Dirty Girl Things
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
One-Hundred-Eighty-Seven
Inside out...
Do I make you dream?
Do I make you wet?
Do I make you shiver?
Good for you...
It’s this blog existance meaning...
Enjoy this inside out sexual flash moments...
* * * * *
( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
One-Hundred-Eighty-Six
Love and sex conflict and convergence...
Loving you too much, makes me vulnerable...
Making long and gentle sex to you makes me softer...
The sex beast that leaves in me, gets sleepy...
Mixing up my feelings and deeper thoughts...
Am I being addicted to love?
* * * * *
( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Sunday, April 27, 2008
One-Hundred-Eighty-Five
Lost Souls
Following our last conversation about sharing sexual flash moments...
I’m sure you wonder as well as I do...
How come that so beautiful girls...
Deliver themselves to completely debauchery sexual lives...
There must be something else than just an easy way of life...
More than carnal need, they must be first...
Lost souls...
* * * * *
( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
One-Hundred-Eighty-Four
Please don’t say you’re sorry...
It was love at first sight!...
In a glance, I took proper notice of your wonderful body lines...
I felt adrenalin all over my body...
And becoming hard on, just imagining you and me...
In a sexual flash moment...
I got your positive feedback and soon we were talking...
And touching...
Sooner or later we would make love...
Just a matter of time...
That intimate moments came few days later...
After a wonderful evening...
Where you were the star and I was the lucky guy...
Please don’t say you’re sorry...
* * * * *
( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
One-Hundred-Eighty-Three
Paul Raymond: Self-styled ‘King of Soho’ who built a successful business empire from property and pornography
Raymond eventually settled in London where he again exploited a loophole in the law that allowed private members’ clubs to be virtually exempt from censorship from the London Guardian (March 2008)
The self-styled “King of Soho”, Paul Raymond was a self-made millionaire and pioneering sex mogul whose x-rated career spanned seven decades from coy post-war striptease to the hardcore world of the internet. He brought pornography out from under the counters of tatty corner shops and onto the top shelves of WH Smith, giving bare breasts a sophisticated sheen and earning himself a £650m fortune along the way.
Once described as “the most successful man in modern London who isn’t an aristocrat”, Raymond was the original British porn baron, a free-thinking entrepreneur who made nudity mainstream, yet preferred to be remembered as a theatrical impresario. He believed that sex didn’t have to be tawdry, hidden away in seedy strip joints. For him, “adult entertainment” was just that; a privilege of getting older and something to be enjoyed without embarrassment. “There’ll always be sex,” he said. “Always, always, always.”
He was born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn in 1925, the son of a Liverpool lorry driver, and was raised by his mother and aunt in Glossop, Derbyshire, after his father abandoned the family. On leaving school at 15, he sold hair nets and stockings from a barrow but hankered for a life in show business. He changed his name to Paul Raymond in 1942 and tagged onto the variety circuit, ending up as one half of a bizarre mind-reading double act on Clacton Pier called “Mister and Miss Tree”.
From performer he became producer and married Jean, a choreographer of dancing showgirls. Their first travelling variety show – The Vaudeville Express – featured topless girls who posed in saucy tableaux but remained completely still so as not to trouble the Lord Chamberlain, who had prohibited any jiggling by half-dressed performers. Raymond’s show eventually evolved into the Festival of Nudes (a cheeky wink at the Festival of Britain) and then Moving Nudes, where naked lovelies were winched high in the air on precarious wooden platforms.
Tiring of touring, Raymond eventually settled in London where he again exploited a loophole in the law that allowed private members’ clubs to be virtually exempt from censorship. The Raymond Revuebar, located on the corner of Walker’s Court and Brewer Street in Soho, opened in April 1958 promising a programme of striptease and beautiful girls. The venue’s garish neon display became as much a London landmark as the statue of Eros, emblazoned with the legend “The World Centre of Erotic Entertainment”. Raymond’s new venture was the first of its kind in Britain and regularly played to packed audiences of middle-class men seeking new nude thrills.
In 1961 a judge labelled the club “filthy, disgusting and beastly” and fined him £5,000 for keeping a disorderly house, but it barely dented Raymond’s burgeoning fortune. By the mid-1960s he had made his first million and was driving a black Rolls Royce, plate number PR11, and living in a mansion in Wimbledon.
Buoyed up by the success of his live shows, Raymond launched, in 1964, King (the “real man’s magazine"), distinguished by lush photographic studies of “tasteful” nudes and the obligatory articles on motor cars, cigars and military history. Designed as a British competitor to Penthouse or Playboy, the title was, surprisingly, not a runaway success and instead Raymond put his energies into buying the Whitehall Theatre. Here he staged extravagant nude revues including Pyjama Tops and its sequel Yes, We Have No Pyjamas, as well as Let’s Get Laid! and Come Into My Bed, which paired “family” comedians like John Inman with troupes of topless dancers.
Raymond’s biggest coup came in 1971 when he acquired the magazine Men Only. He was now dating the glamour model Fiona Richmond, and promptly installed his pneumatic new girlfriend as Men Only’s nominal editor-in-chief. Richmond became a household name as her self-penned articles documented her travels through the UK “road-testing men”. Other magazines, including Club International, Mayfair and Escort, would also be published by Raymond, following a format of porn presented as glossy Sunday supplement.
In 1974 Raymond divorced his wife, Jean, and she received a settlement of £250,000 after he admitted his affair. With Richmond established as his star attraction, Raymond bankrolled her first major film, Exposé (1975), a menacing sex drama full of blood, gore, surgical gloves and gratuitous lesbian love scenes. The film later enjoyed the distinction of being the only British entry on the infamous “video nasty” list compiled by the Department of Public Prosecutions.
Raymond stumped up the cash for two further Richmond romps – Hardcore and Let’s Get Laid! The former headlined the relaunch of Soho’s Moulin Cinema in Great Windmill Street in April 1977. A beaming Richmond posed for reporters outside the cinema with a selection of bananas and cucumbers. But no amount of fruity publicity could save the movie and Hardcore flopped when up against the sex comedy Come Play with Me, financed by Raymond’s porn-baron rival, David Sullivan.
Known for his long straggly hair, sharp suits and bevy of glamorous companions, Raymond became a larger-than-life figure in the West End but his association with pornography never afforded him the mainstream respectability he desired. In 1980 he returned to movie production with Paul Raymond’s Erotica, arguably the most expensive vanity project of his career.
Budgeted at £1.5m, the film starred the French starlet Brigitte Lahaie as a young investigative reporter seducing half of London. If cinema-goers weren’t put off by a sex scene set in Smithfield meat market then they certainly were by Raymond’s woeful attempts at acting. The Daily Express critic reported that it was impossible to hear the film’s dialogue over the sound of cinema seats snapping up as disillusioned patrons fled the auditoria. Raymond didn’t appear on screen again and, hurt by the commercial failure of the film, slunk back to relative anonymity running his publishing and property empire.
Raymond had started buying up huge swathes of Soho during the 1970s after a crackdown on unlicensed sex shops and peep-show premises by the Obscene Publications Squad. Again, after the property crash of the late 1980s, he started buying more freeholds. By the end of the following decade, he owned nearly 60 of the 87 acres in the district and had practically cornered the market in legitimate sex-shop outlets.
As Raymond neared retirement age he began grooming his daughter to take over the family business. Unfortunately, the flamboyant and undeniably talented Debbie Raymond, a former dancer at the Revuebar, had an addictive personality and died in 1992 after an accidental drug overdose, aged just 36. It was a tragedy from which Raymond never fully recovered and he became increasingly reclusive, rarely leaving his suite next door to the Ritz. His stranglehold on the business further loosened through the decade and, in 2000, his GP-brother Philip became director of the sex and mortar empire.
The Raymond Organisation also gave up the day-to-day running of the Revuebar and sold its name to the choreographer Gerard Simi. In February 2004, the business ceased operating after Simi claimed he could not afford the £270,000-a-year rent. Raymond’s iconic building is now occupied by a gay cabaret bar.
Simon Sheridan
Beneath the slight stammer and gentlemanly manners, Paul Raymond was often ruthless with rivals, former associates and even his own sons, writes Pierre Perrone.
I worked for Paul Raymond Publications for over 20 years, editing a French magazine and then the flagship title Men Only as well. When I joined the company in 1986, there was much to admire about Raymond’s instincts for tapping into Britain’s then unsated appetite for erotica. As a publisher, his eye for the smallest of details was still there, and he was prepared to back his hunches that France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada would buy a French-language equivalent of his classier magazine.
When the French government took a dim view of what Club Pour Hommes was trying to do – taking coals back to Newcastle in an “ooh la la” fashion, basically – and threatened to confiscate the title in the mid-1980s, Raymond hired a commanding law firm and threatened to take the case to the European courts before deciding that a change of title to Club Edition Française for France might just do the trick and enable us to carry on publishing, which we did successfully for many years.
However, after his beloved daughter Debbie died in 1992 there was a definite darkening of mood. Gone were the publicity stunts over the unlikely purchase of a football club. Gone was the dabbling in theatre and film production which had made Fiona Richmond a household name. Raymond became an elusive figure, more interested in building his property empire than broadening his range of publications.
