HOLA! Or, to put it more formally, buenos dias. How’s the snow? I ask because, as I write, I am sitting in a Mexican hotel room with the sun streaming through the window and the Caribbean Sea swishing against the white sands to my right. Hence the Spanish greeting.

I should be in Old Hall Street, shivering with the rest of you but, thanks to a case of our aeroplane going “to tech” as they put it – it needs a new part flying over from England – I find my Šlast minute pre-Christmas escape to the sun unexpectedly extended by a day.

Actually, as I write, I have no idea when we are coming home, but, judging from the state of some of my fellow passengers, pina coladas are in plentiful supply, so mustn’t grumble.

And anyway, thanks to the wonder of the world- wide web (and my husband’s trusty laptop) a bit of plane trouble cannot keep me from my dedication to duty.

So here I sit, feeling distinctly unfashionable with sun-ravaged hair, patchy suntan and a bad case of prickly heat (an allergic reaction to an unidentifiable product of Mexican origin) trying to find some stylish wisdom to impart.

Not easy when you have spent seven days surrounded largely by Americans for whom oversize vests and baseball caps appear to be the last word in sartorial elegance. As for the Mexicans, they haven’t exactly been major contributors to the world of couture, unless you count the sombrero and that brief poncho epidemic which engulfed the globe a few years back after Sarah Jessica Parker wore one on Sex and the City. Mine was pink and fringed.

That said, they do have a Mexico Fashion Week. Elle Macpherson appeared there this year. Ironically in a department store called Liverpool!

But my recent reconnection with the online world reveals I am not the only one having a style crisis.

I feared sunstroke when I first read the words, but style queen Anna Wintour has been accused of committing the biggest fashion faux pas of 2008.

Time magazine has put her top of its list of the year’s worst outfits for the Karl Lagerfeld creation she donned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute Gala in New York in May. The editor of American Vogue, who is generally regarded as the most powerful woman in fashion, was host at the party regarded as the fashion world’s Oscars.

Time said that the dress made her look as if she “were encrusted with giant fossils”. To be honest, I was just amazed she had taken her sunglasses off – one imagines it might require a surgical procedure.

Time’s stinging attack will no doubt serve to fuel the speculation that 59-year-old Ms Wintour’s days at the top are numbered.

There is probably something to be said about old fossils here, but I do believe my plane is being called . . .