Mitford's

Just in case you are wondering,  there was no picture in the carpet in the hot room this morning. It was standing room only so I had to practice at the back of my mat - my view was of the towel. Just the towel. No potential for psychoanalysis today.

The disappointment of having no new material for my blog broke my one track yoga concentration. Suddenly I was standing on the mat thinking of Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate- when Jassy and Victoria are taken up with psychoanalysis and are toying with their father. They offer to test his intelligence level by having him look at an ink blot on a piece of paper with the results stemming from what he can 'see' in the ink blot - a spider, the Himalayas. When he tells them that it looks like nothing other than an ink blot they reply, 'It's just as I had feared....and shows a positively sub-human level.....Oh, dear, sub-human, that's bad-'. What would they have said about my towel being a towel?

On my way home I kept thinking of Nancy Miford. Have I mentioned that she is one of my absolute favourite writers. And that I am endlessly fascinated by the lives of her and her family. How can you not be.If you have utterly no idea what I'm talking about then you had better start here.

Anyway, one of my favourite quotes from Love in a Cold Climate is where Linda says to Fanny '...do you think about dresses and hats all the time, even in church...'. Do you? And me? Maybe not hats and maybe not in church. Oh, and maybe not ALL the time. Yet I must confess to having spent some time this afternoon in the park while the children were eating sand and playing to thinking about what I'm going to wear tomorrow night when I go to my friends house. Big question. Right up there with what am I going to cook for dinner.

Once Nancy made serious money as an author she bought her clothes at Dior. So did her sister Debo aka the Duchess of Devonshire (now Dowager). Debo writes in her book Home to Roost and Other Peckings:

about the time her grandaughter, the model, Stella Tennant, came to Chatsworth for a fashion shoot. One room was full of new clothes from some of the most famous fashion houses in Europe and America. During the shoot Debo showed off some of her forty year old coats and dresses from Dior, Balmain and Lanvin. In the end that they dressed her up in them and took photos of her with her granddaughter wearing the current models. How fun would that have been.

R