Dad, me, so long ago.

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Chanel, Tokyo, March 2012, my pic.

I finally saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 … forgive my belated attention to this matter … I come not to offer a review but instead some scattered, semi-connected thoughts about the follow-up to the much-loved 2006 film about the terrifying fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep, inspired by editor Anna Wintour and Vogue).

For a few years in the first decade of the century I worked at a luxe magazine with some fashion content (the now-defunct 😢 “The Sydney Magazine”, released monthly with The Sydney Morning Herald and styled graphically as the(sydney)magazine).

It’s not a stretch to say I was fashion-magazine adjacent. I have some sense of how magazines and fashion magazines work. I feel equipped to offer some reflection on TDWP2.

Like, once, in a time long ago, I was even flown business class to Tokyo for a couture show, a Chanel show no less. I still have the lanyard.

Chanel, Tokyo, March 2012, my pics, bar that of me bottom right, who took it, who knows?

Karl Lagerfeld (Sarah Jessica Parker on his arm) passed me by, like inches away, not once but twice! First, at an Aoyama exhibition of Lagerfeld’s photographs for his The Little Black Jacket, a book he photographed (styled/edited by French fashion editor and former model, Carine Roitfeld who, in some circles, is not insignificant … 2.8 million followers on Instagram). Second, the following day, at the Chanel 2012 Spring/Summer runway show (my understanding is that to call it a fashion parade would immediately signal my lack of sophistication) in a space in the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden styled as the interior of an “Air Chanel” plane.

True, I was no style icon in a front-row seat, no time, no money, no body, no fashion closet to raid as Anne Hathaway’s TDWP character Andy does; I think I dug some old things out of the back of my wardrobe to pack, dark/black, sufficient. Besides, what I looked like didn’t matter, no one was looking at me.

Fringe-dweller that I was, my internal monologue through the show was censorious, sacrilegious: I thought the whole thing was, well, a bit silly, emperor’s new clothes and all that. But I didn’t say so in the article I wrote for the(sydney)magazine. Of course I didn’t. Chanel was my host.*

Look, I guess the dresses were decent. Some had nice sequins. Maybe the sequins had been stitched on by the hands of a hundred virgins. Maybe Mr Lagerfeld himself had signed off on every individual sequin. And the colours, all the blues, my favourite – apparently 150 shades of blue – were very fine. But the tornado hair? Really? Why? The stick-insect models? Seriously, still, why? The gushing and carry-on and cultiness? Spare me. I kept wishing there was a call button above my seat so I could get a drink. I kept thinking about the Akasaka sushi bar to which I planned to escape afterwards.

At a press conference, the next day I think, in a ballroom at Tokyo’s Park Hyatt Hotel, I ventured a couple of questions to Mr Lagerfeld. A bit provincial, I know, but how, I asked him, did the library of his mind see Australia/Australian imagery.

His reply: “I would love to go to Australia but I need a professional reason to go to Australia. I’m not a tourist, I’m not a holiday person. I don’t believe in, I go to beach and lay in the sun and wait for inspiration; you get dumb and brown, that’s all you get.”

Right, dumb and brown.

Oh, The Devil Wears Prada 2? Oh yes, that’s what I was writing about …

So, to buy into this sequel requires a greater suspension of disbelief than I can manage: we’re meant to believe that Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway), who began as an assistant at Runway magazine in the 2006 film, has, by the sequel, become an award-winning investigative reporter for a serious news publication but returns to Runway, seemingly with few qualms, as its features editor. Barely minutes in movie time after accepting a journalism award for the serious publication with a fiery speech – “journalism still fucking matters!” she cries in a sort of man-the-barriers Les-Mis way – she is back at Runway dipping into the fashion closet and editing/writing features about designer labels’ new looks and skincare.

I tried to take that leap with the film but tripped and fell.

Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada 2 (The Walt Disney Company).

My disbelief tripped me up again when Andy “interviews” Dior executive Emily (played by Emily Blunt) as she whisks her around Dior’s new New York flagship store on a tour. Andy seems to be carrying a little notebook; at one point, she even appears to scratch a couple of notes down. Me when I have to walk and talk to subjects at the same time? I’m a slapstick comedy routine, a panicky juggler of notebook, pen, tape recorder. If there’s a real features writer alive who can walk, interview, concentrate, take even half-legible notes, not use a tape recorder, yet, back at their desk still write something decent and accurate, I’ll buy them a drink.

Oh, and then there’s that small matter of her old toxic boss, Miranda Priestly.

Over decades, I have had the misfortune of working for several unpleasant, undermining female editors. They are a very special breed unto themselves. You don’t go back to them. Not ever. You would rather stick pins in your eyes than ever, ever go back and work for them again.

Journalists who have moved between magazines and newspapers, as I have, those who love the alchemy of words and images, as well as people who once could not imagine life without being in monthly possession of a number of hefty glossy titles (Vanity Fair, Vogue, Esquire, Monocle, GQ, American Gourmet, Vogue Entertaining, a design title or two etc), might find TDWP2 a requiem for magazines (also see “Mood” below).

Some might dismiss magazines as superficial relics but once, most, even Vogue, were home to outstanding narrative non-fiction writing, to brilliant columnists, and extraordinary ideas, art direction, photography, graphic design and illustration. That creativity formed the backbone, the luxury-product ads paid for it all. Thinking ruefully on this, I dug back to find something Tina Brown (former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk magazine) said in a 2025 interview with The Shift’s Sam Baker:

“I think of those Vanity Fair days as the dinosaur days. They were the great days of Condé Nast, and they were so much fun. It wasn’t just about the expense accounts, it was about the freedom and joy of only having to really think about the content, the hiring of the writers, how your cover was going to look, and what was going to be in the magazine. I spent my time finding talent, growing talent, splashing the work, and getting people excited about it. The offices that I had at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Tatler, and The Daily Beast were these humming thrives of fun, creative people who couldn’t wait to get to the office. It was a bloody Camelot!”

“When Magazines Ruled the World” was the headline on a CNN Business article last year timed to coincide with the 30^th anniversary of the launch of the late John F. Kennedy Jr’s magazine, George. “The same magazines that could once make or break a designer or an author, announce a new star, or dictate what we’d all be wearing a few months later today have a fraction of that influence,” the article observed.

I think of all the magazine things I’ve loved over the years, oh look, so many, just a few:

• The first feature writing I’m sure I ever saw, a sports column from Esquire, August 1984; a university lecturer shared it with my class. The writer, Pete Dexter, profiled the Canadian professional wrestler, Joseph Maurice Régis “Mad Dog” Vachon. Dexter described the wrestler: “He is fifty-four years old and the top of his head, which is as shiny and hairless as your liver, is freshly scarred in a way that resembles a crayon drawing of the sun”. I still have the print-out of the article the lecturer handed out in class, four decades ago, good grief. I’ve highlighted the words – “the top of his head, which is as shiny and hairless as your liver…”. The simile floors me.

• Items of “furniture” (see “F” here) such as New York magazine’s “The Approval Matrix” and wild ideas such as Vanity Fair’s (satirical) “The Impossible Interview”, eg, Kim Jong-Un speaks with Anthony Bourdain (2012), Kanye West speaks with Pope Francis (2014). Plus, VF’s “celebrated interrogation”, the “Proust Questionnaire” (“What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?”, “What is your current state of mind?”, “Which historical figure do you most identify with?”).

• The extraordinary pieces of writing – “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Gay Talese, Esquire again, 1965); “The American Man, Age 10” (Susan Orlean, also Esquire, December 1992 – wonderful annotated take on the story here); the rolling and remarkable post 9-11 coverage including “Manifest Courage: The Story of Flight 93” (Bryan Burrough, Vanity Fair, December 2001).

But, oh well, too bad, it’s just about all over. In a world of digital media, smartphones, apps, AI, splintered attention, influencers, social media, a world where anyone can make content, the floods of advertising dollars that once permitted editors with brilliant minds like Tina Brown to pay properly for the best of words, photography, illustration and design, have, for the most part, dried up to a trickle. (Thank goodness for The New Yorker magazine which continues to thrive; it even got an Easter egg in TDWP2 – an iconic black and white New Yorker tote hangs in Andy’s apartment.)

