Further Under the Duvet (4 page)

A dash across town only to find they’re ‘running late’, so we go for a cup of tea. Or at least we try. We hover at the entrance to the gilt-ridden tearoom, entirely ignored, while other fashion people bank up behind us. Finally we’re led to a table, but when the waiter approaches a table of
Vogue
staff before us, Liz yells, ‘We were here first.’ Alas, he pays us no heed. (God, fashion is
so
bitchy.)

Then to the crammed art deco ballroom where I’ve never seen such a concentration of fabulous handbags. On our seats, our first goody bag of the day – Diptych shower gel – has ‘disappeared’. A spare is found which Marie graciously offers to me. I accept. I have no shame.

The music starts, it’s all very French – accordions and chanteuses – but right behind me is a man with a MASSIVE bunch of flowers and for the entire show all I can hear is the rustling of cellophane.

And down the black marble catwalk they come, pretty party frock after pretty party frock after pretty party frock. Lots of black and pink satin, with circles of jet beading, creating a doily effect. Soft wrap-over tops and flared ballerina skirts in belle époque prints, then comes a fresh wave of doily-covered party frocks and I realize I’m a teeny bit bored. Jaded already? (I really
am
a natural.)

Alice Temperley emerges to take her bow and for my rustling friend with the flowers, this is his moment. He surges towards the stage, but Alice skips away like a startled faun and the rustler falls back, looking foolish.

By now I’m unsettled, confused even. I’d always thought Fashion was a big joke played on ordinary people, that when
Anna Wintour leads a standing ovation of a show featuring girls wearing only snorkels and gold lamé knickers, that it’s a big ‘let’s make fun of the non-fashion peasants’ conspiracy. But so far, everything I’ve seen has been disappointingly
wearable
.

Now this is much more like it. The atmosphere is very buzzy, dry ice swirling, people wandering around drinking mini-Moët bottles through straws and extreme seating disarray. And I’ve hit goody bag paydirt! A Phillo corsage, a Filofax, a Pucci-style make-up bag filled with I Coloniali products and – prize of prizes – two Krispy Kreme doughnuts, apparently one of the most addictive substances on the planet. At a promotion in Ohio, when they wouldn’t give a teenage boy any more free doughnuts (he’d already had about sixteen), he attacked the staff.

The lights dim, Shaft-style seventies music starts and the first girl clopping down the catwalk is in a sliver of glitter and a pink hooker’s fur coat, followed by a girl in a bikini, a black fur coat and high knee boots. Mucho sparkly disco-wear and very Studio 54 – everything is slashed to the waist, front and back, and we see our first nipple of the day. Then our second. Then our third. It’s a veritable knocker-fest with dresses ‘accidentally’ sliding off shoulders and down to the waist and coats being worn with nothing underneath except knickers. Almost everything is totally unwearable –
exactly
what I’d been expecting.

Afterwards, everyone is terribly sniffy about it. Someone says the clothes looked as though they’d been run up by
students in some back room. All show and no substance, says someone else. Well, I thought, hugging my goody bag closer, I liked it.

En route, I eat a Krispy Kreme and although extremely pleasing – delicious, in fact – it doesn’t plunge me into a week-long doughnut binge. Maybe after the Ohio incident they removed the addictive component?

We’re now running an hour late, but never mind: I have high hopes for Boudicca. Alexander McQueen described them as ‘brave’. ‘Brave’ usually being a euphemism for ‘mental’.

When they finally let us in the smell hits me: damp earth. The stage is covered in scrubby, muddy grass and weeds (all real); it smells like a sports day. Some of the seats are in the ‘field’ and as I watch fashion ladies get mired by their spiky heels in the mud, I fear for the models.

And here we go! The first girl out looks as if she works with nuclear waste – wearing a baggy, black boiler-suit with a hood that covers her entire face, but in lovely floaty fabric: what Darth Vader might wear for a romantic dinner. Then comes a similar rig-out in white plastic with a beekeeper’s veil, followed by a hooded sou’wester and matching over-trousers – that a mackerel fisherman would wear in a Force 8 Gale – but in a purple, metallic see-through fabric. Next, a gorgeous white fur coat except that someone has taken green gaffer tape and wound it round and round the girl’s shoulders and upper body. Post-
Apocalypse
headbands, French Foreign Legion hats, Lawrence of Arabia veils, lots of glaring faces – when you can see them – and Swampy hair: very warrior girl. Clothes that will have people stuttering in disgust, ‘And
I’m meant to wear that to Sainsbury’s, am I?’ But it’s affecting and exciting and if it’s toned down a little (a lot?) you wouldn’t be laughed at in the street.

