Happy Christmas!

Buy of the month

Hands up if, like me, you haven't updated your idea of Laura Ashley fashion these past 30 years. Even back then, when long granny print dresses could pass unremarked down any street, her Little-House-on-the-Prairie look was too much for me. I whole-heartedly embraced ethnic girl but drew the line at pastoral maiden, in spite of regular breadmaking and an impressive vegetable patch.
Nowadays this style looks positively sinister. Only the lowish neckline on this one counteracts the impression that its wearer belongs to some nasty fundamentalist sect that marries 14-year-olds off to old men to kill time while they wait for the end of the world.
Think Big Love's strait-laced Nicky (played by Chloe Sevigny), for instance. The sight of whom immediately calls to mind her evil prophet dad, played chillingly by Harry Dean Stanton. First-rate television, and I wonder if we'll get another series. But I digress.

Even Nicky would draw the line at Laura Ashley's home furnishings. These were cut from the same cloth as her fashions, with enough flowers and frills to make you fear for your sanity.
This afternoon, however, I stumbled on a second-hand shop I didn't know existed, right on Lambton Quay. Its prices were already good but it was also running a 20%-off sale.
For the grand sum of $111 I picked up two luscious, new-to-me tango items: a Keith Matheson black silk chiffon skirt, which not only has a frill at the hem but half-a-dozen diamantes too, and, yes, a Laura Ashley dress. The dress is utterly plain raspberry silk - bias-cut and sleeveless with a cowl neckline. As unfrilled and unbeflowered as you could want.
I've spread these two beauties on my bed and keep sneaking in to take another look at them.

Predictable, really

The bargain-priced, smudge-proof L'Oreal mascara I reported on so eagerly yesterday proved to be neither a bargain nor smudge-proof. I got home from the tango ball at 12.30 this morning looking like this, only not so cute and furry. The question is, how long had I been looking like that on the dancefloor?

Save! Save! Save!

In case there was any doubt, I hereby freely declare myself a puppet of multinational capitalist/consumer forces. On Wednesday out of the paper fell one of those ugly pamphlets advertising a fragrance and cosmetics sale. UP TO 80% OFF! and IMPORTERS CLEARANCE!, it screamed, too excited to worry about apostrophes. WHY PAY MORE? Why indeed? So off I went to town.
No point searching for metered parking the week before Christmas, so I drove into a parking building and took the lift down to the street.
The pavement outside the temporary premises (recently vacated, I was sad to discover, by one of the last city dress fabric shops) was clogged with customers and security men. Just inside the door, we were separated from our bags, and invited to take up a plastic bucket. I declined, not without a sniff of disdain. I had come here for one thing and one thing only. I had no intention of joining the lines of fervent women, and not a few men, edging past the trestle tables, inspecting every bottle, jar and tube, and slipping favoured items into their buckets. I would make a lightning strike and be out within minutes.
It took 30 seconds to locate where my perfume would be waiting for me. Another five for the helpful university student-assistant on the other side of the table to tell me it had long since sold out.
Motivated by what I see now was a vague but misplaced refusal to be beaten, I made a quick tour of the other tables, picking up a L'Oreal lipstick (excellent value at $9) and smudge-proof mascara (ditto at $7).
After queuing for the checkout and reclaiming my bag, I went across the road to Kimberley's. After a quick flick of the racks I was sensibly on my way out when I noticed a useful, summery swing t-shirt reduced from $69 to $48. Done.
Next, I nipped down to Kirks to pick up sheer black footless tights - $18.99 and not on sale - to wear to the Christmas tango ball tonight. I was back at my car within the hour, so only had to hand over $4.
The upshot of this failed mission to buy perfume for $40 less than usual? A total spend of $87. 

Gone gardening

Remember Margot (Penelope Keith) in The Good Life? She who used to "garden" in a wide-brimmed hat and gloves, carrying a trug? I never look like that. At least I don't think I do. I've never actually checked because I don't give a damn what I look like when I'm gardening. The priorities are ease of movement, freedom from concern with tearing and muddying, and protection - from the elements and from the garden itself.
The current ensemble de jour is an unpleasant blue t-shirt that lost its shape after the first wash, a pair of trackpants that long ago gave up the fight to stay black and which are tucked into flowery No1 Shoe Warehouse gumboots, and black canvas and rubber gloves. If the sun is shining, add a thick layer of sunscreen on all exposed parts, and a kahki brimmed hat that looks as if it should be protecting the balding head of an angler. Dressed like this I can accomplish almost anything.
I often have to. "Garden" is a euphemism for a patch of hillside bush, to which  my basic approach is slash, pull and chop. This has to be done at least twice a year at the macro level unless I want the greenery to engulf the house. Amidst this, I tend two or three little spots of dug earth that I fondly think of as beds, and where every summer I even plonk a few annuals. My annuals of choice are usually Crystal Palace lobelia, if I can get it, and dwarf cosmos, as much for their ferny foliage as for their shining white faces.

