client, no one cares if you're dressed in Havaianas and a pair of cut off denim shorts. But now things are tighter, and people more risk averse, it seems only the seriousness of a made to measure suit will do to convey the seriousness with which you take the guardianship of your client's money.

It's as if some new sumptuary law has been put in place: the economy and people's uncertainty about their jobs has rendered decoration, individuality and flair in poor taste. Clothes are cut along austerity lines, in sober neutrals. Waists are nipped in. Fabric used with a parsimony not seen since Molyneux, Worth, Amies and the rest of the Incorporated Society of Fashion Designer united in 1941 to create thirty-four utility clothing designs, with the CC41 label (Civilian Clothing 1941) sewn inside.

In 1942, the British government issued the Civilian Clothing Order, which made illegal the decorating of clothing with additional buttons, embroidery, extravagant cuffs or other frills and furbellows.

But in 2009, it seems we are more self-regulating. And it's not merely 'street-fashion', a trend coming consumer up rather than designer down: the key looks on the A/W 09 ready to wear runways also had strong tones of tailored austerity chic, and with the exception of the price tag, could have come straight out of the pattern book of those 34 Utility designs.

Prada set the tone with its boiled wool dresses, with slim, belted waists and defined, tailored shoulders.

Even Lanvin took an unusually sotto voce, pared down approach to severe tailoring, albeit one with a defiantly sexy edge

And me? Despite bellyaching about the way meetings appear to be a viable alternative to real work, I'm sure I'll be as suited and booted as the rest of them before the next session in the boardroom comes around.

If you want to be seen to be waging war on economic armageddon, better make sure you're in the right uniform.

EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY

I once had a dog. I miss the blissful softness of his silken spaniel ears and the guilty thud as he flopped off the sofa whenever he heard me coming. And I've never forgotten the disconcerting way he used to stare me awake with his baleful, unblinking eyes.

I still yearn for my dog. Forget fervent promises of visiting rights and access, custody was as good as lost the minute the removal van moved my things out of the house. Losing him to my ex was the bitterest part of a bitter ending, and the one thing I find it hard to forgive.

Occasionally, and heartbreakingly, I still glimpse him from across the other side of the park, being walked by the unspeakable one. I immediately duck behind the nearest tree for fear of having to attempt a civilised conversation, still impossible at ten years distance. Erm, I mean, impossible with the ex... obviously, I could talk to the dog... tee hee.

Actually, the dog was always appallingly badly behaved: very much the Alpha-male, belligerently ignoring his position in the pack. I once fed him an entire tin of Good Boy chocs, in the vain hope that they would do what they said on the can. My Ex and I both corrupted him horribly, each trying to get the dog to like one more than the other: the life of a tug-of-love puppy is ever thus. His behaviour deteriorated dreadfully of course, after we split up. And he would probably have ended up with a canine ASBO, if he hadn't had the excuse of coming from a broken home.

Anyway, as ever, the tail of this particular story is wagging the dog in the worst possible way. My intention was not to take you through a morose ramble round my past, but to share Dan Burn-Forti's magnificent pictures of the finest dogs you've ever seen, published in the June issue of UK Esquire magazine. From Stanley to Bluebell, these dogs are a perfect and adorable foil for the season's latest accessories, and gladden the heart of all who look at them.


This is Jack, in Dior Homme




Archie, in Brooks Brothers



Bee, in D&G



Stanley, in a Bailey of Hollywood pork pie hat: very Brad Pitt, no?



Mollie, in Cutler & Gross



Inka, in Thomas Pink



And, especially for Belgianwaffling and LibertyLondonGirl, Bluebell in Louis Vuitton


'Doggy Style': Reproduced with the kind permission of Esquire magazine. Photographed by Dan Burn-Forti.


To see the full story, and other examples of clever, brilliant journalism, the June issue of UK Esquire is on sale on 7th May at all key newsagents, or you can subscribe from only £15 for 12 issues. http://www.esquire.co.uk/

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

How on earth did Anna Wintour manage it for all those years? And how does Bono cope? And come to think of it, even Victoria 'Posh' Beckham?
The wearing of dark glasses in conditions other than bright sunshine is extremely counter-intuitive. It's hard to pull off when indoors, makes one very self-conscious, not to mention a danger to oneself and passers by at night, and looks incongruous when it's grey and overcast.

