A Weekend in the Country

We just spent the weekend at the (holiday) vineyard of some friends, up in the Hunter Valley. It was exactly my preferred type of weekend - much cooking and eating, lovely wine, a log fire on Sunday night (even though it wasn't really cold enough to justify it), walks, reading, happy children (they have three), even a happy teenager (mine) ... I think the offspring are mainly happy as they're now both on holidays for a couple of weeks.

Now I'm a day behind on my magazine deadlines, but since the publisher always pays me late, I'm refusing to care.

And this coming weekend I'm running away again, driving five hours north to visit a good friend who abandoned me and moved to the country (she used to be my neighbour). We plan to make marmalade and quince paste and gossip and plan her garden and play with her baby (9 months old) and cook hearty roasts and eat too much ... I might even motivate myself enough to take up my knitting needles.

It seems that my preferred activities would be more suited to a wardrobe of tweed and wellies, whereas what I really really want (thank goodness my size is already sold out on NAP) is this:

Up

I can't help it. Like everybody else, it seems, I've been suckered into buying a copy of Ines de la Fressange's Parisian Chic.



Living where I do, and Amazon being what it is, I'll get it some time next month, by which time I will probably have seen most of it online and be sick to death of it.

Already, I'm wondering why I felt such a strong compulsion to buy it. I don't find it hard to resist fashion magazines. I don't believe that there is one 'formula' that will make each and every one of us suddenly chic. And yet here I am, buying into the seductive myth ...

If I just buy this book, get the right pair of white jeans (so practical when you live with children, dogs and cats), the right navy cashmere sweater (forget that navy doesn't suit me) and the right ballet flats, I too will look like a tall, thin, glamorous French model with amazingly long legs. Or her 17-year-old daughter. Except I won't, will I? I'll look like me in jeans and a jumper.

I have been known to say I'd like to be Ines when I grow up. Up is probably the operative word. At 5'4", the best I'm ever going to manage is gamine ... Is there even such thing as a grown-up gamine?