CUTE FROCKS MAY BE MORE ON YOUR RADAR THAN CUTE KIDS. DOES YOUR GP DEMAND YOU MAKE A CHOICE?

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What would you say if your GP told you it was time to get pregnant? ELLE s̓ Kerry Potter

uncovers growing pressure from the medics for twentysomethings to have babies…

t was a routine visit to her GP. Julie, 27, had started getting heavy, irregular periods and was hoping for a prescription painkiller that would reach

the parts Feminax couldn’t. But her doctor’s response wasn’t what she had anticipated. He asked her if she’d started thinking of getting pregnant! ‘He said my period problems were nature’s way of telling my body to prepare for a baby,’ she says. ‘I was indignant – I had an ultra-busy job in publishing and was fresh out of a painful long-term relationship and just dipping my toes into the dating pool. Having a baby wasn’t something I’d thought about. It freaked me out – but at the same time, that conversation affected my attitude towards future relationships. I didn’t want children right then, but I knew that I did want them soon and so I decided not to waste any more time on dead-end flings.’

A straw poll of my friends found that Julie isn’t the only twentysomething woman to get the baby chat from her GP. Annie, 28, was recently discussing changing her contraceptive with her doctor when he asked The Question. ‘I saw him checking my date of birth, then he asked if I wanted children. I said at some point and he said, “Well, you’re at the right age now.” He said that we all want the right man, the right house and the right job sorted first, but that too many women mistakenly think they

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can simply delay childbirth, only to face heartbreak when they can’t conceive.’

Since when did doctors start asking such personal questions and offer life-changing advice? Apparently, since they started seeing more and more heartbroken late-thirtysomethings who wished they’d thought about it earlier. Leeds GP Dr Zoe Goodman says, ‘If women aged 27 upwards come in with contraception issues, I always ask if they are thinking about planning a family. It’s

simply to make women aware that it’s something they need to think about now rather than in 10 years’ time.’

And this isn’t some middle-aged male GP with a thinly-veiled moral agenda: Dr Goodman is 31, childless and typical of our generation of high-achieving women whose careers come first. ‘Raising the issue may seem retrograde in feminist terms, but we are talking about a biological reality here,’ says Dr Goodman. ‘It is a fact that after 33, the quality of your eggs, and hence your fertility, starts to decline. Women must realise that medical science may have advanced but it won’t necessarily grant you a baby when you want one. IVF, for example, doesn’t always work. Today, intelligent, well-educated women in their twenties often just don’t think about babies unless you specifically mention it.’

Fertility expert Dr Gillian Lockwood agrees. ‘I see a lot of thirtysomething women who are successful in every other area of their lives – they’re attractive, have great careers, material things, relationships – but they’ve just “forgotten” to have babies,’ she says. ‘But when they remember, Mother Nature won’t play ball. I don’t want to scare twentysomethings into grabbing the next passing man to breed with but, if being a mum is important to you, don’t leave it too long to make the decision to do it.’

It’s not just medical experts who are forcing us to sit up and take notice. Anyone who ever reads a magazine or newspaper can’t fail to have noticed the recent bombardment: be it endless, earnest essays in Sunday broadsheets about the pros and cons of having children, spiteful rants about teenage mothers in

certain tabloids, or the exhaustive coverage celebrating the glamour and coolness of late celebrity motherhood. Earlier this year, an episode of Panorama called ‘Right Time to Have a Baby?’ explored the dangers of leaving it too late, fuelling a hundred screaming headlines with dark predictions of a ‘fertility time bomb’ and dwindling population if more of us selfish madams didn’t ditch the Marvelon and start making babies.

So where do all these mixed messages leave the average woman in the street? Kim, a 34-year-old physiotherapist, is hoping for a baby with her long-term boyfriend soon. ‘I’m feeling the social pressure. Lots of my friends either have children or are

desperately trying to. But I see people like Cherie Blair or Madonna having a baby late and I find that quite reassuring.’ Three years ago, despairing at his footloose and fancy-free daughter, Kim’s father decided to raise the baby issue in a rather unique way. ‘He sat me down to discuss what he termed “Project Grandchild”. He said it in a jokey way, but he was serious. He had a sheet of paper and made me tell him at what age I saw myself having a child, and then work backwards along a timeline to the present day to work out what I needed to do to achieve children within that time frame. He calculated that I had precisely six months to meet the person I would have children with!’ Kim humoured her dad, but ultimately she believes he had a point, however maverick his methods. ‘I’ve unwittingly followed “Project Grandchild” and things are working out that way. I’m now with a long-term partner and we’ve talked about kids. It’s not been a case of having been too career-oriented to think about it, it’s more that time flies so quickly. You really have to make a specific effort to sit down and go, OK, when are we going to do this? Otherwise before you know it, you really will be panicking about that biological clock.’

Recent figures from the Office of National Statistics show more women of Kim’s age and older are giving birth than ever before. (Of course, more than ever before are also finding themselves unable to have children, too). Interestingly, the same statistics show that the number of younger women, aged 25 to 29, having babies also increased, for the first time in 14 years. So what is behind this bucking of the trend? It’s been drummed into

most of us since puberty that we shouldnít have children young and that we should focus on our career so we don’t need a man to support us. In fact, most of us spend our late teens and early twenties actively trying not to get pregnant. Is that attitude now changing?

Nicky, a dietician from Oxford, married at 24 and had her first child at 25, at a time when all her friends were still falling out of nightclubs and sleeping with cads. At 28, she had her second child. Now 30, she’s back at work three days a week. ‘I enjoy my job now more than I ever did before I had my children because I’ve got that balance. I appreciate being at work, using my brain, spending time with adults, and I appreciate days spent messing around with the children, too.’ She says. ‘I’ve done the baby thing now and I still have time to develop my career. I’m very lucky. We all just expect to have everything, exactly when we want it, but babies might take two, five, 10 years to come. It’s the one thing in life you can’t plan.’

Antonia, 28, agrees. ‘I got pregnant at 25 and worried that I hadn’t been with my boyfriend long enough, that my career wasn’t established, that I wasn’t financially secure… But a friend’s advice struck a chord. She said, “You can plan your career, your mortgage, you relationship, the rest of your life, but you can’t plan a baby.” At 35 you can take control of your job – get a new one, give it up, whatever – but you can’t control whether you have a baby. Now I feel lucky to have both.’

Dr Goodman has noticed this shift in attitude towards twentysomething motherhood, too. ‘The generation of women who are now in their early 40s were so into their jobs – it was career suicide to admit you wanted a child more than a promotion. Many of those women are now frantically looking towards medical science for ways to have children because their fertility is so reduced. But I’m seeing a younger generation of women seem slightly less focused on work and material things. They’ve got good careers but they are simply more interested in considering motherhood before they hit 30, and more willing to make the financial and career sacrifices having a family may involve.’

Clearly it’s not up to the newspapers, our GPs, friends or our dads to tell us when to have babies. Perhaps it is time for society as a whole to make it easier for young women to make the right personal choices, both biologically and emotionally. In the end, only you can decide.

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RUDE, BLUNT, abrupt, outspoken,

strident, vocal, direct, frank,

explicit, candid...Why are we being increasingly MEAN

to each other? Kerry Potter investigates

Recently I was invited on to a live radio show to review new music releases. It was all ticking along nicely until I noticed the computer screen in front of me was a live feed of the listeners’ online forum. They were having their say about the show, the music and… me. And, wow, some of them did not like what I was saying. ‘Who is this idiot?’, ‘Why has she been allowed on the radio?’ and ‘She clearly knows nothing about music.’ On and on they went, my unadoring public. Before you feel too sorry for me, bear in mind that I am a journalist and have detailed my fair share of opinions about people in print before. Yet this was the first time I’d been at the sharp end of the instant, unedited, unstinting feedback that the internet allows – and it was a deeply unpleasant experience.

