Simple pleasures

My life seems to have settled into a gentle pattern here in New Jersey. I write all day, breaking for meals. Y & I eat lunch together every day in the French fashion. That is we sit down together at a table, with salad bowl & placemats and talk, as opposed to my usual fashion which is to shove everything into a deep white bowl and retire with it to my lair to type & eat simultaneously.

Supper is similar, except we move to the dining room, with candles & napkins and, of course, wine. The downside of all this lovely civilised behaviour is that I am getting fatter not thinner. I'm not overly obsessed with my weight - I don't even own scales - but I do like to be able to fit into my clothes.

So I'm back on my regimen minceur. It's quite simple: no wine with supper (which will horrify the boys), no chocolate, no bread, no tortilla chips with my guacamole, no cupcakes or ice cream. It's those little treats that make me porky.

It will help too when the swimming pool here is finished, & I can swim each day. We've been unableto use it as the liner split, & we are waiting for the men to come (tomorrow!) to fit a new one and fill the pool.

This, of course, is the part about which I am excited. The house's water supply comes from an artesian well, so the water to fill the pool is being transported in tankers from the local Fire Station. And that, I believe, means firemen. Excellent.

Mother daughter bonding at The Halkin, London

It’s weird living abroad. On one hand it’s quite useful being thousands of miles and five, sometimes eight hours out of sync from family arguments, squabbling infants and the overly familiar quotidian grind. On the other it is rather miserable not being able to give & receive comforting hugs. Playing on Facebook does not make up for proper face time.

So when I go back to England my first priority is to spend proper time with my family & see as many of my wonderful friends as I can possibly manage. There are always godchildren & bundles of new infants to prod, plus there’s usually a wedding I’ve missed or engagement to celebrate.

I’m like a bunny out of a trap as I land at Heathrow, usually whizzing straight to my sister’s house in Kentish Town for an intensive debrief, and then getting up at 7am to do a stream of breakfasts, lunches, coffees, drinks & suppers, all woven between meetings & work stuff. It's trickier seeing my parents as they don't live in London, (or together for that matter), so I have to grab any opportunity to see them.

Last month I landed in London the day before my mother flew in from Verona, so I persuaded her to spend the night in London with me before heading to the country. I always find it’s best to book a hotel together for the proper mother-daughter bonding experience; we always end up squabbling when together en masse in my sister & Posetta Baddog's one bedroom London flat.

My mother, being of the Birkin bag & Chanel pump-ed persuasion, doesn’t really do anything outside of London's W or SW postcodes unless forced so when I was offered a suite at The Halkin in Belgravia, just behind Hyde Park Corner, I jumped on it. I used to stay at its sister hotel the modernist Metropolitan on Park Lane when I was an NY magazine editor (convenient for 8am appointments to visa wrangle at the US Embassy), but had yet to experience the minimalist taupe experience of The Halkin.

And goodness, it is taupe. And beige. And sepia. And pale cocoa. And other synonyms I can’t be bothered to look up. From the Buddha in the entrance hall to the Como Shambhala aromatherapy products in the bathroom, it may well be the most calming environment in which I have stayed. It’s so tranquil that it’s the hotel equivalent of Prozac. They should have a Halkin in Milan or in Paris for fashion editors to stay in during the collections.

The calmness was equally good for a mother/daughter stay because we are quite capable of going from smiles to snarls to smiles in seconds. But we seemed unable to have one of our signature blow ups here. It probably helped that when the Front Desk rang to say she (& her luggage) had arrived, I poured us glasses of super chilled Champagne and drew her a deep bath using scoops of fragrant bath salts from the oversized jar in the oversized bathroom. I do find pre-empting maternal requests tends to diminish potential snappiness.

Lulled & cosseted into inertia, leaving the hotel was far beyond our capabilities. Not that this mattered: we had reservations downstairs at Nahm, David Thompson’s extraordinary Michelin-starred Thai restaurant (more of this to come later).

The Halkin really is a boutique hotel for grown-ups: it feels discreet, the scale is intensely intimate (but not claustrophobic), there are no spread out communal areas, soaring atria or chattering tourists, the service is beyond charming. The suite ticked nearly all my demanding boxes: the best soup-plate showerhead I’ve come across in a hotel anywhere, generous toiletries, a proper well-lit dressing table in the bedroom (as opposed to a mirror-free desk or expecting us to balance warpaint on the side of a basin) and plenty of cat-swinging space.

Sure the Asian chic interiors are a little disconcerting inside a Georgian stucco fronted townhouse, but somehow it all comes together. And, best of all, less than half a mile from Knightsbridge, Horrids & Harvey Nicks, cradled in our temporary taupe universe, we felt as though we were on holiday in London. And, as dyed in the wool Londoners, you can’t get better than that.

LLG was a guest of The Halkin Hotel (but if she thought it sucked, she would say so)

Are you ready for your close up? Max works it

Getting carried away: A studio visit with accessories designer Sang A

Back in May, Carine Roitfeld told The Guardian (UK): "You know, I think as you get older, the snake is more chic than the leopard." She happened to be wearing a pair of Margiela python boots, but her mantra applies just as well to the delectable python bags from accessories designer Sang A.

The bags have that rare combination of immaculately well-made good looks and neat solutions, (detachable chains, deceptively & beautifully lined interiors, and well thought out clasps).

Sang A didn't start out dreaming of making bags. Far from it. With a background as a highly trained dancer, she spent her early twenties in Korea as a successful singer & actress, with three albums to her name. Although she had styled her own videos, it wasn't until she moved to New York, and signed up to study at Parsons that she moved across to the fashion industry.

(Sang A in her studio). Since the launch of her eponymous collection for Spring 06, she has specialised in bags made in both exotic skins (croc, ostrich & python) and leather, all of which are manufactured traditionally in Italy.

I've carried her bags at events:

(yup, those are my stubby fingers) and included them in editorial but never had time, until last week, to visit her studio to see the collection in its entirety.

Hidden away in a building in the heart of New York's SoHo, the studio is the accessories equivalent of a candy store:

These bags are the Jade clutches, (starting from $982 for leather, and available in alligator, python & ostrich). Big enough for more than just a $20 bill & a lipstick, they make great evening bags. As Sang A told me, "I carry around three data devices, so I always design my bags to fit these at least." They work equally well during the day for the same reason: they fit plenty of stuff, not just pared down essentials, without looking like an urban survival kit's been crammed inside.
Of course there's more to see than just enchanting evening bags. Intelligent women will appreciate the chic backpack styles (next season's big thing), which include removable exotic exterior shells so they can be worn in several different ways, which makes for a sensible return on what can be a hefty fiscal investment.

I'm inexorably drawn towards a table of her Migration Duffel (the cream & yellow Degrade bag $1895 in the foreground is from her latest collection) & Cine bags.

This is the Cine Bag in hand waxed rustic grey python. An investment piece through and through at $4749, it looks substantial, yet is unexpectedly light, as I discovered when I started getting carried away.

The detailing is perfect, from the simple magnetic clasps

to the capacious, easy to use open wide interior, with its pretty polka dot print lining (a Sang A trademark), and sensible pockets.

If these prices have you choking into your cocoa, rest assured that the entry level prices for Sang A's bags are distinctly more achievable. These delicious Python Pouch bags are $484.


and these striking card cases start at $209:

But my current lust after pieces from the collection are her series of parallelogram shaped Flash bags, especially this one in Bronze Mirror leather at $695:

Sang A is stocked in the following stores, amongst many others: Augustina in London, Vivre online and Kirna Zabete in New York. A full list of stockists can be found here and her online store is here.

One & Other: The Fourth Plinth

I can't sleep and logged onto Twitter where I saw a tweet telling me a man dressed as a dinosaur was playing swingball & crushing the Houses of Parliament on the Fourth Plinth* in Trafalgar Square.

And there was.

I checked his reason for being on the plinth:

Girlfriend told me to do it.

And his plan for whilst he was there?

I will be monstrous
I may or may not destroy London
I will see how I feel

I just can't see a man in a homemade dino costume being officially sanctioned to jump around squishing models of major landmarks in the middle of, say, DC's Capitol Hill. I'm pretty sure it would be deemed disrespectful.

God I miss England sometimes. That a man who can use his hour on the plinth to do anything he likes would chose to be a dinosaur playing swingball is so quintessentially English. I love the laconic description of his plans to destroy London. Only in Britain...

This is an art project called One & Other by Antony Gormley. He is asking the people of the UK to occupy the vacant Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London, a space normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals. They will become an image of themselves, and a representation of the whole of humanity.

Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, a different person will make the Plinth their own. If someone is selected, they can use their time on the plinth as they like.

And the winner is....

Thank you everyone who left a comment on the Kimberly Sayer Deep Cleansing French Clay Mask competition post. They all made fascinating reading and I'll be sure to cover some of your beauty suggestions and skin types in future posts.

Meanwhile, to find a winner I used a random number generator to pick comment number 13 who was Anna, who left the following comment:

"I'm always keen on a competition! I've followed your recommendations in the past - with La Roche Posay, and also C is for Carrots - and they always turn up trumps! Ah, my favourite product at the moment is my el cheapo Eucerin Q10 Night Cream - perfect for a grad student budget, and seems to do good things for my skin: calming and quite plumping too. Really enjoying the blog."

Anna - please can you email me at libertylondongirl@gmail.com with your address so that I can get it off to you next week?

Could someone please turn the heat back on?

I would just like to have it on the record that I am thoroughly pissed off with the behaviour of the Clerk of the Weather right now. By July, the temperature on the East Coast of America should be in the mid-late eighties. We should be spending our off hours lolling on the beach, or sitting propped up against trees with our laptops in the park.

Instead we are wearing wellies in Manhattan, at imminent risk of trench foot, as the heavens open and buckets of water are dumped on us hourly. This is America, not sodding Glastonbury. It's supposed to be frigid in winter and sticky & hot in the summer. This mildewed dampness was not part of the contract I signed when I moved over here. Today it is 69F. This is not an American summer as I know it.

To add insult to injury I spent the first fortnight of June in the English countryside. Every morning I looked out of my bedroom window to bright blue, cloudless skies and a heat haze over the horizon. Look: I have proof. This is the view from my room:

The heat was so pervasive that even the dogs collapsed. Exhibit one - Posetta Baddog:

And exhibit two - Maudiepops:

It rained every day for the first eleven days after I returned to Manhattan. This is just not acceptable.

The only plus point is that I can sleep at night with the sash windows flung up, and a duvet over me rather than wriggling around in a knot of sheets sweatily attempting to keep cool.

Picture of the day: Unfurling poppy in an English garden

I took this in my mother's country garden. I like the promise of this picture, that tomorrow this flower will be even more beautiful than it is today.

Today's indulgence: Cupcake Stop

As I pedalled down Fifth this morning I wasn't just keeping a look out for kamikaze taxis and suicidal pedestrians: I was searching for a large white truck which I knew was parked up somewhere near Madison Square Park.

A couple of weeks ago I'd seen a piece on the Diner's Journal blog on The New York Times website about Cupcake Stop, a new food truck prowling the mean streets of Manhattan, selling frosted cupcakes from its window.

I immediately started following its Twitter feed and started to get tweets telling me where it was parked (usually mere blocks from my apartment) and which flavours they were pushing. I was sitting at home filing copy, dreaming of frosting.

So today, when I had promised to return to Jersey with Red Velvet cupcakes for Y,

nothing was simpler than to click on Twitter, pin down the location and cycle up to the truck. $10 bought me a dozen mini cupcakes in the flavours of the day:Red Velvet (as requested), Key Lime Pie, Oreo Crumb & Chocolate Mousse

An added bonus was meeting Lev Ekster, the man behind the cupcakes who was lurking in the back of the truck and came to say hi when I mentioned finding the truck through Twitter. He immediately won me over with two free mini cupcake vouchers. Who says journalists can't be bought?

