Tyne O'Connell's Blog

Savile Row – Saluting the magnificent sheep farmers of Britain.

My heart swelled with pride at the thrill of these sheep farmers bringing their sheep for a day trip to London to meet with the tailors of Savile Row – evoking as they do ballrooms & the larkiness of the endless cascading #Vintage-Champagne-fountains of my youth, & the floppy-haired boys fencing in chandaliered ballrooms.

Dapper Gentlemen in White-Tie who always stood when a Lady entered or departed a room & were perfectly happy to remove their jackets, roll up their double-cuff Edes and Ravenscroft sleeves in order to assist in birthing a lamb or foal mid-ball only to return to toast the lambs birth in champagne & swing from chandeliers & dance till dawn.

Armed with a slash of red-lipstick, tiara wearing ballgowns in bed & looking at life through rose-tinted glasses I’ve managed to endure the unrelenting-pain, daily vomiting & thinning hair; that hollow sense of helplessness which makes me a burden to the very people I want to support. It may not be practical vomming in a ballgown, but I have no other occasion to wear them, so why not? The key to surviving a brain tumour is living, not just in the moment but vicariously through the happiness & adventures of those one loves & immersing oneself in literature & art.

I’m grateful for my faith & I’ve survived by the loss of freedoms this bally tumour’s stripped away & focused on what it couldn’t touch; my love for my children, a pretty rose-bud tea-cup, a rose, a ring, a memory of a bluebell pathway that I once skipped along as a child, for these thoughts lead to hope & hope has been my only friend at times.

My life is very small: a bed, a vomit-bowl & a table crammed with medications & medical accoutrements, but I’m surrounded by pictures of my family & my pretty bibelots & paintings. I am blessed.

I live through my children & the bright vitality of all those I love.

It is very easy to be virtuous when your life hangs in the balance, so I do rather relish naughty gossip…sadly others shy away from sharing naughtiness with invalids. It is a great injustice.

Ultimately the triumph of my tumour’s fought in daily skirmishes with sick bowls, medications that take more than they give, EKGs, chemicals & catheters. But it’s a battlefield nevertheless, littered with sacrifices & fear like any other.

The Victory of the invalid comes in living the Glorious Life Vicarious!

Life is precious & in those dark nights of the soul, I have excavated all the treasure chests of memories buried throughout the larkier decades of my life. Mining my Mayfair past for precious memories & moments that seemed so ubiquitous & banal at the time, but as I rediscover my sons first tooth, first words, first pictures, my daughter’s first ballet lesson, a day feeding the ducks in St James’s Park all now sparkle with the radiance & glory of the Koh-i-Noor Diamond

My Granny told me; “A man is only as valuable as the women who speak for him.”

Raising the profile, position, & access to opportunity for all women across the globe is the most pressing issue facing us all.

In financial terms alone, women account for over 50% of the the world’s talent & yet bigotry & petulance, prevent men utilising female talent for fear of being undermined.

It is time to pack up the Male-Hegemony.

It is time to topple it.

And what better time in history do it?

As the daughter of a gentleman, the mother of two gentleman, Granny to a gentleman & wife to two gentlemen & friends to numerous gentlemen I have a vested interested in seeing women unshackled.

While one half of society is in servitude to another, none of us are free.

And so I make my Call to Charms!

For while we deny women options we are only utilising 48% of our talent & running on 48% of our potential – it’s irrational & cloth-headed.

Bigotry cannot be permitted to reign if we are to leave the world a better place than we found it.

Unleash the talent of all & we all prosper.

A man is only as valuable as the women who speak for him.

http://bit.ly/MayfairLarks

Please Forgive my inexcusable grammar, syntax & punctuation. My brain tumour blinds me with pain & photophobia, so at times I rely on Siri.

Poor grammar is the thin edge of the wedge, swiftly followed by bad-manners & before you know it lapses in proprietary.

I do not wish to live see the day when a lady enters the room & the men are too slothful or wicked to stand. “For when a man is stripped of gentleness he is but an oxen worthy only to pull the plough the fields.” And whilst I do love a nicely ploughed field & an oxen, I prefer my men urbane & gentle xx Tyne

“The irony of the ephemeral magical moment – such as a perfect after-noon, we wish would never end – is that it stays with us forever; buried amongst all the other treasures we have secreted away over the years. Sacred memories that never fade, but sparkle gently & eternally like rose-cut diamonds in the mine of our past.
Now the glamour of my Proustian cork-lined room lifestyle has palled, I live on memories such as these. The sparkling eternity of my salad days.” Tyne O’Connell

When the Dark-Nights-Of-The-Soul close in & possibilities & hope evaporate & the pain takes over, I grapple for memories like this to sustain me. If only the Great Men of Science could feed me this soul-nourishment through my IV-Drip along with the morphine. For while there are books to read, hens to delight in, tea to sip & family & friends to cherish, despair has no dominion.