I believe a culture of rudeness, cruelty and outspokenness has pervaded our lives in recent times. Indeed David Denby, a contributor to The New Yorker, has written a book decrying it, called Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal and It’s Destroying Our Conversation (Picador). So why can’t we play nice any more? The fact that much of our social interaction takes place online is one reason. We can pass judgement instantly and anonymously, and an off-the-cuff remark can go global in minutes. A trawl of the ‘have your say’ reader comments on online newspaper articles

reveals an outpouring of viciousness and opprobrium, often extraordinarily misplaced and just plain bonkers. I recently read a story about a woman giving birth on a London bus, about which someone had commented, ‘I hope they fine the stupid mother for being negligent.’ What?

Then there’s the terrifying world of online parenting forums. As a new mother on maternity leave, I clicked on Mumsnet on occasion. The ‘my way or the highway’ attitude and rudeness of some of its members was breathtaking. It takes a lot to make me feel sorry for a politician, but I don’t think even Gordon Brown or David Cameron deserved the haranguing they both received from Mumsnet’s scarier members when they did web chats on the site. Where are your manners, ladies? Meanwhile, American businesswoman Penelope Trunk notoriously

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ELLEcultureannounced on Twitter that she was having a miscarriage during a board meeting. A little too much information for my liking, but I was taken aback by the vehement response from her followers: did she really deserve to be told, ‘You are a poor excuse for a human being’? You could argue that Trunk invited this kind of feedback – we have a tendency to over-share the minutiae of our lives when we’re online, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when others respond to that – yet there’s something cowardly about these modern-day versions of the poison-pen letter. If you won’t put your (real) name or your face to an opinion, perhaps it’s best left unsaid.

Switch on the television and you won’t need to search hard to find another pointer to why we’ve all become so openly mean. Reality TV is the standard-bearer of cruelty and humiliation – the modern version of putting people in stocks and throwing stinky apples at them. Who wants to see Simon Cowell telling an act on The X Factor that they’re brilliant? Boring! And remember on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! how Katie Price was consistently voted for by viewers who wanted to see her eat bugs and be trapped in confined spaces. When she refused to play any more and walked, a tabloid front page screamed in response: ‘Is this the most hated woman in Britain?’

Cultural commentator Miranda Sawyer believes people take behavioural cues from what they see on TV. ‘Take Big Brother. They’re all very confrontational, and, as a result, viewers think that’s how we’re supposed to interact. We start to believe that if we’re not constantly telling people what we think, we’re repressed.’

This seems to be a specifically female problem. Sifting through Facebook’s ‘hate pages’ (fan sites are so last century), I notice that they tend to be created by women about women. Socially acceptable bullying? If we behaved like that towards colleagues or in the playground, disciplinary action would follow. The only A-list famous male I could find on Facebook who attracts the same unwelcome attention is David Beckham – and the page about him is run by a man who merely thinks he’s an overrated footballer. It’s several notches of viciousness below the others. Sawyer believes that men simply can’t be bothered to be that nasty to each other: ‘They just pootle around in their own little worlds. Women notice things more, they pay better attention to detail, and they love unpicking what people say.’ This is particularly the case when it comes to our favourite topic of debate: what we look like and what other people look like. Exhibit A: the treatment meted out to Gemma Ward, the model who recently dared to gain a few pounds. Cue a cascade of online vitriol, including videos on YouTube comparing her ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots.

But it’s not all about our love-hate relationship with celebrities and reality TV. Our penchant for nastiness can also stem from female ambition gone bad. We’re supposed to have achieved equality with

men and be treated as equals in the workplace, at home, in society. But, of course, that’s not actually the case. Women have to work much harder and be much more ruthless to make it to the top. And how do you communicate the fact that you’re a woman to be reckoned with? You’re direct, you say what you think, you’re outspoken. Note how the perception of outspokenness has changed in recent years. It used to be pejorative, now it’s a badge of honour. No one wants to be the timid little woman, the one who doesn’t speak her mind. We think if we adopt Alan Sugar’s straight-talking (translation: abrasive and unpleasant) style, we’ll make it to the top too. I also detect a backlash against the 1990s Bridget Jones school of thinking. Women have moved to distance themselves from the stereotype of the neurotic, uncertain, hapless woman. This rejection

is undeniably a very good thing, but does the alternative have to be Cruella de Vil meets Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada?

The world would clearly be a nicer place if we were all a bit less rude to each other, but there are also sound medical reasons to lose the bad attitude. David Hamilton is a former scientist turned author. His latest is Why Kindness Is Good for You (Hay House). ‘I wrote it because I wanted to demonstrate that when you show kindness and compassion, it massively impacts on your physical health. Humanity is genetically wired to be kind. If a person wanted to develop coronary artery disease, the fastest way – faster than even a poor diet and lifestyle – is to become aggressive. That way of behaving produces large amounts of free radicals in the bloodstream, which can cause disease.’ If this wasn’t bad enough, free radicals accelerate the ageing process – so not only can being mean make you ill, it can also give you wrinkles.

Fear not, though: Hamilton isn’t asking us all to become Mother Teresa. The occasional bit of bitching is good for us. ‘Offloading now and then is fine – in fact, you get a kick out of it and feel good because your brain releases endorphins, and that’s OK. But when rude behaviour becomes a daily habit, that’s when the collateral damage happens to your body and the free radicals build up.’

I’m all for a bit of gossip, debate and difference of opinion – the lifeblood of female conversation –

but please let’s ratchet down the breathtaking rudeness. It may sound old-fashioned, but how about a return to kindness, courtesy and discretion? We’d be happier and healthier for it. My mother drilled into me that if I haven’t got anything nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything at all. This is a bit rich coming from the world’s bluntest woman (if you think changing-room mirrors are harsh, try going clothes shopping with her), but she has a point. Call me an old hippie, but I don’t want my baby daughter to have to grow up nervously picking her way through a world in which women communicate with each other by being uniformly vile. After all, aren’t we all a little too old to be starring in a never-ending version of Mean Girls?

SO CRUEL… Natalie Evans-Harding, features assistant

Laura Davies, sub-editor

Amy Bannerman, assistant to the fashion director

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What s̓ the latest must-have to go with your new It bag? A new-found statement skill, reports Kerry Potter

male colleague once informed me that every woman’s CV boasted exactly the same hobbies under the ‘Interests’

heading. ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘How sexist.’ We were recruiting at the time, so he handed me a pile of resumés to see for myself. Infuriatingly, he was right: reading, swimming, yoga. On every single one. Like a compulsory triumvirate of clichéd female leisure activities. I checked my own CV that night when I got home:

oh dear – yoga and reading (I’ve never been a strong swimmer, thank God). ‘How depressing,’ I thought. ‘Is womankind really that predictable?’

Fast-forward a few years and things are very different. The word ‘hobby’ has been reclaimed from the outer fringes of the CV and given a shiny new veneer – evening classes across the UK are reporting record female attendances and no one in the ELLE office is showing off about their new handbag any more (too crass!). Instead, boasting about one’s art-history

night class is where it’s at. Everywhere you turn, there’s a woman proudly brandishing a newly acquired skill – a statement skill, if you like.

Tam, 25, is an accountant with an unlikely sideline in poetry appreciation. ‘I love my Thursday night class. It’s so nice to switch off from work and move beyond my usual circle of friends for one night of the week. I have to leave the office slightly early to make my class, and my colleagues know it’s non-negotiable – I will work late any other night except

FROM QUAD BIKING TO ART-HISTORY NIGHT CLASS, HOBBIES ARE BACK!

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Thursdays. I come out at the end of the session really buzzing. It’s liberating, a brilliant escape from mundane routine, and great to use my brain for something other than figures and spreadsheets. I’ve met some really interesting people, too, from all walks of life and all ages. It’s definitely good for the soul.’