In the film, Runway magazine is greatly diminished from its outing 20 years ago in part one – in its size, prestige and budget.

And, perhaps the most truthful, and raw, moment comes when Miranda Priestly is forced to turn right not left when she boards a plane for the Milan shows.

I felt like crying, but not for her, or for business-class travel – rare is the journalist who turns left not right these days, even on someone else’s dime – I felt like crying for the lost world that moment represented, a world that understood that good journalism and good writing were worth paying for.

I flinched, I did, when Emily looked Andy up and down and said: “You’ve changed, you have, you’re much more confident; kept those eyebrows though, didn’t you.” Oh eyebrows. How I’ve let mine go.

And, when Stanley Tucci’s character, Nigel, looked Andy up and down and observed – “well, look what TJ Maxx dragged in” – I felt my Anko T-shirt and leggings upon me.

Andy has nothing on me when it comes to going downhill.

Down a few cinema seats from where my friend and I sat, a bunch of teen girls settled in with giggles and enough junk food to stock a supermarket. Were they 13, 14, 15? Something like that.

In a grumpy-old-woman-sort-of-a-way I glanced at them every so often through the first few minutes of TDWP2 to gauge their noise levels; soon I was sneaking looks to check their reactions.

So much must have sailed over their heads. Nigel, on quiet luxury: “luxury that is so quiet that you need an ear trumpet”. Miranda Priestly looking at (a reproduction of) “The Last Supper”, talking about Leonardo Da Vinci and human fallibility ...

The kids were there for the labels, the fashion, the stars, the glitter, the popcorn.

How were they to know that the culture eating them has eaten my industry?

*When you read the declaration at the bottom of articles, frequently travel articles, with words to the effect of “X was the guest of Y”, do know that X cannot say what they really think about Y. No, I don’t feel good about my complicity, not good at all. In another time even longer ago I worked at The Independent in London. And it was. Freebies of any kind were forbidden. But that was an era when print media still was a viable business; publications could afford to send journalists all over the place to cover things independently. I’m not sure there’s a publication left that can afford to do that.

And look what I found in my files, the text of my 2012 article on Tokyo-Chanel …

Chanelsw

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Gather round my fire: a rare special Vamp offer!

A couple of years ago I asked you to tell me about yourself. This week I found myself re-reading your responses to my survey and it’s reminded me what remarkable humans gather round my fire.

You are artists, psychologists, nurses, lawyers, teachers, carers, farmers, former (and current) journalists, authors, gallery directors, environmental campaigners, doctors, researchers, scientists, television producers, ceramicists. You live in cities and regions, in seaside towns and country hamlets, and some of you beam in from abroad. You are caring for ageing parents, writing novels, rebuilding your lives after divorce, dealing with illness and grief, learning to swim, learning to paint, learning to breathe, learning to retire.

Most of you still feel like you’re 30 although the actual number is, to one degree or another, somewhat higher. Most of you are women (although, hello there, you splendid handful of men who are followers!).

What unites you is curiosity and, I see, kindness. You want to live big, thoughtful, curious, kind lives.

You’re interested in books and humans and trees and art and good food and intense conversations and politics and dogs (or cats) and beautiful writing.

You have found that, in a noisy internet built to make us anxious, distracted and distrustful, Vamp is a haven, a place to read human words, disappear down rabbit holes and feel emotion – both difficult and joyful.

One of you told me that Vamp is like “a long email from a comfortable friend”. Another of you called it “my weekend treat in bed with coffee”. Someone else wrote, “Your email arrives ... and my world becomes normal again.”

I know many of you have been reading for months, even years. Whether you’re a paid subscriber or not, I’m genuinely grateful you’ve chosen to spend part of your week with Vamp. Reading your survey responses and the lovely messages you leave for me, I’m reminded what a privilege it is to have earned your trust and shared words and information that matter to you.

I spend a few days each week on this project, going down rabbit holes, reading, reading, searching for images, agonising over ideas and words. It is one of the most time-consuming things I’ve ever done – and also the most rewarding.

Thanks to paid subscribers, I’m able to keep most of Vamp free for everyone. I like the idea that anyone can wander in.

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Paid subscriptions are what keep Vamp alive.

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I know there are more demands on our wallets than ever, so if you’re able to move a little closer to the fire and support Vamp, thank you. It means more to me than you can know.

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🎵 Mood

OK, here’s something serious I love (you will most certainly know the start of the section “Dies Irae”, or “days of wrath”, for it has been used in countless films), something for grey rainy days, for days when my late father is on my mind.

Dad adored requiems and te deums, in a non-religious but existential kind of a way. “The crash bang stuff,” was how he described them.

Once, ahead of Christmas, he emailed me:

“I will take Mahler’s Symphony No 2 (Resurrection) – you can listen at leisure. I will also bring Mahler’s No 8 (Symphony of a Thousand) which will enliven the neighbourhood. To the list I will add Berlioz’s Te Deum, although these all need full-throttle reproduction which will make it difficult in the relatively narrow confines of the neighbourhood. I can only play them when driving in the car alone, or at home when your mother is out. If you really like the crash-bang stuff I will also bring Verdi’s very operatic Requiem Mass. I collect Requiem Masses. There’s Fauré, Mozart, Bach, and a couple of others I think. They’ve got guts in their music.”

Oh how I miss my Dad, how I have been thinking of him.

Wild thing

I’ve been meaning to share this for a while: Hungarian-born photographer Clara Aich bought this New York brownstone, a former foundry, in 1979. According to The New York Times (gift link to the beautifully photographed article here), the space was filled with plaster models of architectural sculptures: gods and gargoyles, cherubs and lions, eagles and nymphs – the remnants of the work of Rochette & Parzini, a firm that from 1909 to 1972 created architectural sculptures for New York landmarks. “Beautiful,” Aich says of her first sight of the building in this gorgeous video, “I felt like I’m in Rome or I’m in Greece or in Turkey on the ruins”. She has, says the Times, long operated the building “as a sort of sumptuous, speakeasy salon, hosting intimate musical performances, operas and plays. … Palazzo Parzini, Ms. Aich calls the place, but others have named it Casa Clara.” Postscript: Aich listed the property for sale in 2025 for US$7.95 million (AUD$11.52 million). I cannot find any record that it has sold.

Reading

Nick Cave, writing for his newsletter “The Red Hand Files” … on ageing, old people and being an old rockstar: “… for that fleeting, hellish moment I see my image on the phone – the crazy old face, the strained grimace, the panicky, rheumy eyes, the angry, pleading Pavarotti eyebrows – and I realise that the only difference between me and these dentured old fuckers grinning into the camera beside me is that I dye my hair black, which I see, in that dreadful flash of existential lucidity, just makes me look older and fully ridiculous.”

I can’t write without a computer, if I try to write anything by hand I write nonsense. My brain is an amoeba without a keyboard beneath my fingertips. I’m in awe of those who can write exceptional words by hand. American crime fiction writer James Ellroy (LA Confidential) does. He does. not. own. a computer. never. owned. a. mobile. phone. never. sent an email. “It’s satanic to me, the dependency that people have on computers,” he tells The Guardian. I have been possessed by satan. Ellroy describes his process, and far more significantly, the horrifying back story underlying his life. “In 1958, when Ellroy was 10, his mother, Geneva Hilliker, was murdered. Her body was found lying in a patch of ivy with a nylon stocking and cotton cord around her neck. Ellroy wrote in his 1996 memoir My Dark Places: ‘Her face had gone slightly purple. She looked like a classic late-night body dump’.”

