Can I Come to the Party?

I was flicking through an old American Vogue which I’d picked down from my shelf the other day – yeah, I know, I do odd things like that. As with most magazines and books it was the cover which drew me in. Shalom Harlow and Amber Valletta looked ready to go to a party. The kind I’d secretly love to attend, but would never get invited to let alone have the nerve to go if I did.

But you see that’s the whole point of Vogue. Forget the insightful writing on places you’ll never visit, or interviews with stars you’ll never meet. It’s the world created in those magical fashion spreads by stylists like Grace Coddington and Tonne Goodman which you really want to enter.

Once I’d opened the pages of the September 1995 issue, the party was in full swing. Almost thirty years later and I still wished I could visit the world inhabited by theses bright young things with not a care in the world …

The Bafflement of Poetry

Poetry has always confused me. I just don’t get it, at least not what passes as modern poetry anyway. Disjointed words, jotted randomly with little relation to each other. Or so it seems to me. I work in a bookshop and turn cold whenever customers come near and ask for advice or a recommendation from the poetry section. All people are interested in are words, phrases and sentences which seem confusing and portentous.

But maybe it’s not poetry, but modern poetry which baffles me? Give me classical poetry. Poetry which scans, which tells a story, which makes sense. Poetry which speaks to me. Take Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. Now there is a work of art, a piece of magic which comes alive on the page …….

Oh if no other piece of poetry had ever been written, the world would have been at peace with this Victorian masterpiece of tragedy and magic ……