Sally has a column in the Sunday Times and writes regularly for the newspaper.

She is also contributing editor to Easy Living magazine where she has a column about gardening, one of her passions.

Sally has another column in Saga magazine where she is beauty editor.

Here are some of her favourite pieces:

Love

Sunday Times - November 25, 2007

The prompter of poems, pop songs and plenty of tears, what is this thing called love?

Sally Brampton

Last year, I asked a friend what his new year's resolutions might be. He said he didn't make resolutions. He set goals. There were quite a few, he said, but by far the most important was, “To love and be loved”. Adorable, no? Most people would simply say they want to find love, a relationship or a boyfriend, as if love was a state of having rather than one of sharing.

That friend has still not found love, which drives his closest friend, my normally sane husband, to the conclusion that all women are in some way mad. It may be because he tucks his T-shirts into his trousers. Still, you'd think anyone would jump at the chance to be loved by someone who understands that loving is the better part of love.

But most of us, sadly, are weirdly bad at being loved, perhaps because we find it hard to believe that we are lovable. You cannot accept love if you think you might be unworthy in some way. The real luxury of love is being at ease in ourselves. We might catch the odd, fleeting glimpse, when our child smiles, when the person we love looks at us and thinks that we are perfect, when, for just a moment, this difficult, disjointed universe holds its breath. Or we might try to create it in ourselves.

We talk, in the vaguest way, about “finding love”, as if it is some rare butterfly that must be netted, rather than an act of conscious effort. We rarely talk about wanting to “give love”, but instead focus on giddy happiness and a world suddenly transformed and made wonderful. We want love to be done to us.

But love comes in two parts – receiving and giving. Love is seeing another person as they are (rather than as we want them to be). And it is allowing ourselves to be seen as we truly are – all flaws and frailties forgiven. My husband does not buy me diamonds or handbags or fine leather shoes, but every time he goes to the supermarket, he never forgets to buy a crate of my favourite Diet Coke (of which he strongly disapproves), and he has never once taken me to task for the cigarettes I love so much. He does not try to change me, but leaves the question of giving them up to me, which I will one day.

My favourite therapist says there are only two pure emotions – love and fear. “Live in love,” she says, not as an idle instruction from a self-help manual, but as a serious act that requires discipline, focus and intense effort. For me, this may mean accepting my husband's occasional dark mood as his own and not mine to take personally, and giving him a hug rather than a cold shoulder. Or it may simply mean smiling at a stranger. I know if I live in love, the world seems better.

Every morning, very early, I take my teenage daughter to the Tube to go to school. Inevitably, this being the inner city, there is somebody ranting on the pavement, mad with drink or crack. The first time it happened, Molly was so frightened, she wanted to cross the road. I held her hand and we both said, “Good morning,” smiling at the woman who was shouting. A hand shot out to pat Molly clumsily on the shoulder. “Sorry, love. Didn't mean no harm. You have a good morning too.”

We are all frightened. None of us feels good enough, so we turn inward, not outward – to drink, to drugs, to food, to loneliness. We are blinded by self-absorption. We forget that we are all in this together. Just the other day, when life seemed difficult and hostile, I found a text message on my phone from a friend. “Don't ever forget how much you are loved.” It was a small gesture, born out of enormous generosity. Immediately, it made the world seem better. And that is the luxury of love.

 

Vanity

Easy Living - 2006

Sally Brampton

When I was a young teenager, I owned a vanity case. It was cream leatherette, lined in pink watered silk. In it was a Rimmel lipstick (frosted pink), a block of Miners eyeshadow (aqua blue), a bottle of Anne French Cleansing Milk and the remnants of a gold atomiser of Ma Griffe scent, given to me by my mother.

I loved it. I love the word too. Vanity. I love it like I love the words glamour and grooming, and all the silly fripperies of the cloistered, scented world of women. My grandmother gave me the vanity case, just as she taught me to sit and stand up straight, by thrusting a ruler down my back and balancing a book on my head. I still stand up straight. My grandmother was my legal guardian; my parents were abroad. I travelled a lot, on long haul flights to Arabia , where my parents lived. In those days, international travel was an event. You dressed up, you carried your vanity case, you dreamed of being an airhostess in all its unspeakable glamour. The cabins were large but the distances long; it was polite to arrive as groomed as you left. Hence the vanity case.

To this day, when I fly, I still carry makeup, a wash bag and a bottle of scent. The vanity case is long gone and so is my grandmother, who I loved. She loved good clothes but had no money, so made all her own clothes from Vogue patterns, including her coats and hats. Her vanity was her hands, which were beautiful. She manicured them once a week, laying out cuticle creams, cotton wool pads, an orange stick, an emery board and a bowl of soapy water on the kitchen table. And she always sat with her hands held up, fingers arranged just so, the veins invisible as the blood drained down to make her hands, almost magically, white. In her life she had been a model, a dancer and a hairdresser and she would pay devotion to those disciplines; leg lifts in the sitting room, curling tongs in the bedroom, blocks of black waxy mascara mixed with a match and applied to each eyelash. And always, but always, when my grandfather was out.

Vanity, she said, was personal. And private. Vanity was good manners, respect for yourself and for others. Vanity was something you left firmly behind your own front door. She was adored wherever she went and so I still believe that vanity is best left unspoken, just as I still do a weekly manicure and sit with my hands held high. And I would no more go to a spa with the man I love than fly rings around the moon. Let him think that my legs are smooth and hairless and golden, not let him know how they got that way.

So, vanity I love. Vanity, I applaud. I love my friends for turning up at a dinner party over which I have slaved, with their best Blahniks or Choos forward. I love their shiny hair and glossy lips and best frocks. I was once roundly trashed on a radio show for saying as much, for remarking that if a friend appeared at my house for dinner with unwashed hair and in a daggy old jumper, I would worry about her. Some friend, said the presenter, for judging your friends on how they look. Perhaps, but often, how we look is how we are. Or how we feel, not simply about ourselves, but about life itself.

I am a depressive and have spent time in psychiatric units where a lack of vanity is so pronounced, people can't get out of bed. And where the first glimmer of a return to life is a hair-wash or a shaky lipstick line. I know when I am getting well, when the great black blanket of despair begins to lift and I take pleasure in life once more. I know because I give myself a manicure.

In rehab units addicts are forced to look at themselves in the mirror as part of therapy. Most, at first, simply cannot, and not because of their alcohol-bloated or heroin-raddled faces, but because they can't face the guilt, shame and disgust in their own eyes. Hating the person you are, or have become, is like hating life itself and addiction, or substance abuse, is the most emphatic denial of life.

“Vanity,” says psychotherapist Elizabeth Hearn, “is the energy to get up in the morning, to look good and attract good things in our lives. The opposite of depression is expression, which is why the most attractive thing on the planet is somebody who feels good about themselves. Basically there's a hierarchy of needs and, as adults, it's our responsibility to nurture ourselves. A healthy expression of vanity is self-love or self-care, which means I eat properly, exercise, brush my teeth, put on my makeup. It's also part of the Buddhist philosophy of be good to your self, be good to somebody else. If you can give it to yourself, you can give it away to somebody else.”