By the time the publishing side of his many companies eventually decided to invest in DVD cover-mounts and a stand-alone website, Raymond’s magazines were caught between an increasingly liberal attitude to the import of hardcore material from continental Europe, the proliferation of x-rated internet content and lads’ mags like Loaded, Zoo and Nuts. By the mid 2000s, the market was shrinking, with Men Only and Club International selling a 10th of what they had in their heyday, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to offload the publishing company.
After many years editing the French titles, I was also asked to edit concurrently Men Only, a magazine which had gone through five editors in the previous 10 years. When this experiment did not achieve the desired sales spike, I was taken off the English title and continued editing the French title, which I had launched 20 years before with Debbie. Shortly afterwards, I was made redundant. I had to take the company to court in order to secure a fair settlement. The tactics used by some of Paul Raymond’s directors throughout the redundancy process and the subsequent shenanigans of his legal team “beggared belief”, said the judge, who ruled in my favour.
Paul Raymond may still have had the appetite for a legal fight but his showman attributes had long deserted him. The man who had once bought a mind-reading act, and said his younger self “was a total spiv”, had reverted to type.
Geoffrey Anthony Quinn (Paul Raymond), entrepreneur, publisher and property magnate: born Liverpool 15 November 1925; married 1951 Jean Bradley (one son, and one daughter deceased; marriage dissolved 1974), (one son with Noreen O’Horan); died London 2 March 2008.
* * * * *
Paul Raymond heirs to clean up in Soho
Girls in line for huge property estate, say Ben Laurance and Martin Tomkinson, London Times (March 2008)
THEY are young: Fawn James is 22 and her sister, India Rose James, is just 16. They live in Home Counties comfort, sharing a house with their father near Woking in Surrey.
And these two lively, attractive sisters sit on a fortune - from an empire that was built on the profits of pornography, and which controls swathes of prime London property.
The death last weekend of Paul Raymond - the man whose wealth was built with magazines such as Men Only and Club International - means one of Britain’s most successful private property firms is about to pass to a new generation. India Rose and Fawn - or, at least, trusts set up for their benefit - find themselves controlling property worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
For Raymond, porn was certainly profitable. He made his first money by launching Raymond’s Revue Bar in 1957, taking over the Whitehall Theatre in the 1960s and the Windmill Theatre in 1974. But the launch of Men Only in 1971 was to prove the first building block of a publishing empire that would finance his property investments. In 1993, Paul Raymond Publications made a pretax profit of £15m on turnover of £25m. By 1998, profits were £21.5m on turnover of £28m - an astonishing margin that others at the respectable end of publishing could only dream about.
And amazingly, even with the growth of the internet, giving easy, cheap availability to much more hardcore material, Raymond’s publishing profits continued to roll in after the turn of the millennium. Accounts show that in 2005, Paul Raymond Publications turned a profit of £8m on sales of £16.7m. About 15% of the business was in America, and there were offshoots in Belgium, France and Poland.
Porn was not the source of Raymond’s serious wealth, though. His masterstroke was to realise in the 1970s that Soho, in the heart of central London, was cheap. It was dirty, run-down and sleazy. Corruption in Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad meant it had become well-nigh impossible to obtain obscenity convictions in the courts. Soho was packed with hardcore film clubs. Westminster council appeared powerless to do anything about it.
Raymond would turn up at property auctions wearing one of his trademark fur coats and quietly bought up a string of properties. To begin with, he profited from the sleaze. Take one example: a Maltese-born Soho businessman, Charlie Grech, was paying Raymond £3,000 a week to rent a tiny cinema - and that was in 1980.
But whatever happened to Soho, Raymond couldn’t lose. Either he kept on collecting high rents from fly-by-night operators in the sex industry or Soho lifted itself into respectability.
Cannily, Raymond avoided being drawn into the corruption that blighted the area. He dealt with gangsters, but he wasn’t one himself.
He had been fined £5,000 in 1961 for “running a disorderly house” - the quaint legal description of the girlie show at his Revue Bar, but he avoided bribing policemen.
In the end, Soho was smartened up. Westminster council used the 1982 Local Government Act to clamp down on the porn merchants, introducing a strict licensing system for “adult” book shops and cinema clubs. The area was gradually transformed into a centre of the burgeoning industries of advertising, television and magazine publishers, eager to be based in the heart of London’s West End.
By 1987, Raymond was collecting rents from 136 properties in the area. He was a tough and unsentimental landlord. He jacked up his rents. Pizza Express founder Peter Boizot was the tenant of a restaurant that had been charged £90,000 a year. Raymond demanded £400,000. Boizot ruefully reflected: “I used to think Paul Raymond’s god was sex; now I know it’s money.” In the end, the rent was fixed at £235,000.
Raymond’s other strength was that he had sufficient cash to avoid relying on outside finance. There were no external directors to satisfy, no outside shareholders clamouring for dividends or City advisers trying to push him into their pet schemes.
The most recent figures for Raymond’s property business, Soho Estates Holdings, show just how conservatively it has been run. The 2006 accounts show investment properties valued at £290m - but this figure was struck in 2003, so doesn’t take into account the rise in property values over the past five years. The company had £27m in cash. And - strikingly for a property company - bank borrowings of zero.
Over the year, the company paid out dividends of only £1.3m - chicken-feed compared with the tens of millions paid in previous years. The highest-paid director - presumably Raymond himself - received £386,000.
In his declining years, as he whiled away his days drinking brandy in his flat near the Ritz in central London, Raymond became increasingly isolated. He had been devastated by the death of his daughter Debbie in 1992 and ventured out less and less. But sporadically, he would take sums out of his businesses in the form of dividends. He took £15m from Paul Raymond Publications in 2005 - equivalent to almost twice pretax profits.
Earlier - before a corporate reorganisation four years ago - one of his companies, Paul Raymond Organisation, had paid him a dividend of £2m in 2001, a further £2m in 2002 and £4.6m in 2003. During the 1990s, most of his payouts were taken from Soho Estates.
Since Raymond’s death, it has been widely suggested that he was probably worth about £650m. Some believe the real figure was far more. He was always rumoured to have assets overseas, but there is no public record of them. “His empire is worth billions, not the £650m that has been reported,” said one former associate.
Raymond was widely disliked by tenants whose rents were pushed up to what he called “commercial levels”.
Colleagues and rivals in the property industry respected him, however. David Coffer, former chairman of Earls Court & Olym-pia, said: “I never forget the time that he came to bid for the Rialto cinema, which we were selling. His driver brought him to our office and he gave me his offer and I opened it up, and it was simply a cheque for £14.25m. We exchanged contracts in 48 hours. He was always the epitome of professionalism in his property dealings, precise and prompt in his terms.
“He was charming, a very interesting raconteur. His knowledge of the West End and its characters stretching back six decades was almost unrivalled.”
Raymond also commanded respect from people in the sex industry. Oscar Owide, owner of lap-dancing clubs in Soho, said: “I always found him very nice and charming. He was always impeccably dressed - he always wore a tie and had lovely shirts and suits. He was always very correct. In spite of all you read, I found him very generous.”
But Raymond was defensive about his status as Soho’s biggest landlord. On one occasion, a newspaper said that West End property developer Laurence Kirschel had more space in Soho than Raymond. Kirschel received a phone call from Raymond, who said simply: “That may be true, Laurence, but you’re missing the point: I have no loans.”
So why did Raymond have such an aversion to debt? One reason is that in the 1970s he became involved in a development that failed. “The banks crucified him for it,” said John Warden, a Raymond lieutenant for more than two decades.
But also, more than 80% of the shares in Soho Property Holdings are controlled by trusts, understood to be for the benefit of Raymond’s granddaughters Fawn and India Rose. In an interview some years ago, Warden indicated that the terms of the trusts made it hard for Soho Property Holdings to gear itself up. At that stage, in 2000, the two girls, then 15 and 11, received about £1m a year. Their father John James - widower of Raymond’s daughter Debbie, who died after bingeing on drink and drugs in 1992 - runs Soho Estates Holdings and is a trustee overseeing his daughters’ inheritance.
Warden said that some of the proceeds from Soho Estates Holdings would go to the girls when they reached adulthood; more would be handed out during their lifetimes.
What is not clear is whether Fawn and India Rose are still the main beneficiaries of Raymond’s will. Their mother Debbie was not Raymond’s only child - and towards the end of his life, the tycoon is understood to have had a rapprochement with his son Howard having previously become estranged (see below). Howard or his two children may benefit.
At 16, India Rose is too young to have any involvement with Raymond’s empire. But since September, Fawn has been a director of six Raymond companies.
Neither Fawn nor India Rose will struggle financially. From the seediness of Raymond’s Revue Bar to the respectability of property investment – their grandfather’s business acumen has left them wealthy.
OTHER HEIRS WHO MAY BE IN LINE FOR RAYMOND FORTUNE
PAUL RAYMOND was devastated by the death of his daughter Debbie from a lethal cocktail of drink and drugs in 1992. She was being groomed to take over the Raymond empire and it is thought most of the tycoon’s wealth has been left to her daughters, Fawn and India Rose. Their father, John James, has been running Raymond’s property company, Soho Estates Holdings, on a day-to-day basis since 1998.
But Raymond has two other children. The first is Derry McCarthy, the son of Raymond’s stage partner in an end-of-the-pier act that he performed in his youth. Derry was born in 1950.
Raymond’s other child is Howard, Debbie’s brother.