And the taste? Y cldn't get the box open quick enough. And I am presuming the frankly indecent sounds he made as he inhaled the Chocolate Mousse mini were appreciative. The crumb is incredibly moist, the icing smooth and not too sickeningly sweet. I like the little well of icing inside each cake and, in the case of the Key Lime, the green gooey stuff.

Win or Fail? We say WIN. Yet another reason not to eat those awful dry Magnolia cupcakes ever again.

Oreo Crumb Cupcake Stop cupcakes

Universal grief & the Michael Jackson memorial

When an icon dies there’s often a wrenching twist to the heart & stomach, with a realisation of our own mortality, and the passing of our youth. The icon becomes a totem for each loss one has suffered, plastered across the world’s media.

It happened with unprecedented intensity after the Princess of Wales was killed and, again, this past week after the sudden unexplained death of Michael Jackson, this seeming desperate sadness, and a recognition of universal grief. Yet.

Yet. It’s not really grief for the icon, is it? And watching the news packages of the memorial service for this complicated man last night it seemed that the audiences worldwide were luxuriating in a tempest of grief that seemed wholly shallow. The people interviewed in the street, distraught, literally renting their clothes, puffy eyed and snotty nosed. They weren’t crying for Michael. They were crying for themselves. And I’d bet good money that many of these emotional wrecks with their disproportionate reactions were exactly the same people who bayed for Jackson’s blood back at the time of the child abuse accusations.

Jackson’s music was extraordinary. For many it did change the world around them, gave them, at the beginning at least, an African American role model in a disprportionately white arts & media world. He provided a soundtrack for the lives of millions, including myself. But I don’t make the mistake of allowing my passion for his glorious music to override the fact that this was a tormented, unhappy man.

A man who spent the last years of his life shunned by the very people who have lined up to give sound bites about how much they loved him. I can’t remember who it was last night who said that Jackson gave up his childhood for me, for all of us, and I thought, no he didn’t, he gave it up for money and for fame, whether or not he was too young to make that decision.

The memorial service was in such bad taste that I could barely stand to watch. Memorial services should be hyperbolic: they are there to celebrate not to judge, but this seemed less of a celebration and more of a showcase for many of the stars who flocked to get on the Jackson bandwagon.

Stars like Usher who seemed to think it was all about them, the Rev Al Sharpton who seems to believe that Michael Jackson is a candidate for sainthood for the cause, regardless of the fact that Jackson hated his African American heritage so vehemently that he endured constant plastic surgeries and raised three children who looked nothing like him. Brooke Shields was the only person to speak of him as a real person that she knew well & loved.

But most shameful of all was that Jackson, who went to such complicated ends to ensure the privacy of his children, must surely have been turning in his grave to see his attention hungry family parading his confused, and sometimes terrified looking children in front of a global audience. It was a travesty.

Tuesday: back in Manhattan

It's only Tuesday and already I feel drained. Trying to get my Dell XPS laptop fixed has taken up most of my time over the past two days, what with the countless hours spent talking to well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual Dell Tech Support.

Without it I cannot work, and I have three stories I need to finish and file on there, and which I cannot access until the Dell technician comes to New Jersey to mend it tomorrow (fingers crossed.) At least everything on there is fully backed up to my external harddrive.

I'm also a little tired as we celebrated S's birthday a little too enthusiastically for a Monday night with a dinner for fourteen on the Roof Deck at Soho House. If I remember correctly, we were the last people left up there.

I'm writing this sitting in a corner of Soho House on their guest PC. A couple of years ago I nearly gave up my membership. I was still in London, Shoreditch House hadn't yet opened, & I was spending too much pro rata money for one drink there every couple of months.

Fast forward to New York and I can't imagine how I would get organised on these short trips into the city without having access to the changing rooms & showers in the Spa, the Drawing Room for working in between appointments, the Baggage Check for my cases during the day, and the Roof Deck for meeting friends in the evening. There's even a convenient lamppost outside for my bicycle.

Which I brought in from Jersey on the train yesterday. So simple and easy (apart from the bit where I nearly fell down the Up escalator with it at Penn Station), and makes Manhattan a much easier place to get around, especially with Mr Bloomberg's zippy new bike lines which seem to have multiplied each time I come into the city.

I've been zipping around all day on it doing showroom appointments in SoHo with designers (in particular, accessories designer Sang A who I will blog about later this week), heading to Chinatown for lunch at the Vegetarian Dim Sum House on Pell and then to Crumbs for a quick restorative cappuccino cupcake. Living in Jersey is turning me into a wide-eyed tourist all over again. It's wonderful to be reminded just how much I love this city.

The weird beauty of the Dell phone & online Tech Chat service

“Yes for sure a technician will be calling you this afternoon or Sunday morning.”
(Premium XPS Tech support Saturday 1pm approx)

Nope, he didn't.

“The parts are out of stock. It may be taking 2-3 days for the technician to receive them.”
(Premium XPS Tech support Monday 930am approx)

“I will be calling you absolutely for certain this afternoon to let you know the status”
Supervisor, Premium XPS Tech support Monday 10am approx)

He never rang so I girded my loins for round three

(interim Monday 4-430pm – three failed calls to tech support as for some unexplained reason Premium (AS IN PAID FOR) tech support is being directed to customer help who redirect my call to 1) warranties 2) general tech support 3) cut me off)

"Well, as 4th July being a public holiday we were unable to send the parts to the service tech.”
(Premium XPS Tech support Monday 430pm approx)

“The parts are in stock. As we had a weekend, the parts are delayed at the warehouse”
(Supervisor, Premium XPS Tech support Monday 500pm approx)

"The parts will be reach the technician today. He might call you tomorrow”
(Supervisor, Premium XPS Tech support Monday 500pm approx)

"Unfortunately, the parts are not yet arrived at their location. If the parts come to their location by tomorrow morning 10: 30 AM, they will call you by 12:00 PM Noon."
(Supervisor, Premium XPS Tech support Monday 530pm approx)

"If the parts are there, they would definitely call you tomorrow."
(Supervisor, Premium XPS Tech support Monday 545pm approx)

Nope I’ve no idea what’s going on either

Rant du jour: Dell (lack of) Customer Service

I've been stuck in the hell of Dell's Technical Support call centre for the past hour. I have a very nice man in India dealing with my increasingly irate state of mind. The only problem is that he has no authority to make any decisions off the call centre's prompt sheet.

I paid Dell large amounts of money for a three year Complete Care comprehensive warranty & service contract that included Next Day/Weekend/Night On Site Technical support.

However they seem unable to tell me why I have been waiting since Saturday afternoon for a technician to ring me to make an appointment. I've had various excuses including Independence Day and 'the parts aren't in stock', but no real answers that will lower my increasing blood pressure. The problem is more acute for me now as, in the interim, the A/C adapter which was working but not charging the battery has now died completely. I have just 1hr of power left.

It wldn't be such an enormous problem if I wasn't supposed to be going into Manhattan this morning for two days/nights. No laptop = no work. I can hardly write & file features copy on my Blackberry.

My blood pressure really started to boil when the nice man told me that it would be another 2-3 days before the parts were in stock again at the warehouse near me. This is the point where I gently explained to him that Dell sell many, many laptops each day in America, each with an A/C adapter.

An A/C adapter that is in fact on sale from Dell RIGHT NOW (For $69.99 that I cannot afford & shouldn't have to pay.) However Dell's EXPRESS retail service couldn't deliver an adapter before July 13th. YUP that's EXPRESS & JULY 13th in the same sentence.

It surely couldn't be beyond the bounds of possibility to locate a new A/C adapter somewhere in this VAST country and use the services of those extremely helpful courier companies to get an adapter to me tomorrow, thereby fulfilling the contract made when I PAID them for a Three Year Complete Care comprehensive warranty & service contract that included Next Day/Weekend/Night On Site Technical support.

I'd love someone to explain to me how if I broke a binding financial contract, I would experience unpleasant consequences, but that all that happens to Dell is FUCK ALL?

I've already missed my first train this morning with this stupid rigmarole, and am about to miss the second. GOD I AM SO ANGRY

Addendum: I just found this genius excerpt over at the Dell blogsite:

"Here's any number of studies that show that consumers trust product opinions from friends, family members and other customers more than they trust what a company says about its own products" So, please, read what I wrote above and take it into account when thinking about buying a Dell product. No electronic product is infallible and if the customer support (especially the PAID FOR customer support) isn't up to scratch, then you are better off looking elsewhere.

Kimberly Sayer Firming Botanical Serum & a reader competition!

As my skin grows older, I find that I need a serum in addition to my moisturisers to keep my skin feeling plump and healthy. I've tried plenty, with mixed results, but the one I keep coming back to is Kimberly Sayer Firming Botanical Serum.

Kimberly trained at Neal's Yard Beauty Therapy College and went on to develop her own organic & natural line, inspired by her family's use of organic fruit & vegetables as she was growing up.

Although I’m all in favour of using organic products where possible, I will always choose the product that I think works the best. In this case I don’t have to make any compromises: the serum always leaves my skin dewily hydrated and is a perfect canvas for make-up. In winter I supplement it with a night cream but this summer, so far, I haven’t needed any extra hydration bar my eye cream.

It's £52.50 from here in the UK
$75 from here in the US

In fact I'm such a big fan of Kimberly Sayer products that I am going to give away a jar of the Kimberly Sayer Deep Cleansing French Clay Mask to one of my readers. Just leave a comment below telling me your favourite skincare product of the moment. I'll use a random number generator to pick a comment on Friday and post the winner then.

(This competition is independent of Kimberly Sayer, & I am providing the mask myself.)

Good morning New Jersey

Being awake very early is one of my most favourite things. Doesn’t happen very often as I rarely fall asleep before 2am, being more of an owl than a lark. Not that I’m out partying, just reading and writing late. Jet lag is brilliant: when I fly back to America from Europe I wake at 6am for at least a fortnight whilst my body adapts to New York’s time zone. I’m always amazed at how much I accomplish when I’m up early.

I woke at 830am this morning which, for a Sunday, is unprecedented. Summer's humidity normally makes for disturbed sleep and late wake-ups, but the temperature dropped here in New Jersey last night. It was cool enough for an embroidered shawl around my shoulders at the Independence Day fireworks on the beach in Long Branch, and we slept without aircon and with the sash windows flung up.

There is a bird squawking in a tree outside my bedroom window which is probably the cause of my waking, but I don’t mind. There’s a particular quality of still out here in the country when no one is around bar the wildlife.

When I moved out here I didn’t expect to see so many animals: groundhogs scuttle across lawns, rabbits perch casually on kerbs, whiskers twitching, and deer & their fawns stand motionless in gardens, regarding me as I whizz past on my bike on my daily early evening exercise route.

The house is in a community of other equally large clapboard homes, all standing proud in their couple of manicured acres with a flagpole flying the Stars & Stripes, a pool out back, a basketball hoop and an SUV in the driveway and a large mailbox standing sentry. I am endlessly fascinated by the people who might choose to live in these places but I rarely see anyone, bar the odd solitary jogger or dogwalker and the ordered teams of Hispanic workers who tend the shrubs and lawns in rotation.

So goodbye to my fantasy of bumping into Colt’s Necks’ version of a young Patrick Dempsey mowing the lawns in Can’t Buy Me Love. The lawn guys are cheery and always wave back as I ride by, but they aren’t quite Patrick Dempsey.

