Of hats and hockey

The abbey from the bishops' summer palace

We’d decided that, irrespective of the weather, Tuesday would be a day off – or to be more specific, would not involve a long walk.

It had taken half an hour or more the previous evening just for my feet, once out of boots, to stop throbbing. A phone app said that, all told, we’d done nearly 19km the previous day, including 15 flights of stairs (that’s ascending – it doesn’t register going down).

A very great deal of water has passed under the bridge since I’ve done anything like such a lengthy walk. I like walking – but London is not really conducive to the sort of walking I like, a point not helped by crowded pavements, or cyclists trying to mow you down, even on the canal towpaths, where pedestrians are supposed to enjoy right of way.

So we set off at a gentle pace to do more exploring of the old town, with stops for bowls of milky coffee as required.

That walk took us into the inner courtyard of the summer palace of the bishops of Augsburg for the first time. At this time of year, it’s only open to the public on a Friday afternoon, though much of it – together with parts of St Mang’s Abbey next door – serve as civic office space.

Summer palace of the bishops of Augsburg

The inner court was built between 1490-1504 by bishop Frederic of Zollern, but what makes it most distinctive is the illusionistic paintings on the outer facades, which date from 1499 and are unique in German late-Gothic architecture.

These trompe-l’oeil windows, brickwork and door frames are extraordinary, but while they are unique, painting on buildings in the Alps is hardly rare, and we saw plenty of delicate work on walls around the town, including clearly recent work that maintains the tradition.

And talking of tradition, there is plenty in the area – and not least sartorially.

In Munich on the Saturday, we’d even seen a gaggle of young men walking around in bits of regional dress, with soft, brimless caps. Students, we concluded, in a fraternity.

Looking into the palace courtyard

There was also a group of young women with matching clothing walking around too.

Alpine-style jackets were visible all over the place – some more traditional than others. We even spotted one man wearing a tracksuit top that had a round Bavarian collar and was trimmed in green, while hip, young men were wearing them with jeans.

There was even a smaller amount of lederhosen on view, and many eateries in the region see female staff wearing the dirndl.

I like it: I like what feels to be a statement against the globalising homogeneity. And that aside, a lot of it looks damned good.

Then there are the hats.

There are various types of regional headgear, as this hat lover had discovered via the internet by way of pre-trip research.

View of the palace from our room

We’d only been in Munich a short time before I managed to get one on my head. Indeed, this was such a specific hat that it an Allgäuer loden hat – from the very region of Bavaria that we were on our way to.

Loden is becoming familiar in the UK as a shade of green, but it’s actually a material. Items made from loden are often a dark hunter green or an olive green, certainly, but not always.

The word comes from the German ‘loda’ for a cilice, a coarse, rough garment worn by medieval monks to show repentance.

Once that’s complete, it becomes a dense but light fabric that can repel water, while also cheating wind and keeping the wearer warm. It’s sheered and brushed up to 20 times to gain the desired nap.

War memorial between the abbey and palace

Long viewed as the fabric of peasants, it emerged from the mountains in the 18th century, making its way into civil jackets and military uniforms, before becoming acceptable in the upper circles of society when worn by Austrian emperor Franz Josef in the 1870s.

So, that’s loden for you. The shape of the hats vary a little, but many come with a cord ‘band’ and it is traditional to dress them with brushes, feathers, brooches and pins – the latter often being linked to walking clubs.

I’d already decided I wanted a brush for mine, and found a super one in the shop where I bought it: boar hair set in a pewter brooch.

Then, as we were rambling around the city, I stopped to browse at an antique shop. The owner had seen me coming, new hat and all, and pointed out to me some delicate, carved edelweiss pins.

One, he said, was about a century old. It was carved from bone or horn and, when he told me that it was just €20, I decided not to resist.

Trout – there was a large bowl of salad with it

A few days later, after visiting Neuschwanstein, I added a further brush and feather combination, held in a mountain goat brooch, sold to me by a woman who was managing to dance and sing to Status Quo’s In the Army Now.

The final pin was added from a shop in Füssen and is a metal walking stick and hat, with fir leaves and ‘Neuschwanstein’ on a slender strip, with a single crystal hanging below.

