Sometimes when things get just a little bit too crazy, something outrageously awful happens that it is too raw right now to even laugh at it and it feels the world has gone completely and utterly bananas, it can only take one small thing to make me smile again.
Today it was this; dashing around Covent Garden this lunchtime weaving between street artists, tourists, shoppers and the like, I spotted a Chanel lamppost. For those who swoon over anything mildly romantic, legend has it that our very own second Duke of Westminster was indeed so taken with Mademoiselle 'Coco' Chanel after their meeting in the late 1920s, that he insisted that all lampposts in Westminster were to have her initials adorned on them.
Apparently Westminster City Council has quashed these romantic notions and state that the two Cs actually stand for City Council. Sigh. Don’t they know what love is? Have they ever seen any of her beautiful designs? Have they not read Justine Picardie’s Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life? Well?
Coco actually turned down the Duke’s marriage proposal and is said to have told him ‘There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel'. in a way in which I suppose only she could have.
Today, I feel the need to be reminded of life’s small but wonderful things and am choosing to go with romance. When I pass that same lamppost later, or on any other sunny day in London, I will smile and think of Coco.
