I’ve been putting it off, but with temperatures rising into the high 20s, it’s time to change my wardrobe from winter to summer

Some women have a clothing rail, and can just swap summer and winter from one end to the other, while others wear the same thing all year round, but I must admit I wear radically different clothes in different seasons.

This house is medieval pile with insufficient heating, perched on a hilltop exposed to the elements. And I work from home, so I’m here all day.

In winter, that means thermals, t-shirts, knitwear, Uggs and thick moleskin jeans, while in summer, only the t-shirts are still used. I’ll keep out a couple of lightweight cashmere knits, but my summer trousers are thin, I switch to blouses (too cold for those in winter here), and I get out all my linen skirts and dresses for working in our (very non-air-conditioned) home office.

However, I also confess to having that greatest of luxuries - another room in which to store my out-of-season clothing. Formally the spare room, and then the sewing room, one of its principal functions now is storage. I don’t like being surrounded by my clothes in the bedroom, so would rather have the space, but it does mean that somewhere in a room over there, my summer clothes are lurking in flatpacks, waiting to be shaken out, ironed and rehung.

It’s the ironing bit of this equation that’s putting me off. I’m not a great lover of ironing, though I press items religiously when I’m actually making clothes. But since I left The City, I don’t mind looking a tad more crumpled. After all, linen’s supposed to look creased… But I hit on an idea a couple of years ago that works really well - twist the stuff when it comes out of the washer, fasten it with elastic bands and dry it in the sun for a mega-creased shibori sort of look. It quite transforms a garment into something it never was before.

Anyhoo, for those of you who are about to get out the summer clothes, it’s a good opportunity to chuck stuff out, and the usual method applies.

1 Get it all out at once and pile it on the bed, and then go through it religiously and try it all on in front of a big mirror.

2 Shake and hang up anything that you look great in or feel happy in or that makes you smile.

3 Discard without mercy anything that doesn’t fit or that you haven’t worn in two years (no, don’t keep things to get into when you’ve lost the weight…). Discard any item that is out of date. Discard anything that’s disgracefully worn and not even the postman can see you in. Don’t feel guilty if you chuck some things just because they’ve had one outing too often. You’ll be taking all this to charity anyway, so someone else will get the benefit. I just remeasured myself and found I’d gone down a cup size in my bra, which means a refit.

4 Sort out the maybes - the clothes that would still be perfect with a bit of a tweak. These are either clothes you love but are bored with, or clothes that are great except for some minor problem (a juice stain on a blouse, for instance).

If you have clothes that you’re bored with, think first of all about changing the buttons - this is a minor tweak that takes about 10 minutes, but which can radically transform an outfit. If you’re a more talented sewist, think about braids, trims, embroideries and appliques to refresh a garment that still offers you a good cut and fit. I sometimes dye an item after a few years, which can change it completely.

With outfits that need minor repair, place to one side and aim to do one a week until they’re finished. Minor repairs might include loose buttons, fallen hems, hanging threads etc. Stains that aren’t treatable, think again about dyeing. My well water often leaves indelible rust-coloured stains on clothing, and gradually turns all white garments a nasty shade of brown, so periodically I batch-dye a bunch of items a dark colour such as chocolate, navy or black. If the clothes are still in good condition, this is a very cheap way to give yourself a wardrobe boost.

Once you’ve got your wardrobe sorted (and the items arranged by colour and type of course), go through and spot the gaps - the right bra to go under a t-shirt (I bought two more Doreens on Ebay yesterday), the right length of jean for a flat sandal. Buy the clothes you need to get you through the summer first - before you get waylaid by prettier offerings. For me this year it’s long vests to go under short t-shirts. A black one, a grey one and a blue one should do the trick. Plus a pair of Footglove mules for when my feet spread in the heat. What with that and my new bras, I’m sorted.

Josef Fritzl is now protesting about his portrayal in the media, saying his treatment of his offspring ‘could have been worse’

Astonishing to believe, but Josef Fritzl doesn’t think of himself as a bad guy. But then I dare say the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and any number of Nazis, Colombian drug lords, Argentinian generals and serial rapists worldwide.

