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| Among the Sierra Nevada, 1868, Albert Bierstadt, via Wikipedia. |
Re comments, I feel compelled to tell the story of my meeting with Malcolm Forbes, although it is completely unimportant.
It's from when I was the editor of a glossy magazine (actually more than one) in Singapore, a moment that was briefly brought up for me this morning when Scott Simon interviewed Jo Hamya, author of a new novel, Three Rooms, whose protagonist is a copy editor at a fancy London magazine, even as the author happens to have been a copy editor at The Tatler, a once-distinguished periodical (early 18th century I think) where she may have had experiences somewhat like those of her heroine:
after a passage where she'd visited her flatmate's parents' house, and there was this face wash in their bathroom that she uses to wash her face with after she's been crying. To her, it's a very sort of aspirational thing to have this home which she owns that she can fill with, you know, things to offer to guests to comfort them and ease them. And so at that point in the book, she skips out on a few days' worth of lunch to buy this face wash, I suppose to remind herself of what it is she's trying to attain rather mistakenly because the blueprint she's working off of is, you know, a kind of England that existed under Tony Blair, a kind of New Labour movement that was very preoccupied with social mobility. And she, of course, is working through a digitized gig economy that has been under conservative rule for a decade. And social mobility is not the byword.