It’s a cracking statement hat.

We took a rather fuller lunch on Tuesday, sitting outside Nostalgie-Restaurant Madame Plusch, where I enjoyed some trout, with mental accompaniment by Schubert.

We’d decided to make this our main meal of the day because we’d spotted a poster on

Sunday that had given us an idea for an evening out.

Ice cream van outside the old fire station, now a market

The local ice hockey team, EV Füssen, were due to play a home match on the Tuesday evening against EV Weiden in a Oberliga ‘best of five’ game.

Neither of us have ever seen an ice hockey match before, but it seemed an ideal cultural counterpoint to seeing a piano Wagner had played.

We snacked on more cake and coffee at Kurcafe and then headed off, managing to take the scenic, but ridiculously long, way around to the stadium. It did, however, provide another good sunset shot.

Another lovely sunset

EV Füssen was founded on 11 December 1922 and are historically one of the most successful ice hockey teams in Germany, having won 16 titles before slipping into the third tier.

Nicely, their shirts bear a silhouette of Neuschwanstein.

We took our seats as the players were warming up and in time to see the opposition manage to shatter one of the glass panels around the edge of the rink, which provided entertainment of a different variety as staff worked to replace it before the game could kick – puck? – off.

Having not a shred of knowledge of the rules between us – not bad for two former sports journalists – didn’t hamper our enjoyment and, at the end of the first period of play, Wikipedia came into its own with a run down of the sport.

EV Füssen take to the ice

We were obviously lending our support to our hosts – The Other Half had rapidly decided that their colours could pass for Castleford Tigers, making it even easier to get behind them, particularly when he also decided that the opposition could pass for Wakefield Trinity Wildcats.

Unfortunately, by the end of that first period of play, Füssen were 4-0 down. By the end of the second period, they’d pulled back two goals, and the third ended with a final score of 6-4 to the visitors.

Hopefully, it wasn't our presence that had jinxed them. We did, however, see a couple of superb goals from distance. And all in all, it was fast, furious and hugely entertaining.

I’ll say this though: if ever I go to an ice hockey match again, I need to wrap up more warmly – it was freezing in the stadium!

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.

Dealing with a case of SAD. Or is it EOF?

It could be the all-pervading gloom and a dose of SAD; it could be a hangover from the festive period. It might be the knowledge that the clock is now ticking on the final year of my forties.

But one way or the other, I have not been myself of late. And the nearest description I can offer is that it has felt like a case of Early Onset Frumpiness.

Is this what women mean when they talk of suddenly feeling invisible as they reach A Certain Age?

At home, I slob around in casual gear – and feel perfectly happy doing so. But elsewhere, I have been feeling distinctly dowdy and dumpy.

After allowing this mood to dominate me for a week or so, I realised that there were things that I could do. Mostly, it was about finding ways of feeling that I was taking back control.

Step one seemed obvious. Ever since getting less than a pound back from a tenner for a single packet of fags at WS Smith at Glasgow Airport in November, my smoking days had been numbered.

I hadn’t set a time frame – it was too frenetic a period to be adding in something like that – and then stocked up in France on the basis that, once the Gauloise were finished, I would be too, as a smoker.

In the event, it took a packet more, but on Monday, I pressed a patch onto my arm and threw away the remaining ciggies.

It is nearly the end of day five now and we are progressing well. And I haven’t had increased munchies either (which will calm my father, who is more worried that I will turn into a veritable beach ball of elephantine proportions than improve my bank balance and my cardiovascular health).

Step two – book a hair appointment. And that was late this afternoon – fresh colour to cover the grey and a short, sharp cut to make me feel modern again.

I never have been able to do the long hair that, in the UK, seems to be de rigeur for every woman who doesn’t want to be assumed to be a raving bull dyke.

Why this obsession with long hair, I don’t know: why this belief that the only 'properly' feminine hair is long hair? There seems to be far greater variety of length in France than here. Personally, my hair has always been far too fine – and a halfway house between curly and straight – to do much with it if I do let it grow.

Yet more than one hairdresser down the years has baulked at cutting it short. Not Ian, though, who always does a very nice job. And the whole experience – not just the wonderful head massage – is deeply relaxing.

