Alexandra Shulman’s Notebook
health and safety element skewered that one – and ballgowns and tiaras were determinedly ruled out.
While Meghan is clearly a different woman to Catherine, she will also want to be seen as her own person, judged by her own standards and values.
The people around her will be trying to protect her from the comparisons with Diana that hover in the background, whether that be in her style of dress, charitable works or relationship with the media.
By having raised the subject so publicly, Clooney will have made their job – and that of the Sussexes – much harder.
Why it’s right for pupils to strike
I HOPE headteachers have been more tolerant of their pupils’ climate change walkout than my son’s was when he joined the tuition fee demos some years back. At Westminster, his posh London school, he was threatened with expulsion by the headmaster, as he had been absent all afternoon because the demo had been kettled by the police. So much for the independent intellectual engagement public schools are meant to encourage.
Time to shed that baggage...
AN INSTAGRAM post of a minuscule suitcase captioned ‘carry-on only for NYFW [New York Fashion Week]’ from an ex-colleague of mine tells it all. Carry-on is the new status symbol in travel. Forget the days of trolleys piled high with Vuitton trunks. Now every cool person wants to appear as if they’ve managed to pack their impeccable style into the smallest possible space, with no ungainly sweating around the baggage carousel at the other end.
I asked her what was in there: three coats, five shirts, three trousers, five T-shirts, two pairs of shoes, make-up.
I believe her… just. But others might think that she’d had her real luggage flown ahead to her hotel, as many celebrity and professional travellers do. Travelling in a separate cabin to your children might be questionable but travelling on a separate flight to your suitcases is guilt-free, if costly, nirvana.
At last, I found a use for Beeb’s batty app
I DON’T think I’m alone in not being able to get my head around what BBC Sounds is meant to be.
I know that the Beeb is desperate for a younger audience and think that podcasts are the new rock ’n’ roll… but is that it? Anyway, since I don’t want to be thought of as a dozy oldster unable to adapt to the new, I’ve persevered and finally found a use for Sounds.
Since you can listen to what you want, when you want, on the app, I’ve discovered that tuning into Any Questions whenever I go for a run is a great boost to stamina.
Infuriation with the party lines of some Right-wing lunatic or intransigent Leftie spurs me to speed up more than any power song has ever done, while composing my own – of course, brilliant and utterly original – responses makes the time whizz by.
All About Eve? It was all about me!
LAST WEEK I saw All About Eve on the West End stage. Gillian Anderson takes on the role of Margo Channing, the monstrous and insecure movie star at the peak of her career, undermined by the calculating ingénue Eve Harrington, played by Lily James. ‘Funny business, a woman’s career,’ muses Margo. ‘The things you drop on your way up the ladder.’
Although the particular qualities she mentions, femininity and helplessness, would nowadays be thought old-fashioned, she has a point.
There are definitely trade-offs that women, especially, make to achieve career success and often some of the aspects of our personality that we may have rather liked, have to get dumped.
A touching vulnerability doesn’t marry well with power. Charmingly vague is incompatible with brisk efficiency.
Gentle is not easy to team with decisiveness. In time you become different to who you, but possibly only you, still recognise as the person you started off.
Many of us have had Eves in our life – mine was actually called Eve. She took over my job, my boyfriend, even my car, but I was still young and therefore felt none of the vulnerability that Margo experiences as she watches the younger version of herself hungrily enthral those around her.
Now, were I in the same position with a voracious doppelgänger waiting in the wings, I might well feel more threatened. And like Margo, question whether the tradeoff was worth it.