I often drift outside to inspect these little outposts of civilisation during the course of the day. Within seconds, I'm getting earth under my nails and collecting dirt and biddybids on whatever non-gardening clothes I'm wearing. My favourite activity during a long telephone call is digging the moss, dandylion and baby dock from between the bricks that form the terrace at the front of house. Conversing while bent double has an odd effect on the voice, but most people are too polite to ask what the hell it is I'm doing.
I always wear long pants outside, to avoid the mosquitos and numerous scratchy things that lurk in the undergrowth. In winter, my arms will also be well-covered but in summer it's just too hot. Consequently I went to tango on Sunday night looking as if I'd barely survived a dog attack.
The freedom I feel when I launch a planned assualt and dress for it is exhilerating, empowering. It's true, what feminists have always said - we dress boys and men for action, girls and women for being looked at. There's lot more to be said on this topic. But not by me, not now - I'm off to work in the garden.

OK all you Scrooges ...

I was chased out of New World yesterday by a choir of chipmunks chorusing: "Just hear those sleigh bells jingle-ing/Ring ting tingle-ing too/Come on, it's lovely weather/For a sleigh ride together with you."

This, though, transcends mere seasonal sentiment so give yourself a treat and watch.

Avoiding The Fringes

If you know where The Fringes are and who lives there, you're probably a John Wyndham fan. I became one in early adolescence, when my father handed me a battered Penguin copy of The Chrysalids from his own bookshelf. I swallowed it whole, and read it several times more in the next few years, along with The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos and The Kraken Wakes.
It's a marvellous book, guarranteed to appeal to adolescents going through that "why am I so different to everyone else?/I must be adopted" stage.
You can find a detailed plot summary here. All you need to know for present purposes is that The Chrysalids is set in post-apocalyptic Labrador. Here, a small group of survivors adhere to a harsh fundamentalist doctrine that sees transgressors exiled to - yes - The Fringes. And it all it takes to be cast out is to be revealed as deviant from a tightly defined genetic normality.
Ten-year-old David is the son of a pious and powerful patriarch. He therefore keeps quiet about his strange recurring dreams of a beautiful lighted city and horseless carriages. However, he and a few other young people discover they are carrying their own blasphemous deviation - the ability to read each other's minds. Soon, they are forced to flee to The Fringes themselves.
Eventually the group is rescued - by a woman who contacts them telepathically from a far-off place called Sealand. When they reach it, David recognises the place of his dreams.
My father told me this place was New Zealand. As we were still living in England and I knew nothing of parental plans to emigrate, this was of little interest to me.
What made it of complusive interest was that I was a deviant myself. The medical diagnosis is that my right ear lacks the usual cartilege folds, which means it's shapeless and prominent, like the one on the left.

And what got me thinking ears was my recent blog on resumed ponytail wearing. I said that:

one of things I hated back then, apart from lack of ponytail perkiness, which was closely correlated with popularity, was that girls sat behind me in class playing with it and boys whizzed by in the corridors and playground and pulled it

I quite forgot the thing that I hated more, the thing that lay behind my dislike of any attention paid to my hair: how heartlessly a ponytail revealed my deformity.
I wasn't teased or bullied about my ear, but, from the day I changed from plaits, which hid the ear, to my ponytail, I was subject to helpful observations along the lines of "Your ear sticks out", and innocent inquiries, like "Why does your ear stick out?"
My mother had asked herself the same thing. Apparently I spent the first few weeks of life with the offending ear sticking-plastered to my head. Until some medico pointed out that this was never going to fix it, that it would take an operation to do so. Someone - perhaps the same health provider - told my mother there was no point doing this before I was 14, since it might just revert. But when I got to 14 and 15 and 16, my ear was the last thing anyone was thinking about. Instead, we emigrated en famille to New Zealand.
Only on bad days does it seem like The Fringes; mostly, it lives up to the promise of Sealand.

A tango milestone

No, I haven't just executed the perfect ... er, one of these.

Nor am I ever likely too - I'd have to marry him.

What happened was that in a drive to reduce wardrobe crush and streamline the deciding-what-to-wear-tonight process, I separated all my tango options from my real-life gear and hung them in a wardrobe in another room. No more ferreting through hangers of ageing cardies, abandoned jeans and office-y dresses. Now I have glam at a glance.