©Tyne O’Connell

Hens – The Ultimate Mayfair Accessory for Hons. Everywhere.

Nancy Mitford & her siblings talk of Hons & frightful anti-Hons was a reference to their hens not their Honourable titles which came much later. I’m a terrible Hon & abhor the counter hens ie: roosters & other panjandrums of this world with puffed up bossy ideas.

Hens lend a larkiness to any situation & confined to my sick bed as I am, my Hens are finer than Veuve when it comes to bucking a gal up.

Don’t leave home without your hens. You’ll be ridiculed on Mount St if you try! They fit in a Crocodile Birkin & while Spaniels are heavenly, hens are far better for intellectual discourse. When you’re undecided on the Angelica Kauffman or the Fragonard ask a Buff Orpinton – though be warned they’re predisposed to favour The Angel.

King Charles II never took his Mayfair peregrinations without his ducks in tow. I never go anywhere without my hens.

Do beware of foxes though as they’re getting bolder & bolder & brazenly sallying forth at lunch time now, nabbing your Fortnum Hamper before you’ve spread your tartan picnic rug. With the rich pickings of the bins of Berkeley Square, Mayfair & St James’s foxes have grown terrifically arrogant, lording it over all & recently demanding membership to the Arts Club & publishing their own undergrowth magazine, Fox & Fortnums.

The Cheek!

In honour of the Gentle men of the World
Connie St Louis is a classic anti-feminist using the tactics misogynists have, for millennia, used to demean women & children.

Witnessing the shameful way feminist Tim Hunt had his words twisted by knaves by Connie St Louis to make a trap for fools in his attempt to expose the truth of the workplace as an oftimes hostile place for women, raised my feminine hackles.

I was blessed to have many Magnificent Gentleman in my life – my father – a true gentleman – in love & awe of my mummy, an ‘I Am Woman Hear Me Roar’ feminist academic.

Together with the precious little ancient nuns who educated me in our all girls convent to differentiate between gentlemen & those “men who think they rule the world”. They also made me acutely aware that there were girls prepared to use the misogynist hegemony to suit their own purposes. We called these girls anti-girlfriends.

Connie St Louis is a classic example on an anti-girlfriend – a bad hat.

It makes me especially sad when women turn against those few men brave enough to stand up for women. It will make other sympathetic men think twice before admitting the truth of the pitfalls of the male dominated workplace.

Misogyny is an ideology & feminism is the alternative ideology.

Misogyny diminishes us all, not just women.

Misogyny is the root of all injustice, from racism to homophobia to the destruction of our planet for misogyny is the ethos of might is right.

While half the worlds population is subjugated to the other half, none of us can be free.

Germaine Greer said “women don’t realise how much men really hate us!” But NOT all men DO hate us although many men are quite reasonably reluctant to change a system that puts them in pole position.

To me feminism is a call to charms to both men and women to stand shoulder to shoulder in defending the vulnerable & fighting injustice.

I was fortunate also to marry two men who stood shoulder to shoulder with me in bringing up our three children even after our marriage was broken.

I would like to raise a toast to honour my father, my two husbands, my two sons & all GENTLEMEN in the true sense of the word.

A salute to Gentle Men & Good Hats & Good Eggs everywhere, brave enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with their mothers, wives daughters & female-coworkers! Brava!

 

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science...

The embroidered velvet smoking hats of Mayfair & St James’s

I do miss the sight of gentlemen in embroidered velvet smoking hats especially sighting smokers huddled outside the restaurants & clubs of #mayfair & St James’s now Summers here.

There’s nothing like the glimpse of a smokers tassle wafting in a summers breeze to make a girl’s heart leap.

With the smoking hat readily available at most Mayfair tobacconists; Locks on Jermyn St stock them from £150 there’s really no excuse.

As a child of romantic whimsy I used to embroider them myself for for the chaps in my life – priests & fit alter boys mostly.

My father was delighted when at 10 he received my first misshapen effort – regretfully retired when he was diagnosed with emphysema.

Undeterred I made a burgundy fancy with a bold 12 inch gold tassel for my trousseau; dreaming of the day I’d gift it to my husband on our wedding night.

