Monday 3rd February 2014

Actually I’m just back from Hastings yesterday. But that’s yet to come. Oh, I’ve such thrills for you. A world figure lunched at the Home Store. Genevieve Suzy gave a tea for further World Figures. Angus Willis has done a new shop window.

But I have not finished with January yet. I dined with Aunt Lavinia. Cousin Barley was in, saying that the doctor is sending her to a dietician because she’s too thin while pregnant. I said, ‘Didn’t you explain that you’re in fashion?’ Incidentally she’s come up trumps with tickets for the Alice Temperley Show on Sunday week. So we’ve that to look forward to.

I’m slightly getting a ‘Nothing to Wear’ feeling. Tweed trousers are lacking. But there’s a Designer Warehouse Sale next Thursday so hope.

Merle Barr dined, formerly Head of Children at one of the Councils – except that’s not quite the right title. She couldn’t believe my salad shaker: ‘It’s got a brake,’ she shrieked.

Val and I went fabric shopping before Aunt Lavinia’s and had nasty toasted sandwiches near Ladbroke Grove.

Another day I took ’12 Years a Slave’. I did love this film. I thought it would be terribly arty and contrived which it is in a way but the odd thing is I’ve never had such a sense of the past come back to life. These seedy, flimsy Southern homesteads, with their wooden porticos, weeds growing in the dust all around, small places really, were got back to being alive again through the intense almost magnified effect and the colour saturation of the filming. Also presumably real and true to history. Slavery carried on in these back-waterish, insignificant places, vaguely familiar to us. It was all horribly casual and normal, not vast, epic gangs of slaves on a darkening plain, as might be imagined by some crass film-maker who’d only seen other films.