The fickleness of fashion and taking constitutional turns.

This was supposed to be posted days ago. I found it pending. Goodness knows how that happened. Here goes nothing!

Fashion is a strangely fickle beast. It throws up demands for us all to conform to certain body shapes. According to this report the thing to have at the moment is a large and shapely backside. Women are spending money to have fat removed from their thighs and injected into their buttocks! How very odd! It must makes buying clothes very difficult. More seriously, the procedure -a Brazilian Butt Lift - BBL - can be quite dangerous. Women suffer for their ”look”!

Also onto the fashion front comes the news that clunky lace-up boots with big thick soles are going to be the thing to wear this winter. So I can polish up my five-year-old brown leather lace-up boots and be bang up to the minute!

What goes around comes around and the stuff you have at the back of the wardrobe suddenly comes back into mode. Forget about the maxim that says if you haven’t worn an item for clothing in the last year you should send it to the charity shop. No, never throw anything out! Get yourself an extra wardrobe and label it “stuff that might come back into fashion”!

And as there was a sprinkle of snow on the tops of the hills around here this morning, maybe lace-up boots with a thick sole are not a bad idea!

The Brexit nonsense rumbles on, with some odd twists and turns. Theresa May’s cabinet must change as much as fashion does.

And now John McDonnell, shadow chancellor, is saying that if MPs vote down the Brexit deal, then the Queen should invite Jeremy Corbyn to form a government. Apparently he claimed that, according the UK constitution, Labour must be offered the chance to govern if Ms May is no longer able to command a majority in the Commons.

I was struck by the words “according to the UK constitution”. Whenever I have been involved in conversations about how things should be done in this country, some bright spark has sat up and declared, “ah, but we don’t have a constitution!” And someone else will explain that it is a matter of pride not to have one as it leaves us unshackled and flexible. We can tweak the way the country is run without having to amend the constitution.

So I went and looked it up.

“The United Kingdom does not have a codified constitution. However, a number of texts are considered to be constitutional, such that the "constitution of the United Kingdom" or "British constitution" may refer to a number of historical and momentous laws and principles that make up the country's body politic. Thus the term "UK constitution" is sometimes said to refer to an "unwritten" or uncodified constitution.”

It went on and on at much greater length but basically it amounts to this: we don’t have an ACTUAL written constitution as such but we have a load of CONSTITUTIONAL stuff - rules and regulations and accepted practice - just to make it possible to run the place.

Until now, I read in the article about John McDonnell, Labour’s policy has been that a general election should be triggered if the government’s proposed withdrawal agreement is rejected by Parliament, but Mr McDonnell admitted this would be “difficult” to bring about.

And maybe a general election might still not give the desired result. But running to the Queen and demanding Labour’s “turn” sounds a bit iffy to me. Isn’t she supposed to remain impartial?

I wonder what she really thinks about the mess the country is at the moment!