So back to my friends, my lovely glossy frocked-up friends, giving it to themselves, and giving it to me. But what I love them for most is leaving the mirror at home and getting down and dirty and not minding (or even noticing) when they have lipstick on their teeth. It is the mirror-carriers I am wary of, the photo-opportunists, for whom every scene is a self-portrait, not a group shot.

It is then that vanity topples headlong into narcissism, which is not so much slef-love as a love of self, to the exclusion of all others. As Diana Vreeland, the doyenne of 20 th century style once said, “I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.” In my early twenties, I worked for Diana Vreeland for a few months, when she was in town researching one of her many exhibitions for the Metropolitan Museum , New York . Although in her eighties, she was as elegant as fresh paint and still given to ringing pronouncements, many of which are preserved in cannons of great quotes. The first time she set eyes on me she said, (and I kid you not), “the ungilded lily is a wretched thing,” and whisked me into her bedroom, where she covered my face in rouge. Mrs Vreeland, who described herself as, “the ugliest thing I ever saw,” had a thing about rouge, painting it across her cheeks, up her temples and along the pronounced widow's peak of her bootblack hair. With her long, lugubrious face and beaked nose painted stark white it was an arresting, and effective, sight. In the evenings, before one of her various glamorous walkers (Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Terence Stamp) appeared to squire her about town, she would first rouge herself, and then she would rouge me. She would then make me spray vast quantities of scent in the air while she marched up and down through the scent; two, three, four, five times. Once she was quite ready, “poised” as she would say, I would throw open the double doors to her suite, and announce her. And vanity was left behind, in the bedroom, where it belongs.

I know I seem inordinately fond of elderly people, but that's because I am, and was recently interviewing an eighty-year old man. He was still puzzling over a front page story claiming that Victoria Beckham spends £40 on her son's pants. “Such vanity,” he said. I was explaining my own fabulously dull theories of the Beckham phenomenon, when he cut through my sophistry and crap by pointing at a photo of Posh herself and asking, “Why?”

Why indeed?

Now you could say that Victoria Beckham is no more than a vain, trashy self-serving creature. You could also say she's a cultural icon of our time. Both things would be true, in the same way that vanity and narcissism have become mistakenly intertwined. Now, I'm all for a little self-appreciation (although I think acceptance a better word, not to mention a better emotion) but the “because I'm worth it,” culture (uttered without a trace of hand on hip irony) is vanity run riot. Or, in other words, narcissism. And narcissism, which is, in extremis, a pathological personality disorder, is self-love run riot. And while it might seem cruel to point at finger at Posh, she is simply the most visible and absurd example. You can't take the girl seriously, and yet we do. And we do because there, but for the grace of God, go we. Not in grace or glamour, but in fear.

The truth about Posh is that she's an insecure little sparrow (scarily insignificant in the flesh) who, despite her best efforts to make herself uniquely desirable, still has a husband who shags other birds. Which is sad but makes you realise that, at heart, narcisissm isn't about sex or shagging or even men. It's about female competition. Take New York where the good grooming culture has become so obsessive that missing out on your weekly manicure means you're a slut. Where thinliness is next to godliness and where bare, tanned legs in winter doesn't mean you're insane, it means you get sent a limo to take you to work every morning. Ergo, bare tanned legs equals success, not to mention a high-maintenance beauty budget.

I went to a party the other night. I spent hours and hours working on being fabulous. There was a reason but, like vanity, it is personal. And so I worked hard and achieved something like success. And did one man comment on my unusually sparkly self? They did not. And did every woman? They did. I think it had something to do with the coat (Betty Jackson, totally fabulous) which, really, had nothing to do with me.

Just as celebrities, really, have nothing to do with us. What we forget, or perhaps what we have not yet learned given the startling advances in digital technology is that, these days, the camera always lies. I have stood in studios watching on screen as thighs get thinner, necks longer, eyes bluer. We judge ourselves by false images, live according to false gods.

I ask a friend if she thinks vanity a good or a bad thing. “Good,” she says, “because on the whole it means healthy self-esteem. When it all goes wrong is with a particular group of 40 something women who have bought into the culture of beauty and youth but are getting old and hate it. That's when vanity becomes self-obsession and it's not pretty.”

But then, desperation is not pretty either – at any age. We live, you might say, in a culture of failure. When the iconic symbol of beauty is eighteen, a size eight, five feet ten tall and with glossy, golden unblemished limbs, how can we not but fail? Every time we see her image, replicated across the Western world, we fail. I watch my thirteen year old daughter gaze at herself with a mixture of love and despair. She asks, “Am I ugly? Am I fat? Are my eyes too small? My face too round?” She is beautiful, but I am not the mirror that counts. I cannot reflect her beauty back at her. “You would say that,” she says.

Insecurity is a normal developmental stage. I've been there. We've all been there. “When you're a young girl,” says therapist Elizabeth Hearn, “it's okay to say how am I looking? How am I doing? That's gorgeous, you're testing yourself out, testing the limits. But when you're twice, or three times that age and you're still doing it and dominating the conversation with yourself, it tips over into unhealthy narcissism. “Am I too fat? Do I look fabulous? Do I look terrible? Does my butt look big in this?” The underlying issue is, am I loveable?”

Okay, hands up. Who feels loveable? Who feels, as they say in therapeutic circles, “good enough”? Few of us, if only because trying to be the best that we can be is no longer an option. Being better is, which means shooting toxins in our faces (the use of Botox has risen 2500% in the past three years) or going under the knife (cosmetic surgery up by two thirds in the past year). Vanity has nothing to do with it. Rampant, collective insecurity does and at a price that's way too high. Narcissus was destroyed, drowning as he tried to reach his own perfection. Just as we are drowning in the giddying rise of emotional disorders from depression and anxiety through alcohol and drug abuse to binge eating and anorexia while all the time trying to reach ultimate physical perfection.

And do you know what? It's not worth it. My most beautiful friend is a little overweight and has a pronounced disability. Her lips are painted red and her hair is tinted blonde. She wears diamonds on her fingers and gold on her wrists. Her glamour is overwhelming but I watch people blossom and open up before her, because she is more interested in them than she is in herself. Like my grandmother before her, and countless other uncelebrated women, she lives in the true spirit of vanity.

 

A Letter to My Younger Self, aged thirty

Psychologies Magazine - November 2007

Sally Brampton

My darling Sal,

So, you're thirty, at last. Happy birthday. You've been longing to be thirty since you were twelve, because you thought you'd be at ease with life, because you thought you'd know . You did so hate being a child, just like your daughter, Molly, who you haven't yet met, who had exactly the same trouble when she was small. “It's like being in constant captivity,” she complained, aged eight.

You're gorgeous now, with a body that has men stopping in the street, but you say you're fat and your breasts are too big so you keep Venus under wraps, starving and punishing it into skinny conformity. Enjoy it, please. Don't waste your beauty. It fades so fast.

I know that independence is tougher than you thought and there's nobody around to tell you how to be. You're scared but you refuse to show it. You always were a fighter. “Headstrong,” that's what they called you as a kid. Do you remember how Dad used to joke that you were always covered in bruises because you were in such a hurry that you constantly fell over your own feet?

You think you should be an adult, (whatever that is, and really, even now, I don't know) so you act shiny and bright to hide that small, lost feeling you hate so much. I see the journalist who comes to interview you as you are launching Elle (thirty is a big year for you) and how she writes, “Confidence glances off Sally Brampton like light off a laser.” And I see how you wince as you read that line, how hard and unrelenting it makes you, me, sound. But you shrug it off, never asking for help because you confuse self-care with self-pity and vulnerability with weakness. You are an adult now, and you should know .