Oh the joy that John Birmingham and his Alien Sideboob Substack give me, this week writing on the Karl Stefanovic fandango and his interview with “nasty little fascist gobshite” Tommy Robinson, which led to his sacking from Nine. Oh Birmingham’s wordly gems: Stefanovic “spent an hour rubfucking a jackboot tamagotchi who Scott Morrison’s government ruled was too feral to let through passport control”. And: “Matt Canavan emerged, blinking, from cosplay hour down in his backyard coal mine to denounce any move against Stefanovic”. And: “if the Australian media really is a legion of woke leftist pronoun warriors, as the Whiny Right insists, then who the fuck are all these chodes? Because from where I’m sitting the loudest voices in this chorus of complaint are all billionaires and millionaires or their hired janissaries.” (I had to look up “janissaries” – they were, apparently, the elite infantry corps of the Ottoman empire, the sultan’s powerful and loyal troops and household soldiers)

A disarming list from the dazzling journalist-writer-presenter Virginia Trioli, who this week finished up at the ABC after 27 years – “27 Things I’ve Learned at the ABC”. “If in doubt, play some disco: off air, on air, while you're desperately trying to find the lead story to the show that you're half an hour away from presenting. It solves most problems, and even if it doesn't, it always helps.”

Love this – Susan Cain (author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) on “SIMIs” – “the constellation of minor interactions that round out our days.” I had a few today as I walked Lola between bouts at my desk … with the nice man who maintains the street plants in the lane near me, with the neighbour needing a knee-op (I gave him the details of Mum’s excellent surgeon), with a woman in the dog park and her cocker spaniel. Didn’t talk to anyone else. Didn’t much want or need to. SIMIs are lifeblood.

The Quiet Life with Susan Cain

Have you heard of SIMIs?

Have you ever come across the term — and concept — of SIMIs (the Seemingly Insignificant Minor Interactions of Everyday Life…

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14 days ago · 189 likes · 35 comments · Susan Cain

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Tina Brown, fabulous as ever, on the new book by Australian wonder-journalist Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, is Brown says, a flabbergasting feat of political reporting.

FRESH HELL Tina Brown's Diary

Regime Change: The Big Beautiful Beach Read

As many as 30,000 English language books have been written about Donald Trump since he first eyed the White House in 2016, but only one has managed to weave together his maniacal haphazard decision-making with the vaunting stream of consciousness that inflates his indefatigable will to power…

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16 days ago · 459 likes · 65 comments · Tina Brown

And, for anyone with even a passing interest in UK politics, the great British writer/journalist Ian Dunt on why he thinks Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is dead. “Farage is, it goes without saying, a moral stain upon this country’s reputation, the fag-brown teeth of a rotting corpse. But he is also, and this is underdiscussed, a hapless clown. His competence is as degraded as his ethics.”

Striking 13

Triumph in Makerfield: Everything is about to change

A comprehensive, thumping result and an absolute vindication. Andy Burnham won the Makerfield byelection for Labour with a performance which shattered pollsters’ predictions. Labour came in with 54.8% to Reform’s 34.5%, with Restore coming third on 6.8%. Some disparate thoughts below…

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20 days ago · 511 likes · 90 comments · Ian Dunt

Beautiful Things

Fab, fab video, via Instagram. Plus: World of Interiors story here – “Today, she’s wearing a sculptural turquoise hat made from paper towels and trimmed with decorated loo rolls. ‘It isn’t fashion,’ she explains, ‘but a personal statement of embellishment. My ABCs are assembling, building and constructing, with my body as the armature.’ Around her neck hangs an ostentatious neckpiece, forged in 1983 from found metal and telephone wires. ‘Most of the others I made in the 70s, 80s and 90s are in museums now,’ she says with the shrug of someone long past seeking approval.” Plus, plus: Rapoport’s Insta account here.

Oh these are heavenly … Jean Baptiste Vérany’s chromolithographs from 1851 – “Mollusques méditeranéens: observès, decrits, figurès et chromolithographies d'après le vivant”, via Instagram. More on The Public Domain Review website – Vérany wanted “to accurately render ‘the suppleness of the flesh, the grace of the contours, the flexibility of the membranes, the transparency and the coloring’.”

Kelp, it’s underrated. Via Instagram.

Food

This week, cooked a version of this lovely recipe – polenta with broccolini, peas and pecorino – well-pleased. Substituted (lightly steamed) broccolini for the asparagus because, there’s something wrong about eating asparagus year round. The peas were frozen, the broadbeans were left out, the garlic wasn’t wild, the mint was a bit sad (because, at this time of the year, they’re barely clinging to life), and the “shallots” became a white onion, because, hadn’t been to the shops. And, because, protein (god, the gram-volume we’re meant to eat every day😳), I cooked a chicken breast on the barbecue (wrapped in foil with garlic, oil, white wine then flash seared at the end) and sliced it over the top. LOTS of butter. LOTS of pecorino. VERY good.

Cucumber or squash and eggplant, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) (via Wikimedia Commons).

I made a good eggplant/aubergine dish too, the Middle Eastern, babaghanoush-related “moutabal” (or mutabal). Excellent, it was, with crudités, and on toast, and on a sort of assembled salad plate with whatever was resurrectible from my depleted fridge. Says Ottolenghi: “Baba ganoush and mutabal have one thing in common: they’re both a burnt aubergine mezze. Besides that, throughout the Arab world, they are two quite different things. Mutabal is made creamy with the addition of tahini, baba ganoush on the other hand is much lighter.” I approximately followed this recipe, here’s Ottolenghi’s slightly fancier version with pomegranate molasses and pomegranate seeds.

What Sydney’s most legendary chef did next: moved to the country. For The Australian Financial Review, Jill Dupleix visits Peter Gilmore at his little farm in south-west Tasmania. “I don’t plan to stop cooking,” he says, as he gently pulls a giant, burgundy-skinned onion from the rich soil and gives it a shake. “I want to open something really beautiful in Hobart that isn’t too small to make money, and isn’t too big to handle.”

Socials: news/observations/humour/inspirations

Via Threads.

Via Threads.

Stolen words

“Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. …

I believe it is a responsibility to myself – to not waste my precious life. In the immense hallways of time and of space, out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment, I am here. I breathe. I see. I feel. I experience this grand spectacle of a cosmos I find myself in. That is not a thing to be wasted, or left unobserved.”

–American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur Alan Lightman in a remarkable article in The Atlantic, “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing”.

Danielle Kabos in her Normandie garden: “It takes a lot of mental strength not to drive yourself nuts,” she says. Photograph: Annemique de Kroon.

In last week’s newsletter, in aid of a story I’m researching, I asked you to tell me about what arrangements you might (or might not have) made for the end of your life. Advanced health care directives, wills, funeral instructions, last-hurrah-party instructions, burial/burning instructions … bracing life admin of that nature.

A few of you emailed to fill me in on your thinking on the matter (thank you). And, in answer to the poll I posted and its more specific question – “Have you documented your wishes for serious illness, incapacity or end-of-life care?” … Well, you (and me too) have room for improvement. Only about 20% of you have fully documented your wishes. Another 32% have either made some plans or told your families what it is that you desire. 37% of you keep meaning to get organised (yep, me too). 11% of you (and me too) are in complete denial. Don’t want to think about it. Fuck off and leave me alone.

And someone else emailed me, a brilliant Australian-born reader of Vamp who lives in rural Normandie. Her note stopped me in my tracks, lodged itself in my mind. I have carried it with me all week.

Danielle Kabos is 54 and living with stage 4 colon cancer.

Her words are funny, devastating, irreverent and full of joy. I have found myself returning to them over and again this week. (With a big birthday looming, these are subjects weighing heavily on my mind. Perhaps you too?)

How can we live when we know we are dying?

Danielle, I feel, has dived into the heart of things and, with her permission, I’m sharing her email to me in full below.

Her words are about dying, but more than that, they’re about continuing to live:

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This Zoom conversation is a benefit for paid Vamp subscribers.

This will be a confidential and judgment-free conversation about what actually happens to our bodies across midlife and beyond: prolapse, i…

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This Zoom conversation is a benefit for paid Vamp subscribers.

This will be a confidential and judgment-free conversation about what actually happens to our bodies across midlife and beyond: prol…

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Public Library, Cambridge, hand-coloured etching and aquatint (Thomas Rowlandson, 1809, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959).

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Rachel Ward on her Nambucca Valley property during shooting for ABC Australian Story’s episode “Regeneration”. (Photograph: Vanessa Gorman/ABC.)

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Etching of two skeletons and one half-skeleton, half-female figure, by the Spanish painter José García Hidalgo (c 1691, the Wellcome Collection).