The perfect swimsuit: Ginger's Island custom swimwear

I've been obsessed with finding the perfect swimwear ever since I started my first job and could afford to look further than the High Street. Blessed with a very small back (32) and a very, very large front (fluctuating between F & GG), I had been reduced to wearing Speedo tanks, purely because I could shovel myself into them.

Swimsuits are a problem as ones without cups aren't an option (too much wobble), and off the rack standard ones with cups are never, ever big enough on top in my size. As for bikinis, it's only recently that you could buy tops & bottoms separately, but that hasn't solved my problem because bikinis that fit my front are at least a UK 16-18 & so are always way too loose at the back.

Working on the theory that boob jobs and curves were more prevalent in Miami, I did once find a bikini that fitted in South Beach, but it was wetlook, Brazilian cut on the bottom & downright pervy on top. I never had the balls to wear it in public. (My girlfriends referred to it as my pornstar bikini).

I was charged to buy one for an equally well-endowed best friend who had better remain nameless. She never managed to get further than the bedroom door in it as her husband pounced every time she wore it. Effective but not so useful for swimming purposes.

I have tried all the retailers who now sell bra sized swimwear but it has a tendency to look like underwear not swimwear, with a bias towards pastel prints. And anything above an F is very very limited in range.

The Queen's corsetiere's Rigby & Peller is often cited as THE shop for properly fitted lingerie & swimwear. When I was a 32E I did find an expensive, very dull but useful black halterneck bikini but everything else there was (and is) way too granny or just plain hideous, and they have hardly anything above a 32F.

Then a couple of years ago Tara & I went on a mission to chic swimwear retailerHeidi Klein & I dropped a mind-blowing £140 on their own label, absolutely perfect, hidden underwire string bikini - my holy grail. And then promptly went up a cup size, beyond their sizing. (Useless website for larger breasted women tho as you can't search by size, and few of their pieces go beyond a D, so you have to check every style to see what size it comes in.)

I know many people swear by Bravissimo, but I find it all a bit frumpy, with lots of huge boulder holder tops yet worryingly skimpy bottoms, and they never have quite the right combination of colour & style for me. Large size bra specialists Freya & Fantasie do interesting swimwear & are worth a look through sites like Figleaves, but there's nothing there that looks like it will work for my figure or that has ever induced me to spend $100 on a suit.

So, still no swimwear that fitted.

And then I discovered the miracle that it is Ginger's Island.

Whether you want a bondage style bandeau suit, a modestly cut costume with skirt, a classic tank or a string bikini, have two water balloons attached to your front or are flat as a pancake, California-based custom swimwear company Ginger's Island can help you custom fit swimwear to your body and in your choice of colour, pattern & finish. And, if you have a particular style in mind that isn't just a case of a small adjustment to a current style, they can also, for an additional cost, create a pattern just for you. They aren't cheap: the average suit comes in at around $150 (still substantially less than their competitors), but they fit perfectly and that's got to be better than having five badly made suits in your drawers.

Don't let the slightly tacky website design put you off: the product is fantastic, and the customer support is exceptionally good, possibly the best I've ever dealt with both professionally and personally. They also use real, older women as the models, which is fantastic and extremely unusual for a swimwear site, and a lot more helpful for the prospective buyer than seeing swimwear being modelled by whippet-thin 16 year olds, (although some of the lovely ladies do look a little alarming in a mane of hair, Baywatch kind of way.)

With 49 different types of bikini bottoms, from thongs to hipster board skorts (no, I don't know either), 62 tops from bandeaus to a crisscross back full tankini, 14 swimsuits, 37 different skirt, sarong, sundress & cover-up options, all of which are made to measure, and more fabric selections than I've ever seen:


(This is a compilation of just some of the options, which includes plain colours too) I have absolutely no idea how anyone comes to a final decision.

They cover girls' sizes (2 mos. to 14 years), adult sizes (0 - 24) and cup sizes A - J, and happily send out fitting samples worldwide (for free if you purchase!) to your exact measurements, and fabric swatches too. If you need padding they offer three different types of cup pad, including silicone, and everything is properly lined, especially important in a pale or print suit.

I orderedthis style as my basic template:

When ordering, they ask for seven separate body measurements to put together the first fit samples, which arrived within ten days. The parcel included several suits with different cup styles to accommodate different breast shapes, and I was fascinated to see how some of them didn't fit at all, even though they were the correct cup size.

Once the samples arrive, it's a matter of calling their brilliant fit team, who have masses of experience, and talking through any changes. The basic suit shape worked very well for me, but I needed a higher leg, the waist taking in, & wanted to add a couple of amendments to their design to better fit & flatter my body shape.

I have a nice back (as opposed to my horrid tummy), so I wanted the reverse to be scooped out more, lowering it by a couple of inches.

Halternecks are the most flattering for all chest types: they give a little lift to smaller fronts, and support over-sized breasts. Bra style straps can often result in swaying bosoms as the support in a swimsuit, even with an underwire, isn't comparable to a proper bra. So, on our 'phone consultation, I asked for the bra straps to be converted to a tie neck. This also gives the visual impression of smaller breasts as the eye is drawn to the narrow neck area by the straps rather than to the width of the shoulders. (Strangely this isn't the case with smaller breasts: they benefit from the added volume added by bringing the breasts closer together.)

I wanted to lose the bra back too, but the incredibly helpful & well-informed girl on the other end of the 'phone was dubious, pointing out that the lower back & halter combination meant that my erm, ample, breasts might well escape out the sides without the back strap to pull it all in. This made complete sense, so I stayed with the adjustable bra back.

Although I flirted with the idea of a polka dot costume, I went for a plain French navy as this would be my everyday suit and I wanted it to be a building block for my summer wardrobe.

The finished result:


It may not look particularly exciting but it fits me immaculately: it doesn't look like reinforced underwear, it doesn't ride up, (so no wedgies) as the coverage is perfect on my lower half, my breasts fit into the cups with no chafing or spillage, yet is plunging enough to be sexy whilst giving me plenty of support. Perfection.

Independence Day cocktail: Watermelon & basil vodka martini

I called this a martini as it is nothing more than vodka with a splash of flavouring, but of course it would have a classically trained bartender raising an eyebrow at its presumption.

It's so simple, so fruity, so...thoroughly restorative that it seems perfect as a cooks pickmeup/reward for slaving over the barbecue(grill) on a sunshine-y day.

There are plenty of recipes kicking around for watermelon cocktails that require simple syrups (gomme) and various other ingredients, but this is so simple a child could make it. Not that I recommend that infants play with vodka but you get my point.

For two short glasses hack off a piece of watermelon about six inches long, chop it up, pick out the seeds, and squish it through a sieve, a juicer or any kind of press. (I found some random press in the kitchen whose usage remains obscure.)

Finely chop a handful of basil leaves, reserving a couple for decoration (maybe not the ones that look snail nibbled as in my glass above), and divide the leaves between the two glasses. Add three or four ice cubes & pour over a lovely big shot of frozen vodka (I used Grey Goose) and top with watermelon juice.

It's hardly a recipe but damn it tastes deeeeeelicious.

(If you wanted to get all fancy pants, you could macerate the basil leaves in the vodka overnight to really infuse the basil flavour, but I am waaaay too lazy.)

Happy Independence Day my American friends

Image: Flag dress by Catherine Malandrino

Object of desire: vintage style necklace

The Garden Statement Necklace from Banana Republic $98

Fried courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta, mushrooms & thyme

When we went shopping at Delicious Orchards for all the ingredients for Y's birthday dinner we saw these courgette (squash) blossoms on our way to the till:

Y was looking longingly in their direction so, ignoring the $9.99 sign we picked out eight of them. Which ended up costing a breathtaking $1.50.

I'd dredged up a memory of seeing them stuffed with ricotta, then shallow fried. So I beat together ricotta with an egg, & salt & pepper and added some cooled down sautéed minced mushrooms with garlic and thyme to add a little bite.

Stuffing them with a teaspoon is messy, and I'll use an icing bag next time, but eventually I got the flowers filled (and the counter decorated with) the ricotta mixture. I made a simple tempura batter with a cup of cold water, a cup of flour & an egg, mixing it together so there were still some lumps in the mixture. Then, holding each flower by the stem, they (& my fingers) were coated in the batter and then fried three at a time in an inch of hot oil.

They worked out fine, light & cheesy & crispy, with a little bite of courgette at the stem end, but next time I will add some finely grated Parmesan and some soaked chopped porcini to the ricotta mixture for a more intense flavour.

Grilled cheese, salad, vinaigrette, courgette flowers - not one of my finer food pictures, but you get the idea...

Book of the day: Chastened: No More Sex in the City

Released this week in the United Kingdom, I think Chastened: No More Sex in the City by literary critic & journalist Hephzibah Anderson would be a great addition to any bedside pile of reading material. (And that's not just because she's a friend.)

The book is a memoir, covering the year that she decided to give up on sex voluntarily and explore what it really means to be chaste in a sex fulled world. Her twelve months of dates, temptation, frustration - and excuses is chronicled in her intelligent, witty voice, and her writing never fails to engage.

She wrote about some of the experiences of writing Chastened in The Guardian here. You can buy Chastened at a greatly reduced launch price here. It comes out in America next Spring, published by Viking.

Luella as Minnie Mouse

I find this photograph of my godson Oliver's little sister at her 3rd birthday party in London last month just the most immensely cheering thing. I also covert her Mouse ears.

I had very few days in London on that trip, spending most of my time in the country with my mother and the hounds. But I did sneak away for 24hrs, to lunch in the garden with Tara & her family, and eat her wonderful homemade strawberry ice cream,

to play in the garden afterwards with my goddaughter Amelia

and her baby brother,

to go dancing with my girlfriends at Guilty Pleasures, and then to see A & A and baby Carter, before finally heading for infant overload and Clare's BRILLIANT homemade birthday cake.

And then I slept for two days.

Y's (French, dedicated carnivore) birthday supper menu

I had volunteered to cook everything, not just pudding, for Y's birthday, if he would tell me what he wanted to eat. Sitting on the sun-filled deck at lunchtime, eating bowls of my homemade leftover Thai curry, he came up with the following menu of things he loved and I added a few things too:

Discs of grilled New Jersey goats cheese with walnuts on sourdough toasts with a mustard vinaigrette, fried pancetta & frisée (endive) salad

Roast pork tenderloin, wrapped in smoked bacon (Which Y cooked to his special recipe)
Green beans, steamed & then tossed in melted butter, thyme & garlic
Mashed Idaho potatoes (cream, butter)
Cauliflower cheese, gratinéed (crispy crumb topping)
Homemade apple sauce

Instead of cake he opted for strawberry tart with creme patissiere & strawberry puree.

The whole menu took three hours from unpacking the shopping to putting on the table. For such a super simple menu, there was an awful lot of prep as we made everything from scratch from the fried breadcrumbs on the cauliflower cheese to the salad vinaigrette. (And I also added an extra element to the first course, dropping the walnuts and adding deep fried courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta & mushrooms.)

[I read on Obamafoodorama that the US pork industry has suffered badly from shoppers (erroneously) eschewing piggy products due to Swine Flu. Not in this household is all I can say. There were barbecued pork escalopes the night before, and sausages tonight.]

Tarte aux Fraises: Strawberry tart with strawberry puree

We celebrated Y's birthday yesterday with a supper for four of us, which I cooked as part of my present for him. The piece de resistance was pudding, a classic French fruit tart with a strawberry puree.

I made this! I'm beside myself with glee. My first ever fruit tart!

Whilst I've been making classic quiches for years with great success, I've always been a little scared of making a proper patisserie type tart before. They require two ingredients which are notorious for going wrong: pate brisée, an extremely short, buttery pastry (which can be a pig to work with as, if you get it too short, it has to be pressed into place rather than rolled) & creme patissiere, proper confectioner's custard (which splits if you so much as look at it the wrong way).