Step three – think about the wardrobe. Not quite as easy. I am, in many ways, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea in two ways at present.

On the one hand, I’m a traditionalist in matters sartorial – my mother had me looking like a junior Miss Marple in my teens, so it’s well rooted – but there's a part of me that yearns to be far more bohemian. After all, I’m ‘A Creative’, don’t y’know!

On top of that, the clothes problem isn’t helped at present by being ‘between sizes’ as I very slowly lose weight.

But what could be done easily was remembering to wear some heels in a morning rather than opting for the rather flat boots I’ve been living in. It might sound daft, but even a small heel can put a bit more spring in your step.

And then, in a take-hold-of-the-situation-and-shake-the-cobwebs-out-of-it sort of way, I set about a day of deep cleaning in the flat.

It might not have been good for my hands, but it was certainly good for our abode. And the exertion was a good wrench out of the lethargy that seems to have been hanging around with all that grey cloud.

I had allowed myself to slump into laziness. Other little things had been allowed to slip too – like a decent skin care routine.

The only thing that is clear is that, five days after embarking on this attempt to invigorate myself, I feel a lot better. Now if only the blue skies stay overhead, I can finally step properly into the new(ish) year.

Coping with the insanity of London life

I don’t know whether it’s the time of year, the time of the month or the time of life, but there seems to be a great deal of medium-grade irritation around at present.

Much of it involves my morning journey to work. This, when everything is running properly, involves walking around 100 metres to a bus stop, getting a bus, getting off at the penultimate stop on that route, getting any one of a number of other buses that also stop there and getting off just another 100 metres or so from the office.

Some weeks ago, the final stop in that journey was closed for roadworks. Roadworks, of course, take weeks.

Now that the stop is one more open, the stop I leave my first bus at has closed because of roadworks. And this morning, my first bus stop was closed because of … yes, you guessed it.

Add to that a person on each of today’s buses gabbing into their mobile phones. One is a regular: I’ve hardly ever seen her when she doesn’t have a conversation on the go; the device might well be glued to her head.

Today it involved a few ‘well I’d tell him to fuck offs’ before I could leave the bus – only to have her replaced by a far younger woman having another conversation that seemed to revolve around someone’s else’s troubled relationship.

Really, I do not need to and do not want to know. And a mobile phone is not a megaphone.

Off the bus eventually, I hit a shop and bought custard creams and jaffa cakes as therapy for myself and the whole department.

As a slight aside, the main difference I can see with an office that has a large number of women in it is the cake and biscuit frequency. And in the run up to annual conference, this increases.

But that was today. Yesterday was not helped by a trip to try to find some new clothes for conference later this month. As a hackette reporting such an event, I am expected to look smart. As a woman who has been very slowly losing weight in the last couple of years, some of my more formal clothing is being to look rather baggy – or simply fall off me.

Not wanting to spend a great deal, I went to M&S, which has served me admirably on the clothes front for many years. And I know my dress size according to that shop’s sizes

Or I thought I did. I picked out two pairs of trousers and a jacket and took them to the fitting rooms to try. They were all apparently of the same size – a size that, on the basis of what’s in the wardrobe at present could be expected to be on the generous side.

Nothing fitted. Not only that, but while one pair of the trousers could be fastened, the others didn’t come close. So the sizing isn’t remotely consistent. And the jacket was ridiculously small.

I gave up and, since it was either Marks or Tesco, nipped downstairs to get a couple of food bits.

But that was depressing too. Wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor plastic. Everything covered in it, bagged by it. My mother thinks this is a food heaven. Some of the packets even have the sort of security strips on them that you get on CDs, with the addition of a warning to ‘remove before putting in the microwave’.

For want of anything else, I picked up a pack of dab and then left. Fortunately, there was a rather nice chocolate shop nearby and a selection of truffles improved my mood straight away.

The dab was hardly the freshest fish I’d had. It was well within date, but smelled strongly when I opened it later. That’s not a sign of fresh, fresh fish.

It got done à la sole meuniere: so, dredged in seasoned flour and then cooked carefully in butter. When it’s nice and golden, remove to a warm plate.