Yes, if smokers persist in their Byronesque love of this Ottoman habit, standing firm in the face of bans, social outcry & health risks, I really think now The Seasons arrived and we’re all outdoors smokers ought to don the essential accoutrement of the smoker – to add a dash of Timeless Smokers Sartorial Splendour to our Polo & racing events as well as our streets.

Think how much prettier our Mount Street & Curzon St would be with the clusters of smokers in their colourful hats & jaunty tassels wafting in the breeze as they sip on their Pimms & Veuve?

“Life’s too short to waste a moment on the mundane” I told my children. We owe it to posterity to live extraordinary lives.

We instinctively know this as children but as we age we accept the ordinary all too readily.

Since my illness – unable to wear heels or lug handbags – I’ve taken to wafting about my flat or hospital in ballgowns as I did as a little girl because I can’t afford to wait for occasions that may never come again.

So I sit about my flat or hospital bed sipping tea from bone china in tiaras & antique robes in to raise my spirits & add some glamour.

My mother said, “inside every little old lady there’s an antique little girl eager to break free. She never believed you’re too old! Mummy danced on tables & drank champagne & wore ALL her jewels & finery ALL the time until the day she died.

Her generations still held balls & celebrated life & beauty while enduring depressions & fighting wars. My grandfather read poetry in the trenches of the Great War.

Like QueenElizabeth II Mummy relied on her friends pooling their ration books in order to purchase the fabric for her wedding gown – I’m wearing in this picture taken with my spaniel. The idea that she should forgo duchess-satin because bombs were falling or there was a depression was unthinkable.

We must never surrender larkiness art or splendour in the face of illness or war. For that’s what makes life extraordinary.

Besides everything seems more possible in ballgowns tiaras & white-tie.

AN ODE TO THE TWEED TOURS OF LIFE





by ©Tyne O’Connell




A well tailored tweed can shape a season, last several lifetimes and see you through fortune and misfortune.Tweed is the reassuring constant, immune to fickle fads & fancies.Like crocodile shoes & Mummy’s pearls, tweed is eternal, exuding the simple pleasure of a freshly cut lawn. Hinting at a faint mist, back-lit by the glamour of a candle-lit chandelier and safe in the hedgerows we hid inside as children.Tweed is the reassuring constant, immune to the vacillations of time and the fickle fads & fancies that raid our closets of memories.

In the pathways and corridors of time we reflect on The Tweed Tours of our youth.

The tweed, woven and spun through our romances and broken hearts.

The tweed jackets boys lent us on winter walks

Tweeds worn on our travels and the tweed that saw us through pregnancy;

surviving the spills and thrills and sleepless nights of motherhood. The family tweeds as treasured as any family jewel whisper and cajole to us from the closets of time.

Tweed tells the story of all our heartening and disheartening moments, woven into the fortunes and misfortunes; those days at the races, the point-to-points the tweeds that journeyed with us to foreign climes.

In tweed we are always at home.



Trains, rickshaws, elephants, camels, ponies  and donkeys; our tweeds have seen it all.

Captured in every snapshot, there in every dream, along with all the friends, and pets, and parties where we danced until the sun came up; barefoot in the back of a flat top and there in the stolen afternoons alone in a treehouse with a book of verse.

Our lives are spun out on the looms of Tweedy memories, dyed in rich moss-greens, deserts-browns and the black and white boucle of Bond Street, fretted with the shining threads of summer afternoons, and folded in the soft hush of the past woven into all.

Teamed with pearls & crocodile shoes or Wellingtons or waders; tweed is woven into the very warp and woof of our existence.

Ordered new, tailored to fit, passed down through generations…. or, shamefully as in my case, poached from my Father’s closet.

 

The shame, tinged with the memory of my bold-daring,  still makes my blood rush as I recall filching Daddy’s beloved Tweed jacket; Tailored by Anderson & Shepherd of Saville Row in 1939.

The colour of a grouse moor; the reassuring smell of wet-spaniels, fish and the sharp tang of his lemony Trumper’s aftershave.

His tweed had flickered through the decades within the pages of photograph albums. Perfectly cut to his dignified Edwardian frame, a talisman of an era of Kipling’s “If”, ballrooms, honour, bravery, valour, Spitfires, parachutes, dance-cards, box brownies, secrecy, cigars, sacrifice and gentleman’s clubs.

That Tweed represented all he stood for, even after I’d half-inched it – aged seventeen – to accompany me on my first fishing trip without him.



The fishing trip was a triumph of disasters; gilded over time into a treasured memory of my first real romance.

A week of icy days, huddled in a tiny boat on a frozen lake.

A week of nights  huddled around an inadequate fire of gorse bush.