It doesn't help either that my mother makes extraordinarily good pastry, and thinks nothing of knocking up a tart at the last minute. Leave it to the experts I've always said, or do as the French and buy one from your local patisserie.

So, I've never made pate brisée or creme patissiere before. As I don't like hot eggy runny custard, I always presumed that I didn't like creme patissiere. How wrong was I? Last year I discovered that I loved it. After all what is there to dislike about a pastry filling that consists of eggs & sugar?

Anyway Y intimated that a tart would be extremely acceptable as a birthday cake, and I didn't like to admit that I'd never made one before. I consulted their rows & rows of cookbooks. Of course, the baking book, Gateaux de Mamie, would be in French, and there was no recipe for tarte aux fraises, or strawberry tart. Still nothing daunted, I found the separate recipes for pate brisée and creme patissiere & set to work.

And blimey, if they weren't the most ridiculously simple things to make. (If you ignore the fact that i had to keep converting the measurements to Imperial on my Blackberry.) Ignoring the instructions to make the pasty by hand, I just threw the pastry ingredients (flour, an egg yolk, icing sugar, a little salted water) into the Magimix, keeping an eagle eye on it so the pastry wasn't overworked. The moment it came together I dumped it onto a floured board, pushed it into a ball, wrapped it in clingfilm and popped it in the fridge to rest for an hour.

The custard was even easier. I had to wing it a bit as the recipe called for French soup spoon measurements & I had no idea if this equated to tablespoons, so I just guessed that it might. I heated 500ml of whole milk with a splash of Bourbon vanilla, meanwhile beating together four egg yolks with 6 tbsps of icing sugar and 4tbsps of cornflour. When the milk was simmering, I slowly dribbled the egg mixture onto it, whisking away. It immediately thickened into perfect creme patissiere. I scooped it into a dish & left it to cool. And that was it.

After the pastry rested I rolled it out to a disc an inch wider than the 26cm greased, nonstick, fluted,loose bottom. metal tart tin, (why on earth do people use china tart dishes? Makes for soggy pasty), flipped it into the tin, pressed it into shape and trimmed the top. No baking parchment or baking beans to weight the pastry as it cooked so it wldn't rise, so I improvised with tinfoil and rice. Baked it at 180C/350F for 25mins (the book said 15 but it was still soft then), and slid it off the tin base and onto a wire rack to cool.

I did slightly overcook it, but better browner & crisper than pallid & soggy I guess. When the pastry shell was cool I tipped in & spread out the custard, and spent a fun 5 minutes decorating with half inch slices of strawberries, blueberries & raspberries.

I had a punnet of just going over strawberries in the fridge, so I used my mother's technique of hulling them, cutting off the bad bits, & throwing them in the Magimix with some sugar and lemon juice. Whizzed into a puree, this is ambrosial.

Gratifyingly, the boys all had second helpings.

The Aston Martin Cygnet

I love driving. It's up there on my list of favourite occupations. Whilst I was in California if I heard about a road with a mountain pass I was so there, even if it meant a massive detour. I like the feeling of being in control, I love the speed & the escapism, and I ended up covering over 4000 miles in the seven weeks I spent in California.(And no speeding tickets. Helps being English when you get stopped.)

Given my family's tastes, it's hardly surprising: my father is a complete petrolhead, who races classic cars, my sister bought herself a sports car when she was a banker & my mother drives something very fast and German.

My dream car has always been a 280SL, more for its gorgeous styling than its engineering and, although I don't want to drive anything that can't overtake a tractor, (although I would make an example for a Cinquecento or a 2CV), the way a car looks is important to me. Certainly as important as the marque.

Which brings me neatly to the just announced new addition to the Aston Martin stable.

The Cygnet.

Yup, joining the ranks of the ravishingly beautiful Vanquish and the Vantage is the Cygnet. Maybe they've called this staggeringly ugly car a Cygnet in the hope that it might grow up to be something more beautiful one day.

As the piece in today's Times points out, car companies can no longer afford to rest on their drooping laurels. They must innovate or wither away. But is this £20,000 ($35,000) entry level car that looks like a first cousin to the Ford Ka the way to go for a company known for luxury & speed?

Moonwalk for Michael June 09: the video

I don't think any of us expected to spend Friday afternoon organising an open air dance tribute to Michael Jackson in New York's Washington Square Park. Or that it would actually happen.

At 10.19am on Friday a group email arrived from S. As a fervent Michael Jackson fan he couldn't believe that no one had thought to organise a flash mob gathering in New York like the one at London's Liverpool Street.

We drew a blank on Twitter and on Google. And so our own NYC Mass Moonwalk was born.

With a hard core of maybe five of us, (French, Spanish, English & American in a staggering show of entente cordiale) we fixed on a location, Washington Square Park. But we still had the problem of how we were going to play music loud enough for a crowd to dance to. We didn't think a boom box was going to cut it,

Then T had a brainwave: the French Embassy's Cultural Services arm was organising an open air screening of The Big Blue at 8pm. Maybe, if he asked nicely, they would let us use their sound system for half an hour beforehand.

Astonishingly they agreed. (More entente cordiale.) So we started flooding Twitter & Facebook with updates, I blogged on here so it wld register on Google searches, and we all emailed friends, random acquaintances and various press to let them know of our plans.

Within half an hour it was obvious that we had struck a chord. So one of the girls designed & printed off 200 flyers, someone else printed up some T shirts, and we prayed for good weather.

Not hard enough. At 7pm the heavens opened and dumped a bucket of torrential rain over lower Manhattan. We were convinced no one would turn up. But apparently the French Embassy have their own weather sonar system and assured us that a) it would stop raining at 730pm &b) they had no intention of cancelling their screening.

Ambitious thinking as it was still raining at 7.25pm.

And then, miraculously, the sky started to clear from the west, and the rain stopped. We hung about, maybe fifteen of us, practically outnumbered by media & film crew wielding notebooks & cameras, as we thrust flyers at passers-by and wondered if we would be the only ones dancing.

We needn't have worried. By the time we played Thriller the Moonwalk had kicked off and we had a huge audience dancing, singing & laughing along. We even managed to find ourselves a choreographer, actor Matthew Chai who led the dancing for us.

RIP Michael Jackson

If you can't access YouTube, click here

My new abode

It's somewhat of a culture shock to go from this old tenement building in Chelsea:

To this:

It even has a mailbox for goodness' sake. (This is a novelty for an Englishwoman.)

Fake tan: the horror edition

Dearest Belgian Waffling,

I have read your blog on Fake Tanning whilst drunk and all I have to say is that I raise you a mottled forearm
and two stained feet.

What is worse is that I PAID to have this done to me in a spray tan booth at Solar Salon in Chelsea on Friday. And that I am now living with a French man who exclaimed, 'putain' when he saw my arms. He & his husband then laughed at me for three blocks. And a large part of supper.

Love LLGxx

The post where I arrive in New Jersey

Safely ensconced in what passes for countryside in New Jersey. There are deer in the cornfields and rabbits frolicking on the front lawn. The house is a clapboard neo-Colonial dream and I have a bed so large and so high that I feel like the princess in the fairy tale The Princess & the Pea.

The bed is wonderful but I am afraid that I was more than a little distracted by the Welcome LLG hamper on my bedside table:

Jammy Dodgers! Proper Baked Beans! Fruit Pastilles! Choccy Digestives! Toffee Crisp! (Okay that one's missing from the photograph. I ate it approx 5 secs after entering my room for the first time.)

If I was at all worried about being a burden or an awkward guest then this utterly brilliant & over the top gesture completely set my mind at rest. Bless the boys.

Cathartic clearing out

So it's all change today. I woke up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, am spending the day in Manhattan moving, and will go to sleep in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Not exactly what I had planned for the weekend.

But there's always a silver lining: I get to stay with two of my great friends from London and their dog Max. Their house is near the beach, they are letting me bring my bike, and I get to explore a different part of the East Coast. I just wish that moving house didn't always involve lugging cases up & down umpteen flights of stairs. This time tho, I have GG &Y who are arriving shortly to help move the heavy stuff into their SUV and thence to storage.

I've already done one trip this morning on my bike to the storage facility, narrowly escaping death on the mean streets of Chelsea when one of the several bags I suspended from the handlebars got caught in the wheel spokes & I came to an abrupt halt.

I spent an hour or so in the container, going through my cases & boxes, primarily hunting for my father's birthday present which seems to have escaped, but also going through everything.

One of the frustrations of living in New York is the sharp divide between the seasons. The winter is so wretched & cold, and the summer so steamy & hot that you require two completely separate wardrobes: furs, cashmere, scarves, boots as opposed to shorts, thin silk dresses & paperweight sandals. So I have two huge bags just filled with winter stuff in there as well as a case of winter shoes.

Or I did until this morning. There's stuff in those bags that's moved from London to New York, gets unpacked every September, hangs untouched in my wardrobe for six months and then gets packed up again. So I grabbed everything I haven't worn for two seasons and put it aside for The Salvation Army. As well as binning two bags of old underwear, & fifteen or so pairs of shoes that really were beyond the ministrations of a cobbler.

I cannot tell you the joy of getting rid of things. I am such a squirrel and I need to learn not to hoard unnecessarily. This was a very good step in the right direction.

Euphemism of the day

One of the things that I miss about England is the way we hide behind words. That's not to say that I don't like the American way of being direct, of having no social fear about asking how much? with who? or why?, but that there can be a beauty in euphemism.

I passed this sign on a pub on London's Shoreditch High Street, on the way to the epic six hour lunch on the Shoreditch House roof deck that I, Belgian Waffling, Mrs Trefusis, MTFF and India Knight indulged in back at the beginning of May.

(If you haven't seen one of these signs before, it means it's a strip bar.)

A CELEBRATION OF THE KING OF POP in NYC: Moonwalk in Washington Square Park, New York

UPDATE: The French Consulate have a weather sonar and the storm will be done shortly. Moonwalk still on and so is the screening!


A CELEBRATION OF THE KING OF POP in NEW YORK / NYC

Join us for the NYC MASS MOONWALK today at 730pm Washington Square Park, New York

Go here for a step by step guide on how to Moonwalk

RIP Michael and thank you for the music

It's amazing how some entente cordiale can something together in hours: A very big thank you to the organizers of the Films on the Green festival and the girls from the French Consulate for letting us use their sound system before the 8pm open air screening of Le Grand Bleu/ The Big Blue in the Square tonight

Building blocks for my summer wardrobe

I was whinging only a few weeks ago about having nothing to wear. So, having been utterly depressed by the scant nature of my summer wardrobe (worn out pieces, changing body shape), I finally took a step towards replacing the items I wear everyday (my bleach splashed shorts and crumpled tops).

After some thought, I've decided that this summer I will be wearing short-ish shorts with blousey tops and classic white shirts, with wedges for smart and strappy flat sandals for everyday, along with just above the knee Bermudas with stiletto strappy sandals for smart.

Hallelujah for the sales is all I can say. After scoping out & trying on all the pieces I wanted in Banana Republic & Old Navy, I took a squint on-line. I really do not understand this group's pricing. Old Navy white denim shorts that were $22.50 in store were $5 on-line, and the same at Banana: a cute cardigan that will work brilliantly in LA was originally $79, $41 in store & $27 on-line. And I'm thrilled that the Banana Martin shorts are suit cut, with a little stretch and twice the quality I'd expect at the price point.

