you're so vain

So I caved in and bought Grazia magazine the other day. Spring is coming, and I need to study shoes and sandals, possibly handbags. Mmmm, I thought, Delicious! But picking up the mag I saw there was an insert included, another magazine rather, and thought Oh tops it's Grazia Casa so I can get into gardening mood which is going to take more than a push and shove (of my mower as well).

But then I saw it was Grazia UOMO and groaned. Grazia MAN. Oh well for one euro ninety I could leave it around for my jeans-below-the-bum sons.

Now while I wait for my obstinate computer to download I have been flicking through it. Oh my goodness! What has happened to the Italian man? Have I always been so blind? Fine, I love gay men and their delicate taste, but who are all these girly guys??

Flipping past the young things I have been trying to find a mature Italian male only to find - what? Tanned faces and stylish wrinkles, flat eyes and flawless shoes, rolled up trousers and not a yacht in sight?!

What a festival of vanity! Is it because I have been too long in the mountains with messy-haired men with panda tans? With their gorgeous wrinkles and steely thighs?

And worse - or even more twisted - am I wrong to expect a bloke to not care how he looks while I am allowed to pore over designer shoes?

Please, please! Tell me there is someone out there who thinks WHITE JEANS ON MEN ARE A CRIME!

Losing my mojo

That's it, it's gone. I've lost it. A series of brutal things and I am unhinged, wishing I could plant blind happiness on my face.

The Japan earthquake, and here am I fretting over bills, and now bombing in Libya, while I am off skiing on melting snow, depressed because the season of hot thighs is over!

How superficial, how privileged, how unnecessary are we. I look outside and see not the keen growth of spring but roses I should have pruned, the thick wet grass, a sore back approaching. What a moaner!

Basta. This divorcée has to bring back her mojo. Stare at the blossom buds on the cherry trees, live the season, be grateful, re-learn simplicity.

A spring clean of the mind!

let me shipwreck your thighs

They are Dylan Thomas' words, I can't claim them. We giggled and swooned over them when we were schoolgirls in tunics and ties, dreaming madly. We imagined pale cool thighs and something coming at us, rocking, hard, a wonderful sea-smell, our faces flushed. It wasn't vulgar it was poetic, as poetic as were Thomas' words, damp and mist-filled, taken to bed. It wouldn't hurt it would be sublime.

(I don't think my daughter thinks of it quite like this. Oh, how we were so keen and literary. Oh, how Facebook reporting has altered all of this.)

And now that we are older, and have been shipwrecked many times over, in fact our debris are scattered over the seabed, how does it feel? What have we learnt of sea vessels in the night?

Ask any older woman of love. Often, she won't mind speaking of sexual specifics. What she likes, where she feels she still has to travel, who were her most joyful lovers. There are those of us who have strayed, who have left good men or men who were abusive. There are those of us whose child-bearing years became unbearable and, converted to suckling mothers, we lost ourselves and then rebelled, wanting more with an explosive tenderness learned from motherhood itself. There are those of us who thrive on violence, who need an edge, who like intrigue and deceit or the freshness of younger men.

Then there are those of us who, entwined in a busy throbbing life, so fatigued at the end of the day, brain fitful and awake, suddenly, wretchedly, find themselves lovestruck, struck down by love, wilting and unmoored.

Dreaming again, like a schoolgirl in a tunic and laddered tights.

This may be the spring of sluicing, shipwrecked thighs.

the things we do for money

Not love? Nah, not today. Living in today's Italy makes one wonder about love. And beauty. And youth. Did you see the half million women marching last Sunday for women's dignity? Scrappy housewives, young militants, women in boots, scarves, jeans, kids on shoulders?

And have you seen the women who have driven them to protest? The veline on television - bums patted by 70 year old presenters - shaking their fake assets? I reckon there is a lull of thirty seconds before one comes out again to revive the male audience.

It's tiring, seeing our leader crump his jaw again. It's tiring, seeing the sleek bad-girl Ruby you can be sure a good share of the country is lolling about.

I'm tired of arrogance, of the loveless sheen of perfectly dressed people.


Here is a funny part from my book:Vanessa, my narrator's London-raised daughter, is visiting her mother in Milano. Federico is her mother's young boyfriend. Do laugh some.


Vanessa was glued to the television frowning. ‘I just can’t believe a woman would do this. Did you see her?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Federico, and I was very embarrassed about what might be coming next.

‘She get undressed on television so husbands at home have something to think of when they make love to fat wife. You know, like pornography. Then women can relax and tidy kitchen while men watch television.’

Vanessa’s eyes widened and she looked over to me. ‘You mean women don’t mind parading around like that?’

I was worried they were going to seriously clash and didn’t know whether to change topic or wait for the fall out.

