Different times

I have just watched one of the first series of 'Last of the Summer Wine', which would have been filmed around the early seventies.

Two things struck me - first, how much everyone smoked in the show. You never see anyone smoking these days, but then it was chain smoking that looked so odd now that I am used to the current tobacco ban in programmes. The second thing that struck me was the length of the skirts. Fashion said that skirts were short, and therefore skirts were worn short, no matter what those short skirts revealed. Sometimes it wasn't a pretty sight, there is a reason I go round in jeans all the time.

I think that is one thing I am profoundly grateful for. There are fashions around now, I think - I don't pay that much attention. But if you are of a fuller figure, you are not condemned to wearing crimplene short skirts whether you like it or not. And you can wear trousers without your mother complaining (mine never did, but she was a bit individualistic herself).

I am old enough to remember when someone wearing their hair in a mohican style was considered threatening. Nowadays I usually think that it is too much effort to be worth it, and it must cost a fortune in gel. Fashions seem so much more optional and less confrontational these days, and I am so glad.

Many, many years ago, at the height of the New Romantic Fashions, I was on a bus, wearing footless tights, bright floaty skirt, scarves and beads to the armpits and make up Lady Gaga would blink at. I was too caught up in a daydream to pay much attention to any glares, but when I got off the bus I caught my heel on the step and fell, with my handbag sailing off into a nearby garden. I could hear those on the bus tutting and muttering about drugs.

I was on the way back from a Church disco. But in those days (though I didn't realise it at the time) that sort of outfit was quite unnerving to the older generation. It was a wonderful lesson to me. Never judge by appearances.