Suffice to say that, with free shipping over $150, I bought everything on-line & got it delivered to New Jersey. This is what I got:
Old Navy
Blue-Gray Women's Cuffed Twill Shorts (5") $24.50 reduced to $5 (full price in store)
Bright White Women's Mid-Rise Denim Shorts (5")$19.50 reduced to $5 (FPIS)


Women's Sheer Roll-Up Camp Shirts in bright blue & in white $24.50 each (FPIS)

Women's Eyelet Sleeve Tops in navy, white & black $24.50 reduced to $15 each ((FPIS)

White Women's Mid-Rise Embroidered-Eyelet Shorts (5")$24.50 reduced to $5 (FPIS)

Blue & white Martin 4-inch striped short $44 reduced to $16.99 ($25 in store)
Black Martin 4-inch short $44 reduced to $29.99 ($25 in store but sold out)
Grey Heather Long 4-button cardigan $79 reduced to $29.99 ($41 in store)

Eleven pieces for $190. Not bad. (Plus I bought the Martin shorts in olive & in navy in store for $25 each as they are sold out on-line, & I know I will wear these everyday.)

Remember The Times

Home video players were still not that widespread when Thriller was released, and the idea of showing a video at a birthday party was almost revolutionary. My best friend Claire Awcock's big sister had rented Thriller for us to watch at her party and we sat, mesmerised, and a little scared by the graveyard scenes, not really understanding what we were seeing, but loving the music all the same.

With hindsight we were a couple of years too young to really get Michael in all his magnificence but I remember that afternoon so, so clearly. I must have seen thousands of movies since then but no film from the first twenty years of my life has stuck in my mind the way Thriller did. The costumes, the make-up, the idea of a proper story set to music: it's hard to get across just how revolutionary this all was in 1983-4.

Image from 1OAK's e-flyer this evening celebrating Michael

No more burgers

Oh God. I tried on some shorts today in glamorous Old Navy in my usual size and they were a little tight around my middle. So I hopped it across to banana Rpublic on Fifth Avenue. Same story.This is not good. I refuse to go up a size.

So, I did my usual act upon realising I need to stop eating: I walked up a couple of blocks to Madison Park where my beloved Shake Shack resides. As I sat there twittering about Michael Jackson (RIP), I shovelled in crinkle cut fries and a shroom burger. Strange to think that I will probably always remember eating that burger because of Michael Jackson.

It's all salad from now on.

Jersey Girl

Well, yesterday was quite something. After the morning’s broadside from my soon to be ex-flatmate & friend, I spent the day frantically emailing around Manhattan looking for somewhere else to live. Although my rent is paid up until next Tuesday, I’ve really no desire to stay here a moment longer. The irony is that she wants me out so that she can be ‘safe’ in her home, yet she’s made me feel so unsafe here that I am desperate to leave,

Because, believe me, what you read yesterday was the measured view. I laughed when I read the comment from one girl who thought I was harsh writing that entry. To her, I say, you can have no idea what really happened, and that what you read there is merely the tip of a very large iceberg. If she can accuse S of potential violence & stalking after one contact in two months, then I wanted a public record of what was happening.

Anyway, I have been inundated with offers of help for which I am very grateful. I have decided to stay with R tonight as we are going to a dinner party together, & then lovely F, talented designer & good friend has offered the keys to her Greenpoint, Brooklyn place until Sunday morning. Then les gars (GG&Y)

are leaving Max, their over sized Bassett hound behind,

and driving in from their Macmansion in the wilds of Jersey in their gas guzzling behemoth of a car to help me put my things into storage and take me back to their lair.

Yup, that’s right. I am to be a Jersey Girl for a while. GG had suggested I go stay with them this summer when he & I were propping up the bar at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco but I had already arranged to stay here. I didn’t want to let X down, so refused GG’s offer. (She laughs dryly.)

And, best of all, he & darling Y have been happily married for A Very Long Time, so no potential emotional warfare there. I don't think I can face any more of that.

Someone find me a nice new place to live in Manhattan

Whilst I was in Los Angeles, one of the things that reassured me about returning to Manhattan was that back in March I had arranged my accommodation for the summer: I was to sublet a room in Chelsea until the middle of August. It was convenient, well-located and very inexpensive.

I based my plans, work, fiscal, social, around this, and arrived back in New York ten days ago. I unpacked, gradually removed my possessions from storage, settled in.

The fly in the ointment? My flatmate was the emotionally fragile ex-girlfriend of my best friend, S, & I had met her through him. Not an ideal situation; the breakup, two months ago whilst I was in LA, was complicated and messy, as most break ups are and there was a lot of emotional fallout. There is no right or wrong in a break up. S is no saint but then neither is she. They no longer speak.

But, we are all adults and I thought that, as I was just here for six-eight weeks, that we would be able to deal with this. On my first night back I told her that I was Switzerland, completely neutral. The problem, tho, was that she wanted to talk about it. A lot. Has been, frankly, unable to stop talking about it in the eleven days we have been here together. I do not wish to talk about it. Ever. I'm already dealing with my parents' breakup. But I listened, and nodded along as she was clearly distressed.

I am empathetic: as a single girl, I’ve had to be a shoulder for a lot of people, and one cannot fail to be sorry for anyone trying to come to terms with the end of a relationship that they thought might be The One. It’s miserable, throws one’s equilibrium out, and makes the world feel like a hostile place. However much I love my friend S, I can’t help but feel sorry for this girl & her emotional turmoil.

Hell, I’ve been there myself. After one heart wrenching break up I did all of the following: posted every photo I possessed of him though his letterbox, sent rambling letters, drove convoluted journeys home so that I could drive by his house, frantically Googled him to find out what he’d been doing, and basically acted like a nutcase.

But it passes. I look back now and cannot believe either that I even liked him, or that I would behave in such a way. And I hope that I am old & wise enough now not to fall for the kind of unfaithful cowards who would induce such behaviour.

Unfortunately, my flatmate is still in the throes of the nutcase stage. This morning she informed me that, as she had passed by S at the subway when he had come by to pick me up for dinner, it was no longer possible for me to live here & that I needed to move out by the 30th June. She was also considering a restraining order against S as he obviously can’t keep away from her.

I had promised her that I would never have S in the house which seemed fair enough to me (& he has zero desire to come in anyway) but, with hindsight, if I had realised it would distress her so much, it wld have been better not to have met S on the street outside the apartment last night.

But a restraining order? And evicting me? A normal person would have said, LLG you were a bit insensitive last night. Please don’t meet S where I might bump into him, not turn it into an accusation of stalking. The whole thing is utterly ludicrous: in two months he has got in touch with her once: on Monday he emailed, texted & then left her a missed call after he had found out a few things about her which upset him, and he has picked me up for dinner from my home once.

I’m aggrieved because, whilst I was inadvertently insensitive by allowing her ex to pick me up from my doorstep, I wld do anything to ensure a woman's safety. Regardless of my friendship with S, if I for a moment thought there might be even a scintilla of risk to her I would back her every step of the way.

But in this case I am afraid that right now the only risk to her is her own imagination.

And evicting me because she needs her home to be a ‘safe’ environment (God I hate therapy speak) is patently absurd. But if it makes her feel more secure, then so be it. And maybe it is too much for her having one of S’s friends around her. That’s fine: I’m thoroughly bored with her games, accusations and character assassinations and with the whole situation. Clearly, I am much better off out of the apartment and out of her life.

Now I have six days to find a new place to live. Curses.

Object of desire

The Pashley Princess Sovereign $1195. Only to be ridden in Manhattan if you have an elevator or a garage to chain it up in. Waaay to heavy to carry upstairs, and a magnet for thievery. But, oh so beautiful.

Recipe: Cauliflower & mushroom soup with fried Halloumi cheese

Whenever I have deadlines to meet I cook incessantly. Every meal becomes an exercise in flashy knife skills & obscure ingredients. Although the latter is as much to do with the fact that I won’t allow myself to leave the house until the copy is filed and so must cook with whatever is in the cupboards.

In London that didn’t really present much of a challenge as I had a superb kitchen bursting with supplies. Here in New York it’s like playing Ready Steady Cook. I have a third of a kitchen cupboard for dry ingredients and a very small fridge & icebox, and that usually means that I eat everything before going shopping again. I have no room for the standard essentials: no flour, no sugar, and certainly none of the esoterica with which I filled my London shelves. And I never really plan what to eat in advance: I just buy what looks good in the markets.

Last night all I had left were some distressed looking mushrooms, a small cube of Halloumi cheese, an onion & a small head of cauliflower. To be completely honest, I do live opposite the Westside Market, a very good food store, but it was raining, the apartment is a fifth floor walk-up and I hadn’t brushed my hair since the day before.

So, I scratched my (unbrushed)head for a while. I’d run out of starches, milk, tinned tomatoes and coconut milk, so there were no sauce ingredients to bring it all together, and nothing to bulk it out. Then I remembered a meal I had thrown together for my mother last month in England: a cauliflower soup with fried mushrooms and Halloumi,

Fortunatley for this post, I photographed all the food I cooked in England, so I can give you a proper recipe below. I had chopped coriander there, so that's added too. It works like this:

Chop up the onion & a clove of garlic if you have it. Find a big saucepan (big is good, you’ll see why in a minute), put in a splash of whatever oil you have kicking around, & a knob of butter if you have it, turn the heat to medium and, when the oil is hot, add a tsp of ground cumin, a tsp of haldi (turmeric) & a tsp of garam masala. Cook the spices in the oil for 30 secs, and then throw in the onions.

Keep the heat at low-medium – you want the onions to cook slowly, without browning. Push them around in a desultory way with a spatula from time to time to check that they aren’t sticking. In between prodding the onions, chop up the cauliflower into pretty small pieces (removing the stalk & outer leaves) and rip up the coriander and, when the onions are translucently soft, throw in the cauliflower rubble & the chopped coriander.

Then you need a about a litre/ 1.5 pints of hot liquid. (It's going to depend on the size of your cauliflowers - you need the liquid to come just over the pieces.) Stock is best (I like using Marigold Vegetable Bouillon - it doesn’t taste too processed), but water wld do in a pinch. Pour this over the cauliflower and cook till the cauliflower is super soft. This can take about 10 minutes.

Whilst the cauliflower is cooking, chop up the Halloumi into teeny cubes, heat up a frying pan on the stove, with a tsp of oil and when it looks hot, throw in the cheese. After 10 secs, push them about a bit. The aim to get them nicely browned. (You don’t need much oil for this). When they are done, tip them out onto kitchen paper and try to resist eating them all. Good luck with that.

You also need to chop up the mushrooms into small pieces, and fry these in butter (preferably), or else olive oil, with a pinch of salt, over a medium heat until they are cooked. (It's good to not boil away all the juices.)

The fun part. And the reason why you need a big saucepan. Get out your stick blender and whizz that cauliflower to a soup consistency. It won’t form a puree, what you will get is a thin-ish liquid with teeny tiny pieces of cauliflower in it. If it looks too thin, bubble it up on the stove to reduce the liquid; equally, if too thick, add some more stock/hot water.

Season generously to taste with lots of black pepper & Maldon (kosher) salt.

To serve, ignore the dog who will have retired to the sofa in high dudgeon upon realisation that there is no meat in tonight's supper:

and put the Halloumi in the bottom of the soup bowls:

Pour over the cauliflower soup, and then spoon over the fried mushrooms. More chopped coriander looks & tastes good sprinkled over the top. Flat leaf parsley wld work too.

Eat, enjoying the contrast between the salty, crispy, melty cheese, the delicate cauliflower and the earthy mushrooms. (I do appear to be obsessed with cheese & mushrooms right now.)

