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The Guardian
20-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
How we let our babies down in 1974
UK parents, listen up: you're letting your babies down. So warn husband-and-wife team Brian Jackson, director of the Child Minding Research and Development Unit, and child psychologist Sonia Jackson, writing in the Observer Magazine on 22 September 1974. They kick off a three-part series on child development with a stern rebuke: we are failing our little nippers in the 'vital' preschool years, a time 'when so much of a child's intellectual development is won or lost'. Every bairn is a genius in nappies and we must recognise 'the mind-dizzying potentiality of our children'. That potential, the Jacksons argue, is being thwarted, owing to 'the immediate world into which the baby is born'. Babies may be programmed to learn, 'but in our society, and this is not a problem confined to poor or poorly educated families,' we are letting them down. There are, they decry, 'three cardinal ways in which early growth is delayed or restricted'. Top of the list, here in the UK, is 'Boring the baby.' Not so in 'many African or Asian villages', which may be 'much more dangerous' than in the UK, but at least they do not hold their infants back with 'the trappings of affluence' such as 'cots and prams'. Far worse is the way we make our babies sleep. This is a 'deadly restriction' and one that UK parents ignore. Why? Because a sleeping baby 'means a free adult'. The result? 'Every day, millions of babies spend endless, empty hours lying on their backs, unable to move their heads to vary their view – so they sleep for lack of alternatives.' The third cardinal offence is 'clocking them on', which is to say, treating a baby as an object, not a person, albeit a 'delicate, precious and loved' object. Squealers are wheeled about in 'trendy prams' or sport 'a prima donna's wardrobe'. The result? 'Babies in Britain are often worse off than in many of those poorer parts of the globe about which we think with pity.'
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
A million-dollar gamble on Royal Lavulite, 1982
A few years back, Arizona jewellery designers Randy and Janie Polk were struggling to make ends meet. Randy traded gemstones with fellow hustlers in smoky hotel rooms. He liked the bright stuff, the 'gumdrop colours', he tells Anthea Disney for the Observer Magazine of 6 June 1982. When 'some young hustlers brought him a bag full of purple rock' from South Africa, Randy 'didn't know what it was. I just thought it was pretty, like grape juice,' he reminisces. 'Everything I made in purple or lavender sold quickly, so I was interested.' And on edge. His four-year-old daughter had been critically injured in a car accident and he was struggling to pay mounting hospital and care-home bills. As he cut and polished the purple rock, he dared to dream: 'It had all the qualities we look for in a gem: beauty, durability and rarity.' Randy followed his hunch and sold everything, including his wife's engagement ring, their stereo and his gun collection, to pay for a ticket to the manganese ore mine in South Africa. The miners, writes Disney, 'had 'liberated' the coloured rock… by taking it out in their lunch boxes.' Randy went one better: he emptied his suitcases, filling them with what would turn out to be '$20-$30m worth of gem-grade stones'. Back home, he set the price for a mineral he'd by now named Royal Lavulite. 'I was taking the biggest gamble of my life.' It paid off. The mineral, a rare strain of sugilite and 'a freak of nature to be found only in one mine in South Africa', was classified as a rare gem in 1980. Randie had cornered half the world's supply, with an estimated value of more than $50m before the gem peaked. 'He is rapturous about his newfound prosperity,' says Disney. And yet. His daughter died last year. Their 10-year-old son misses his sister. 'I've learned that fairytales do not come true,' reflects Randy. 'Sometimes I think I've lost more than I've acquired… Maybe there's no such thing as a happy ending.'
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Issey Miyake brings his revolutionary piece of cloth to Tokyo, 1999
It is rehearsal day for Japanese designer Issey Miyake and the 61-year-old fashion innovator is pumped. This is his first Tokyo fashion show in five years and he's keen to share his new concept in DIY clothing: 'A revolutionary idea called A-POC' – an abbreviation of A Piece of Cloth – writes Tamsan Blanchard in the Observer Magazine on 25 April 1999. 'He has not been so excited about one of his own products since Pleats Please was launched in 1993.' For Miyake's Paris show the previous autumn, an A-POC – a single strip of fabric – was 'transformed into a capsule wardrobe before our very eyes,' gasps Blanchard. 'Lengths of white fabric were laid out on the floor and a small team of assistants set to work with their scissors. A snip here, a snip there and voilà! A pair of knickers… More scissor work and there was a bra top.' A skirt, hat, socks and more besides followed: one piece of fabric, one capsule wardrobe. The message: yes, you can try this at home! 'I'm not interested in selling myself,' Miyake confides, adding that he sometimes observes his customers in the Pleats Please store on London's Brook Street. They are nice people, 'ordinary'. For his part, 'I never tried to be like a superstar or a famous designer. The only thing I wanted was to be very proud of what I'm doing.' He wasn't proud of himself back when 'his clothes were beginning to look more at home in a textiles gallery than on the woman in the street'. Following one Paris show, he realised he'd forgotten the importance of everyday life, so he got himself a rucksack, some underwear and a toothbrush and went to Greece. He hand-washed the underwear, took stock. Three years later, in 1988, functional, affordable Pleats Please was born. The A-POC retails in the UK for £470. Too high, and Miyake knows it. Fashion victims are not his target market. 'I'm not interested in high-maintenance women who take one hour for hair, one hour to dress, one hour for makeup. Disaster!'
