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 British edition 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.
She has recently written to leading fashion houses, complaining that sample sizes are now so "minuscule" that they force fashion editors to use models with "jutting bones". Vogue, apparently, has to retouch photographs to "make the models larger". Make the models larger! You practically need a microscope to see them now. In real life, they must be like those poems engraved on grains of rice.
Which brings me to the main reason I like Alexandra Shulman. She is not like one of those poems engraved on grains of rice. She is like a poem written in calligraphy on a fine piece of parchment. Beautifully turned out, and also solid. She looks as though she might recognize rice, might even have eaten it with a Thai green curry. She does not look as if she would order an egg-white omelet that she would then bury under a pile of rocket.
While I wouldn't go quite as far as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in wanting "men about me that are fat," I share his suspicion of anyone with a "lean and hungry look." Anyone, for example, like Victoria Beckham. The poor girl looks as though she might buckle under the weight of her sunglasses. She looks, in fact, as if a single bean sprout would have her bursting out of her size-of-a-seven-year-old jeans.
My friends, like me, and like every woman in the Western world, would mostly like to be thinner. We'd like to be thinner in the way that we'd quite like to win the Booker Prize, or marry George Clooney, or bring about world peace. We'd like to be thinner in the way that once had me devouring The Atkins Diet in the bar at Waterstone's bookshop with a nice glass of Sauvignon and a bowl of Kettle Chips. I read You Are What You Eat in a hotel lounge with a cafetière and a plate of home-made shortbread. I read French Women Don't Get Fat in a café with a banana muffin and a latte. French women don't get fat, if I remember rightly, because they're neurotic, miserable creatures who would rather look like a clothes horse than get a life.
Because that's what it's about, this thing called eating, it's about life. Food is fuel, of course, to keep the body functioning, the heart beating, the blood flowing and the brain alert -- but it is so much more than that. It's about the tastes and smells and textures of life itself. For me, sharing tapas, or mezze or a smorgasbord with people I love feels like a kind of communion.
Last week, the columnist Liz Jones confessed she had "never eaten a whole banana" and spent her entire life wanting to be "like the women in the pages of Vogue". It hadn't made her happy, she said, but she would "rather be thin than happy." She was flooded with responses, she wrote this week, from people who felt the same way.
How very, very sad that so many women -- not pre-pubescent teenagers, but adult women -- are wrecking their lives in pursuit of such a silly, life-denying goal. And now we know even the "women in Vogue" don't look like the women in Vogue. And neither, thank God, does its editor.