Michael Barrymore and the eternal mystery of a woman's handbag

Hillary Clinton has been talking about her love of a good handbag. (Rather than a good handbagging, which is what Margaret Thatcher used to give her opponents.) She – Mrs Clinton – reckons they are a great uniter of women and that “no one should make fun of anyone else’s handbag choices”. Her favourite is a Ferragamo in hot pink. She thought she would only carry it in spring, but it made her so happy she uses it in winter, too. “I mean, how can you be unhappy if you pick up a big pink bag?” How indeed. I suspect Sir Christopher Meyer, our former Ambassador to Washington, applied the same logic to his bright red socks. However grey your suit, how can you be unhappy if you know they’re down there? But the sock cannot be the proper equivalent of the handbag, because handbags are about much more than colour. For the young, they provide something to dance around at a disco; for the old, they are a useful weapon, as 71-year-old Ann Timson showed when she used hers on six jewellery thieves in Northampton. Handbags also signify what Freudians would call “the self”, which is why nightmares about losing them are apparently common. Perhaps this is also why buying new ones can become so addictive. A survey not long ago found that the average 30-year-old woman owns 21, and buys a new one every three months, adding up to 111 over a lifetime. The most desirable handbag in the world, I am reliably informed, is the Birkin made by Hermes. Victoria Beckham has 100 of them. The basic model costs about £5,000; the most expensive, studded with diamonds, is closer to £1,000,000. I doubt many men could identify one (it doesn’t have a logo), so it must be assumed that women buy them to impress other women. Only they are fluent in the language.