Very soon now, in a matter of weeks, your husband will leave you. He's having an affair (with a model, good grief) because he's young and scared and needs love too. Like you, he doesn't know how to ask. So he leaves, and you're bewildered and shattered but you get right up again and go to work so you don't have to show how much it hurts. You work so hard, and that's fine, but remember that you have a choice about what works for you too, and work that touches your soul. One day, you will take it. People are telling you to slow down but you won't listen, just as you won't listen to me when I say to you, go gently. Reach out your hand and let somebody take it. I know you think you have to do this alone, but you don't and you can't. The walls we build to protect ourselves become our prisons. They block out the light. Have faith, Sal, trust in life and in people and you will be happier and more loved than you ever believed is possible. And in twenty-two years time, two days before your fifty second birthday, you will marry again and you'll look into the face of love and then you really will know; that life is about connection and nothing else truly matters.

 

Third Time Lucky?

Sunday Times - June 2007

Sally Brampton

I am getting married. This, really, is only of great interest to me and, of course, to my future husband. We don't use the word fiancé. It sounds too young and we are not that. I don't wear an engagement ring and we are not giddy with excitement. We are, rather, rapt with quiet pleasure.

Oh, and perhaps it's of interest to our four (one for me, three for him) children. My teenage daughter said, “Cool”, which I took to be succinct but high praise. His teenagers said “cool” too, so at least we're all at the same party.

As for my mother, here's the conversation.

“Mum? I've got some good news.”

“Lovely, darling.”

“I'm getting married.”

“Lovely, darling.” Long pause. “Who to?”

Well, it is the third time.

Yes, third. That's the bit that seems of greater interest than the mere fact of getting married. People's voices tend to get a little high on the “third”. Then, quite often, they laugh, which took me aback at first but is perhaps not that surprising. Marriage is at a record, all-time-low so obviously people think you must be nuts to do it once, let alone three times.

And we are getting married on Friday the thirteenth, which, like getting married a third time makes me either certifiable or so indifferent to received opinion that I am sub-zero cool. Neither is true, as it happens. When my intended went to sign on at the registry office, he discovered that the Saturday 14 th was fully booked but the 13 th was, strangely, completely free. “Pick your time,” he said. “They're not exactly selling tickets.” As it is the same registry office in which I got married before, I was careful to choose The Blue Room. I thought it might be tempting fate to revisit The Yellow Room, the scene of the first crime.

When I told my various friends that I was getting married again, only one had the nerve (or lack of tact, although perhaps they are the same thing) to say, “Why?!” The implication being that I am obviously very bad at marriage, so why not just give it up? Most friends, though, have been incredibly happy and excited for us. My closest friend said, “I think it shows great optimism and an extraordinary willingness to commit.” I love her for that but for most people, the big question is not, “why?” but “what?” as in, “What are you going to wear?” So very twenty-first century…

I hate to sound too casual about my own nuptials but I have never been interested in the big church wedding or months of nervous preparation. The part that excites me the most lasts for about two minutes. It's when I look into his eyes (blue, gorgeous) and say, “I, Sally, take you…”

Otherwise, a good frock and an excellent party suit me just fine.

The first time I got married, I wore a short, scarlet taffeta cocktail frock by Antony Price, so corseted and tiny it amazes me now. Well, I was twenty-five and worked on Vogue and lived on air and could run for a bus in skyscraper heels. The ones I wore at the rock and roll party we gave that night were bright red suede Monolos. I remember them well although I don't, honestly, remember why I got married the first time around. Nor, I think, does my ex husband except it seemed like a good idea at the time. Neither of us thought about the future. We knew the ways in which we were similar but not the ways in which we were different. Turned out, he wanted to live in a freezing, empty loft. I wanted central heating and stairs up to bed.

The second time I got married, I wore white. Perhaps I was trying for reinvention. I was older too (36) and (I thought) wiser so it was lunch at The Ivy and a short dress by Jasper Conran, embroidered with crystals and a curvy little jacket that fitted just so. My shoes were sensibly high, Jimmy Choo, and my second husband was clever, funny and kind and I thought he'd make a great dad. He did and he does but I didn't make a great wife. We are emotionally, very different. Neither of us understood that, until it was too late.

The truth is, I did not know myself. I knew only the cover version. I thought it was enough. It wasn't, of course. I am not proud of two failed marriages. I don't think it's cool or funny or something to make light of. I think it's a tragedy and the tragedy was that I had no idea that love is the ability to share yourself with somebody and to let them share themselves with you without either trying or wanting to change the other.

It took me a long time, a lot of it on my own, to learn about myself and think about what might make a good relationship. For years, I believed I was so hopeless at intimacy that it was best if I stayed single. Then along came my future husband and I loved him so much that I slowly learned the courage and humility and patience it takes to properly love another person. It was not easy, for either of us. It took seven years, three of them apart, and a lot of pain to get to a place of absolute peace and understanding.

But why get married? Why not just live together? Well, every marriage is different but for us, our wedding marks a coming into the light and the best reason is perhaps the simplest of all.

I said to my future husband, “Why exactly do you want to get married?”

He said, “Because I love you very much.”

Me too. Oh, and I'm wearing navy blue silk crepe by Betty Jackson so, darling, I hope you're not reading this now.

 

Charity

Easy Living - 2005

Sally Brampton

I'm a sucker for guilt. It gets me right where it's intended – in my wallet. Every time a starving kid shows his face in my sitting room, I only have to look at my own well-fed, beautifully educated, gorgeously clothed child and I'm on the phone reciting my credit card number. I cannot pass a rattling collection tin without retracing my steps, cannot even catch sight of a chugger without feeling shame. Or a passionate desire to deck them with a swift left hook, for which read guilt. And, god forbid that they should stop me. Instead of saying “no, thanks” or “sod off, I'm late,” I feel compelled to launch into a long-winded explanation of how much I give, to which charities and why. All of which may be true but is so fabulously boring that one man literally begged me to shut up.

As well he might because he's paid to sell, not to listen. Eight pounds an hour is the going rate for a chugger (aka charity mugger or, in official speak, face to face fundraiser) and he or she is expected to sign up five people a day to a donation, via standing order, of anything from six to fifteen pounds a month. An interest in the job (sorry, the charity) is useful but not essential.

According to The Public Fundraising Regulatory Association, the industry watchdog, chuggers persuaded 690,00 people to sign a “committed giving” contract in 2002, contributing 240 million pounds to charity over the next five years. Big money, for sure, but the hired hand with the clipboard isn't a terribly cosy image, is it? Nor very heartfelt but as most of us are now suffering from a severe case of compassion fatigue, not to mention good cause overload, charities say they have to raise money any way they can. Most people dislike chuggers but enough of us pay up that it can be justified as effective practise. And, argue the charities, it's not how the money is raised but where it goes that matters. The end justifies the means.

