Adele: A fashion audition that wasn't worth the weight Here in the Thames Valley Frost Pocket, specifically in that part of it which lies between Newbury and Basingstoke, the snow that fell on Thursday night is still on the ground. I am going stir-crazy. Having learnt years ago never to make a New Year's resolution in January, because the house is still heaving with rich foodstuffs that need to be eaten (Muscat dates, tins of gingerbread, marzipan; waste not, want not), I make them on Twelfth Night for the first of February. So I ought to be nicely into my New Year Fitness Plan for a Sleek New Me now - running (plodding) up the hill past Lloyd-Webber, leaping about to salsa music over the back in Burghclere. Can't face it, though. Can't face even Step 1 (donning icy nylon dancewear in unheated bedroom) or Step 2 (getting into a frosted car). So I am doomed to be self-hating until spring. Unlike 23-year-old Adele, who appears to be as serene and full of self-esteem as she is lovely looking and sensationally voiced. She has risen above her rude attack by Karl Lagerfeld, the master of Chanel, who was quoted as saying she was "a little too fat," (the word "fat" is rude), "but has a beautiful face and a divine voice," which is true. Adele, meanwhile, is on YouTube looking blithe and telling CNN she likes her curves and wouldn't diet, not ever, never. M Lagerfeld has been backtracking most uncharacteristically ever since, although he knows whereof he speaks, curveswise. He was himself a fairly weighty chap. He is in the business of being ruthless about fat, though. I once saw a very young model in my office - well, she was 17, which seems to be "very young" these days, though when I was 17, I was treated as though grown-up and in charge of my own destiny. When the fashion director asked who she'd worked for recently, she mentioned how she had been into Chanel for a go-see (that's what they all call an appointment) by Lagerfeld himself. She'd entered the building carrying her portfolio, which was taken from her by an underling and handed to an overling who accompanied her into the studio to wait for "Monsieur le maître." Lagerfeld had his back to the room - in those days a pretty broad back - and the underling took the portfolio from her, put her finger to her lips and made a "don't talk!" frown and slid it on to Karl's desk. Lagerfeld swivelled round in his chair to look her slowly up and down, his face expressionless, before rapidly flicking over page after page of her pictures. Then, slapping it shut for the underling to remove, he turned again towards Little Miss Londoner, said: "Lose weight," and turned back to his desk. Whereupon she was whisked outside into the Paris street. As the fashion editors in my office fluttered around her, tut-tutting, she was still smarting from his stinging slapdown. But how much did the poor child weigh, for heaven's sake? "Eight stone," she said, sniffing, and: "Five foot 10," to the next question. Don't lose weight, I told her, speaking as a mother of daughters. At that time, M Lagerfeld weighed around 17 stone himself and (not being anywhere near 6ft tall), he looked a bit like an egg in an eggcup. In the year 2000, he determined to lose weight and went to a nutritionist. After a year or so of drinking only Diet Coke and eating some sort of slurry I never got to the bottom of - plus unlimited "berries" - he'd lost, he said, "more than 60 kilos." Funnily enough, that's what I weigh, post-Christmas. And whereas before he'd looked like George IV, post-diet he looked (and still looks) more like a white-haired Mick Jagger costumed up for Blackadder (in its Regency period). A New Yorker profile of him reported that while he watched his own fashion show someone asked him, "How do you feel?" He replied: "I have no human feelings." Except self-hatred, possibly?