All very admirable but, as Sara, a 29-year-old publicist, admits, the decision to learn a new skill doesn’t always come from the purest of motives. ‘I do a Spanish class on Saturday afternoons,’ she says, ‘and if I’m honest, it makes me feel smug that I’m doing something worthwhile. There is definitely an element of showing off involved – I love it on Monday mornings when my colleagues ask what I did at the weekend, and I can fill them in on my tireless search for knowledge and culture. It’s cool to be seen as bettering yourself intellectually. Nobody wants to be seen as shallow. It’s a badge of honour for me.’

It’s certainly contagious: at the last count, the ELLE staff were collectively attending seven art classes, five language courses, three jewellery-making sessions and a circus-skills workshop (don’t ask). As one ELLE staffer, who wishes to remain anonymous, puts it, ‘When I started doing my evening class, everyone suddenly pricked up their ears. I couldn’t believe how interested they all were in my new hobby. The course brochure got passed around the office, and within two weeks they’d all copied me and signed up for classes of their own. Everyone has gone mad for extra-curricular activities!’

Adult-education college City Lit, based in central London, has noticed our growing appetite for new skills. ‘Evening classes have had a huge renaissance, and 60 per cent of our students are women, most typically twentysomething and thirtysomething professionals. Many are looking for a creative outlet at the end of a stressful working day,’ says marketing boss Liora Ives. ‘Certain classes have become incredibly popular. For instance, complementary medicine – from massage and healing to reiki and homeopathy. Creative writing is big, too – we think this is the JK Rowling effect. Plus Spanish and French, as large numbers of people are thinking of moving to those countries.

And finally, interior design and cookery, because of TV shows involving interior designers and celebrity chefs.’

In fact, it is hard to switch on the TV and find a show that’s not about celebrities themselves acquiring a new skill for our entertainment. They’re all at it – singing, dancing, ice-skating, cooking, horse-riding, hairstyling. It’s no coincidence that reality shows involving people learning something useful attract a higher calibre of celebrity than the ones in which people sit around doing nothing. You get Zoë Ball, for example, being put through her paces on Strictly Come Dancing, whereas Celebrity Love Island makes do with Paul Danan sunbathing. Who knows, things could have been very different if Jade Goody had gone on a show that involved weeks of thimble-based training, in an attempt to become the UK’s tapestry-sewing champion.

Even if they don’t do it on TV, a hobby is the new small-dog-in-a-bag as far as celebrity must-have accessories go. And we like them for having a bona fide passion. We knew, for example, that Madonna really loves horse-riding when she fell from her mount and broke her arm. Cameron Diaz is into surfing – and good for her. We would be, too, if we looked that good in a bikini. Meanwhile, how cool is it that Angelina Jolie can fly a plane? And that she got boyfriend Brad into it, too? Recently, Kate Winslet felt obliged to apologise about her lack of hobbies, saying of her recent year off, ‘I wish I could tell you I’d been doing a cookery course or learning French. I’m not that organised – I can’t even get it together to go to the gym.’ A word of caution for Z-list celebrities: going to one pole-dancing or fencing class in 2003 because your publicist told you to does not a hobby make. So don’t bang on about it in interviews – it looks try-hard.

Trendspotter Marian Salzman, from top

New York advertising agency JWT, agrees. ‘Your new interest has to come from the heart – you shouldn’t have an ulterior motive. My friend took up golf purely to meet guys, but only ended up playing twice.’ Salzman has been watching the current skill-acquiring frenzy with interest. ‘Expertise has become the new status symbol. And a by-product of that is expertise envy. Last Friday, I had dinner with a friend who was telling me about how she’d got so into opera and was starting an Italian language course to enable her to go on an opera tour in Italy. I sat there thinking, ‘Oh my God, I am a

loser. I just sit at home and watch TV.’

So where is this impulse for new knowledge and skills coming from? ‘We have overloaded on material things – how many more pairs of shoes can we buy? What does buying a new pair add to our lives? It doesn’t make us any more interesting,’ says Salzman. ‘But our threshold for new experiences is high. We’re now embarrassed if we don’t have hobbies. And while I don’t want to become a stamp collector, I do wish I had a hobby.’

She’s right: the old-school concept of status symbols, the designer dress, the fancy car – the top-of-the-range mobile phone – seem a bit 1980s, a bit yuppie. Status skills, on the other hand, are worthy, make you seem more interesting – and it’s perfectly acceptable to show off about them.

As for me, my name’s Kerry Potter and I’m a hobby-phobic. I know it’s shameful, but I am trying hard to find one. I’m toying with knitting (stitchnbitch.co.uk is an established ‘knit and natter’ community), thinking about off-road quad-biking and pondering learning Cornish (purely on the grounds that it’s totally contrary). In the meantime, my CV will continue to bear the legend, ‘Interests: yoga, reading’. Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia are the authors of Next, Now: Trends for the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99)

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THE NEW COCAINE: WHO’S TAKING IT NOW?

Professional career women are shunning cocaine-fuelled nights out to stay in for some psychedelic fun – with mushrooms, reports Kerry Potter

Camden Market in north London, Saturday afternoon. The narrow pathways between the stalls are teeming with tourists and locals alike. Among them is Jasmine*, a stylishly dressed 29-year-old project manager who lives with her boyfriend in west London. She’s rummaging expertly through a mountain of second-hand clothes, discarding acres of tat before she strikes gold – a vintage sequined cape that’ll work perfectly with jeans for the house party she’s going to tonight. Triumphant, she pays the stallholder. She has a manicure booked for 4pm but just has time to visit another of her favourite stalls – the one selling magic mushrooms.

It’s less chaotic than the clothes stall: all laminated product information cards, neat plastic containers displaying the wares and smiling, well-turned-out sales staff. Jasmine has a quick chat with the seller, he makes a recommendation and she pays £20 for a small bag of Mexican Gold Tops. Purchase complete, Jasmine texts tonight’s hostess to tell her that she’s got something special to help get the party started, before heading off to have her nails painted.

Jasmine isn’t the only one who turns up to parties with a bag of funghi rather than a bottle of Chardonnay. According to the most recent British Crime Survey, the use of hallucinogenic magic mushrooms in Britain leapt by 17 per cent in 2003. An estimated 25,000 people take them every week, says Psyche

Deli, the UK’s biggest mushroom wholesaler and retailer, which owns three mushroom stalls in London, supplies 80 of the UK’s 400 mushroom shops and has an online store that promises next-day delivery. ‘Mushrooms aren’t just for hippies any more,’ says business manager

Sarah. ‘Our customer base includes doctors, teachers, lawyers and trendy twentysomethings, who see it as a good alternative to getting drunk.’

Psyche Deli is a multi-million-pound company which, thanks to a loophole in the drugs laws, operates legally. However, by the time you read this, the ban currently proposed by Parliament may make the importation, possession or sale of magic mushrooms a criminal offence, punishable by a life sentence.

Mushrooms are effectively being reclassified as Class A drugs. Whereas prior to the bill going through Parliament, there was a grey area: psilocybin and psilocin – the active, hallucinogenic ingredients found in mushrooms when they are prepared – were categorised as Class A substances, whereas fresh mushrooms were not. Most of the mushroom users I spoke to weren’t, at the time of writing, huge ly bothered by the impending changes in the law.

‘It has made things easier that you can buy them so easily and openly now, but having grown up in the Cumbrian countryside, I

know exactly where to find them growing wild and which ones to pick anyway,’ says Lauren*, a 25-year-old school teacher. ‘You can just pick them, keep them in the fridge and have a nibble when friends come over.’ Taking mushrooms is, apparently, a deeply bonding

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experience. ‘I do them when I’m staying in with the girls,’ says Lauren. ‘We brew them up into a tea, just eat them raw or sometimes whack them on a pizza. I love the all-in-it-together feel and the fact that you have such a laugh.’

