What’s in a name? When are leggings not leggings? When Marks & Spencer decides to call them footless tights! Granted, they are fleece-lined and beautifully warm for the winter and I suppose it might be difficult to line the feet of tights with warm fleece but the fact remains that these are not tights but leggings. As far as ai am concerned, tights are worn with skirts and dresses, leggings with over-long jumpers and shirts - not with crop tops in my opinion, even if you are 16 and have a beautiful figure. Oh! and leggings should be plain although they can be whatever colour you choose to wear, depending on the colour of the long top you have chosen to wear. Patterned leggings should not be worn by anyone over the age of 6. Well, that’s my opinion. Fashion advice from this blogger!
Time was, the only people who wore “footless tights” were ballet dancers for practising, usually with leotards, usually black. With the advent of aerobics, suddenly every exercising woman was wearing footless tights and leotards, now manufactured in different colours. The really trendy exercisers had several sets in a range of bright colours. At the start of Jane Fonda-style exercise classes the cry could often be heard, “Ooh, what a lovely leotard! Where did you get it?” I was a cheapskate (aka impoverished young teacher saving up for a deposit on a house) and only ever wore black.
And in recent years everyone is wearing leggings - even men out running who seem to wear them under floppy shorts - at least the men who don’t insist on being all macho and running in shorts and bare legs in all weathers. It has to be said that leggings are a very versatile and comfortable fashion item. Anyway, I gave in and bought a pair of M&S fleece-lined leggings, aka footless tights, on Tuesday when I was in Manchester. Very warm and comfortable they are too!
I was in Manchester principally to go to the cinema as part of the course on “Significant Women in Italian Cinema” which I have been attending. I seized the opportunity while there to pop into a couple of shops. Manchester centre is crazy, full of Christmas “markets”, i.e. pedestrian streets crammed with stalls selling all sorts of tat, stuff you might impulse-buy, street food, and more varieties of sweets than you might ever have thought possible.
I was going to see an Italian film called “Lazzaro Felice”, English title “Happy as Lazzaro”, a strange tale of a modern slavery, a community believing themselves trapped in the countryside of Lazio, sharecroppers constantly tricked into believing they are in debt to the aristocratic owner of the Inviolata estate and therefore obliged to work without pay. Lazzaro (Lazarus) is a simple character, seemingly unrelated to anyone in the community, exploited by all, accepting his exploitation with a beatific smile. Inevitably it all comes to a disturbing end. Transferred to the city, the members of the community grow older (apart from Lazzaro who seemingly died and was resurrected) and are differently exploited. Neorealism, social realism and magic realism go hand in hand. I will be interested to see what next Tuesday’s discussion has to say about it.
The friend I met to go to the cinema told me he has been watching a series on BBC TV (we often swop recommendations for TV watching). Another friend raved about it on Facebook. This is “Boat Story”, the tale of two people who find a shipwrecked boat full of drugs which they proceed to try and sell. Of course, they find themselves in difficulties with the police, drug pushers, gangsters and all sorts of baddies. I was instantly reminded of a Portuguese series we watched earlier in the year. Called “Turn of the Tide” in English, its Portuguese title is “Rabo de Peixe”, the name of a small place in the Azores. It’s a very similar story of a group of friends who find and try to make their fortune with a stash of cocaine and, as well as turning their small community upside down, find themselves pursued by the Sicilian mafia who were transporting the drugs from South America to Italy. This one is based on a true story, although the four friends in the series are an invented element. Did the writers of “Boat Story” use the same source? I wonder.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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