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It is autumn, which means certain things will happen. Leaves will fall. Evenings will Draw In. Parents will lovingly allow their small children to dress up as malevolent spirits of dead people. And women’s fashion magazines across the world will run preppy fashion spreads inspired by the film Love Story.
If you have not seen Love Story and have no idea what I’m talking about, I can only imagine that you have never read a women’s magazine between the months of August and March. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen Love Story either. But I don’t need to – I’ve read so many derivative fashion stories that I feel like I’ve watched it seventeen times.
The point is this: there are sub-plots to the film about young love, class divide and tragic early death, but the main message is that Ali Macgraw wears unfortunate 1970s polo necks and woolly hats. A lot. And, at some point between meeting Ryan O’Neal on campus and, well, dying, she evidently finds time to run crunching through autumn leaves in some of the finest municipal parkery ever captured on the silver screen. Ryan gamely matches her step for step with striped college scarves and the like, and the result is a blueprint for Preppy Style which is aired by fashion editors every year like some dusty old school blazer brought out from the wardrobe every September:
According to Filmsite.org, one of the film’s most touching scenes is “the montage of the couple tossing snowballs at each other.” Jesus.
It’s frightening how the magazines never deviate. I have, in fact, seen one bit from Love Story, in which Ryan O’Neal was sporting some minky ice-hockey gear and trying to catch Ali’s eye with some daring puck-related moves. I’m not sure what she saw in him, actually, but then, she wasn’t well. Anyway, there are never any “How to dress like a porky male ice-hockey player” spreads in the magazines. It’s always, “How to look waifish in a punt with some young Etonian”. And who needs help with that?
I’m betting that none of the fashion editors have actually seen Love Story, and have all been copying the same feature published in Paris Vogue in 1981.
The annoying thing is that readers in the northern hemisphere really don’t need to be told to wear flared jeans, brown boots, warm coats and minging 1969-apres-ski-in-Gstaad knitwear when it’s October. It’s as natural as farting in the bath. What we do need help with is, for example, how to wear low-crotched trousers without looking like MC Hammer, how to wear the Folk-Gypsy-Luxe look without getting incarcerated by Italian police, and how to run away from rapists in Christian Louboutin shoes. By contrast, the preppy style is impossible to get wrong.
How extraordinary, then, to find in October’s issue of Germany’s Amica (”Das Fashion-Magazine”) that they have fluffed up the obligatory Love Story feature! How is that possible, you ask? Well, they score points for cable knits and some argyle sock action, but then they go completely off piste by putting the model in Russian fur hats and, even worse, sixties mini-dresses. Nein, nein, nein! Das ist nicht Preppy! Haven’t they READ the source material?
I’m afraid this is the nail in the coffin in my relationship with German women’s magazines. Try as they might, they never get it quite right. There’s always loads of horrid real fur, the shoes are grim, and the photography doesn’t show the clothes off well at all. In Amica, a model is pictured lounging on a furry white carpet in wrinkled beige tights and a rabbit-skin jerkin while caressing a lobster. That, I’m afraid, is beyond the pink. Adios, Amica!
When a newsreader is reaching the ‘And Finally’ part of his slot and begins a new story with “Levi Stubbs, the lead singer with the sixties soul group The Four Tops, …”, you somehow know the story is not going to end well for Mr Stubbs.
The same goes for “Robert Lantz, one of the most influential Hollywood agents of the 1950s…”, or “Isaac Hayes, the American soul singer who won an Oscar for scoring the 1970s film Shaft…”. The BBC World Service is not going to mention blaxpoitation movies unless there is a pretty deadly reason.
No, I’m afraid there is only one way these bulletins are going to end, and it is not going to be with the news that said celebrity has launched a new cruisewear fashion line.
It would be nice if, just for once, instead of finishing the line with “has died at the age of 72″, they could say, “Levi Stubbs, the lead singer with the sixties soul group The Four Tops, has released a new acid jazz album.”
Or, “Levi Stubbs, the lead singer with the soul sixties group The Four Tops, has converted to Islam.”
Or, “Levi Stubbs, the lead singer with the sixties soul group The Four Tops, has had a new Stannah StairLift installed in his Albuquerque mansion, where he lives as a virtual recluse with his three former band members and a butler from Azerbaijan.”
I look out of my window this morning and see a young man in my neighbours’ garden with a shotgun. He is inspecting the gun intently. It is shiny and conker brown. I hope he is not trying to work out which end the bullet comes out of. Then he takes up a killing stance, and stares down the barrel. Is he going to shoot one of the chickens that run about the garden? Or a dog. Please let him maim one of my neighbours’ intensely annoying dogs. Perhaps he is waiting for his family to emerge from the house, ready for church no doubt. They have cut him out of his inheritance, and he is going to blow them away.