Picture of the day: Posetta Baddog in the buttercups

Get Lashed London: Fake eyelash bars open

When I was at school I used to horrify my best friend Clare by rubbing off my mascara with my fingers when I was nervous, which frequently pulled my eyelashes out. I never listened to her and my once luxuriant eyelashes have never really grown back properly.

Around the same time our friend Caz introduced me to the brilliance of individual falsh eyelashes at a salon near Leicester, but we could only afford to get it done for really special occasions and, once I left school, I never found another salon that could apply them.

It wouldn’t be a problem if I had darker colouring, but I have all the colour of an albino bunny: a natural blonde with skimmed milk skin, & taupe eyebrows and lashes. At university, Clare taught me how to apply liquid eyeliner to help minimize the pink-eyed bunny look, but my sparse lashes need more help than makeup & tinting can provide.

Fast forward ten years or so.

I was a beauty editor, dealing with the knee high piles of products in padded envelopes around my desk. Once morning I shook out the contents of a bag onto my desk. Out fell a giftcard for individual falsh eyelash applications from make up store Pout. I was down there quicker than winking, and back again & again when I discovered that for fifteen odd quid individual fake lashes were go.

And then they stopped their beauty services. I shed a tear when I discovered that the only people who offered individual lashes in Central London were the ultra expensive long lasting services which cost upwards of two hundred pounds. I've learnt to apply strip lashes since, but they aren't entirely reliable when applied by me(read my disasters with them here.)

So I am extremely happy to hear about Get Lashed, the eyelash service equivalent of a nail bar. Which isn’t surprising because the concept has been developed by Nails inc. They can apply sixteen different styles of strip lashes, (£7.00 to £12.00 each with free application) in a choice of 16 styles and, hurrah, false lash extensions, priced at £30.00 (full sets) or £18.00 (outer corners). AND they do tinting, and brow threading & waxing.

I so know where my first stop is next time I'm back in England. And could someone please open a Get Lashed on Manhattan?

Get Lashed now available at Debenhams, Oxford Street, London; House of Fraser Bluewater and nails inc. South Molton Street and Bishopsgate
Further Get Lashed sites are planned for Debenhams stores nationwide

Mushrooms & mozzarella: LLG's guide to putting on weight rapidly

I am currently on a reducing regimen. Over the two weeks I spent at my mother's house in the country I was face down in the trough for at least 50% of the time, and put on 6lbs/3kg. In two bloody weeks!

The sheer, unadulterated bliss of having all the ingredients on hand to cook whatever I felt like, in my mother's wonderful, fully equipped kitchen with her as an enthusiastic participant to boot all added up to avoirdupois overload.

So, it's with this in mind, that I share one of my all-time favourite recipes, which I cooked, er, three times whilst I was there. Dreamed up by myself one day in London when all I had in the fridge were mushrooms and a ball of mozzarella di bufala (random, I know), it's deliciously addictive and takes maybe ten minutes from prep to mouth. Sure, you can practically feel the fat cells multiplying on your thighs, but, sod it, we all need comfort food now & again.

It can be eaten with any starch. Basmati is good, mashed potato is other-worldly but turns it into a bit of a performance so I don't bother unless I have leftovers (or shhh M&S cook-chill), and I'm mainly using quinoa right now as it cooks so quickly. If using rice, put it on to cook before you start the main dish.

To start the journey to food heaven/hell (you decide), you need a couple of handfuls of as fresh as possible white mushrooms. (Look for mushrooms with gills as pink as possible, rather than dark brown: you want that lovely just yielding texture they get when cooked, as opposed to the sloppiness of week old ones.)

Then a ball of fresh mozzarella. It doesn't have to be buffalo:

But it does taste magnificent. But, please, whatever you do, do not use a brick of mozzarella or grated mozzarella as it doesn't melt in the right way for this dish. Or, heaven forfend, 'domestic' or Danish mozzarella. That stuff is just plain wrong.

Add a tablespoon of butter to the frying pan. Once melted, add some chopped garlic, and tip your mushrooms and a generous scattering of Maldon Salt (or kosher salt). Turn the heat down a little to let them cook.

The point here is to get them to release all those lovely mushroom-y juices, so you need to avoid reducing the liquid comes off them. You can always cheat and pop a lid over the frying pan for a few minutes (but not for too long, as steamed mushrooms always taste a bit weird).

Then tear (do not chop) your ball of mozzarella into the frying pan. This was a very large ball (am pig), you could easily use half this amount for the mushrooms shown. Turn the heat to very, very low.


And put the lid on your frying pan for about 3-4 minutes, until the pan looks like this. DO NOT STIR. This breaks up the mozzarella and you end up with a pan of string. Whilst the cheese is melting, pour boiling water over some quinoa in a saucepan and place a lid over it so it cooks quickly.

Drain the quinoa and add to pretty soup bowl, check seasoning of mushrooms & cheese, add black pepper (you want freshly ground here for the texture and the same goes with the sea salt), spoon delectable mixture & cooking liquor over quinoa. Shovel into mouth.
How many does this feed? Well, one of the reasons I got so porky was that I ate all the above on my own. But less greedy piglets could probably make the amount of mushrooms shown above stretch between two if you made a simple lettuce salad to go with it.

Happy Father's day!

Suzannah: Vintage inspired design

Eighteen months ago I wrote enthusiastically of Suzannah's wonderful debut collection, and I've been a fan ever since of her thoughtful and chic, often vintage couture inspired designs which frequently use vintage textiles.

(Parisian Coat Dress £380)
Her label is appealing on so many levels. The price point, as I wrote about here, is sensible, and her service is so personal that she can offer different solutions to the pieces in her collection: a specific garment length, a simple sleeve added or removed, a bespoke wrap to match, a swatch service with other colour ideas or print variation for many of the looks.

And I know it works, as I was thrilled to discover on one of my trips home that a wonderful friend of one had bought some semi-bespoke pieces from Suzannah on my blog recommendation.

I have fallen in love with her Petal Sculpt Dress, which could have been designed for my figure (long thin legs, no waist, lots of bosom):

And, I'm still lusting after the Future Tuck Jersey Dress, which has been reduced in the sale:

I was reading her blog this morning and was blown away by the couture wedding dress she designed recently. If you are in the market for a personal wedding dress, then Suzannah could well be your saviour.

Eating & dating: My first week back in Manhattan

I’ve been back in New York for ten days, & it’s rained every one of those ten days. Fortunately, as wellies are obviously impermeable, they are one of things that weren’t ruined in the employee-caused flood at Manhattan Mini Storage in Chelsea, so I fished them out of my locker and have been wearing them every day to splash around the streets.

That said, I’ve also been dating and, whilst my wellies are certainly practical, I’m not wearing them to dinner. This has led to several near arse over tit, knickers in the air moments as I’ve picked my way Downtown over wet, slippery cobblestones in stilettos.

Date number 1 was through my online dating site, & was the first person who’d got in touch with me for several months that I wanted to meet. We’d arranged a drink in New York whilst I was in Lausanne, which I then promptly forgot.

Still, I’m glad that he reminded me on the day as we had a hilarious conversation, fuelled by rather too much Pinot Noir, and I actually lost track of time, so much so that I ended up dashing from our date at SHO Shaun Hergatt's bar at The Setai by Wall Street to Café Select on Lafayette to meet a charming & brilliant English architect friend of a friend for dinner. I arrived a shockingly rude 45minutes late. Fortunately he had a friend from London in tow, and managed to recognise me when I finally pitched (I didn’t have a clue what he looked like), and we ended up having a hilarious evening of beer, perfect rosti and god knows what else.

A group of girlfriends & I convened at Double Crown on the Bowery for dinner on Tuesday. I gave the restaurant a rave review for a US publication when it first opened but it’s gone steadily downhill since. Sometimes the food is good, but the service is execrable, which takes the shine off the whole experience. Notable ballsups have included a two course meal which took 2 ½ hours to be served and was cold when it did arrive last November, and the sloppy, graceless service and tasteless shredded green bean salad on Tuesday. The whole sorry affair was rounded off by this episode at the bar afterwards.

(I should add though that I still believe that Double Crown’s interior is one of the best in NY. The bar is great for drinks, as is its sister bar Madame Geneva next door. Just order carefully in the restaurant and maybe take a good book & a sense of humour for the longueurs in service.)

Wednesday had one of the few sunny interludes of the week, and was warm enough for Francoise & me to take to the roof deck at Soho House. I live two blocks away & there's wireless access, so we’ve decided that it will be our summer office, and, when it finally stops raining, will be found most days under the third umbrella from the left, by the pool, in our bikinis, with laptop (me) & sketchpad (F). Was also very pleased to bump into charming architect & friend from Monday on adjacent sun loungers.

Having spent a large part of the previous days dealing with the aftermath of the storage container flood, I spent Thursday & Friday writing like a fiend, and emerged, blinking, for al fresco drinks with JK on, yup, the roof at Soho House. I know this is getting repetitive, but it is lovely up there, the people watching is second to none, it’s practically next door to my apt, and they do a sublime chili cilantro margarita that knocks your socks off after a hard day. So much so that we ditched our smart dinner plans and retired to PopBurger for burgers & fries instead.

And that was my first week back in Manhattan.

Isabella Oliver 365

One of the thing I constantly bemoan about the fashion industry, as you all know, is the lack of clothing for women with lives in the real world. It's all very well me & a hundred other fashion editors writing about how marvellous Marni is for the quirky working woman, but it's not exactly realistic to spend £700 on a skirt.

But then neither do I want to wear Primark or Forever 21. What I want is to spend a reasonable amount on my clothes. Then I know they are ethical as possible, made from good fabrics, won't fall apart after one season and have some twist, so I don't look like everyone else.

And that's why Isabella Oliver 365 works so well. These are the pieces that may cost just a little more, but will be the mainstay of anyone's wardrobe. And I want the lot.

I've always liked Isabella Oliver's maternity clothing. Stylish, chic, definitive & worn by my best-dressed girlfriends. And, as it happens, they are based in London, just around the corner from my London flat. I discovered this when the lovely Baukjen de Swaan Arons, one of the joint founders, emailed me through the blog & we became friends.

I was beyond thrilled when she got in touch once I had stopped blogging last year to tell me she & her partner Vanessa Knox-Brien were in New York to show their new collection Isabella Oliver 365 and would I like to see it?

Would I heck?! I scrambled a town car after a long day at the coal face of fashion, slightly unsure as to what to expect from an Isabella Oliver non-maternity range. I needn't have worried: I loved it all.

I'm especially liking the Shirt Coat from the new Fall 09 collection in both pink & in black.($389, but there's 15% off all Fall pre-orders right now, so it's $330.)


I'm suspecting that this cape will be a best seller too come Fall($389, now $330 on pre-order):

For now tho, I'm loving these crepe de chine shorts which are just perfect for a hot & humid Manhattan summer ($145):

But the piece I really, really like is the Multiway Maxi Dress that caught my eye at their SS09 press show. Everything about it appeals: the fabric which is light enough to drape beautifully, but heavy enough to skim the body, the versatility of a piece that can be worn so many different ways, and which can easily take you from a lazy brunch to a black tie dinner and the very attractive price point ($325).



NB Someone asked in the comments about workwear of the pants/skirts variety and so I wanted to make clear: I have picked the pieces here from 365 (not maternity!) that I am thinking of buying (I never wear trousers & rarely skirts. Of course they make trousers, skirts etc. Go check it out at Isabella Oliver 365

Violet RIP

I didn’t really want to post this as I am trying very, very hard not to think about this, but you have all been so wonderful and your comments, emails & tweets have been so lovely in asking for updates that I felt I should say something.

Our darling whippet Violet was put to sleep yesterday morning after a three week battle following a car accident on the road outside our house.