I've always felt that particular piece of morality was mortally flawed but, more importantly, does handing over cash do anything to connect our hearts to our fellow creatures which, madly, I think charity is all about? Not for me, it doesn't. It makes me feel like shit because, secretly, I don't think I give a damn. At heart, I think I just want the world to shut up and go away and leave me alone. I don't want to know about starving kids or beaten women or dying men. I don't want to know about them and so I pay up and buy their silence. I use my money to create a wall between us so I don't have to engage with their terrifying reality. If I really cared, I'd go out and do something about it.

Or, at least, that's how I think it works. Of the £1.7billion donated to charity in this country in 2003, I'd hazard a guess that most of it was to make the world go away, not bring it up close and personal. And here's a fascinating fact. Men give more money to charity than do women - an average of £94.80 a year against women's annual £71.05. Who'd have thought it given the female reputation for being a bleeding heart? You could say that's down to a disparity of income but I say it's because men are better at compartmentalising their emotions than women. Give money, feed starving child, job done - a brief but effective transaction.

And yet I can't help thinking that the more we reduce human relations to these brutal monetary exchanges, the crueller and more impersonal the world becomes. Technology reduces them still further. Intellectually we may connect dialling a number or keying in our credit card on a web site to a starving kid in Africa but emotionally, I suspect, our hearts remain utterly disconnected. Have the devastating physical and emotional afterwaves of the tsunami receded? No. Do we think about the consequences of that terrible December day? Not often.

That disconnection has its own momentum. We happily hand over a fiver to the kid in Thailand who's lost his mum in a wall of water, but ignore the snotty nosed brat next door whose mum's drowning in a torrent of crack. Real lives are messy, real charity means getting down and dirty. Or, at least, it means paying attention to what's going on in our own backyard.

I know it's hilariously old fashioned but I believe that charity begins with good manners. Not in a pompous use the right knife kind of a way but in the true definition of charity which is love, universal benevolence and good will. Take my corner shop which, like most corner shops in the land, is run by Indians. They are not in need of financial charity. They do very well, thanks. But they are, like the rest of us, in need of a little kindness. I have stood in that shop and watched people be unspeakably rude and unpleasant to them. The same people, I'd bet, who hand out a tenner to the tsunami fund and feel like smug gits just before shoving an old lady out of the way because she's taking a little too long to get off the bus.

I exaggerate. I know. It's not that we should stop giving. It's just that we need to think a little harder about what charity actually means. For ten years, I was a trustee of a small charity called Fashion Acts, set up to help people affected by HIV. Three close friends died of the illness in the 80s, so it was a cause dear to my heart. We raised money to help people at grass-roots level, in the most intimate, personal way that we could. Of all the projects that we ran, one of the most affecting was the giving of Christmas presents to men and women too ill to leave their hospital beds. Due to the stigma of the illness, many had been abandoned by families and friends. On Christmas morning, we did the rounds of London hospitals and hospices, handing out stockings tied up with scarlet satin ribbons. Those visits may not have changed lives, but they did change hearts. Most of the people we visited cried, not out of gratitude but in sheer relief. We all need to feel that we matter, that we count in the indifferent sea of humanity and suffering. We cried too, the fake Santas, and those visits always reminded me of my favourite poem, Last Fragment, by Raymond Carver. He wrote it two days before he died of cancer.

“And did you get what you wanted

from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved,

To feel myself beloved on the earth.”

Feeling beloved on the earth, this vast, often cruelly impersonal planet, is what we all want. And I believe it's what charity truly means, that compassion for each other's vulnerability. I am conscious of that every time I scan my standing orders or “committed giving contracts”, horribly aware that it's really the only time I think about those people. The charity I worked for closed down, swallowed up by larger, more important organisations. Since then, I have done nothing but give money and though nominally I give more now, in truth, I give less.

Bob Geldof had it right when he said at Live8, “We don't want your money.” Well, we do, obviously, but what is wanted more is a universal consciousness that we are all in the same game, on the same planet, and in the same mess. Which, in essence, was Live8's message. Not, we give and you receive, but there, but for the grace of god or good fortune, go I. It's a long way from the Live Aid message, “Give us your fucking money,” which, twenty years ago made giving hip.

Too hip, I sometimes think. Big charities now talk “brand awareness” and “marketing strategy.” So what? It's the way the world works. It's the supermarket crowding out the corner shop. On an economic scale, it makes sense. On a human level it does not. And, just so you know your philanthropic Gucci's from your Prada's, the big league line-up starts with Cancer Research UK with a voluntary income of £360 million. The list, provided by the CAF (Charities Aid Foundation) moves down through The National Trust (£144 million) at second place to Save The Children UK (£70 million) at tenth place. Curiously, The Royal National Lifeboat Institution is at fifth place with an income of £91million. Boats get £21million more than kids. Go figure.

Then, of course, we all have to show how hip and giving we all are by wearing compassion on our wrists. I hate those wristbands. God, how I hate them. It's one thing to endorse a political message such as Make Poverty History but flaunting a terminal illness on your wrist is, literally, sick. Since when was breast cancer this season's must have? I hate the profound cynicism of reducing human suffering to the soundbite of a style accessory. Just take a look at Ebay where, on any given day, there are nearly ten thousand wristbands for sale, (for charity? For sure. But whose?) for everything from leukaemia to “police, fire, ambulance – support our emergency services.” They get paid, don't they? Or am I missing the point? When every cause is made both hip and worthy, the overload is so great it shuts down our hearts and minds.

The other point about causes such as Live8, of course, is that it's about dignity. Just as true charity is about helping others to help themselves. Which is why the upmanship of wearing a cancer bracelet is so reductive to somebody who's actually got cancer. Whose illness is this anyway? A friend who was dying of cancer said she didn't want pity. She didn't even want compassion. She just wanted to die well, just as she had lived. And she wouldn't say no to a bit of kindness along the way, but no more kindness than anybody else was entitled to.

The point about charity, surely, is that we should do it, not boast about it. There I go, being hilariously old fashioned again. But on that note, the man I most admire on planet charity is the man who talks about it the least, Richard Curtis. I happen to know Richard and the man's a saint, right through to his bones. He'd hate hearing that, just as he'd hate anybody knowing that he devotes more than thirty per cent of his time to charity. Elton comes a close second, giving twenty per cent of his time. Rocket man. They give money too, of course, but it is the intimate attention they pay to others that marks them both as true givers.

In this cash-rich, time-poor culture of ours, the most precious commodity we have is time. Ask somebody to sign a cheque to help somebody they don't know, and they probably will. Ask them to give up two hours a week to help a stranger, and they probably won't. That's not conjecture, it's simply what I saw as a trustee of a charity. Volunteering our precious time is, in this brutally self-involved world, the most truly selfless act.

But that, for most of us, is difficult, if only for the practical reasons of kids and work and keeping house and all the demands that crowd the hours. So, just as a start, we might all start behaving according to Webster's definition of charity which is, “Liberality in judging of men and their actions; a disposition which inclines men to put the best construction on the words and actions of others.”

Imagine it. The whole world thinking well of each other. Imagine what would come of that. Sweet charity indeed.

 

Addicted to Love

Vogue - September 2004

Sally Brampton

LOVE IS A DRUG

Let's face it, we live in a broken world. Anti-depressant use is rampant, obesity is epidemic, alcohol fuels increasing public and domestic violence, skunk and ecstasy misuse is breaking into the smartest schools and porn is flooding our homes through our computer screens.