Howard Raymond is now 48, and is himself a director of two property companies, Provincial & Metropolitan Property and Provincial & Metropolitan Property Investment Company. He is also a director of a small leisure company, 1861, whose registered office was until recently given as Worksop Town Football Club.
The companies have not been notably successful and, in 2006, the Revenue obtained a winding-up order against Provincial & Metropolitan Property Investments Ltd. This order has recently been rescinded.
For much of Howard’s adult life, he was estranged from his father, but there had been periods of rapprochement. In 1979, one of Paul Raymond’s companies bought a house for Howard. In the 1980s, the two men fell out, when Howard had problems with drugs. “I was going for it in the mid1980s. Everyone was – seven grammes of coke a day was great,” Howard once told a reporter.
But, according to Howard, in recent years he managed to rebuild his relationship with his father. Paul’s companies once lent Howard’s businesses £166,500 in the early part of this decade, according to company accounts.
Howard was present at Paul Raymond’s deathbed. He said that recently he saw his father once a week or once a fortnight.
Whether the reconciliation was warm enough for Paul to leave money to Howard or his two offspring, Cheyenne and Boston, will be determined only when details of Raymond’s will emerge.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
One-Hundred-Eighty-Two
F O U N D . . . Brad’s last letter to Jenn
Dear Jenn
I know the counselor said we shouldn’t contact each other during our “cooling off” period, but i couldn’t wait anymore. The day you left, i swore I’d never talk to you again. But that was just the wounded little boy in me talking. Still, i never wanted to be the first one to make contact. In my fantasies, it was always you who would come crawling back to me. I guess my pride needed that. But now i see that my pride’s cost me a lot of things. I’m tired of pretending i don’t miss you. I don’t care about looking bad anymore. I don’t care who makes the first move as long as one of us does. Maybe it’s time we let our hearts speak as loudly as our hurt. And this is what my heart says: “There’s no one like you, Jenn.” I look for u in the eyes and breasts of every woman i see , but they’re not you. They’re not even close.
Two weeks ago i met this girl at the gym and brought her home with me. I don’t say this to hurt you , but just to illustrate the depth of my desperation. She was young ,maybe 19, with one of those perfect bodies that only youth and mabye a childhood spent ice skating can give you. I mean , just a perfect body. Tits like you wouldn’t believe and an ass that just wouldn’t quit. Every man’s dream , right? But as i sat on the couch being blown by this stunner, i thought, look at the stuff we’ve made important in our lives. It’s all so superficial. What does a perfect body mean? Does it make her better in bed? Well, in this case , yes, but you see what i’m getting at. Does it make her a better person? Does she have a better heart than my 30 something Jenn? I doubt it. And i’d never really thought of that before. I don’t know , maybe i’m just growing up a little.
Later, after i tossed her about a half a pint of throat yogurt, i found myself thinking, “Why do i feel so drained and empty?” It wasn’t just her flawless technique ore her slutty, shameless hunger, but something else. Some nagging feeling of loss. Why did it feel so incomplete? And then it hit me. It didn’t feel the same because you weren’t there to watch. Do you know what i mean? Nothing feels the same without you. Jenn, i’m just going crazy without you. And everything i do just reminds me of you.
Do you remember Carol, that single mom we met at Acapulco last year? Well , she dropped by last week with a pan of lasagna. She said she figured i wasn’t eating right without a woman around. I didn’t know what she meant till later, but that’s not the real story. Anyway, we had a few glasses of wine ane the next thing you know, we’re banging away in our old bedroom. And this tart’s a total monster in the sack. She’s giving me everything, you know, like a real woman does when she’s not hung up about her weight or her career and whether the neighbours can hear us. And all of a sudden, she spots that tilting mirror on your grandmother’s old vanity. So she puts it on the floor and we straddle it, right , so we can watch ourselves. And it’s totally hot, but it makes me sad , too. Cause i can’t help thinking , “why didn’t Jenn ever put the mirror on the floor?” We’ve had this old vanity for what, 2 years, and we never used it as a sex toy.
Saturday i took a trip to Paris. I bumped into Angelina Jolie. She’s got a pretty good head on her shoulders and she’s been a real friend to me during this painful time. She’s given me lots of good advice about you and about women in general. She’s pulling for us to get back together, Jenn, she really is. So we’re doing jell-0-shots in a hot bubble bath and talking about happier times. Here’s the hottest woman in the world and all i can do is think how she looked like you when u were younger. And that just about makes me cry. And then it turns out Angelina’s really into the whole anal thing, that gets me thinking about how many times i pressured you about trying it and how that probably fueled some of the bitterness between us. But, do you see how even when i’m thrusting inside the pretties cinnamon ring in the world all i can do is think of you? It’s true, Jenn. In your heart you must know it
Don’t you think we could start over? Just wipe out all the grievances away and start fresh.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Sunday, March 23, 2008
One-Hundred-Eighty-One
YOU’RE MY EVERYTHING...
Do you remember when was the first time...
I got you in my camera?
How sexy was the pictures sequence?
Do you remember...
How erotic they still are today?
You really were something that day...
You are my everything...
Today...
* * * * *
( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
One-Hundred-Eighty
Delirium tremendus...
She got the courage of execute her sexual fantasy...
She dreamed about making sex with two guys...
At the same time...
And getting possessed by them…
At the same time...
She did it last night, with nearly forty years old, at last…
It was the case to say:
DELIRIUM TREMENDUS!...
* * * * *
( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Thursday, March 06, 2008
One-Hundred-Seventy-Nine
All you need is love…
Our life experience is like a chest of drawers…
Each drawer a personal achievement objective…
Having some full up doesn’t make you up on those who are empty…
You feel incomplete with those drawers empty…
You look for what you need the most…
Most of the people in the net use the sex drawer but not love’s one…
All you need is love…
* * * * *
( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Sunday, March 02, 2008
One-Hundred-Seventy-Eight
My jet set girl…
I never thought…
That a so sophisticated and fine girl like you…
Would fuck so damn good…
So much better than many depraved girls I met in my sexual past experiences…
I’ll keep you in my mind…
My jet set girl…
* * * * *
( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Thursday, February 28, 2008
One-Hundred-Seventy-Seven
Jacqueline Gold: the woman who reinvented Ann Summers \
Jacqueline Gold is the woman who turned her daddy’s chain of sleazy Ann Summers sex shops into a multi-million-pound ‘retail experience’. But beyond the boardroom there have been far harder battles - like facing up to years of sex abuse. She talks to Lucy Cavendish, of the London Telegraph (February 2008)
For such a teeny tiny person, 47-year-old Jacqueline Gold carries a lot of weight on her shoulders. She may look like a little doll with her side-tied chignon and tight-fitting Alexander McQueen dress, but during the course of our conversation she coughs nervously and, at one point, tears come to her eyes. I hadn’t expected this.
Jacqueline Gold: ‘I’m a fighter. I had to fight for any grain of self-confidence. I had to fight to raise my head and get my voice heard’
When I walk into her suite in the Covent Garden Hotel in London, where she stays three nights a week - she lives in a converted barn in Kent - she looks so perky and businesslike that I forget why I am here. For a moment I gaze at her plunging neckline, tanned cleavage, heavily made-up eyes, false eyelashes and French-polished nails, and then I remember who she is. She is Jacqueline Gold, the chief executive of the Ann Summers sex shops. In fact, they’re not really sex shops any more - they still sell cheeky underwear and vibrators but, as Gold points out to me, Ann Summers is now ‘a retail experience’.
However, we are here to discuss not Ann Summers, but Gold’s autobiography. Called A Woman’s Courage, it originally came out last year with a picture of a besuited Gold on the cover. It is currently being reissued as Please Let It Stop and now has Gold as a child - cute, sweet, dimpled - on the jacket. It’s doesn’t take a genius to work out why. Books such as Please, Daddy, No and A Child Called ‘It’ sell, and this book is up there with the best of them. It is, essentially, the story of Gold’s life and the abuse she suffered as a young girl at the hands of her stepfather. ‘The publishers wanted to change the title,’ she says. ‘I am sure that’s for commercial reasons, but for me personally it was because I thought the original cover made it look like a business book whereas, in fact, it’s a personal story.’
It starts with the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and the man who was to become her stepfather, whom she calls John, moving in to her family home in Kent, with her mother, herself, and her younger sister, Vanessa. ‘John was a truly horrible man,’ she says. ‘He was very frightening and domineering. My mother was obviously dominated by him.’ Gold’s mother, Beryl, does not come across very well. ‘I don’t even remember her hugging me or Vanessa,’ she says. ‘In many ways I still can’t fathom her out. She couldn’t bear being on her own, which is why she let John move in. In many ways, I think she would have been happy living her life in the middle of a field with a bloke and nothing else. She was scared of everything, really.’
The sexual abuse started when Gold was 12. ‘I almost knew it was going to happen,’ she says. ‘His behaviour was always inappropriate.’ Most shockingly, she believes her mother not only knew about it but, in many ways, condoned it. Gold describes how her mother would tell her to go and sit on her stepfather’s lap to cheer him up if he was in a bad mood. ‘It was awful,’ says Gold. ‘I was terrified of my mother going out. She’d say she was going to the shops and I’d beg to go with her but she’d make me stay at home with John on my own. She’d do anything to keep him happy.’
