Frank N Furter at 40!

Tim Curry (centre) and Richard O'Brien (right)

Now here’s an astonishing thing: this year marks the 40th anniversary of the first stage performances of The Rocky Horror Show. The film followed in 1975.

As with so many other things in life, I was late to the game with Rocky, not seeing it in any shape or form until 1990, when I was sent to review the first major West End revival at a packed-out and boisterous Piccadilly Theatre.

It starred Adrian Edmondson, Tim McInnerny and Edward Tudor-Pole amongst others, with Jonathan Adams reprising the role he’d created in the original version, as the narrator. He played Dr Scott in the film version and, oddly enough, I had met and chatted with him some years earlier in Leicester, when he was appearing in David Pownalls’s play, Master Class. A very fine actor.

Anyway, I loved Rocky instantly: the sheer glorious naughtiness appealed to me straight away – it was just exactly as had happened some years earlier when I first saw Victor/Victoria. Love at first sight.

And, if possible, it got even better when I finally saw the film version with Tim Curry as Frank N Furter.

In some ways, the role has been a mixed blessing for Curry – a far more talented actor than he has, in effect, been allowed to be since simply blowing the world away with his seminal stage and screen performances.

I’ve long been rather amused that Curry’s father was a Methodist Navy chaplain.

Some years ago, I sang at St Mary’s, Henley, as the female relief in a concert given by a local male voice choir.

My father, who had decided I was doing it (an act of self-promotion for himself, rather than of me, I tend to believe), was deeply disappointed that I didn’t sing hymns.

Robert Preston and Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria.

Mind, both my parents were always disappointed that I wouldn’t sing hymns whenever I was in any sort of festival – although songs like Cherry Ripe (which played a role in Victor/Victoria) would have been considered acceptable. My mother approved of such ditties, many of which were contained in a large, leather-clad collection of English songs that fell to me when I was teaching myself to play the piano.

I opted, on that Henley occasion however, for show songs, culminating in the absolutely wonderful Cole Porter classic, Everytime We Say Goodbye. A masterpiece of popular songwriting, which I’d only discovered shortly before and which, though I say so myself, I executed rather well.

But that's as may be. The relevant point here was that both my practice and concert accompanists were clergy children themselves. Which made three of us. And each of us, spanning a generation or three, regarded ourselves as “reprobates”, with our background as the cause of that.

So I allow myself to feel a little affinity with Curry, the son of a Methodist chaplain.

I also love the idea of him being a “mixture of Joan Crawford and Burt Lancaster”, as one critic apparently put it: it’s not only deliciously camp, but it equally suggests something delightfully subversive.

And Rocky is subversive – even now: a ribald anthem for anyone who feels that they don’t quite fit into the confines of sex and gender that our society expects and is most comfortable with.

All of which meant that it was hardly a major surprise to read, a short while ago, an interview in which Rocky creator Richard O’Brien threw open the door on the subject of sex and gender, and blew it clean off its hinges and into the middle of next week.

In it, O’Brien described himself as 70% male and 30% female.

“It’s my belief that we are on a continuum between male and female,” he told the BBC.

“There are people who are hardwired male and there are people who are hardwired female, but most of us are on that continuum and I believe myself probably to be about 70% male, 30% female.”

This is sex as a spectrum – just as sexuality is a spectrum.

This is not gender dysphoria, but something quite different.

Some people use the phrase ‘third sex’ to categorise the experience that O’Brien was discussing.

But even that somehow doesn’t quite seem to grasp what I think O’Brien was trying to explain. It almost seems to defy the idea of a spectrum by being something rather more concrete.

Marlene – and you didn't think girls do drag?

However we define sex, though, O’Brien’s comments and his openness were exhilarating.

For so many people, life is just that bit more complex than feeling strictly one thing or the other. And with culturally-determined gender roles thrown into the mix, it can be even more difficult.

I remember, back in the 1970s, in Mossley, praying to be changed into a boy – mostly because I wanted to play football. And indeed, quite specifically, for Manchester City.

And boy, we’ve come a long way since then – girls and women playing football is no longer viewed as ‘wrong’, while the possibilities to actually do so now exist. Perhaps that may also explain why I am delighted to sponsor Manchester City's ladies' team these days ...

I’ve long been aware that I am a ‘masculine’ woman – if we really have to slap labels on the matter.

When I showed my mother the self portrait that os my avatar – and which I personally see as very much reflecting how I am to myself – she was slightly shocked. "It's very masculine," she observed. Had she really not noticed before?

