What The Butler Saw

I expect most brides had a similar pang of sympathy as did Glenda Cooper on hearing of the furious women who were left without their wedding dresses by bridal dress shop owner Lisa Clarkson this week.

Glenda is absolutely spot on when she writes: 'Those Georgette Heyer heroines who found themselves socially excluded after having the vulgarity to dance the waltz are not a million miles away from a modern-day bride who might innocently mention that she was thinking of hiring a chocolate fountain for the reception, decides on money rather than a wedding list, or fails to refer to her fiancé as an H2B. With endless pressure to display good taste, is there any surprise many brides go mad?'

With six weeks to go until my own wedding, I look back on my nine-month engagement as a minefield of manners and morals. The problem is that everyone has their own notion of what is polite, yet one is, for once in life, allowed to do whatever you (never mind the groom) want and believe 'it is your day'.

Because you are given carte blanche to build the day up into 'the best day of your life', a huge amount of work goes into preparing a wonderful experience for the guests, and you can become very autocratic and imperious, not to mention stressed. Perhaps the reality is that some guests simply don't realise what a big deal a wedding invitation, or even a wedding itself, is to a bride. Yet people have so many expectations of a bride. To be modest, to be low-key and tasteful, to be polite, and yet to look stunning and have a perfect day.

I feel great sympathy for those brides deprived of their dresses by the shop owner because for many brides the wedding dress is the sign and signal of the whole day - in effect, the dress becomes the wedding, boiled down to one object. The moment of walking down the aisle when all the guests turn to see the bride in THE DRESS and of course the groom also sees THE DRESS for the first time can become the focal point of the day for the bride (perhaps because she believes this is the moment all the guests will make their first and lasting impression of her as a bride), and this causes a lot of excited, selfish expectation.

It's this expectation that has made me spend a small fortune on Estee Lauder make-up and miracle face serums, go to the gym religiously for the last six months, and festishise my dress. Choosing my wedding dress was the most fun I have had in years and I dreamed of lace and satin and embroidery for two weeks solid when I was in the thick of the process. To get my 'dream' dress, I drove a five-hour round trip to a godforsaken town in east Anglia where the very last existing dress I wanted was on sale in the wrong size in a random wedding dress shop. The bizarre thing is that any bride looks beautiful in a wedding dress, and yet to her, it has to be adjusted to fit that one inch tighter, because she wants to look beautiful.

How odd it is that while grooms tend to leave the planning to their fiancees, we brides wake in the night panicking about having enough time to arrange x or y, or whether we have forgotten some tiny detail, or who will stand where in the ceremony and whether all the people around us will support us or whether someone will do something rude and let us down. Planning a wedding, I've discovered such enormous kindness on the part of friends and family, but I've also discovered that weddings don't matter to some people, and that includes members of the wedding industry, like this wedding shop owner, who so evilly left these poor brides without dresses at the last minute. It's typical: brides discover that as soon as they have paid for their £1500 dress, the shop's ingratiating attitude often changes and becomes contemptuous.

We brides need everyone around us to let us be bridezillas for a few weeks, to realise the stress and pressure we are under (as well as the fun we are having being bossy) and allow us to be demanding. In return, the world around us gets a boost in the economy from all the products and services we indulge in, and our guests get a wedding from the bride's heart.

I've decided it's time to restart my blog - so here goes.

I realised recently that the modern-style carriages on the tube must have been designed by men.

In the golden olden days, the seats on the tube all faced each other at right angles to the window like on a train, in groups of two people. Although tube trains on the Metropolitan, Victoria and District lines still have a few seats arranged this way, though, the typical seating plan on the tube is simply two long lines of seats along the length of the carriage.

Quite apart from anything else, I hate this way of sitting, because you have nowhere to look other than the row of people facing you, and they are all staring at you, too. It's like a panopticon, and the atmosphere that results is typical of the mass experience in modern life of having no privacy.

But my gripe today is that no woman would have invented this seating arrangment, either. Any woman who has sat on the tube in a skirt whose hem falls just above the knee (or higher) knows the irritation of having to keep her legs firmly together or strategically crossed to prevent the row of strangers facing her seeing the tops of her thighs.

If the seats were arranged in the traditional, old-fashioned way, you would be able to slant your legs so that the view up your skirt would be from an angle no-one could see. But in the modern tube carriage, your legs are seen from every angle to the right, left and centre.

On long journeys when you just want to sprawl with your legs hanging apart in an unladylike way, the need to keep them pressed together can genuinely be a massive pain.

Perhaps the problem is the average woman's body insecurity, which makes me, at least, want to cover as much of my thighs as possible in the harsh light of the underground. But even when as a teenager I had thighs as slim as cucumbers and wore miniskirts, I still had a self-conscious modesty which made me not want to flash my knickers to a carriage full of people.

Being on the tube must be so much more relaxing for men, whose trouser uniform, combined with an instinctive ability to take up space unashamedly, allows them to sit comfortably with their legs wide apart (not to mention their elbows halfway across the seats on either side of them, but that's a whole other annoyance).

So I say bring back the cosy old-style tube carriage seats, in which you can hide away from the world just a fraction. Either that, or let women sit with their legs open without getting a second glance - which, let's face it, is never going to happen.

In an update to the bra shopping, I visited a friend of a friend who's a celebrity psychic last week. She told me in her reading, 'The spirits are telling me you have to go to Rigby and Peller'. I said I had only just got myself measured. 'No,' she said, 'I know it sounds crazy, but the spirits are insisting you must go and get yourself measured again and at Rigby and Peller.' Will update again when have done so!