No, he takes the gun away from his face and inspects it again. Fascinating. I note he has got a TopMan scarf tied in the city-boy way around his neck. This seems a bit incongruous with the general hunter-stroke-assassin vibe. Ah, here comes another male – his father? – and they drive away in what looks like a Toyota HardCore 4×4 Destructor. Perhaps they are going off to shoot things together. This is a huntin-shootin-fishin-killin kind of place.
“Lewis advises Mike and Roy on the planning and building regulations necessary for the house conversion. It’s going to be a few months before the work can start. Mike’s disappointed that a connecting door is impossible, for fire safety reasons, but Lewis talks them through the plans.”
There is a hole in my heart where this sort of passionate drama should be.
Have just donated some money to Christian Aid’s emergency Burma cyclone appeal so I can blog about nonsense without feeling guilty.
So that’s all right then.
I have been thinking about the part in Roald Dahl’s The Witches where the hero is turned into a mouse. Er, sorry, spoiler alert! In children’s books, transformation = molto scary, a case in point being Dahl’s creepy The Magic Finger, in which a horrible family that liked shooting things swapped bodies with ducks and got shot at themselves. But what happens in The Witches is far more terrifying: bad enough that the hero will never be turned back into a boy, thus breaking the rule of a happy ending for every story, but worse, we learn that he can only live for a few more years, given his newly mouse-sized life expectancy. He will die around the time that his grandmother, his last remaining relative, will. Their stoicism about their impending not-existing-ness was incomprehensibly bleak to me, and scarier than the prospect of 100 Vermicious Knids.
Y I K E S
We had another book, this one about a real mouse called Ralph who used to zoom around a hotel at night on a little boy’s toy motorbike. This too was pretty freaky: full of vast, empty, silent and worst of all super-dark corridors. Just like The Shining. Actually, worse.
“Ralph had a scary feeling he was on the threshold of adventure. There were no beds or chairs for him to dart under in case of danger. The floor creaked. Someone was snoring in Room 214 across the hall. Outside in the pines an owl hooted, sending prickles up Ralph’s spine.”
Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
And don’t get me started on Tom’s Midnight Garden, in which some idiot used to creep around the house in the dead of night (fool!) with some creepy grandfather clock ticking in the background. Yeurgh.
There was something about being shrunk or otherwise removed from the world that gave me a horrible jolt in the stomach, like peering over a cliff or the first bit of the Doctor Who music. I suppose transformation is easy to relate to when you’re young because you live in a kind of liminal world anyway, being smaller than adults and mostly separate from their world. Obviously children’s authors like Lewis Carroll knew how to play on this to freak us out. All I knew is that it sounded super scary, but at least if I got smaller, custard creams would get bigger – a mutually beneficial relationship.
Am not quite sure why I have been thinking about this so much. Perhaps I should stop eating mouse sandwiches before bed?
In other news, I realised today that I have not had to think about the term “Web 2.0″ for 11 months.
1:45 pm. Room A-148. The ping-pongian fortunes of my department hang on the outcomes of my next match. I’m facing the sweet German woman who belts her jeans too high. She’s got her game face on.
As someone French-sounding announces our names, making me feel like I’m playing at Wimbledon, my boss hands me his Special Paddle. I am too intent on success to note the potential for smutty euphemism.
It’s ping pong time.
Win, and we will be propelled on to a stage worthy of my teammates’ wunderschoen skills.
Lose, and our efforts will be consigned to a footnote in the pages of history.
…
Still, at least United won.
As excited as I am to have found my vocation, albeit 15 years later than would have been optimal, career-wise, I still find the subject a bit boring to read about for more than a few hours. Perhaps I could be a world-leading ecological economist part time?
Suppose I shouldn’t get too carried away. I have also thought my vocation was to be a primary schoolteacher, a historical monument, sorry, historical monument inspector, an archivist and a manta ray. And I don’t seem to be any of those.
Anyway, I escaped studying this afternoon to watch Unsere Erde at the cinema. This is the BBC’s Planet Earth, minus Whispering Bob, er, Richard, Attenborough and plus smoothie German narrator who rolls his ‘r’s, needlessly, in my opinion. It is quite marvellous, all the same. Awesome, in fact. I think my German fellow audience members were knocked out by the polar bear scenes. Am looking forward to similarly naturetastic events in the coming weeks, as Bonn is hosting a conference on biological diversity this month. [Listen to the meeting's theme tune here!]
Helpfully, the film alerted me to an important point related to my possible karmic future. I realised that, much as I admire the bigness of our more generously proportioned mammalian friends the walrus and the humpback whale, if I am reincarted as an animal, I think I would prefer not to be in a body that has lichen actually growing on it or has fish constantly hanging around its genitalia. In fact, if I could be a manta ray that would be acceptable.