‘Always with trusted mates,’ agrees Rosie*, 24, a student from Glasgow. ‘The ideal scenario would be outdoors on a sunny day rolling about in a field being silly. The most significant thing about it for me is the overwhelming desire to giggle.’

Tina* is a 30-year-old company director from London who took mushrooms as a student, and started again recently. Says Tina, ‘The older I get and the busier my career becomes, I find myself increasingly tired of going out and getting so drunk or smashed on cocaine or Es that I can’t function for days. The hangover or comedown gets worse and worse. But I still want to have fun, and mushrooms seem a gentler option.’ She sees taking them as less stressful than being jostled in a crowded bar. ‘It’s about creature comforts. I’ve been known to sit there on mushrooms with a hot-water bottle and a peppermint tea.’

Susan*, a 27 year old from Manchester with a hectic PR job, likes the fact that weekend mushrooming is becoming so popular among women. ‘It used to be a laddish thing, something younger guys did to show off,’ she says, ‘but I think women are realising that it’s actually quite a female-friendly drug. It’s a mellow high and I never feel completely out of control – it’s a far gentler trip than taking acid, more like being really stoned and giggly. I always wake up clear-headed, not even tired. In fact, I sleep like a baby after taking mushrooms. I’ve never experienced any comedown.’

The rise of mushrooms also appears to coincide with a disillusionment with the alternatives. ‘Everyone knows that Es aren’t as good as they used to be,’ says Tina. ‘And cocaine is, well, chavy – a bit Footballersí Wives. Everyone does it these days – it’s boring. I know it sounds sad, but part of the appeal is that mushrooms are “in” again.’

Drugs aside, psychedelia is hip right now. Many of this year’s s/s collections (think Pucci, Jonathan Saunders and Eley Kishimoto) were an explosion of riotous

Roundabout hit the big screen this year, and most of us will have guffawed at Renée getting nutted on ’shrooms on a Thai beach in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

All very entertaining, but taking mushrooms, like any other drug, can be very dangerous. ‘We’d question whether mushrooms are as harmful as other Class A drugs, such as crack or heroin, but people shouldn’t underestimate them,’ says Petra Maxwell, of DrugScope, the drug information and policy charity. ‘One of the biggest dangers comes from people picking their own – the wrong ones can make you sick. And, given their hallucinogenic qualities and the effect on the mind, mushrooms are a no-no for anyone who has had mental health problems or who has a family history of them.’

Users are unlikely to become addicted and no one has ever died as a direct result of taking mushrooms (a lethal dose would mean eating your body weight’s worth). However, possible ill-effects include anxiety, panicking, sickness and stomach pains. Petra advises against mixing alcohol with mushrooms, as it can heighten any feelings of confusion. She adds, ‘If you are with someone on a bad trip, put your arms around them, and reassure and calm them.’

On a lighter note, mushrooms taste revolting. ‘Like mud,’ says Tina. ‘I gag when I’m trying to eat them,’ says Susan. Rosie advises against taking them with food to help them slip down easily. ‘If you do, you’ll never want the food in question again!’

So with the future of magic mushrooms

as a legal high hanging in the balance, it’s possible that very soon the only funghi that’ll legitimately make an appearance at the weekend is in your Sunday-morning fry-up. Still, there’s always The Magic Roundabout DVD… For more about the dangers of magic mushrooms, visit www.drugscope.org.uk

prints and daringly lurid yellows, pinks and greens. In music, hardcore trance has had a renaissance, whi le the NME dubbed Glastonbury Festival 2004 ‘The third summer of love’ – which will come as no surprise to those who witnessed mushroom sellers working their way through the crowds holding a tray of goods in one hand and a credit-card machine in the other. Even the notoriously conservative film world has been dipping a toe in psychedelic waters: The Magic

One 27 year old gives the lowdown on mushroom-taking with the girls

MUSHROOM PARTYING

ʻMushrooms are best taken staying in, with a select group of friends – no more than 10. We usually start with food (a fondue on one occasion) and wine, fol-lowed by some mushroom brew, as well as bowls filled with mushrooms for people just to swallow with water (or wine). The food has to go before the mushrooms because youʼre not hungry after taking them, and the hallucinogenic properties of the mushrooms can make the food look as if it has come alive in your hands!

ʻTaking mushrooms can be a real bond-ing experience, so once they start to kick in (after about 20 minutes), you have a party – albeit a strange one – on your hands. One time, everybody was dancing and inspecting each otherʼs faces closely and giggling uncontrollably (have you ever seen a girlʼs lips pulsating as if sheʼs having collagen implants every five sec-onds?). Another time, we tried on each otherʼs clothes; colours and patterns contort and become vivid and exagger-ated – one butterfly-print coat literally started to take flight!

ʻA chilled, buzzy warm feeling comes in waves. It wears off after about six hours (if you donʼt take tons), so the party winds down in the small hours of the morning. You drift off to sleep and will probably have slightly more vivid dreams than usual.ʼ

ʻNowadays, mushrooms seem a much gentler option than going out and getting so smashed that you canʼt function for daysʼ

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he epiphany came this week when I tried to arrange an evening out with my six closest girlfriends from university. Old friends, a few cocktails in a nice

bar in town… easy, right? Not exactly. It took 23 e-mails, extensive diary-checking, three days of protracted negotiations and nine proposed dates before we found an evening that we could all do. And that agreed evening? It’s in three months’ time.

You can bet your bottom dollar that at least two of us will drop out nearer the date, due to other commitments (and you can bet that same dollar that those two will be bitched about at length in their absence). Yet when we were at university, making plans would consist of mooching into each other’s rooms and saying, ‘Pub?’ Fast-forward a few years and I’m ashamed to admit my social life is a spontaneity-free zone. How has it come to this?

There are the obvious factors. The higher up the career ladder we climb, the more demanding the job, the longer the hours we work and the more organised we have to be. Like many of my friends, I often travel for work. I have to drop everything to fly to America to interview celebrities who take delight in summoning me to their lairs with 24 hours’ notice. So in addition to scrabbling round

Does your social diary stretch into 2008? Do close friends have to get in line to see you? It s̓ time to swap all that planning for a little more impulsiveness, says Kerry Potter

for a plane ticket and packing my bag, I have to call around everyone I’ve planned to see that week and grovellingly cancel.

What’s more, the older we get the more friends we have in far-flung places (strangely, though, I see my friends who are thousands of miles away in New York more than the ones who live in York), plus, of course, boyfriends increasingly enter

the equation and clog up our social lives.This obsession with forward-planning

our lives goes beyond simple logistics. Being too busy for your friends has become a badge of honour. Full diary = popular, high-achieving party animal. Empty diary = saddo. I conduct a little experiment when my best friend e-mails me suggesting we meet up. The

GO ON, DITCH THE FORWARD-PLANNING AND LET YOUR HAIR DOWN – BEING SPONTANEOUS IS GOOD FOR YOU!

options she gives me are: a) dinner in eight days’ time or b) a quick coffee at 3pm on Saturday (she’s a fellow sufferer of the spontaneity-free social-life syndrome). I e-mail straight back saying, ‘How about Friday or Saturday night instead?’ (This

equates to a double-whammy of sadness – availability on both weekend evenings, or ‘prime time’ as my friend calls it.) Plus – and this is even worse – I add, ‘Or are you free tonight?’ – ie, in about two hours’ time.

Such is her concern on receiving this reply that she calls immediately to check I’m OK. Have I split up with my boyfriend? Lost my job? Am I ill? Depressed? I reassure her that it was a joke and, of course, I’m not free until eight days’ time. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why we feel the need to have gruelling, immaculately planned social lives, but I think it’s something to do with making us feel young, wanted and in-the-loop, as well as the fear of being seen as lacking in friends. After all, we often use the phrase ‘She doesn’t get out much…’ as a jokey insult.