Addiction to drugs, alcohol, food and sex is messing up lives big time. And just when you thought it couldn't get much worse, there's a new addiction to grapple with – love. I know, it's easy to take the piss. What's sweet old love got to do with the dark side of life? Easy, too, to sit in a church hall with a bunch of men and women who introduce themselves with, “Hi, my name's Roger (or Ralph or Rupert, or Maud or Maureen), and I'm a love addict,” and think they're a bunch of losers. But listen a little harder, open your mind a little wider and some of it begins to make pertinent, even distressing sense.

Or at least that's what happened to me.

At first, I thought the title, love addict, was just a sexy, snappy label for an old emotional disorder. Then I began to talk to self-confessed love addicts as well as to other people who aren't, as they say in addiction circles, “on the programme,” but who desperately want help after decades of messed up relationships. As one put it, “I've almost given up. Each failure's worse than the last.” Are they love addicts? Perhaps, perhaps not, although all fulfil one definition of addiction - “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

The other thing that got my attention is the love addicts themselves, who are not sad downtrodden no-hopers but smart, sassy sophisticated women. And men. Love addiction, like any other addiction, knows no social or gender boundaries.

I have another reason too, and this one's personal – the emotional fall out from a relationship that was difficult. Okay, it was a disaster. Both during and after it, I was compulsive, needy, angry, tearful, obsessive and possessive. I was all the things that, at heart, I am not. Or, at least, never have been before. Were I to take the object of my affection and objectify him as a substance, there is no doubt that I was in the grip of a vivid compulsion. He was my drug of choice.

But can one bad relationship make you an addict? And can there be degrees of love addiction? There can't be degrees of alcoholism. Either you are or you're not, just like you can't be a bit pregnant. Yet a madly non-empirical study of female friends seems to indicate that most of them have experienced a degree of love addiction. So when does it stop being the human condition and become a disorder as such?

In the States, where attitudes to addiction are light years ahead of the UK , love addiction is taken very seriously indeed. As it is at Life Works, a new UK based treatment centre, set up by an American anglophile, Don Serrat – himself an addict – and staffed predominantly by Americans and US trained counsellors.

According to Steven Lanzet, a Marriage and Family Therapist and clinical supervisor at, Life Works, “If somebody drinks, that doesn't mean they're an alcoholic. People are defined as alcoholics because their behaviour has created significant problems in their life. It's the same with love addiction. If somebody has a relationship that's troublesome or gets into a relationship that began badly or ended badly, that's not necessarily love addiction. What we're interested in is whether there's a pattern that continues over time and does it create significant problems? You could say, well I had one bad relationship and I learned from that bad relationship. That's healthy. So it's not about degrees, it's about the number of problems it causes or has caused in your life.”

A drug, as most addicts will acknowledge, is a substance they use to block out reality, or pain. In the language of Alcoholic's Anonymous (AA) it's using something, “to change the way I feel.” That something may be a drink. It may equally be food or another person. Experts make the distinction through the terms, “substance addiction” (drugs and alcohol) and “process addictions”, (food, shopping, sex, gambling and love). Each addiction has its own self-help group, or fellowship. For love addicts it's either, Love Addicts Anonymous (LAA) or Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), the sex part because many love addicts use sex compulsively, misinterpreting it as affection.

Sarah, who is a painter in her early 40s, believes that, “addiction generally comes on top of a high level of unhappiness and is about medicating that unhappiness. When I hit loneliness and sorrow, I want to medicate the pain with a relationship. I go to a very dark place of, “I'm incredibly lonely, it's not fair, I'm unattractive, I'm fat, I've got an enormous bottom.” Instead of ringing a girlfriend who completely understands, I'll go through my mental address book of single men who've paid me some attention lately. If I'm not very careful, I'll ring them, which is the worse thing I could do because I'm in no shape to go on a date. Also, I don't really want them anyway.”

In AA, the unhappiness Sarah describes is generally referred to as, “the hole in the soul.” Every addict knows that emptiness and the desperate need to fill it with a drink, a line of coke, a bar of chocolate or a binge at Zara. Love addicts fill it with a person. Jane, a model, had an intensely addicted relationship that eventually led her into treatment. “If anything good happened. I'd need to call him. If anything bad happened I'd need to call him. I thought about him all the time. It was like I was insane. I couldn't do anything else, even work, and I'd always been really successful at work. I ended up drinking more and more, to kill the pain.” She also ended up stalking him and trashing his car with her bare hands.

“Other people eat,” says Sarah, “or drink or take drugs. Well I don't want to drink or take drugs. I just want somebody to put their arms around me and tell me that I'm all right.” A pretty human need, surely, except that in Sarah's case, almost any man will do, even men that she says, “ten years ago wouldn't have been allowed to kiss my shoes.”

A love addict is not simply somebody who has serial love affairs. That, according to relationship therapist, Elizabeth Hearn, is, “way too simplistic. The love addict goes after the same sort of emotionally unavailable guy every time. Same guy, different suit. And every time they say, “this time it'll be different.” The love addict, in their blind spot, can't see that they're actually a need addict. They need something from another person – which is self-esteem, validation and worth. It's got very little to do with love in a healthy, holistic way.”

It also has very little to do with reality. As in alcohol abuse, love abuse clouds judgement. According to Charley Shults, a psychotherapist and Senior Counsellor at Life Works, “People get addicted to being, quote, in love even though there are all sorts of warning signs that this is not going to be a good relationship. It's like they can't help themselves, even though they know it's bad for them.”

Fiona, who is 39 and in marketing says, “I've stayed with men who are violent, rather than be on my own. I avoid being left at any cost to myself, however great. My first big relationship, when I was 17, was very volatile. You know that violent, on/off thing. I realised then my propensity to cling around a man's ankles even when he's walking out of the door.”

The earliest stage in love addiction, according to Steven Lanzet, is limerance. “Limerance is that first stage in every relationship where you're high on the relationship. It's so exciting; you can't get enough of each other. It creates its own drug in the brain and is very powerful.”

Sarah has recently been in casual relationships with two men who, “weren't even remotely special. Even so, I could feel my head and my life being completely overtaken with wondering if they would call and checking for texts and emails constantly. That's not the way a sophisticated 45-year-old woman behaves. I don't behave like that in any other area of my life, but the minute a man shows me attention and thinks I'm really rather marvellous, I become like somebody who's had a line of coke.”

People in that state practise what Lanzet calls, “overlook”, as in, “I overlook everything that's bad about the other person. The problem with limerance is that it doesn't last. In that way it's the same as a drug. People who are craving limerance go from relationship to relationship because, as soon as the limerance fades they think, well this sucks, I want out of here, because it's not exciting any more.”

“I was constantly going into the fantasy of wanting a man to be somebody they're not,” says Fiona, “and then resenting them because they're not who I want them to be. In my twenties, I totally shut down emotionally by choosing men I didn't care about. Or I was in multiple relationships. You know, keep the excitement going but never get emotionally engaged.”

