Alexandra Shulman’s Notebook
Quitting my dream job is the best thing I’ve ever done
I’LL miss hearing the barracking John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today. Having been on the sharp end of his interrogation technique, I know all too well how it feels to have his accusatory questions lobbed at you with an assumption of guilty-until-proven-innocent.
He was merciless – even though the only charge against me was being part of a fashion world blamed for press-ganging women into agonising high heels.
Still, in true Stockholm Syndrome style, he remained a trusty part of my morning routine.
The news that he is leaving Today after 32 years has also triggered memories of deciding to leave my own long-held job as Editor-in-Chief of Vogue. Making the decision to give up a prestigious role and take a leap into the unknown is never easy. Easy is staying where you are.
Humphrys spoke of knowing that, although it was going to be hugely difficult to leave such a large part of his life, the time had come to get on with the many other things he also wanted to do.
It was exactly that thought which propelled me to resign from Vogue after 25 years. One morning I woke up and realised that the future was an open door and not something to be fearful of. And I wanted a future, not just a past. If I remained at the wonderful job where I had been for so long, I would miss out on exploring the world beyond my comfortable mink-lined rut.
Of course nobody ever believes that anybody voluntarily resigns from a big job, preferring the more dramatic narrative that you were pushed out to your greener pastures. And one has to get through the King is Dead, Long Live the King moment. But once you’ve learnt to deal with all of that, I can reassure Humphrys that the view from the other side is pretty glorious. You can even get an occasional lie-in.
Smarten up, ladies, you are NOT thick
WHY do so many women automatically assume it must be us who’s the ignorant party? I have never had any kind of cosmetic intervention so imagine my reaction on learning that, although the results of a regular mammogram revealed no malignancy, it showed a possibility of ‘silicone leakage’.
Did I think they’d sent my doctor another person’s test results – which was clearly the case. No. I thought I must be the thicko who didn’t know that breasts naturally contained silicone.
A nation divided ... by net curtains
WHERE would thrillers be without the device of spying through uncovered windows? You, the new Netflix psycho rom- com, relies heavily on peeping tommery for its stalker plotline, while the domestic chiller Woman In The Window has been on the bestseller lists for weeks – even as its author Dan Mallory has been revealed as fabricating his own life-story and not just his pseudonym A. J. Finn. How comfortable you are with the idea of people being able to look into your home from the street is one of the great divides. Perhaps it comes from a childhood living in a second floor flat, but I have always hated the idea of blocking out the world and the light with the pulled down blinds and voile drapes of most of our neighbours.
One of my most depressing moments was when, on moving to my first house, we installed some net curtains in the bedroom to shield us from the house directly opposite. I felt trapped. And the first thing I did the day my husband moved out was rip them out in some curious gesture of liberation.
But others feel completely the opposite. I have a friend who, every time she visits, never fails to mention how weird she finds it that we happily sit with light on and the curtains open at night allowing anyone who wishes front row seats to our life.
Now I’m taking our public exposure even further. As I write, the garden is filled with hard hats and chainsaws as a 100ft lime is being cut down (and thank you to the reader who suggested the catalpa bignonioides as replacement). We are going to reclaim the light but also the gain the gaze of even more of our neighbours. Let’s hope they don’t see anything too sinister.
My online shopping hell? Sacha Distel!
ONE of the many advantages of shopping in the physical, rather than digital space, is being spared the banality of algorithmic preferences. A random click and you are condemned to a lifetime of suggestions of things that you would never want popping up on your screen.
It’s why we need people like Doug Putman who has stepped in to save HMV and rescue 100 stores. Walking into a shop and riffling through the racks or shelves encourages us to discover things that don’t necessarily conform to what we already have, whether that be music, books or clothes.
Conversely, e- commerce tends to lead us to simply repeat buy what we know we like, unimaginatively preserving our tastes in aspic. Just because I once bought what I regarded as a cool, recherché cover version of a Burt Bacharach song on iTunes, it doesn’t mean I want Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head by Sacha Distel to endlessly pop up as a personal recommendation.
The PC cowards are rewriting history
THE BAFTA crew are gathering in town for tonight’s awards. All the talk is of how unreal it was for the highly-acclaimed Green Book to portray a black and a white mans’ road trip through the Deep South in 1962 without hearing one mention of the n word. Hollywood’s scaredycat political correctness is playing havoc with authenticity. UNREALISTIC: Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen star in Green Book
Now it’s Becks’ turn to hand over £100m
TIME for a new raft of the very wealthy to step up to the philanthropy plate and emulate David Harding, the hedge fund manager who has donated £ 100 million to Cambridge University to fund students.
Philanthropists have traditionally been people who have made their fortunes in the most lucrative businesses of the age. And what are these? Entertainment, sport, retail, property and tech.
So over to you, Victoria and David Beckham, E. L. James, Mick Jagger, Ed Sheeran, Jony Ive and Bernie Ecclestone. Your country needs you and your name carved into the wall of a museum or university college.