Am I dismayed by this display of self-indulgence? A bit. Don't I think that with all the misery in the world my money could be better spent? Yup. 

I confessed my sin to S and was immediately reassured. "You're so lucky to have another room with cupboard, I wish I did. Now that would be a real milestone - moving to another house because of tango."

Those not infected with the bug will find this reprehensible, if not just plain silly. It might be both, but it's also normal. So normal that tango shoe collection is the subject of one of series of deliciously sharp cartoons from Tangocynic.

 

Ankle fur

Down with the marketing of absurd items that give fashion a bad name. Like these so-called legwarmers.

Thanks to the The Fashion Police for running these offenders down. And they're from such a good home too - Marks and Spencer, no less. But then these were the very people who, only a few months ago, thrust bulge-enhancing male underpants into polite company. If my mother had a grave, she would be turning in it.

Does my arse look big in this tanda?

Ms Hedgehog blogs mainly on tango, and her most recent is on what it does for female bums. She says that:

[R]egardless of your shape, whether you have a fat bottom, a thin bottom, a round one or a flat one, squareish, prominent, pear-shaped, athletic, negligible, or enough for two, following well in tango is going to make it look fabulous. Callipygousness in motion. If you want to feel good about your bottom, this will work.

I agree. Watch any good follower and within seconds you'll be hypnotised by her bum. And I speak as a straight woman. God knows what it does to men.

A ponytail comes of age

I haven't yet tangoed through a summer, so it's a very recent discovery that, even in a climate as untropical as Wellington's, if you have 50 people dancing in close embrace on a small floor, the temperature fast goes through the roof. Mine, anyway. Right now this feels like as big a challenge as was learning to dance backwards in high heels at the beginning of the year.
As a general rule, I don't sweat. I wish I did - it might slow down the overheating process. But get me clamped (however nicely) in someone's arms, with the right side of my face against their head, and we're almost instantaneously glued together.
Men, by and large, do sweat. Plus, as leaders, they must work damn hard. So, after one tanda, I leave the floor with my hair plastered to my scalp, and my face damp, and an unbecoming scarlet.
Longish hair is therefore a problem. Last Sunday, P paused, mid-dance, and plucked some of mine from the region of his mouth. I didn't feel great about this, so last night I pulled it back into a ponytail. Which is cooler for me, too, since it isn't hanging down my back.
It's ... um, a very long time indeed since I publicly accompanied a ponytail. From babyhood, my hair was chopped to just below ear-level, parted on the left and the right captured in a ribbon. The classic 50s girl-child look.
Then, one day when I was about seven or eight and was going to the church fete, my mother announced that my hair was long enough for pigtails. With a degree of pulling and pinching, she managed to scrap it into two stubs and secure them with rubber bands (that's right - scrunchies had yet to be invented). She called my father to admire them, as I stared awestruck into the mirror above the fireplace.

From then on we were growing my hair. (If you knew my mother, you would understand that she was commander-in-chief of this project while I was a mere foot solider.) I progressed through plaits, and then, after intensive lobbying, was finally - around the age of 10 or 11 - allowed to graduate to a ponytail.

Sadly, it was by then too late for one of those perky little numbers so beloved of 50s girls. My hair was too long and straight and heavy.

I would lie on my back over the edge of the bed so that head and hair hung nearly to the floor, then, as if taking my hair by surprise, could corral it all into the rubber band. I would get to my feet convinced that this time I had done it - got my ponytail to bounce on the top of my head. But within minutes it had slipped from ponytailness to horsetailness.
I came to hate it, and my thirteenth birthday present was being given permission to have it cut off. But that's another story.
One of things I hated back then, apart from lack of ponytail perkiness, which was closely correlated with popularity, was that girls sat behind me in class playing with it and boys whizzed by in the corridors and playground and pulled it. Both, from a position of rock-bottom self-esteem, I interpreted as a subtle form of disdain, if not downright mockery.
How lovely it is to grow up! Last night at the milonga two boys pulled my ponytail and not for a second did I think that meant they hated me.

A great dame

On Saturday evening, E's two grandchildren took us to the pantomime, and I had the best time I've had in ages in a theatre. It was Roger Hall's Robin Hood, staged by Circa (go here to read some reviews). Star of the show, as they so often are, was the Dame - Robin's mother, Trelise Hood, played in grand style by Gavin Rutherford.
If you live in this country, her name will alert you to the fact that this poor widow makes her living as a fashion designer, unfortunately one who designs entirely in green and embarrases her derring-do son with outfits made just for him.
It being a truth universally aknowledged that a poor widow woman must be in need of a husband, Trelise goes all out to catch one, refusing to draw the line at the wicked Sherrif of Nottingham (booo!) or innocent Bob in the front row.

