DAY 40--Fake Fur

Confessions time: I have an inner Cruella De Vil.  When my sons were small enough to be beguiled by Walt Disney videos, 101 Dalmatians was a firm favourite.  Inevitably, I ended up watching it with them a few thousand times.  Secretly I was rooting for Cruella.  She was such a fabulous character, wasn't she?  Anita was such a drip in comparison. Remember Cruella's best line? 'I live for furs. I worship furs! After all, is there a woman in all this wretched world who doesn't?' 

Obviously we all know we can't say that any more.  We can only think it very very quietly, then repent afterwards if we have a Nonconformist upbringing.  The wearing of animal parts reached its apogee in the Victorian era, when hats were festooned with whole birds, fur stoles showcased the taxidermist's art, beetle shells shimmered on evening capes and butterfly wings gleamed in necklaces.  These days we can wear leather and sheepskin without getting pig's blood hurled at us in public.  Maybe a spot of rabbit fur trimming can be tolerated.  Although when the chancellor was a curate, he was once accosted from the pulpit by an angry Methodist minister.  She pointed and declaimed: 'That man there is wearing RABBIT FUR on his academic hood!'  I forget what the sermon was about now.  It was probably in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

Well, the reason for this subject today is the fake fur gilet I'm wearing.  No rabbits or mink suffered in its production.  However, I bought it from Primark, so I expect some poor human or other suffered in a dismal sweatshop.  How else could it have been so cheap?  This being England, people are less churned up by that thought.  Ever noticed the bins in supermarkets where you can donate tins of cat and dog food?  There's never one where you can donate tins to homeless people.  As I said in an earlier blog, I no longer shop at Primark.  Somebody somewhere is not being paid a living wage.  The same is probably true of high end fashion, but I never buy that, so my boycotting posh shops would have zero impact.

My fake fur gilet is nice and warm.  But oh, it's not as nice as real fur would be.  Have you ever plunged your hands into the sleek depths of a real fur coat?  I once bought a real fox fur, complete with little dangling paws and accusing glass eyes.  I got it in a vintage clothes shop because I was going to a Murder Mystery party as a Russian countess.  It later emerged that I was an imposter.  In fact, I was a human cannon ball.  But by then I'd bought the real fox fur.  I no longer have it, you'll be relieved to hear.  It got infested with carpet beetles, so I put it in the wheelie bin, closing the lid forever on those reproachful glass eyes.

No, it is not right to ransack the natural world and deck ourselves in the spoils.  Wearing rare animal fur is only the crassest form of this, I'm afraid.  But oh...

DAY 35--The Dressing-Up Box

Look!  Look!

How about that for a fab stripy blazer?  I borrowed it from one of the alto lay clerks.  I will be wearing it in the cathedral tonight when I am taking on the role of narrator in our 'Come and Sing Iolanthe' evening.  Normally the narrator's part is played by Michael Fabricant, our MP, but he is unable to be with us.  I am his stunt double for the night, and that of course, requires me to dress the part.  Hence the stripy blazer.  I shall team this with wall-to-wall filthy innuendoes.  People will hardly know the difference.  I did contemplate going blonde or sporting a Marilyn Monroe wig, but in the end I decided that would simply look ridiculous. 

Please don't run away with the impression that all our alto lay clerks prance about the Close 24/7 in stripy blazers.  I believe this one came from the gentleman's dressing-up box.  He told me he bought it when he took part in a Murder Mystery party while still at school.  Quite recently, then.  (This is the fellow who so crassly pointed out that he is the same age as my oldest jumper.)

I think the world is divided into two camps on the issue of dressing-up.  When that fancy dress party invitation arrives, half will groan, the other half will already be mentally ransacking the dressing-up box.  I belong to the latter group.  I quite literally have a dressing-up box.  It's contained in the trunk I went up to Durham with as a callow 18 year old--a treasure trove of fireman's helmets, wigs, sparkly frocks, hats, mortar boards, velvet jackets, army fatigues, gloves, frills and furbelows.  

Dressing up is in my blood, and not being ordained, I have so few outlets for expressing it.  My sisters and I always won first prize in the local village fêtes.  Fancy dress costumes weren't something we hired.  No, they were cobbled together out of curtains and cardboard; adapted from charity shop and jumble sale purchases.  I inherited the fancy dress eye from my mother.  You need a cheap but effective costume?  Come to me and I'll sort you one out.  I was always insanely competitive on World Book Day.  But my sons went to a C of E Junior School, and we all know what that means, don't we?  Yeah, exactly--first prize goes to the poor kid whose parents are splitting up, not to the BEST COSTUME.  Which invariably was being worn by MY SON.  I spent hours scouring the charity shops to find those doe-skin britches that fit with never a wrinkle for his Highway Man outfit!  My mother made those flintlock pistols out of papier mache!  And they gave the prize to a kid in a factory made Batman outfit.  HELLO?  

Obviously, I'm over it now.