The abuse stopped when one day, by then nearly 15, Gold told her stepfather he wasn’t to touch her again, and he didn’t. ‘I wish I’d known earlier on,’ she says. ‘But the thing with being abused is that the abuser makes you feel powerless. Somehow it’s your fault, so it takes a tremendous amount of courage to tell them to stop.’
Jacqueline Gold certainly has courage and yet, despite all that and her stratospheric success, her book is full of depression, divorce, failed IVF attempts, unfaithful partners, a boyfriend who gave her a date-rape drug, and more. Gold’s life seems to consist of one long list of disasters. But how can this be? This is the person who is regularly voted businesswoman of the year, who now has 136 Ann Summers high-street shops, who opened a shop in Dublin and faced down threats from the IRA. She even went to court in order to allow vacancies at Ann Summers to be advertised in Job Centres as, previously, they had been banned. And she has met the Queen.
‘I’m a fighter,’ says Gold. ‘I’ve always had to fight. I had to fight for any grain of self-confidence. At school I was bullied because I had no friends. My mother wouldn’t let people come back to our house so I was very lonely. I did have Vanessa but she’s seven years younger than me. So I had to fight to raise my head up and get my voice heard. When I started the business, I took on all these doubters. I have kept on going and it is that which has made me successful.’
Why is her personal life such a disaster then? ‘Oh, God, don’t ask me advice on relationships!’ she says. ‘I can help anyone professionally but when it comes to how you make a relationship work, I’m hopeless.’ But she seems so brave - it was pretty brave to publish the book - and she’s a risk-taker. ‘I do take risks,’ she says, ‘but I think I’m going to have to change to find the right man. I always feel I have to do everything. When I was with my husband, Tony, I wanted him to love me so much that I organised everything. I was very young when we married - only 20 - and I saw him and our life together as my get-out clause. My mother would never have let me leave home unless I was getting married. But I did love him so I did the cooking and the cleaning and the washing-up.’
She says her marriage started to go wrong when she realised that being a housewife wasn’t the way she wanted to live her life. ‘After about a year I got resentful,’ she says. ‘I now realise it wasn’t Tony’s fault. I didn’t give him a chance to help out and he got used to having everything done for him. But I knew I wanted a different life.’
To find this life she went to work for her father, David Gold, who, along with his brother Ralph, owned Gold Star Publications, which produced top-shelf magazines. They had also, however, started up some Ann Summers shops and, pretty soon, Gold was put on work experience in that section of the business. ‘Back then the Ann Summers shops were all pretty sleazy,’ she says. ‘They were full of what men wanted women to wear. I remember this nightdress. It was called the Royale and it was long and sky blue with a split up the side. It was made of very scratchy nylon and horrible lace. My idea was to make lingerie that women wanted.’
It all started in 1981 when Gold went to a Pippa Dee party - a sort of Tupperware party but with racy lingerie instead. ‘I couldn’t believe it!’ she says. ‘The women were having a great time and they were snapping up the goods. I thought, “Why not do Ann Summers parties?“‘
She employed two of the Pippa Dee girls to front the business and recruit party organisers, put together a business plan and showed it to her father. ‘He said I had to present it to the board, so I did. It was very difficult. They were all quite hard to convince. One of them said, “But women don’t like sex.“‘
In the end, the board approved it and Ann Summers has been proving that women do like sex ever since. Does Gold feel that part of the reason it has been so successful is because attitudes towards sex have changed dramatically over the past two decades? ‘Well, I don’t want to show off,’ she says, ‘but I hope we were important in advancing that change. I have always thought that women should be able to enjoy their sexuality despite whatever opposition there has been to it.’
And yet there is something a bit dated about Ann Summers. After all, over the past decade so many upmarket lingerie and sex-toys-for-women shops, with their horsehair whips and silken blindfolds, have opened up that no one blinks an eye any more. Does Gold feel that Ann Summers is now at risk of being left behind by the likes of Coco de Mer and Agent Provocateur? ‘I think we are dealing with a different market,’ she says. ‘They all have shops in exclusive areas of London. I have them in shopping centres all over Britain.’
She is changing the shops, though, she says. Her vision for the future is to encourage women to have the aforementioned ‘retail experience’ so that they will, hopefully, remain in the shops longer. ‘We’re going for a boudoir feel,’ she says. ‘We’ll have peepholes in the changing rooms so that their partners can see them dress and undress. A bit titillating, really, but something that makes it an experience for a couple.’
This leads us back to talking about her own men. After her husband, Tony, there was unfaithful Ben, who used drugs, then Paul, who was serially unfaithful, then Dave, who spiked her drink, and then, finally, Dan, the much younger boyfriend who wanted to have a family.
Their relationship became irreparably damaged when it turned out they could not have children. ‘We had three failed attempts at IVF,’ says Gold. ‘It was very hard. All I can say to anyone thinking of having IVF is you have to be prepared for how difficult it all is, not just emotionally but physically as well. I’ve succeeded so well in my work life that I couldn’t believe how I was failing in my personal life.’
She says she and Dan tried their hardest to stay together but the relationship wasn’t working and they split up on New Year’s Day 2006. ‘I don’t want to end up like my mother,’ she says. ‘I’m not desperate to be with a man - any man - no matter what.’
This brings us back to her stepfather. By now, at the mention of his name, Gold is coughing a lot. She tells me it’s a nervous reaction. ‘Actually, that’s why I wanted to do the book,’ she says. ‘For years I didn’t tell anyone about the abuse. I still had to face him. I geared myself up mentally for every family event when I knew he’d be there, and it was torture. I developed this stress cough then.’ She worked this out only after she went for counselling. ‘I became very depressed during the whole IVF thing,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t realised I was, but then after Dan and I separated I realised I had no energy. It was an immense effort just to get up and feed the cats.’
In the end, after pestering her doctor, she went to The Priory for psychoanalysis. ‘I was diagnosed with depression and went on antidepressants and had counselling.’ It was during this time that she finally talked about what her stepfather had done to her. By this time she had told her sister and Dan, who were both supportive, but Gold says she felt a lot better once she accepted some professional help.
What’s interesting about this is that, although her mother died in 2003, John is still alive. Has she heard from him? ‘No,’ she says shuddering.
She says she has really struggled with the fact that, since the book came out, some relatives have come forward to say things like, ‘We thought something was up.’ ‘I don’t understand why they didn’t say anything,’ she says, now tearful. ‘One person told me that they had said something to my mother and that she’d brushed it off.’
She sits silently for a while. ‘I am not trying to make excuses for my mother but, actually, by the time she died, I felt sad for her in many ways. She was a very difficult and negative woman. The book has been very cathartic for me.’
Then she looks at her watch and jumps up suddenly. ‘Got to go,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a very important meeting in a minute.’ She smooths down her dress, pats her bun and goes off to greet her next investors as if she doesn’t have a care in all the world.
‘Please Let It Stop’ (Ebury, £6.99), by Jacqueline Gold, is available from Telegraph Books Direct (books.telegraph.co.uk; 0870 428 4115).
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Saturday, February 23, 2008
One-Hundred-Seventy-Six
A final farewell to sex
‘The most obvious thing about moving into my 70s was the disappearance of what was the most important thing in life: I ceased to be a sexual being.’ Diana Athill, 90, reflects on the affair that carried her into old age
from the The Guardian (December 2007)
All through my 60s, I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My 70th birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my 71st did change it. Being “over 70” is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up.
I have lived long enough to have witnessed great changes in being old as far as women are concerned. In my grandmothers’ day, a woman over 70 adopted what almost amounted to a uniform. If she was a widow, she wore black or grey clothes that disregarded fashion; and even if she still had a husband, her garments went a bit drab and shapeless, making it clear that this person no longer attempted to be attractive. My paternal grandmother, who was the older of the two, wore floor-length black garments to her dying day, and a little confection of black velvet and lace on her head, a “cap” such as Victorian ladies wore. (Judging by the skimpiness of my own hair in old age, which comes from her side of the family, she had good reason for adhering to that particular fashion.)
Nowadays an old woman would obviously be daft if she dressed like a teenager, but I have a freedom of choice undreamed of by my grandmothers. Even more than clothes, cosmetics have made age look, and therefore feel, less old. Having inherited a good skin from my mother, I still receive compliments for it, but nowadays I know that at least half its “goodness” is thanks to Max Factor.
Appearance is important to old women, not because we suppose it will impress other people, but because of what we ourselves see when we look in a mirror. It is unlikely that anyone else will notice that the nose on an old face is red and shiny or the broken veins on its cheeks are visible, but its owner certainly will, and will equally certainly feel a lift in her spirits when this depressing sight is remedied. I know for sure that I both feel and behave younger than my grandmothers.
In spite of this, however, the most obvious thing about moving into my 70s was the disappearance of what used to be the most important thing in life: I might not look, or even feel, all that old, but I had ceased to be a sexual being, a condition that had gone through several stages and had not always been a happy one, but that had always seemed central to my existence.