The evening's only disappointment for this member of the audience was that the Principal Boy wasn't a girl. But that might be because his modern opposite number - Maid Marion, in this case - seems to have taken over all his/her splendid traditional attributes. This one was bold, assertive, a cracking shot with a bow and arrow, and sensibly dressed. No sign of simper or frill. 
Robin Hood runs until 23 December. Grab the nearest kid and get down to Circa.

Hat-trick

Like many people, I've never been able to carry off a hat. Unlike most of them, I keep on trying, spurred on, at this point in my life, by the non-aesthetic benefits of hat-wearing - keeping warm and keeping off the sun.

When younger, I routinely made myself ill in hot places by refusing to sacrifice appearance to health (in the same way that many won't consider warm underwear in cold weather until they're past 35). Monte Alban, near Oaxaca in Mexico, comes to mind. 

I walked around these exposed ruins for several hours under a searing sun, and, not surprisingly, suffered a blinding 24-hour headache. 

Some people look great in hats. Ruth, for instance, who borrowed this one from me only minutes earlier and immediately made it her own.

It was bought for me last century by the X in a Sydney St Vincent de Paul's because I was trapped in the house by blazing heat. I didn't wear it then, I don't wear it now, and yet it goes on waiting for me to do so. 

I have more luck - or is that confidence? - with winter hats. Perhaps because they're markedly less ladylike and I don't feel such a fraud. 

I borrowed this one from E for a winter weekend at the Chateau last year and felt remarkably at home in it (I was, mind you, in love with the person weilding the camera, which probably anaesthetised me against all other sensations). E also gave me a nice wool cloche she bought at considerable expense in London. I don't feel too bad in that, either.
Sun hats, though, continued to elude me.
And then - drumroll - last year in Melbourne I found it - the perfect hat. Because I've spent much of my life in a state of hat denial, I don't know the proper names of various types of hat, so I'd better just give you a picture of this one.

Which doesn't go far towards illustrating how nifty it was in Kookai when I bought it. That's because within a day or so of getting it home I ran it over.
I must have rushed down the path to the car and plonked the hat on the car roof while I got myself and my belongings inside. I didn't notice the hat wasn't among them until I returned an hour or so later and found it flattened on the road. Tragically, it's never been the same since.
I suppose what I like/d about it is that it isn't ladylike. It appeals to the boyish in me. It makes the wearer look jaunty rather than as though she should be bedecked in muslin, carrying a willow basket of cut flowers and brimming with sweetness. 
This hat's other important feature is that it fits me. I have a small head and that, coupled with the usual onslaught of the Wellington wind, means your average-sized brimmed hat is off my head in seconds. This one is soft, rams on tight and stays put. Unlike a similar one, bought a year or so later, also in Melbourne but rather more cheaply. Which means it serves more as a bedroom decoration than a useful piece of headgear.

Slut-wear, again

A furore this week about whether or not a teacher was entitled to tell a uniformed 14-year-old that her short skirt "made her look like a slut".

Here's TV1's report, which also shows the length of skirt worn by various of her peers. 

And here's (some of) what media bloke Brian Edwards had to say about it all:

Ms Marshall [the girl's mother] appears not to understand that when you enrol your child in any school you automatically accept the rules of student conduct set down by the school’s board, including any dress code which the school may have. Her daughter, Amethyst, has been flouting Newlands College’s dress code for some time. ... Perhaps my favourite word in looking at any issue is ‘perspective’. Perspective has been lost in this matter. A kid was dressing inappropriately and was told so by a teacher. In seeking publicity for what happened, her parents have done their daughter and a fine teacher a disservice.

My favourite word would be "look it up in a dictionary" (sorry, favourite six words). Or, failing that (which I have, because I don't want to budge from the computer), Wikipaedia. This characterises slut as:

a pejorative term meaning an individual who is sexually promiscuous. The term is generally applied to women and used as an insult or offensive term of disparagement, meaning "dirty or slovenly".

This dual definition shows up in several online dictionaries too, and chimes with my own experience of the word's usage on opposite sides of the world.
In England, at least during the 50s and 60s, it was the second meaning that had currency. Your conventional housewife might have bristled to find it applied to herself, but plenty of others would shrug it off or even laugh and agree that that was indeed what they were.
My mother used to delight in Katherine Whitehorn's Observer column. I particularly remember her laughing over the one in which Whitehorn described herself as a slut. Sure enough, here's Wikipaedia again to back me up:

The British journalist Katharine Whitehorn wrote a famous 1963 article applying this meaning in The Observer: "Have you ever taken anything out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing? Changed stockings in a taxi? Could you try on clothes in any shop, any time, without worrying about your underclothes? How many things are in the wrong room—cups in the study, boots in the kitchen? ... [this makes] you one of us: the miserable, optimistic, misunderstood race of sluts." This article prompted a flurry of correspondence, with many women writing in to describe their own acts of sluttishness.