She had a massive heart attack at the vet hospital two days ago which damaged her heart sufficiently that there really was no hope left for her continued survival.
Muv emailed me from home today :

“Violet wasn't going to get better and her heart was struggling. She was so pleased to see me and I cradled her in my arms and it was very peaceful. They buried Violet under one of the willow trees by the stream, and Molly put a posy of roses, pinks, Canterbury bells and alchemilla on the grave. Violet looked so peaceful and I couldn't believe that she had been so ill. I loved Violet so much - she was the sweetest, gentlest dog, and had three weeks of misery. A chain of events that could have all been avoided. It is an absolute tragedy.”

It’s been a bad year for my family with my parent’s ongoing divorce, and Violet was Muv’s salvation. I wish I could vault the Atlantic to give Muv an enormous hug right now. Our animals are so very important to our family.

I shall remember how she tried to crawl out of her vets bed, whilst attached to a drip to climb into Muv's and then my lap, and how she & Billy would jump on my head in the mornings to wake me and try to sneak down under the duvet when Muv wasn't looking, and how she woke me in the middle of the night last week trying to get on my bed to go under the duvet, even though her operation scar meant she couldn't leap up.

We will miss her very, very much. (Violet with Billy her son)

Inshriach House: The perfect Scottish getaway

In our twenties, various of us who had been at university together frequently barrelled up to the very, very north west of the Scottish Highlands to a beautiful coastal village called Scourie, where we would set up camp in the tiny stalking cottage which had been left to our partners in crime Nick & Susie by their father.

(Arkle seen from Scourie Beach)There was lots of fly fishing (or, if you were me, lots of watching fly fishing, sitting disconsolate in a damp boat in the August drizzle, smoking pot to ward off the midges & watching the rain on the loch); mountain goat activity of the running up hills before breakfast kind (or, if you were me, cooking of gargantuan breakfasts), and long walks through the heather (or, if you were me, ceaseless whinging about the mud, the midges & the rain).

I was at my happiest when the others were playing at being mountain goats, & I was left to my own devices. I would cook huge meals for their return, and then curl up in a faded floral armchair in the sitting room next to the fire and the oak bookcase, working my way through old paperbacked Agatha Christie & Georgette Heyers, with the aid of a packet of Garibaldi biscuits and endless cups of tea. I do so love the great outdoors when I have to wipe the fug off a window to see it.

I spent Millenium New Year in Scourie with five of my closest friends, having stipulated I would only go if we dressed up properly. (My silver & green 50’s brocade & tulle number from Cornucopia cost £15 & was so poofy it had to have its own seat on the plane up to Inverness.) On the night we pulled layers of fleece & Gore Tex over our Black Tie and climbed a mountain to set off exhibition fireworks & drink Champagne at midnight, before rolling back down the mountain to the village cèilidh. (If you happen to have architects as friends, then you’ll know that this combination of outdoors & insanity is perfectly normal in their eyes.)

It was on the drive back down to England from one of these trips that we stopped off to pick up our friend Walter from his grandmother’s extraordinary - & enormous - Edwardian country house set in 200 glorious acres near the banks of the River Spey, in the Cairngorms National Park just outside Aviemore.

Untouched by the hand of post-modernism, Inshriach still has open fires, panelled rooms, lots of faded chintz, antlers aplenty, claw footed baths, and shooting prints in the loos. The house has always stuck in my memory as a wonderful escaping place, just as Scourie is, where you can fish, walk, stalk & mountain goat, or do as I do and curl up by the fire to read, so I was particularly pleased when Walter wrote to say that he & his mother Lucy had turned Inshriach into an extremely reasonably priceda fully functioning rental property for groups & location shoots. (It’s just been reviewed (well) by The Guardian.)

This summer, Walter had planned to run the bars, food & a stage at The Outsider Festival in Aviemore. After he had built most of the stage & bar, struck deals with brewers & distilleries, made friends with lots of musicians and invited lots of friends, The Outsider was cancelled. Not being one to give up, he decided to hold an alternative festival in the grounds at Inshriach, catering for a maximum of 400 people.

So, The Insider was born.

It promises to be a magical weekend, not least because it's the Summer Solstice. There’s a fabulous musical line-up including Lau, twice named 'Group of the Year' at the BBC Radio2 Folk Awards, burlesque performances and children’s workshops. There are yurts for rental for sleeping in, & the catering by Ord Ban restaurant is reason alone to turn up, with Walter promising local beef and venison, trout, scallops, curry, stews & cakes. As he says, ‘That's what happens when you organise a festival with a lot of foodies.’

There are still a few tickets left, so do go to www.insiderweekend.co.uk (All tickets are advance sales only.) There are a BARGAIN £40 each, a fraction of what festivals usually cost.

In addition to yurt rental, there's plenty of camping space, but if that's not your thing, then Suie Hotel in Kincraig (about 4 miles away) have offered 10% off their already very reasonable £35 a night rate for anyone who doesn't fancy camping.

Bruce Weber for Moncler

So, skinny models. I think we've all had quite enough of that debate for today, so I'm suggesting that dogs could be the way forward a la Bruce Weber's golden retrievers in this upcoming campaign for Moncler. I'm thinking maybe chihuahuas in Versace, poodles in Dior, shih tzus in Chanel & dachshunds in Loro Piana sweaters.

The Moncler campaign was discussed on Cathy Horyn's New York Times blog yesterday.

It's not the models, stoopid. A guest post from my Deep Throat correspondent

You may remember that back in February, I ran a series of pieces about what it is really like to attend the Milan fashion collections. I had a huge response, including a spirited email riposte from an old colleague on the other side of the fence. This resulted in my running a series of posts from my Deep throat correspondent called Through The Looking Glass: The Horror of the Milan shows, on what it was really like to be at the shows as a fashion publicist.

This time my secret correspondent read both the editor of British Vogue, Alex Shulman's letter to the fashion industry pleading for larger samples so that they could use bigger (relatively) models and, today, Carol Midgely's column in The Times about "scraggy models and emaciated celebrities", and was fired up enough to email me about her experiences with slim models but even skinnier celebrities. Her email:

"In contrast to Alex Shulman's letter to the industry, I have very rarely experienced situations in which the samples are too small for the models (once or twice, mostly things with corsets) but have lost count of the number of times I have had to send a tailor to a celebrity's house to take in a sample I have lent them.

My theory about magazines making people thin is a bit more personal, and is along the lines of “If I have worked in this biz for 10+ years and have yet to lose any weight at all, it can’t be the fashion industry that is making young women thin, so it must be something else”.

Sample sizes got tiny about the same time celebrity magazines started to multiply like those weird mushrooms that grow under the trees that dogs like. Up to that point there just were not that many ‘red carpet’ opportunities that it was worth schlepping samples around for.

Now, almost immediately a sample walks off the runway it is on the back of a celebrity at some gala or other, and they are so teeny that the samples are shrinking. When you factor in the huge celebrity magazine market in Asia, and the even smaller size of celebrities in that region, tiny samples start to look inevitable. And when you look at the sales of celebrity magazines vs.the sales of Vogue, Bazaar etc, it is clear that a typical reader will be exposed to many more images of tiny celebrities than they will of tiny models and haute couture.

Given that it would be bad form for an editor-in-chief to take a whole other category of magazines to task for existing, Alex Shulman has probably focused on the nearest available target. Whilst it is admirable that she has such strong feelings, it puts the fashion houses in a very difficult position as the value of celebrity coverage, particularly to beauty sales, is so high there is little they can do to back away from lending to x-ray thin celebrities.

If I am right, once the public stops being interested in thinness, sample sizes will revert to their pre-Heat(magazine) dimensions."

LLG: I also wanted to add one of the basic truths about skinny models versus skinny celebs which doesn't seem to have been pointed out in the media so far, which relates to simple anatomy. Models are very tall, the majority over 5'10", (and much taller than the average lollipop-headed celeb) so it's physically impossible for most of them to get down beyond a size 2 because of the size of their skeleton, regardless of how much flesh is wasted off them....many female celebs, on the other hand, being generally somewhat vertically challenged, can feasibly get down to double zero, their skeletons being that much smaller in the first place.

Obie Accessories: How to make your hair the star of the show

Breaking into the fashion industry is almost impossible. It takes not just talent but guts, tenacity, exposure and a healthy dose of luck. This makes it extremely important for fashion editors to support new & upcoming designers, not just the advertiser brands, by writing, shooting and, hopefully, wearing their collections.

Of course I don't want to wear a lot of the collections I support, so it’s immensely satisfying when I do find something I really love AND that I want to order. And that was the case when I met Honor & Natasha, the charming girls behind new hair accessories label Obie Accessories.

Based in Los Angeles, their fledgling business is based around handmade bejeweled, feathered and flower adorned clips and bands. Sure, I see plenty of pieces like these, but what drew me to Obie was their attention to detail, (even the backs of the clips are jewelled),

and that I can see a gap in the market for what they do at their price point, which is less than say Tarina Tarantino’s. And, of course, there’s the Gossip Girl effect. Blair’s penchant for Brooklyn based Jennifer Behr’s hair bands has seen hair accessories take an enormous rise in popularity over the past couple of seasons.

We met at Honor’s home in Laurel Canyon, as she & Natasha were shooting the images for their first look book.

My magpie eye caught their blue crystal clips, and they sent me one in New York. It makes such a difference when postal orders arrive in pretty packages, and Obie go the extra mile, with a crystal securing the carton in which their clips are packed, and a little handwritten tag swinging from the handle.

But, most exciting of all, was what was in the carton:

Thank you girls: I shall look forward to wearing it.

Chauvinism is not dead

I got dressed up last night, & went out for supper last night with a group of girls. At the bar I bumped into a lovely & charming man I know, drinking with some people I had met on New York’s social circuit whilst out and about for my old job as fashion director on a fairly serious magazine. We chatted for a bit whilst we worked out our connections before I went to join my table for dinner.

After the meal, I went over to the bar to say goodnight, and two of my (very beautiful) girlfriends joined me on their way out. As we made light conversation, one of the (older) businessmen whom I had met before looked at all three of us standing in a row, and made a comment about the collection of breasts on show in front of him.

For a minute I thought I’d misheard, and asked him to repeat what he’d said. I stared at him in disbelief.

I was furious. We are three women in our thirties, all of us serious businesswomen, highly successful in our chosen fields (one manages a team of creatives, one is responsible for millions of dollars every day), and this was all this man could find to say to us.

I almost never wear low cut outfits, as I am generously endowed and a little embarrassed about it. But last night I thought, don’t be silly, you are who you are, wear that pretty DvF dress. Well, I was right. According to some men the sum of all that I am can be reduced to my breast size.

The romance of the handwriten letter

The longest lasting result of spending the first half of my teens unhappily locked up in a crap boarding school has been an obsession with receiving mail. Every morning the miserable boarders would rush from the refectory, still chewing cold carpet tile toast to congregate around the wooden alphabetical pigeonholes where our post was sorted. I can still remember the heady bliss of finding a letter or, better still, a brown paper parcel from home.

And today, even in the era of electronic communication, there’s still something enormously satisfying about getting proper mail in the post, especially with a handwritten address. Believing in both manners and giving what you enjoy, I send copious thank you letters on a collection of carefully hoarded picture postcards and on my own die stamped Smythson letterhead.

My friends are particularly wonderful on the letter sending front, maybe because many of them also went away to school, and I keep each letter that they send. Which is why I was devastated to discover that my memory box of mail, containing letters, personal invitations & photographs that have been sent to me here in Manhattan was partially destroyed by the employee-caused flood at Manhattan Mini Storage in Chelsea last week.

