EMMA COWING: I need a Mr Prue Leith in my life to spare me hell of High Street shops
I’ve always rather liked Dame Prue Leith. She’s snazzy and no-nonsense, the sort who tells it like it is and seems like she’d be a good giggle over a gin and tonic.
She’s quite the over-sharer too. In 2016, at 76, she married her husband John Playfair, and in recent years has treated us to various anecdotes about their life together (including the fact that for years she didn’t let him live with her).
This week she was at it again, revealing that Playfair has an online shopping addiction… buying clothes for her.
Dame Prue Leith
‘He is really good at it. It’s mostly shirts and tops and things,’ she said. ‘Often, we’ll be going to bed and he’ll say, “Before you take your bra and pants off”, and then we have this little parade...’
Gosh. Lucky Prue. Not least because, as she admits herself: ‘I hate shopping but I love clothes.’
Amen. I can’t be the only woman cheering along with this sentiment. In fact, I’d say there are a fair few of us who feel conflicted about facing the High Street these days.
Many women shop online now for clothes, despite the risks. The top might not fit. On you, the dress may not look remotely the way it does on the 22-year-old size 6 model. That skirt is actually 3in shorter on the knee than you’d realised.
And yet we persist. Why? Because ‘going to the shops’ is no longer quite the treat it once was. City centres are gloomier than they used to be. A lot of brands have shut up shop completely, while many streets are haunted by To Let signs and boarded-up windows.
Stock is not as high as it once was (probably because so much of it is on the website) and the chances are that even if you do find something you like, they’ll have every size except yours.
Found something you want to try on? Well, you may have to chance it in a gender-neutral changing room, or run the gauntlet of a terrifying changing room capo who insists on counting each item while suspiciously eying your every move. Or you may find, as I did recently when asking to try on a dress in a train station-based outlet, that there’s no changing room at all.
Some of us try the hybrid option. I was in John Lewis this week (which appears to have grown, Tardis-like, with precious little signage to keep you right) and found myself wandering aimlessly through endless aisles of unappealing clothes, fruitlessly searching down the one magic gem I’d already seen online, determined to get a look at it in all its cottony glory before handing over my cash.
I think many of us do this thinking – often erroneously – that we’re saving time, when all we’re doing is giving ourselves a headache.
Off we trot to the website of some label or other, identify something that ‘looks nice on the model’, then spend hours searching for it in vain in the shop.
It’s an exhausting and often demoralising business. Is it any wonder that so many of us simply give up and stick to the trusty dress we bought aeons ago?
What we all need then is a Mr Prue Leith in our lives. A man with a good eye who will do our shopping for us, present us with various outfits then tell us what looks good.
Is it really too much to ask?
A Swift hand up the pop charts
Hurrah. Taylor Swift has a new album out. Although it only seems like five minutes since the last one was released (where does she get the time between world tours and glamorous football boyfriends?), this one contains an entertaining nod to Scotland.
Taylor Swift gives a nod to the classic Blue Nile song The Downtown Lights in her new album
In a break-up ballad entitled Guilty As Sin?, Swift claims that every time she listens to Glasgow band The Blue Nile’s song The Downtown Lights it makes her cry.
Many Scots of a certain age will know exactly what she means: released in 1989, The Downtown Lights is indeed a classic.
Such is Swift’s power, expect it to zoom straight up the starts.
It is not so long ago that splashing out £6 on a bottle of wine meant getting something reasonable. Not Chateau Lafite, I grant you, but still. Something better than engine oil.
Alas, the latest rise in minimum pricing on alcohol in Scotland will mean that a bottle of wine won’t be sold for less than £6.09.
Sigh. Nanny Scotland strikes again.
Branch closures do our banks no credit at all
So the Royal Bank of Scotland is shedding one in five of its branches, with 18 of the 86 in Scotland earmarked for closure within months.
RBS should stop treating their customers with contempt
I know I’m a broken record on this but, yet again, it feels like a decision that will impinge on the elderly more than any other sector of society. Never mind the inconvenience to those in rural areas, many of whom already must travel miles to do any in-person banking.
I do wish these companies, many of them once great institutions (the Post Office springs inevitably to mind), would stop treating their customers with such contempt.
Fascinated to learn nutritionists are telling Scots they should take vitamin D daily to combat the lack of sunlight we receive naturally, as it strengthens the bones.
I’ve been taking vitamin D for years, mainly because I used to get sore ears if I slept on my side (I know not why), and vitamin D vastly improved the situation.
Of course, what we’d all prefer is actual sunshine. Oh, how tiresome this wet, cold weather is. Forget April showers, this is more of an April deluge. At this rate, by the time spring actually arrives in Scotland, it’ll be winter again.
Farcical tale of failure
So, a scaled-down version of this year’s Aye Write festival in Glasgow will go ahead, but only thanks to the charitable foundation set up by late EuroMillions winner Colin Weir, which stepped in after funding was turned down by Creative Scotland.
I struggle to understand how paying for a literary festival in Scotland’s biggest city could be anything other than a no-brainer.
A poor decision on Creative Scotland’s part.
Fast food as A&E slows to woeful pace
It's the sort of tale that makes your jaw drop. Patients are having to wait so long stuck in ambulances outside an A&E ward at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary that they need to order takeaway pizzas.
One former NHS Grampian health worker told of a case where a patient was taken to hospital by paramedics at 6pm and still hadn’t been admitted by 1.30am, so ordered pizza from a late-night takeaway.
It would be laughable if it weren’t so horrendous. Because what this story really highlights is the appalling state of A&E waiting times.
That even those being brought to hospital by ambulance are having to wait an unacceptable amount of time before being seen, and treated.
The figures bear it out: in the week starting April 8, 10 per cent of the 620 crews waited more than 2 hours 55 minutes. It’s an unacceptable state of affairs. For goodness sake, just treat them.