Finally get to the bottom of the models’ silly walk – it’s so their legs will look thin for the photographers. Well, that makes sense because they look like tree-trunks ordinarily. Er…

As soon as they start picking their ridiculous way down the catwalk, I’m in an agony of longing. A model with plaits swirled around her ears like two Danish pastries passes in a circus-print fifties-style shirt-waister. Then a model with hair like a brioche, wearing a tweed suit trimmed with spangles. And a model with hair like a batch loaf in a petrol-blue coat, patterned with lilac triangles. There are little felt pixie hats, net face-coverers dotted with what looks like Smarties and excellent two-toned shoes with bold, big-top stripes. (The theme is a circus one.) It’s fun, cheery and knuckle-gnawingly beautiful. All too soon, it’s over and everyone is off to parties – there’s one at Hugo Boss, another at Fendi – but I’m exhausted from all that yearning, I have to go home and lie down.

First published in
Marie Claire,
September 2004
.

How to justify buying as many shoes as you want in five easy-to-follow steps

1) The economy is slowing down, so we’ve got to keep spending in order to avoid a recession.

2) As my mother always says, if you’re doing a job, do it properly. If you’ve gone to the trouble of going out shopping, make it worth your while – never take the lazy way out by buying just one pair.

3) Your current ones might be stolen by a rabid inner-city fox, so it’s vital to have a back-up pair. Several, actually.

4) Everyone needs a hobby.

5) You need to match your new bag. You can’t go out in last season’s ones. Honestly, do they want you to be a public laughing-stock?

As if you ever need a reason, here are my top five reasons to buy even more handbags

1) You need to match your new shoes. You can’t go out with last season’s one. Honestly, do they want you to be a public laughing-stock?

2) What else are you going to carry your Maltesers in?

3) A second hobby is always nice…

4) That rabid inner-city fox could strike again and it mightn’t be shoes this time…

5) Beautiful handbags are works of art. It’s culture, innit?

Ice cream can be found in many flavours – but these are the best!

1) Triple chocolate, chocolate chip, chocolate-coated, thigh-exploding special. (Served with chocolate sauce and anti-cellulite serum.)

2) Vanilla – the unsung hero.

3) Brown bread – strange but true!

4) Baileys – it’s the one thing I miss now that I don’t drink any more.

5) Strawberry – we need to eat five helpings of fruit or veg a day, what better way to do it?

So, you’ve met the bronzed body of your dreams, the question is, what movie to go and see. The only ones that fit the bill in this situation are:

1)
Roman Holiday
– if you don’t see him wiping away a sneaky tear at the end, get rid of him.

2)
Raising Arizona
– if he says, ‘Blimey, what was that all about?’ also hurry him to the door.

3)
Seeking Five Metal Jacket Men Still Standing on a Thin Red Toor of Dooty
– or any other of those war movie things starring the likes of Bruce Willis smeared with photogenic soot and wearing an ivy-covered helmet. You’ll be bored out of your skull, of course, but he’ll think you’re the coolest girl he’s ever met, for suggesting it.

4)
Monsoon Wedding
– you’ll both feel so uplifted afterwards that anything could happen.

5) Any porno film from the local video shop – the LAUGH you’ll have!

Or if you’re just going to admire the actors…

1) Harrison Ford. I know he’s getting a little mature these days, but all the same… I’ve never really recovered from
Working Girl
, the bit where he takes his shirt off at work and all the girls cheer… Ahhh…

2) Philip Seymour Hoffman. I can’t understand it. He’s freckly, a bit chunky, and has perhaps a touch of the gingers, but he’s such a great actor.

3) Brendan Gleason. Ditto.

4) George Clooney. I never really got him until I saw him in
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
, then everything changed. You were right, I was wrong – he’s YUM.