Turn up the heat and let the butter start to brown if it hasn't already; then add a really good big squeeze of lemon juice and stir. Serve on top of the fish.

Now I'm not a dab hand at fish, really. I wish I was, but it takes more skill than I have to be a really good fish cook, I think. However, this is a great and easy sauce. I served a very small amount of new potatoes with it, together with asparagus tips and fresh peas and voila!

Simples. And enough to improve my mood. Until this morning’s commute, that was!

Making the most of a cloudy day

Saturday might not have been quite as clear-skied as the forecasts had suggested, but it was still hot and sunny enough to sit out for most of the day, and enjoy a spot of Man Cooking in the evening – a whole week earlier than the first braai of last year.

The weather – which I seem to becoming obsessed with, in a typically English way – has certainly been a boon to my efforts to stick with a much more Mediterranean/Italian style of eating: and to boost my early tan.

Apparently, the British Isles enjoy more cloud than any other part of Europe. So it could hardly be considered a shock when today, unfortunately, the cloud returned. Desperately trying to get outside for the intermittent patches of sun has proved futile – and the chatter of a large group enjoying a BBQ in the carpark just beyond our tiny garden has rendered it well nigh impossible to concentrate on Gore Vidal's writings on sex. A loud and lengthy discussion about car insurance is not making it easy to concentrate on an essay about W Somerset Maugham.

So I've given up and returned inside.

Food will just have to compensate – and it's not doing badly thus far.

The first broad beans of the season were available on Broadway Market yesterday – cause for celebration and a late breakfast of these little emerald gems with some feta.

That was followed by a Collioure salad – I'd found good anchovies at Waitrose last week and combined these with some roasted pepper, a few black olives and a half each of hard-boiled egg, plus a large sprig of lamb's lettuce on the side.

Dinner was simply some boerewors that had been in the freezer since last summer, small steaks and a lamb chop each, plus a salad of orange segments and beetroot, and a nice bottle of a chilled Languedoc white.

Today, with The Other Half in sunny Yorkshire for the Rugby League, I prepared a simple tomato and basil sauce, served with penne, for lunch (the rest will be reheated for him tonight). And later, I'm going to try a vegetable dish of asparagus, broad beans, peas and potatoes, 'stewed' in olive oil – a Roman dish from one of my River Café books – followed by simply grilled Dover sole and courgettes.

I've made some more chocolates (double cream, infused with vanilla, heated and then poured on chocolate to melt it, before being dolloped onto greaseproof paper and popped into the fridge to set) and even processed a load of pictures I took on Thursday for an organisation, and which will inevitably end up as my second photographic charitable donation in eight days.

I've even managed to order some clothes to pep up my summer wardrobe, which is, to be perfectly honest, in need of a serious overhaul.

Because I've slowly been losing weight for a few years now, I didn't get anything new last summer. My collection of linen trousers were already descending of their own free will then – and it's not different now. And further up, tops that once seemed quite smart are beginning to look decidedly the worse for wear. The next thing will come tomorrow – when I actually take a binbag to the wardrobe and actually strip out all the things I won't wear again or which, bought at The Wrong Time of the Month, were mistakes in the first place. Shopping might be a form of therapy, but there are periods when that therapy is more expensive than ever: and that's particularly true of periods. Shopping trips undertaken in such an hormonal state leave you with stuff that your rational self would never touch with the proverbial bargepole.

But back to today: depending on how energised I feel, I may actually get the camera out in a while and see if I can't manage some more indoor still life shots – I have a couple of ideas and it's enjoyably creative stuff to try.

The sun may have disappeared at present, but there's no shortage of things to occupy my time.

Getting a bit demob happy

After a fairly manic week at work, I’m now starting to feel distinctly demob happy.

I spent a rather large portion of the weekend scouring the Time Out guide to Venice and pouring over pictures of the city in another book and online.

As the date for departure nears, it seems ever more of a fairytale place; not quite of this world. And it is increasingly – rather than decreasingly – difficult for me to imagine myself there.

I’m rather surprised at the size of the place – or the lack of it. According to the maps, it’s actually far smaller than I’d ever realised – although you can bet your bottom dollar it’ll still take some time to get use to navigating around.

