Byline: by Rachel Johnson
WHEN I was small, I desperately wanted to be a boy and refused to wear dresses; and even now, most days I slob around in tracksuit bottoms and trainers.
I was expelled from my Dorset boarding school for bad behaviour, had sex before marriage and sometimes don't wear knickers or remember to wax (legs, moustache, armpits, whatever).
So, yes, I admit, I've never been a heelsand-pearls sort of girl and, at my age - 43 if you must know - I'm unlikely to embark on a punishing grooming and dressage show pony-style regime now. But despite all the above, I still consider myself - stop sniggering all those who have seen me dogwalking in the rain in my children's Abercrombie & Fitch hoodies - a lady.
Being a lady is not about how demure you look or how plummy you sound, which is why we all laugh, of course, when David Walliams paints his face with slap, encases himself in a Lady Bracknell frock and waves a handbag shrieking: 'I'm a Laydee!' It's an attitude. And it's a quality to which we can all aspire, which is why I've decided to spend the next stage levis of my life editing The Lady magazine.
Yes, I know, in modern life it sometimes seems the only time one's ever called a lady is in letters from the GP to your consultant (as in 'this 54-year-old lady presented with an acute case of ulcerative colitis'). But trust me on this, what The Lady represents - making the best of yourself and the most of your limited time on this earth - is making a comeback.
Just think of the extraordinary popularity of the TV reality series Ladette To Lady, which takes a bunch of thong-twanging, bingedrinking girls and incarcerates them for six long weeks in Eggleston Hall finishing school, with miraculous, transformational results that would have Professor Higgins bursting with pride.
The girls land with cans of extrastrength lager and Lord knows what else in their wheel-on luggage, and leave like princesses, with a self-confidence they never dreamed was within their reach.
Meanwhile, their parents are sobbing their eyes out as the girls make speeches in which they thank the middle-aged staff - not for coaching them in how to curtsey before royalty or which fish knife to use - but for imbuing them with the inestimable value of learning manners, courtesy and self-respect.
Sharon Osbourne is doing much the same - only with less-rounded vowels - over on another channel, with her series Charm School.
Cartier Tankissime Yes, decades after women won the freedom to burn their bras, free their bodies from the obligation of childbirth via the Pill, split up and remarry, and all for more equal pay, there is the lingering sense that something precious has been lost.
SO TO regain it, we have to define for a younger generation of women - who have as much opportunity to drink, work, and have sex as their male counterparts - what it means to be a lady today.
Which is harder than it sounds.
In years past, when young debutantes were presented at Court, society was governed by rules as immutable and unyielding as Sharia law. Women had to give up their jobs when they got married; menstruation was taboo; and nice girls simply didn't.
Meanwhile, debutantes were dab hands at flower-arranging, small talk, deep Court curtseying, croquet, tennis and ballroom dancing. And while they could whip up a white sauce blindfold, or make their own corsag
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