Alexandra Shulman’s Notebook: Take care, Gwynnie! A boomerang is set to hit you

What better way to deal with the empty nest phase in life than to do as Gwyneth Paltrow has done and moving house? After selling her family home of 18 million pounds in the Brentwood area of ​​Los Angeles, she and her husband move to what in LA conditions counts as their country house in Montecito.

Okay, not everyone wants a bigger place to play with, like Gwyneth, but many parents want to chucify the cards in the air and see them get down in another pattern when their children leave home.

More people I know have sold in the city and decided to base themselves between the fields and Bable Brooks with their dogs. That’s a good idea.

But guess what? The adult children who made us feel miserable as we helped pull all their belongings out of the house for a new life have a nasty habit of moving back in. The idea of ​​children who actually leaves nest, rather than to Having a quick flutter outside and return is really only for the birds.

Ask any middle -class parent of Twentysomethings, about the end of university parents.

My own 29-year-old is currently living (or should I say to stay) with us. Every time he moves out, I look at the room that was his childhood bedroom with a feeling of nostalgia mixed with excitement over what I had to do next with it.

And then, before I have resolved that question, he is back. It is a treat to have your adult child around instead, and definitely the conversations are more interesting than the monosyllabic grunts of the teenage years. But some parents/children’s behavior are preserved in aspisks and not always in a good way.

Those who invest in a new home and a new life often get an ugly shock when they find the extra space they have appointed as a home office or – what happiness! – A dressing room suddenly has to become their adult child’s bedroom again. Not that I imagine Gwyneth Paltrow will have to fight with a space problem when her children, Apple and Moses, Boomerang back.

New Cold War about what’s in the fridge

Continuing this topic: Can we talk about how different generations consider food hygiene?

When I stick around my 97-year-old mother’s fridge, I’m horrified by some of what I find. There are cheese that could march on Moscow, salad that redefines the expression limp, jars of sauce with crust that can serve as a lid. But every attempt from me to throw things out greeted with a rigid refusal and comment: ‘It’s just fine if you just cut off the crust/skin.’

As a child, I remember that onions would be held until they had trees that grew out of them and potatoes were obsessed with budding growths like acne. But astonishingly, my son considers my own behavior to be just as unsafe.

A pack of feta left a little open, with the outer edges that go a little yellow, is unacceptable. A cucumber that has not been sent again in cling films is considered useless. If the open pesto jar is a week old, it’s for the trash.

Some of my friends have a house with an old fridge full of so many odds and ends of food that their adult children were desperate after the club together to buy them a new one – just so it would be emptied of what they considered as toxic substance.

If it continues like this, every generation, which is fussies about food hygiene than the next, our great -grandchildren, will be brought up on the kind of rehydratable food used by astronauts to survive in space. No possibility of bacteria lurking there.

Are asked to relax? It emphasizes me

Last week I was sent to undergo a magnificent Swiss health spa. There I was, swirling in a soft white dressing dress, with nothing to do than being looked after. But every therapist – from the facial to the nutritional physiologist to that doctor to the masseur – looked at me in a worried way and told me I had to relax.

Who has ever found to be asked to relax something other than extremely annoying and hugely stressful? We are constantly bombarded with the importance of relaxing and ways to do it – mindfulness, yoga, sound baths, alternative nostrils breathing. All designed to transport us to this supposed nirvana of relaxation.

But what does it mean to be relaxed anyway? And really, what is the poenget? Who ever won the war by relaxing?

Pump the volume up – the buffant is back

Big hair is back, but it has nothing to do with the return of Donald Trump, despite what some fashion commentators say. When I was sitting in the hairdressers in recent months, I was transfixed by the sight of young women who had their long hair, for years held poker-traight, wrapped in curlers and appeared with hairstyles that make Dolly Parton’s wigs watch Then flat as Norfolk. Smaller Republican, more country music style, à la Miley Cyrus. How long until Dyson comes with a set of heated rolls?

Marianne’s special place in my heart

One of the very first items I owned was a 45 rpm of this little bird of Marianne Faithfull.

With his death last week comes a little personal loss of the little girl I once was, sitting on the floor and playing the single on a small laptop player. Some characters establish themselves as a springboard in the memory card of life. Marianne was one of them.

Bamboo … of a four -legged blotter

If anyone is interested in an update on the mouse situation I wrote about last Sunday, I can report that I have just seen two of the blighers that I am writing.

But I have no idea where they have scarpered. Obviously, their network of tunnels in the kitchen is just as wise disguised as Hamas under Gaza.