Granny giraffe
This year has been the year of therapy for obvious reasons. I’m not sure I have the perfect therapist for me and sometimes think I’m paying only to have an hour where I can talk about things I don’t feel anyone wants to hear any more. It’s been months and months and I’m still not fully healed but who wants to hear that? I’ve had therapists before. One good one, two that were not great. One who wanted me to explain the dynamics of my family by using plasticine figures. Weird. Anyway I found this one through the BACP directory. I had done what I usually try to do and asked for recommendations, but the recommended one did not respond and then was rude. I’ve been content with my choice, and I like her refusal to read up anything about her clients so the entire interaction is in her consulting room. I like that every time when I leave she says, “take care,” and she means it.
Once though we had a disagreement. She has words she doesn’t much like, and I don’t mind that. She doesn’t like “strong.” Everyone tells me I am strong and will get through the pain, and I don’t feel strong but the opposite so it’s not much use to me. She also didn’t like “endure.” But I did. And I use it a lot. I have to endure. This is about endurance. I said it often. She wrinkled her nose every time I used it and finally I asked why. She thought endurance was something passive, that you sit there and take it.
No, I said. Endurance to an endurance runner is the opposite. It is power and strength. If I had to picture endurance, I would picture me on the top of Pendle Hill in a blizzard, running the Tour of Pendle race and wondering what the hell I was doing there. I couldn’t see far in front, I couldn’t see anyone to follow, I couldn’t even see the trods or paths beneath my feet. I was exhausted, the blizzard was overwhelming, but I endured.
I endured by moving my feet, by remembering to stop slumping and stand taller to make it feel easier. I call this “Granny Giraffe.” Granny gear and reaching up to giraffe height. I kept moving, I kept going, I was anything but passive, and I was enduring.
Oh, she said. That’s different. And we have agreed to use my definition instead, or that she will try to overcome her connotations of passivity of hers.
It’s rare that I am the more positive one in the room. I have been thinking about this because yesterday I ran a ten-mile leg of the 62-mile Leeds Country Way with my team-mate Hilary. We were one of six pairs; each pair had between ten-ish and eleven-ish miles to run. Team relays are good fun but also a headache. As they are linear, they often involve complicated negotiations about cars: usually you both drive to the end, then leave one car and drive to the start, then at the end have to drive back again to fetch the other car. Then there are the timings: the aim is to get the baton round before the mass start, but the following pair has to calculate how long the previous pair might take and what time to get to the changeover. I don’t think anyone in our club has missed the changeover but it is not unheard of. Yesterday Hilary and I avoided the car headache by parking at the finish and getting an Uber to the start. Our taxi driver told us he used to train hard at the gym, got mysterious back pain and was bedbound for 7 months, put on 22 stone, got married and lost 8 stone (how? all the sex?) and is going to go back to the gym at the end of September, honest.
Our Leg 2 lads arrived 15 minutes ahead of mass start, so we still had the baton. We knew that we wouldn’t get it to Leg 4 though; it required us to run nearly ten miles with a net uphill and 1000 feet of climb in an hour and 45 minutes. That was beyond both our abilities currently. So we just settled in to have a good day out. It was muggy and sweaty, and the route took in a mile of road over a motorway which was not much fun, then several miles along the valley floor of Pudsey which led me hoping never to see another field again (I think we traversed about 12, at least). Our friend Martin popped up a couple of times to support and take photos, and he took this photo of us climbing out of the valley. I’d spotted him at the top and so had to run the climb, obviously. I posted this on Instagram:
Along the route, Hilary mentioned that her daughter told her that she was wrong to do herself down, as I do. Her daughter said, “you’re comparing yourself to other runners, but you should be comparing yourself to the general population.” If we did that, we’d been in the most active top 1%, probably. I’ve had a crappy year and I have picked myself up and I am doing so much exercise I can’t see straight, and yet still I berate myself when I should congratulate myself. I can do 20kg deadlifts and 100 17.5kg squats, and I can run ten miles, and I’m worried my legs are too fat? Idiot.
I am not an idiot. I have been socialised to do myself down because I am a woman. The darkest side of that is the troubled young girls who think they can fix their problems by cutting their breasts off. It is so profoundly sad, but it is all part of the same thing: women and girls are socialised to talk to ourselves in a way that we would never tolerate from a friend.
Basta.
Fatman
In 1999, I accidentally got a job at COLORS magazine. I hadn’t heard of it when I arrived in Rome with nothing in mind. I went to Rome because I spoke Italian and I didn’t have anything else in sight. First I got a job as an intern at Associated Press, because I’d just left an internship at The Nation magazine in New York, where interns were prized and taught and it was brilliant, and most of my class of 1993 are still my friends today. The AP was very different. Interns weren’t allowed to associate with each other, and the only exciting thing to be done was to get the Vatican’s daily press release from the fax machine. The boss was bored and mean. I soon left. I phoned round any media contacts I knew and ended up in an old Roman palazzo on the top floor, where I found a magazine I’d never heard of, staffed by young people, and it seemed astonishingly cool. I was taken on as a writer, but secretly. The editor, Alex, hadn’t told his boss about me so when the boss came to visit I had to stay way. The boss was Oliviero Toscani, because COLORS was funded by Benetton.
I didn’t properly meet Oliviero — we all called him Toscani — until I was legitimately employed and the magazine moved to Paris. He was big and loud and his presence was even bigger. I liked him and disliked him equally. There is no question that he is brilliant, but he wasn’t always a brilliant manager of people. Some reminders of his brilliance:
You can object to the image of man dying from AIDS being used for advertising, or you can think that maybe it did more to legitimise stigmatised AIDS patients than any number of earnest government campaigns.
As boss, Toscani mostly left us alone to have the most brilliant job: to compile a magazine about the rest of the world, on various themes. War, death, touch, time. We were so young, and we spent our days phoning random people in Kazakhstan or Uruguay to ask them what they had for breakfast, or how they had sex. We had amazing freedom, a regular salary and a discount at Benetton. They were wonderful years and again I still have good friends from that time.
After a couple of years, the magazine’s offices moved from the beautiful hotel particulier in the Marais where we had been based, to Fabrica, a Benetton-funded creative academy in northern Italy near Venice. From our office, we could see the Dolomites. It was a huge privilege to work there. I mean, look at it.
But it wasn’t perfect. Frequently Toscani would arrive, yell a lot, be rude, and leave again. Maybe he was right. Definitely he was hard work. But now I am old and look back, I see that he was hugely generous to give us all that freedom. We were mostly unleashed. And we produced some great magazines that I am still extremely proud of.
Look how young we were:
This interview I gave to Fabrica describes what working there was like.
After three years I left and became a freelance journalist. One of my early assignments was to write about Oliviero for Arena magazine. I remember it took me six weeks to write. I read things I’ve written long ago and sometimes would change some of it, but mostly I wouldn’t. I’m still happy with my books, apart from some small changes and maybe removing a lot of commas. But I wouldn’t write that piece about Oliviero in the same way. I don’t think it was kind. Luckily I can’t find it anywhere. My affection for him has grown I suppose. So I was sorry to hear that he has amyloidosis. And I was shocked to see someone we called Fatman, even though he was big not fat, reduced so much in size and voice. Here is a recent interview with him, in Italian. And here he is.
I wish him well. Whether you like his work or not, the world is better and more colourful for it having existed.
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