When I rambled on about trench coats yesterday I forgot that I meant to include something about my old school coat. We didn’t call them trench coats. They were gabardine macs. But effectively, from the point of view of style, they were trench coats and we girls all had to have one. No other coat was permitted, apart from the brown ones worn by girls who joined us in the sixth form, having come from the convent school which did not provide sixth form education.
Ours were bottle green, with a hood, which was a bonus because if you put your hood up the prefects could not tell whether or not you were actually wearing the regulation green beret with the school badge facing to the front. When I joined the school at age 12, I was equipped with a seriously oversized gabardine mac, which I wore for the next four years. Fortunately I did not grow enormously upwards or outwards and by the time I was in the fifth form (year 11 nowadays) I was still wearing the by now nicely softened and battered quite disreputable gabardine mac. I wore it cinched in at the waist and felt quite trendy, as did all my friends.
Then I progressed into sixth form and my mother decided I should be “rewarded” with a new school coat for the remaining two years of secondary education. Perhaps she thought my battered raincoat was just too disreputable for her daughter to be seen wearing. So she bought me a new style A-line coat, in the regulation green gabardine. It was a fashionable style and in a different colour would no doubt have been a fine addition to my wardrobe but it just wasn’t what the trendy sixth form student wanted to wear - it just wasn’t the same! But I couldn’t hurt my proud mother’s feelings by telling her so. The battered trench coat had to go!
Nowadays I would be posting pictures of it all on Instagram or something similar.
I came across this article about London theatres wanting to ban audiences from taking photos with their mobile phones during performances. I’m not sure how they would police it. Would the audience’s bags and pockets be searched and their phones put away in a safe place? It’s been done on security grounds. I think it was in the period after the bomb at the Ariana Grande concert that we had our bags searched before being allowed into the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. That was not so much for phones as for suspicious items that might be connected to terrorism.
Just over a decade ago I went to a Joan Manuel Serrat concert in the fancy concert hall in the centre of Vigo. The staff were run ragged dashing about the place trying to stop people video bits of the performance on their phones, much more disruptive to the proceedings than the actual videoing!
It’s become a fairly standard thing though when you go to a concert to see any number of people with their phone raised as they video-record a favourite song. Like the people who make cine-films of their visits to places of historic interest, surely they miss the best by trying to make a permanent record of it. I am not blameless in that respect. Somewhere on an ancient mobile phone I have a recording of Leonard Cohen singing “Dance me to the end of love” at the start of his concert in Castrelos Park in Vigo.
Such is modern life. We are all performance artists to some extent, some of us simply posting pictures of our latest ramble in the countryside and others seeming to live their whole lives on social media.
And some of us write blogs!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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