I am almost ready – well at least I’ve now got everything together for my evening attire on the Orient Express itself.

To complement the £15 M&S dress – long, black, sleeveless and simple – I got a bolero shrug in black lace from ebay for £16 and some Van Dal slingback courts with kitten heels in black patent leather. Then a pair of knot gold earrings and a Swarovski ring to go with the cuff I got a few weeks ago.

I am now of the opinion that nobody – but nobody – will notice the dress itself at all: they’ll simply be blinded by all the bling. I could almost be hypnotised myself by the ring – it catches the light beautifully. The Other Half looked at it, rolled his eyes, and made some snide comment about bling. But who cares? If you look at the sort of things that Tiffany produces, it's just very expensive bling, with actual jewels instead of crystals. The use of 'bling' in a derisive tone is simply snobbery.

The hair has been chopped right back, coloured a rich teaky sort of shade (which also covers all the grey) and styled. I have – miracle of miracles – persuaded The Other Half to actually got to a proper hairdresser tomorrow instead of his usual £6 barber (who does a decent enough job – but never seems to get the crown right).

He has taken to saying things in Italian, making the very most of really rolling every ‘r’.

He will collect his suit tomorrow – and our cat sitter is popping round to collect the keys and meet Otto and Loki on Wednesday evening.

Actually, that’s my biggest concern – how they’ll do with us disappearing for a week. Fortunately, they’ve seen both of us come and go individually for anything from a night to a week since their arrival. And when we’re away, I will miss the cats.

Amazingly, Boudicca is spending more and more time playing with the kittens – although she’s giving off some extraordinarily confused signals: she seems to think that hissing and growling are part of play as well as being genuinely cross.

But she’s now chasing with Otto as well as Loki – and has also been seen to do that sort of high five jumping in the air with each of the kittens.

So they should be able to cope – at least she won’t now be on her own for any length of time. She might still grumble about the kittens, but the lack of boredom behaviour for the last few months is evidence, were any needed, that she really did need some feline interaction.

Lessons in not being underdressed

With his 50th birthday celebratory trip on the Orient Express nearing, The Other Half has gone mad on the sartorial front.

The website proudly proclaims that: "You can never be overdressed on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express."

Okay.

"The historic decor of the train and its atmosphere encourages everyone to dress to suit the occasion. Dinner provides you with a marvellous opportunity to recreate the style and glamour of a bygone age."

Ahhhh. Glamour. Hepburn, Dietrich, Garbo.

"For evening dinner, many travellers will wear black tie or evening dress. At least as a consideration for your fellow passengers you will need to meet our minimum requirements of a suit and tie for gentlemen and an equivalent standard for ladies. During the day “casual but smart” is the rule. At lunch for instance, gentlemen might wear jacket and tie. At no time during your journey will jeans be acceptable."

Yikes!

Not that I would have been planning to wear jeans, you understand, but there are limits to what I own that constitutes evening dress.

The Other Half decided quickly what he was going to do.

And last week he visited a tailor in the City to be measured for a new suit. To be fair, his previous suit had been ruined by a dry cleaner – he only found out when putting it on for a wedding 18 months ago: I had to dab mascara over the holes so that rather large spots of lining or flesh wouldn't show.

Indeed, he'd only taken it to the cleaner after it got splattered with blood at a family funeral when some distant nephew or other tried to put his fist through a reinforced glass window.

They do things their own way in Yorkshire.

So, off he went to a tailor and ordered a "midnight blue" three-piece suit. He's a sucker for waistcoats.

Then he added another jacket – same material, but this time an evening jacket. Then a tailored dress shirt and a dress waistcoat.

Since then, he'd ordered white braces and white and black bow ties (not clip-on ones).

And there was I hoping to get away with the black, devore Windsmoor kaftan top I snapped up in the John Lewis pre-Christmas sale, plus some decent black trousers. But frankly, if he's determined to dress like an extra in an Agatha Christie period piece, then I'm going to look – and feel – woefully underdressed.

He came up with the answer – or at least part of it. I do have a long black dress. It's not really an evening fabric, but it's incredibly simple and always looks very flattering.