Anyway, I’m a woman – all the right bits in the right places – but I seem to have a huge range of attitudes and even interests that are more characteristically ‘male’.

I have always struggled to dress and feel comfortable in what might be seen as conventionally ‘female’ attire. Only this last week, in a dire panic about my upcoming trip to the Baltic and taking account of the weather, I realised that I needed additional warm gear.

Now, I’m entirely capable of thinking in terms of self image, so I was absolutely considering what image I wanted to create – and, hey presto, although I didn’t sit down going: ‘what would be ‘masculine’ here?’ the styling is pretty 'masculine'.

We're talking cords and sweaters and cravats, which – I think – will work well with my leather jacket and my DMs and whatever hats I don.

But most importantly, it’s stuff that I’ll feel comfortable in – that I’ll feel like me in.

Which is ultimately the only thing that matters – isn’t it?

Much as my mother might have hoped, I really am not a frilly person. I may be a woman – and I’ve never felt any serious desire to undergo treatment – but I was never cast from some ‘feminine’ template.

Now I don’t mind that, but there are still moments when I see people’s surprise at my ‘male’ interests and it is disconcerting.

But to take a different note, a few days ago, we heard the sad news that author Iain Banks has terminal cancer. Although most highly acclaimed for his literary fiction, as Iain M Banks he has created a series of top notch sci-fi novels, most of which feature a civilisation known as The Culture.

Highly advanced and egalitarian, with wage slavery a thing of the past and medical technology meaning great longevity and, in effect, an end to traditional ageing, The Culture’s citizens even have the time and opportunity to change sex once or twice in their lifetimes.

It could be a sci-fi version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, where the eponymous heroine/hero changes sex down the centuries.

It seems quite extraordinary that, in the 21st century, we can go – and look – into space, and yet we are still so locked into limiting ideas of sex and gender.

Both men and women face societal pressure to conform to what are still viewed as ‘natural’ behaviours that are defined purely on the basis of gender roles – something that many people don’t really seem to understand is a construct but appear to believe is a direct consequence of nature.

There is no rational reason that a boy should not wear pink and a girl blue.

The ideas of sex and gender in The Culture, in Orlando and in Rocky have the potential to be unsettling, but offer not simply so much more variety, but also so much more potential for individual growth and productivity.

And aren’t there just a few of us who just love the idea of doing the Time Warp – and more – with Frank and co? Go on – be honest!

So, on this 40th anniversary, thank you Richard O’Brien: not just for The Rocky Horror Show – but for your remarkable openness about your experience of being human. It helps many of us.

• The full BBC interview with Richard O'Brien is here.

A coat for the season

Yesterday was an historic day. After years of refusing, putting it off, not considering it worthwhile, I gave in and bought a winter coat. A good one, that is – not just a £15 imitation sheepskin from a market stall that sheds blobs of fluff all over your inner clothing.

It was an unplanned purchase in many ways: I looked out of the window yesterday to see a bright and beautiful morning and, in my excitement, forgot what that actually means in October in the UK.

Donning a dress but thinking that I could get away without tights, I strode out into the invigorating air, breathed deeply – and found it bloody chilly.

I'm barely over the south of France yet! I've adjusted to the idea of autumn, but I wasn't ready for the actual temperature. Today, I could even see my breath while waiting for the bus.

So there I was, at lunchtime, sitting outside having a coffee, trying to wrap my lightweight yellow coat around me and still almost shivering. What happened to the northern lass who used to wander around the snowy school playing fields at lunchtime in a nothing thicker than a school blouse, tie and scarf? I've become a right southern jessie, that's what!

A coat – that's what was needed. So after work, I ventured into the West End. A little online research had given me some good pointers: John Lewis was the place to start, with next door's House of Fraser a next stop if unsatisfied. Actually, I've never been in the latter – and still haven't. John Lewis did the trick with consummate ease.

I'd seen a Windsmoor coat online (how did we ever cope in the days before the interweb?) and had targeted that. Thigh length in navy wool, brass button detail gives it the military look, which is a recurring trend that I really like. Having no waist and with a gentle flare, it's an ideal shape for a rather round figure like mine. The sleeves were supposedly three-quarter length, but with me being a short arse, they're just right.

Not cheap, but then a good winter coat is an investment. Taking deep breaths, I paid and watched as it was carefully packed into a bag.