While ensconsed in the parental home this bank holiday weekend, soaking up the Londoner's monthly-odd dose of rural familial comfort, I was reminded how rude visitors can be.

I should preface this by saying that my parents were very sanguine about the experience and extremely forgiving and non-judgemental of the guest. It was me, sitting viewing the goings-on from my vantage point in the kitchen (what the butler saw, indeed), who got offended on their behalf!

My parents had a large lunch party and one guest they didn't know very well, who had been invited with his partner, decided it would be better to leave her behind and bring, in her place, their two children aged around five. I thought that was kind of impolite to start off with. He also insisted on my father picking them up and dropping them off at Oxford station rather than just getting a taxi or a bus. But the real issue was that he clearly wasn't bringing up his children to have any respect for other people. You can't bring two unruly small children to a grown-up party and just let them run wild. You either book a babysitter and leave them behind at home so you can mingle at the party, or you take them to the party and keep an eye on them at all times. This man basically just let his children run through the house into every room, where they caused carnage. He halfheartedly followed them intermittently but, and this is what really shocked me, just left the mess they had made, making no attempt to clear up or apologise.

Going upstairs, I found they had taken my mum's antique wooden sewing box from my parents' bedroom and the man had allowed his kids to scrawl on it with blue felt tip pen. They had also unravelled all the cotton in the box. The man saw this, but just stuffed the cotton reels back in it still trailing metres of thread and left the box open and graffitied on the floor. No apology or even acknowledgement. He had let them play in my parents' room and he saw that they had left it with the cover pulled off the sofa in there and the duvet partly off the bed, and he just left the room like that where I tidied it up and put the sewing box back and wound up the threads. But the felt tip pen has ruined the box.

He then gave the children my sister's old guitar to play with. What kind of parent gives a small child someone else's guitar as a toy? Of course, the next thing we knew, they had pulled out two of the strings. When the man saw it, he was overheard by my sister's boyfriend saying 'Oh it's just a guitar'. We couldn't believe he wasn't apologising profusely and offering to pay for the strings to be fixed.

This guy then had the cheek to get my dad to drive him back to the station without telling my parents about any of these goings-on.

I don't blame the children one bit - I was just shocked by this father. It wasn't just the way he didn't at any point say to the children 'This is someone else's house, please be careful of things'. You could see from the way his children were unable to communicate with adults politely that he has brought them up not to have any manners. I kept comparing them in my head to the way my friend J has brought up her beautifully polite 3-year-old son. He is able to respond politely to adults and plays quietly and nicely, and it's because she watches him every second and is very firm with him, in a hugely loving way.

As a child, I was all too strongly aware there were nice, well brought up children, and nasty, badly brought up ones. The whole experience on Sunday reminded me of how I used to hate it when I was little and my parents' friends brought badly brought up children to play with me while they had lunch or dinner. The little devils would stamp on all my things and scribble all over my books with pens while their parents glibly refused to tell them to stop.

I've just been interviewed by a PhD student researching women's experiences of working in the media. She told me that many of the young women she has interviewed, especially those working on women's magazines, don't believe in feminism. Apparently women working in newspapers and women with children are more likely to call themselves feminists.

It makes me really sad to know I'm in the minority as a 20-something journalist and feminist. A lot of women my age seem to believe feminism is dead, or some kind of Spice Girls 'girl power' thing connected to going pole dancing, which is just depressing.

I wondered into Selfridge's lingerie department today along with lots of middle-aged women buying sensible beige bras, a Muslim woman in a burkha shopping with her husband, and a wealthy-looking foreign 'gentleman' purring into a mobile while handing piles of Agent Provocateur demi-cup bras and basques to a sales assistant.

Anyway, I had decided the time had finally come to get my bra size measured. I'd heard for years that 90% of women wear the wrong size bra, but have always assumed this somehow didn't apply to me. And I was completely shocked by what the fitter told me when she put away her tape measure. She declared me to be 2 cup sizes bigger than I have believed for my entire adult life, and 2 rib-measurement sizes (the 32/34/36/38 bit) smaller than I have always believed. I have therefore been wearing totally ill-fitting underwear for all these years.

Amazed, I tried on a load of bras in my 'new' size and they fitted perfectly! I realised that for years I have been living unnecessarily with bulges and gaps in all the wrong places and with far too little 'support'. It was a complete revelation. All I can say to any woman reading this who has not been measured is try it and you might have an excuse to buy yourself a whole new lingerie wardrobe!

It has recently come to my attention that it is virtually no longer possible to go into WHSmith or Woolworths or Rymans or even Paperchase anymore and buy a nice notebook which does not have perforated pages.

It may seem a small and trivial gripe, but anyone who's ever wanted a notebook to be a notebook, as opposed to a notebook crossed with a pad of A4 rip-put paper, must sympathise with the level of my affront.

Message to stationery buyers: we do not want too-clever-by-half notebooks with pages which tear off by themselves when you turn them. We just want normal notebooks!

I spent about two hours last weekend searching for a nice unperforated notebook in all the shops on Finchley Road and South End Green, with increasing disbelief at the impossibility of the task. Of course, I eventually found what I was looking for: a beautiful selection of A4 hard and softcovered books with ruled pages and NO PERFORATED HOLES. Which shop was this beacon of wonder? The art shop, of course. The sweet little art shop on Finchley Road, with its shelves stacked with classic, well bound, European-made stationery. It is quite simply the last outpost of traditional stationery in Hampstead.