It had started when I was four or five with the announcement that I was going to marry John Sherbroke. He was a little boy who lived a few houses up from us. I can’t remember John at all, except for his name, and that he was my Intended. His successor is clearer in my memory because of his beautiful, sad brown eyes and the glamour bestowed on him by his great age - he was Denis, the gardener’s boy at Hall Farm where we had gone to live under the wing of my mother’s parents. I doubt whether I ever spoke to Denis, but I did, with great daring, spit on his head out of the lavatory window when he was working the pump by the back door. He was followed by loves with whom I did communicate - indeed, I and my brother spent much time with them: Jack and Wilfred, sons of the head cowman at the farm, remembered even more clearly than Denis because of the amount of time I put into trying to decide which I loved best.
Those two were the first beneficiaries of my romantic phase, in which love took the form of daydreams. The object of my passion would be placed in a situation of great danger - his house on fire, perhaps, or he was being swept away in a flood - and I would rescue him, the dream’s climax being that when he recovered consciousness, he would open his eyes to find me leaning over him, my cloud of black hair enveloping him like a cloak (I was a skinny child with a mouse-coloured bob, but I confidently expected to improve with time).
Then, at 15, I fell in love as an adult. It was with Paul (I called him that in Instead Of A Letter [a previous memoir], so he can keep the name here), who came during one of his Oxford vacations to earn a bit of money by coaching my brother for an exam. He dispelled daydreams by being the real thing, but he did not dispel romance. I loved, I assumed love equalled marriage, and I was certain that once I was married to the man I loved, I would be faithful to him for the rest of my life. I did have the occasional, fleeting daydream about my beautiful white wedding, but to embroider my romanticism beyond that, once I was old enough to hold Paul’s attention and we became engaged, was not easy, partly because of how everyone went on at me about how poor we would be and how I would have to learn to be a good housewife. Paul, who had gone into the RAF, was still only a pilot-officer whose pay was £400 a year, which seemed to him and me enough to have a good time on, whatever “they” said, but still the warnings were sobering; though less so than something that happened about six months after we announced our engagement.
We went, with his sister, to a party with a group of rather louche friends of Paul’s. One of them had brought along an extravagantly sexy-looking girl who made a dead set at Paul the moment she saw him, and to my incredulous dismay he responded. After an extremely uncomfortable hour or two, he shovelled the task of seeing me home on to his embarrassed sister, and he ended the evening, I was sure, in bed with that girl. During the following two weeks I heard nothing from him, and felt too crushed to write or call myself, and when he let me know that he was about to fly down from Grantham to spend the weekend at Oxford with me, as he often did, I was more anxious than relieved.
During the Saturday evening we drank too much and he collapsed into almost tearful apology. He had behaved horribly, he was so ashamed of himself he couldn’t bear it, I must, must believe that it had meant absolutely nothing, that girl had turned out to be a ghastly bore. (What a slip-up! Suppose she hadn’t been?) Never again would he do anything like that because I was and always would be the only woman he really loved, and so on and so on. It was better than silence had been, but it was not good.
Next morning we took a taxi to “our” pub in Appleton and dismissed it before we got there in order to dispel our headaches by walking the last mile. Paul seemed relaxed, scanning the fields on either side of the muddy lane for fieldfares; I was dismally silent, mulling over his apology. It had meant nothing: yes, I accepted that. But his declaration that such a thing would never happen again: no, that I was unable to believe. I don’t remember being as shocked as I ought to have been at his doing it under my nose, thus betraying a really gross indifference to my feelings. I had a humble opinion of my own importance, carefully fostered by a family that considered vanity a serious sin. What I knew I was thinking about was how this flightiness of Paul’s must be handled. I remember thinking that once we were married I would have to learn to be really clever. “It will be all right for quite a time,” I thought. “He will go on coming back to me while we are like we are now. But when I get old - when I’m 30” - and I saw a flash of my own face, anxious and wrinkled under grey hair - “then it will be dangerous, then he could fall in love with one of them.” Would I learn to be clever enough? I’d have to. The whole of that day remained dismal, but not for a moment did it occur to me that I might not want to marry him, and soon our relationship was restored to its usual enjoyable state.
So I don’t think there was ever a time in my adult life when I didn’t realise that men were quite likely to be technically unfaithful to women, although it was not until Paul had finally jilted me that I saw that women, too, could be cheered up by sex without love. I “recovered” from Paul in that I fell in love again, twice, and heavily, but both times it felt “fatal”, something impossible to avoid - and anyway, I longed for it - but which was bound to bring pain.
The first time it was with a married man much older than myself, and I never envisaged him leaving his wife for me. No doubt if he had suggested it I would have accepted, but I admired him far too much to expect it: I was his wartime fling, or folly (there’s nothing like a whiff of death in the air to intensify desire, the essence of life), while she was his good and blameless wife who had just become the mother of their first child, so leaving her would prove him cruel and irresponsible, which I was sure he was not. I would not have loved him so much if he had been.
My second after-Paul love was available, even eligible, but his very eligibility seemed to make him too good to be true. He liked me a lot. For a time he almost thought he was in love with me, but he never quite was and I sensed almost from the beginning that it was going to end in tears, whereupon I plunged in deeper and deeper. And it did end in tears, both of us weeping as we walked up and down Wigmore Street on our last evening together. With masochistic abandon, I loved him even more for his courage in admitting the situation and sparing me vain hopes. (And in fact such courage is something to be grateful for, because a broken heart mends much faster from a conclusive blow than it does from slow strangulation. Believe me! Mine experienced both.)
That, for me, was the end of romantic love. What followed, until I met Barry Reckord in my 44th year, was a series of sometimes very brief, sometimes sustained affairs, always amiable (two of them very much so), almost always cheering-up, and none of them going deep enough to hurt. During those years, if a man wanted to marry me, as three of them did, I felt what Groucho Marx felt about a club willing to accept him: disdain. I tried to believe it was something more rational, but it wasn’t. Several of the painless affairs involved other people’s husbands, but I never felt guilty because the last thing I intended or hoped for was damage to anyone’s marriage. If a wife ever found out - and as far as I know that never happened - it would have been from her husband’s carelessness, not mine.
Loyalty is not a favourite virtue of mine. When spouses are concerned, it seems to me that kindness and consideration should be the key words, not loyalty, and sexual infidelity does not necessarily wipe them out.
Fidelity in the sense of keeping one’s word I respect, but I think it tiresome that it is tied so tightly in people’s minds to the idea of sex. The belief that a wife owes absolute fidelity to her husband has deep and tangled roots, being based not only on a man’s need to know himself to be the father of his wife’s child, but also on the even deeper, darker feeling that man owns woman, God having made her for his convenience. And woman’s anxious clamour for her husband’s fidelity springs from the same primitive root: she feels it to be necessary proof of her value.
There are some things, sexual infidelities among them, that do no harm if they remain unknown - or, for that matter, are known and accepted. I have only to ask myself which I would choose, if forced to do so, between the extreme belief that a whole family’s honour is stained by an unfaithful wife unless she is killed, and the attitude often attributed to the French, that however far from admirable sexual infidelity is, it is perfectly acceptable if conducted properly. Vive la France!
This attitude I shared, and still share, with Barry, with whom I eventually settled down into an extraordinarily happy loving friendship, which remained at its best for about eight years until it began to be affected not by emotional complications, but by Time. This was not a sudden event, but its early stage, which took place during my mid- and late 50s, was followed by a reprieve, which made it possible to ignore its significance. Gradually I had become aware that my interest in, and therefore my physical response to, making love with my dear habitual companion was dwindling: familiarity had made the touch of his hand feel so like the touch of my own that it no longer conveyed a thrill. Looking back, I wonder why I never talked about this with him, because I didn’t. I simply started to fake. Probably this was because the thought of “working at” the problem together struck me as tedious and absurd: if something that had always worked naturally now didn’t work - well, first you hoped that faking it would bring it back, which sometimes it did, and when that stopped happening, you accepted that it was over.
That acceptance was sad. Indeed, I was forced into it at a time when our household was invaded by a ruthless and remarkably succulent blonde in her mid-20s and he fell into bed with her. There was one sleepless night of real sorrow, but only one night. What I mourned during that painful night was not the loss of my loving old friend who was still there, and still is, but the loss of youth: “What she has, God rot her, I no longer have and will never, never have again.” A belated recognition, up against which I had come with a horrid crunch. But very soon another voice began to sound in my head, which made more sense. “Look,” it said, “you know quite well that you have stopped wanting him in your bed, it’s months since you enjoyed it, so what are you moaning about? Of course you have lost youth, you have moved on and stopped wanting what youth wants.” And that was the end of that stage.
Soon afterwards came the reprieve, when I found, to my amusement and pleasure, that novelty could restore sex. The last man in my life as a sexual being, who accompanied me over the frontier between late middle age and being old, was Sam, who was born in Grenada in the Caribbean. Whether he had come to England in order to volunteer for the war, or his arrival just happened to coincide with its outbreak, I don’t know. He joined the RAF Regiment, in which he worked as a clerk, and in his own time came to know black elders of that day who were concerned with establishing the black man’s rights in Britain. He gained a good deal of experience in broadcasting at this time, which served him well later, when he moved on to Ghana and soon attracted the attention of Kwame Nkrumah, who put him in charge of his government’s public relations. He remained Nkrumah’s trusted servant and friend until the coup that brought the Redeemer down, simultaneously putting an end to Sam’s palmy days in Africa.
Because he was known in Accra as an honest man who took no bribes, he escaped prison, but he had to leave the country at four days’ notice, taking nothing but his clothes. When I met him, all he had left from those days was a beautiful camel-hair overcoat with a sable collar, and a gold watch on a handsome bracelet given him by Haile Selassie.