"Why not wear that?" he said.

"It is a £15 summer dress from Marks & Sparks," came my riposte.

"Then dress it up," he retorted. You'd think he was Castleford's answer to Trinny & Susannah.

I have, however, decided to do just that.

Thus far, I have splashed some cash on a Kara Ross gold cuff as a hulking statement piece (everybody will look at that and ignore the £15 dress), while I've picked up a black lacy bolero shrug from ebay for little more than pennies.

I have next to no gold jewelry – I am absolutely NOT wearing the gold coffee bean earrings from Argos that my sister gave me years ago – so I need a ring and some earrings. A visit to John Lewis is on the cards.

I have a very chichi evening bag (small, round, black and with tassels) that a former colleague, who had been a model in her youth, gave me.

Shoes will be the biggest problem. I have awkwardly shaped feet – short and wide, with hereditary hammer toes (The Other Half claims I’m “deformed”) – and absolutely nothing elegant enough.

Obviously I’ll have a hair appointment shortly before the trip (and we’ll go for a rich teaky colour to get rid of the grey), and if I can manage to keep my nails from splintering in the coming month, I’ll have a proper manicure done too. I shall have to give some thought to my make-up – foundation will be essential for once, and I’m wondering whether my usual purples will work best or the current ‘nude’ look.

This might just work. And at least these days I enjoy trying!

Ten years ago, I’d have been in despair. Indeed, in 2000 I was due to attend the Bafta awards ceremony through work, but almost bottled out because I was absolutely convinced that I had nothing appropriate – and matters had not been helped when my boss weighed in, putting on her best New York Jewish princess routine to just ask me nicely not to embarrass the company with my obvious lack of sartorial elegance. Only at the last minute did I manage to get something together and go, after days of panic and feelings of inadequacy.

This’ll be a cakewalk by comparison!

Tales of a leather jacket

After what feels like a rather frenetic January at work – including five days away on business in Gateshead and Newcastle – it's been most theraputic to have some time to myself.

It was back in October when I first committed myself to a trip to Rigby & Pellar to get new bras, but I finally got around to it yesterday, when I gave myself a sort of 'ladies who lunch' day shopping. Well, it wasn't a full day – not least because my visit to R&P was completely successful, but considerably shorter than expected, due to a surprising lack of a queue for fittings.

I'd started the day with the fullest intention of enjoying myself, and had dressed and done my make-up with that in mind. I was going to do the smart, sophisticated shopper routine for once in my life.

With R&P concluded so fast, I headed up to Oxford Street. The eastern half, from Oxford Circus to Tottenham Court Road, has long been the rather less classy part; shops full of tacky souvenirs and faintly trendy (in a sort of attempted rock 'n' roll way) clothing.

Yesterday, it looked even less enticing – downright sad, really. Record and DVD store Zavvi was one of the first casualties of the recession, and it's flagship store on Oxford Street had previously been the Virgin Megastore – an absolute gem of a shop, not least, from a personal point of view, because it had a wonderful, dedicated classical music section with knowledgeable staff. Now that's gone. Several other shops are empty – even on such a major street. And to cap it all, there are the beginnings of huge new roadworks cutting a zig zag along much of that part of the street.

So apart from the Marks and Spencer just east of Oxford Circus, I usually head down to the other end. And particularly to John Lewis.

Yesterday was no exception. But with the extra time (and money – my bra expenditure at R&P turned out to be massively lower than my previous visit some five years ago), I headed to Ann Harvey first. A few doors down from John Lewis, it's shop was revamped last year – and the clothes seem to have been given a makeover too. Although it's aimed at the 'larger lady', I'd tended to avoid it, at it seemed rather frumpy.

Either I have since headed into frumpydom myself or things have improved. The end of the January sales are still dragging on and I picked up a quality pair of smart trousers for £15, before lashing out considerably more on a new jacket – soft black leather, fully lined and styled in biker fashion, with a diagonal zip closure.

It was like a reminder of myself. Only that morning, I'd been struggling to know what jacket or coat to wear, and testing a black, leather jacket I'd been reminded just how shabby that staple of my wardrobe had become.

