Knackered, pasty, complexion like a tub of custard? Join the club, says Alex Peake-Tomkinson. Here’s how to cheat that elusive healthy glow
I love blusher like only a pale woman can. And of course, the main reasons I am cravenly dependent on it is that I am one of those people that never blushes. I am often hideously embarrassed, excited and out of breath. And yes, sometimes, I am all three of these things at the same time but – for whatever reason – this never results in a flushed face.
We’re much enamoured of the jamon bars of Seville (truth be told, it’s one of the main reasons we visit the city every summer) and are constantly on the hunt for similar places in London. And yes, one can eat very good tapas in London now if one is prepared to pay through the nose. We want the kind of relaxed and inexpensive night (that might turn into a very late one) that you can only really have in a charcuterie bar, however.
I have tea with Andrew O’Hagan one morning at his house in Primrose Hill. We start talking about Seamus Heaney, a great friend of O’Hagan’s who died two years ago. I ask if he misses Heaney.
“Oh, every day. He had this brilliant tendency to take you under his wing, to be concerned about you in a very local way. He didn’t make friends with writers in order to pay attention to their reputations, or read reviews of their books, or to figure them in some higher or lesser constellation. He was interested in you humanly: he was a good person to have around if you had a cold.
We’ve been fans of the Pixi Glow Tonic for a few years now so we always take an interest when they develop a new product. The Double Cleanse they brought out earlier this year really made us sit up and pay attention as it has been developed by the hugely popular beauty blogger Caroline Hirons in conjunction with Pixi. Hirons certainly seems to know her stuff (it was Hirons who told us an exfoliating tonic should be run across the lips as well as the rest of the face to get rid of dead skin, for example, and we’ve not looked back on that score.)
Lee Miller was one of the most fascinating, and beautiful, women of the 20th century. After starting her career as a fashion model, she worked (and had an affair with) with Man Ray before becoming an acclaimed war photographer and one of the first people to photograph the concentration camp at Dachau when it was liberated. After this, she married Roland Penrose — the Surrealist and co-founder of the ICA — and retired to live at Farley Farm House in Sussex.
Brad Watson’s second novel is both charming and disquieting. The Miss Jane of the title is a baby born with a genital birth defect which Watson reveals by degrees. Notions of how anatomy constitutes identity might now seem modish, but Watson sets his novel in rural Mississippi during the early twentieth century and was inspired by the real-life example of his great-aunt, who died in 1975. This historical setting is crucial: the defect, which the reader can gradually piece together as being persistent cloaca, could now be operated on, but Watson is interested in exploring how a woman isolated by this abnormality could learn to live.
