Reflections on changing society and perceptions.

I can do nostalgia with the best of them. There's nothing quite like looking back to a more innocent age when children roamed freely from breakfast time to teatime and no-one worried about them! Really? My parents always wanted to know where I was going. But yes, there was more freedom. And there are things that should be brought back, like deposits on fizzy pop bottles, an excellent source of income for impecunious kids and a way of discouraging people from just dropping bottles by the side of the road. Ah!!! Nostalgia!! 

What I am failing to understand is some of the nostalgic posts I see more and more frequently on Facebook, harking back to a time when, to quote an Australian friend's post, "every house in Adelaide had an outside dunny". Now a "dunny" is Australian slang for a toilet. So these people are getting all dewy eyed at the memory of having an outside loo! I wonder if they get nostalgic about using torn up newspapers for loo roll!! And having a bath in a tin tub, often sharing the water with several siblings! Oh, give me a nice, clean, modern bathroom with flushing toilet and heated towel rails for when you step out of your nice, clean, modern shower!! 

Sometimes people are hard to understand! 

There's that news reporter in the USA who told everyone that Birmingham, UK, is a totally Moslem city and a no-go area for non-Moslems. He's apologised for that one but on TV last night I heard him state categorically that there are areas of London where you get beaten up if not dressed in appropriate Moslem dress. It must be true; he read it in British newspapers. Now I wonder which ones they were! No doubt there is some tabloid somewhere that has reported an incident of that kind and it has been inflated into a general way of doing things. I know there are people who believe that every word you read in the tabloids is the absolute gospel truth but most of them are not news reporters on well established TV channels! 

Perceptions are strange things, are they not. I once saw a documentary which showed how you could give totally opposing views of just about all cities with a bit of selective filming. Every city has its bits of beauty; film just them and you give the impression of a wonderful place. They also have their really sleazy parts, the tumbledown areas, the dirty places; film just them and no-one would ever want to go there. 

The same goes for dress codes. Remember when a "respectable lady didn't go out without a hat, or at least a headscarf? (Oops, there's that nostalgia thing again.) and then remember the people like Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy who made the headscarf a fashion item. I can remember wearing a headscarf so that the ends went round your neck and tied at the back. And there was the Lara-from-Doctor-Zhivago look, where you wore like a kerchief, tied under your hair so that your hair hung loose from under it. (Oops, again! More nostalgia!) 

Well, on BBC Radio 4's " Pick of the Week" on Sunday, they played an excerpt from a programme about "Hip Hijab Wearers". Young Moslem women talked about how they accommodate wearing the headscarf with being fashionable and making a statement about their own identity. As in every family, they get complaints from their mothers along the lines of "you can't go out looking like that" because they choose to pin their headscarf in a particular way or make it as high on the head as possible. ( Nostalgic moment for beehive hairdos coming up.) They even talked about getting into the fashion industry, although they were uncertain about whether they would actually be permitted to do so. But look online and see how many are already doing so. 

They almost certainly couldn't do so in certain middle-eastern countries but I have long thought that the women of our immigrant communities might be the ones to effect a change, and improve integration, maybe with a quiet revolution involving textiles and fashion instead of guns and violence. Oddly enough, I am less optimistic about it now than I was thirty or more years ago, probably more like forty years ago, when I first came across girls from the Asian communities here going through the education system. But, listening to the girls on the BBC programme, I see perhaps a little glimmer of hope. 

None of us need to adopt the life style of another community but we do all need to adapt.