He has told German tabloid Bild (via his lawyer of course) that he deserves credit for taking his daughter/grand-daughter Kersten to hospital when she was sick, and has pointed out that he could have killed everyone in the cellar and: “Then there would have been none of this fuss”. Lovely.

It ought to defy belief really, but it doesn’t. Anyone familiar with the Fred and Rosemary West case remembers that men (and women) without remorse are capable of fantastic amounts of self-deception.

Hitler had girlfriends, loved his dog, was charming to women, told great jokes and did impressions of Winston Churchill. And at the same time, he was capable of murdering literally millions of innocent people and plunging an entire continent into a maelstrom from which it still hasn’t fully recovered. He also murdered his first girlfriend when she tried to leave him (should’ve been a sign…).

Fred West, awaiting trial for the rape, torture and murder of at least 10 women, one of whom was his daughter, wrote a sickly tome about his equally murderous wife, entitled : “I was loved by an angel”. He considered that all of his victims had it coming for ‘playing the loving lark’, and claimed that at least one of them - Lucy Partington - had been a willing participant. His eldest daughter stunned a courtroom into silence when she described how her mother and father had raped her in the cellar when she was eight and told her to be grateful for having such loving parents.

One parallel I note also with the Wests is that they also claimed that their daughter had run away. In their case, they said she’d become a prostitute in Leeds and was too ashamed to come home - an accusation that their son believed added terrible insult to injury, given that she was already buried in the garden (but, at least not in the Wests’ favourite site of the cellar, under the kid’s playroom). In Fritzl’s case, he claimed that Elizabeth had run away to join a cult and that she had abandoned her three children for him - the kindly old grand-dad - to look after. Now it appears that these children may have been freed for no other reason than that they were crying babies who might draw attention to his dungeon.

Well, every day in this case unfolds new and more terrible details, so I suppose it is just more wait and see - and hope. It is no compliment to say of Fritzl that at least he’s not as bad as Fred West. “What planet is he on?” my DH asked this morning. And the answer, sadly, is ours.

Further to my article on swimwear I found these babies the other day - swimdresses

Wearing a tankini, high-waist bottoms and a swimskirt is a great chop-and-change option for the beach, but if you can only pack one cossie and you like a bit of cover, you could think about a swimdress. As you can see, a swimdress is a more forgiving alternative to a swimsuit, and if you pick your design right, you can have rather looser coverage than wearing a swimskirt - useful if you’ve got tummy issues.

Somewhere in my heart I knew these things must still exist (I remember my mother wearing one back in the 60s), but it took me a while to find them.

With a swimdress, you get what you pay for, as with any other costume. Those from Sears (sadly not available in Europe) are at the cheaper end of the market. Sears has numerous designs of swimdresses (I count 24, plus another 10 or so from sister company KMart), offering different features. Some have moulded cups while others have a shelf bra: you can choose ruffles, thick straps, thin straps, tie fronts, halternecks, backless and bandeau. Those that aren’t empire-waisted have vertical princess seams and a sewn-in brief. Prices (for the KMart range) start at just under $25. The regular size is US 8, 10, 12 and there’s also a plus-size range.

This batik suit (above left) is the type with a separate tank underneath an empire waist overlayer. There’s a string tie in the front, the cups are moulded and there is bead trim on the straps. The tank suit underneath has a mesh panel across the midsection for better ventilation, which strikes me as a great idea, given that you’re wearing two layers. Sadly, the size range is limited to US sizes 8, 10 and 12. But at $54.60 it’s a bargain.

This floral number is one of the plus-size models, available in 18W and 20W. It has vertical princess seams and a sewn-in brief rather than two layers and costs the same price - $54.60. My personal fave though is this halter-neck swimdress with contrast bust section (great for women who are small on top but heavier on their lower half) and loose, floaty plain skirt. $47.60.

Best of all at Sears, the firm is linked with My Virtual Model, so you can log on via the Sears site and dress your actual figure in one of these suits to see what it looks like.

If you’ve got deeper pockets, check out Orvis, which also has a range of swimdresses, with nicer styling and more features than the Sears dresses, averaging about $90 a pop. This floral one has a faux sarong skirt, which is a very feminine option, a built-in softcup bra and adjustable straps. Many of their models have a built-in tummy control panel, including this soft green and brown batik option (right).