I browsed the nearby shoe section: possibly fortunately, a pair of Dune knee-length, black patent boots with a spur detail in gold-coloured metal were not available in anything close to my size, so I made my way down to the food hall, attempting to look like an experienced and sophisticated shopper, while planning on buying those most basic of foodstuffs, bread and milk. I stopped for a short while to indulge in a glass of bubbly and a small dish of salty pretzel snacks at the new wine bar, and feel rather 'ladies who lunch' – even though it was considerably beyond lunchtime.

The last winter coat I had was as a teenager, bought by my mother as she attempted, with an increasing sense of despair, to mould me into the sort of respectable young lady that she obviously considered my birthright. It was full length and camel. And while I always liked it, it never felt like anything to do with me – I couldn't wear anything so classy and smart. Not least because I had nothing to wear it with – I could never imagine teaming it with jeans and a lumberjack shirt.

I'm learning these days. I was right that what I'd seen online, in terms of shape, would work for me. And the military look also allows me to be able to be a bit creative with other parts of an outfit.

If there's one thing I am deeply uncomfortable with, it's the increasing realisation that I probably look at my best in some fairly classic clothes. But I'm not that woman – I'm not a middle-aged frump inside! For goodness sake, having only managed to start anything like an adolescence at around 36, I'm not remotely ready to look or feel 'middle-aged' just yet. It brings feelings of mortality too close – and time has been so condensed by that late development.

So I have to learn how to do things – how to make myself feel good – by using my creativity and imagination, and combining those with what does work well. I'm getting there. My new coat is another step in the right direction. It's smart and good quality; I'll be able to wear it in a variety of ways – I'll enjoy creating ways to present myself in it; almost a form of performance.

And buying it felt so very glamorous!

Dressing down the sartorial naysayers

The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant (published by Virago)

Novelist Linda Grant doesn’t claim to be a stylist or even a fashion buff. What she enjoys, she explains, are good clothes. And shoes. And handbags.

So what she has set out to do in her new book is to explore why clothes are important – and why making an effort to think about how we dress is not wasted time.

This accessible – and in places very, very funny – book is not what you’d call a work of scholarly rigour, but Grant still manages to get across a number of messages with enjoyable ease.

She illustrates, with just a cursory look at the distant past, how humans have always cared about how they look – about how they present themselves, from the earliest adornments and tattoos. Which, as she points out, makes a nonsense of the view that fashion is only a product of capitalism and consumerism, and that shallow women are just manipulated into contemplating matters sartorial.

She also illustrates the inherent misogyny in the view that thinking or talking about clothes is an indicator of vapidity. Men base so many of their responses to women on how women look, and criticise them if they don’t look ‘good’, but also criticise the time they spend achieving that look.

As Grant points out, we have to wear clothes: a man begging on the street might have plenty of people pass by and ignore him. But if he’s naked, the police will turn up pretty quickly and take him away. Clothes, in our society, are not an option. It might sound howlingly obvious, but if that’s the case, why do some people consider it to be an indicator of a weak mind – or a capitalist plot – when people enjoy thinking about clothes, shopping and dressing?

Why, for instance, is shopping derided more than, say, watching football or playing dangerous sports or playing shoot-em-ups on a computer – or any other predominantly male form of pleasure?

Grant rails against clothing being limited to the strictly utilitarian, and peppers the book with anecdotes about her own mother – the daughter of immigrants – who understood the way clothing could be used to help fit in. And there is a series of interviews with Canadian style doyen Catherine Hill, an Auschwitz survivor whose teenage life was possibly saved by a moment of old-fashioned, female vanity.

The point that, in the 19th century, department stores were a new and liberating place for women, where they could go unchaperoned, is made too (see Zola's The Ladies' Paradise). And how new designs (by designers, thus stressing the importance of designers) for shoes and dresses also helped in the process of liberating women (from corsets etc).

We read how Coco Chanel created the timeless little black dress as long ago as 1926, and how, in the aftermath of WWII, women swooned for Christian Dior’s beautiful New Look.

Grant is quite clear that fashion – in terms of the catwalks etc – is not ‘real’ clothing, but a form of art, and every bit as valid as a painting or a piece of music. However, she also believes that our innate desire to look aesthetically good – to be attractive – is “irrational”.

But that begs the question of whether art in general is irrational – indeed, whether it’s irrational to consider aesthetics in anything that could be strictly utilitarian (architecture, for instance). And unless you think it is, then it’s difficult to conclude that clothing should adhere to a different ethos.

Grant ends with the story of a single red, high-heeled, patent shoe that she spotted on the top of a display of shoes at Auschwitz, where they’d been stolen from owners who were mostly destined for the gas chamber.

