Men like Boris make such a drama about losing weight
Alexandra Shulman
THIS week my 23-year-old son and I escaped the political chaos of the UK for a couple of days of culture in Paris. The riots had quieted and the city was calm and twinkling with Christmas lights.
It was the first time we had visited the French capital together for many years, although when Sam was little he would often join me there for a few days during Paris Fashion Week.
We would eat steak frites, share a bedroom and visit the sights in between my fashion shows. Exactly what we did on this trip. But this time was so different. Because from the moment we arrived at Gare du Nord, it was as if we had stepped into another country, not just in the obvious geographical sense but emotionally and psychologically too.
A strange foreign country in which I had become the child and Sam the adult.
‘Look out, Mum!’ he kept saying as we navigated the crazy Parisian traffic, presuming I was unable to remember the cars would be coming from the opposite direction.
Instead of being that teenager who used to loiter miles behind or storm ahead (anything to pretend that he wasn’t in the company of a parent), he kindly guided me by the arm through the streets or kept looking back to check I hadn’t somehow wandered off and got lost.
He fixed my non-functioning iPhone in a couple of swipes. Ordered meals in impressive enough French to stop the waiters looking uncomprehendingly at me before they answered in flawless English. Manned the GPS and mapped our Metro routes. And gave me a whistlestop briefing on Picasso’s Blue period as we waited in line for the beautiful exhibition of that artist’s work at the Musée d’Orsay. It was wonderful… kind of.
I was delighted to discover that he was so competent. I was touched by his solicitude. But as the hours passed, it made me feel more and more elderly, as if I had suddenly become somebody who could no longer manage by myself.
In his company I ceased to function properly, increasingly untrusting of my own ability and reliant on his.
The only aspect that hadn’t changed, naturally, is that I paid for it all.
Back on British soil, maternal domination was happily resumed. I nagged him to check he had his passport and not to leave his bag on the train before chivvying him to get a move on as we rushed to the taxi queue.
Once home, I cooked supper and dug out the Vitamin C for his cold. As a parent, you spend so much time wondering when the heavy burden of care for your children will lighten. But now I’ve seen the future and learnt that when it does, you really miss it.
Hold the front page: Man goes on diet
BORIS JOHNSON has joined the cohort of men who considers his weight-loss a matter of public interest. By his own account, he has managed to lose a dramatic 12 lb in two weeks (several of those pounds might have been shed as a result of getting a good haircut). He follows in the illustrious steps of previous political male dieters – Tom Watson, Nigel Lawson, Sir Nicholas Soames – but Boris has decided to go public and fill us in on the details of his regime, crowing in an article that he is now lighter and brighter. I’ve often noticed that men seem to lose weight faster and with more dramatic effects than women. Within weeks their chubby cheeks have been swapped for sunken hollows, their suits hanging somewhat sadly off their new frame because they haven’t got round to buying anything new. They regale us with their discovery that, if they hold off the potatoes, bread, spaghetti bolognese and rioja, the pounds just drop away, with the same excitement as if they had just worked out the structure of DNA.
By contrast, women tend to keep their dieting quiet, preferring to downplay their commitment by muttering something about it being ‘stress’ if you mention how slim they have become, or saying it was all because they had taken up yoga – which famously loses you no weight at all.
Boris’s new svelte persona will no doubt be some compensation for the fact that he’s not about to pocket those keys to No10 any time soon.
Or will that cause him to relapse back to his favoured chorizo and cheese midnight snacks and a bottle of vino collapso?
Yellow vests are so yesterday, darling
THERE was no sign of any gilets jaunes on the streets of Paris but last week the high-viz movement crossed the Channel and gilets were worn at pro-Brexit protests that blocked three of London’s main bridges.
One thing’s for sure. That’s the end of this autumn’s fashion trend for yellow.
Honest Kirstie has it all wrapped up
I’M A fan of Kirstie Allsopp because, whether intentionally or not, she is always winding people up. Her comment, in a recent interview, that she didn’t have the time to do her own gift-wrapping, while someone she employed was busy at the task in the next-door room, provoked even more outrage than her revelation that she destroyed her children’s iPads this summer.
At least, unlike many celebrities, Kirstie acknowledges the team of helpers who keep the Allsopp household on track.
Obviously, she needs to hire help since she’s rarely off television in her cheerful wrap dresses appearing to be wildly interested in how to clothe home-made pipecleaner figures.
More importantly though, she recognises that gift-wrapping is an activity with an abysmal appreciation v time-spent ratio.
No child (or husband) cares that you have spent hours picking out colour-co-ordinated paper and ribbon or managed to make a book look like a bottle.
And that’s exactly the kind of calculation canny Kirstie has made a fortune paying attention to.
Only a nanny state can save us now
THE new Mary Poppins film is set to be the biggest grossing of Christmas. When P.L. Travers published the book in 1934, she was clever enough to recognise the fictional nanny’s popularity would depend on portraying her conventional middle-class employers as utterly feeble and hopeless.
If only Mary and her carpetbag could float into the House of Commons and sort out the overgrown children in there.