Being an impressive-looking man, very tall, with pleasant manners, easy-going but sensible, he had no trouble getting a job almost at once in the British Government’s organisation concerned with race relations. He was just settling into it when we met at a party at which there were several old African hands of one sort and another. My partner at André Deutsch had kick-started a publishing firm in Nigeria during the 60s and we had some African writers on our list, so the newly independent countries, and race relations, were part of the landscape in which I existed at that time.
In addition to that, in the course of my relationship with Barry, which had by then lasted about eight years, I had come to feel more at home with black men than with white. Barry, having been educated by English schoolmasters at his Jamaican school and by English dons at Cambridge, used sometimes to say that his fellow Jamaicans saw him as “a small, square, brown Englishman”, but he was black enough to have received his share of insults from white men; and one can’t identify with someone of whom that is true without feeling more like him than like his insulters.
The first black person with whom I was ever in the same room was an African undergraduate at a party during my first term at Oxford in 1936. Dancing was going on, and I was deeply relieved at his not asking me for a dance. I knew that if he asked I would have to say yes, and I hadn’t the faintest idea why the prospect seemed so appalling. It was just something that would have appalled my parents, so it appalled me. But I am glad to say that when, a week later, a friend said, “I think I would be sick if a black man touched me” I was shocked. I don’t remember thinking about it in the intervening days, but somehow I had taken the first tiny step of seeing that my reaction to the idea of dancing with that man had been disgusting.
After that I must gradually have given the matter enough thought to get my head straight about it, because when I next came in touch with black people, which didn’t happen for some years, I was able to see them as individuals. The first time I was kissed by a black man - a friendly peck at the end of a taxi ride from one pub to another - I did note it as an occasion, because the fact that it was just like being kissed by anyone else proved me right in a satisfactory way: I was still feeling pleased with myself for not having racist feelings. But by the time I met Barry, although I had never had occasion to make love with a black man, I had met many black people and worked with some of them, so clicking with him at a party and soon afterwards going to bed with him didn’t seem particularly noteworthy except for being much more fun than the last such encounter I’d had, because this time we liked each other so well.
So when at our first meeting Sam made a stately swoop, I was pleased: it was both funny and revivifying to be seen as attractive by this agreeable and sexy person, just after concluding that my love-making days were over. Soon after that he moved into a flat near Putney Bridge, and for the next seven years I spent a night with him there about once a week. We rarely did anything together except make ourselves a pleasant little supper and go to bed, because we had very little in common apart from liking sex. Sam had an old-fashioned sense of what was proper, but I am sure it had never entered his head to think of sex in connection with guilt. As well as The Pickwick Papers, The Bab Ballads and several booklets about the Rosicrucians and the Christian Scientists, the Kama Sutra was among the books permanently entangled in his bedclothes. We also shared painful feet, which was almost as important as liking sex, because when you start feeling your age it is comforting to be with someone in the same condition. You recognise it in each other, but there is no need to go on about it. We never mentioned our feet, just kicked off our shoes as soon as we could.
To be more serious, the really important thing we had in common was that neither of us had any wish to fall in love or to become responsible for someone else’s peace of mind. We didn’t even need to see a great deal of each other. We knew that we would give each other no trouble. So what did we give each other? For Sam, the first, but not most enduring, attraction was that I was white and well bred. Sam had nothing against black women (except his wife, whom he saw as a burden imposed on him by his mother before he’d developed the sense to understand what a mistake it was); but since he had come to England at the end of the 30s all his most important women had been white.
He had been bettering himself ever since his mother urged him to work hard at school, and claiming a white woman for yourself would, alas, be recognised by most black men from his background, at that time, as part of that process. This was a fact that gave older and/or not particularly glamorous white women an edge with black men that they hadn’t got for white ones, which is evidently deplorable, although I can’t help being grateful for it.
Then it turned out that physically I was right for him, and that I could be good company. So I was satisfying as a status symbol, agreeable as a companion in so far as he wanted one, and was able and willing to play along with him in a way he enjoyed. He obviously felt he need look no further.
Sam’s chief attraction to me was that he wanted me: to be urgently wanted at a time when I no longer expected it cheered me up and brought me alive again - no small gift. Also, I am curious. His background and the whole course of his life, being so different from mine, seemed interesting even when he was being dull. Even when I was thinking, “What an old noodle!” I liked him, and what I liked best was the sense I picked up of the boy he used to be.
He had the calm self-confidence and general benevolence bestowed by a secure and happy childhood. Sam’s father owned the patch of land on which they lived, but it was a property too small to support a family, so he had to find work in Trinidad, and then in Venezuela. It was the mother who ran the home, and she gave her son unquestioned precedence over her two daughters.
“We didn’t know it,” Sam told me, “but the food we ate was just what everyone says nowadays is the healthiest: fish, fruit and vegetables, we were never short of those.” They lived right on the sea, so escaped the common West Indian overdependence on root vegetables. “And all that air and exercise. I thought nothing of running five miles to school and five miles back.” They rode, too. Most people kept a horse (this surprised me) and if a boy wanted to get somewhere in a hurry, he could jump on to some neighbour’s bare-backed nag without having to ask. And they swam as much as they ran.
A good-looking, even-tempered boy, good at all the local pastimes, crammed with healthy food and plunged by his fond mother into herb baths of which she knew the secrets, Sam was evidently secure among his friends as a leader. When he recalled those happy times, he seemed to bring glimpses of them into the room - a whiff of nutmeg-scented sea-breeze, very endearing.
His mother lost him, of course - that wife was her big mistake. He begot two children on her, then could stand it no longer, left for England and his mother never saw him again.
He did not consider himself a bad son, husband or father for having left. He had kept in touch, sent money, seen to it that his children were educated: he had done what was proper.And his wife… Thirty-five years after he left Grenada, he returned for the first time, for a three-week visit at the invitation of the prime minister. He didn’t let his wife know he was coming, but after the first week it occurred to him to drop in on her. “So what happened?” I asked. He shook his head, clicked his tongue, and said slowly and disapprovingly: “That’s a very cantankerous woman.” Our relationship ended gently, the gaps between our meetings becoming gradually longer. The last time we met, after an especially long one (so long that, without regret, I had thought it final), he was slower than usual and seemed abstracted and tired, but not ill. Although we had agreed already that our affair was over, he said, “What about coming to bed?” but I could see he was relieved when I said no. “The trouble with me,” I said, “is that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. My body has gone against it.” He didn’t say, “Mine, too”, he wouldn’t want to go as far as that, but he did say: “I know, the body does go against things. You can’t do anything about that.” And the next thing I heard about him, not very much later, was that he had died suddenly of a heart attack.
You can’t miss someone grievously if you haven’t seen them or wanted to see them for several months and they had touched only a comparatively small corner of your life, but after his death Sam became more vivid in my mind than many of my more important dead. I saw him with photographic clarity - still can. His gestures, his expressions, the way he walked and sat, his clothes. The seven years of him played through my head with the immediacy of a newsreel: all we said, all we did; perhaps the pattern of our meetings was so repetitive that I couldn’t help learning him by heart. I particularly remember the feel of him. His skin was smooth and always seemed to be cool and dry, a pleasant, healthy skin, and his smell was pleasant and healthy. I feel him lying beside me after making love, both of us on our backs, hands linked, arms and legs touching in a friendly way. His physical presence is so clear, even now, that it is almost like a haunt (an amiable one).
Perhaps because he carried into the beginning of my old age something belonging to younger days, he is still alive in my head, and I am glad of it. Dear Sam.
· This is an edited extract from Somewhere Towards The End, by Diana Athill, to be published next month by Granta at £12.99.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Sunday, February 17, 2008
One-Hundred-Seventy-Five
W H I P C R A F T
Handcrafted Perfection
Philosophy
WHIPCRAFTs philosophy is to combine classic craftsmanship and beautiful materials to create aesthetic pleasure. The tools are no longer just accessories to play, but an integral part of it. Visual pleasure and physical ecstasy is the ultimate goal – where individual and tool merge into one.
If it were only a matter of function, then the design, in principal, would be unimportant. Human beings, however, have always been attracted by beautiful things that function well because the pleasure of use is thereby increased. The uncompromising quest for the sublime has pushed back the limits of attainability time after time. This is also the philosophy underlying WHIPCRAFT – a classic example of applied art – the point where utility merges with art.
Whips have probably been part of mankind’s history almost as long as we have walked the earth, though the historical sources cannot tell us exactly when humans first wielded them. The first whips were presumably just branches used for the control of domestic animals in the later Stone Age. Since then, and with great ingenuity, various types of whips have been specifically designed for corporal punishment, and the act of punishment is, in principal, still the ultimate purpose of the whip. However, nowadays in civilized societies the whip normally serves only two purposes: either to command obedience from animals - usually horses, or as an erotic seasoning. The whip is strongly symbolic, no matter how one chooses to employ it, and should of course only be used by consenting adults.
The voluntary desire to feel the caress of the whip is richly portrayed in literature. Homage is paid to erotic pleasure by means of the whip in the authorship of the Marquis de Sade and in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs and of course The Story of “O”, to name but a few of the more striking examples.
WHIPCRAFT is just the latest example of this positive development.