Men, as is so often the case, take a very different view. My boyfriend fancies himself as the ‘King of Spontaneity’, strutting Fonz-like through life, randomly bumping into friends and going for a beer with them; a surprise party here or there; maybe a cheeky weekend away in Ibiza on a Friday-afternoon whim.

His diary (bought under duress) is not his friend and he refuses to write anything useful in it (holidays, weddings, his niece’s birthday), although precise details of all Newcastle United fixtures are deemed worthy of record. He enjoys complaining that, ‘We always go out with your friends’ – this, of course, stems from the fact that I organise our social life and on the rare occasions he does call one of his pals suggesting a pint, they always already have plans (made for them by their girlfriends).

But to be fair to the boyfriend (for a change), he does have a point. There’s

no greater night out than the one that happens entirely by accident. I had one myself recently. I popped along to an art exhibition launch with a friend on a Thursday night. We were both tired and were thinking quick glass of wine, a chat,

then home by 10ish. But somehow, and without any prior warning, the event was packed with a dangerous array of our party-monster friends and a

ridiculous quantity of free champagne. Our spur-of-the-moment catch-up turned into a 4am club-hopping, disco-dancing odyssey; one of those nights that you gossip about for days afterwards.

I also find it useful to have a small stockpile of spontaneous friends (usually men, I might add) for those times when my planning mania needs urgently addressing. Jon is always free for drinking and general silliness, and only requires three minutes’ notice to mobilise himself for a rendezvous (he zips around town on a motorbike – public transport just isn’t spontaneous enough). And it’s a safe bet that if I get given a last-minute pair of tickets to a swish film premiere or exclusive gig, then that stockpile of spontaneous friends swiftly expands – just as my own spontaneity emerges from the wilderness. On the flipside, I’ll catch myself childishly rebelling over events that by their very nature require extensive pre-planning: another wedding next summer? Boo! A big family gathering at Easter? Boring! Then I’ll write it faithfully in my diary and start planning my outfit.

I think it’s time to bring a little more spontaneity back into our busy, overly structured lives. Time to stand up and say, ‘Yes, I am free tonight, actually!’ Unless you’re being asked out on a date –

the availability/saddo rule still applies here. Help in my quest will soon be at hand

from Streethive (www.streethive.com), an American mobile phone-based gizmo that allows users to look at a map on their handset and see where their friends are, using GPS – think Sat Nav for your phone. ‘You can see who’s nearby, what’s going on and how to get there,’ says Streethive’s Tasso Roumeliotis. ‘It gives rise to a new culture of spontaneity.’ Look out for it over here some time this year.

And I’d never usually condone looking to celebrities for any kind of guidance, when it comes to spontaneity, they seem to have it all worked out. If they want to arrive at their own birthday party at 2am, they will. If they want to charter a jet from New York to London right now for a manicure, they will. If they want to cancel a day’s promo to go shopping, they damn well will. And good for them – they understand that spontaneity is the essence of rock’n’roll, the spice of life (and it keeps the staff on their toes). Although a word of warning: staged spontaneity completely backfires. If you have a new girlfriend,

don’t ‘spontaneously’ jump up and down on the sofa on a chat show declaring your love…

So in the interests of ruffling up my perfectly planned existence, I’m going to cancel this evening’s engagements (sorry friends) and reacquaint myself with 1980s classic Ferris Buellerís Day Off on DVD instead. The patron saint of spontaneity, Matthew Broderick’s teenage tearaway Ferris bunks off boring old

school and spends several glorious, thrilling hours ‘borrowing’ a Ferrari and tearing around the city having adventures. It’s a movie of many brilliant one-liners, but one particular piece of Ferris wisdom strikes a chord, ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’

In other words, put down that diary, lady, and live a little.

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ABCGIRLS

FROM LADETTE TO WINE BUFFETTE Seven out of 10 women are now wine drinkers

(…anything but chardonnay)We all love wine, but not just any old house white. Kerry Potter charts the rise of the girl who knows a Merlot from a Pinot d Jennifer Aniston had a $5million Frank

Gehry-designed wine cellar in the house she shared with Brad Pitt and Avril Lavigne has a $1million one in her new LA pad. Teri Hatcher was a guest of honour at a recent California charity wine auction; Angelina Jolie is a fan of wine-tasting game, The Winerd Game, while Jessica Simpson and husband Nick Lachey went on a wine-tasting trip for their wedding anniversary. And Sienna Miller struck a chord recently with her response to the question: what are the three things you do to get ready for a party? ‘Have a glass of white wine, then another, then another…’

Popular culture is playing its part in

o you fancy a glass of wine? Chances are that unless you’re reading this at 9am or have a blinding hangover, you probably do. But we’re not just talking about a glass of ropey Chardonnay here. The days of sinking Bridget Jones quantities of bog-standard vino have given way to a more thoughtful approach. Today, every girl fancies herself as a connoisseur.

The ladette with a pint is, happily, long gone and no one over 15 would be seen dead with an alcopop. A few years back, you might have caught us disguising the taste of an unspeakable £2.99 white table wine with blackcurrant cordial and calling it a ‘cocktail’, but now we know our New Worlds from our Olds and can distinguish a fresh new rosé from a cheesy 70s dinner-party no-go. Yes, vino is where it’s at and we’re all proud to be ABC (anything-but- Chardonnay) girls.

What’s more, celebrities are in on the act.

making wine our new favourite thing. Big brands target the twentysomething sofa drinker – Jacob’s Creek sponsored Friends, while Blossom Hill does the same for Will & Grace. The Oscar-winning movie Sideways, featuring two knowledgeable-but-cool, wine-savvy girls, created a huge buzz, and the US has seen a leap in sales of Pinot Noir – a wine praised in the film.

Meanwhile, we Brits spend £6billion a year on wine, according to Datamonitor research, and women are drinking more of it than men – 55 per cent of wine bought is quaffed by us girls. Seven out of 10 of us are wine drinkers, and we’re eager for more knowledge. On hand to help is author Camilla Morton, whose new book How to Walk in High Heels (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99), is a girlie manual on ‘how to be socially adept’ and includes a chapter on

appreciating wine. ‘I’ve used language that women will understand; girl-friendly analogies,’ says Morton. ‘I’ll describe a red wine as being like red lipstick, a pencil skirt or Coco Chanel. Or liken a white to Gwyneth Paltrow or a satin bias-cut skirt. After all, who cares about tannins or what kind of soil the vine is grown in?’

We’re predicting wine-tasting will be the new cooking, and author Matt Skinner is doing for wine-appreciation what Jamie Oliver has done for food. Skinner has two books coming out this autumn: Thirsty Work: Love Wine, Drink Better (Mitchell Beazley, £17.99) is a beginner’s guide, while The Juice (Mitchell Beazley, £6.99) is a guide to the 100 best wines on the high street for under £10 – and it’s CD-sized, so you can slip it in your handbag.

Skinner, a 30-year-old Australian, is Jamie’s friend and wine operations manager at his London restaurant, Fifteen. ‘There has been an “anything-but-chardonnay” backlash. Now girls dining in the restaurant are more willing to step outside their wine comfort zone,’ he says. ‘They’re more willing to experiment than men and to take on board my advice.’

‘Riesling is cool right now. It used to be the Kenny G of grape varieties – skilled at what it does but you’d never buy it – but the Australian and New Zealand ones are fabulous. Bone-dry and limey – great with

spicy food.’ It’s safe to predict that Matt will be coming to a TV screen near you very soon.

The social aspects of wine play a huge part, too. ‘I prefer wine because beer isn’t very feminine,’ says 31-year-old legal publisher Emma. ‘No one wants to be labelled a “ladette” any more.’