If a love addict does hook into somebody, they way they maintain the excitement, or limerance, is to step on the emotional gas. According to James, a photographer, “The love addict gets continually more hurt, more obsessed, more needy, more demanding and can get insanely jealous over nothing – things that aren't reality.” James is speaking personally. One of the founders of SLAA in this country, he has been in recovery from love addiction for fifteen years. These days, he tries to help potential love addicts like a woman who's obsessed with another man, despite being married herself. “Her behaviour is literally insane. She interrupts this man's business meetings, accusing him of sleeping with other women. Then she says he's treating her like dirt. What she's actually doing is trying to swallow him up. The guy's totally overwhelmed so he's trying to put some normal, healthy distance between them. If I say that, she refuses to listen.”

Denial, as in any drugs or alcohol, is central to love addiction. Addicts are incapable of seeing their own behaviour, or understanding that it's the alcohol or the relationship that's toxic, and they'd be better off putting it down. If they're really in denial, they won't leave. Instead, they'll come up with every justification in the book for their partner's behaviour. Steven Lanzet's heard it all. “Maybe if I was nicer, maybe if I left them alone more. Maybe if I lost weight. Maybe if I agreed to that open marriage and let them sleep with so-and-so. From there they either have to stay in the fantasy of, “oh it's no big deal, he loves me really,” or move onto a new relationship.”

As in every other addiction, there's a paper trail of broken promises. “I'll stop tomorrow,” is the addict's war cry. Then there is the morning after, or even moment after, hangover of guilt and shame. “I did things that I said I would never ever do,” says Jane. “Stalking him, making scenes in restaurants, crying. I needed him like a drug. When I begged him to say that we would be together forever and he couldn't say it, I asked him to lie to me. Part of me couldn't understand it because it was never my plan to be a woman consumed by love.”

Sarah's last, addicted relationship turned sour after a year. “Instead of rushing home to be with me and texting me 52 times in a morning, he wouldn't contact me for days. I felt totally lost and began to be unattractively needy. He'd say he was busy at work and I was being insecure and silly. There were a lot of rows. I knew that I needed to get out but I wouldn't go. I worked harder and harder to get back to the love bubble that we'd had the year before. I looked and felt terrible but I did more and more of what he asked.”

The breakdown of a relationship is, to the love addict, as painful as the withdrawal from any other drug. Once Jane was in recovery (originally an AA term for getting sober and living well without alcohol, now used in all the 12 step fellowships) she told the man she was obsessed with that she could never see him again. “I knew that if I did, I would go straight back, it was so powerful. Somehow I got through it, but not without wanting to die. I know now that it wasn't about love or even him but a need no human being could ever fulfil. It was too huge.”

Alcoholism is defined as a progressive, sometimes fatal disease. Can the same thing be said about love? Fiona, who has been in recovery for 8 years, and regularly attends SLAA meetings, maintains that there's a high suicide rate around the condition. “Particularly if there's drink or drugs involved, which there often is as a way to medicate the pain.”

Sarah, who had intended to marry the man she was addictively involved with says, “If I'd taken my children to live with him, they would have had an entire life of less than because I was so focused on him. I would have had an entire life following in the wake of somebody else, not being me because I was so frightened he'd leave. I would have destroyed my children. And that would have been as dangerous as me being off my face every night on two bottles of wine.”

At the root of love addiction is a syndrome known as attachment disorder. Charley Shults explains. “Some people are theorising, and I would place myself in that camp, that it's actually attachment disorder that gives rise to love addiction. People who are securely attached feel good about themselves, so they're not looking for somebody else to make them happy. They're just looking for somebody else in a similar state to share their life with. We know from research that securely attached people attract each other, just as insecurely attached people attract each other because they believe the other will make the unhappiness inside go away. Unfortunately, it never works.”

Attachment disorder stems from childhood. “As a child your emotions are your needs. If your emotions aren't effectively dealt with, then your needs aren't getting met. If you're needs aren't getting met, how that registers is, “okay, I'm unworthy of getting my needs met, I'm a bad person for having them.” People who are used to being in that state are susceptible to seeking out adult relationships in which their needs for love are not going to get met.”

And this is not, Shults, emphasises, blame-the-parents-territory. “People can have very well meaning parents and still have attachment disorder. In family systems theory, we have a template about who we find attractive, how we relate to ourselves, how we relate to others, our model of the world and how we parent our own children. So what's happening with men and women who get into an addictive pattern around relationships is that their template is off. A typical example is where mum is too enmeshed and where dad is distant and unavailable. Anyone growing up in that scenario would tend to choose emotionally unavailable men.”

Enmeshment is when a parent (usually a mother) overwhelms a child with demands for love and attention, to fill their own emotional hole. Classically over-protective, they are known in therapy as, “smother-mothers.” As Jane says, “My mother smothered me; my father created the ideal of me being perfect. What I got from my mother was the too much, and what I got from him was the not enough. I think I pursued that with love from a man.”

Sarah grew up with, “a very angry father who was utterly unavailable except to make sexually inappropriate remarks. The way my mother dealt with that was to tell me that I was ugly so I grew up thinking that the way to be with men is to physically attract them and flirt with them, and also that I'm ugly. That's bred a pretty sad aspect of my personality, which is to be pathetically grateful when a man finds me attractive and to think there's an immediate possibility of love.”

Attachment disorder is not always obvious. Charley Shuts describes a client, “who couldn't identify anything his parents did wrong. Then he told a story of wandering out of the neighbourhood and getting lost. When his mother discovered him, she was frantic and the way he described it was she alternated between hugging him and hitting him. It was interesting seeing that played out in a family session. This guy's very sick with addiction and mum's saying to him, “I love you so much,” and in the next breath, “if you don't get well I'll never talk to you again.” Those two extremes are probably indicative of her relationship with him throughout his childhood. The underlying message is that it's not the child's needs that are important, it's mum's emotional needs that matter.”

Love addiction's a particularly tricky syndrome to treat because we all need love, and most of us cherish the ideal of companionship and intimacy with another person. “As human beings,” Hearn says, “we have basic needs, and one of those primal issues is love.” Giving up relationships entirely isn't the answer, (LAA suggest a year's abstinence) just as stopping eating isn't a helpful solution to someone with an addiction to food.

For most love addicts, the solution is to recognise their pattern and try to adjust their behaviour accordingly. But it's tough. According to Sarah, “It's a bit like being hardwired to be an alcoholic. You know you're hardwired so you don't drink.” She checks her responses and feelings around men constantly, but if she's feeling vulnerable, it's difficult. “One might be in control of one's brain and attempt to be in control of one's thoughts but one is rarely in control of one's emotions and this is very visceral and very emotional.”

Which is why the fellowships of SLAA and LAA are helpful. It is part of the human condition to think that everyone else is having a lovely, happy time and you're the only one who's bonkers. Just as it's human to want to feel understood. And that, in a nutshell, is all a fellowship is, a group of people who gather to share, “their strength, hope and experience,” and offer each other a lifeline out of the tangled emotions of their mutual addiction.

 

Cleavage

Easy Living - 2006

Sally Brampton

This is kind of personal. It's about my breasts. And, perhaps, yours too. Mine are large, a 34E. Their size gives them an importance they don't deserve. I hate that. Sometimes, I hate them too.

This is why. I am 18, walking along a street in the sunshine, happily minding my own business. I hear a lorry stop, a door slam, urgent footsteps. I walk faster. The footsteps sound faster too. I look over my shoulder. A man is right behind me.

He is faster than I am. He stops, barring my way. He is a big bloke, red in the face. I tense, terrified.

