Christina Patterson
Recently by Christina Patterson
Christina Patterson: No, children don't need happy endings
Saturday, 29 August 2009
Sure, children want to know What Katie Did. Did she have another boob job?
Christina Patterson: At least sport keeps men busy
Wednesday, 26 August 2009
There is no single thing that will unite women the way it unites men
Christina Patterson: Politics is dirty and difficult. And a noble calling...
Saturday, 22 August 2009
I’m very glad I don’t have to have my cleavage subjected to national scrutiny
Christina Patterson: Lessons in fashion and the female brain
Thursday, 20 August 2009
When I was 13, I was obsessed with fashion. I spent boring car journeys with my boring family dreaming of the outfits I would save up for and acquire, the outfits that would shock and dazzle the world into knowing that I was someone.
Christina Patterson: The big problem with the NHS isn't funding
Saturday, 15 August 2009
I won’t bore you with the mammogram that turned out to be an X-ray of an ankle
Christina Patterson: Predicting the perils of predictive text
Thursday, 13 August 2009
At a packed audience at a London theatre last year, Seamus Heaney announced that he was a big fan of predictive text. The Nobel laureate who has, for nearly 50 years, been "digging" (according to his most famous poem) with his "squat pen" now, it seems, taps away at his handset like a bored teenage boy. C u 2moro! GBT! 4Q m8! Well, perhaps not that.
Christina Patterson: The price of this war keeps going up
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Fighting on the frontline is tricky, of course, but if you want real stress, try working for the MoD. Actually, if you want real stress, just try speaking to them. When I last phoned them up, about casualty figures in Iraq, I thought I was going to explode.
Christina Patterson: The hangover that women can't shake off
Saturday, 1 August 2009
Yes, we need cheaper childcare, but the real question for women is ‘Are you hot?’
Christina Patterson: Oh, the delights – and dangers – of charm
Thursday, 30 July 2009
On Monday night, a contemporary sex symbol celebrated the life and loves of a spiritual brother. Byron, said Rupert Everett in a Channel 4 film, In Search of Byron, was "the first modern sex symbol", the "first international celebrity" and "one of the earliest practitioners of PR". He was also a rather good poet, but the poetry, it soon became clear, was not Everett's chief concern.
Christina Patterson: Thank God for the Church of England
Saturday, 25 July 2009
I like the fact that it’s mature enough to recognise doubt – and that it is calm
Christina Patterson: What Americans want is not what they need
Thursday, 23 July 2009
It had to happen. Barack Obama has been ousted by Susan Boyle. Let me say that again. The President of the world's only hyperpower has been pushed from the TV schedules by a plump Scottish spinster with quite a nice voice.
Christina Patterson: Self-help books don't work, but I love them anyway
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Don’t you just love the exclamation marks? I love the perkiness. I love the confidence
Christina Patterson: Tips on parenting from the dad of a 'stupid kid'
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Just occasionally, in the litany of bad news about the economy, and bad news about the government, and bad news about the environment, and bad news about the general collapse of everything all the time, you hear something that makes you want to cheer. For me that moment came yesterday morning when I was brushing my teeth. I was listening to an interview with a man called Richard Cass, whose son, Jamie Neale, had just been found after 12 days lost in the Australian bush.
Christina Patterson: Here's why nice work pays much better
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Recruiting bankers is, apparently, as tricky as getting pandas to mate
Christina Patterson: Here's how we know our feelings are real
Thursday, 9 July 2009
I was in a monastery in Syria when I heard that Michael Jackson had died. "What a shame!" I thought. "What a sad life!" And then I went back to looking at icons. (The kind of icons that feature a Madonna and child, I mean a real Madonna and child, a Madonna-looking-good-at-1,500, not just at 50, and a child that wasn't "rescued" from the other side of the world.)
Christina Patterson: Hurrah for democracy – and that World Wide Web
Thursday, 2 July 2009
There are certain moments in a job that you'll always remember. One of mine was the day I logged on to the website of the organisation I was running, to find it had disappeared. In place of thousands of pages of information about poetry, education projects and events, there were offers to counter my erectile dysfunction and hair loss. They were not very poetic and nor was my response. It had a lot less characters than a haiku and, as a past participle, summed up where we were. Not, as a misreading of Larkin might suggest, safely tucked up by our mums and dads, but – well, sorry to be rude, but screwed.
Christina Patterson: I'm giving up hope for our postal service
Thursday, 25 June 2009
Yesterday's post brought a lovely surprise. There, among the bills and the Somerfield fliers (I get one almost every day, and if there is a Somerfield within a five-mile radius of where I live, I've never seen it) was a parcel. Not a slim volume from a poetry publisher I've never heard of, not a pile of books from Amazon to plough through for my next interview, but a proper, squashy brown paper parcel. And in the middle of it, the handwriting of a friend.
Christina Patterson: Shelley and middle-class musical chairs
Saturday, 20 June 2009
Shelley, who said that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world", might have been amused that a high court judge who hit the headlines this week shared the name of his rival, Coleridge. He might have been less amused by his message. "There is a tendency," said Mr Justice Coleridge on Wednesday, "especially among the chattering classes, to assume that we have attained a social utopia, in which we are entirely and happily free from taboos, stigmas and other constraints on human behaviour. It sounds so beguiling: let us do what we want, when we want and sort out any mess as we go along."
Christina Patterson: If you don't like food, you don't like life
Thursday, 18 June 2009
I have never met Alexandra Shulman, but I think I'd like her. Not, alas, because of a shared interest in haute couture (I think £49.99 is rather a lot to spend on a handbag), but because of two much more important things. The first is that as editor of the fashion bible, Vogue, she has dared to bite the hand that feeds her. But only (since no one in fashion eats anything) in a metaphorical way, of course.
Christina Patterson: Hijab and civil war in the House of Lords
Saturday, 13 June 2009
Politics is, boringly, necessarily, but at times gloriously, the art of the possible.
Christina Patterson: When old age is the time of your life
Thursday, 11 June 2009
The other day, in a house in Prague, I met an extraordinary woman. The house was the home of Alfons Mucha, the Czech artist who met Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, and whose posters for her performances made him one of the leading lights of Art Nouveau. The woman was his daughter-in-law, Geraldine. She met his son, Jiri, at a wartime party in 1941 in Leamington Spa. You can see why he fell for her. Geraldine Mucha is attractive, bright and funny. Next month, she will be 92.
Christina Patterson: Alternative therapies just don't work
Thursday, 28 May 2009
There was the man who took blood from my ear and told me to avoid aluminium saucepans. There was the couple from the Cotswolds who wired me up to a machine. There was the woman who told me to rewrite my parents' past. And then, of course, there were the herbs. Liquid herbs, powdered herbs, herbs in capsules, herbs in tinctures and the herbs that bring fear to the heart of those who have tried them, the herbs that trigger Pavlovian waves of nausea and disgust. Yup, the Chinese herbs.
Christina Patterson: Of course women can't have it all
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Helen Fielding lives in the land of gleaming gnashers and giant, plastic breasts
Christina Patterson: If you're reading it, you should be paying for it
Thursday, 21 May 2009
On Tuesday night, I sought salvation, but found only counsels of despair. "The future is ghastly," said Claire Enders, a leading analyst of the industry. And then, just in case we hadn't got the message, "the outlook is extremely bleak".
Christina Patterson: The true religion of Iran is not Islam
Saturday, 16 May 2009
How free did we feel before this hot, itchy carapace swaddled our heads?
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