It's around 10 years old: the first leather jacket – or any other piece of leather clothing – that I'd ever owned, and was bought at a shop around Petticoat Lane market one Sunday afternoon. It was just after the start of my 'adolescent' development; an emerging from a sort of shell. Late – 40 was only just over the horizon – but better late than never.

Part of what followed was a realisation that I didn't have a clue how to dress. I had to start pretty much from scratch and try to learn. And that leather jacket – with collar turned up as a friend suggested – was the first piece of statement clothing I bought. You could dress it down or up. You could wear it anywhere – I did. And looking back, it was probably the first piece of clothing that I bought then that has survived that process of learning. It was my first 'right' piece.

You never forget your first leather jacket. I'm not about to throw it out just yet – although it's so battered that I've been wearing it less and less in the last couple of years. It's been re-lined twice, but the pockets have gone again and the leather itself is worn in a number of places, plus there are a number of little snicks where I left it hung over an armchair once, only for one of the cats to walk all over it with claws out.

This new jacket will be hung up carefully in the wardrobe when it's not being worn. There will be no repeat of that feline episode.

I am not ready for 'frumpy'. And I need to give myself a slap to stop falling into the temptation of being conventional. Decades of silent tears, spilt first because I longed to be 'normal' and then because I'd lost whoever the real me was by trying to be something I wasn't, should have taught me that happiness doesn't lie down that route.

But there seems to be a huge appetite for approbation from the more naturally conventionally inclined; from society and The Establishment even.

Look at actors. Once upon a time, considered far from respectable, but now regularly hobnobbing with royalty and picking up honours. The same goes for rock stars and writers and even journalists.

Journalists, for goodness sake! Why don't we want to be outlaws and reprobates any more? What happened to the spirit of rebellion and non-conformity? What great art or music or literature has ever been made from conformity?

It's such an irony that my parents are, in religious terms, non-conformists. My mother, in her determined effort to make me a poster girl for conformity, stuck me in handed-down tweed twin sets and (imitation) pearls in my teens. If such a thing had been possible, I imagine she'd have had me joining the WI (junior section) and making jam to sell at jumble sales.

So I have to fight regularly against this deep-seated compulsion to conform. Never was it revealing itself more than in my panic about what clothing to wear on our forthcoming trip on the Orient Express. Given the stuff I'd been browsing on the web recently, I was in mortal danger of inventing whole new levels of twee.

The leather jacket has pulled me back from the brink. Now even if I wear the smart new trousers (a dark, tweedy check) and a plain blouse, if I top it all off with the jacket, with collar turned insouciantly up, then even such an ensemble gains an edge. And there are, of course, plenty of other things that I could do with it: wearing the bowler hat that I bought in Berlin last year, for instance: it might not quite make me Sally Bowles, but it'll be a million miles from Hyacinth Bucket.

Royal treatment for the boobies

The time is coming when I must pay a visit to Rigby & Peller. It's around five years since I last went – in the days when walking into such a 'posh' shop, in posh Mayfair, was still an intimidatory experience.

Rigby & Peller are no less than the royal corsetieres. The company, founded by a Mrs Rigby and a Mrs Peller in 1939, received its royal warrant in 1960.

They're famed for their quality, to be sure, but they're perhaps best known for the fact that they do not measure customers with a tape, but judge size simply by looking.

It's impossible not to wonder how this process came about – perhaps because the royal boobies must not be touched?

My boobies, on the other hand, have been touched many times by supposedly trained staff, in Selfridges and John Lewis in particular, in my eternal search for a bra that managed to combine comfort and support.

There is nothing worse than an uncomfortable bra. Okay – ill-fitting shoes are bad too. And I utterly loathe underwiring, but received wisdom always seems to be that the larger bosom requires such scaffolding.

I have vague memories of that awful experience that every girl undergoes as a sort of rite of physical passage: the trip to buy the first 'training' bra. I didn't have much to train at the time and found the whole thing embarrassing – followed by the realization that the discomfort of being strapped into something that felt simply restrictive was going to be a life sentence.

