My very first pair of platform shoes was bought for me during that lazy, hot summer of ‘76. They were easily as long as they were tall, decorated in flower-bedecked cotton, and impossibly ...

How many types of sweet flowers grow in an English summer wardrobe? I only ask because, if the catwalk directives are anything to go by this season, your closet will be wild with meadowsweet and...

You’ll have heard, of course, of the NIMBY. You may well live next door to one – a couple, perhaps, almost entirely surrounded by Leylandii, and patrolling the crazy paving in case s...

If you’re anything like me, your life will regularly be afflicted by a yawning reality gap. I’m referring to the difference between those daydreams in your mind’s eye that have...

Your lover has exactly one week to buy you the wrong-sized bra.  

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, the man in your life may well be weighing up the various gift...

I sometimes yearn for a more elegant life. I don’t want to come over all sentimental for an era I never knew, but few would deny that the Fifties had style all buttoned up. OK, so they als...

I note with great relish that British women have overtaken the French as the biggest spenders on lingerie in Europe. We now fling an average of £71 a year at our underpinnings, beating the...

My mind was in turmoil, crowded with the jagged thoughts of a person plagued with guilt. I’ll give you just a sampler… “How can these clothes be so cheap? They must be made by...

“You simply can’t have long hair after thirty-five,” my friend Margot announced the other day – checking herself a moment too late as she remembered the long pon...

The dog days of summer… Back to school around the corner… The glum feeling that the year is on its way out and you haven’t even got used to writing a new year on your chequ...