This was back in the pre-tights Pleistocene era when women held up their stocking with suspenders. This - in case you're unfamiliar the mechanics - involves stretching a piece in the top of the stocking over a plastic or metal button and pushing it through a metal or plastic loop at the front (it was a lot simpler than it sounds). What I remember of that particular Whitehorn column is that she claimed to have once resorted to replacing the missing or broken suspender button with an aspirin tablet. Sluts were clearly pretty smart.    
So I was shocked when I arrived in the southern hemisphere at the tender age of 16 to discover that antipodeans mean something quite different when they call a woman a slut. It's an insult no woman is ever going to laugh it.

It's also, of course, another symptom of that social Grand Canyon - the double standard. No dictionary will ever tell you exactly how many men a woman has to have sex with before she can be definitively labelled a slut. Which means men (and sadly, women too) can apply it whenever they feel like it and on whatever grounds they like.

Note also that there's no parallel epithet for the men who sleep with so-called sluts, thereby creating the slutdom they can then condemn. 

Edwards has got the wrong end of the stick when he writes, "when you enrol your child in any school you automatically accept the rules of student conduct set down by the school’s board, including any dress code which the school may have".

Nothing I've seen or read has suggested that Amethyst's mother disagreed with the rule, only its method of enforcement in her daughter's case. I'm sure, in hindsight, the teacher does too. Fourteen-year-olds are some of the most annoying creatures on earth and to be surrounded by them day after day would push me towards far worse behaviour than name-calling (and while I'm here, why not give Amethyst's teacher and all her colleagues a raise? We didn't have trouble coughing up all those millions for Warner Bros).

When men use the term of women, it's a way of trying to control them. When this teacher used it, it was a way of trying to control Amethyst (which is, I agree, part of the teacher's job). That doesn't make it right. Or, to use the contemporary term, appropriate.

My mother used similar tactics on me when I was Amethyst's age. One Saturday morning showdown saw me banned from accompanying her into the village because I'd backcombed my hair to the point that, according to her, I looked "cheap".

I well recall my hurt and fury. And my sense of powerlessness. I was vanquished by this adjective in a way I had no idea how to combat. All I could do was refuse to comb out my hair, and burn.

To be told you're inappropriately dressed is one thing. To be told you look like a slut for not doing so is quite another. It's no way to exert your authority, no way to get kids to do what you want them to do.  

Boob-tube debut

I dislike the word boob - it's so pantomime-y - but its alliterative effect when combined with tube is too compelling to ignore. Besides what else are you going to call this thing? Deborah in Madison Rose, where I bought mine this week, flourished bustier, which sounds classier but is, I think, inaccurate. A bustier is structured, often boned. Like this. 

Hmn, classier, did I say? This one from Victoria's Secret makes a liar of me. But compare it to this - your classic boob tube.

An item owing its existence entirely to the invention of lycra (which some might regard as the pinnacle of human achievement; and surely of more benefit to more people than, say, getting a bloke on the moon).
As you can see, your classic boob tube is structured entirely by the body inside it. And my point - yes, I've finally reached it - is that right up to two days ago, I'd always assumed my body simply wasn't up to the job. Well, two jobs really: 1. looking nice, and 2. keeping the tube in place. Both doubts stemming from the one root cause - a marked lack of what Sarah charmingly refers to as "boobage".
So what changed? The proximate cause was that, on Thursday in Madison Rose, I actually tried one on, although not as an end in itself. I was lured into the changing room by a delicious little black dress - Saba this time. I'm not going to describe it because in a couple of days it will be mine, all mine, and I'll photograph it. The essential point here is that it has one of those blouson tops that hangs open to the waist, and requires something appropriate to be worn underneath. Deborah handed me a small black sequined stretchy item, saying it wasn't exactly right but it would give me an idea. It certainly did. I loved it, both under the dress and on its own. 

