I'm a sucker for the occasional home magazine, especially country ones. Despite my view that they are a waste of money and my resolve not to buy them, they still get me when I'm having a low moment. They're like a paper chocolate biscuit, they pick-me-up.
What's the appeal?
First, they're a visual feast of homes, objects and gardens. I don't like everything I see in them, but they offer aesthetic food: colours, shapes and combinations. This nourishment is handy when I can't see my own home clearly - when I've swept and washed up for the umpteenth time, and it all seems a little too much like hard work.
Second, and more problematically, they allow me to indulge in a little fantasy of life elsewhere; of the classic tree-change; of village life, Bloomsbury-inspired interior decoration, and jersey cows.
Now having lived in the Australian country, I know the reality of the good and bad. The crisp air and mountains that are always up, as well as the smoke spirals over the hills and the tiger snake by the letter box. But in a sedate British country magazine, the more difficult aspects of rural life are always rendered in a charming way. It is all hedgerows and squirrels.
This aesthetic and imaginary escapism is two-sided affair. 'All modern people have their own repertoire of eleswheres, of alternatives,' writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, 'the places they go in their minds, and the ambitions they attempt to realize - to make their actual, lived lives more than bearable. Indeed the whole notion of escape, that it is possible and desirable, is like a prosthetic device of the imagination. How could we live without it?'
Yet, it isn't all escape and then return to a brute and unwanted reality. No, a brief imaginary holiday can bring me back to where I am, stronger for the break, clearer in the sense of who I am, seeing the ordinary world around me anew.
Despite these benefits, I don't think buying them is a particularly good use of limited funds, so I've found a way to stop buying them new... 20 cents at the op shop!
I hear you loud and clear - I am one of your ranks for sure - I just finished slobering over the new Vogue living and surprised I actually know someone in it! Their house crazy tidy, unlike mine...
ReplyDelete( great quote too)
(wish I could find my fix at the op shop, I am the one dropping them at the op shop!
That great quote comes courtesy of your Phillip's Houdini book - thank you, I've only just finished it. I've found lots in there that's useful, intriguing and fascinating.
ReplyDeleteI can't get into Vogue Living. It must be too cutting edge, designer-ish for me. I'm so nostalgic for old, battered things. But I am now curious about who is in it you know. Might have to take a peek and try to wildly guess... Do they really living 'crazy tidy' everyday, or only for the magazine pictures?
We have a friend who buys such magazines by the truckload. She shares them with us when done.
ReplyDeleteIt is wonderful to view how some others 'allegedly' live and to dream.