When we moved to this corner of north London 16 years ago, two things thrilled us. The first was the fact that Charles Dickens’s secret love, Nelly Ternan, once lived in a house at the end of our street, to which the writer was a regular visitor. The second was that Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism and my all-time heroine, worshipped at the nonconformist chapel up the road. To think of these women, as I invariably do most days, is to be filled with gratitude. How much we owe those who came before us.
But then, last Tuesday, it happened: Maggi Hambling’s statue “for” Wollstonecraft landed on Newington Green, as if from outer space, and pretty much ever since, I’ve been in a rage. Trust me. No photograph does its Bacofoil badness justice. Its ill-considered site means that it stands in a mud bath. The typeface on its plinth ranks with Comic Sans when it comes to inelegance. The tiny proportions of the naked female figure that tops it bring to mind a 1970s Pippa doll, a toy that, even as a child, I identified as utterly pathetic.
Still, on the upside, the mood here is vaguely festive. Mary is a community art project now – all fun-size knitted vests and gaffer-tape bras very welcome. My favourite intervention so far reads: “Where are my books? Where are my clothes?” My own installation, in the planning, will riff on the luxuriant pubic hair of Hambling’s Everywoman. It will feature a cauliflower and invite passersby to spot the difference.
Nostalgia and The Crown
Watching the new series of The Crown has left me in a state of feverish nostalgia. All I really want to do is stick a tape of Diana Ross singing Upside Down in a Walkman, and rollerskate wildly. But, dignity. I must find alternative ways of scratching this particular itch.
On Etsy, a website known to me as The Key to All Mythologies after Casaubon’s never-to-be-completed book in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (I can surf it forever), I’ve already spent an evening looking for a Liberty lawn blouse like the one Princess Diana wore to her wedding rehearsal.
Meanwhile, there’s always alcohol. In The Crown, the royal coven (the Queen, her mother and sister) are forever at the aperitifs. I can’t quite take Dubonnet with only gin and ice, as Her Majesty is said to like it. But having ransacked The Savoy Cocktail Book, I commend this variation on the Blackthorn: one third Dubonnet, two-thirds sloe gin, one dash orange bitters. Shake, strain and drink to Billy Joel.
The crosses of a rookie reporter
No one writes a word about Lee Cain, the recently toppled Downing Street director of communications, without noting that during the 2010 election, when he was a Mirror reporter, it was his job to taunt David Cameron while dressed as a chicken. But hey, we’ve all been there. In the early 90s, the designer Hussein Chalayan, then in his edgy pomp, sent a model down the runway wearing a kind of jaw brace: an ugly piece of metallic hardware that forced her mouth wide open. On seeing it, my boss at a Sunday newspaper resolved to send me, the junior butt of all his most humiliating jokes, out and about in this bit of kit. And so it came to pass that I travelled on the tube, shopped at Budgen’s and ate dinner at Terence Conran’s Mezzo, my expression all the while fixed à la Munch’s Scream. My, how we (he) laughed.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