Marketing executive Claire agrees: ‘I went out with a bunch of male friends recently and had a pint because they were. There I was, a 26-year-old sophisticated career woman, with nice clothes, hair and make-up – and the pint just felt wrong in my hand.’

Adds Kate, 26, a journalist, ‘Wine is elegant, something that is to be shared among friends. Buying a bottle of vodka in a bar would seem quite alcoholic, while, to me, having a bottle of wine is a much more natural thing to do.’

Crucially, it’s now acceptable to drink wine alone, at home; the perfect accompaniment to a night watching TV or having a relaxing bath. ‘We’ve found that women prefer screw-cap bottles,’ says Sara Brook from Asda. ‘Men love the ritual of pulling the cork. Women don’t care – they like screw caps because they can have one glass and put the bottle back in the fridge.’

The difference in attitudes has also been noted by wine writer Matthew Jukes, who runs expertwine.com and wine-tasting classes. ‘Men always say silly things when trying to look knowledgeable in front of other men. They’ll say, “Yes, I like the oak in that one,” and it’ll be one that doesn’t have oak in it. It’s all about showing off, whereas women are more honest and say, “Nope, can’t taste oak.”’

Vine share schemes are also booming: this involves

paying a fee to ‘rent’ a row of vines in Italy or France, from which you get a certain number of bottles of wine a year – and you get to design your own label. Closer to home, Vinopolis, London’s wine ‘museum’, where you get to taste the exhibits, is highly popular. ‘We get a lot of hen-night bookings,’ says spokesman Charlie Stamp, ‘and on FA Cup Final day, it was funny to see lots of reluctant men being dragged around by their girlfriends.’

A new spin on speed-dating incorporating wine-tasting (six different glasses shared with six different men) has also sprung up in London while, for a wedding reception, emphasis is on choosing the right vintage. Says Kate, ‘My husband and I are such wine snobs that at our wedding we had a £65-a-pop Chablis on the top table, while the other tables had a £12 Chardonnay.’

Of course, any self-respecting ABC girl has one eye on what’s new. This year’s hit is rosé, which has doubled its share of the market in two years. ‘Demand for rosé is up 30 per cent in our restaurants,’ says Lisa Fredman of Café Rouge. ‘This is mainly

from women at lunch who don’t want a heavy red and don’t want to play safe with white.’

Matt Skinner points to an Indian wine winning the curiosity vote in Fifteen, while Henry John of wine trend pred i c to r s HwCg advises looking East. ‘China is a potentially huge producer. The wines aren’t bad, but they are a few years off being ready.’

The other big growth area is the over £5 a bottle. ‘Traditionally 95 per cent of the market has been below £5, but that is on the turn as peop l e ge t more adventurous and more confident,’ says John. ‘It’s safe to say wine is no longer the domain of stuffy fortysomething men.’ And we’ll raise a glass to that!

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BLUFFERʼS GUIDE…

When asked what you think of a wine, don’t say, ‘Er, it’s nice.’ Use a vague-yet-plausible phrase, like: ‘Interesting depth’, ‘A pronounced bouquet’ or ‘Somewhat lacking in finesse’.

Always pretend you have a wine cellar. Even if you live in a tower block.

Never plump for the bottle one up from the house white: sign of an amateur.

If you stumble across a wine you love, write down its name and take it with you when you go to the off-licence. ̒ I think it had a gold label,ʼ is no help.

Remember wine you buy on holiday never tastes as good back in your living room.

Impress friends with this fact: ice cream is the one food that doesnʼt go with wine – it numbs the tongue and dulls tastebuds.

TO BEING A WINE BUFFETTE

elletrend

What do you think of when you hear the word feminist? Emily Davison throwing herself under the King’s horse? Germaine Greer and her 1970 book The Female Eunuch? Serious-minded 1970s women fighting for equality in education and the workplace? What about you? Is matching your male friends drink for drink a strike for feminism? When you demand a pay rise or enjoy a guilt-free one-night stand or don’t bother to get your legs waxed before you go swimming, are you fighting for the sisterhood?

In 2006, modern women might be seen to be enjoying greater equality than at any previous point in history. But with the pay gap between the genders still wide, a continuing scarcity of women in positions of real power and an ever-increasing pressure to conform to impossible ideals of beauty, is the role of the feminist really redundant? Is feminism a historical irrelevance, a dirty word? Or is it still fundamental to our lives? We asked six women what they thought…

Are you a feminist? ELLE asked a broad range of women – from an Afghan Muslim to Abi Titmuss – that very question. Their responses may surprise you…

photograph by tierney gearon

What do you think of when you hear the word feminist? Emily Davison throwing herself under the King’s horse? Germaine Greer and her 1970 book The Female Eunuch? Serious-minded 1970s women fighting for equality in education and the workplace? What about you? Is matching your male friends drink for drink a strike for feminism? When you demand a pay rise or enjoy a guilt-free one-night stand or don’t bother to get your legs waxed before you go swimming, are you fighting for the sisterhood?

In 2006, modern women might be seen to be enjoying greater equality than at any previous point in history. But with the pay gap between the genders still wide, a continuing scarcity of women in positions of real power and an ever-increasing pressure to conform to impossible ideals of beauty, is the role of the feminist really redundant? Is feminism a historical irrelevance, a dirty word? Or is it still fundamental to our lives? We asked six women what they thought…

Are you a feminist? ELLE asked a broad range of women – from an Afghan Muslim to Abi Titmuss – that very question. Their responses may surprise you…

photograph by tierney gearon

‘I’m probably not a feminist. I think of that word as relating to something that happened in the 1970s. Women have come on so much since then: we have good jobs and good lives.

‘We should be very grateful to those women who chained themselves to railings, burned their bras and went on hunger strikes. Without them, today’s world wouldn’t be the way it is for women. What they did was amazing. But today, if someone behaved like that, it would seem slightly extreme.

‘Feminism isn’t apparent in everyday life – we’re not fighting all the time to be recognised as equals. That said, women still have to fight harder to make it. I have female friends who are TV football pundits. They know the game as well as any man, but they have to know that little bit extra. And in the music industry I haven’t seen many female managing directors – they always seem to fall short of the very top.

‘The WAGs I know just get on with it and take opportunities that come their way, and why shouldn’t they? Good on them. Modern women aren’t afraid to turn an opportunity into something. Why should we judge them for that?

‘I think women can have it all, but it’s hard. Being a mum who loves to work, you have to make sacrifices. There’s a certain role that women are meant to fall into when they get married. I don’t feel I should have dinner on the table every night when Jamie gets home. Maybe in that way I am a feminist. I’d go crazy if all I had to think about was what to cook for dinner.’

‘I describe myself as a feminist without hesitation. There’s no translation for “feminism” in my native language, Dari, so

we use the English word. Most women are scared to call themselves feminists because Afghan society is so conservative, and most leaders condemn feminism as anti-Islamic. But I think that many women in my social circle are feminists, even without knowing it.

‘My activism has had a huge effect on my personal life. I married Nadim, a man from my mother’s extended family. Nadim knew that I was an activist, but hoped I would stop working when we married. It became an irreconcilable difference.

‘When I told my parents I wanted to divorce him, they were alarmed. But I was lucky that they eventually supported me. Most Afghan women would never be allowed to divorce their husbands. I’m fortunate that I’m financially independent. That also brings me respect, which reduces the stigma of being divorced. Dating new men is out of the question. Afghan men see divorcees as second-hand goods. I don’t care, though – I’ve had enough of men here.

‘When the Taliban was in power, women’s lives were very constrained. We had to wear burkas to go out and lessons for girls were organised secretly by networks of women. Things have changed dramatically since then. The presence of the international community here means that women’s rights are kept on the agenda. I am optimistic about the future for Afghan women, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had been born somewhere else.’

