Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.

Ah, it's good to be home again! With flowers in the window and birdsong in the garden, and roast potatoes for tea! Telephone campaigning was arduous indeed, but I befriended some fabulous, Sparkles and Crumbs-souled girls who I probably would not have met otherwise. On our last night in college, we retired to my room for microwave chocolate cake and discussions of brilliant books, the merits of old movies, and shoes. It was this discussion that sparked my inspiration for this post - which, I am afraid to say, will be lengthy! My inspiration was this:-

It started when everyone tried on my Irregular Choice ice cream heels and gushed over their beauty - one of my new favourite people sighed, "I love them, but I can't wear heels. I'm already too tall and gangly. I feel like I'm all limbs, 'Hey, I'm an Octopus!'" [This lady is, yes, tall, willowy and resembles Alexa Chung in style and prettiness.]
Someone else reassured her: "Oh gosh, no, I just feel so beefy when I stand beside you. Like, I just have so much meat on me! I'm so chunky!"
Another new comrade reprimanded me for feeding her cake, complaining: "You're going to make me fat! It's not fair! You just eat so much, but you still fit into a dress that size!" One of my older friends reassured her with more than a hint of glee: "Don't worry; one of these days, she's going to hit menopause and balloon. Then we can all laugh!"

Seriously, this just threw me! Here were these lovely, light-hearted heroines, brooding over the conviction that there is something terribly wrong with their appearance, and, moreover, that this was somehow detrimental to their captivating characters! I just don't understand it!

I got lucky with genetics, and can indeed eat like a glutton, go for a stroll through the colleges, and not gain particularly greatly with girth. Still, all those roast potatoes and marzipan chocolates tend to fill my pot-belly fit for a piglet! But I consider it worth it for an extra jackflap or - ahem! - two. My point here is two-fold - Susie Boyt puts it so much better in My Judy Garland Life, which my dear mama insisted I read. It is, indeed, wonderful.

Here's the first point: "The responsibility of pleasure can be too much of a burden. Having what you want, sometimes, seems so far-fetched... high whimsy, too rich an experience for the average palette. It's madness. 'I couldn't possibly!' Have what I want? Don't be silly!" Try this: "Hold out your arms in front of you, parallel to the ground, and reach forward as hard as you can towards the opposite wall; then reach harder still. Stretch out your fingers as far as they will go. Hold the position for two minutes. Do you feel comfortable? Is this how you intend to live the rest of your life?"

Sometimes [well, for me, always!], a big juicy baguette or a bowl of strawberries dipped in chocolate is so much more scrumptious than having a perfectly *trim and attractive body*

Another lesson learned from the gorgeous Judy Garland? There is so much more to being fabulous than having that conventional *trimness and attraction*. Can you believe that MGM Studios used to call her the 'Little Hunchback' or 'The Fat One,' and that they severely rationed her food?!

Mickey Rooney went to the MGM School with both Judy Garland and Lana Turner. He described Miss Garland as "no glamour girl... a little too short... She looked, well, different," whereas Lana Turner's "body said it all... I thought, Here is a woman."

Lana Turner

Turner was stunning, for sure - but she was also 'banal and even silly.' Her memoirs read: "Shortly after I met him he asked to marry me, but for once I knew I really didn't want to. After I declined he left for Arizona to do his nightclub act. Clever man, he didn't call me for a few lonely days. Sensing my mood, he again asked me to marry him. This time I agreed. Our wedding took place in Las Vegas. Why oh why?" As the brilliant Boyt puts it: "Indeed."

Judy Garland, on the other hand, was described by Dirk Bogarde as "complete, unforgettable magic." For Susie Boyt, she "seemed miraculously to transform the harsher truths of life into something wonderful, where all feelings, however dark, are good and true because they're yours." And just watch her performing Get Happy in Summer Stock, clad in a tux jacket and bowler hat!:-

Despite serious psychological problems and a drug addiction that eventually killed her, Judy Garland radiates fabulousness - proving my pet theory and her own 'Garlandian truisms':-

• Things that are hard have more of life at their heart than things that are easy.
  
• Glamour is a moral stance.
  
• Loss, its memory and anticipation, lies at the heart of human experience.
  
• If you have a thin skin, all aspects of life cost more and have more value.

Let's all be a little bit more like Judy and Kay Thompson, and never be afraid to crank up our own personal pizzaz to the highest kilowatt! I unearthed this whilst researching fundamentalism in the USA, and found it hilarious:-

“The most sinister and menacing figure of our mod life is the cigarette smoking, cocktail drinking, pug dog nursing, half-dressed, painted woman, who frequents the theatres, giggles at the cabarets, gambles in our drawing-rooms, or sits around our hotels, with her dress cut ‘C’ in front and ‘V’ behind! She is a living invitation to lust, and a walking advertisement of the fact that many of our modern women have lowered their standards of life!”
-John Straton, ‘Slaves of Fashion,’ written in 1920s New York. Wonder what he'd think of Sex and the City...?

Hmm - I think I'm much more of the Mary Oliver school of thought:-

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
— over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
-Lucille Clifton

More Garland Girls:-

The inspiring 'Octopus' - not only for her exquisite mix of realism and dreams, but for stating matter-of-factly: "You know, I really don't think I need a boyfriend right now. I'm much happier without."

The hardest situation to stay happy in, I think, is when you’re trying to find love, and yourself at the same time. It just doesn’t seem to fit well. So I believe that happiness is being able to wake up and just know that this is what you wanted and not what somebody else wanted.
-Sophia Bush

Barbra Streisand in Hello Dolly.

