ALEXANDRA SHULMAN
What DOES one wear to go on a demo?
NOBODY could mistake me for a political activist. I was at university in the days when students held sit-ins but I was far more concerned with my new Fiorucci jacket than I was with squatting on the floor of the student union in the company of hairy guys who looked as if they should be in Jethro Tull.
But due to the chaos of the Brexit negotiations – and a conviction that the information the country voted on in 2016 is not the same information before us now – I felt compelled to j oin yesterday’s People’s Vote march in London.
I’m well aware of the fact that we’ve already had a People’s Vote – it was called a referendum – and I would have been happier had the march not taken place under such a sappy name. I also wish its aims were a little clearer in terms of exactly what that vote might be.
However, I decided to overcome those reservations and instead concentrated on the detail of my participation. After all, the lack of detail is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Firstly, who was I going to march alongside? I’ve been receiving rallying emails and texts for weeks but I wasn’t affiliated to any particular group and felt queasy about marching under any one banner. However, the prospect of trolling along on my own was daunting, so I decided to behave as if I were a royal at a cocktail party, moving between groups of people to avoid getting stuck with a bunch of bores.
Then there was the question of what to wear. Obviously, clothes are not the key question when you are taking part in a demonstration on the future of the country but, for me, clothes are always a question. Demos are an occasion where it is not necessary to suffer for the sake of beauty so, in the end, I stuck on a pair of trainers, green corduroy trousers with big pockets to avoid carrying a bag, and a threeyear-old velvet jacket hoping the rain held off.
In fact, I had been photographed in the same outfit for a newspaper article on Ageless Style last year, but I don’t suppose any of my fellow marchers noticed.
Sadly, I had to leave the march before it finished to rush to the London Film Festival premiere of the biopic A Private War in which Rosamund Pike plays my close friend Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times war reporter who was slaughtered in Homs six years ago.
Had she still been alive, Marie would have been marching too. But she would also have understood the need to rush off before the end, in time to get home and change into the evening’s party dress and heels.
Men NOT invited
A FEW nights ago I gave a talk for BroadMinded and Allbright, two new women-only networks. These kind of female members’ clubs are on the rise in many large cities. The a udi e nce was 100 per cent working women in their late 20s and early 30s. They were ambitious and curious but with a great sense of humour. How t i mes change. I compared this group with my friends at that age. I doubt any of us would have considered an all-woman evening, discussing how to make the best of our lives, a night well spent.
Although in the late 1980s women occupied far fewer senior roles than now – we thought that it was by getting on with the men at work that we were most likely to succeed.
It didn’t mean we weren’t close to our female colleagues but after work we were far more likely to be in the pub (or more likely wine bar) forging relationships with guys, both professional and personal.
Instaboasting, the new social menace
BY ALL accounts, Prince Andrew was fit to be tied over Harry and Meghan announcing her pregnancy at his daughter’s wedding.
Totally understandable. We all know how infuriating it is when another member of the family newsbombs your own important event.
Instagram has i ncreased the likelihood of this. Instaboasting – posting up the news of an offspring or partner’s triumph on the social media site – means that nowadays, guests will often arrive far more interested in that second’s gossip than they are in one’s own long-planned moment in the spotlight.
Blonde addiction
BLONDE is known as the crack of hair colour in the trade. Once you get a taste for it, you keep wanting more. Lighter and lighter you go until, before you know it, you’re a blonderexic, unable to give up the habit and needing a colourist to manage the perilous withdrawal from peroxide back to the safety of mouse.
Park cafe where you can’t spend cash
OUR local park has gone cashfree. Since most of the visitors are under seven years old, it’s rather a sad state of affairs now that they can’t go to t he cafe and buy their own sweets and soft drinks. Or perhaps they are all being told to just tap their parents’ credit card. Possibly not the best way to get an early understanding of the value of money.
Milkman delivers
THIS year’s Man Booker Prize was a magnificent occasion, held under the flying buttresses of London’s Guildhall, with guests served honey-laced tarte tatin courtesy of the bees that live on the roof of Fortnum & Mason’s Piccadilly store, and actors Fiona Shaw and Jimmy Nesbitt in attendance. The winning novel, Milkman, sounds a challenging read. With no character or place names and occasionally very long paragraphs, the author Anna Burns is testing our tolerance to the limit.
But for all the criticism of books such as this being too rarefied and unpopular, it’s wonderful that the prize exists and the Man Group supports it. Culture should be popular but it should also introduce ideas you have never considered.
Now that the BBC is employing EastEnders’ Danny Dyer in period dress to front its new history series and our national museums and galleries are under increased pressure to mount mainstream blockbusters to secure Government funding, it’s vital to safeguard the experimental and the difficult. Otherwise there’ll be nothing left in the land of Shakespeare but wall-to-wall Love Island and pointless diet books.