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Detail from a sketch of chrysanthemums by Bakusen Tsuchida, c. 1933 (pencil and colour on paper, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, via Wikimedia Commons).

I have never received a bunch of chrysanthemums for Mother’s Day.

I have never received A Florist’s Selection For Mum Bouquet on Mother’s Day. No one has ever agonised over a Mother’s Day Gifting Edit to pick Something Truly Special for me on Mother’s Day.

No one has bought me a new pair of pink slippers or a new vacuum cleaner or a nylon nightie or a bottle of bubble bath on a Sunday in May.

No, no one has ever chosen for me one of 50 Luxe Ways To Treat Mum To Breakfast In Bed. No wonky fat pancakes smeared with chocolate sauce and tiny fingerprints and a cup of tea sloshing in its saucer for me. No one has ever pondered which recipe to cook for me from 85 Effortless Mains For An Easy Mother’s Day Lunch.

There have been no little or bigger hugs, no finger paintings of hearts and flowers and “I luv yous”.

Can’t you tell? I am barely consolable.

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The writing hasn’t been so successful but there has been swimming.

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Fish seller, Princes Bridge, Melbourne, circa 1914 (G.G.M. Photographer, State Library, Victoria).

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For years, immersed in blues and greens: Coogee Ladies Baths, Raja Ampat, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Esperance Bay, Monterey Bay, Bondi Icebergs, etc.

Coogee Sunday forecast: Sunny. 20°C, water temperature 23°C. Wave height 1-2 feet (thigh to waist).

Event: Coogee Island Challenge, 1km “Splash and Dash”.

Goal: Finish the swim without needing to be rescued, without having to crawl on my stomach up the sand to pass through the finishing portal.

Triumph: earlier in the week, three weeks ahead of schedule and with a lingering head cold, I managed to do a non-stop 1km in the pool. For me, a little triumph. This morning at Bondi Beach (Saturday) I pushed myself through training – about 1.2km through a weedy, choppy sea. Coaches have convinced me I am ready for a proper event in the blue. So it is, the Coogee Island Challenge, tomorrow (Sunday), a dress rehearsal for my “goal” swim in three weeks, the Bondi Bluewater. I might still be swimming when you read this over your morning pot of tea. For that matter, I might still be swimming when you sit down to your Sunday night dinner.

Blue: In my epilogue to Fake, I wrote about the colours I love – the blues, the blue-greens, the blue-greys. I wrote about the joy I get from the ocean, Sydney’s sea baths, all those colours. I wrote:

One afternoon I return to the ladies baths, my thinking place. It is grey and drizzly. But for one other woman in a red bathing suit doing slow laps, it is all mine – a rare, delirious joy – and I run down the stairs with the excitement of a child about to swim for the first time since last summer. The stillness is infinite, the water dark and velvety, more jade than turquoise, the sea beyond the pool wall a platinum swathe that blurs into the palest periwinkle blue where it meets the sky.

I could not explain blue before, all the blues, the blue-greens and blue-greys, how they made me feel, the catch in my breath, the multi-tonal thrill of them, but then I found American writer Rebecca Solnit’s words on blue – the “colour of horizons ... of anything far away ... the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and of desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not”.

Those blues, they are sustenance for me.

Me, Bondi Bluewater, 2020. I do like a pair of boy-leg swimmers.

Swimming: I have never been nor will I ever be any sort of athlete. I am lazy and inconsistent, I drop balls or flail about or get puffed out or run last. But for the third year I am doing a Can Too swim program. Thanks to the program, I swam the Murray Rose Malabar Magic in 2018 and the Bondi Bluewater before the pandemic in 2020 – 1km each time, very slowly.

The chance to get out in all those colours gets me through to the end of 12 weeks of Can Too’s coached sessions (twice a week – an evening lapping and drilling in the pool, a morning at Bondi, ins and outs and porpoise-diving-under-wave practice and out to the back beyond the break and distances) and, after all that, to the end of an event or “goal” swim.  

It’s around $450 for the 12 weeks of intense coaching, lairy orange Can Too swimmers and cap, plus lifeguards at every Bondi session. But in return for that paltry fee, participants are required to fund raise for cancer research – $1300 is expected of each person. And perhaps that’s the real motivating force to get me to the finish line: the weight of sponsors on my shoulders should I skip too many pool sessions or sleep in through a Saturday morning Bondi swim is heavy. I’m accountable to them and their hard-earned!

Panic: After the pandemic, I reassembled myself and found an informal group of women who swam a kilometre or more at Coogee one morning a week. Briefly, occasionally, nervously, I went out with them. I was always the straggler gasping up behind.

I wanted to keep going out with them. I wanted to get faster and stronger. I took stroke-correction classes. But I was inconsistent: I didn’t do the pool laps required to build up my fitness. And without CanToo’s lifeguards reassuringly close, I never relaxed in the swims.

And then, in mid-2024, swimming on another day elsewhere, I nearly drowned. I’ve taken the post about the experience I wrote for Vamp out from behind the paywall if you’re interested. From that post:

“I have never before experienced such a thing. It was the panic, the completely irrational insane panic, not the waves nor the currents, nor my ordinary fitness and swimming capacity that nearly drowned me. It was the panic. Its onset was so fast, so devastating. I had barely expended a scrap of energy yet I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t take a breath. Hyper-ventilating? Gasping for breath. … And the impressions, barely thoughts, arrived: ‘This is how it ends, this is the end, this is what drowning feels like’.”

After that, for the next 18 months, I barely entered the water.

I did not expect that I would do another CanToo program. But how else was I going to find the confidence to get back out in the blue?

A poor hammerhead, I think, hooked on someone’s line, helpless, consumed by the sea.

Sharks: “Aren’t you afraid of sharks?” It’s what almost everyone asks when I say I’m training for an ocean swim.

Yes, terrified of them, terrified of what lies beneath and beyond my limited field of vision. And the news from this terrible sharky Sydney summer has not bolstered any ocean swimmer’s morale. That poor 12-year-old kid taken at Vaucluse in January, plus, astonishingly, in the same 48 period, three other people bitten/mauled in Sydney waters. Thankfully they survived. Their ocean confidence? Who knows if they’ve returned to the sea.

Lesson: it seems to be that if you swim after heavy rain when the water is murky, you’ll likely be swimming with bull sharks. So much rain had fallen in the Sydney catchment in the days preceding the attacks and the water was warm and dirty and silty, perfect conditions for swimmers to become shark supper. The lessons are: don’t swim near big bait balls of fish, don’t swim at dawn-ish and dusk-ish, shark-feeding times, don’t swim after heavy rains when all of Sydney streets’ muck drains into the sea.

The sharks are out there, of course they are, as they should be. They were there before we were.

The thought of them flashed through my mind this morning as I fought my way out through the Bondi chop, as masses of kelp tangled around me. But my brain was busier with the task at hand: first, swimming to a lifeguard-on-a-surf-ski a few hundred metres off shore, then around him, then back to shore in a surf where the waves defied catching. I’d swim like mad and think I’d caught a wave that would carry me a few metres closer to shore but instead it would stop, pull me back a bit. I forgot about sharks; instead for me, below my surface, was an uneasy rising feeling of panic … that horrifying clutching feeling I’d had on that day 18 months ago when I thought I was going to drown. But I kept the panicky feeling down, kept swimming, kept breathing, got to shore. Four times over we did that this morning. Out to the lifeguard on the surf ski, back in to the beach. Go again, the coaches said. Every time, on the way back to shore, that panicky tingle as the ocean tried to tug me back. No time or energy to think of sharks. Made it, every time.

This morning, sharks were only fleetingly on my mind. Perhaps the pleasure of such an experience is heightened by the fear factor?

But you’ve never seen anyone leap from the water as quickly as I did a few weeks ago at Long Bay (Malabar), one of my favourite spots.