She dares us to denigrate the unknown victim of the Holocaust who had worn or carried with her on that final journey, shoes that she loved.

And she leaves us with a challenge – to live and to make the most of it. Including in the enjoyment of what we wear.

This feels a little like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion: as he was eventually provoked by fundamentalists into writing, so Grant has been poked with a stick by those (including women) who pour derision on others for taking care over what they wear.

And while it doesn’t have quite the force of Dawkins’s work, it’s an enjoyable, interesting and welcome rebuttal to a particular attitude and critique.

I'll let you into a little secret

The Other Half is out of town this weekend – well actually, he's out of the country.

So, having arrived in the office very early this morning, I took a slightly extended lunch and popped down to Oxford Street to look at the Russell & Bromley bag I mentioned yesterday.

I shall be able to take it home without any questions this evening – without any questions or raised eyebrows and, by the time he sees it, it'll be 'too late'.

It is a thing of beauty – a mix of matte and patent black leather, with chains and studs (oh what a kinky minx I am).

And as if that weren't enough, it's actually very roomy – thus practical too.

I'll take a snap this weekend, when I embark on a spring clean of my wardrobe – possibly accompanied (or followed) by one of Irene's cocktails and certainly by my own music.

Doubtless the Queen B will be around to help, as is her feline wont. Or at least to sit and watch in the way that cats do, with an expression that you know means that you're doing it wrong.

And I'll relax – possibly with a suitably girlie movie or even a few episodes of Sex in the City, which I only managed to 'discover' at the end of last year.

Reports will follow, I promise.

A handbag?

Are you channelling Edith Evans yet?

Having spent years shaking her head as if in grief, asking: “When are you going to grow up” as I walked through the door in a football shirt, my mother is now aghast to hear of my lecherous adoration of handbags.

In my early teens, she forced me to carry a suede creation (this was the 1970s) to church (and put some slap on every Sunday morning). But I complied under protest. I wanted to be a boy – or at least to be allowed to play football and not have to worry about matters girlie.

And once I was free of the every-day authority of my mother, I dumped handbags.

Well into my 30s, a battered men’s tweed jacket, bought in a charity shop, remained preferable, blessed as it was with countless pockets. Who needed handbags?

And that was the situation as it existed when I met The Other Half.

But in the last decade, I have changed. And the changes have included the discovery of handbags.

The Other Half is only just coming to terms with this. I’ve spent the last few years arranging for female colleagues to explain to him, slowly and patiently, that there really is no such thing as too many handbags.

He has worked out that the correct answer to: ‘I need a new handbag’ is not: ‘you need no such thing’, but simply: ‘yes dear’. A quiet life is worth some adjustments to one’s thinking on matters materialistic.

Indeed, Miss Piggy had the right approach: "I find that it is vital to have at least one handbag for each of the 10 types of social occasion: very formal, not so formal, just a teensy bit formal, informal but not that informal, every day, every other day, day travel, night travel, theatre and fling."

Three years ago, I was able to afford my first designer bag – an Osprey, purchased in Liberty after a number of reconnaissance missions to a number of rather upmarket stores.

It was with me when I joined The Other Half in his staff bar a short while later to take part in a quiz night. The rest of the team he was on was female. All the women drooled over the bag and, when realising it was an Osprey, nearly wet their collective knickers.

The Other Half said later that it was only then that he had realised exactly what status symbols handbags are – like cars for men.

Well, I have quite a few these days, including a couple in the BMW class. But one day, when I have the money, I shall step up to the Ferrari class – and I shall buy a Dior bag. Until then, the glossies provide handbag porn for lusting over.

In the meantime, my current day-to-day bag is looking rather tired, so I’ll just have to brave the West End crowds and head for the shops. Russell & Bromley have a nice one in their new spring collection.

Now what was it dear old Oscar said about dealing with such a situation?

Ah yes: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

And just think – I’ll be doing the economy a favour too.

Of misandrists and men

How long ago is it that women had the debate about whether feminists could wear lipstick?

Like you, I thought that that issue was dead in the water – after all, isn’t feminism supposed, at core, to be about women’s liberation? And wouldn’t any meaningful idea of liberation mean that women could choose things for themselves?

And isn’t it about women taking responsibility for themselves and their own decisions and actions?

Well, unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward, as Irene’s story and the responses to it that she received illustrate.

And it adds yet more weight to what I’ve been noticing in the last few years.

