Beauteous bag by Pat Mcgrath
Marzipan fruit; Fortnum & Mason
Floral perfection: Roses that last a year
I’ve been thinking about how ephemeral our reality is. Ambling down Bond Street to Piccadilly last week, I found myself surrounded by any number of gorgeous, beautifully crafted goods, cars, people, until I hit that point of being overwhelmed by just how much ‘stuff’ there is. I experienced the same phenomenon whilst walking around the gold souk in Dubai. I went in with the full intention of buying an investment-piece of jewellery; I’ve given up spending oodles of cash on Chanel and Armani etc which never keeps its value, no matter what the fashion magazines say. Anyway, after the fifth shop full of hundreds of thousands pounds worth of serious jewels, I totally hit a wall. It was when I was invited to try on a ruby, pearl and diamond suite that cost 50K that I realised how little interest I had in it all. I spent the rest of the time chatting to one of the sales assistants, helping him to finesse his chat-up lines. He was so ridiculously goodlooking that to be frank, he could have read out the Encyclopedia Britannica and they’d have been falling like ninepins, and he knew it too. Still, it kept us both amused. The point being that this was no puritanical sneer at the love of jewellery; I love the colours and craftsmanship as much as the next person. There was just so much of it, it was too much.
It made me look again at just how blessed I am, and how much sheer material acquisition I accept as my everyday due. Quite frankly, most of us are spoilt rotten. I suspect that contentment is the most valuable gift anyone could have; I don’t see much of it, least of all in myself. So, I saw all this gorgeous stuff, and some of it made me smile, and I admired some of it very much, but it’s nice to be able to walk away without a pang. What did I really like? The beautiful packaging of Fortnum & Mason’s products rather than the goods themeslves (whoever combines their colour palettes is a genius), the red and gold combo of that bag, the perfection of the marzipan fruit, the delicacy and fragility of the roses. I hope I like people more than I like things, I hope I admire art more than its monetary value, I hope I can tell when it is ‘enough’. I’ve been thinking about how much I miss my dear Mama lately; she was probably the least materialistic person I’ve ever met. And you know what I recalled? Not what she bought me or gave me but the look on her face when she would come to pick me up at the airport when I came home from school. Home is not a place, it’s people. BTW, has anyone ever enjoyed playing the guitar as much Alex Weir does below? I hope you all find your place.
