It was
International Women’s Day this week, so I thought I should do a blog celebrating 40 years of feminism, but I’m afraid I’ve just got too much housework to do. So you’ll just have to make do with one about handbags.
You may or may not have noticed that there have been a rash of blogs about handbags recently from the likes of top bloggers
Exmoor Jane, and the gorgeous
ElizabethM (whose is a tip-top blog, by the way - always full of insight and inspiration and glorious photography). I note that no one has tagged me to do anything for aaaaages, but I’m not feeling miffed. Really, I’m not (ok, maybe I am a bit, but I promise I’ll try not to hold it against you). But I’ve felt troubled for a while after reading on Jane’s blog that “more than a random set of ‘things’ – a woman’s bag is a mirror of her personality.”
Well if that’s the case, I think I might as well just go and shoot myself now. Because mine is a sad old baggy thing with a broken zip and a collection of old bus tickets, shopping lists, some random small change, a very old tube of
Anthisan, an indiarubber with a picture of a cow and several (thankfully empty) dog-poo bags. Oh, and there’s a sort of layer of gritty dust at the bottom, which I suppose counts as an object. No wonder nobody tags me.
A handbag is like a husband. You don’t want to go about changing them too often, even though other people’s sometimes look so much more practical and, well, useful, not to put too fine a point on it. One is always being tempted by new ones in soft stroky ponyskin and the like dangling enticingly in shop windows, but we all really know that way lies danger. And guilt. And disappointment. And probably penury. We used to have an old family friend called Mrs Fitzpatrick, whose wise words on the subject were indelibly etched into my pre-teenage brain.
“
Changing one’s
handbag is an
absolute
nightmare,” she would say, stressing every perfectly annunciated alternate syllable in her inimitable RP English for emphasis (despite the fact that we all knew she hailed from the wrong side of Dublin, something she had always tried to keep very quiet but the odd
‘Mother o’ Mercy’ exclaimed at times of stress would invariably give her guilty secret away). As she scrabbled in the bottom of a capacious shiny alligator-skin Kelly bag, lacquered nails would click expensively on the hard shell of a compact or an
Estee Lauder lipstick case as she rootled around for something or other that always seemed to elude her. “
Take my
word for it,” she added, coming up for air for a moment. “Buy the
best one you can
possibly af
ford, and
hang on to it for
Dear Life.”
Wise words indeed. Mrs Fitzpatrick wasn’t quite so careful with husbands, however. She’d had at least three – the last one being dispatched unceremoniously following a disagreement about whether peas or leeks were the more appropriate vegetable to have with a roast duck dinner – before she moved on into the realms of the “gentleman companion” – and I’ve lost count of the number of those she’d pop up with to various family functions.
Still, I think she had a good point. It’s all very well to experiment with different bags as a young woman; a flappy satchel with capacious, sensible pouches one day, a glossy clutch with its tinkling chain the next… But the idea of the It bag, however – the handbag as a disposable fashion item – has always seemed a bad one to me. Like a series of unsuitable boyfriends. Quite apart from the expense, they all have pockets and buckles in different places, and just when you’ve got into the habit of diving into the middle bit for your lipstick, or the pocket at the side for your keys or your mobile phone, suddenly you’re faced with a whole new battalion of possibilities. Quite apart from the obvious question of expense – come again, how much??? (Oh dear, hang on a minute – I think I may just have started to channel Mrs Fitzpatrick…)
So falling on Mrs FitzP’s immortal words like pearls of whatnot from beyond the grave, I saved long and hard and sometime during my mid-twenties, I threw in my lot with a soft brown leather bag from
Jones the Bootmakers with a secret central zipped compartment and one small side pocket for my keys, my lipstick and a mirror.
And it lasted me well, until now. Battered and a bit bruised, and with the zip distinctly broken, I’m afraid it’s nearing its nether days and if I’m to retain any credibility in the working world, I’m afraid it’s going to have to be replaced.
* * *
I think I mentioned a while back I have sort of been sucked into a kind of networking group full of glossy women called things like Astrid and Davina. I’m not quite sure how it happened – I can almost hear my mother whispering over my shoulder “you’ve got in with the wrong crowd,” because glossy I have never been. Lived in or friendly, perhaps – definitely on the shabby side of chic; the sort of woman you might ask to help out at a church jumble sale or prevail upon to walk the dog if you have to go out for the day – but never glossy. But if there’s a chance of paid work involved, I guess I shouldn’t be too choosy.