FORMER SINGER LOUISE REDKNAPP, 31, IS MARRIED TO FOOTBALLER JAMIE REDKNAPP. THEY HAVE A

SON, CHARLEY, TWO. SHE PRESENTS THE CLOTHES SHOW ON UKTV STYLE

NAJIA HANEEFI, 29, IS DIRECTOR OF THE AFGHAN WOMENʼS EDUCATIONAL CENTRE, AN ORGANISATION THAT OFFERS EDUCATION TO GIRLS FORBIDDEN TO ATTEND SCHOOL UNDER THE TALIBAN REGIME OF 1996-2001

AMY SACCO, 38, IS A NEW YORK CLUB AND RESTAURANT OWNER

‘When I hear the word feminist, I think “bitter”. It has bad connotations. Maybe we need to look at the word, re-evaluate it, and say, “OK, how can we make this positive?”

‘But I’m not a feminist. I think believing in who you are, rather than what someone thinks you should be is more important. The misconception is that there’s a divide between men and women. I see the divide as whether you are good or not good at your job. Period.

‘I think feminism is an excuse for a woman to go, “Ooh, it’s hard”. But you can achieve anything if you work hard enough. That’s why

America’s so great – the land of dreams. I’m just a girl from New Jersey, but I made it in Manhattan.

‘Then again, women like Gloria Steinem [1970s US feminist writer] paved the way for me to make a decent wage. I’m privileged that I’m able to do so – they helped us with that. They are the women who burned the bras and raised hell and they were right. I just showed up and said I’m going to work really hard and get what I want.’

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WHAT KIND OF SUMMER DRINKER ARE YOU?

Apologies if there’s a freak hailstorm going on while you’re reading this but, in theory, summer is here. Which means you’re likely to be sporting flip-flop blisters and a coating of St Tropez, have increased your Magnum consumption by 400 per cent and be spending your days gazing out of the office window. And you’ve committed to the serious business of Summer Drinking.

Ah, the great British summer booze-up: saying ‘au revoir’ to red wine, Jack Daniel’s and cream-based liqueurs, and ‘hello there!’ to Pimm’s, Del Boy cocktails and lashings of rosé, which you wouldn’t normally touch with a bargepole. (The most hardened of wine buffs lose their mojo when the sun comes out – even the white-wine spritzer becomes socially acceptable.) It involves going out every night after work (even Mondays), drinking heavily, bankrupting yourself and behaving badly, and all because it’s ‘too hot’ to go home. It involves weekend benders downing warm beer in grotty pub gardens, because it makes you feel ‘Mediterranean’ to be alfresco. And it involves sitting in the local park with your pals, draining endless bottles of £2.99 Lambrusco as the sun sets (in winter, this is called ‘being a tramp’; in summer, it’s ‘having a picnic’). In short, what’s not to like about Summer Drinking?

After an extensive survey of women’s seasonal drinking habits (OK, I talked to

friends in the pub), I discovered several species of Summer Drinker. First up, the Summer Party Animal, who hibernates during the winter months (she’s spending quality time with her sofa, TV and biscuit tin), but, once the sun comes out, emerges from her cocoon, a fully formed social butterfly, resplendent in floaty Issa dress and sparkly sandals, as she flits from party to party, mojito in hand. As my friend Josie puts it, ‘I can’t be bothered to shave my legs or get my highlights done in winter, and I tend to go to the gym or just go home after work, so I hardly ever drink. But summer nights were made for boozing – it’s so light and warm, everyone’s upbeat and happy to move from bar to bar, I love it. Winter is for detoxing, summer for retoxing.’

Single girl Natalie, meanwhile, is a Summer Predator. ‘I find it so easy to pull on a summer evening,’ she grins. ‘People chat more standing outside the pub than they do when they’re sat down inside. Everyone is more up for adventure when it’s hot. And you can show skin without looking try-hard – all you need is a cute sundress, a good pedicure and cool shades.’

Finally, there’s the Summer Slob. In winter, she frequents only ultra-stylish bars and drinks dry martinis, shaken, not stirred. Come summer, she’s a promiscuous drunk: barbecues, festivals, watching the

World Cup in a scary pub. She doesn’t care where, what or how she drinks (plastic cups, out of the bottle, before noon…). Public displays of drunkenness become a badge of honour, whereas she’d turn herself in to be Asbo-ed if it were November.

My friend Terri, a softly spoken publishing executive, is a case in point. ‘One Sunday last summer, a bunch of us went for a picnic in the gardens of Alexandra Palace in London. I ended up drinking 10 pints of lager, then tried to start a fight with a group of girls sitting near us who objected to me loudly slurring Here Comes the Sun. My humiliated friends had to carry me miles home because no taxi driver would take me. When I woke up on Monday morning, I was so sunburned, I had to take the day off work, which I spent texting my friends to apologise. And I’m usually the kind of person who tuts when the housemates get drunk on Big Brother.’

But whatever your summer drinking style, alcohol tastes better on holiday. And while ELLE would never encourage you to behave like a stereotypical Brit-abroad lager-lout, we would like to raise a glass to the holiday tipple – especially that magical extra-cold bottle of beer or gin and tonic by the pool that signifies your holiday has begun. As the Isley Brothers once (almost) put it, ‘Summer booze/Makes me feel fine.’

Why is it that when the sun comes out all your drinking rules fall by the wayside? Kerry Potter explains

PARK LIFEIt’s hot, you’re wearing flip-flops and rosé is suddenly oh-so acceptable – in huge doses!

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Yes, dust off your Wham! CD, dig out that Jilly Cooper novel from under the bed and mix yourself a piña colada, because, says Kerry Potter, naff is where it’s at. Your guilty secret has never been so cool…

secret busted fan? jackie collins addict? itʼs ok, your guilty pleasures are suddenly cool

alloons, tinsel and streamers adorn the venue. The DJ is wearing a white suit and is flicking through his dog-eared vinyl. Battered disco lights flash weakly. Behind the bar is a job lot of Liebfraumilch (unchilled), a stack of plastic glasses and a sour-faced middle-aged barmaid inexpertly mixing up piña colada cocktails – a freebie for the first 30 drinkers through the door tonight. ‘What’s this – an episode of Phoenix Nights?’ sniggers my friend, Karen, as we gingerly walk through the door.

It may look like a particularly low-rent wedding reception, but tonight I’m at one

WHAT A CHEEK No longer can a secret yearning for Busted’s James be sneered at

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remember much of tonight’s playlist from the first time round but aren’t letting that stop them enjoying a rowdy girls’ night out.

‘The men here aren’t lecherous and the music’s not intimidating,’ explains Claire, a pretty 26-year-old club promoter who is here with a gang of friends. ‘Every song that comes on makes you happy, and you

can’t help but dance.’ Liz, who works for a newspaper and is used to cooler-than-thou media parties, agrees. ‘You simply can’t have an attitude when you’re dancing away to Leo Sayer. It’s

like being in an overgrown youth club.’ There is indeed a palpable sense of fun that’s entirely absent from clubs that play ‘proper’ dance music – it’s all drunken mucking about, communal reminiscing about the music, and silly dancing designed to make your mates laugh. As Rowley puts it, ‘I’ve never seen so many smiling faces in a club without drugs.’

By 9pm, the dancefloor is packed with women, while the men stand around the edge, looking vaguely uncomfortable. By 9.30pm, every last person in the room is dancing. And, by the arrival of the ‘Erection Section’ at 11.30pm (sample track: Neil Diamond’s weepie Love on the Rocks), it’s wall-to-wall slow-dancing and snogging. Finally, at midnight, everyone is punching the air and stumbling around to Chas & Dave’s Ainít No Pleasing You, before heading out, chuckling, into the night.

‘We live in this age of “the list”, of being constantly told what the 100 Best Albums Ever and so on are. And there are certain records that you’re simply not supposed to

like,’ says Rowley as he packs his records away. ‘But we say, actually, it’s fine to like this stuff, and that comes as a relief to people.’

