Here and There (7 page)

I heard somewhere that ‘Happy Birthday to You' is the most pirated artist work in history. We've all stolen it. It belongs to the estate of some American woman. We should be paying royalties. What I want to know, though, is what on earth made her write it in the first place? What possesses someone to sit down at a piano and go, I know: what we really, really need is a song to sing at people on their birthdays. Had she always felt there was a song-shaped hole in the anniversaries of her birth every year? Whoever said: this would have been just a perfect day – if only there was a song you could all sing at me, preferably all starting at different times and in different keys and then halting at the personalised bit, like horses preparing to refuse a fence, while some of you call me by my given name, some of you use a pet name, a couple of you call me mummy, and those three at the back just mumble uh-uh because you've come as someone else's date and don't know who I am at all. Why isn't there a song for that?

So, Mrs Whoever-it-was sat down and said, what sort of song should this anniversary song be? Perhaps lyrical and romantic. Or maybe a dance, samba or waltz. It could be histrionic and hopeful. The words could be full of poetry and fondness. It might be amusing. Perhaps the whole thing would be best as a sort of Tyrolean drinking song? No, she thought. No, let's make it a blessed nursery rhyme, with words so crapulously bland and functional that even five-year-olds who've only heard it three times before make up pithier versions. Yes, that's what birthdays need – a nursery rhyme that will follow you around during your hopeless, gauche teens, your mate-hungry 20s, your sophisticated middle-age, your wise old-age and sage-like dotage, every year treating you like a stupid toddler.

After the invention of a birthday song, the most inexplicable thing is that anyone sang it twice. Not anyone, but everyone. How did we all know? Were there hymn sheets? Did they have a practice run-through? Were they all humming the tune in the kitchen before coming out with the cake? Now I think about it, I can't ever remember a time before I knew the tune for ‘Happy Birthday'. Maybe it's hard-wired into our cerebellums. Perhaps we learn it, like whale song, through the amniotic murk, along with the theme for
Neighbours
.

I resent ‘Happy Birthday'. I mind its cheery imbecility. I mind its predictable repetitive ersatz jollity. I object to the implicit invitation to strangers to lean over and sing at me as if I'm remedial, and to remind me that my mortal coil is unravelling. Mostly I hate it for not doing what it says on the tin. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, has never, in all the countless times it's been sung, brought an extra watt of happiness to anyone.

And anyway, if you're going to mark small milestones of a life's course with song, why stop at birthdays? We already mark Christmas and national events, sport and death and marriage with specific songs. Why not a coming-out-to-your-parents song? Why don't we have a song and a cake for sleeping with a new partner for the first time? The waiters could come out with cake and a candle, and sing,
Happy rumpy to you, happy pumpy to
you, get your knickers off, easy Sheila, rumpy-pumpy for
you
. That would give you a warm glow on a first date. And what about a song for exam results, or for getting fired, or moving house? So raise your glasses, and all together,
Happy …

Catwalk cool

In Svalbard, the most northerly
inhabited place on earth,
function takes priority
over fashion.

Short is the new sweet, bum the new breast, tea the new lunch, poor the new rich, vintage is the new new. It seems that contrarianism is the new conformity. The ‘new black' is a catchphrase that espouses and exposes the relentless search for innovation and the circular sameness of fashion.

It has always been attributed to Diana Vreeland, the ridiculous and venerable editor of
Vogue
, who actually once said pink was India's navy blue, which is funny, observant and anthropologically worth a student's dissertation. It was some other fashionista, I think Gianfranco Ferré, who actually said grey was the new black, which is gnomically dim, but then the '80s were the gnomically dim decade and the new black encapsulated the common garden-gnomishness of it all. By the turn of the 21st century, calling anything the new black had exhausted its frail profundity and worn out its nickel-plated irony. And then along came Obama and suddenly black was the new black and it had jumped from fashion and style to politics and civil rights.

