If Meghan's so progressive, why's she flogging napkin rings?
A *tiny little* rant about the Duchess of Sussex's new business. Plus are neck pillows on planes ever acceptable? Also, a REALLY FUN book and advice about egg freezing.
If you have a look at The United States Patent and Trademark Office website, and I recommend you do because it’s a laugh and freely available, you can see what the Duchess of Sussex’s new lifestyle brand is going to sell. It’s been reported that she’s going to offer ‘jams, jellies and marmalades,’ but there’s so much more intel on there. According to the paperwork lodged with the American website, she’ll also be selling coffee and tea ‘servingware’, napkin rings, place card holders, cutlery, beverageware (what?), tablecloths, kitchen linens, recipe books and a frankly boggling number of things to put on toast. Not just jams and marmalades but ‘edible oils and fats, and preserves, vegetable-based spreads, legume-based spreads, nut-based spreads, garlic-based spreads, sesame-based spreads, dairy-based spreads, nut butters,’ and, finally, ‘fruit butters.’ I promise you those are all lodged on the patent site.
American Riviera Orchard, in other words, is going to become yet another business pushing products to fill our kitchens with pretty knick-knacks, and Meghan’s about to become another woman flogging napkin rings.
My god there are a lot of women doing this now. And they are mostly women. I don’t want to be a bitch and single anyone out, but off the top of my head I can immediately think of several successful women who promote such knick-knacks online. Lovely things, admittedly. Lovely cushions, lovely napkins, lovely butter dishes, lovely flower arrangements, lovely rattan rabbits to decorate the Easter table. On the one hand, their own businesses. Splendid. One step forward for feminism. On the other, are they perhaps promoting quite a twee, stylised image of what a woman’s life should revolve around?
They encourage the sale of their knick-knacks via their photogenic lives on Instagram - oh look, here’s one fluffing daffodils on her dining room table for a ‘casual’ lunch for 17 people. Here’s another posing in an apron in her rustic, £150,000 Plain English kitchen. You’re not just buying a gingham butter dish if you buy one from these women, is the subtext. What you’re doing is buying a tiny bit of their seemingly perfect, glossy lifestyles. You’re going to make your life more like theirs.
FAIR ENOUGH, on one level. There’s little joy around atm. Why not spark some with the purchase of a £70 butter dish*? It’s all part of the interiors boom we’ve been witnessing since the pandemic, the ongoing attempt to make our homes, in which we now spend so much more time, look nice for social media. Hashtag cottagecore and all that.
It’s just quite old-fashioned. Here these women are, making perfect homes with small children in smocked dresses or long Victorian nighties clinging to their legs. Where are the men? No idea. In the City doing Important Financial Things, presumably. And it feels particularly old-fashioned for Meghan, who’s supposedly so progressive. Who famously and impressively wrote a letter to Proctor and Gamble aged 11 complaining that their washing up advert was sexist because it referred to ‘women all over America fighting greasy pots and pans.’
I suspect her marketing efforts online will be similar to those pushing tablescapes and napkins elsewhere. Even the fairly silly name - American Riviera Orchard - seems designed to conjure up images of sunny, homespun wholesomeness. The Instagram account’s already launched and last week an Insta story briefly showed Meghan cooking in her kitchen (in a cream jumper, very practical), and a pair of hands arranging pink and cream roses. Perhaps next we’ll see an artful shot of her baking a batch of jam tarts, a light dusting of flour on her nose, with Archie standing on a stool beside her licking the spoon. She didn’t want to be part of an institution she supposedly considered anachronistic, and yet here she is selling the 1950s housewife vibe instead. Is that progress?
(*I bought a butter dish the other day but it was £17 from Amazon.)
Picture of the week
Where do we stand on neck pillows? This picture wasn’t taken this week, but a couple of months ago in Mumbai. I was flying to Nairobi on a 2am flight, so VERY RELUCTANTLY bought one of those preposterous neck supports that people often strap to their rucksacks as if to say '‘Ooooh, I’m such a traveller.’
I’ve sometimes posed this scenario to people: imagine that you fall wildly in love with someone, but the first time you go away together, he or she arrives at the airport carrying a neck pillow. What would you do?
I’m asking because my boyfriend and I are going away next month, on a night flight, and we have now been discussing neck pillows for several weeks. The cheap black pillow in this picture was awful. Didn’t do anything. Arrived at Nairobi airport feeling only slightly more together than Marie Antoinette after her turn on the guillotine. So I’m threatening to buy another one for our journey and have recently found myself googling ‘neck pillow reviews’. Does anyone have strong feelings about neck pillows? Do *any* of them work? There’s one I’ve seen online that looks like a small duvet you wrap around your neck which has good reviews, but do I want to traipse through the airport clutching one of those? Will I soon be single again? Paul keeps laughing nervously when I say I’m going to buy two neck pillows for the trip - one each - but unfortunately he doesn’t realise I’m serious. All neck pillow tips extremely welcome in the comment section below.