I’ve peeled apart all the letters, but many were written with a fountain pen and the ink has run beyond redemption. I’m going to have to iron flat all those that have dried and then glue back together the old Verdura box I use to store them. There’s no monetary value to the damage caused but since when has emotion been measurable in dollars? I do hope that incompetent employee feels the weight of his idiocy.

K Mart: who'd a thought it?

Once upon a time, I would burrow through the clothes section of any store, like a pig after truffles, certain in the knowledge that I could always find something to wear in the most low rent of shops. But, as I’ve got older, the desire to hoard mountains of clothing has rather left me, and I am happier with one really good piece rather than twenty cheapo bargains.

As I wandered down to the East Village yesterday to pick up some new bike locks, I was mulling over the lack of pieces that I actually want to wear in my wardrobe. So maybe it’s because clothes were on my mind that I glanced over at the clothing section in K Mart. I have shopped in there at least once a week for the past two years, yet I always sprint straight through to the bike lock or grocery section without even registering that they sell clothes.

That’s probably because this is what the clothing section looks like:

Let me point out that K Mart is not the US equivalent of Britain's Primark, where for almost pennies, the trend conscious budget dresser can pick up fashion forward pieces. It mainly sells clothes from the land that style forgot.

But yesterday I had seen a huge blow up poster of Jaclyn Smith in the store windows and was curious to see what on earth an ex Charlie’s Angel’s fashion collection at K Mart would look like.

And, you know what, it’s not that bad. So not that bad that I actually bought something. Granted it’s more of a stop gap piece, but it was pretty, inexpensive and useful,

I like the detailing,

and that it is made from silk, rather than synthetics, although I will grant that it’s more akin to lining material than anything else.

I just did a Wiki search for Jaclyn Smith and was gobsmacked to discover the following, "Woman's Wear Daily reported that the signature Jaclyn Smith line had the highest consumer awareness of any private label apparel brand in the country." Which is rather chastening for a fashion journalist to discover, and a welcome reminder that fashion doesn't just exist between the pages of Vogue et al.

I also rather liked this silk dress from K Mart’s main collection:

But I needed to be at least three cup sizes smaller in the chest region to have a hope in hell of fitting into my size. Still, it hung well, the stitching wasn’t wonky, and it had these great pleated shoulders. All for the grand total, I think of $34.99.

I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR!

I am stumped, stumped I tell you over what to wear right now. Quite apart from the unseasonal weather (it's 17C here and raining, as opposed to the normal hot & sunny June climate), all my clothes are out of date.

The summer I moved to New York, (2007) was the second year of floaty, tent like smocks and I wafted blissfully around Manhattan. Heels don’t work with smocks (wrong proportions), so I wore primary coloured ballerines & flat sandals everyday which suited me fine as I was dating a laid back guy in Brooklyn and walking everywhere.

Last summer I was busy being important, and breakfast, lunch and dinner-ing my way around the city. Smocks were pretty much dead in the water and, whilst they may have been get away-able with in the East Village, they certainly weren’t going to cut it in the fashion corridors of power, so I invested in armfuls of light silk summer frocks (bought on-line) and the kind of fashion forward vertiginous heels which aren’t a problem when you have fleets of Town Cars at your disposal.

But because I was either at a work dinner or at my desk until past 10pm most nights, and most summer weekends were spent in the office (I even missed my best friend’s wedding, curse you ex-editor-in-chief), I didn’t have the time or inclination to bother buying any casual summer clothes.

Which could be regarded as a mistake, seeing as I am now back on a writer’s salary, those lovely silk frocks are akin to crumpled & faded dishrags after a summer of dripping humidity and repeated dry cleaning and my everyday clothes are now three years out of date.

I want to go shopping, really I do. But there’s an added curve ball, quite apart from my lean bank account. My chest appears to have taken on a life of its own. My previous list of all the clothes I cannot wear owing to disproportional breast size has now grown to just about everything in the shops.

I am fresh out of ideas as to what to wear. Believe me, I've looked everywhere. And there's nothing that fits my shape out there. God only knows what normal women with big breasts do for on-trend dressing who don't have my professional's laser shopping eye.

Right now, I’m living in navy blue 5” leg shorts with a navy long sleeve crisp cotton top, sleeves pushed up, worn with red wedges, & some rolled up leg jeans (this shows my desperation – I NEVER wear jeans) which I wear out with silk blouses & very high heels, and well, that’s about it.

I have a date tonight and have absolutely no idea what to wear. I can hardly turn up to The Setai in short shorts & wedge sandals, and all my dresses from last year aren’t just knackered, they’re too light & waaaay too short for the current unseasonal (rainy) weather.

Bugger.

Great Used Bikes

Evil bastard sticky fingered immoral thieves have stolen my beloved bicycle from outside my apartment whilst I've been travelling. And I am FURIOUS. I'm now down $260 after replacing not just the bike, but the basket & locks too.

I’ve had to replace way too many bikes here in Manhattan. There was the one taken by the police when they (illegally) decided to remove every single bike chained to a lamppost in the East Village & the one taken when I was at a press appointment because I had forgotten to put both locks on*. I sold this flea market buy on after this incident (it was a cruiser with pedal brakes, which was asking for trouble with a malco like me riding it), but this is the first bike, I think, that has just disappeared for no good reason.

And I’m pissed off. It was the best bike I've had here: super well-constructed, with a brilliantly comfy saddle & lovely padded foam handlebars, but I didn’t have anywhere to leave it when I went away apart from the street, and so I took the gamble. And lost.

Anyway, the lovely John from Great Used Bikes delivered its bright blue replacement today.

It has Free Sprit emblazoned across the body, which makes me chuckle. I think this is the third bike I’ve had from John, and I can’t recommend his service enough. He delivers the bikes to your door on a Sunday, properly tuned up, which is more than you can say for the hot boneshakers sold on street corners and in the flea markets here. He attaches baskets, and an I Love NY bell and, if the bike doesn’t feel quite right, he will bring you a different one the next week to try out.

And if you have a disaster he can help too. When evil bastard putative bike thieves did this

to the first bike I bought from him, he brought an acetylene burner into town and removed the busted lock for me. And then brought a new wheel in for me the next weekend when he noticed that the original one had been buckled in the incident.

I can't recommend his service highly enough. Sure, you can buy a shiny new bike for maybe a little less in K Mart or elsewhere, but there's no service, or after-care, &, most importantly, something shiny & new will get stolen within seconds on Manhattan, so that's just a false economy in the long run. (My first bike from John lasted 10 months, and the second 13 months.)

*thus proving my theory that you don’t necessarily need expensive locks, just plenty of them as deterrents.

Back in Manhattan - and settling in

I’ve been back in New York for two days and three nights and have achieved the following:

Thursday: So shattered by Geneva trip & NY journey that beat jetlag & wake at eminently sensible 8.30am. Play on internets until 11am. Sleep until 2pm. Rearrange room. Shower. Faff. Plan to run errands. Fail to run errands.

Finally leave house at 7pm. Go to Soho House reception to pick up video camera. Only two blocks away from apt so just about within capabilities. Buy $17 of fruit & veg at local stall to kickstart regimen minceur. Return home. Do not return home as distracted by sign reading manicure/pedicure $20 two seconds from front door. Return home with orange toes and shell pink fingers. Attempt to watch CSI:NY on Hulu. Fall asleep at 10pm.

Friday: Wake at 0430hrs. Play on internets until 9am. Sleep until 2pm. Write blog. Rearrange room. Shower. Faff. Plan to run errands. Fail to run errands. Speak to sister on Skype and watch the dog hunting for me under sofa on webcam. Finally leave house at 4pm with large empty suitcase to collect essential supplies from Chelsea storage container (Heinz Baked Beans, wine, duvet, scented candles, Champagne, kitchen knives, unsuitable footwear, linen, cosmetics).

Upgrade to large container with shelving unit as fed up with shoe collection falling on head when door is opened. Spend many hours unpacking, sorting & transferring possessions to hand trucks and wheeling through labyrinthine corridors. At bottom of container discover results of recent catastrophic flood (caused by employee incompetence). Box of love letters & entire bag of winter clothes (furs, cashmere, leather gloves, cocktail dresses, woollen day dresses, silk lingerie, Wolfords) sopping. Think about weeping. Sort through wet clothes. Finally leave storage container facility in town car at 830pm with plastic sacks of wet clothes & four cases essential supplies.

Spend 30 minutes hauling plastic sacks & essential supplies up five flights of stairs. Work out that this is equivalent of 25 flights at 25kgs a time. Flatmate returns from LA. Offers to buy supper. Immediately ignore sacks of damp clothes, trowel on foundation in attempt to disguise communal jet lag and walk to dinner at Barbuto underneath Industria SuperStudio.

Lovely outside table, animated conversation & stellar people watching over Prosecco, gnocchi with asparagus & peas. Italian version of pot au chocolat (two spoons). Home. Drape damp clothes around apartment. Collapse at 1230am.

American Airlines aren't always merde

I continually whinge when I have to fly American, the Aeroflot of the 21st century. A dedicated Virgin traveller for years, I’ve grown used to on-demand TV & movies (ones I actually want to see), a sense of humour, & imaginative food to dull the Cattle Class experience. AA is not known for ticking any of these boxes.

They were the preferred carrier of the axis of evil last year, and this time I needed to fly LAX-LHR-JFK & AA was super cheap, so I suck it up when I have to. The flight from LAX to LHR was misery in a metal tube; my vegetarian meal had been forgotten, the films were crap, the cabin crew were surly strop artists and I had a woman whose BMI was middle-aged in the teeny tiny seat next to me.

Fast forward. AA’s Heathrow Terminal 3 check-in is unfortunately bang next to Virgin’s shiny new flagship area, which makes AA’s section look even more low rent than normal. The flashy AA check-in machines of JFK & LAX are nowhere to be seen. Instead the scruffy desks are stuffed around a corner and usually manned by cheerless automatons.

But none of this mattered yesterday. Running true to form, I had arrived late at my father’s house for my lift to the airport, and, after he cheerily dropped me off kerbside,
I skidded across the hall with my cart on two wheels convinced that AA’s usual dismal queues would make me miss my plane.

There was no one there. Some SMILING check-in people and no travellers. Not one.

Turned out there were maybe 50 passengers on the 747, so I had two seats for my junk, and a row of five seats across the aisle which I turned into nest central with armfuls of pillows & lovely soft fleecy blankets.

We were delayed on the apron for 1hr30 but I was glad of the rest after my Geneva dash, & curled up like a very happy dormouse in my mental geraniums, with ample chocolate supplies and free copies of the high class literature on offer (Hello!, InStyle).

Of course the movies on offer were at the wrong end of dire (New in Town, Confessions of a Shopaholic) but my supper expectations were confounded by a delicious supper (al dente pasta, fresh Italian bread, Le Vache qui Rit cheese, beurre d’Isigny). And when we arrived (early) at JFK, the arrival gate was maybe 150 yards from Immigration.

Where there was no line. Let me repeat: no line. Of course, AA can’t be held responsible for the global downturn in the economy & resulting lack of travellers but I was very happy not to have to wait behind 400 people (the hideous JFK norm).

And the upside was a very cheery, flirty Immigration guy who wasn’t having to deal with thousands of travel sore passengers, and who high fived me after inspecting my O-1 visa (it’s an Alien of, erm, Exceptional Ability visa which is useful for spuriously impressing purposes and therefore getting through Customs quickly).

It got better. My luggage was already waiting for me on the carousel. SuperShuttle arrived in ten mins not the estimated 25 and, for the very first time dropped me off first not last. (Am trying to be good and not blow $60 on cabs from the airport every time I fly.)

I don’t know what I did to deserve such a blissful journey home, but I am hoping it’s a good omen for the next two months here in NYC.