‘No, I don’t think. Look at,’ He started zapping around all the channels. It was mid- evening and the quiz shows were in full swing as people sat around their dinner tables supplying answers. On each channel there was a booby female holding up a card with a letter or spinning a wheel. On one channel two girls were doing a go-go dance.

‘You see? It is always like this.’ Then he switched to a news channel with an older woman announcer. Her skin had been stretched across her face and her lips were fat and shiny. ‘And then they get them like this.’ He shook his head, glancing for a split second in my direction. ‘But this is awful. This woman she no know who she is anymore. She is like carnevale mask, very scary. But this is Italy now, everyone afraid to get old except short bald man, you see him?’

He was pointing back to game show announcer, a flaccid bald man with a paunch, who was pointing to the girl in the hot pants and reading from his cue card. Then Fede turned off the television and said, ‘Basta! My new Australian family will think Italy crazy place! Tonight I take you out to trattoria!’

fornesighe

It was a carnival of masks. Not Venetian masks, delicate and stately as the palazzi themselves, but of the grooved and veined wood of the mountains, with expressions contorted and weathered as the valleys themselves. One of the winning masks had machinations of wood protruding from a grainy forehead. Is it the isolation? Does the silence and the spinning views make one think of this?

We sat on the steps of this steep and furrowed village, the sun on pulleys slipping behind the serrated peaks gradually softening, darkening as the chill settled.

In a bar men began to sing mountain songs as I pushed away the idea of getting drunk and attempting to drive. But grappa with berries is hard to resist. So is standing around a fire, stomping one's feet, too lazy to hike down to the car for a jacket.

This divorcée is warm. The crisp air makes me feel strong and ripe. At 6 that very morning I was feeding a child who will soon be taller than me, loading the car with ski gear for the race, pulling away along the dark winding roads as the dawn marked out the peak of Civetta, and my son told me so. Look at it Mum, look at the sun up there.

I feel it is a stark privilege to see these things and how I hold them close.

Tall Women

I have always had tall women friends. It is not because I am short, I am average height really. Once a tall skinny friend suggested I have a height complex because I always wear silly heels, but I don't think it is that. I have always worn heels. I remember my first mini platforms when I was around nine, and my first cork clunkers when I was twelve. Precious thing I was.

But I drift towards tall women. Maybe because they seem stronger, more resolute, they've had years of people staring at them. I like walking alongside them. They are easy to spot on the dancing floor in clubs.

Last week I caught up with a tall friend, now separated. We had a lot to speak about - about creativity, about men, about handbags. But that makes it sound simplistic. We talked about the courses our lives were on, and how we had set out as twenty year olds into the world.

My first glimpse of Europe was when I was nineteen. I instantly fell in love with the gritty Paris of the eighties that has shifted now. As soon as I had saved up enough, at twenty-one, I went back there to live, enrolled in the Sorbonne, wrote a novel in my room above the sweatshop downstairs. My 'family' were artists and there were murals painted on the walls, a dark room for printing and - oh yes! - a baby to look after. Malou was a classical Parisienne rebel who organised her world into creativity-motherhood-womanliness. She was my first and strongest example of these forces at work, and the main reason why I was determined to write, while getting my childbearing on the way.

And that was where I met my first tall friend, a dancer who basically helped me learn Italian (my boyfriend thought my accent too cute) while I ironed out her English. She too was easy to spot in nightclubs and walked with a remarkable back. We have since grown older and danced together in clubs in Tokyo and Moscow, thinking ourselves very exotic.

And still she wanders

There is a myth out there, sometimes debunked, about the warmth and sensuality of Italy. About the richness of living here in the bosom of the ancient Romans, about being surrounded by frescoed churches and Palladian villas, markets bursting with produce, swarthy men in dozens driving sports cars about to whisk one off to chic bars ...

Beh! On some days I beg to differ.

In my book I try to talk about certain other truths. How women of an age become competitive, sour, unyielding, while dressed immaculately in Prada. About the out-of-season tans and massive handbags, the Sophia-Loren cleavages and a distinct lack of smiling.

Or the ruthless checking-out should you parade along a cobbled city centre street. What is she wearing? What brand is it? Could it be a Chinese copy?

I am skinny and wear heels and get looked at. I love clothes - but cheap clothes, designer markdowns, stuff I pick up abroad. In big European cities I might get blinked over, but not shredded over with mean, biting eyes.

Where is the sisterhood? I thought that yesterday as I was checked out again as I strolled through the school gate in my Barbarella boots and cheap fur jacket. That woman with the pulled and puffy face - was she smiling? Laughing? Where are the ladies in gym suits or with messy hair and no make-up? Where is another woman dressed a little crazy, stylish but in her own way?

No no no. Sometimes Italy is very very cold.