Women

Jane Birkin, who died this week at the age of 76, appeared to be a delightful woman – attractive, adventurous and stoic. Nevertheless, I had to look twice at the Daily Mail headline on Monday which screeched 'Jane Birkin, a true style icon who put today's trashy celebs to shame'. Are they talking about the same Jane Birkin, I wonder? The one whose first film role, when still a teenager, was as a naked, nameless model ‘romping’ in a threesome with David Hemmings and Gillian Hills? I mean, talk about nice work if you can get it – but pretty ‘trashy’ if you want to fling around words like that about actual human beings, which I generally don’t.

Anna, the daughter of friends of mine, is in her final year at university and keen to enter the wine trade. Clearly, she is wise beyond her years because it’s a hugely engaging career. She will never get rich but will always be happy. Oh, and a glass of something tasty will never be far away, and nor will someone congenial with whom to share it.  Wine is made in beautiful places – just think of Bordeaux, the Douro Valley, Western Cape, Yarra Valley, Napa, Piedmont, Mendoza, Central Otago and even the rolling South Downs of Sussex – by delightful people (well, with just the one exception). It’s a warm, friendly and collaborative world to be in.

This, we are told, is a very bad time to be a woman. When young, we're warned that we are sexual prey, privy to a misogynistic ordeal both on the streets and in the sheets, courtesy of the jungle of app-mediated romance. Despite being slaves to the gym and learning to pole dance, we still can’t win. We are locked in a never-ending hell spiral that sees droves of us as young as 18 racing to the plastic surgeon, desperate to fill our faces with Botox and hyaluronic acid in a bid to look sexier, younger, hotter, fitter, less tired and more like the stars of reality TV. Did I mention younger?  And now a new book, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith, has arrived.

The final trimester of pregnancy is a strange time. You’ll be told to rest, as if you can somehow bank sleep. The reality is likely to be a dash to buy everything you need, as well as don’t need (a hi-tech ‘nappy bag’ for instance). Once the baby arrives, even trying to get out of the house becomes a mission. With that in mind, here are some helpful ways to focus mind and body during the final few weeks, if you’d rather not spend too much time obsessing over the correct shade for the nursery.  Complete your baby courses The National Childbirth Trust runs the most well-known antenatal courses, but many others are available too. Bump and Baby Club is supposedly a little more relaxed in its attitude towards childbirth.

‘New year, new you’, or so they say. And as sure as eggs is eggs (particularly for the high protein advocates), new year’s resolutions for many will have revolved around the quest for a new body. I use the word ‘body’ specifically because our prevailing culture keeps finding new and alarming ways to reduce us all, but women in the most dehumanising terms, into mere bodies; bodies that can be chopped, changed, rearranged increasingly even to accommodate the outward trappings of the opposite sex. This manifests itself most completely of course in porn, as it always has, where the cold-eyed camera sees everything of the body and nothing of the person inhabiting it.

I always thought that 'Ann Summers' was one of those made-up names created by corporate brains, like Dorothy Perkins and Ted Baker. But it turns out that Ms Summers was an actual person.  The store's founder Michael Caborn-Waterfield named his first shop after his 19-year-old secretary Annice Summers. 'Dandy Kim', as he was known, had been a roguish figure around post-war London, a gentleman adventurer who'd smuggled guns into Cuba, dated Diana Dors and served time in a French jail.