I was reading something I thought I would never read. It was an article in a women’s magazine listing all the bad advice it had given to its readers over the years! It was an anniversary issue, a time for consolidating and looking back, of course, but what a confident and humble and mature thing to do, I thought. If we accept - and I think we can — that it is the job of many women’s magazines to make us feel bad so they can sell us stuff, this was quite a revolutionary approach.
First up, the magazine referred to the time it had advised its readers to wash their hands every time they passed a basin. “I know, right!” was its tone of voice. It reminded me of someone apologising for bad hair in the 1970s and bad clothes in the 1980s. What were we thinking?
Seeing the hand-washing advice written down brought the dermatologist and the psychiatrist in their white coats, galloping over the fields of my imagination. Had the advice column been sponsored by Atrixo hand cream? Did the writer have a guilt complex of Shakespearean proportions? I pictured a lady in a Hollywood maid costume, complete with organdie collar and cuffs, presiding over six pink lavatories and six pink sinks in a five-star Mayfair hotel cloakroom with roses on the carpet, at her wits’ end.
I thought of other kinds of “Every time you see ...” advice that I have heard over the years. A youngish friend of mine recommends that his pals ask a policeman for directions every time they see one, as he wants the police to get used to interacting in a friendly and helpful way with young men and not write them off as troublemakers. It is a sort of training course that he operates for the good of society, or so he explains it, and besides, he has been directed to some great places.
I have another friend who believes that every time you hear the magic tinkle of an ice-cream van you ought to run out into the street and buy one right away to celebrate life. This is not something I am capable of, sadly, ever since someone I love looked at a man dispensing swirls of soft whip on to little cones and mouthed to me the words: “It’s frozen margarine.” (Thanks mum.)
Next in its spirit of oops-confessional, the magazine shook its head at itself for having advised people to be like Madonna and Cher and navigate life with just one name. This would enable you to achieve a sort of high-handed “Here I am, take me or leave me; never apologise, never explain” style, promoting a proud and powerful “Damn, I’m good” atmosphere — what literary critics sometimes call ‘imperial sway’. This advice worked for exactly one reader, apparently: Beyonce.
When I was 16 a girl in my sixth-form attempted to bring off the one-name-only trick. She had a perfectly good name — the name of an English meadow flower — but it didn’t really suit her because she was super cool, striking to look at in an international beauty queen way (when we went out and about, strings of new admirers would follow her) and she was also very clever. The flower name wasn’t strong enough to carry all this, it seemed to me. It buckled.
Feeling foolish
Anyway, one Monday she decided to ditch her given name and be known as “Chase”, which I believe was her middle name. I used it a bit but felt foolish when I did so, mainly because she did not respond. “What do you want to make yourself sound like an American bank for?” our English teacher asked.
Within a month it was back to Poppy again. So that was that.
I tried to think of bad advice that magazines have given me that I have followed. Apply a dab of red lipstick to your ear lobes and it will reflect a warm light on to your face. I tried that until a good friend told me to desist. Drink whisky and wear scuffed shoes — not so bad that one. I am very suggestible in this department, always have been. My sister once starred in a wonderful play called “I didn’t know celery could kill you”, which was filled with magaziney advice such as “stuff your cushions with superfluous body hair”. I saw the show every night of its three-week run.
At about this time I read that to be a femme fatale you should cultivate a laugh that is “both alluring and dismissive”. When I attempted this in public someone tried to give me the Heimlich manoeuvre.
Simpler times.
-Financial Times