I take Lola there. It’s a long, skinny bay, rocks and rock pools and rock shelfs and cliffs on either side, a fingernail of a beach. On the boat jetty side, Lola and I walk out towards the mouth of the bay where rocky edges, kelp forests and underwater canyons alter the water’s depth and give all those incredible blue-greens I love so much. The colours are such that I feel we’ve been transported to the Mediterranean. I throw the ball for Lola and she races across the rocks to launch herself over the water at the ball, then swims back. Again and again. When I’m in the water, snorkelling, once recently diving for sea urchins, she will launch herself at me. I think she thinks I might be drowning. I thinks she thinks she will save me. When a 16kg fluffy brown dog lands on your back while you are peacefully snorkelling you can think, for a moment, that a far more dangerous animal is attacking you.

We were there a few weeks ago. I went in briefly to cool down – on my own I am timid and stay close to the edge while Lola watches me anxiously. I swam without goggles or snorkel for a few minutes, noticed on the sea floor a couple of metres below me the blurry form of what looked like a discarded white plastic bag. Paid no more attention. I got out, threw the ball for Lola for a bit, then went back into the water with my goggles. I swam over what I had thought was a white plastic bag.

I was a ping-pong ball getting out of that water. The white “plastic bag” was a rotting one-metre-plus-long carcass. Skeletal in its middle section, head section semi-intact, flesh there still for hungry other sea creatures.

There were a few other swimmers around me, they jumped out too, some were curious. A six-packed young man waded back in. He grabbed the carcass and pulled it up on to the rocks. I’m no fisher-person but there was a huge hook and what I think was a (huge) weight wedged in the poor creature’s mouth. Its body was but a skeleton but its head suggested hammerhead. Two, three, four dogs plus Lola gathered around. What interesting scent was this!? The young man tugged the carcass back into the water.

When the waves moved the creature’s remains it was beautiful, sinuous and elegant and tragic. I can only think that a serious fisher-person had hooked the creature, realised it was not something legal or edible, and been unable to extract the hook from its jaws. Its fate was sealed.

I look at my photographs of the creature billowing in the water and feel so very sad.

Selfish too: we can send three men and a woman around the moon but still haven’t developed a wearable device to keep those extraordinary creatures at arm’s length so we can all share the ocean.

Dad: From his teenage years, my father suffered terrible chest problems including asthma. He told me once how he’d developed pneumonia when he was around 16 and was admitted to Toowoomba General Hospital. It would have been around 1955. From what Dad told me and wrote, the public ward was filled with old men, hacking and coughing and dying. I have no doubt from what Dad said that the experience of being in that dreadful place traumatised him for decades.

For a while in the late ’50s, early ’60s, Dad was a surf lifesaver on the Gold Coast; someone had told him that it would help his poor lungs. He didn’t stick at it though. He never much liked the surf.

In the end though, it wasn’t Dad’s chest problems or asthma that got him but cancer. In 2004, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He lived for six more years. Quality of life? Variable. They were immensely difficult, emotional years, the cancer treatments an assault on his already fragile mental health. He had more than one admission to a psychiatric ward. He had a couple of courses of ECT – modern, accepted widely as an effective treatment for major depression. (Visiting him in that psych ward gave me an immeasurable sense of relief: should my own depression ever get to a point at which I needed more than my GP’s help, I could see that good, kind, wrap-around help was available.)

Dad died in January 2010. Unbelievable that we have been without him for 16 years.

I am, tomorrow at Coogee and on May 3 at the Bondi Bluewater, swimming for Dad.

Blue: In Fake, I wrote more about colours. In the course of my research I discovered the magic of 19th century German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner’s “nomenclature of colours”. I wrote:

The Scottish botanical painter Patrick Syme created charts based on Werner’s work and included examples of each colour from the animal and plant kingdoms. In his divine hand-coloured work, ultramarine blue, for example, takes glorious, poetic flight: it is described as the ‘upper side of the wings of a small blue heath butterfly’, it is the flower borage, it is azure stone or lapis lazuli. Greens, too, become poetry – the ‘egg of a thrush’, or the ‘beauty spot on the wing of a teal drake’ or the ‘leaves of leeks in winter’ …”

Charles Darwin carried Werner’s book, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, on the HMS Beagle. My favourite, surely, is Verditter Blue which carries a small portion of verdigris green.

These are the colours in which I will immerse myself tomorrow.

Swimming: If you could spare some coin to sponsor my Can Too swimming effort I would be most terribly grateful. My plan is to swim 1km tomorrow at Coogee and then, again, weather permitting, 1km at Bondi on May 3. I will be slow. I might be nervous. Your help will add some catch to my arms. If you are inclined, this link will take you to my sponsorship page. My fund-raising effort has been as wan as my swim training effort and I would be profoundly grateful for your support.

Dad: I know that if Dad had still been alive he would have been at the finishing line tomorrow, ready to grab me and hold me up as I stumbled up the sand.

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Housekeeping

Looking for subjects: I’m immersed in two new subject areas and hope you might be able to help with your insights and stories! 🙏

• First, job hunting in 2026: what does it look like, what hoops must be jumped through, what are CVs/résumés looking like these days, AI – where is it coming into things, how long does the search process take, how often are howls of existential despair issued throughout, what new questions are asked in interviews, how many interviews, how many interviewers, have you been through the process recently, are you going through it right now, do you still have a will to live? I would adore to hear your thoughts, comments, insights etc. Please email me!

• Second, stuck in relationships: I’m investigating the phenomenon of unhappy couples forced to remain under the same roof because of the escalating cost of living crisis. Together-apart under duress. I can’t imagine the nightmare that must be. If this is your situation I’d be very grateful if you feel able to reach out to me for a chat. I promise absolute confidentiality. Please email me!

Stolen words

“Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.”–attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, via Austin Kleon.

My mother on Meg the pony, Marilyn, the old white house.

Do old houses of your past exercise your memory?

For me, it’s my maternal grandparents’ old white 1930s house in the Hills District of Sydney. For little me it held both the promise of adventure and the lure of a certain worldliness. For adult me, the thinking of it has always held comfort, filled me with a sense of belonging.

As I often do when I’m trying to fall asleep, last night I returned to the old white house, walked around its rooms, up and down the stairs, reacquainted myself with its geography, its art deco-era elegance, the fireplace, the garden. I can see its every corner, smell my grandmother’s talc and cigarette smoke and the remnant scent of the evening-before’s open fire.

Earlier yesterday as my bastard of a head cold and I stumbled down to breakfast at my mother’s place – Easter long weekend and here I am, yet again, cowed by her to-do lists and my own, by her mess – I passed the old photographic portrait of my great-great-grandmother Amelia. Her sad eyes followed me towards my coffee pot.

Amelia: tubercular, died in her early 30s, six children left behind.

Amelia’s sad eyes have followed me since I was a kid: her portrait hung in the dining room of that old white house in Sydney for most of my childhood. In my teenage years it moved with my aged grandparents into my parents’ home to hang over the piano. On the rare occasions that I practised, I imagined her to be beseeching me to stop and leave her alone. Now she is here, in my 89-year-old mother’s last house by the sea.

Mum’s to-do list, newsletter work, they sat heavily on my shoulders yesterday but I pushed them away. There was something I wanted to find.

Coffee in hand, I entered the family photographic vortex. It’s possible in there, an enormous wardrobe filled with boxes of snapshots and slides and negatives and the relicry of long-gone 19^th century photographic studios, to be lost in other worlds forever.

I wanted to find photographs of the old white house; see how they match the impressions of my night-time walks. An Easter metaphor, resurrecting history in the hope of giving it eternal life.

There were photographic detours: more of Amelia (poor Amelia, tubercular, died in 1873, still in her early 30s, six children left behind; after her husband died a year or too later, my great-grandmother Maud ended up in the Randwick home for destitute children). Photographs of other prim, unsmiling men and women, an Easter bonnet parade of Victorian names – Euphemia, Edwin, Florence. My grandmother, Alice, a young woman on horseback. My mother, a child, in a little suit with a hat, shot by a street photographer during World War II, my mother astride her pony outside the white house, my mother dressed up to go out in the 1950s. My parents’ travel photographs. Endless 1960s baby photographs and regrettable 1970s attire (and still worse in the 1980s – see “Wild Thing” below) and 1990s family dinners. I pulled out and set aside a few of me as a young adult, dressed up, one occasion or another, gorgeous but unaware of the fact, filled with self-doubt (for god’s sake, tell your young women they are gorgeous).

