Victoria Beckham has just been to London to promote her line of ten dresses, to be sold in Selfridges, which mostly feature those calf skimming pencil skirts and waspish waists she’s so fond of. They are obviously completely impractical for anything like catching public transport or running after your kids, but given that her clothing ranges from £650 to £1,900 I’m guessing that her target market isn’t working women or mothers.

Victoria gave a long interview with the London Times, and clearly reporter Lisa Armstrong found her utterly charming. It’s a great article, you can read it in full here.

On paparazzi and gossip:
The paps and the bodyguards – even her children have them – are facts of life now. Is it worth it? “Sometimes, like today, I ask myself that question,” she grimaces. “But in LA at least we can be freer. I think the obsession with celebrity is actually worse here than in America.”

Victoria’s take is that she is a positive person. “I’m just really happy. I wake up every morning and I think I’m so blessed. I don’t read the stuff that’s written about us. I’m not interested in gossip. Some of the people that I’m friends with in America – you know, Tom and Katie – they get it too and we laugh about all these stupid things.”

On her new collection:
So I ask her (who designs her clothes). Without apparently taking offence (she has been fighting cynicism since she started school), she tells me that she does the designing. “Do I draw? No. Then again, nor do lots of designers. But I put it all on myself and walk around in it, and I know what feels comfortable. I know how a dress should sit. I’ve worn so many in the past and when I see the photographs I think, crikey, my boobs are up round my neck again because the corsets are too short and not cut high enough. Like I knew I would spend a lot on the best-quality zips because, like many women, I’ve had my share of crappy zips. I wanted a zip that undoes from both ends because then you can either put the dress on over your head or, if you don’t want to mess up your hair, you can step into it – and also, you know, going to the loo wouldn’t be this whole big palaver.”

On spirituality:
Does it ever bug her that the Beckhams are caricatured as barbarians when they are clearly not? “Thank you. No, not really. I’m quite spiritual. I’m very good at visualisation.”

Uh oh. This sounds ominously like Hollywood-speak. Or maybe Tom got to them after all. But it turns out that Victoria’s visuals are not the babbling brooks or still mountains kind, but clothes. “I was talking to Gordon Ramsay and David about this the other day and they’re the same. Gordon visualises a meal, then figures out how to prepare it. David visualises the goal. I’ll lie in bed and think, what kind of look do I want to go for tomorrow? Then I find the pieces in my mind to create it.

Sometimes she visualises her and David when they are elderly, but she doesn’t think old age will be a problem for them “because we’re really supportive of one another”. She pauses, thoughtfully. “Yeah, I really believe in creative visualisation.”

On her private life:
As she has it, her idea of a thrilling night is watching a DVD with David, unwinding in the bath and going to bed early with a notebook “because I’m always thinking of things in the middle of the night”. She emphatically does not travel as much as people think she does. Nor is she plastered in make-up and hoiked into a corset dress every day. “We lead our lives in a much more low-profile way than people think. I’m not going to The Ivy in Beverly Hills. I don’t think I’ve been to a premiere since we moved there.

“We’re not courting fame. I can give you a list of numerous restaurants that have underground parking so no one can get any photographs. I know all the restaurant kitchens in LA. Underground car parks and kitchens. That’s my grand entrance.”

The Times

Victoria might not be corseted and made up every day, but I have seen her dressed up to take her kids to stuff a bear, or catching a plane, or taking her son out in a Christmas hat while she wore an elf outfit. She might think she lives a low profile life, but that might just show how out of touch Victoria Beckham is with your average mother. But, bless her, that’s exactly why we love her.

Victoria Beckham is seen leaving her hotel in London on 12/4/08 (Black jeans – credit: Big Pictures/Bauergriffin) and on 12/3/08 (Gray pencil skirt – credit: WENN)