This wasn't what I meant to talk about. I wanted to write about fashion and the cold because (I may have mentioned this before) I strongly believe that cold is the new hot and fashion is a vanity of temperate climates. You can draw the Tropics of Fashion on a map. The northern line starts about five miles above London and the southern just off the tip of Sicily. If you continue those two orbits latitudinally around the world, between the two points you've pretty much encapsulated the Tropics of Fashion. Of course, there are clothes and choices and fashionable people either side of that but this is where fashion gets indented and arbitrated. This is where the new blacks are posited. This is the zone where the weather allows you the greatest variation in clothes and you can dress with an airy disregard for the sky. Go further south or north and the climate becomes your stylist. There are stylish people above and below the meridian but they tend to wear things that have been made not by designers but by experience and necessity.

When I found out I was going to go to Svalbard, a huddle of islands overseen by Norway that are the most northerly inhabited place on earth, I knew I'd need some advice on what to wear and I wasn't going to get it in the fashion department, from some editor who'd tell me that alpaca was the new cashmere and Dolce were doing some really butch biker boots that look warm.

Svalbard is 78 degrees north; the pole is 90 degrees. After Svalbard, there are only a few hunters, some climatologists, and adventurous nutters pulling sledges. It's cold. Really, really murderously cold. It was too cold for the Eskimos to ever bother living here. It's a place that is made up only and solely of weather. Big, white, mad, bad, bullying weather. But the Norwegians have a saying; they say that white is the new black. They also say there's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.

So I asked a Norwegian what I needed and he gave me a list that was longer than the one for my boarding school uniform. There was not a single thing on it that I already owned. All the stuff I thought might transfer from Scottish autumn walking holidays was damned as being suicidal.

It wasn't just the amount of kit; it was the size and the volume. It started to arrive in my office and colonised a corner and then spread across the room like a glacier of goose-down, merino-wool waffle, wickable, breathable, impenetrable waterproof gear. I regarded it with an unbeliever's scepticism. Nothing here was constructed remotely by aesthetics. Not a single stitch or button was added to make the wearer look svelte, or handsome, or taller or sexier or better proportioned. I come from a place that would rather be wet and chilblained than ugly but chilblains aren't the price for getting stuff wrong up in Svalbard. Still disbelieving, I dragged a vast, waterproof North Face bag big enough to smuggle a gravid sow in up to the roof of the world. I stepped off the plane at Longyearbyen in my London tweed and the climate grabbed me by the lapels like a furious drunk. The scale of the weather here bore no relation to anything I'd waded through before.

My local guide said that if I wore gloves with fingers, I'd lose the fingers. You wear mittens. You wear boots with huge detachable inner boots of insulation that look like they've fallen off the space shuttle. If your feet get cold, you lose toes. You wear two balaclavas. The wind catches your nose or your cheek, it'll cut them right off. I put on everything I'd brought with me, layer after layer. Everything you wear has an understudy: socks have other socks, pants have bigger pants, jerseys come in pairs, so do jackets and trousers. My gloves had mittens. This is not clothing for comfort. The Norwegians dress for life. Get it wrong and you could lose a finger or your sight or the whole mortal coil. What you have to do, in effect, is turn yourself into a self-regulating ecosystem. You become a purpose-built micro-climate. And as cold as it got, which was bloody cold, 30 degrees below with a 40-knot wind shoving down the temperature, so cold that our smart modern technology ran out of figures to measure it with, wherever I stuck my face out or took off a mitten, it burned like frozen venom, like all-over toothache.

And I became immensely interested in other people's kit – but not in a fashionista sense, not in a ‘Where did you get that bag?' way, but in a nerdy, mechanical way like boys talk about carburettors and torque. I'd ask about wicking and wool and weight and whether your socks had been organically lanolin washed. There was a relief in all this jargon, this heavy-kit chat. It was nice to be released from the insecurity of style, of taste.

I noticed something at the airport in Spitsbergen. The Norwegians are a remarkable weather-blasted, capable and bonetough people. You never see a fat one. I expect they leave them out on the glacier. They wear their skins tight-drawn over their angular bones like battened down, faded tarpaulin. They are admirable, attractive people who speak profoundly but seldom. To open your mouth unnecessarily is to waste hot air. And I also noticed that at the airport they were the best-dressed people in the world. In a postmodern Bauhaus-Corbusian sense, where form follows function, everything was carefully chosen for its practical application: the uniform of compatibility and outdoor competence. I realised that what they had was anti-fashion, given that the essence of fashionable style is to put on an attitude or an aspiration, to project a character, essentially to be someone you're not. What the Norwegians dress as is themselves so they can continue being themselves. This season's look is the same as last season's look. It's very, very damned cool. Freezing cool. I turned to Tom, my photographer, who occasionally works for
Vogue
, and I told him blonde is the new black.