But in all the boxes, only hints of the old white house, no interiors, nothing to take me inside again.

My imagination must do the job. Last night I turned the light off and returned to the white house.

My grandparents, Charles and Alice, my mother and brother. A home-crocheted dress for me. The old white house.

I ran up the staircase, sliding my hand over the curved timber banister on the way, and bumped on my backside over the worn green carpet on the way back down. Past the hall phone table with its big black Bakelite rotary dial phone, I can remember the echo of its deep ring through the house, past the dim cloakroom where social-climbing Great Aunt Amy who came back from living in San Francisco kept her frightful fur coat, gathering dust and moth holes. Into the living room with its big old velvet-upholstered lounge suite – you know the sort, god-ugly, immovable, every grandmother’s house had one in the 1970s; every student’s house had a threadbare inherited one in the 1980s.

I climbed up on to the long, broad window-ledge where every holiday my brother and I set up rival camps surrounded by arrangements of our treasures, then jumped back down again to study the books on the shelves built around the fireplace … a Scarlet Pimpernel omnibus, Joy Adamson’s Born Free about Africa and Elsa the lioness, Grandma’s curious collection of books about alien arrivals.

Passing then my grandfather, Charles, sitting in front of the old black-and-white television bellowing at a wrestling match, past Amelia’s portrait, then pushing through the swing door into the kitchen where I’m given jobs: podding the peas from Grandpa’s garden, enjoying the little popping sound as the freed peas hit the bowl. Hulling the fresh-picked strawberries. Grandma’s lifelong friend, “Aunty” Helen, sitting in the breakfast nook, smoking Benson & Hedges and talking politics as Grandma cooks.

Back in the lounge room, the fire is blazing and dinner is at Aunty Amy’s Spanish Mission-style old table – it came back from San Francisco too, along with a grandmother clock, boxes of fine linen, and a crate-load of now-retro glass and tableware. A blanket is laid over the table to protect it, then a lace tablecloth. Cutlery comes from the sideboard where rows of jars hold Grandma’s plum jam.

Last night as I lay in bed, as the family gathered around the table – my parents, my grandparents, Great Aunt Amy, “Aunty Helen”, later my little brother – my memory started to wobble. But not because the walk through the old white house had done its job, helped me towards sleep. Instead, while the physicality of the house was vivid, the people were ghostly flickers.

My grandparents, my father, Great Aunt Amy and “Aunty Helen” – all dead. Only my mother and brother remain. And Amelia on the wall presiding over it all? She has only ever been a woman I built with tiny historical fragments of fact coloured in by imagination.

And then, wide awake again last night, I wondered why I keep being drawn back to the old white house and its apparitions. Is it a wistfulness, a longing for things that are lost, for the sense of safety and certainty of that moment in time, for the innocence of it all?

Yes, but it’s more than that. Our houses and the humans they have held are formative, they shape us. They are the places we learn about our people, their humanity, the paths they have taken, their values. They are where ancient ancestral wisdom and biases embedded in marrow is passed on.

In my old white house, from its people, I learned how words matter, horizons are malleable, gardens are good, food is more than fuel, kindness and decency are paramount, politics is about life, and holding on to our stories, our personal histories, is one of the most meaningful things we can do.

Is there an old house that holds great meaning for you? Please share your memories.

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Plus: on the subject of techniques to help me fall asleep … I’ve also found “glimmers” quite useful … here’s something I prepared earlier … I’ve brought it out from behind the paywall so it’s free to read.

Housekeeping

In this weekend’s Good Weekend magazine, my feature story deep diving into the challenges elderly and vulnerable people face with digital technology. Mum is lucky, she has me to help. But many others who don’t have supportive children or grandchildren find the digital world they’ve been thrust into alienating, even frightening. “It makes me feel angry, disempowered,” one old guy told me. “It’s not a friend, it’s an enemy,” another said. (My story will be behind a paywall. Long-form journalism is expensive to produce – dozens of hours of my time, multiple photographs, multiple editors etc. Either sign up for a subscription or see if you can still pick up an old-fashioned hard copy of The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age today.)

Plus: if you missed these pieces of mine (not paywalled):

• In The Guardian last month, the impossible task of caring for elderly parents who did not care for you. (Huge response to this globally – if this is your situation you might find solace/community in the more than 2000 Facebook comments on The Guardian’s link to it).

• Also in The Guardian, a little reflection I wrote earlier this year on rafting down the Franklin River (“I learn there is a fine line between fear and thrill”).

• And – in last week’s Vamp … why the story behind my book, Fake, keeps coming back to haunt me. (Contributing factor: last week ABC Conversations replayed my 2019 interview for the third time; apparently it does very very well every time!😳)

Looking for subjects: I’m about to immerse myself in two new subject areas and hope you might be able to help, again! 🙏

• First, job hunting in 2026: what does it look like, what hoops must be jumped through, what are CVs/résumés looking like these days, AI – where is it coming into things, how long does the search process take, how often are howls of existential despair issued throughout, what new questions are asked in interviews, how many interviews, how many interviewers, have you been through the process recently, are you going through it right now, do you still have a will to live? I would adore to hear your thoughts, comments, insights etc. Please email me!

• Second, stuck in relationships: I’m investigating the phenomenon of unhappy couples forced to remain under the same roof because of the escalating cost of living crisis. Together-apart under duress. I can’t imagine the nightmare that must be. If this is your situation I’d be very grateful if you feel able to reach out to me for a chat. I promise absolute confidentiality. Please email me!

🎵 Mood

What a gorgeous cover – the Icelandic-Chinese singer Laufey (full name: Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir) performs Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now with the BBC Concert Orchestra. She’s touring Australia in July/August.

Plus: for Joni Mitchell fans, another cover … Amanda Seyfried on Jimmy Fallon …

Wild thing

Thanks M for alerting me to this wild trip back to the 1980s: the Emanuels fit a high-society girl for a new silk suit; Margaret Thatcher shows off her wardrobe (“I must never be mutton dressed as lamb, never!”); Zandra Rhodes makes a house call; trendsetters show off their op-shop hauls (a lovely little rough silk Cacharel shift, 20 pence). A comic wonder of whiteness, posh accents, chilly ladies of the manor and terrible fashion. (Highlight: Lady Rothermere at the 29-minute mark … “as long as one is pretty …”.)

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Reading/watching/listening

A great interview with actor Charlotte Rampling in English Vogue. Rampling turned 80 in February. In her latest leading role she starred with Cate Blanchett in Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, the Jim Jarmusch 2025 Venice Golden Lion winner. “Now I’m based mostly in Paris,” she tells Vogue, “I live with my cats, I have a wonderful man. Une amitié amoureuse, that’s what it’s called. It’s sort of a loving friendship.”

Plus: the film looks amazing (screening now in selected cinemas around Australia). Thematically aligned with my last Guardian story (see “Housekeeping” above) about caring for elderly parents who might have been rubbish at parenting. “Shall I be mother?” Rampling’s character asks, lifting a teapot to pour. “You might as well start sometime,” replies her daughter Lilith (played by Vicky Krieps).

When a pair of Ray-Bans isn’t just a pair of Ray-Bans: the rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses which can record video from the wearer’s POV. An important story in Wired about the glasses and their implications for privacy. “Smartphones normalised our constant, often aggressive recording of one another, and now there’s just a more convenient, frictionless, and secretive means to accomplish the same result.”

I love this story in The New York Times (gift link here) about the reading retreat, “Page Break”: 148 hours, 16 strangers, an isolated mansion, and a novel – Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg. “What if I didn’t click with the 16 strangers with whom I would take turns reading aloud [the novel] over the next 48 hours? What if my fellow attendees were as young and cool as their predecessors appeared to be on Page Break’s Instagram?”

I am still immersed in re-reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch and listening to The Secret Life of Books’ wonderful Book Club series on the novel, considered one of the greatest of all time. I’m also keen, when I’m through the series, to listen to their episode on “literary honeymoons” – “Honeymoons don’t become fixed stars in the literary firmament until the early 19th century, but they begin as they go on – badly. The first literary honeymoon of the century is Maria Bertram’s ill-fated tour with the fatuous Mr Rushworth in Mansfield Park, with her jealous sister Julia Bertram third-wheeling. Next up we have Victor Frankenstein’s wedding trip to Evian with his bride Elizabeth.” etc …

Plus, one of my favourite Middlemarch passages, sleazy old men talking about young women:

Via Instagram, ABC finance commentator Alan Kohler explaining how AI is upending the value of words and a range of white-collar professions, including mine!