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pedro Almodóvar's image crisis, 1994
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar established his international reputation with 'raucous farces' such as What Have I Done to Deserve This? And Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, writes Robert Chalmers in the Observer Magazine on 5 June 1994. His new film, Kika, features a porn star, a lesbian maid, a serial killer and a rape scene played as 'knockabout comedy', begging the question: has the clown prince of Europe lost his sense of humour, both in his life and in his art? Holding court in his Madrid headquarters, the 42-year-old is 'listless, withdrawn and miserable'. Reviews for Kika in Spain and France are poor. He has a bad toothache. The state of his nation is also causing him pain. 'The economic position is bad,' offers Almodóvar. 'The social situation is bad. People are more afraid. I think the 90s have taken us all by surprise.' The early 80s were different. Back then, 'Spain was the most liberated country in the world.' The director's 'vulgar frivolity', says Chalmers, had free rein. Now, says Almódovar, censorship abounds, with 'Anglo-Saxons' key offenders. Former associates from La Movida, the post-Franco countercultural movement, say fame is the auteur's undoing. Painter Guillermo Pérez Villalta blames the 1980s: they 'screwed up a lot of things. It was one of the most horrendous periods. 'Almodóvar, who was a wonderful person, has become almost unbearable. Fame devours you.' For Almodóvar, self-doubt does not ail him. This evidently makes Chalmers uneasy. Calling on the director's knowledge of fin de siècle figures such as Oscar Wilde and Audrey Beardsley, he asks the Spanish enfant terrible if he might yet 'undergo an 11th-hour conversion and leave his friends a testament that ended with the instruction: Destroy all the bad pictures?' The answer is: no. 'I reaffirm everything I have done… If I had my life again, I would live it in the same way.' The director pauses 'for one final provocation', says Chalmers, before adding: 'The same, but more.'
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The begum's beady eyes: Madhur Jaffrey on filming Heat and Dust, 1983
Madhur Jaffrey, 'the lovely lady who teaches us Indian cookery on television and in books,' was a Rada-trained actor before becoming a 'household name', writes Janet Watts in the Observer Magazine on 9 January 1983. Now she is resuming her acting career in James Ivory's latest film, Heat and Dust. She plays the wicked old Begum, manipulative mother to the Nawab (played by Shashi Kapoor)who makes 'a dishonest woman of a ravishing English rose' (played by Greta Scacchi). 'I was always a rebel,' she tells Watts from her New York home. Born into an 'upper-upper-middle-class' family, her matriarch grandmother ruled the women in the Delhi household 'like a boss'. Women and, Jaffrey later realised, men too, were oppressed. 'Everything in her birthright,' writes Watts, 'gave her claustrophobia.' Her father called her acting a 'hobby', she called it 'the most wonderful escape', even if 'I was short and thin and had a big nose.' After Rada, she went to America, married the actor Saeed Jaffrey and had three daughters. The couple introduced James Ivory to Ismail Merchant and Jaffrey was cast in their 1965 film Shakespeare Wallah. She worried about not looking right. 'I still do!' she adds. She won Best Actress at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival. Afterwards, she asked her mother to send her the 'now-famous letters' full of Indian recipes, got divorced and began writing cookery books. Heat and Dust takes her back, not only to her acting days, but to a past of homegrown oppression and western colonialism. She feels sympathy for the British Raj that has gone, the tourists who are still coming. Jaffrey clarifies: 'India can suck out all your starch, your crisp European consciousness, and everything you hold dear can seem to slip out into this vast Indian vastness.' Not for Jaffrey, though. 'I'm part of the vastness,' she enthuses, 'I'm its product. It's taking nothing away from me; because I am it.' She feels nourished by it, says Watts, as readers do by her personal tastes of India.'