Emmanuelle Beart on the cover of French Elle

Marilyn Monroe [obviously]...

...And, of course, the camerado. Whether she is being madcap and theatrically evil...

...or charming and impeccably dressed for hot chocolate...

...she epitomises the Judy Garland gumption: "To be utterly lovely is more important than just about anything in life." And it is her birthday, too! I can't wait for her to come home she can celebrate with our usual shopping, sugar and Greg Peck movies.

In the meantime, to every Sparkles and Crumbs heroine - as Judy is told in A Star Is Born: "You're better than that. You're better than you know. But you know yourself, don't you? You just needed somebody to tell you."

Ooh, and just as a sartorial aside - if you ever doubt this, take Dolly's advice and "put on your Sunday clothes when you feel down and out!" Last night I was approaching a massive wardrobe clear-out with the focus and ruthlessness of Napoleon Bonaparte, and was considering charity shop-bagging these two items - a gorgeous, rich purple, balloon-sleeved crepe shirt that the camerado lent me money to buy two years ago, and black linen trousers she passed on to me. I usually wear dresses rather than seperate tops and bottoms, but by chance I tried them on together to make my decision - and I was instantly reminded of something Lauren Bacall would have worn to lounge in in How To Marry A Millionaire!:-

I amused myself for about half an hour posing and reclining around my room! Needless to say, I am keeping them. Edith Wharton described the importance of clothes for women: "It’s their armour, their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it." Too true, my lady! And I also unearthed my old style scrapbook during the excavation:-

P.S. When someone broke into the Judy Garland Museum and stole a pair of ruby red slippers, David Letterman commented: "Police are looking for someone armed and FABULOUS!"

I'm dreaming a world with you, I wish the night was longer...

...I'm chasing the way we were, I wish that I could catch us
I'm feeling your hand in mine, I wish I'd held it closer
...But I know
These dreams will bring you back to me.
-Ben Jelen

Oh, Roman Holiday... still my favourite movie of all time. I know, I know, I write about it far too much - but every time I see it I fall in love with it all over again! I had a fabulous Pyjamas, Chocolate Cake and Films afternoon with one of my cohorts. I was not impressed, however, by her description of Greg Peck as "a gerbil," and Westley from The Princess Bride as "smarmy, and he knows everything." Good grief! My greatest dream is to live in that little apartment overlooking the Eternal City on the Via Margutta with GP...

...we'd drive around Rome on a rented Vespa...

...and on Saturdays I would shop for sandals in the market-places...

...and eat chocolate gelato...

...and receive roses from kind flower-sellers who resemble Northern butchers.

Other Fabulous Films:

Gene Kelly in his most lovable role!

This just looks fabulous! GP, Lauren Bacall, beautiful clothes and the requisite mobsters. I have searched high and low, but Amazon only stock Region 1 DVDs! Boo!

Yesterday we wandered through the meadows to Grantchester, a little town about half an hour's walk from Cambridge, and high tea-d on huge, delicious scones with strawberry jam and elderflower cordial at The Orchard! I didn't even realise that the wonderful Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf, E M Forster, Housman, Sylvia Plath, A A Milne, and Cecil Beaton used to take their tea in the Gardens here too! Brooke even wrote a poem about it whilst in Berlin in 1912 -'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester':-

ειθε γενοιμην... would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester!
-Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low:...
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester...

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester...

Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?...oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

"I do not pretend to understand Nature, but I get on very well with her, in a neighbourly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we're both very tolerant. I live on honey, eggs and milk, prepared for me by an old lady like an apple (especially in the face) and sit all day in a rose garden to work."
-Rupert Brooke

"Do you feel kindly towards Cambridge? It was, as Lytton would say, rather 'hectic'; young men going in for their triposes; flowering trees on the backs; canoes, fellows' gardens; wading in a slightly unreal beauty; dinners, teas, suppers; a sense, on my part, of extreme age, and tenderness and regret; and so on and so on."
-Virginia Woolf

It rained and hailed on our tree-climbing route back, but we didn't mind, and the sun came out in time for us to explore a wonderful playground in the Fens! I must return next term and take some pictures of the big red aeroplane ride under the cherry blossom trees. And to celebrate the END of the telephone campaign, I broke, and bought my beauties:-

I wore them for our last day of work, and they evoked very strong responses. The girls adored them. One of the boys simply pointed and exclaimed, "F*** me! They're huge!" Halfway through the session, two of the boys popped up behind me: "We're heely heely worried about your feet. We love the shoes, don't get us wrong - but every day you wear ridiculously high heels. We're concerned for your heelth." It was like a terrible sketch.

"I rationalized that my new shoes shouldn't be punished just because I can't budget."
-Sex and the City

I also got a gorgeous new leaf green shirt dress from Zara. Oh, dear - I really shouldn't be allowed to shop by myself. And from the ridiculously stylish to the sublime, this has been my food for thought of late, other than microwave chocolate cake and Carrie Bradshaw's philosophising:

[I love discussing books and movies with intelligent people who read and watch things because they love them, not because it makes them look intellectual. Last night I lent out Roman Holiday, Some Like It Hot, 27 Dresses and Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted!]

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
-G. K. Chesterton

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
-Mary Oliver

“It seems cruel,” she said, “that after a while nothing matters… any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: ‘Use Unknown.’”
"Yes; but meanwhile-"
"Ah, meanwhile-"
-Edith Wharton, 'The Age of Innocence'

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
-William Faulkner