“Sorry, love,” he says. “I just wanted to tell you that you've got the most fantastic tits I've ever seen.”

He waits expectantly, as if I should thank him for his time.

I am too astonished to speak. I am wearing a Biba T-shirt with a modest neck, nothing provocative. I do not want, or enjoy, such attention. I say nothing. He shakes his head reproachfully at my ingratitude, walks back to his lorry and drives away.

I am blonde, with blue eyes. When I was younger, my face was appealing, even cute, although never beautiful. But it was not my face or blondeness but my pneumatic breasts that gave me the status of some sort of living doll; senseless, vapid, inarticulate, a repository for fantasy.

Once, in London , as I was idling along the pavement on a sunny afternoon, a man walked towards me wearing a suit of dark, business like stripes. He stopped in front of me and put his hands on my chest, a hand to each breast.

I am not sure which of us was more astonished.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I said.

He shook his head. “I don't know.” And he walked away.

My breasts have been handled by complete strangers a number of times. They have been offered thousands of pounds (“if you let me fuck them”) by men in pubs as well as countless photo opportunities. Not me. Just my breasts.

There are ways in which I like my breasts. I like them at night; they are comforting to lie on. Those men I have chosen to share them with like them too. But not, I think, more than they like any other part of me.

Men and breasts have a curious relationship. They seem capable of objectifying them until the owner of them, a woman, ceases to exist. The more they objectify, the more the fantasy runs amok. As Rita Rudner, the American comedian, once put it. “Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it's quite the opposite: A woman having large breasts makes men stupid.”

Get men up close and personal with a woman and her breasts and they gain something like a perspective. A pair of tits becomes, well, a pair of tits, no matter what their size. According to research, most men prefer women - by which one has to infer the women they actually have sex with rather than fantasise about - to have medium-sized breasts. Only 14% preferred women with larger ones. A study published in Playboy magazine (where else?) involving 275 men, maintains that the "perfect" breast is 3.84 on a scale of 5, with 1 being an AA cup and 5 being a D.

So that'll be a C, then.

You'd never know it from our culture. Or from my experience. And that's, perhaps, what makes being the owner of a pair of large breasts so humiliating. You are helplessly eroticised, objectified in a manner that, instinctively, you know has nothing to do with you. And against which you have no recourse. What do you do? They are there. They exist, through no more than a genetic fluke. Worse, perhaps, is the airhead myth that prevails, among women as well as men. According to a study, again published in Playboy, of 270 male and female college students, the first impression of a woman with large boobs is that she is, “stupid, incompetent, immoral and immodest.”
Well, gee, thanks. I'll say this; they sharpened my tongue. As John Wilkes, the libertarian and womaniser, once said about his appearance, which was hugely ugly, “It takes me five minutes to explain away my face.”

Yes, women comment. They comment all the time in a way they don't about any other part of my body. Which is why this is personal. If ever I have complained to female friends about the size of my breasts, I am simply told that I should be so lucky, they're fabulous, I'm being absurd or, most usually, not to boast.

So I don't talk about them. I shut up. Which is curious. My breasts are the only part of me that I cannot share with other women. In every other way I am allowed entry to that warm, cosy, intimate female bonding club known as mutual complaining about our bodies.

I once had a friend with the same breast size as me. We complained in chorus. My back hurts, my neck hurts, I have grooves in my shoulders, I get hideous rashes in the summer from the sweaty heat and weight of my breasts chafing against a bra, and I can't find pretty underwear. I say, once had a friend, because she got herself a breast reduction. I have never seen a person so happy. She says it's like Christmas every day. She buys charming bras, wears tight t-shirts, can run down the beach wearing only a swimsuit. If I didn't love her so much, I'd hate her for abandoning me.

We used to go shopping together, when we were in our twenties, for bikinis. “Torture day,” we used to call it. This was in the bad old days when bikinis came in dress sizes, not cup sizes, and tops and bottoms were never sold separately. “A bikini is a set, madam,” explained one saleswoman after another as I stood in draughty changing rooms, my 14/16 bosom covered (just) by two flimsy triangles of cotton while the knickers hung, Norah Batty like, around my size 10 hips.

You see? You can't help it. You think I'm boasting.

It used to make me want to weep. So did the racks of beige and pink surgical bandages that in those days passed as bras for the “fuller busted lady.” Except that we were expected to be fuller all over. And old too, so past caring about pretty wisps of lace.

It's better these days. The only thing that gets me cross is any bra designed for an E cup, which has eensy weensy ribbon straps. According to research into the engineering needed for the perfect bra, “a pair of D-cup breasts weighs between 15 and 23 pounds—the equivalent of carrying around two small turkeys.” I'm an E cup. Try suspending two large turkeys from your shoulders with a pair of thin ribbons. It's like having wire cutters put through your skin.

I have tried to lose weight, to lose them. But even when I get very thin, my breasts remain, immovable. My bra size gets smaller (32) but the cup size only drops to a D. Which, on a thin frame, is still highly visible.

After years of practise, I've become so good at disguising my breasts that most people have no idea they are so large. I contain them with serious, madly expensive, bras; have become expert at sizing up a jacket, a jumper (V-neck, always), a dress that's cut to minimise. I research my t-shirts to an inch of their lives. They must have the right amount of scoop – too high and my breasts look huge, too low and too much is on show – as well as the right amount of cling (an easy skim is best) and a just-so density of cotton. And I never, ever, show any significant cleavage. I did once, to a party. I wore a dress, black, skin tight and low cut. People, women as well as men, began to discuss my breasts. “I had no idea!” So did people I had never met before. It is the most disconcerting, reductive experience to have somebody talk, as they say in America , “to the rack.” Or about the rack. There are other, hard earned achievements, I'd rather be known for.

A friend who has no breasts to speak of complains that she feels unfeminine. I fail to convince her that a couple of E cups does not make you feel feminine. It makes you feel like a turkey carrier. But I can see her point. Her lack of curves renders her sexless in a way that mine render me sexual. And neither is true.

I can see, too, how you might yearn to wear a pretty piece of lace across your breasts, or have them curve lightly under chiffon and silk. She complains that every pretty bra is underwired, which is impossible. If she lifts her arms, the wires lift too. I understand that retail frustration. In Bendels , New York , recently, I asked a sales assistant if she had a pretty silk camisole in a 34E. She laughed.

I am jealous of women with small breasts. How heavenly never to have to wear a bra, to be able to slip any old thing over your head and look perfectly fabulous in that narrow, couture ready way that all fashion designers adore. And design for. Even those Hollywood divas who get their breasts out for the red carpet are fashioned into shape by gowns engineered to turn a B or C cup into the illusion of an E. But it is simply an illusion. Give them the real thing and, I promise you, the star becomes a slapper. Why else do Kate Winslett, Tessa Dahl et al starve their curves into submission?

I know women who get their cleavages out at a moment's notice. And very lovely they look too. There is nothing prettier than the modest curve of a breast, the shadow of a cleavage. But they are blessed with moderation. They don't necessarily know it, of course, as witnessed by the numbers of women who want their perfect B or C cups enlarged to a D or even, god forbid, an E. Why? What possesses them? From my perspective they need, literally, to have their heads examined. Their man likes them bigger? Perhaps, or perhaps their man just likes the fantasy of bigger breasts. And, who, honestly wants to be loved by a man who loves you as a fantasy? And who, once nature has its way - and she will, implants or not - may go in search of younger, firmer, alternatives.