It seems we can’t get enough of the Guilty Pleasures feel-good factor: the BBC is interested in turning the concept into a TV show, the club night is being rolled out in Manchester, Nottingham and

BOSOM BUDDIES So you’re a grown-up fan of Charlie (left) and Matt from Busted? Flaunt it

of London’s hottest club nights. Guilty Pleasures – the legend is inscribed on a pink neon sign hanging above the stage – began life as a strand on the BBC London radio show presented by Sean Rowley.

The concept was simple: listeners would ring in to confess the dark secrets of their record collections – the White Stripes fan with a penchant for Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman perhaps, or the dedicated clubber who dances around her bedroom to Ronan Keating when no one else is in – and Rowley would play the record in question. It proved such a hit that the next step was a compilation CD: Guilty Pleasures arrived last spring (sample tracks – David Essex’s Gonna Make You a Star, 10cc’s The Things We Do For Love). Its sequel Guilty Pleasures Rides Again is released this month, and features John Paul Young’s Love is in the Air, Foreigner’s Cold as Ice and – him again – Cliff Richard’s Carrie. In short, the onus is on the kind of 70s and 80s cheese that makes Magic FM look cutting edge.

The success of the album led to the monthly club night, which sees Rowley

on the decks, sporting his trademark white suit and a huge grin. The inaugural party boasted an appropriately cool-meets-naff guest list that included indie-rock luminaries the Strokes and Lostprophets, 80s popstar Siobhan Fahey and, um, Vanessa Feltz. The emphasis is on audience participation: attendees are encouraged to bring along their own ‘guilty pleasure’ for Rowley to play. Each tune is judged by the crowd’s reaction: boo ing means instant ejection from the decks; cheers mean the song is played in its entirety. It’s fair to say the audience is a pretty o p e n - m i n d e d bunch: the only record to be booed off tonight – and rightly so – is 1991’s abysmal mullet-rock ballad Wind of Change by the Scorpions. (‘Who?’ you cry. Exactly!)

Although there’s a fair smattering of thirtysomethings present, there are also lots of glamorous twentysomething girls – people who certainly can’t claim to

ʻYou simply canʼt afford to have an attitude when youʼre dancing away to Leo Sayer. Itʼs like being in an overgrown youth clubʼ

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Glasgow, and Rowley has just finished doing a weekly evening DJ slot at London’s Somerset House outdoor ice rink: Guilty Pleasures On Ice, if you will.

Elsewhere, School Disco, the home of cheesy anthems, remains one of Britain’s biggest club nights, while, for those who prefer not to wear a school blazer of an evening, there’s London’s small but beautiful Club Beer, where S Club 7’s Donít Stop Moviní segues into Barry Manilow’s Copacabana (hence its manifesto: ‘In a bid to rewrite what’s cool and what’s fool, we play music that only sounds good when you’re drunk’). Meanwhile, on Wednesdays, the fashion crowd can be found at hyper-trendy east London bar/eaterie Bistrotheque (run by House of Jazz designer Pablo Flack) enjoying food with a side order of cheese – über-kitsch transvestite karaoke.

Even America, home of unironic naffness (think toddler beauty pageants, Jerry Springer, the mullet), appears to have developed a sense of humour on the subject. Manhattan hipsters are currently flocking to Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke at Arlene’s Grocery on the Lower East Side to belt out cover versions with the house band; there’s no Strokes wannabes here, it’s de rigueur to tackle an 80s-hair metal classic. Meanwhile, US magazine Entertainment Weekly publishes an annual guilty pleasures issue, and the American authors of the new Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1001 Things You Hate to

Love (Quirk, around £8) pay tribute to the murky delights of David Hasselhoff, Dunkin’ Donuts and Dirty Dancing. As they put it, ‘Go ahead and indulge. Just don’t talk about it round the water cooler on Monday morning.’

A quick survey of friends finds that beneath every glamorous, sophisticated exterior lurks a love of naff. Natasha, a 29 year old with a high-powered job in TV and a Saturday-night sideline in DJing at

fashionable clubs, has harboured a secret crush on the king of chavs, Brian Harvey, since his East 17 days. In public, she blathers on about obscure ar t-house movies. In private, she’s to be found reading Take a Break in the bath (while listening to Brian Harvey).

Karen, meanwhile has a to-kill-for job in the music industry by day, but a penchant for Danielle Steele bonkbusters by night. ‘I occasionally read classics – like Tess of the DíUrbervilles to balance things out,’ she says. Karen was, for a time, obsessed with housewives’ favour i te TV show, Heartbeat, but was outed by her flatmate. ‘Everyone took the piss out of me so much, I had to stop watching it,’ she says.

Tessa, a marketing executive, meanwhile, adores roguish snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan (‘I always watch the snooker when he’s on and I’ve even registered on his fan-club website’), while

radio producer Sarah has a love affair with teen TV drama Dawsonís Creek – ‘even after it was relegated to Channel 5’. What’s more, at all three hen nights I’ve attended recently, the conversation has turned to an impromptu game of Who-Do-You-Fancy-That-You-Really-Shouldn’t? Names that arose with alarming regularity included (brace yourselves) Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Boris Becker and Leslie Grantham.

Neil Stevenson, former editor of now-

defunct bible of cool, The Face, has a theory on why naff is making a comeback. ‘People are sick of being dictated to – they’re rejecting the canon of cool, defying tastemakers,’ he says. ‘People don’t want to be categorised by marketing people. Having guilty pleasures is a way of saying, “I’m into stuff you wouldn’t think I’m into”. It’s exhibiting non-clichéd behaviour.’ He points to Stella McCartney publicly admitting she adores Big Brother. ‘She’s saying, “You think you know who I am, but I’m not really so easily categorised”.’

Stevenson runs through a list of his own guilty pleasures: he’s downloaded the German version of Nena’s 1984 bubblegum pop classic 99 Red Balloons; he’s developing an unhealthy interest in wronged-woman country music and has a substantial collection of old issues of Playboy (‘Although, actually, I don’t feel guilty about any of them,’ he declares).

Even John Harris, a cultural commentator and panellist on TV arts show The Late Review, admits to crying at the end of Dirty Dancing and to being the proud owner of Shania Twain’s Man! I Feel Like a Woman! ‘It’s like the notion of c o o l h a s b e e n s o comprehensively used up that we’ve had to embrace what we

once considered beyond the pale,’ he says.So are these small things that bring joy

to our lives really that shameful? The word ‘guilty’ implies we should put down that Jackie Collins novel and read something more worthy. But what exactly? The EU constitution? Let’s stop kidding ourselves. I don’t know about you, but I have better things to do on a lazy Sunday. Speaking of which, I’m off, The OC is about to start and my sofa awaits.

THE RECORDS Take My Breath Away

– Berlin Anything by McFly Club Tropicana

– Wham! Slippery When Wet

– Bon Jovi The collected works of

Stock Aitken & Waterman

THE FILMS Pretty Woman Grease 2 Calendar Girls The Goonies

THE TV SHOWS HollyoaksTrisha Loose Women Anything with Linda

Barker in it

THE BOOKS Rivals by Jilly Cooper Barbara Cartland’s

oeuvre The Sweet Valley

High series

THE MEN Charlie from Busted Jeremys Clarkson

and Paxman Fran Cosgrove

THE ACCESSORIES Plastic charm bracelets A stupid mobile ringtone Pick ’n’ mix sweets

from Woolworths ‘Funny’ slogan T-shirts Pork scratchings

ʻPeople are rejecting the canon of cool, defying tastemakers. Having guilty pleasures is a way of saying, “Iʼm into stuff you wouldnʼt think Iʼm into”ʼ

GUILTY PLEASURES: THE LIFESTYLE