IN DEFENCE OF TWEENESS

The 't, 'w' and 'e' keys on everybody's laptop have been getting extra use since Kate Muir's 'Dark Ages' article in The Times Magazine last Saturday. Twee it seems is the word of the moment. 'Well, some are born twee, some achieve tweeness and some have tweeness thrust upon them, to borrow one of the Bard's memorable constructions. Thanks to Ms Muir we Purple Cooers suddenly find ourselves in the thrust upon camp, to great consternation all round.

I am such an un-twee person that even tweeness thrust upon me would surely need a good length of knicker elastic to hold it in place. Nevertheless one can aspire. I should love to live in an elegant cottage, surrounded by nasturtiums and hollyhocks, a couple of Labs docilely playing with my flaxen-headed children on the lawn, while Boden-clad I whistled up summer puddings gleaned from the Waitrose magazine.

In fact I should love a thousand accomplishments to which a truly twee person should aspire, but as I have yet to collide with a fairy godmother on a civilising mission, I can only make do with using the right words, such as hollyhocks and Labradors. By selecting the correct buzzwords (and leaving out others) we can all make our lives appear insufferably twee to others. To this end I shall make myself available should Ms Muir want an interview.

For tweeness is in the eye of the beholder. Tweeness is the swan gliding effortlessly over the water, its furiously paddling feet hidden from view. Tweeness is the lamb gambolling in the field or the rich dark rosemary laden chop on your plate; it is not the transport, the abbatoir, the meat plant.

Tweeness can be suggested by a single word like Boden, which then becomes the leit-motif of everything we are. Even Joan of Arc can be made twee, with this slight of hand - just think of her linen shirts, her love of horses, her avant-garde hair and her 'voices' (clearly charming) from heaven.

What could be more twee than our little 65 seat theatre nestling 'au fond' of what was once a bustling cattle market. Or the four 'Deckchair' playlets by Jean McConnel, that we staged there last week, finishing with the traditional end of show supper, the tables decorated with a seaside theme of shells and wooden fish?

Or after that again, the midnight glass of Muscadet under a gazebo in someone's garden, surrounded by geraniums and petunias; or the next day's wrap-up lunch for cast and crew, decked out in our summer finery, in another garden where the dragon flies swooped in the sunshine?

Very Midsomer Murders, very Rosemary and Thyme you might think; the apogee of tweedom - but a glance at the television while ironing soon brought me down to earth. Beside the fictional theatre offering in Rosemary and Thyme's new series last night, our efforts were mired deep in stone age unfashionableness.

Yet such celluloid tweeness is an impossible illusion that can only exist in the overheated mind of high budget television. In real life, we can suggest tweeness, but we can't really make it happen. Reality gets in the way.

Tweeness is an artificial construct: it doesn't exist. It is a sanitised and sectioned view of life, a fraction of the story, an illusion in other words. Thus the hollyhock cottage will be draughty; its roof leaking. One of the dogs will have been sick on the carpet; the oven will be on the blink and the (not so gorgeous) food will have come mostly from a packet.

Even worse, though the world may portray you, twee-ly, as doing 'something frightfully clever' from home - you know you are always only a hair's breadth away from joining the great army of the self-unemployed.

Still provided we recognise that tweeness is a face presented to the world after appropriate and lengthy complexioning at the dressing table, where's the harm in aspiring to its elegance? Living in the gutter, as the poet said, should not prevent us from looking at the stars. Is tweeness really any different to beauty - something to be worked on, and even suffered for, to produce elegance? A game that we play to make us feel nicely grander than we really are.

We can accept that clothes and make-up are veneers, so why can't we accept aspects of tweeness in the same way? Is it wrong to sweep dust under the rug or to shelter our ragged selves behind some attractive artefact? We are not denying that our feet are clay and our lives are drab, we just want to inject a bit of colour, to rise above the ordinary, to become a little more civilised. Despite the cliché, we are really worth it.