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.