Monday 16 January 2012

Magazine in a muddle

Well, that seemed to go well. Celia Back was very nice though of course, like policemen, she was much younger than I expected. (Which only really means that I'm much older than I expected. Golly, I *love* being middle-aged and confident and clever - I must tell you later about explaining the physics of frost and snow to Sasha this morning on the way to school.) It really helped being an ex-journalist and an amateur magazine editor now: when she said things like "So, did Sasha ever go round with a [can't tell you what the anti-stereotype toy is or I'll give away whether Sash is a boy or a girl which though known elsewhere is still a secret on this blog]?" I was able to say "No, I'm afraid not - ooh! But we did once have a great game with something else..." and know why she'd asked, because she needed some strong things to build the story around, and what might do instead. I hope. She seemed very interested in the principles behind it all, and that was very encouraging.

So now I'm off to the supermarket to buy a magazine to see what that column is about and check what Woman is actually like these days. (That really is them, btw - very strange URL but I suppose the obvious one was always going to have been taken.) Now and again I pull a Good Housekeeping or YOU or Elle magazine out of a skip (or someone else's recycling - is that a social faux pas? It's much more meaningful recycling than having them pulped and made into new magazines) and have a look to see what nonsense is being peddled to my sisters. Things have got a lot worse, though possibly still not as bad as the copy of US Cosmo that Mike brought back from a visit to the States for me in the early 1990s. The message of that was "You're a strong smart glamorous working woman who needs to buy buy buy a lot of make-up and perfume and things to stop you smelling nasty because you feel so utterly shit about yourself". Let's see whether Woman has got it a bit better than that.

1 comment:

Kim said...

Are you going to keep it secret even though it is now all over the internet?

Interesting experiment on Sasha...I wonder how it will turn out.

Happy Mothering, it was all so much harder than I thought it would be :0)