No, I'm not modelling it, having no wish to let myself in for invidious comparisons with the pink shape above. Admittedly this one is rather more constructed than the pink one. That powerful band of swathing has both a bolstering and a flattening effect, which cancel each other out, but it does maintain a reassuringly tight grip on the torso. Still, I was a bit worried about how it would stand up, so to speak, to tango.
I wore it that evening and lived, unembarrassed, to tell the tale. I worked very hard at not hauling at it nervously on the dancefloor, mid-tanda. And, when the moment came that I couldn't stand another minute without doing so, I ducked out of sight into the kitchen and tugged away unglamorously.
All in all, I enjoyed wearing it. Shoulders are nice, even on women of a certain age, and I felt daringly Becky Sharpish.
And this revolutionary wardrobe step's less proximate cause? Tango, of course. Tango offers the excuse, the occasion, the confidence and the culture for such personal reassessments. I'm looking forward to more shoulderless evenings.

So anyway ...

Back to the recent nuptials.

As you can see, the groom was unconventionally attired, although not as underdressed as he'd threatened to be several months before, when cut-off jeans and jandals were mentioned. He wore this fine, pale-gray Zara item - known officially as the Wedding Cardie - a new white teeshirt, his best jeans and new white trainers.

To my great admiration, the bride was more than happy to let him go his own way, although she had other ideas for herself and wore white. But let me hasten to add that she looked nothing like a meringue, let alone one of the type's lime-green variations, several examples of which we spied in shop windows in Kunming and Hanoi, before flinching and scuttling past.

S had asked her friend and maid-of-honour Winsome to make her a dress. Winsome has a design shop in Kunming, and her tailoring is knock-out perfect. When I was there in January she fitted me for and made - in a few short days - a beautifully constructed little black jacket. Her design for S was a perfectly plain, strapless, fitted sheath in crisp stretchy cotton. With it, S wore pale satin high-heeled sandals, a short veil she'd bought online, her mother's pearls and a few white lilies.

And the celebrant? At the last minute - and almost certainly prompted by an attack of nerves - he dashed out and bought that black Chinese shirt. The consensus was that it considerably enhanced his authority.

Tanguero wear

"If you come to a milonga, you will see a huge number of women, nicely made-up, in the most stunning outfits, wearing the highest and latest Comme-il-fauts. I've never seen so many gorgeous women as in tango and lots of them are quite decent dancers as well!

Unfortunately, I've never seen so few gorgeous men as in tango. Men are in a minority, often dress very carelessly and the average level of attractivity isn't breathtaking. Also the dance level is much lower amongst men than amongst women. And this is why every semi-decent male dancer can feel like a kid in a candy-shop and choose freely amongst the female population according to the check-list:
- Age

- Level of attractivity- make-over and shoes

- Dance qualities"

Not my words but definitely my opinion. The writer is tango teacher Melina Sedo, who blogs here.

On Friday evening, after class, two or three of we women were having just such a conversation about the low standard of male appearance and the need for them to up their game. The trouble is - why should they want to? As Melina says, they're kids in a sweetshop and get all the dances they want without changing their jeans or, in some cases, even applying a lick of deodorant.

My friend I wrote the other day from England that he'd been "dragging my mother through M&S in search of suits for tango". When I pointed out that he didn't normally wear a suit to milongas, he agreed but added, "Everything that I wear is chosen consciously though - if I'm wearing jeans, it's a deliberate choice.

"But you're right that I should lift my game, and this is part of an effort to move it up a notch. Yesterday's acquisition was an understated black wool and cashmere suit which feels lovely. Not sure when I'll be able to find the right occasion for the pink linen jacket I bought earlier ..."

Which is great but he wasn't one of the men we'd been talking about. He's a noticeably careful dresser, and has a great line in smashing shirts. Quite how you get through to the others his subtle point that jeans should be a deliberate choice rather than the default is beyond me. 
And no, I'm not advocating this as a look - or demeanor - not in Wellington anyway.

Eat, Pray, Love ... Puke

"A true story that feels fake"; "charcuterie porn" - UK Daily Telegraph; " a two hour and fifteen minute ad for being rich; ... a smug, patronising travelogue" - quickflix.com; "a 140-minute shampoo advert" - movies.sky.com

And, I'd like to add, a marvellous opportunity to unleash all the literary bile you can lay your pen to.

And weddings in general

Ms Hedgehog often but not always blogs about tango, which is how I caught up with her. But here she is on the subject of weddings:

I'm all for people getting married, if they want to marry each other. But a marriage ceremony (at least in the European tradition) is a very simple affair. It traditionally requires the couple, some witnesses, and some sort of official, and the conversation, with answers understood, is basically as follows: 

•Who exactly are you two?

•What do you think you're doing?

•Are you sure?

•Anybody else here got a problem with that? This is your last chance. No?

•Do you hereby marry each other?

•Right, then, consider yourselves married, and the rest of yous are not to interfere.

