She's Gotta Have It
Fashion, beauty, shopping, social life and things that make you go hmmm; come scroll with us for the She's Gotta Have It guide to girlitude
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‘I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres’
From ‘The World’ in ‘Silex Scintillans’ (1650-5) by Henry Vaughan (1622-1695)
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In Town Last Night
The glitziest parties...
Media movers and shakers, politicians and novelists gathered for the launch of Tina Brown’s Princess Diana biography. More party pictures 
Good news Topshop are organising a series of charity fashion sales (London, June 23; York, June 24; Manchester, June 30; and Brighton, July 1) in aid of the National Domestic Violence Helpline. Turn up, get shot of your own jumble and pick up some bargains.... Bad news Researchers at Sheffield University have discovered that girls with a twin brother are 15 per cent less likely to marry and 25 per cent less likely to give birth, because of exposure to their twin’s testosterone while in the womb
The Big Issue: Paris, je t’aime
I’ve just spent a couple of days in Paris. And you know what? I finally got it. From the French exchange in which I was sartorially and linguistically outclassed, to the many row-strewn and tear-streaked weekends with boyfriend or husband, and over numerous ill-fated visits when my feet hurt, I felt fat or the poppers on my body (remember those?) dug in, Paris has been one long trauma. But no longer. True, I had a run-in with the instinctively cruel French shop assistant (I asked for a pair of trousers in a 40, and she took one look at my vast English hips and said, non non, for you, 44) but it
couldn’t spoil a weekend of shopping, walking and street flirting. You see, unlike our own fair city, where women over a certain age are, it seems, invisible, in Paris one’s efforts do not go unnoticed. Those wonderful French men appraise and appreciate with gratifying openness, bringing a glow to the 40-year-old cheek, English hips or no. And, aside from a hotel bathroom filled with very expensive and luxurious bath products, there’s no aphrodisiac like the male gaze, which is why I suggest any husband reading this should take his wife to meet the Parisians a tout de suite.
Laura Tennant
Bonkers health Based on the Indian Ayurvedic philosophy, Shirodara, in which a stream of oil is poured on to the third eye, “is an extraordinary wellness treatment,” declare spa experts Gerard’s “that alleviates accumulated stress, promotes deep relaxation, improves the perceptiveness of the senses and helps to lift anxiety, anguish, anger, stress, concentration difficulties and insomnia, helping to improve sight, memory and circulation”. They don’t say if it cures cancer too...
June 22, 2007
Kyran Bracken, Myleene Klass and Damon Hill are expected to attend the Sport Award luncheon at the Four Seasons Hotel, London
Ready, Steady, Shop
Island shopping
Street Seen
Short cuts
Going out? The Place
Flavour
20 Brewer Street,
London W1
If you're a fan of the principles but not the designer prices of pesticide-free grub, seek refuge at Flavour, Soho's latest organic cafe and takeaway. Breakfast and lunch options include organic porridge, low-fat pastries, wheat-free sandwiches, interesting salads and seasonal vegetable tarts. There's also a hot meal selection including a sensational mushroom risotto which you can take home and pass off as your own, while wowing your dinner guests with your GI-index knowledge.
Gabrielle Strachan
Flavour is offering free coffee to 100 First Post readers. Just drop into Flavour from 9am on Thursday and say you read it here first. Limited to the first 100 people, one coffee per person.
Recipe of the Day
Read Me
A comic novel about the male mid-life crisis? Yawn, right? Not, however, when it’s written by the very funny Tim Dowling, a man whose journalism regularly provokes audible chortles. The eponymous hero of The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club (Picador, £14.99) is a middlingly successful freelance journalist who discovers he is the subject of a blog written by people who loathe and despise him. Just the sort of boost a chap approaching 40 needs. His wife patronises him, his children ignore him and, despite a touchingly masculine talent for mending complex domestic appliances, Wareing’s mojo is definitively AWOL. He can fix the dishwasher, but can he fix his life? Funny, touching and illuminating.
Laura Tennant
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