Priced in between the two are suits from Spiegel, which offers about 15 designs of swimdress for the mid-70s of dollars, but are currently on sale for about $55. They include moulded cups and power-mesh tummy- and butt-smoothers and some interesting designs, such as this contrast-border black one (left). Crucially, for British readers, Spiegel will ship to the UK. For more US offerings, check out NexTag.

We Yurrupeans seem to get a bit short-changed generally when it comes to swimdresses, and they are much more expensive. The UK version of Orvis offers the same swimdresses as the US company but for TWICE THE PRICE. The best is this one from Miraclesuit, which offers all the usual Miraclesuit goodies, is 32 per cent lycra, so will suck you in, in all the right places, and promises to take 10 pounds off you, but at the moment it’s out of stock.

But why, I ask you, should we pay twice the price for the same bloody thing anyway? Log onto Spiegel, or get yourself an American friend instead.

Victoria’s Secret is having a swimwear sale, so if you want to stock up on tankinis, now’s the time.

Models are being offered at 25 per cent to 40 per cent off, so if you need swimwear, log on fast at www.victoriassecret.com. Styles include those crucial tankinis and high-waist bottoms, along with swimskirts, and the Body range of good basics is also heavily discounted.

Well, at least that’s what I’m telling my sister

My big sis turns 60 today. And how the hell did that happen, she wonders?

Like all of us, she still feels 20 inside. She still likes clothes, makeup, going out to functions, and she’s a tad reluctant to go and pick up her bus pass just yet. Instead she’ll be seeing her youngest son back down to his job in Essex and then going out for a Chinese with the girls.

The dichotomy between how old you are and how old you feel set us talking the other day about our mother, who died a year ago aged 83, and about our gran, our father’s mother, who died at a similar age back in the 1980s. To both of us, both of them always seemed irredeemably ancient - and they dressed accordingly.

Mum was about 40 by the time I remember her and already she wouldn’t go in the sea because ‘it was bad for her insides’. She dressed in elastic-waist trousers and comfy shoes. Add a hairdo just like the Queen, and she didn’t change very much in the next 20 years. I never once saw her in heels or a dress. She gained weight and lost weight and was always on a diet (if she had a pound for every slimming magazine she’d read, she’d be rich, said our father), but her fashion sense never changed. She never learned to drive or had a full-time job, and when my father died she was terrified to live alone and moved in with my sister. She was only 61 but seemed like a tiny little old lady.

Gran, called Nana by us, I only ever remember looking like Ena Sharples from Coronation Street - all curlers and hairnet, in shapeless dun-coloured clothes. She would have been about 62 then, or maybe even younger. The mother of five children, she had no figure to speak of, and above one breast her tops were often see-through - a legacy of her Irish habit of sawing bread across her chest rather than putting it on a table. She never wore a bra and most of the time she didn’t wear her teeth either.

But today is a different world. My sister would cut her own head off with a chainsaw rather than look like this, so much has life changed for women in the past 40 years. This is her with her new car, of which she is very proud, and in which she does many hundreds of miles a year. She owns her own home. Her daily uniform is jeans, loafers and a t-shirt. For walking the dog she puts on one of the big wrap cardigan coats that are so of the moment. She gets her (own) teeth whitened and knows what a mascara tube looks like. Going grey, for the time being, is just not an option.

There’s no question but that for previous generations, 60 was sartorially the end, but now my sis has a statistically excellent chance of living another 25 years or so, so no way is she giving up the fight to look good just yet. More power to her.

So I agree - 60 is the new 40 and that’s good news for me too. You see, I’m 45 but I spent eight years with a crappy bloke, so that makes me 37, and 37’s obviously - what? - the new 25.

It’s great to be back in my twenties.

So, Josef Fritzl’s lawyer is trying for an insanity plea, on the grounds that a man must be insane to wish to rape his daughter

I must admit, I don’t think that argument holds much water for me. I don’t think you need to be insane, you just need to be arrogant, without conscience or remorse - in a word, a psychopath.

In times past, he would probably have been called evil. As an atheist, I don’t much like using the word evil because of its religious connotations. After all, much behaviour that was considered evil in the past is now known to be due to mental instability, epilepsy, brain injury and the like. But my personal opinion is that Josef Fritzl knew exactly what he was doing, he just didn’t give a damn. That is not insanity.