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For anyone who has ever been held hostage by a mother’s fashion preferences, this piece, “Dressing who I am, going where I want” (sub-head: “knowing myself after a lifetime of enmeshment”) by American essayist and author Elissa Altman (on her Substack Poor Man’s Feast) is a wonderful read. … “beyond the food, there was my makeup, or lack thereof; there were the stripes (I loved them; she hated them); there was the tweed coat I came home with from school in England … there were the brown vintage brogue boots I loved that she said looked like her father’s from 1927.”

Poor Man's Feast

dressing who I am, going where I want

The restaurant is always French; my heels are always high…

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3 months ago · 152 likes · 37 comments · Elissa Altman

*Thanks to Sam Baker’s The Shift for nudges towards some good stuff for Vamp this week.

Quote of the week

“At the on-camera Cabinet meeting on Thursday, Trump’s free-associative drivel, in the midst of a world crisis, ranged from the new White House ballroom: ‘The military wanted it more than anyone,’ to the Kennedy Center: ‘It’s going to be beautiful when you add the name Trump,’ to his favored Sharpie pens: ‘They do treat me well, Sharpie.’ My historian friend Sir Simon Schama sent me a despairing text. ‘It was like a bit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What was the 25th Amendment for, if not for this? The stroke-struck Woodrow Wilson was a combo of Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR, compared to this oozing hulk of cognitive rot. HELP US, Obi-Wan, HELP US’.”–from Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell newsletter.

Beautiful Things

For sale: at Christie’s auction house, architect-turned-photographer Horst P. Horst’s American Vogue Cover (May, 1941), epitomising “the bracing spirit of modernism”. Estimate USD$20,000-25,000 (AUD$29,000-$36,000).

Via Substack.

Via Substack.

I should like to be an English mudlarker … adore this video, via Instagram … that gorgeous green colour, how would you describe it?

Socials: news/observations/humour

Via Instagram. “He doesn’t know it yet but the family dog will eat three Easter eggs this weekend and financially cripple the family for the next 12 months. According to family matriarch Tegan Slater, the vet bill will be ‘financially devastating. We’ve only just finished paying off the movie projector,’ she said. ‘If that dog eats another thing wrapped in foil, we’ll have to cancel the Noosa trip and probably sell the Quintrex.’ The family’s eldest child, Luca, is expected to be blamed immediately, despite claims he put the eggs away ‘somewhere’.”

For fans of The Pitt, and even for not-fans-of-The-Pitt, the lovely Noah Wyle, via Instagram. And, below, the radiant Katherine LaNasa on Colbert … (the three-minute mark is tremendous).

Via Substack.

Via Substack.

Via Substack.

Via Substack.

Via Bluesky; once upon a time, even actors were real.

Via Substack; more of Piper’s humour here (I have been laughing out loud).

Stolen words

“The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”

–Love After Love, by Derek Walcott, via Marginalian (a reading of the poem here).

The Sydney launch of Fake, 2019, quizzed by the inimitable Ben Law.

On Thursday, ABC Conversations replayed Sarah Kanowski’s 2019 interview with me.

I keep saying I’ve moved on from my story but it hasn’t moved on from me.

I rarely refer here to my hideous relationship experience that became a book, then a TV series. I’ve written on multiple occasions that I don’t want to be defined by that small chapter of my life; it feels like a lifetime ago and I barely give it a thought.

The guy, “Joe”, he’s an abstraction. I rarely think of him. If I do, it’s with pity for the small broken man he is.

But when, as has happened this week, the story comes up again, I’m drawn back into it all as a new volley of messages and tall-but-true tales land.

Sometimes I feel I’m a warehouse, a vault, for a thousand stories of women’s heartache and men’s perfidy.

From an email that landed this morning: “I have a story you may be interested in – similar to yours with a more sinister bent on it.”

Another: “I’ve read your book and watched the series. I’m not going to ask you to expose his name but if it’s M– O– he’s at it again. If you happen to be interested in another story there are at least seven women in Melbourne, all intelligent, who are victims of the same kind of behaviour. It’s escalating into danger. He needs to be exposed before someone is seriously hurt.” (Mine wasn’t an M– O–.)

And one that tears at my heart: A mother writes to tell me of her daughter’s terrible story: She met a man on a cruise (his schtick – he apparently takes one or other of his children on cruises and uses them as props to earn women’s trust – what a lovely Daddy). He swept her off her feet with love bombing and promises of blended family bliss. She moved in with him and cared for his children, he convinced her to transfer her life savings to him for a dream home, then dumped her after four months, leaving her penniless and jobless. The mother says they have all the paperwork to prove his lies, that he took her daughter’s money under false pretences. They want justice, they want me to write about the woman’s story.

I haven’t replied yet. I have so few useful words to offer. Even if I wanted to write such a story, as a freelancer I don’t have the capacity (time to investigate complex pieces, institutional heft, legal support behind me) to do so.

I could write a different woman’s story each week for the rest of my life and still have more up my sleeve.

Or conversely, I could write a different vile man’s story.

What is wrong with men? In research terms, I have qualitative not quantitative data but I am convinced this is a plague, the deep currents of cruelty and deceit that run through men’s treatment of women.

If you doubt me, visit one or other of the Facebook groups where women compare notes on men they’re dating (eg, “Are we dating the same guy Sydney”). They’re more warehouses for icky and hair-raising stories about fraudulent men who flout every moral code, every code of human decency, mostly with impunity. There are no laws against committing malevolent and calculated acts of emotional fraud against women. Unless you physically hurt her or steal her money and she can prove it and is up for the fight, you’re off and away, ready for your next nasty little adventure.

Yet still, despite it all, there’s a light side for me, how I laugh sometimes!

Never underestimate the capacity of a galah with a keyboard to provide amusement.

It would be selfish of me not to share two sterling examples I’ve received this week from people who took the time out of their day to find my contact details so they could give me a laugh.

Exhibit A, via Facebook:

“I had a sense you’d be a blonde 😉 said gently.” Babe, I’d be asking for my money back on that therapy class you took. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Exhibit B, via email:

Jeepers old man, from which swamp did you crawl?

We are all needy. With few exceptions, we are all needy for love, nurturing, intimacy and reassurance. It is mystifying to me that the word has become a pejorative, a reproach used against women who have had the misfortune to fall in the way of a skilled manipulator. Why are people so much happier to swing their focus on the woman who trusted rather than the man who deceived? A leave pass for the man, yet again.

In any case, I no longer worry much about how I’m perceived. There is something powerful in showing ourselves as we are: imperfect, fragile, human. Over the past few years I’ve revealed my vulnerabilities and frailties in ways I once couldn’t have imagined. The overwhelming majority of messages I receive suggest that in doing so, I’ve helped others make sense of their own stories. “Thank you,” is the message I receive (gratefully) most frequently.

Four years ago I headlined my first newsletter “Perfect Imperfect”. I quoted the American writer Heather Havrilesky:

“I would not have nearly as much to offer … without my squishy shitty sad soggy places. I can’t turn my back on those places and still breathe fire.”

Her words still feel true, perhaps more than ever.

To those of you who’ve arrived here this week – welcome.

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Housekeeping

If you’re curious about the story behind all this, my book, Fake, is available in all the usual places. These are some of the kind things people have said about it over the years:

“I’ve read a lot of good books over Christmas, but probably the best is Fake by Stephanie Wood – narrative non-fiction and a true story about betrayal, delusion, the men who cheat and lie and why they get away with it.”–Ann Cleeves, author of the Vera TV series.

“A meticulously researched blend of memoir and investigative journalism that reads like a gripping thriller.”–Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Australian Bookseller + Publisher

“Fake is a breathtakingly honest and beautifully written account of the emotional wreckage caused by fraudsters of the heart.”–Kate McClymont, Sydney Morning Herald.