As my boobs grew, so did the embarrassment. In my early twenties, I did a bit of running, and tried to restrict it to night time so that I could decrease the number of 'be careful – you don't give yourself a black eye!' comments from passing motorists. I hated them – not the motorists, but my own tits. I very seriously considered trying to get a reduction done.

When I was playing scheming, predatory tart Janey Jenkins in Walter Greenwood’s wonderful Lancashire comedy, The Cure for Love, our director (a former regimental sergeant major) found himself having to regularly boom at me: "If you've got it, flaunt it!” Such an attitude was not second nature for me.

Later, he used to say that that production was his greatest achievement: getting a Methodist minister's daughter and a male nurse to present reasonable facsimiles of a tart and a soldier.

It's a mystery why, in those days, I was cast so often in strumpetty roles. Another memorable occasion saw me play Constanze, Mozart's wife, in an award-winning production of Peter Schaffer's Amadeus. Every night, after being strapped into a corset that took my cleavage to new heights, I faced a scene where I attempted to win work for hubby by offering myself to the court’s favourite composer, Salieri. I sat on a chair, untied the ribbons at the top of my low-cut dress, and spread my legs suggestively.

Salieri nearly gives in to temptation, then refuses. Constanze leaps up and goes to slap his face, only to be pushed away, falling to the floor, where she stays, stock still, while he addresses the audience.

Only after the production ended was I told that, every night, without fail, I fell out of that corset. And then, when I got to my feet, fell back in – hence my never realising what was happening. But a photograph, taken at dress rehearsal, proved quite clearly that nobody was kidding me. The audience never laughed either – I’m proud to say that the scene was far too dramatically intense for that.

My father's objections to my theatrical ambitions were primarily because he was convinced that 'actress' was a synonym for 'whore'. My mother was less against the idea, but would ask, with a worried expression, as if I were contemplating crime: "What would you do if you were asked to do ... nudity?" After all, is there anything worse?

Well, Mother – unconsciously perhaps, but been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Well, got the picture at any rate.

Mind, my mother’s ideas about nudity mean that she finds it astonishing that I can quite comfortably go into a communal shower in the altogether – even in women-only environments – without being struck down by total mortification. It’s an example of the total illogicality of the obsessive British fear of the human body.

But I digress: back to the subject of the purchase of over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders.

I tried the lingerie departments in both Selfridges and John Lewis a number of times over the years. If you want mortification, that was it. Snooty, unpleasant women poking and pulling at you and then instructing you in what you required. I wonder if the attitude was jealousy?

I spent a small fortune trying to find something that offered support AND comfort. To little avail. And then, at one point when I was reasonably in funds, I remembered Rigby & Peller from a programme I’d seen at some point.

I swallowed hard, summoned up some courage, and headed to Mayfair.

It was a revelatory experience. First, it was relaxed and friendly (does one do “relaxed and friendly” with the Queen when one’s fitting her for a brassiere, I wonder?). It’s strange to be ‘measured’ by a visual assessment alone – but goodness, it worked.

And after you reach a certain size, the whole underwired thing ceases to have any great impact.

I ended up with bras that were comfortable, actually gave me superb support and looked good.

It wasn’t cheap. But at almost five years since that visit, the four bras that have given me brilliant service have worked out as far better value for money than those that were purchased over the years – and then thrown out because the underwiring snapped or because they were just uncomfortable.

The fear that I might require something so vast that I couldn’t wear low-cut tops was also misplaced. Now I can do some serious décolletage – and love the impact.

Only a short while after that first purchase, I was striding confidently down a street, wearing a rather low-cut top, as a man on a bike cycled toward me. Women have better peripheral vision than men, apparently. It certainly makes unseen lechery rather easier. This cyclist couldn’t take his eyes off my chest, head swiveling as his angle of sight changed.

I was tickled pink. Thank goodness I never gave in and had surgery!

Some years ago, TV makeover duo, Trinny and Susannah (who are generally pretty unbearable) took on comic Jo Brand for charity. The first thing they did was cart her to Rigby & Peller.

Since I went there, I’ve met other women who have ‘given in’ (which is how it feels initially) and tried them. Not one has regretted becoming an R&P woman. And a return visit will be a pleasure in itself.

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.