5) Likewise Billy Bob Thornton. I couldn’t see why women kept marrying him until I saw him in
The Man Who Wasn’t There
and he was so understatedly brilliant in it that I’d nearly marry him myself. (Assuming he was interested, of course, and I’ve no reason to believe he might be. I think it might be my Giant’s Causeway teeth.)

First written for Penguin Books’ website, 2002
.

Film sets are exciting places. There’s the chance of clocking (hopefully) famous actors without their make-up on, or of seeing stars slipping into another star’s caravan for sexual jiggery-pokery. There’s even the opportunity to feel part of the creation of something wonderful, if you’re that way inclined. But what most people don’t realize is that the best thing about film sets is the on-set catering.

Food is central to the cinematic process, and the catering is as much for the massive team of techies (cameramen, soundmen, etc.) as for the actors. Long, intense days, spent under boiling-hot lights, doing the same thing over and over and over again until it’s right – if they didn’t get regular nosh, they’d be hitting the deck like Victorian ladies who’d been flashed at.

I happen to be furnished with this insider knowledge because when a film was made of my novel
Watermelon
and I got to visit the set, I was given the choice of – get this –
three
delicious hot lunches and when I couldn’t choose between banoffi pie or apple crumble and custard for dessert, they gave me both. Then mid-afternoon, there was the mother of all tea breaks. You’ve never seen anything like it: hordes of techies and extras, desperate for a sugar kick, descended on the catering shed where cake and biscuits were being dispatched like famine relief at a Red Cross feeding station. The catering
team were barely able to tear the cellophane off the boxes of biscuits and cakes to keep pace with demand. And such high-quality confectionery! Chocolate Swiss rolls, Battenburg, fruit cake and the big tins of chocolate bikkies that only ever normally appear at Christmas time. You know the ones I mean – they contain at least two biscuits individually covered in gold foil. (One is usually mint cream and the other orange cream, which I find a bit of a let-down, but still.)

So when news reached me that one of France’s best-known film-makers (Christian Clavier) was going to make a – French – film of another of my novels (this time
Last Chance Saloon
), my first thought was not of winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes but of what I’d get fed when I visited the set. If an Irish catering crew could manage to pull off such delicious nosh, just think of what the French and their culinary skill would produce. Foie gras all the way, was the conclusion of everyone I spoke to. Boeuf bourguignon, crème brûlée, tartes Tatin, crêpes, cheeses so powerful they could almost sing and dance… Excited? Bien sûr!

Finally the food-filled mist dispersed and I realized what an honour it was to have a book chosen to be made into a French film. As an intellectual friend said, ‘Everyone knows the French make the best films in the world.’

And although I agree, to my shame I am woefully ignorant of French film. This is because

a) I am not French

b) er… um… actually I’ve no other excuse.

But I’ve seen enough to conclude that they are mostly about beautiful pouty girls called Solange, wearing extremely red
lipstick, brazenly parading around in their pelt and having sex at the drop of a chapeau (hard to believe that France was a Catholic country, how come they escaped the guilt?), while men called Serge, wearing black polo-necks, slim-fitting trousers and unfeasible sideburns, pace the bedroom, smoking millions of fags. The films always seem to be shot in extremely depressing bluish light and dialogue is sparse but meaningful. ‘L’amour est mort.’ ‘La vie, la mort – quelle différence?’ Er, oui, exactement…

Suddenly I was wondering why they’d picked
Last Chance Saloon
. For starters it’s a comedy and I wasn’t aware of many funny French films. I know those
Monsieur Hulot
yokes are classified as comedies but they’re as funny as being savaged by a rabid dog. But just a minute, everyone said, what about
Amélie
? That was funny. (It was.) And
Delicatessen
, that was funny too. (It was.) And as Himself said, the French might make loads of light-hearted stuff that we never see. What do we know about what they do in the privacy of their own country?

Then, you know, once I thought about it, I realized there’s a fair bit of sex in
Last Chance Saloon
. And one of the characters, Tara, smokes a lot –
and
is on an eternal quest to find genuine long-last lipstick. And although it’s a comedy, it’s a comedy about a young man who gets cancer. Plenty of opportunity to muse on la vie versus la mort. Yes, I was beginning to understand.