Sobbing into a £695 handbag

Following the "I can't cope any more" sobbings of several high profile females, it's been observed by one or two of the group formerly known as the General Public that rich, famous women complaining about depression is a bit, well, rich. Try being poor in today's Britain, said one pissed off correspondent to the Guardian's Letters Page, and quite right too. This weekend The Sunday Times' Style section contributed its two bobs' worth to the hand-wringing with a heartfelt feature that made a reasonably sensible effort to point the finger at women's futile tendency to think they can live a fantasy. (There is another word for this, by the way, and it is Stupid.)

As for the distance between that piece and one promoting said fantasy, I found it was a mere two pages further on: the ‘How I Make it Work’ feature showed us a 34 year-old PR woman who had her first baby in September and started her own company in January. She works through into the evenings so as to be ‘in contact with New York and LA’. (Ever heard of e-mail?) And in case we didn’t get the message, her belongings - £695 bag, £40 tiny Smythson notebook etc, were made to sound as essential as vital organs. Ironically, as Shane Watson said in the same magazine, we now look to a commercial - for John Lewis, which is after all, a shop - to remind us of life’s ‘real’ values. Well, supposedly.

It's at times like these you realise your mother did talk some sense after all.