The women at the networking lunches all appear fantastically confident, colour-co-ordinated and organised and epilated to high heaven, as they fiddle around with their
Bobbi Brown make-up bags and their iPhones while I rummage haplessly amongst old bus tickets and unwieldy plastic keyrings either bought as presents from the school’s Mother’s Day Secrets Room, or embedded with pictures of my child whizzing down one of the water rides at Legoland for my chequebook – only to find the restaurant doesn’t take cheques any more. One of the women there is Siobhan, who does something to do with scarves and skin tone – don’t ask – and runs capsule wardrobe seminars in a nearby town, and whose mission in life seems to be to rescue women from spending their lives ‘trapped in black’. Siobhan is far from being trapped in anything; she is always joyfully, exuberantly liberated in a cascade of virtually every colour known to man, and some I suspect probably hitherto not (hi-visibility magenta, anyone? Thought not.) invariably accompanied by a shiny co-ordinating bag. Whether not I had been subconsciously prompted by Siobhan’s multicoloured hints at my monochrome sartorial failings, I couldn’t fail to notice that quite apart from not quite having the right shoes, the right lipstick or the right mobile phone, it soon became patently obvious that I certainly didn’t have the right kind of handbag. Patent, perhaps, being the operative word because among the bags large and even larger (I was going to say small, but mine was indisputably the smallest and the least shiny one there) there was an awful lot of patent about.
Now there are few things I enjoy less than handbag shopping (barring perhaps a weekend spent sharing a tent with Akela at cub camp or maybe, at a push, an endoscopy). I suppose in a way it’s probably a bit like husband shopping – so many possibilities for dismal failure waiting to plunge one into a lifetime of regret and despair (mind you, I suppose with a handbag, at least you have the advantage of a receipt, although inevitably, as with husbands, you don’t tend to find out you’ve picked something unsuitable until it’s too late…) Perhaps I’m stretching the parallel too far, but you get my gist...
But it had to be done.
So with Mrs FitzP in the back of my mind, and something in shiny fake alligator in the forefront, I soon found myself inescapably drawn towards a large Kelly-style tote with a determined-looking buckle in a shop window in Chippenham that will remain nameless. Why I was there, too, must, I’m afraid, remain behind a veil of the secrecy – needless to say, it had something to do with the allotment. But, whatever – there it was – something that might sit confidently alongside Siobhan’s vision in strident tangerine with tortoiseshell trim and slip seamlessly into the serried brightly coloured ranks of the ladies from the Glossy Club. The only problem was that it was bright red, and try as I might, I’ve never really thought of myself as a red person. I kind of hoped they might have a sort of brown version that wouldn’t look too out of place being hoicked in and out of my aging Nissan Micra, so in I stepped.
“I don’t suppose you have this in any other colours,” I asked the beaming girl behind the counter, once I had opened and closed the bag, ascertained it had the requisite number of internal pockets and not too much in the way of fiddly zippery and flappery, and the catch didn’t snap too loudly.
“We have a kind of green one,” she replied after a while, with an expression clearly reflecting the thought that this was not a woman likely to buy a bright shiny handbag.
“What kind of green?” I asked hopefully, bracing myself for something bright yet possibly not too strident.
“Wasabi,” she told me. I looked blankly back. “It’s a bit like this,” indicating a piece of jewellery that was something between jade and viridian. I wasn’t very much the wiser. I thought wasabi was a sort of Japanese condiment, but it seemed a bit churlish to point this out.
I beamed back and waited for her to offer to get it out, but she didn’t, so eventually I asked, “Could you possibly…?”
“It’s upstairs,” she said at length, not looking very enthusiastic about the thought of clambering up the vertiginous spiral staircase in the corner.
An audible sigh and a lot of clanking and pulling things out of boxes later, she appeared with the bag.
* * *
Well, obviously after all that I had to buy the wretched thing, and I’m still not sure whether I like it or not. So, much to Mrs FitzP’s almost palpable disapproval from beyond the grave, I’m running two handbags at the moment, to see which one I end up with, and I have to say, it does feel a bit like I’m having an affair (obviously, I have no experience of this – Obviously – but I do like to think I have a fairly creative imagination). I can’t quite let the saggy old baggy one go, but then again, I’m not quite sure about the stiff, shiny Wasabi Green one either, with all it’s flaps and buckles and fiddly bits.
If only life weren’t so
complicated.
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