Our sleeping bags spread on the frozen earth, we supped on rabbits shot at dusk, stewed in the icy-brown lake water and ladled from pot to bowls.

We were not an organised foursome. Guns, rods, tweed, hope, matches, youth, whiskey and bait.

Our eyebrows and lashes white with crystallised-frost, even in the soft glow of the gorse flames.

Under the stars, snuggled in tweed and one another, our fishing lines tied to our socked feet awaiting the longed for tug on the line from a hapless trout.

Daddy’s tweed jacket, a testimony to my salad days; now suffused with the faint smell of gorse ash, chaste-love, rabbit stew, Isla whiskey, fish and the violet scent of my youth.

There’s nothing like the redolence of wet-tweed for spinning the mind back into those ballrooms of crowded memories, all vying for attention & casting a line of hope into the future.

The Tweed Tours of life roll in and out of dreams like the footpaths of ancient woods, supporting our “swings of forever” made of thick rope, hung from the branches of old oaks that our grannies swung from in tea-dresses, pearls and tweed; their shrieks entreating  their paramours to push them ever higher!



Everyone remembers their first tweed breeches, their first tweed weekend. Standing in icy trout streams, skipping through bluebell woods, collecting mushrooms, traipsing  through fields with spaniels; soft floppy ears wet with dew & tangled with burrs.



I remember  the first time I darned my tweed skirt and the first time I cut the suede elbow patches for the jacket  which I stitched, less than perfectly, while observed by a boy garlanded with blonde curls who gazed on me adoringly  as if I were Ariadne come to save him from the maze of his own awkwardness.



I recall The Tweeds I wore on those early morning hacks when our breath turned  to mist, our lips too cold to kiss.



A well tailored tweed can shape a season, can last a lifetime & be passed down to our daughters & granddaughters.

The constancy of tweed, teamed with pearls & Wellingtons or waders, or the boucle Chanel tweeds, perfect for tackling the meandering streets of Mayfair, or those light summer pastel tweeds we wore to summer picnics, or the tweeds we wore as armour, along with sturdy matching crocodile shoes & bags; ideal for trudging boarding-school grounds to the marquees erected for the celebratory Mass on speech days the prize-givings and endless speeches



The tweeds worn as we feasted on Gentleman’s Relish and Stinky Bishop from our Fortnum & Mason Hampers and those other picnic lunches we lingered over through long summer evenings in Mount Street Gardens knowing later we must face an inelegant climb hoisting and tugging one another over the locked railings of the gate.



I inhale a tweed jacket and I’m transported to a jumble of places & memories. My now ancient Chanel Tweed bought with my first book deal; wafting with The Scent I crafted with my son on the fragrance organ of the Parisian Perfumiers in St Germain all those years ago, when he was still single & I was still his all; Roses of England top notes, threaded through Ambergris of Egypt and underpinned by the deep, ancient aroma of Cedar, redolent of all the confessionals and sins and penance and prayer, locked in with the sacred moments we shared together in the Louis Quatorze splendour of Paris.



Sipping champagne & gorging on steaming cassoulet.

Our Mummy & Son Tweed Tour of Paris remains in every fibre of that jacket still.



Further into my Tour of Tweed, I discover the tweed that took me on a mad Harley Davidson journey deep into The icy nights of the Libyan Desert,

The same tweed I wore for those moonlight rides from Salah’s Stables; tearing across the cold deserts of Egypt on Arabian thoroughbreds.

The leather and straw odours of the stable as we rubbed the horses down and fed them Turkish delight in the dark.

The Tweed Tour to the South of France where we teamed our tweed with market stall discoveries of French Victorian Jet and pheasant feather hats, my sons waiting in tweed waistcoats and breeches for the train to Beaulieu Sur Mer

The Tweed Tour To Devon in our fascinators for the Christening of Xavier in the Saxon Church, all woven in now with the Tweed Tours of Pregnancy, and The Tweedy Book Tours and those frosty mornings trudging to the milking shed with our Weetabix  for the rich cream that tasted of udder.

I can still smell the rich aroma of steaming hot milk and cow mingled with memories of lips too cold to kiss and pheasant drives and the heather of the grouse mores and afternoon tea in drawing rooms with wet spaniels & hot buttered  scones.

I hear a husband strumming the Ukulele and the cross-over conversations woven through with tinkling laughter as the taste of champagne tingles on my tongue. And all the tweed memories come flooding in, through the waft and woof of my life as a champagne cork pops in another room, a gramaphone delivers Noel Coward arguing with Gertrude Lawrence and digging into a pocket I discover a long lost telegram, “Mother well – stop – dog on mend –  I’ve sent the Lolly.”