His case seems radically different from that, for instance, of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Sutcliffe was was a schizophrenic who heard voices that commanded him to kill and although he was tried as a sane man and convicted (on the grounds of pure vengeance, really) some months after his incarceration he was removed to the high security psychiatric hospital at Broadmoor, where he remains to this day.

However, there is no indication that Josef Fritzl suffers from the kind of delusions that plagued Sutcliffe. As far as I know, he does have fits or hear voices. His actions seem to imply cold, calculated cunning and intelligence. This is the hallmark of the psychopath or sociopath, that percentage of the population that lives among us, passing as normal human beings, but functioning on a different level, without conscience or guilt. Many leading criminals, including gangsters, are probably psychopaths, but there are also plenty in civilian life - some 1-4 per cent of the population - superficially charming, ambitious at work and often high achievers. They are also liars, act without remorse, shaft their co-workers, cheat on their wives and make other people’s lives a quiet misery.

Of course, I should acknowledge here that the definition of psychopathy is constantly changing, and that different nations, and even different US states, have different definitions of it. In the UK, it is defined as: “a persistent disorder or disability of mind (whether or not including significant impairment of intelligence) which results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the person concerned”. That sounds like a pretty good definition of Fritzl - aggressive enough to commit his crimes and intelligent enough to carry them out. Psychopathic personality traits include callousness, grandiosity and fearlessness, lack of empathy, superficial charm, and inflated self appraisal. These are also all pretty good definitions of Fritzl.

It will be interesting to see if his benighted lawyer can make this defence stick, but I very much doubt it. Meanwhile, his victims must try, piece by piece, to rebuild their shattered lives.

I thought I’d start an occasional series about my personal style icons, so let’s start, for no particular reason, with Tina Chow

Tina Chow died a premature death but her personal fashion sense remains an inspiration.

Chow was a jewellery designer, model and wife of the restaurateur Michael Chow. She also collected vintage couture. Her collection contained both contemporary items by designers such as Azzedine Alaia and Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, and early couture pieces by the likes of Alix, Vionnet and Fortuny. In particular, her collection of Fortuny gowns and coats was unparalleled outside a museum, including both Delphos pleated dresses and fabulous printed velvet mantles.

Chow was born Bettina Louise Lutz in Cleveland in 1950. Although assumed by many to be Chinese, she was actually of German and Japanese descent. She became a model as a teenager and during her sporadic career her luminous beauty was photographed by the leading photographers of her day, including Helmut Newton and Stephen Meisel, as well as captured in paint by Andy Warhol. She married Chow, 12 years her senior, in 1972 and the couple became leading members of the contemporary glitterati and art scene.

Chow owned some of the world’s most beautiful clothing and was photographed wearing it for the Rizzoli book ‘Flair’, which is one of the gems of my fashion collection. But despite her couture wardrobe, the image of her that is the most enduring is her great simplicity. Chow sported a daily uniform of close-cropped black hair, almost no makeup, a white vest or t-shirt and black pants. To top it all, she would usually wear jewellery of her own design - big bangles in clear acrylic, or plaited bamboo. Her elegant simplicity is still a great act for women to follow, whatever your age or size, and can be achieved on any budget. In my 20s I dressed like this in white vests and black jeans - in my 40s I’d add longer sleeves and some neck interest, but you can create a look that is basically the same, from chain store to high street to Bond Street.

Chow died in 1992 at the age of 41 from AIDS. Nursed by her daughter China, she passed away peacefully wearing her favourite Fortuny Delphos gown.

If you want information on how to look younger over 40, here’s the place to find it

I’ve had Charla Krupp’s book How Not To Look Old on my desk for a few weeks now, awaiting a review. The reason it’s taken me so long to get round to it is that I wanted to be fair.

I wasn’t keen on the title and the fact is that Krupp and I clearly see the world in rather different ways. In her tongue-in-cheek quiz at the start of the book, she happily admits to being high maintenance - that’s mostly A’s. I answered mostly B’s, which makes me medium maintenance, but as I progressed through the book, I started to feel that I was so low maintenance that I was actually off the scale. (And I’m more interested in fashion and beauty than virtually anyone I know.)