However, somewhere hovering around its edges is the idea that it’s also glamorous and enigmatic, and not a little film-starrish. One can't quite help but to stride around confidently yet warily, as if the paparazzi were lurking behind every bush and bollard. But like smoking – which, in the days when I did it magically made me over as Jean Seberg in Au Bout De Souffle - it’s a faux-allure: neither smoking nor sunglasses effects a Hollywood transformation, it merely makes one faintly ridiculous.


Anyway, my sunglasses aren't welded to my head because I'm trying to develop a mystique. Nor have I become an overnight sensation. I'm merely trying to disguise the grimness of my appearance so I don't frighten small children, perfect strangers or my colleagues. For the last four weeks, I’ve suffered from one eye infection after the other, each more grotesque than the last, with new, unimaginable rococo flourishes in the form of monstrous swellings and suppurating buboes. The not-wearing of makeup was bad enough - I could just about survive that with my amour-propre intact - but the ghastly disfiguring redness, swelling and pustular excrescences can only be disguised by glasses large enough for Jackie O.

In truth, it’s my own fault. Mr Trefusis told me that Hunca-Munca had been lobbing my makeup down the loo, but was unable to be specific about what had gone that way. Helpfully, he fished it out yet the tainted items somehow ended up jumbled in with the rest of my vast collection of beauty products and, unable to distinguish toxic from perfectly wearable, I was loathe to chuck out several hundred pounds worth of extremely fabulous upscale warpaint. I did start with a course of topical antibiotics, but was too idle to complete the course. Repeat this sentence several times until you understand the full scale of the self-inflicted stupidity of the thing.

Eventually, I end up at the optician, thinking I’ve done myself some permanent damage, and in a fit of churning anxiety at the idea of never again being able to wear eye makeup: either having to live with looking mouse-eyed and insignificant, or making an eccentric virtue out of the wearing of dark glasses forever more. But no, fears groundless etc, I have merely to devote myself with renewed vigour to another, stronger course of antibiotics and not give up on it this time after a few days once the symptoms have disappeared.

However, as a side story to all of this, the visit to the opticians has yielded quite a different return: having had perfect eyesight all my life, I discover I need glasses. And worse, the Optician says cheerily 'Don't worry Madam, it happens to everyone - it's just to do with getting older'. I restrain myself from clouting him with something hard and heavy. Reader, you can inject industrial amounts of botox into your forehead, but once reading glasses are prescribed, there’s no disguising your real age.

Oscar Wilde once remarked that London was full of women who’d been 35 for years, and I’ve been inclined to agree. Yet with my fabulous new Bulgari frames parked on my face as I stare at this screen - delighted to be able see what I'm typing - appearances are giving the lie to my lies. Ho Hum.

MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.


From Frank O'Hara 'Mayakovsky' published in Meditations in an Emergency

NB: I fell in love with the poetry of Frank O'Hara many years ago, and stupidly forgot all about him until I was watching Mad Men a few weeks ago, since when I've unearthed my copy and been reading and re-reading: as I've just written on Tania's blog, I was trying to write a post about my father, who is very ill, and found I couldn't and all I had left were these beautiful lines.

VANITY OF VANITIES

I've been gloaming round with a face like a wet weekend, deep in the midst of a Scandi-depression. It's much like normal depression, except it comes with modular furniture and a fitted kitchen: Faktum exterior, with IrRationell interior monologues. I've lamented the parlous state of the economy in general and my finances in particular, executioners guilt at work, the ghastliness of an untidy house, the way one can't get the staff these days. I've quite wailed myself into a corner. I've evolved from simple solipsist into a philosophical zombie.

But is my life really directed by Ingmar Bergman, with a script by Strindberg and additional dialogue by Schopenhauer? Erm, I don't think so. It might just be time to give myself a shake and snap out of it. Wailing Verboten. Absolument interdit. Banished back to wherever it is wailing banshees come from. 

Spring poking its optimistic head through the dead earth has helped add a little cheer, but really, there's nothing like the idea of a party to perk up Mrs Trefusis. And I have not one, but two parties to go to tonight. Yippee. As I write, I'm looking at the invitations, enticingly engraved on board so thick I can't even bend it: They could stand up on their own on the mantelpiece, if only I had one. The first is to Esquire's Beat the Bleak cocktail party, and the second to a Fabulous Moet Celebration: A Tribute To Cinema, at which the new celebrity 'face' of Moet will be revealed, and where much champagne will be drunk by seriously glamorous looking people. 