I stood under a manta ray in Western Australia Aquarium (thanks to an observation tunnel, fish watchers!), and I could not spot any barnacles at all. Just a mouth that appeared to be where its belly button should be. Well, that’s evolution for you.
… an ecological economist.
Hurrah!
How do I get to be one of those, then? And will I need to be good at maths? Maybe I could blag that part. “As you can see from this diagram, the optimum extraction rate is, well, a lot per cent, and production volume has increased by at least, I’d say, 4 quadrimillion, er, walloons since, ooh, quite a long time ago. Look, everyone! There’s a hot air balloon!”
I have made it through to the knock-out stages of the ping pong tournament.
Chumps. They’re all chumps.*
Either our expectations are too high, or all football managers are rubbish. To be precise, within English football there are only ever four good managers: dour genius Alex Ferguson, flawed genius Arsene Wenger, domestic-genius-on-a-shoestring (a role shared on rotation by David Moyes, Steve Coppell, Thingy Redknapp and Martin O’Neill) and foreign genius, the position currently filled by Juande Ramos.
All other managers are rubbish.**
A gratuitous photo of Roy Keane.
This is a phenomenon exclusive to English football, which explains why acclaimed managers from elsewhere such as Benitez, Houllier, Ranieri and Jol are jetted in, suddenly start managing like chumps and then leave, only to rediscover in somewhere like Zurich or Lyon or Turin that they’re quite good, actually.
The latest foreign manager to reveal his inner chump is Fabio Capello, the new England manager from Bracknell Southend San Canzian d’Isonzo. Now, the football writers don’t want to admit that he’s a chump. They have an enormous collective crush on him, like they did on Jose Mourinho. It reminds me of women in Regency novels simpering over the local doctor. Nevertheless, Capello has been displaying undeniably chumpish qualities, such as playing Wayne Rooney as a lone striker up front and suggesting (according to the hacks, anyway) that Beckham can be Rooney’s Ronaldo. (By which I mean he can supply Rooney with inch-perfect crosses, not with high-class call girls.) Capello has no chance – he may have been a wonderful manager once, but he’s in England now, and he can’t be good until Ramos displays a loss of form.
It strikes me that it would save an awful lot of money if clubs and the FA stopped employing managers altogether. It’s all about local empowerment. I have been reading about capacity-building and ‘development by people’, in which local communities are encouraged to participate in the decision-making process towards sustainable development footballing success. In other words, let the fans manage the team. They might not have been professional footballers, but I bet none of them would have played Jamie Carragher as a holding midfielder.
I propose the fans form a mini United Nations, in which representatives of each supporters faction meet in a General Assembly once a week to decide on tactics. The risk, of course, is that any decision would be delayed by a last-minute interjection from the Hong Kong Supporters Group and not be resolved until the match had finished, but that’s consensus politics. The national team would be managed by the country’s most recent lottery winner: “Today’s team was picked by Mr Dave Newt from Trowbridge.” Far better than giving Mr Newt £5.2 million just so he can pay off his mortgage and go on horrific cruising holidays for the rest of his life.
I realise this would narrow the career opportunities for professional footballers. But given that (a) all managers apart from Ferguson are eventually sacked anyway and (b) all managers like golf, I propose that every single football manager works at Leeds United Football Club. The position would rotate every week, which would give each manager a chance to shine before revealing himself as a chump, and afford him plenty of time off (approximately 13 years) to work on his handicap.
Of course, it is just possible that most managers only appear to be rubbish because expectations for their teams are simply too great. There can only be one winner, people! Maybe there should be joint first place in the Premiership for the top seven clubs, just so that Newcastle and Spurs and West Ham and Everton and all the other clubs who think that the national title has been overdue for 87 years can stop whingeing. Another solution might be to forbid a team from losing, so that if the score is 2-0 at the end of normal time, the goalkeeper hands the ball to the striker on the other team and invites him to pummell the ball into an empty net.
It always annoys me when there are calls for a national enquiry into The State of British Tennis or Why We Didn’t Win the World Cup or Our Shocking Olympics Medal Haul or whatever. We can’t be good at everything – our cup runneth over already with cycling and darts, surely? Perhaps I don’t entirely understand the competitive spirit, but why can’t we just say, “Golly, Serbia, you’re awfully good at tennis, aren’t you? Well done you!”
Or, “Hello, Ethiopia – bit of a dark horse at this long-distance running lark, aren’t you? Made us look like right plonkers!”
Or, “I say, Finland, isn’t is lucky that you can produce some of the world’s best rally drivers when you’ve got so much muddy forest all over the place!”
Each to their own, I say.
* Except Roy Keane.
** Ditto.
