Celia Birtwell teams up with Uniqlo

Celia Birtwell is one of the UK’s most talented textile designers. Her gorgeous prints were tailored and cut into romantic dresses in the  60s and 70s by Ossie Clark, her late ex-husband, and worn by the likes of Marianne Faithfull, Bianca Jagger and Pattie Boyd.

Not only that, she also became the long-term muse of David Hockney, whose Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy portrait is one of the Tate’s most famous paintings.

Now in her 70s, she’s still turning out stunning designs. When she created a fashion collection for Topshop six years ago it rapidly became their most successful designer collaboration. The clothes flew off the shelves in next to no time – in fact I remember Topshop staff having to limit the number of Celia Birtwell designs eachcustomers could buy. Then she designed a range for outdoor clothing store Millets (I immediately snapped up some wellies and a sleeping bag).

So it’s great news that Birtwell has now teamed up with Uniqlo. Her archive prints have been transformed into an exclusive range of T-shirts, vests, shirts, tote bags, scarves and much more and will be launched in Uniqlo stores from March 21.

Wow. I’m definitely going to be in the queue…

The trials and tribulations of online Christmas shopping

Like most people, I’ve done loads of my shopping online this Christmas. Instead of flogging round the shops in the freezing cold I've sat in the warmth of my office sipping coffee and choosing presents from Amazon, Topshop and other shopping emporiums.

It’s so quick and easy that I wasn’t surprised in the least to read that online sales have doubled to ten per cent since 2000 and are predicted to rise to more than 12 per cent by 2014.

Except the one thing I’d forgotten in the midst of it all is that someone still has to deliver the blooming stuff. And that’s where I’m not so impressed.

Last week, three Amazon parcels got delivered to our house. Fine, except they were delivered on the days I was in London and were simply dumped on the doorstep. Again, it wouldn’t be a problem if we lived in the middle of nowhere but we’re on a main road in a busy city. Anyone could have hopped up the steps, nicked the parcels (luckily they didn’t) and sped off in a trice.

But I didn’t make a fuss till a third parcel arrived and was left outside in the pouring rain. I arrived home more than 12 hours later to find a sorry, sopping mess. The cardboard packaging completely disintegrated when I picked it up and the book inside was ruined. It took three phone calls to get through to the delivery company and about an hour to repackage the present and arrange for a new one to be delivered. Hmmm. In that time, I could have walked to Waterstone’s and bought it in person. Maybe online shopping isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

PS. The most hilarious piece I read over the weekend was a report declaring that the happiest moment of Christmas is at... 1.55pm. Apparently that’s the time when all the presents have been opened, lunch has been cooked and served and the children are playing happily with their new toys. I’m clearly the most disorganised parent on the planet but I can predict for sure that at 1.55pm in our house, lunch won’t have been cooked and served and we’ll only just have started opening our presents. I’m ashamed to admit that the latest we’ve sat down to lunch on Christmas Day was 5.30pm. And did it matter? Not a bit.

PPS. Just to show that there's something else to be said for shopping in person, the picture above (taken in the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris) shows my favourite shop window of the year. A VW camper in the window? Now that's definitely the way to attract customers.

Why don't teenagers wear winter coats?

Arctic blizzards are set to battle the UK this week, the north is blanketed in snow and even here in the soft south there’s a wintery chill in the air.

Bearing all that in mind, it seemed perfectly reasonable to ask my son whether he planned to wear a coat to school this morning.

“No,” he growled, hardly glancing up from his bowlful of Frosties. (At least he eats breakfast – a survey published this week said only one in two of us eat before leaving home in the morning.)

But teenagers’ aversion to coats is a mystery to me. My daughter was exactly the same when she was at school. Even on the coldest, wettest days she’d head for the bus wearing a threadbare jumper and short school skirt and insist she didn’t feel cold at all. “I’m fine,” she’d mutter, “really warm” – oblivious to the fact that her chattering teeth and blue lips gave the game away.

My son can’t protest he hasn’t got a coat either. I’ve spent a fortune on the blooming things. Last year I figured that if I bought him an ultra-chic Superdry one that he really liked, it would do the trick. My plan worked for a few days but then he met up with friends at a pizza place near Magdalen Bridge and carefully hung his coat by the door. When he went to retrieve his coat at the end of the evening it had gone. In its place was a flimsy cotton jacket – obviously left by the person who’d nicked my son’s lovely, warm coat. The following day the temperature dropped to minus degrees so, worried he was going to freeze, I went out and spent my week’s earnings on an identical one. An identical one that he never wears.

I just hope that he’ll eventually follow his big sister’s example and wake up to the wonderfulness of coats. One day my daughter announced out of the blue that she was off to Topshop to buy a winter coat. She came back a few hours later with a stylish navy number that she still loves. Result!

PS. I mentioned last week how I can’t wait to see Steven Spielberg’s War Horse when it opens here in January. But considering I cry at anything (apart from that John Lewis ad), I was worried by the Times reviewer’s verdict on the New York premiere. “If you don’t cry in War Horse, it’s because you have no tear ducts,” he wrote. We have been warned.

Sleep deprived parents and Christmas shopping

My teenage daughter arrives home for her university reading week laden with history books, files, an enormous bundle of washing and these sky-high Topshop shoes.

“Try them - they’re really comfy,” she says. So I do, and amazingly they are. Well, until you wobble and fall off, when you’re liable to be carted off to hospital with a broken ankle. And as for hobbling round London on the tube or walking into Oxford, forget it.

But the main reason she’s back home for a few days (well, apart from seeing us lot) is to catch up on her sleep. A full-time student, she spends her spare time working three nights a week in a chic Shoreditch bar, running the university art society and partying with her friends. Wow - I’m not surprised she’s tired.

It’s ironic that she’ll happily doze till lunchtime these days, considering she was a very wide-awake baby who slept for five hours at night if I was lucky – and never in the daytime at all. Her sleeping was so dire that my South London GP referred us to a sleep clinic but that didn’t do any good either. It was years and years before she changed her mind and decided she liked sleeping after all.

But despite the solitude and profound lack of sleep I wouldn’t swap those days for anything. She laughs when I tell her about the endless nights of playing soporific Enya tracks to her and about the way I used to climb into her cot and lie beside her in a desperate attempt to get her to nod off. At least I don’t have to do that now.

PS: A new Good Food magazine survey says that in these dire economic times one in three of us are planning to “make or bake” our Christmas presents. Not for the first time in my life, I feel completely inadequate. I can’t think of anything I can "make or bake" that anyone would actually want. Suggestions gratefully received...