In 2024, Fake was adapted for television (an utterly surreal experience … I wrote about that for Good Weekend magazine here … might be behind a paywall). Starring Asher Keddie and David Wenham, it’s currently streaming for free on 10.

If you’re new to Vamp, you might like to check out some of my most popular previous posts:

Let me finish please: You know these people: the interrupters and the sugar-coaters, the hijackers and the sermonisers; the ones who talk but never listen. Is real conversation dying or are we too self-obsessed to notice?

Travelling towards myself: The person I met when I stopped worrying about being alone.

Wedded to the past: the vintage fantasy of ‘The Golden Bachelor’: Corsets and clichés, sequins and stereotypes in a glossy throwback – but still, let’s hold the criticism of the quiet guy.

🎵 Mood

For newcomers – you might enjoy a Spotify playlist I built a while back inspired by the soundtrack to the television series.

Wild thing

The story of Miss Estrogenia Talbot. As far as I can tell, its (surprising) claim that it was nominated for an Oscar (best live action short film) is correct. The short film didn’t win a statue (with Emma Thompson as executive menstrual advisor) but the promotional poster should get one …

Reading/listening

WORDS: Just in time for the next lockdown, the fuel-shortage-induced one, another word game from the creator of everyone’s favourite, Wordle. Meet Parseword, a game that aims to teach the rules of cryptic crosswords. In a story describing the new game’s genesis, The New Yorker writes: “The result, [Wordle creator] Wardle hopes, is a way to introduce newcomers to the joys and agonies of the cryptic, whose curious but finally comforting logic had been, for him, a salve.” (Parseword is available as an app and on desktop; if you have any interest in learning to do cryptics, you might also like the brilliant @minutecryptic account on Instagram.)

HEALTH: The most compelling first line written this week? “After 30, your body starts running a quiet demolition project.” Oh yes, I’m feeling that! This article is compelling in its explanation of how our muscles are machines and that four specific ones matter more than others. “When they decline, entire systems collapse with them: glucose regulation, posture, breathing, circulation, gait.”

EXERCISE: New research shows that to halve our risk of premature death, middle-aged women need to do 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week. Says an ABC story reporting on the study: “Aim for 30 minutes of brisk walking five days a week, lift weights or do body weight exercises twice a week, and include some balance or yoga.” Plus, for the scientists among you – here’s the original source study. I am relieved that, as far as I can see, nothing is said about wine.

WAR: Geraldine Doogue and Hamish McDonald’s ABC Radio National program, “Global Roaming”, is consistently excellent listening, especially when their guest is the brilliant David Kilcullen. If you want to try to understand the chaos of this moment we are in, I can’t recommend it highly enough. “What I think may have happened is that President Trump was listening to a different set of advisors from the folks that know this stuff in the Pentagon,” Killcullen says.

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Watching

When I hit send on this newsletter I’m off to watch episode 12 of The Pitt season 2 which I am completely madly hopelessly addicted to. Some critics might be saying that Dr Robbie has become a jerk, but, frankly, in my mind, Dr Robbie can do no wrong, will never do wrong. LOVE this series. HATE Santos.

(Will be watching): Coming to ABC TV from Sunday, April 26, 8.15pm, Bad Company, starring Kitty Flanagan as a high-flying corporate executive brought in to try to fix an avant-garde theatre company’s administrative and financial chaos. Fisk is my spirit program. Bad Company has my name all over it.

Food

Should you wish to bake this weekend, should you wish to take advantage of the last of the season’s plums, I am a great fan of this recipe – a famous plum cake first published in The New York Times by Marian Burros in 1983. It is everything it claims to be – simple, magical, moist, decadent “and almost custard-like”. I made it this week (most now in the freezer, I was going to take it on a hike with friends that has been cancelled, but I think it’s a keeper). Ingredients: caster sugar, unsalted butter, eggs, plain flour, baking powder, salt, plums, lemon juice, cinnamon. Dead simple.

Very little will convince me that I shouldn’t spend my small income on excellent food rather than (for example) clothes, shoes, makeup. I will live without lipstick but I can’t live without amazing flavours. Most recently: an outrageously good and outrageously expensive toastie at the new Vin-Cenzo’s (formerly Bar Vincent in Darlinghurst). Veal tongue and scarmorza (a southern Italian cow’s milk cheese). My friend and I, we gushed over every mouthful.

I have been, with varying degrees of success recently (mostly less rather than more, see “famous plum cake”, “outrageously good toastie”, and “wine”) been trying to shed some kilograms. I am, for better or worse, of a paleo mind, fat, even saturated fat, is OK (I know this is controversial), sugar and the carbs that turn into sugar in our bloodstream, not OK. This video sums it up. I stumble and fail and get up again and stumble, etc …

Home/design

Please accept this New York Times T magazine gift link to images of an extraordinary, crumbling English country house – “A Home That Became Lovelier the More It Fell Apart.” My favourite part – there’s a “small herd of dairy goats keeping the grass in check”. I long to have goats. I’d milk them and make cheese.

For sale – a 1950s timber cruiser. Heavenly. Click through for real estate porn of a different kind. Floating on Pittwater, Lola and I could be happy there.

Just gorgeous, via Instagram, in Newcastle of all places … “a vast Neo-Baroque local landmark, formerly a wine merchant’s, air force club and wedding venue, has had an injection of their special brand of bohemianism” … so gorgeous that the esteemed The World of Interiors has covered it. … a bath in the middle of the kitchen, “Lottie … will sometimes take a soak with a cup of tea or glass of wine while James rustles up something for supper”.

Socials: news/observations/humour/inspirations

Can all men be like Jay? He likes The Cure and nature and books and his cat. Apply here.

Via Substack.

Via Substack.

Via Substack.

Very reluctant to link to an “identity leadership and power mentor” (FFS) but she beat to the top of my Insta algorithm … no idea who she is but she seems to cut to the heart of things for many of us.

Via Substack.

Via Bluesky.

Stolen words

“Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.”–William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act I, Scene IV

Silent movie star Mary Pickford, 1918 (Hartsook Photo, Library of Congress, public domain).

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On my pinboard since 1999: “Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden”, Otto Dix, 1926. “You are representative of an entire epoch,” Dix told von Harden, “[an epoch] concerned not with the outward beauty of a woman but rather with her psychological condition.”

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Eugène von Guérard, Moroka River Falls (foot of Mount Kent), Gipps Land [sic], plate 19 from Australian Landscapes: A Series of 24 Tinted Lithographs (Melbourne, 1866–68).*

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Woman at a Window, Thomas Sully, 1810-20, in the public domain, via The Met.

I think people I know casually, socially, sometimes come to believe me to be aloof, cold. I don’t mean to be. It’s a lifelong outward manifestation of what’s happening beneath the surface. Madly paddling duck legs, a discomfort with small talk, trying to direct attention away from myself, think of the interesting thing to say, worried I might seem idiotic, that the other person will decide they want to exit a conversation with me, trying to pre-empt that moment by manoeuvring to give them an out if they want it. I feel disconnected before I even start.

You might recognise the feeling.

In group social situations, I am often lost, shrink into myself. My voice is never the loudest or most demanding; it often isn’t heard. A pane of glass separates me from the rest. I am untethered. My mind turns on itself.

I am, typically, the last to arrive, first to leave. Or I just don’t go. I reject social opportunities left, right and centre. It was a relief, a delight even, to learn a few years ago of the existence of the species “introvert”. It gave a name and explanation to my experience in the world. Some people are simply wired to be inward-facing, to retreat from others and towards their own thoughts.

I can see now that it has not been helpful – to so enthusiastically embrace that label and that habit.

It has given me an excuse to disconnect, to become increasingly reclusive and insulated.

During the week I had a phone chat with an elderly friend. It has unsettled me in a way I didn’t expect. It has raised questions about relevance. About mattering. About connection – and how any of us hold on to these vital things as we age. My situation – and perhaps yours – requires something stauncher and more systematic than retreat. It requires I risk being seen …

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Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights (Warner Bros.); Connor Storrie (Ilya Rozanov) and Hudson Williams (Shane Hollander) in Heated Rivalry (HBO).

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