There may or may not be religious additions; I have no objection to sitting quietly and watching that part, although I'm not that keen on being expected to participate as a matter of course. But in my book, the meat of it takes about five minutes, or twenty-five with sitting everyone down and faffing about, and it should immediately be followed by some announcement functionally similar to this:

•The food is this way, the drinks are that way, the dancefloor is over there, and the band [or DJ, according to budget] will be on in an hour's time.

Or, alternatively:

•We are now going to the pub. Follow me.

Waiting around for five hours making small talk in a cold tent in the middle of nowhere without access to food or a cup of tea is not a party. And speeches, if any, should be after the food.

She doesn't mention if she minds travelling vast distances to attend weddings, but if that's no problem, she would have enjoyed J and S's swift and charmingly low-key event.

My own (and only) wedding - more than four decades ago (yes, I was a child bride) - was also low key, but in another, entirely uncharming way. I'll enjoy telling you about it another day, when I don't have so many irksome, income-earning chores to attend to. All I'm prepared to say now is that my groom and I did not look like this

this













or this

 

My divorce was a bit more entertaining. But that too will have to wait for another day.

The Wedding

 The happy bride and groom

The weepy mother and sister

Why do we weep at weddings? "We" being those of us who routinely refuse to have our tears jerked by any number of sentimental strings.

Yes, it was my son and her brother, and look how grown up he'd become, and what a beautiful young woman had agreed to be his wife. I suspect, though, that what reduced this Greer-defined crone to near-sobs and strenuous nose-blowing was witnessing the please-God, not-too-ephemeral triumph of hope over experience.

I'll be back with some observations on the event's sartorial aspects when I've located the tissues. 

A chink in the firewall

It's raining and chilly here in Dali, and upstairs on the balcony, overlooking the courtyard of the Jade Emu hostel, the wedding party are rehearsing. The celebrant, Phil, is a Kunming karate teacher, with a sideline in sausage-making. S and I brought cool weather clothes from home, but, in our effort to pack light to come to Dali, left it all in Kunming. Hopefully the venue will be warm.  The Jade Emu hostel is much nicer than it sounds.  Clean, bright and friendly, and full of character. They've stuck a red good luck decoration on the main gate, and blown up red balloons. If I could locate my card reader, I'd post some pictures. Maybe later.

Behind the firewall

The Great Firewall of China will prevent me blogging for the next three weeks.

I'm allowing a long pause here so we can mull over this fact and what it means to a country of 1,338,612,968 souls.

When you've done that, you can cheer yourself up by going here http://www.shanghaitang.com/ to Shanghai Tang - fashion as chic as it gets anywhere.

Black is still the new black

Although I won't be wearing black to The Wedding, I agree with Coco Chanel when she said, "Black wipes out everything else around." Or do I? Perhaps what I really mean is that - despite all sorts of pressure to abandon it - I feel great in black. Which might be quite different to looking great.

Back in the 80s, when I had a good deal less confidence and money than  I have now, I attended a formal dinner wearing a white shirt with a black jacket and trousers and a black tie. I felt pretty cool. Until my neighbouring guest informed me helpfully over the entree that these weren't "my colours".  She'd had hers done (thank god that dogma has had its day), and, because her colouring was similar to mine, I should have been wearing pastels. She was sporting something ladylike in apricot. I wouldn't have been seen dead in it.

Then there's the omniscient and all-knowing Trinny and Susannah. They've repeatedly denounced black. For us lot, anyway, although T herself doesn't seem averse. Here she is out shopping in London a couple of years ago, head to toe in black and, it has to be said, looking great.

Do you remember back when they (whoever they are) announced that brown was the new black. God knows, they tried. All you could buy for a year or two in the way of jackets, shoes and skirts was brown, brown and more brown. What a recipe for visual depression. Black-lovers simply rode out the brown fad, and sure enough, it passed.

T and S seem to assume that women wear black because it's slimming (which they deny). But that's not it. Black - there's no other way to put this - has power.  I don't feel like my own woman in pastels. Don't feel like anybody's woman, in fact.

E - a snappy dresser from way back - says Chanel is right about black, "but you do need a good night's sleep, which at my advanced age, you don't always have: 

You put me in mind of the first ever Trelise Cooper dress I had way back in the 1980s when she had a small shop in High Street, Auckland, and no one had heard of her. It was black with long sleeves and a swirly skirt and HUGE shoulder pads and I used to wear it with a wide gold belt. It was super and stupidly I seem to have offloaded it on the way – probably when shoulder pads became a no-no.

Shoulder pads had a lot to answer for.