AA, I understand, or A. I get a B, even. Or a B after three kids. But a C? Count your blessings, woman. I know I am hardly one to talk, I am too far over the other side of the fence. What do I know? Except that I have spent a lifetime studying the emotional and physical implications of breasts. I've had to. They are always so very present. And I am never, ever surprised when I read that yet another celeb has had her implants removed. “I want to be me again,” is what they always say. I wonder how many other women with implants feel that way too. I sympathise. I always wanted to be me, rather than my breasts.

In that spirit, about five years ago, I went to see a cosmetic surgeon. He examined the angry red grooves in my shoulders, weighed each breast in a hand, agreed that they were rather too heavy and said a C cup would be in better proportion to my frame. It wasn't the £8,000 that stopped me, or even the scarring, which is horrible. It was my breasts. For better or for worse, I have grown quite attached to them. They have taught me, in big and small ways, quite a lot about the human condition and the, ultimately meaningless, sexualisation of our culture.

 

Don't Forget To Have Fun

Easy Living - 2007

Sally Brampton

When was the last time you had fun? Honestly? Real fun? And I don't mean playing with the kids sort of fun, although thrashing my thirteen year old and her best mate (both five feet ten) at ten pin bowling and yelling “losers” across the ten lane ball park was kind of fun.

For me, anyway.

Childish, I know, but it's about time we let our inner child rip. Not in a touchy-feely therapy session (if anyone else tells me about their inner child work, I swear I'll throw their toys out of the pram myself) but in that hedonistic, self-absorbed way that children are so good at. And which we adults seem to have forgotten.

Almost the best fun I ever had in my life puts me, on the pleasure principle, at about three years of age. It was back in the 80s, at one of Tom Dixon's warehouse demolition parties. Here's the scene; night time, abandoned warehouse, loud dance music and a vast room - empty save for crates of old crockery. Here's what you did; you danced, as badly as you liked, and sang, as out of tune as you liked. As you danced and sang, you picked up pieces of crockery and smashed them against a brick wall. It was like being in a room of mad, giggling, oversized toddlers but I tell you something; on that night it felt good to be alive.

Now Tom is all grown-up and got himself a proper job. Just like the rest of us, with careers and kids and mortgages to think of. Which is all right and proper but it seems to me, sometimes, that we've forgotten how to have ourselves some ridiculous, smashing fun.

Even pleasure has become a duty. Those little treats we once allowed ourselves, a yoga session, a gorgeous massage, a feelgood facial, how did they find their way onto everyone's must do list? Since when did they become a diary appointment, a checked item on the beauty routine (even the word is pleasure-free) and when did the not doing of them suddenly feel like a guilty omission instead of a delight, sadly missed? As for going out to a fabulous restaurant where's the joy? No wheat, no dairy, no fat, no carbs, no smoking, no more than two units max.

No fun.

My most extraordinary pleasure of the past few months has been mastering a handstand. What started out as a yoga move (the yogis believe that turning upside-down is good for everything from stress to depression) became a personal challenge. And you can't just do it by running at a wall. You have to start with hands flat and feet on the floor, then kick upright. I spent weeks thinking about that move, practising that move, imagining myself standing on my hands.

It seemed impossible (it's been forty years since I managed a handstand) until I understood that it wasn't so much a failure of my physical body as a failure of imagination. Once I'd convinced my head, my body followed. It is serious fun to turn upside down and watch the world. It is even more serious fun to do something that we, as grown-ups, are not supposed to do. Or to be interested in doing.

That failure of imagination is a self-imposed limitation. Just like rules. We follow, perhaps a little too literally, a social order. We need rules; of course we do, lest all turns to anarchy. But how many do we actually need? There are rules about body size and shape, rules about clothes, rules about work (the last one at her desk's a winner), rules about parenting, rules about socialising (do it, otherwise you're a sad loser). We even, god forbid, have rules about romance (a book called, scarily, The Rules). We live in a straitjacket of rules.

A friend recently broke out and snuck off to the movies alone in the afternoon, abandoning kids, work, chores, husband and duties. “I LOVED it,” she says. Perfect. It breaks almost every rule - from serious work ethic to lonely sad loser to must be mistress of all chores. Katherine Hepburn, who always seemed to me to be having the most heavenly time, lived by a simple motto, “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”

Well, quite. I love parties but I don't drink. “How,” I am often (always) asked, “can you enjoy them if you don't drink?” Here's yet another rule; in order to have a good time, you must drink. Au contraire. I like to talk to people. I find people endlessly, immensely fascinating. I like it if they (and I) make sense. And when they stop making sense, I leave. Or, if there's music, I dance, alone if I must. And here's another rule or two. I am too old to dance. Cool girls don't dance alone. Except that I am rarely alone. There's always someone else who is longing to dance. It's not that I'm great at it. I just love it. And in my obvious pleasure, my technique is almost always forgiven.

I dance on my own, too, in my sitting room to embarrassing pop. I dance in the park, spinning around to Kylie on the MP3 – but generally when nobody's around. There's a fine line between pleasure and madness.

Or, I drag my teenager out for a walk and nick the scooter she won't ride (there might be a boy looking) and practise wheelies on the paths. Once, a man in a suit asked me if he could have a go. He'd never dared try before, he thought he was too old. “That was so much fun,” he said, his cheeks pink as a boy's.

Lately, there's been a lot of research on fun, or pleasure. Psychiatrist and writer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, (pronounced, he says, "chicks send me high”) spent thirty years studying happiness. His answer lies in something he calls “flow.” It happens, he says, when people are so engaged in absorbing activities that they forget themselves, lose track of time and stop worrying. For one person, that might be gardening or doing a jigsaw. For another, it could be mastering the indecipherable instructions that come with an Ikea kit, for another it could be cracking a quantum physics code. It depends less on rules and society's measure of achievement and more on a personal scale of satisfaction.

Flow, and here's a crucial point, is also active rather than passive, which is why slumping in front of the television or even having a facial is less likely to make us feel happy than learning how to tap dance. Making excessive demands on yourself, a by-product of our must-win culture, is also likely to make you unhappy. Flow stretches someone pleasurably, not beyond his or her capacity. "People feel best when doing what they do best," he says.

And there is good evidence, too, that we should act like children. Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist at the University of California , San Francisco and author of Beyond Love and Work: Why Adults Need to Play (Scribner, 1999) , argues that play is crucial at every stage of life. In fact, she says, play is not just an activity--it's a state of mind because, "all the mental activity of play comes at you sideways." In other words, play is the antidote to stress; it allows us to expand rather than contract. "Play is a lost key," Terr writes, "It unlocks the door to our selves."

Brian Sutton-Smith, Professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania puts it more emphatically. “The opposite of play is not work. It's depression.” He cites a series of Dutch studies that show that when adults play, their memory is better, they think more effectively, and they are happier.

So smashing crockery and dancing and standing upside-down are not as lunatic as my grown-up self thinks, guiltily, that they might be. In fact, we owe it, not simply to ourselves but to everyone around us, to have fun. So, next time you slouch off to the movies alone or cut your kids homework time to get to your tap-dancing class, know that you are doing a good thing. For everyone.