Tag Archives: africa

Frightened by brassieres

Sorry to mention female underwear, but it seems to have been a feature of this week.

First my sister raised the subject.

She also raised the subject of my comments on Mum’s soup. Just to clarify matters – she was a good cook, and cooked a wide variety of what were seen as adventurous food in the 1970s. Her soup also tasted good. It was just that it didn’t look good.

Anyway, back to brassieres. It seems that they can be quite important to women in Africa, because women with underwear are not only more comfortable but are seen as more likely to have male family members, which frees them from the threat of attack.

You’d think they had enough problems with war, famine and bad water.

There are several charities shipping underwear to Africa, which can include “gently worn” bras. This is one of them.

I have all this on the authority of my sister – please don’t think I sit here thinking about underwear.

It became more of a feature when Julia asked me if I could pick up some bras while I was shopping. Being a well-trained husband I said I would. After all, how difficult can it be?

When is was in my early 20s I once went into Marks & Spencers to buy an underslip as a present. I’m still scarred by the memory. I mean, first you feel like you’re being regarded as a pervert.  Then you go snow blind at the amount of nylon. There is only so much underwear you can see before you start staring around in panic. I was helped out by one of the assistants. It was probably not the first time she’d had to help out.

However, I’m older and wiser now, and more a man of the world. I had the size written on a piece of paper, I have done lots of laundry, there was nothing that could go wrong.

Well, apart from some women staring at me like I shouldn’t be there. I confess I panicked.

Next week I will give Julia a lift to the shop and she will buy her own.

Yes, I know many of you will thinking of this clip.

The March of Time

When I was a child I attended a number of schools that had outside toilets, dip pens and inkwells. One had central heating that ran through large pipes and Victorian radiators and the others had pot-bellied stoves. They also had school cooks and kitchens that prepared fresh food every day, disposing of the waste in pig bins. In 1978 we finally moved to a school with modern heating and inside toilets. That coincided with a general downturn in the moral fibre of the nation, though I don’t suppose it was caused by the provision of indoor plumbing for children.

However, we’re talking about 1963, and even by the standards of the day it was a bit of a museum piece. It was very much like this. It also had a flogging headmaster (who eventually got 4 years for inappropriate behaviour with girl pupils) and a map of the world. The map is the point of the story – it was mainly coloured red and pre-dated the the partition of India.

Moving on by 50 years, two of the group are going to South Africa on holiday so we did a jigsaw of Africa today. It’s a bit old as it belonged to our kids, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how things had changed.

On the school map (yes, there was a point to that preamble) we had places like Basutoland, Southern Rhodesia and Tanganyika. By the time the jigsaw was made these were Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Tanzania.

However, when we started the jigsaw it became clear that things had changed in Africa, even in the lifetime of my kids. As we pieced together Zaire, Upper Volta and the Somali Republic I realised how dated the puzzle was. When we had used the internet to identify African countries in the morning these had been Democratic Republic of Congo,  Burkina Faso and Somalia. Fortunately nobody noticed the changes.

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Just shows how things change, and how much there is to learn. I’m just hoping nobody goes on holiday to Eastern Europe, because I’ve never been able to catch up with what happened to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.