I’m a boy, I’m a boy

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Helena

Just call me Leo Suddenly there is no more time for Grey’s Anatomy or the Wham! revival. The serialisation of To Hell in High Heels may happen as early as next week (after a dramatic bidding war between the Mail and the Sunday Times, as usual the Mail won), I am about to be interviewed on French national radio about French women as Two Lipsticks comes out here on March 17th and Leo thinks he’s a girl called Tinkerbell.

To the France-Inter interview first. This may sound significant but when you know it is going to be broadcast between five and six in the morning on Monday you realise that I am not yet what they call over here a “people”.

The Mail is very exciting – they say they are going to do a photo shoot. This time I am choosing my own dress, the last one they put me in made me look like a catalogue model.

And talking of dresses…..yes, Leo. He was last seen wearing a Cinderella nightie and Pocahontas wig. Rupert kept saying; “Repeat after me. I’m a boy, I’m a boy.” He sounded like Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. To this instruction Leo squealed with delight and said “I’m a girl, I’m a girl.”

I am not too worried. I think it’s extremely healthy to just go with whatever flow happens to work for you at the time. He has spent most of his four-year life being either Spiderman or Peter Pan. This makes an interesting change.

I tried to calm Rupert down. “Fine,” he said, gently removing Leo’s black wig as he slept. “But I’m not going to his wedding.”

The wallies from Wham!

Posted on March 5, 2008 by Helena

George & Andrew I have had one of those days when nothing goes right. I go to grab something and break a nail (newly manicured I might add, I painted them last night before I fell asleep with the new Laura Mercier colour), I go to use a stapler and there are no staples in it, I go to get a towel down from the towel rail and the whole bloody lot fall on my head, I have NO work, my work phone rings and I think ‘yippee, it’s the Daily Mail’. It is not, it’s some man trying to sell me frozen foods. In French. Olivia’s CD player breaks and she says she will never be able to sleep without music.

This is where things start improving. We find Rupert’s old stereo, on which only the tape deck works. So then I have to dig out old tapes. Oh JOY – what do I find? The Bangles and Wham! So we spent a happy hour dancing and singing to songs I haven’t heard for at least 20 years.

It is a little known fact that Andrew Ridgley (from Wham!) was once very keen on me. I remember several nights at the Camden Palace when he and George Michael sidled up to me and I was informed by George that Andrew fancied me. Sadly this was all before they were famous. “The wallies from Wham!” we used to call them. We all thought we were much cooler and more talented than them. And would be more famous. Besides, he was far too thin for me.

Anyway, after the dancing Olivia and I had an even more exciting experience. A friend (God bless him) pirated the fourth series of Grey’s Anatomy from the Internet for us. So we watched episodes one and two. I can’t tell you how brilliant it was. Much better than Wham! and certainly better than working.

The fuzzy end of the lollipop

Posted on March 3, 2008 by Helena

Sugar Yes more evidence, if any more evidence was needed, that women get what Sugar in the film Some Like it Hot calls “the fuzzy end of the lollipop”.

Rupert was reading a blog today on The Guardian website by a thirty-seven-year-old man who was complaining that he feels old. Yesterday was Rupert’s birthday, he was forty-six, so imagine how irritated he was by this. But he was cheered up by one comment.

“The only solution is younger and younger women,” read the comment. “Follow the French method for calculating her ideal age – half your own plus seven – this makes you just right for a 25 to 26 year-old. Feeling better?”

So where does that leave women? Hanging out with old gits is where it leaves us. According to this method only men over the age of 70 will give me a second look. Great. That’s something to look forward to.

It was Mother’s Day yesterday in England. Here in France it went largely unnoticed but I would like to share two thoughts on mothering with you.

One is a quote by a woman who said: “I was going to be the ideal mother but was too busy bringing up my children.” The other is from Ines de la Fressange, French supermodel and, since her husband’s sudden death a year ago, a single mother. “You may not be the perfect mother,” she told me. “But you are the best mother for your children.”