dames and wigs

Thank you, Leah! I'd also rather write my books than pink books, though I did watch a glorious 1979 interview with Barbara Cartland last night. She was dressed in full diamente fig (or were the shiners real? Cripes!) and was being interviewed by a man who looked as though he was wearing the worst wig in the world. I was fascinated by both him and the Dame, whose self-confidence and eyelash batting was enviable. Her books are less pink than dreamy silver. She definitely had a gift, though I did not, for one second (ok, just for a second), wish it were mine - except for the book sales of course. Dreamy silver turns to gold ...

If only we did learn from history, Camille. Perhaps this downturn will teach us something although I doubt it. It will be interesting, though, to see whether the 'I want it and I want it now' generation will learn a little patience and find something attractively novel in the old thrill of looking forward to things. They may find it something of a relief!

Apropos of nothing at all, I've suddenly decided to return to sheets and blankets, using the duvet as a kind of eiderdown (remember them?) Believe it or not, the change has proven quite a weapon in the fight against my chronic insomnia. Is it the weight? Is it the comforting presence of wool, harking back to a childhood in which duvets were treated with the gravest suspicion? (Whatever next? Showers? Horror!)

crunch time for cute corruption

What do we read when we're in a mess? I've fingers crossed that young adults will, as their parents downsize their Prada pouches and call time on pedicures for the under 12s, suddenly find the 'cute corruption', to steal from and paraphrase Naomi Wolf in the New York Times a year or two ago, SO last week and turn, with relief, to historical fiction. If things are bad now, consider Yolanda's plight in Blue Flame or Raimon's in White Heat. When perspective is needed, blood and guts (in both senses of the latter word) beat gloss'n'goss any time.

The reaches of the global financial collapse really could call time on the pink books, as I call them, with the loss of Daddy's bonus severely diminishing the fathomless financial liquidity so crucial to the lives of Gossip Girl, A list and Clique characters, to say nothing of their legions and legions of kitty-katty-copy-catters. When everybody has to shop at Walmart and make do with last year's mobile phone, it may become cooler to identify with Meg or Jo March than with Blair Waldorf.

Dream on! Though we are doing the bailing, the bankers still seem to be banking. It will be some time before the Prada pouch shrinks, if it ever does. Reassured or enraged? I swither, sometimes quite violently, between the two.