Here's one of CC's ground-breaking little black dresses from 1927, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

It represents, says MoMA, "one of Chanel's most popular and enduring contributions to women's fashion:

In all of its layered details, a simple material, wool jersey, becomes elegant through superior tailoring technique. Couture details such as seam binding, carefully arranged pleats, the finely finished hem of the skirt, and hand-sewn belt make this ensemble an example of Chanel's characteristic poverty de luxe, an expensive interpretation of a simple design made of modest materials. Chanel appropriated tailoring details from riding habits, men's wear, and service uniforms in her quest to reduce and refine women's clothing to its simplest and most elegant.

Amen to that.

Bulge-enhancing male underwear arrives

You heard it here first ... well, second, actually. This morning's Dom Post reports that that retail shrine to British commonsense, Marks and Spencer, is about to thrust onto the market something called a "frontal enhancement garment". For those whose first language isn't M&S, this translates as knickers that make your package look bigger. Thirty-eight per cent bigger, according to reports, although god knows how they arrived at this degree of precision. 

I couldn't find this exciting item on their website - the closest I got was a bunch of dudes in vests http://www.marksandspencer.com/Bodymax-Underwear-Underwear-Mens/b/332652031?ie=UTF8&pf_rd_r=17EGAD9TBG995YHNEP6G&pf_rd_m=A2BO0OYVBKIQJM&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=43593030&pf_rd_p=475115433&pf_rd_s=left-nav-2 Bodymax vests. Which, claim M&S, "shape" your body. It seems likely the new undies will emerge under this label. 

They'll sell for around NZ$21. And you'll also be able buy bum-lift knickers. I can imagine some men being eager for both enhancements, but the only way to get them will be to wear two pairs of undies at once. Why didn't M&S design them as one?

Women routinely buy and wear wired, push-up, padded bras. Not to mention those stretchy cast-iron garments that "control" you from from mid-thigh to chest. Men just want the same, it seems. Or M&S hopes they do. Which is the way of our glorious capitalist system - create the thing and desire for it will follow.

It once more raises the question of who we dress for. Men dressing for other men will possibly flock to M&S for both products. Men dressing for women might too. They'd be misguided, though, in any belief that this will make the difference between pulling and not. When, lady readers, was the last time you decided it was all on with someone by sizing up their crutch? Their arse, now ... that's another story. 

But then, so the argument usually runs, women buy underwear to make themselves feel good, not primarily to attract a mate. Perhaps it will prove the same for men. A bigger-looking bulge equals more confidence equals more success.  Why do I feel like sighing?

Packing it in

The suitcase is open on the spare bedroom floor and enough stuff - clothes, shoes, accessories, books - for three months is spread across the bed and table. I'm going away for three weeks so much of this will be left behind. This is my preferred method of packing.

I always hate the way people pack in movies - striding about their bedrooms, whipping open drawers and cupboards, flinging things blindly into cases. They're usually upset when they do this - due to a marital infidelity, a pursuing serial killer or a determined police officer - but really, their new life isn't going to be any better for having taken a load of unwearable items and overlooked the one or two that would pull the rest together.

I've no such excuse and I want to get it right. I'm going to China for son J's wedding then on to Vietnam.

It's my fourth visit to China. I first went for the weekend in 1987. I was in Hong Kong for work and, instead of doing whatever it was we were meant to be doing, the photographer and I bunked off to Guangzhou. I didn't go back to until 2007, when J was living in Urumqi. (You can read about that trip here.)
J and S were living in Kunming when I returned in January this year and still are. Technically, they're already married, having registered in Urumqi, so this is the after-match function. It will be held in Dali, a charming old town we visited in January. This was the view from the hotel entrance.

This time, of course, there's the question of what the mother of the groom will wear. The odd (very odd) faithful reader might recall my account of a Skype conversation with J on this subject. I'd just bought a black Karen Walker cheongsam-inspired dress, which for a while I pretended to myself would be just the thing. But it's not - you don't wear black to Chinese weddings. I'd look like the Angel of Marital Death. So I have something else. More of which another day.  Meantime, here are some wonderful images of what I won't be looking like.

Then there's the Vietnam leg. It will be hot, and since the plan is to drive to the border and walk across, we shall have to pack light. Each time I travel I think I can do this and each time it turns out that I can't. Yet I still have this fantasy of stepping lightly off a plane in the middle of nowhere with just a carry-on. I was going to say that at least I won't have to take tango shoes and dresses, but that's hardly a plus.

Never mind dancing backwards in high-heels

Four Sydney women recently broke the world stiletto sprint record.  Click here  then scroll down to watch them go.  Heels had to be at least three inches high, and legs (for some spurious reason to do with hair's breadth wins) had to be freshly shaven.

S suggests Wellington tango women would be up to fielding a pretty good team if the event is ever repeated. But then she's the only person I know who wears higher heels in real life than she does for tango.