I confess, since the invitations arrived when I was deep in the slough of despond - the only time in my life go anywhere near Slough - they didn't meet with unalloyed delight. The ungrateful, petulant, unbelievably spoilt child in me immediately started complaining: Gah, I grumbled, what am I supposed to wear? How can a single outfit take one from cocktails to 'Red Carpet' glamour, for such is the Moet & Chandon dress code? What am I to do about a dress of any kind, since calling something in from a pet fashion PR is off-limits, now that the misery eating has knocked the 's' off sample size. And then there's the depilation of legs and application of copious amounts of fake tan. Not to mention the pedicure and manicure and up-do and make-up and the fact that fabulous Graham* has swanned off to Southern Africa and isn't available to treat me to his usual hair-fabulousness (see profile picture for just one example of his amazing rug re-thinking talents).

And then I thought, Mrs Trefusis: you have become impossibly ungrateful and deserving of an emormous slap. Or detention. Or worse. Go directly to jail. Do not collect two hundred pounds. You have a wardrobe full of beautiful dresses that can work perfectly well for two-centre partying and you can adequately apply varnish to your own toes and probably even conjure up something halfway convincing in the hair department with the aid of a can of Elnett and some carmen rollers. Most people would give their eye-teeth to be in a position to have lovely invitations like this. And as my mother always used to say, 'You'll enjoy it once you get there'. I shall loiter as elegantly as I can, trying not to spill martinis and Moet down the vintage English Eccentrics frock, whilst surreptitiously taking pictures of famous folk on my iPhone. 

By God, I shall go to the ball. Get thee gone, Ingmar - it's all Busby Berkeley and Grace Kelly in High Society from here on in.

 And by the time Mr Trefusis discovers I've used his razor rather than the evil epilator to shave my legs, I'll be miles down the Westway in a lovely taxi.

*graham.tilley@hotmail.com

MADAME SOSOSTRIS, FAMOUS CLAIRVOYANTE

I don't have a bad cold and nor am I the wisest woman in Europe, but I am considering reviving my sideline in casting horoscopes and reading the Tarot. Or tealeaves, being a very customer-focused kind of person. You name your preferred divination method and I'll try to oblige.

In truth, I'm on the hunt for new money making schemes so I can finance the luxury lifestyle to which I've become accustomed.

Now that the economy has contracted, I can no longer afford those little consolations of Mrs Trefusis. The tiny treats that made life seem so much lovelier are now irritatingly not only way out of reach, but also way down the list after the ghastly dull oven and the just-kill-me-I'm-so-bored-thinking-about-it washing up machine. The sheer enjoyment of looking and feeling good seems to have become the subject of extreme recessionary disapproval. But as we plunge from recession into depression, the economy merely operates as a metaphor for my mood.

I started this blog as an alternative to seeing a wincingly expensive Bond Street psychoanalyist, with the realisation that if the thought of new shoes was infinitely more cheering than having my head-shrunk, I was feeling rather better. To borrow from Linda Grant in The Thoughtful Dresser, "If I were heading into the Great Depression, I wanted to arrive there well-dressed". But now that the world is in economic depression, I can neither afford to be so well-dressed, nor therapy, nor new shoes, nor any of the other bibelots that formed a cossetting palisade between me and the tenebrous, liminal places in my head.

But I am at heart a pragmatist. If I can't learn not to rely on these things to shore me up against my ruin, I will have to find new ways to fund their purchase.

I considered following in the footsteps of the Catholic church and selling saints fingers as relics (as tipped off by Jaywalker, though Cardinal Newman apparently had the last laugh) until it was pointed out to me that this was simony and would result in immediate excommunication followed by hellfire for all eternity. Nice. A little trip back through Dante* reminded me that any experience I had - however distant - of fortune-telling automatically relegated me to Circle 8 along with the simonists anyway, and since the start-up costs of selling 'relics' might require hard cash, my pecuniary interests have led me to reconsider dabbling in a spot of astrometry.

Once upon a time, before the children came along, I wrote horoscopes for a magazine, alongside the usual day job. And having spent several years training with The Company of Astrologers, I'm no end of the pier fortune-teller. I have my credentials, and I'm quite sure that in these uncertain times there's a market for it: I simply need to find my customers.

It might take several horoscope castings to collect enough cash for shoes though I rather think a tarot reading would get me the price of a blow-dry.

I've had a lifelong struggle trying to settle on what Aristotle called The Golden Mean. Will this latest wheeze help turn me into a happy medium?

*take the Dante's Inferno quiz for yourself and find out where you're headed.