Wine with breakfast
The best is yet to come
Greetings from France where I am having breakfast in a cafe on a square, watching a woman a few tables away. She is wearing brown suede thigh-high boots, a fur scarf in lime green, mirrored sunglasses and bright red lips. Her cherry nails move up and down as she drags on her cigarette and sips on her white wine.
It is 10am - and she is eighty if she is a day.
Old people are cool here.
Whether they are wearing neat puffa jackets and smart trainers or semi opaque tights and square heels, the whole look is there from top to bottom. They walk around in couples, looking perky and compact, waving at each other, having drinks.
I don’t see older people in London zipping around in this way. Have most of them been priced out of town? Or is it the weather?
Anyway, this woman with the thigh high boots makes getting older look fun.
So does a woman called Carla Rockmore, who I read about in this NYT article about Over fifty style icons. Rockmore started doing videos from her walk in wardrobe in Dallas (which is three times the size of a London flat) during lockdown… and they took off. People can’t get enough of her effervescent approach to dressing. Her get the look videos have names like: ‘Amy Winehouse meets Mrs Maisel’, ‘Ladylike Lumberjack’ and ‘I’m wearing a Persian rug!’. And she just seems to be having so much fun with it all.
I came across that article on Advantages of Age on Facebook. The group was started by Rose Rouse and Suzanne Noble and is one of my favourite places on the internet. They share articles and chat about stuff that’s happening in the world, often with a focus on stories of older people doing brilliant things or they have conversations about how age is portrayed in the media.
In non covid times, they have parties in hot tubs and on London buses. I went to a hot tub gathering once and bobbed around in hot water drinking M&S Prosecco with a group of women. Two had written sex memoirs.
They made me want to get a life.
That night I saw that if you are lucky enough to have your health, getting older is a laugh. You know yourself well, you’ve got nothing to prove - or, as mum says, ‘YOU JUST DON’T CARE ANYMORE!’
As I look up from my laptop, I wonder if the lady opposite has parties in hot tubs or her own fashion channel on YouTube.
I would ask but my French is bad and she is now flirting with the waiter.
In other news, it’s been an antisocial trip - I’m here alone and nervous about speaking bad French - but yesterday I had lunch in a cafe next to two English women. They asked me about the green bean thing I’d ordered and we got chatting.
They sell yachts. Business is booming since the pandemic apparently. People who couldn’t get on flights took to the high waters instead.
I asked one of them about a boat she’s trying to sell this week. How much? I asked her.
‘Two million euros,’ she said.
‘Oh, that’s not bad,’ I said. With complete seriousness.
She shrugged and gave me her number.
I’ve saved her as ‘Kelly Sells Boats Antibes.’
What I’m reading
This on wanting less is gorgeous. (And not in line with buying a new yacht).
I also found this article about online co-working sessions really interesting.
This on ‘sensitivity readers’ - people paid to read unpublished books and flag any areas that may be offensive to marginalised groups - was unnerving.
As this article on the smallest flat on sale in London is a great example of the World Gone Mad. The flat is 7 sq metres and is selling for £50,000 and the current tenant pays £800 a month for it.
What I’m watching
Lessflix didn’t go well this week. I started watching Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee at the start of the week and got sucked into it this world of vintage cars and conversations about ‘bits’ - comedy speak for jokes, I think.
You could say the whole thing is self-congratulatory chat between rich men - and it’s about 80 per cent that - but still, I felt inspired by their love of what they do and touched by the affection between them. They are also, it goes without saying, very funny.
Good episodes to start with are Eddie Murphy, Sarah Silverman and Steve Martin.
What I’m NOT buying
Wine with my breakfast. I love that it’s allowed and that eighty year olds are at it but I am not to be trusted with this kind of freedom.
Workshops
Ooh la la! It’s the last French based workshop TOMORROW (SATURDAY 19 FEB). If you can handle the glamour of me on a zoom sitting in front of a French white wall as opposed to a London white wall, please come! As always I set some prompts and we write in private. No reading out loud. Nothing to be good or bad at. We just hang out and move a pen across the page to see what happens.
A friend is coming over next week so there will be no session on Saturday 26th Feb. Back from London in March.
Love, fromage and thigh high boots xx