Self-appointed, unaccountable women who have decided that they hold the keys to everywoman’s experience of womanhood – of life – and will do their damnedest to foist their views onto every other woman around.

They’re fundamentalists and, like other fundamentalisms that are on the rise these days, feminist fundamentalism is also rearing its ugly head.

In various places, I find other women telling me what to do: how I should dress, how I should behave, how I should fuck (and whom). I’ve even been told that I should be afraid to walk the streets – and when I respond that I am not, I’ve been told that I’m a fool.

The Guardian newspaper, supposedly a bastion of liberal thought, lends legitimacy to this fundamentalist feminism by allowing its exponents pretty much un-challenged space in its opinion columns and online blogs.

The British government is creating dismal legislation that has comes out of an alliance between fundamentalists of feminist and religious hue.

The whole thing is full of misandry – and misandry is no better than misogyny. Indeed, it’s also full of misogyny – such feminists seem to despise the overwhelming majority of their ‘sisters’.

So get out of my life. If I want to be spanked by a man, I’ll damned well be spanked by a man – and I’ll damned well enjoy it.

If I want to wear a burgundy velvet dress, team it with a studded wrist band and idly contemplate what handbag will work best with it – I’ll do so. And I’ll damned well enjoy it.

I’ve managed to rid myself of the controls of religion on my life and thoughts; I’ve dealt with the long-term consequences of having grown up with an emotionally bullying parent, and the impact on my self image and self confidence of yo-yo and faddy dieting and weight worries since the age of 12. In oh so very many ways, I spent years in an intellectual, emotional and sexual burka, hiding from view, from life. It is absolutely no coincidence that, during those days, I hid my physical self beneath layers of drab, shapeless clothing, embarrassed and ashamed by my own body and by my own physical needs and desires.

So I am most certainly not going to start kow-towing to a bunch of women telling me how I, as a woman, should live my life now.

And it would be such a dull and colourless life, because their dull and colourless little brains are filled with bile and jealousy and the need to justify their own tawdry existences by controlling others.

Like puritans and prudes and prigs everywhere, they live in fear of anyone else having any pleasure – unless they’ve approved it first.

According to a certain view, the whole fashion thing, for instance, is a male conspiracy against women – not least, because it’s about getting women to dress for men; in a way that men like.

Let’s assume for the sake of the discussion that such a simplistic idea has some legitimacy – as we’ve discussed elsewhere, dress is partly about attracting a mate.

So …

So what? If I want to dress to attract, why not?

If I want to dress to ‘play the game’, why not?

If I want to dress a certain way because it gives me pleasure … why not?

If I get a kick out of being aware that I attract male glances on occasion (these boobs are difficult to hide), then what on Earth, in Mother Nature’s name, is wrong with that?

The logical conclusion is that it is wrong for men to behave like … well, men. And that it is wrong for women to enjoy men behaving like … err, men.

How do we ‘solve’ this? How about all females of the species wearing burkas? Let’s stop those looks by removing temptation from men – because we all know that it’s women’s fault that men are sometimes tempted to behave badly, and therefore it’s women’s responsibility to avoid that. We know it, because the story of Adam and Eve made it clear that women are the temptresses who must be kept under control, lest they drag down decent, honest, God-fearing men.

While we’re at it, let’s return to the olden days where, in rape trials, the question of what the woman was wearing was paramount – was that short skirt or low-cut blouse ‘asking for it’?

There are times when these radical ‘feminists’ seem to have an awful lot in common with sexist bigots such as the Taliban. Indeed, they’re quite happy to make unholy alliances with religious conservatives in the West when it suits their ideas on certain issues – Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon are a case in point. What an irony! So-called feminists climbing into metaphorical bed with the very sorts of people who would limit women’s choices!

Feminism is not dead. It better hadn’t be. Because we have many, many important things that still need achieving. In the UK, for instance, equal pay is just one such thing. A real thing. A real, day-to-day, economic issue for millions of British women.

Elsewhere in the world, women are dying because a bunch of dried up old men in frocks have decided that they cannot be allowed to have control over their own bodies and their own fertility.

In parts of Pakistan, as the Taliban gain ground, girls are being barred from education.

But no: the important questions are whether women should be allowed to like handbags and green angora sweaters and lipstick. And whether they should ever dare to allow themselves to sexually play a submissive role to a male Dominant (the other way around is just about acceptable, apparently).

What spectacularly crass priorities.