Maybe it’s that although I am interested in clothes and fashion and beauty, they’re still only a small part of my life. Asked to choose between spending money on my garden or on my wardrobe, I’d choose the garden without hesitation. Or beads, or music, or books. Krupp, in contrast, is a beauty editor - she’s spent her life evaluating beauty and fashion products, trying one procedure after another, and readily admits to spending about $7,500 a year on beauty maintenance (that’s about two thirds of my income). She also has rather a dictatorial approach to beauty. You MUST, she asserts, make the most of yourself, because otherwise in this dog eat dog world, you’ll be out of a job in no time. With this, I do not agree.

However, let’s not criticise this book for what it is not, and look instead at what it offers. The truth is, if you’re over 40 and looking for tips on how to dress, specific makeup products, foundation primers, brow shaping, shapewear, the best lipsticks, eye shadows and dermatology procedures, this book is jam-packed with information. Krupp has no truck with the idea that more expensive is necessarily better, and many of the products she has approved are from cheap fashion chains and drug stores. This alone makes the book very useful because she has no axe to grind - she’s not a manufacturer trying to plug her own product, nor a make-up artist unwilling to offend a supplier.

She is also refreshingly upfront about her own beauty hangups, her lack of willingness to endure pedicures or paraffin hand treatments, the fact that she didn’t know her own bra size, and that she’s had plastic surgery herself.

The division into low, medium and high maintenance options is a useful rule of thumb, as you can see roughly where you are on the scale (and have a good laugh at the idiots in the other categories…), and there are many nice photographs of women over 40, both famous and unknown, to illustrate Krupp’s points.

Overall, although our attitudes to fashion and beauty may differ (and I dislike the peppy cheerleader approach), she and I are pretty much on track in terms of advice: having a smaller wardrobe of clothes that you wear all the time; only wearing brown eyeshadow; lightening your hair colour and lessening your makeup. Other advice, such as what to wear after Labour Day means nothing to a European, and some I think is plain wrong, such as not wearing nude-colour tights but going bare-legged instead. (Not that I wear tights at all, but for many women, this is just not an option.)

The chapter on jeans is very useful - personally, I had never thought about pocket size - but many of the names mentioned mean nothing to me (I wear Boden, Next and La Redoute). And I still wear dark velvet scrunchies to tie my hair back - so if that’s out of fashion, then tough tits: I’m not about to split my hair follicles with elastic bands.

We seriously parted company in chapter eight, about dermatology, because I am dead against procedures such as Botox and Restylane-type fillers, the very idea of which fill me with horror (since they don’t stay in your face, where do they GO exactly?). Here’s where I draw my personal line in the sand, along with plastic surgery and Lasik eye surgery. Krupp, in contrast, though not in favour of the full face lift or permanent silicone fillers, is a fan of procedures I would rate as beyond the pale. But if you’re thinking of having a procedure and want to rate it, you will find here a very fair appraisal of costs, dangers, what to expect and recovery times.

Overall, I liked about 90 per cent of this book very much. Where we differ, we differ strongly (I principally believe in diet, exercise and meditation to stay young), but for most of it, we’re in total agreement.

How Not To Look Old is available from:  Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

An article from BeliefNet came through to me the other day.

The author, Marianne Williamson, is an ex-minister, so she has beliefs that I don’t share. Nevertheless, we are clearly both trying to understand how you make your place in the world in the second half of your life as opposed to the first.

She has some very valuable things to say about spirituality and you can read the full article here.

Among them are that when you think to yourself that if only you were younger X or Y would be better, it’s an illusion.

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There’s been some negative press about Madonna being ‘too sexy’ on the cover and promos for her new album Hard Candy. Balls to that, say I

Madonna’s new album came out a couple of days ago and is expected to make the Number 1 slot in about a week. Described as in club mode but this time with an added urban hip hop beat, she’s also promoting it with a series of sexy videos and a raunchy cover showing herself in a leotard and thigh-high boots.

Well honestly, what do people expect? Slippers and a furry dressing gown? Madge has always played on her sexy image, and since she’s still in fantastic shape at 49, I don’t see any reason why she’d change it. Tina Turner was rockin’ on well into her 50s. The Rolling Stones are at it in their 60s. I hope Madge will do it till she drops off the twig.

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