Luxe gone wild

Glamour and camping have
come together. They call it
glamping, and the latest travel
extravagance is a tent
with a flushing bog.

I went to lunch with a big travel company, a big, big international holiday firm. I don't normally waste a lunch on business. It's that horrible hybrid: work, wheedling, and pretending to be social and chummy. Anyway, the food's invariably corporate-ghastly, and there's a presentation of unreadable brochures and a pen that doesn't work and a luggage label that I really don't want. Anyway, this time I went because, you know, I'm feeling sort of sorry for the travel industry. They're having a really horrid time. It's the inexplicable but rather enjoyable truth about the travel business that it provides the nicest, most fun and exciting weeks of our lives, and is consequently the most consistently reviled, railed against, sued and detested business in the world. This particular company trawls the expensive end of the market and so has to deal with some of the most irrationally bad-tempered customers in the world.

Now I expect you've noticed that the tempers in airports are short in exact relation to the shortness of the queues they're standing in. Economy will have a snake of several hundred people patiently shuffling their regulation-size suitcases along, reading books, chatting, and giggling with holiday anticipation. Business class will have a queue of 20 irritated people hissing at children called Tamsin and Roland and trying to corral skittish herds of matched baggage. They are regular travellers and therefore hate travelling. In the queue for first class, where there is a vase of real flowers, and an attendant of cinematic beauty and unparalleled diplomacy, there will be one fat woman in a fur coat who is having a histrionic tantrum, swearing banishment and humiliation to all the staff in the airport and a slow death in particular to the baggage handler because she has lost her mink face mask and they don't have her brand of moisturiser in the bathroom. As anyone in hospitality will tell you, other people's happiness is a miserable career, and the more happy you strive to make them, the more miserable they'll make you.

So I went to lunch, and they gave us the good news, which was that the market was very fluid and contracting and that many companies were going to find things very difficult and would go for long holidays never to return, but for people who could move with the prevailing climate, adapt to the sudden change in commercial environment, then there were great advantages to be taken. There were vast opportunities for the plucking.

My accountant has been saying much the same sort of thing: there are fortunes to be made in recessions, he says. And a banker I know mentioned darkly that some of his mates have never been richer. If this is all true, why don't we have a depression every other month so we can all have a go at being carpet-bagging plutocrats? They all look at me with a bland pity when I say things like that.

After the steamed sea bass and something chocolate over coffee, the travel bods got into their presentation and pointed out the bullet points on the screen. They came on like the mantras shouted by rugby teams in their dressing room before they go out and get flattened by the All Blacks. Luxury, apparently, is over. Conspicuous consumption is inconspicuous again. Gold bath taps, restaurants run by swanky chefs, are all over. Jewellery on the beach, rose petals in the bath, bikini bottoms floating in the Jacuzzi: that's also utterly, utterly passé. Apparently the rich still left with money and time to enjoy it don't want to look like the past-it rich, the over-rich or the idle rich with nothing but hedonism and hair extensions on their minds.

They, and by implication the aspirational bits of you, want an adventure. You want to learn something. You want to come home with more than pictures of a sunlounger and an abused lobster. You want to boast about something that isn't a tan-line, and who you saw at the next table. You want to come back with a traveller's tale, a saga, not a holiday drink-alogue. You want to get out into the corners of the world that room service won't reach. The future of travel, I was told, is going to be [drum-roll; keen young executive flicks the button on his remote; and the screen flashes up, ta-ra … a tent. A tent. That's it, a tent. The future of top-of-the-range holidays is a tent. What's the mass-market version going to be – a refugee camp? Oh no, no, you see I'm not looking closely enough. The images flicker across the screen. This is no ordinary tent: this is a tent you can stand up in, with a bed you can lie down on, with sheets that you could glide across, with a carpet, with mirrors and windows and a mosquito net that looks like interior design. This tent is to other tents what Ava Gardner is to other gardeners.