Hello dear Off-Topicers,
Two unrelated conversations lately have made me think about the places where we get ready each morning. I find the minute I have a hairdryer in my hand, I instinctively want to sit on the floor or a bed - there’s just something that feels weirdly straitjacketed about sitting in a proper chair, with my arm above my head for five minutes. I’d thought this was a personal foible where I was quietly failing to behave like a proper person, but then when I oohed and aahed over a friend’s lovely dressing table recently, she told me she rarely sat at it, preferring her bed. And discussing plans for the bedroom in my sister’s new house, when I asked where she’d do her makeup, she immediately said, ‘Oh, just sitting on the floor; that’s where I’ve always done it’ (I’d somehow failed to process this, even though we always used to sit on her living room floor to get ready when I visited her at her old flat in London).
As I’ve been writing this, I’d started wondering about other people…and then, like a glorious homing pigeon sensing her input was wanted, my friend Jenny texted (making this all feel very LIVE and as it happens1). Jenny says she also eschews any kind of formal dressing table and gave me a wonderfully vivid description of her morning routine and hair-drying stance (literal, rather than moral…although she may have moral stances that went undisclosed).2 She felt where we get ready is partly influenced by light and plug sockets, although added, but even when you go to a hotel where everything’s perfectly arranged, it still just feels wrong. I do wonder if it’s just one of those rituals many of us equate with a grown-up arts and crafts session, and sitting on the floor with colouring pencils spread all around us just feels like the best place for it.3
Anyway, I share this with you because when I realised not sitting at a table is potentially Perfectly Normal Behaviour, then there’s just something lovely in imagining the odd set-ups and unconventional places where everyone might be undertaking these daily rituals (the things that reveal humanness are always the most delightful). I love the idea that we’re perhaps at our most unstudied and lacking in ceremony while preparing to meet the outside world4.
I’m sure there must be a more suitable painting to illustrate this newsletter, but this Velázquez instantly sprang to mind because for years I had two postcards on our bedroom wall - one showing the original, the other a recreation by Habitat to launch a range of textiles. There was something so satisfying about seeing the two side-by-side looking the same but different5. And also something lovely about the woman languorously getting ready…although it’s hard to imagine the point where she stops gazing at herself and actually gets dressed - maybe the cherub be stuck there holding the mirror forever? Below is a maddeningly small image dredged up from my photos circa 2011 which shows this.6
For the last week or so I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting - it’s epic (26 hours long) and wonderful (It feels like about a third of my reading this year has been from Irish authors - they’re just on fire). Afterwards, I had a day or so of walking around with horribly bare ears, before downloading Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil on the basis that I loved the film (a love story set in 1920s China, around a cholera epidemic). This exchange in the first chapter made me laugh:
"Someone just tried the door."
"Well, perhaps it was the amah, or one of the boys."
"They never come at this time. They know I always sleep after tiffin."
For a moment, I wondered if it referred to actual tiffin and was delighted by the idea of her being struck down by the soporific effects of a large chocolatey square every day…but then looked it up and it’s actually a word the British used for a light afternoon meal. But tiffin7 aside, I started to feel more and more unsettled as the book went on, because while the ending of the film is heartbreaking and beautiful, the novel ends in a completely different way that is - to me, at least - a lot less satisfying. It’s so rare to find it works this way around - perhaps it’s the curse of consuming them in the wrong order...
Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying the final days of summer (or winter for some) - I’ve noticed an influx of MASSIVE spiders and am left wondering how they know they’re meant to come inside right now, even though it’s 33 degrees outside and not Septemberish at all (such clever creatures).
With love,
Florence x
Or it would be if I hadn’t got distracted and left this in my drafts folder for a week or two.
I later tried out Jenny’s stance and found drying one’s hair standing with ‘legs akimbo and head inverted’ does indeed create more volume than the floor-seated version of this - it’s like the Gravity Plus option and sends an invigorating rush of blood to the head to set you up for the day, too.
This makes me think of Trevor Harvey’s poem, The Painting Lesson, which used to make my son laugh like a drain when he was about eight-years-old (I don’t think that was related to personal experience).
I know many women who prefer to go bare-faced, so maybe this whole thing feels obsolete if that’s you, too? Or perhaps there are still certain rituals - like plucking eyebrows or applying moisturiser - that require a place?
(My thoughts are also turning to thinking about whether Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling might sit on their bedroom floor to dry their hair. I kind of love that idea).
Has the resolution we take photos at really increased so much since then?
When we were at the farm shop on Sunday afternoon, I saw some gluten-free tiffin (I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before, but maybe I wasn’t looking) and bought it in what may be the world’s first Painted-Veil-inspired tiffin-that’s-actually-tiffin purchase. It was delicious. And I did fall asleep afterwards.
I have always been fascinated by those stacking tiffin boxes that the Indians use and wondered what delights they contain. I once saw a documentary about the Indian railways where they mentioned tiffin boxes being sent by rail to their recipients!
Love this … no PowerPoints in bathrooms has been a learning for me in the UK. I always stood at the bathroom mirror for both hair drying and makeup. It’s been an adjustment (of the first world kind) here … Still standing for both; just in the bedroom seeking the best light.