Recommendation of the week
Doing a shift at The Marsden hospital last week, I was talking to my friend and fellow volunteer Lucy while we made sandwiches for the café. We often talk quite loudly about inappropriate things (celebrity rumours, Kate Middleton, a chair that improves your kegel muscles) considering we’re working in a hospital cafe, but my theory is those waiting at The Marsden might quite like a jolly distraction. Anyway, last week, Lucy started talking about a ‘terrible’ book her friend was obsessed with, and its new film adaptation. She started explaining the book - ‘it’s basically Harry Styles fan fict—’ - whereupon I interrupted her. ‘OH MY GOD, I LOVED THAT BOOK!’
The book is called The Idea Of You by an American writer called Robinne Lee. It was published in 2017, its premiere was at a Texas film festival last week and the adaptation is launching soon(ish) on Amazon Prime (May 2), starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine (the handsome posh boy actor who’s currently larking about alongside Julianne Moore in Mary & George).
It’s the story of a 40-year-old American ‘mom’ who takes her teenage daughters to see the world’s biggest boyband, and embarks on a whirlwind love affair with the lead singer. Literary critics would be very sniffy about it and I’m not saying the thing would be listed for The Booker, but I completely fell for the glorious and very escapist romance and I think might even have wept at the last line??? It’s really good FUN, and don’t we all want some of that every now and then rather than plodding through something we think we should read? So I’m recommending that this week and click HERE for the trailer, which I watched on Lucy’s phone while hiding in The Marsden cafe’s store cupboard last week because I was that desperate to see it.
Nonsense of the week
Wooden spoon to Miriam Cates, the Tory MP who gave a thoroughly uninformed interview over the weekend in which she said ‘egg freezing doesn’t work.’ Grrrr, it annoys me when people slag off egg freezing because they’ve read one article on the statistics.
Cates’s statement is misleading and likely to make (some) women of a certain age feel more panicked. Look, egg freezing statistics are dizzying and can seem dismal. I know this because I studied them for a long time before I went through the process myself aged 34. But part of the problem when it comes to computing success rates is that, because egg freezing is still a relatively new science, women of all ages tend to be lumped in together – whether you’re 35 or 45 – and this distorts the numbers.
What’s more helpful is to study the success rates for your own age. According to a 2017 study, a 34-year-old woman (which I was when I did it) who freezes 20 eggs (which I did) has a 90 per cent chance of getting a gurgling baby from them. Not bad odds, I’d say. Also, before you go through egg freezing you’ll have a series of tests which will indicate how likely it is that you’ll be able to freeze a good number. It is true that success rates decline more quickly aged 35 onwards, but again you should look carefully at your own, specific fertility situation - hormone levels, ovarian health and so on - before assuming anything. Remember, too, that because egg freezing is still a new-ish practice, and while women are freezing their eggs in greater numbers, far fewer have come back to use these eggs, so the data that exists is based on relatively small quotas.
If this is you, wondering about egg freezing, or you have a daughter/granddaughter/sister/cousin/pal thinking about it, my advice is to do the research. Go to the free opening evenings that certain clinics offer. Really read up on the process before listening to people like Miriam Cates, who doesn’t sound like she’s read very much about it at all.
I never want to sound like I’m in the pay of the egg freezing industry when I write or talk about it. I paid for my round. I’m aware there are enormous problems with the industry, including lack of transparency on costs and wildly varying quality when it comes to clinics. But what I do know is that, although it’s an expensive and not hugely enjoyable process and there’s never a guarantee of a baby at the end, it gave me an incalculable sense of relief at a stage when it felt like my friends were getting married and knocked up, and I was 10 steps behind. And now I have those eggs in the freezer waiting if I ever do need to use them.
I agree that more education is needed on this matter, so the message to young people isn’t ‘Don’t get pregnant! Don’t get pregnant! OK get pregnant now! Oh no you’ve left it too late!’ But I also think senior politicians should be more careful when talking about this subject. Miriam, babe, I made a diary podcast of my journey through egg freezing if you fancy learning about it. Listen HERE.
And American Riviera Orchard sounds like a what.three.words location identification code 🤔
The answer to neck pillows or seat reclining is to always turn left!