History
WHIPCRAFT originated from personal experience, and the first experiments into constructing the ultimate whip were carried out back in 1986. The first official whip was not, however, presented until November 2003 at the erotic fair Kinky Copenhagen.
The artist behind the designs is sculptor Troels Jespersen, who specializes in wood and is known for using tools and techniques which combine the very best of every type of woodwork. He is renowned for the enthusiasm and burning passion he brings to his work and for his strongly uncompromising spirit. Each work of art must be something special – whether he chops away at a tree-trunk weighing over a ton or delicately fashions the handle of a whip.
It all began in 1985 when Troels first came into contact with the SM scene and joined SMil – the Danish organization for sadomasochists – and for which he later became vice-president. Over the years he has collaborated on art exhibitions, worked in SM counseling, been a member of the SMIL magazine’s editorial board, and as its editor. This involvement in sexual politics also extended to other branches of the media; Troels was a broadcaster on the Copenhagen based Radio Rosa in 1988 and spent several months in London doing research into fetish and SM subcultures. He has also made several television appearances talking about SM and featured in a documentary film about domination. He has also participated in a number of educational films on the subject.
WHIPCRAFT’s web site opened 19th March 2005, and the same day an exhibition of whips was shown at a Manifest fetish party at the premises of SMil, Copenhagen. In 2005 and 2006 WHIPCRAFT also exhibited at the German Fetish Fair in Berlin and at the Skin Two Expo in London.
Today WHIPCRAFT works out of a full-facility workshop house, converted from a redundant pump station, located in the harbour close to the Copenhagen city center.
With a dedication to the tradition of fine whipmaking and aesthetic performance, WHIPCRAFT is your exclusive acteur in the field of sublime whipcrafting.
All items are hand made in our workshop from start to finish, using the very best materials available.
Design & materials
Every item from WHIPCRAFT is hand made from original designs.
Handles are fashioned from classical varieties of wood as well as precious varieties such as ebony and the perhaps lesser known wengé. For many of our models we also use high-gloss lacquer finishing with clear top-coating.
Lashes may be made of hand-cut leather, durable stitched leather, latex or specially treated hair.
The secret behind a whip from WHIPCRAFT is the respect for the laws of physics. Basically, the heavier an object is, the more energy is required to move it. Wind resistance is a factor. WHIPCRAFT whips are light in weight and constructed to minimize wind resistance. Their special design makes them possible to use without gathering the lash in the hand and in use the whip always describes a precise arc, making it easy to control. Moreover, the handle design ensures that any size of hand grips well.
This unique construction is the result of a close study of the laws of physics and their influence on function. Weight must be concentrated in the lash, as a heavy handle takes a great amount of strength to wield and this makes the requisite control almost impossible. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that a light handle is the answer in itself, as it must also keep the lash in check, therefore length is essential.
The result is precise control and direction – not to mention pleasure.
* * * * *
Crazy Whip Appeal
from 3xL: Lust, Love, Latex (December 2007)
Are you stuck thinking about what to give that special dom/me in your life that has everything this holiday season? Well master craftsman, Troels Jespersen of Whipcraft, has just the perfect thing for you, the ultimate tool of corporal punishment, a beautiful, hand made, state of the art flogger. These are not just any old torture toy I’m talking about here, Whipcraft delivers the Rolls Royce of punishment tools, sleek, sexy works of art that will please the eye along with the flesh. Of particular interest to latex fetishists might be the “Dominator DeSade,” flogger which features a rubber coated, hardwood handle as well as latex lashes (ouch!). Available online since 2005, Jespersen’s incredible creations have drawn rave responses at the Manifest Party in Copenhagen, The German Fetish Ball and the Skin Two Expo in London over recent years and it’s easy to see why!
“WHIPCRAFTs philosophy is to combine classic craftsmanship and beautiful materials to create aesthetic pleasure. The tools are no longer just accessories to play, but an integral part of it. Visual pleasure and physical ecstasy is the ultimate goal ñ where individual and tool merge into one.”
Reknowned for his fine woodwork, the Danish artist’s passion for the lash was born back in 1985, when he was introduced to his local BDSM scene, joining Danish SM organization SMil and later becoming the group’s vice-president. Over the years, Jespersen’s passion for the darker side of eros has brought him into the realm of sexual politics, where he has given lectures, radio broadcasts and television appearances educating and pontificating on his favorite subjects.
Want to be the envy of all the other masters and mistresses at your upcoming holiday party? Bend your sub over and open up a can of designer whupass on the dear girl or boy with a Whipcraft!
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
One-Hundred-Seventy-Four
SaSi
The new toy from Je Joue
SaSi is the ultimate, customisable vibrator. Using the latest Sensual Intelligence technology, SaSi is uniquely intuitive. It learns and remembers exactly what you like, giving you the perfect, intense sensual massage every time.
Fantastic for partner foreplay or solo massage
Splashproof, non-porous and bacteria resilient
Removable covers made from phthalate and latex-free medical grade silicone, using the newly patented SMITEN membrane technology
Fully customisable with fascias available in different colours.
Rechargeable
Beautifully packaged ideal as a gift
* * * * *
‘Sensual Intelligence’ Gives New SaSi Sex Toy an Erotic Edge
by Regina Lynn, Sex Drive, Wired
The SaSi personal massager uses “sensual intelligence” to figure out how best to stimulate you. Image: Courtesy of Je Joue
Given the number of smart toys infiltrating the rest of our lives, it puzzles me that it has taken so long for sexual devices to incorporate “sensual intelligence” into their designs.
But we’re finally starting to see sexual appliances that can compete in coolness with The Sharper Image’s kids-of-all-ages catalog, although not necessarily with the Roomba robotic vacuum.
British company Je Joue launched a new product, the SaSi, at the Adult Entertainment Expo last week in Las Vegas. If the original Je Joue oral-sex simulator is like a 60-GB iPod with multiple playlists you design yourself, the SaSi is like an iPod Nano with an automated Most Popular playlist.
The SaSi takes the best of the Je Joue—soft surface material, firm massage finger, sensual movements—and simplifies the control so all you have to do is press a button to say “yay” or “nay” to a particular movement. It also has buttons to control speed and to add or remove vibration.
It’s the first intimate device I’ve seen that remembers your preferences—and then deliberately steps outside those boundaries from time to time, to see what else you might like.
“When we started out with the research for SaSi, we wanted to find the ultimate movement that every woman loved,” says technical
developer Duncan Turner, 28, who I spoke with at the product launch party. “We did a lot of testing with different women and discovered that although there are some similarities, everyone is different, particularly in the combination of movements that they enjoy most.”
When the original Je Joue came out in 2006, I thought everyone would be clamoring for one, because frankly it’s the closest thing to cunnilingus you can get from a robot. I thought that anyone who didn’t want to bother with the whole “create your own motion pattern” aspect would still be pleased with the 10 on-board programs.
It turns out that the very fact that you can program and customize the Je Joue’s patterns of movement, and even exchange those patterns in a forum with other users, makes it sound too complicated for a lot of people.
Not because we’re too stupid to figure out the interface, but because we don’t generally script out solo sex play ahead of time. Not to this degree, anyway.
The tech is easy. The genius is making it work seamlessly with sex.
“Pre-programming movements is challenging for users as it requires precognitive thought for the experience,” Turner explains.
“With a real partner, one would rarely sit down prior to foreplay and explain exactly what they wanted at what point. But communication during the experience is key.”
I admit that even though my Je Joue is my favorite mechanical buddy in terms of how it feels, I don’t reach for it nearly as often as a regular vibrator simply because I’m usually in a hurry.
We can talk big about adult entertainment as a catalyst for sexual exploration, awareness and intimacy, and we’d be right. But let’s face it: Oftentimes, we reach for sexual devices because we want something other than our own hands, but we’re not always planning on a long lovemaking session with ourselves.
We also wonder why we’d spend a couple hundred bucks on a portable love machine when a $40 back massager can take us over the edge in two minutes.
The SaSi team—which also included co-developer Chris Glaister, Je Joue founder Geoff Hollington, three female researchers and many volunteer testers and focus groups—designed the device to have a big enough repertoire of motions that the embedded software has something to work with. After five or so uses, the rudimentary artificial intelligence remembers what you like and puts together a pleasurable, personalized pattern of movements based on your preferences.
“As products become able to do more than simply vibrate or oscillate, the biggest challenge comes with how to interface with the hardware to make sure it does what you want it to do,” Turner says.
As for why adult-product designers aren’t bombarding us with smarter handhelds like this, Turner believes that until very recently, “sex toys have not had enough variation of experience to warrant this sort of intelligence.”
As we become more familiar and comfortable with enhancing our sexual experience through technology, we’ll see more sensitive gadgets that respond to our arousal and that more accurately simulate human touch.
“We (at Je Joue) have always concentrated on using movement, which is a more natural and intuitive form of stimulation than just vibration,” Turner says. “Movement will undoubtedly become more and more prevalent in sexual devices, particularly with the advancement of motor control in robotics and the commercialization of smart materials such as shape-memory alloy and electrostatic polymer actuators.”
The SaSi is opening the door to smarter sexual devices, even as the recent media blitz around David Levy’s book Love + Sex With Robots plants the idea of robotic sex enhancement in our minds.