Simone de Beauvoir must be spinning in her Montparnasse grave. But then again, de Beauvoir understood the value of intellectual rigour – not the sort of self-indulgent wanking that the women who would replace a patriarchy with a matriarchy like to pretend passes for ‘thought’.

Now, if you'll excuse me: I've a clothes and lippy shopping trip to plan for this evening.

Breaking the dress code

Dress – I’m beginning to think it’s a like a code, and I think I might have cracked it.

Either I currently look so ridiculous that I’m aware of getting a lot of looks, or I’m getting them because I’m finally learning to make my clothes work for me.

So why do we bother making such an effort: why invest time in attempting to put together something that pleases us? Why don’t we all simply just wear the same, utilitarian clothes, keeping costs down and probably being more comfortable, at least on occasion?

Well, obviously the question of attracting a mate comes into it – although the success of this aim doesn’t suddenly stop people making a big effort with their look.

But then there’s also what could be described as the desire for individualism; to stand out in a crowd.

Let’s take a step back in time to 1982, to an institutionally bland room at Leicester Polytechnic, undistinguishable from any other in a block that had been thrown up a decade or so earlier.

We were working on a scene from August Strindberg’s dour Scandinavian drama, The Father, where the nurse has to con the captain to don the straitjacket.

I still remember how powerful it was and how a fellow student (amazing – I can remember that it was lanky, blonde Gary from Manchester) and I got right beneath the skin of the thing in the sort of way that left us emotionally drained afterward.

Our tutor was a man called Tony Yates, a great actor trainer. I remember how he told us all: “You’re gods, all of you; because you have the power to create. Never forget that.”

I haven't.

But if the act of bringing words on a page to life is one of creation, then how much more is the act of creation that we all, to some degree engage in – the act of creating the self that we choose to present to the world – the work of ourselves as gods?

A few days ago, I mentioned self-awareness.

Is it a case that the more conscious the act of self-creation, the higher the level of self-awareness?

Take Marilyn Manson, for instance. You might not like him, but he’s set out with a very specific aim of creating himself for himself – and to piss off the establishment – and been rather successful in terms of achieving those aims. How many other people achieve such a distinctive and successful self-creation as Manson?

And dress, of course, is part of the process. Perhaps too, self-awareness brings with it confidence – and confidence is also something, like clothes, that attracts people's attention.

Maybe the dress code is really just a question of knowing thine own self and then being true to it?

A designer-clad foot in the fashion door

London Fashion Week is almost upon us, with the opening catwalk show slated for Friday.

Now this might not seem particularly newsworthy – except for the fact that I know that it’s happening. And when. And in advance.

This is the girl who spent much of her childhood wanting to be a boy – or at least wanting to be allowed to play football, which was pretty much the same thing at the time; a girl who disappointed her mother with a worrying lack of interest in clothes, handbags or make-up – the very things that it is assumed all girls naturally like.

My mother, who was determined to rectify such shortcomings (regardless of my thoughts on the matter) escorted me to Boots with some Christmas money shortly after my 13th birthday. There she selected what she considered the appropriate make-up. Blue eyeshadow (this was the 1970s), a compact of powder and a medium purple lipstick: the latter was a small thing and I eventually threw it out around 10 years ago. Which tells you something of how much – or how little – I used to do make-up. There was cleanser and toner and moisturiser too.

This had to be applied for church going at the least. God presumably thinks a touch of slap essential for worship, although on the basis of what was excluded from that shopping trip, mascara is just a tad too tarty in divine circles.

But here we are, some 30 odd years later, and I know when London Fashion Week starts.

All due, of course, to a newfound dedication to the glossies. Not that they’re for reading, but for ogling: porn for apprentice fashionistas.

So I really know what this season’s caged boot is, and I know that it comes from Yves Saint Laurent.

Kinky, eh? And probably a darned good thing that I’m not good in heels and designers don’t make things to fit me.

Let’s be quite clear – I’m not a shoe slut: but only because my feet are such an obscurely awkward size.

To be frank, with size three tootsies (wide fitting) and a bra size of 40H, I feel like a cross between a Geisha and Dolly Parton. It’s nothing short of a miracle that I don’t fall flat on my face more often.

So shoes are out.

Or were, until I happened upon a pair of patent pink Marc Jacobs pumps in Harvey Nicks, Bristol, while working in that city in January. A photo will follow shortly for Irene. But they were an historic find: designer shoes that fitted. And suitably credit crunched by around 50% in the sale. A rarity – and the exception that proves the rule.

Still, there are always handbags.

Lovely, lovely handbags.

But that’s a story for another day.