Of course, the SaSi is far from a love droid. Its success, and the reason it has all the sex writers panting for review units, lies in its simplicity; it may not affect your daily life as much as that Roomba, for example, but it’s even easier to use. And there’s no reason you can’t put both devices to work for you simultaneously.
Thanks to Je Joue’s eager young product developers in London, you can now lie back and think of England even when you’re by yourself.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Number One-Hundred-Seventy-Three
Alison Goldfrapp: ethereal girl
Alison Goldfrapp has influenced Madonna, resuscitated glam fashion and performed live shows wearing hotpants and a horse’s tail - quite some going for a shy, mysterious former convent girl. Interview by Richard Benson. Photographs by Serge Leblon
Back in the autumn of 2005, Madonna invited Alison Goldfrapp, former convent-school girl, two-million-record-selling singer and extremely reluctant celebrity, to a party. A few months earlier, Madonna had been photographed taking Supernature, Alison’s then current album, to a Pilates class; at the party, she clasped Alison’s hand, and told her she just loved it. Not long afterwards, Alison was reading a magazine and came across a picture of her recent host wearing a sexy outfit with a jaunty military wedge cap. It was almost identical to one that Alison - who is known for her original stage costumes - had been filmed and photographed in while promoting Supernature.
Alison Goldfrapp: ‘Other people have to do things I would no way do, like do eight billion interviews a day, and smile constantly whatever they feel’
‘I thought, “No - it’s Madonna! Why would she…”’ Alison says, bemused, when asked about her influence on Madonna and, indeed, several other global superstars. ‘I don’t quite believe it. It’s flattering, you know, but… too weird.’ Alison Goldfrapp’s speech tends to trail off embarrassedly when you ask her questions like this, but they are justified - at one point Madonna’s shift in music and style prompted music industry people to refer to her as ‘Oldfrapp’. Kylie Minogue, Gwen Stefani and Rachel Stevens have also been heavily influenced by Alison Goldfrapp; Chris Martin asked Goldfrapp to tour with Coldplay; the reason Kate Moss currently looks like a glam-rock star is that fashion designers’ spring collections were inspired by the glam-rock-ish look that Alison invented. And, in 2006, she received fashion’s unofficial seal of approval when Mario Testino photographed her for Vogue.
Alison, a fine-art graduate in her late thirties, is the vocalist in a musical duo called, confusingly, Goldfrapp; her collaborator, Will Gregory, is a classically trained musician in his early forties. They may sound unlikely pop star material, but they have a dozen top-40 singles, three US dance chart number ones, three platinum albums and Mercury, Grammy and Brit nominations to their name. The success is all the more remarkable given the nature of their music, which mixes influences ranging from Ennio Morricone film soundtracks to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s experimental electronic music to the 1970s pop of Marc Bolan and the New Seekers. Alison’s vocals, simultaneously breathy and steely (imagine Kate Bush singing the Cabaret soundtrack in a disco-ish style, and it being good) complement lyrics (all by her) that somehow tease sexiness and romance from unusual, even sinister subjects. Among their biggest hits are songs - both party staples - referencing Baudelaire (Ooh La La) and experiments on rats’ nervous systems (Strict Machine). You can imagine Madonna hearing it for the first time and feeling about 105 years old.
We meet at brunchtime at Julie’s restaurant in Notting Hill. Alison, who is passing through London en route from her cottage in Bath to Paris, arrives on time with two armfuls of shopping bags. She is petite at 5ft 2in, with big eyes under a mop of natural blond ringlets, and a kindly but slightly self-conscious air that at first makes her averse to eye-contact. Her clothes are fashionable but low key - black drainpipe jeans, white trainers, white T-shirt, grey lambswool cardigan, a bit of chunky silver jewellery, and light make-up with heavy mascara. The main thing you notice is her hair; when she is uncomfortable answering a question, she pulls her large wool scarf up over her chin and tugs at a ringlet, as if it were attached to the bit of brain containing the answer.
She finds interviews difficult because a troubled adolescence (she will not give her age, but in 2006 she admitted to being 37) left her convinced no one would ever be ‘remotely interested’ in her, and with a complex about talking to people. When Goldfrapp’s debut album, Felt Mountain, was released in 2000, her first interviews literally gave her nightmares, and although she has got better at it, she still dislikes the self-promotion. It is the main reason why she doesn’t mind other people following her lead and making more money than she might do. ‘They have to do so many things I would no way do, like tour for a ridiculous amount of time, and do eight billion interviews a day, and they have to smile constantly whatever they feel, and I couldn’t do that. Also they can smile and sing at the same time. I always think that’s really clever, that grinning and singing. I can’t do it.’
This seems strange, given the theatricality of her live shows. Alison effectively approaches Goldfrapp as an art project, with the artwork, concerts and videos (their first in 2000, for the single Lovely Head, was directed by the Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans) being representations of the world evoked by the music. Designed and sometimes made by Alison, the costumes worn by her and her dancers have recently included horses’ heads made out of mirror fragments, horses’ tails attached to hotpants, dog masks and very British combinations of functional (uniforms, boiler suits, leotards) and camp (feather boas, bright colours, everything worn rather tight).
This is all really about personas, of course. For the last two albums, Alison created a highly sexual, vampy character that got somewhat out of control when people began accusing her of being sexually aggressive, or asking if she did the hoovering in her stilettos. ‘I felt slightly uncomfortable that people wanted me to be that oversexual image all the time. I was slightly naive in that I didn’t think people would take it that seriously or be so interested in what I was like offstage.’ It was also high maintenance. On the last tour she ended up having her make-up done for four hours and thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ And then people would be poking and tucking bits in - ‘You know,’ she says, as if I might have been poked and tucked by make-up people on my way here, ‘when you just think f*** off. People constantly asking about your shoes. You don’t feel in control. I’m bored with it now, and I want to concentrate on the music more.’
Apart from anything else, she is not over-keen on the anxiety induced by having to look sexy in public, and can see why so many women in music crack up. ‘You’re looking at photos of yourself all the time, and talking about yourself in interviews all day,’ she says, tugging on a ringlet. ‘Then you go into a newsagent and there are all those magazines saying which women look “right” and which ones look “wrong” - it’s horrible. I find it depressing. But you can’t help but be made very aware of how you look. It’s not a healthy thing to do, really.’
For Goldfrapp’s new album, Seventh Tree, she has eschewed hyper-glamour for a more gentle, folky, rural mood. The music is perhaps more varied and innovative than on the previous three albums, but the melodies are if anything stronger; at least one song, Happiness, is guaranteed to have crowds singing with their arms aloft at festivals all summer. ‘I was always interested in doing something that was very English and also very European,’ she says. ‘But for this one, we talked a lot about Americana, dappled sunlight… the way that a lot of music and films from the 1970s had a combination of bleakness and incredible optimism.’
Goldfrapp on stage: in vamp mode, 2004
Bleakness and optimism come up quite a lot in the Goldfrapp world. A couple of times Alison talks about the blend of naivety and darkness that characterises the English countryside, and that she finds attractively depicted in British horror films from the 1960s and 70s. The video for the new single, A&E, featuring Alison wearing a pure white dress while men who seem to be made of leaves ritualistically dance around her, is deliberately reminiscent of the original Wicker Man. She remembers such films from her childhood, but she also has mixed personal memories of rural England. ‘The countryside was dark and weird. If you’ve grown up in London it’s hard to see that. In some ways it is still idyllic - I had a lot of freedom, running around in the woods - but it is also strange, with a lot of unsavoury characters.’
Alison Goldfrapp was born in the London suburb of Enfield, the youngest of six children - some had already left home by the time she was born, and the next child up was a sister 10 years her senior. Her father, Nick, was an ‘eccentric, romantic’ man from an upper-middle-class family who had been forced to join the Army as an officer straight from school. When he married Alison’s mother, a working-class nurse called Isabella but known as Pat, the family ostracised him for years. He left the Army and ended up working for the Spastics Society and English Heritage, writing and painting in his spare time - Alison thinks she takes after him.
The Goldfrapps - she says it is their real name - moved around a lot, living in cities and on farms and ‘lots of different places’, before moving to Alton in Hampshire when Alison was small. Jane Austen had lived nearby (Alison didn’t read the books but liked visiting the old house), although the story that local children are really brought up on is that of eight-year-old Fanny Adams, notoriously murdered in 1867. The Goldfrapps’ house overlooked the meadow where she was killed.
Her parents led an unusual, bohemian life. Pat, who looked after people with mental illnesses, would invite former patients to the house to visit. And sometimes, on a night with a full moon, Nick would take the family down to the sea and get them to jump in (’I did wonder what we were doing, but I quite enjoyed it’ ), and other nights would usher them into the woods, explaining to them what all the sounds were that they could hear. Her father also played classical music to the children so they could discuss how it made them feel; Alison had a ‘eureka moment’ at the age of eight while listening to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Her siblings were sent to private schools and went on to unconventional careers (Alison will not discuss them, but says they are all close), and so for Alison, Nick and Pat decided to try a convent school - Pat was/is a churchgoing Christian, and felt it would be a good start. Little Alison loved it, saying as many Hail Marys as possible, and spending all her pocket money on blue enamelled Madonnas. Most importantly, she discovered her strong soprano voice, and told everyone she wanted to be a professional singer. ‘It [singing] just felt good. I was awful at everything else.’
Things took a bad turn when, at the age of 12, Alison failed