Miss Martindale’s short-lived column for the Chap provided much needed advice, in 2004, on how young ladies should dress and comport themselves.
Welcome to the Ladies’ Smoking Room – and you must welcome me too, for with my appointment as your Resident Ladies’ Columnist, I make my debut into the world of the Woman Worker. Well, not quite debut exactly, for I did on one other occasion receive what I believe is known as a “pay-cheque”; but now, it seems, I am to receive one regularly, four times a year. It makes one feel quite bourgeois, but I take solace in the fact that writing has long been considered a lady’s occupation. And in any case, the iron discipline of turning out a thousand words or so four times a year ‘on the dot’ will prevent me from becoming lazy. But let us pass on to other matters. The thought of all this routine and timekeeping is starting to make me feel faint.
THE UPPER HAND IN GLOVE
A question I am often asked is this: “I choose my outfits carefully, but I still worry that I do not look completely out of place in the 21st century. Is there any one thing I can do to ensure utter chic?” Well, for once in this dreary old life, there is a Magic Solution. Wear gloves. It is as simple as that. Not the sort of gloves dreadful people wear to keep their hands warm (what do you think fur muffs are for?) but the sort of gloves ladies wear even when they need to flutter a fan to keep cool. Black gloves or white gloves, long gloves or short gloves, gloves of soft calf-leather or of simple cotton. Gloves are the touch the phoney forgets. Gloves, worn with the right outfit, separate the doves from the pigeons and the New Lady from the New Woman.
Gloves lift an ensemble from the aspiring to the inspired. Until recently, no lady would dream of leaving the house without hat and gloves. Then (some time around 1950) the rule was softened to gloves only. To anyone who imagines that the rule has been softened beyond that, the answer is: only for oiks. No doubt some anarchist will, at this point, wheel out the example of some member of the royal family. To forestall such impertinence, let me remind you that members of the royal family are also coached at great expense by the Commissariat to speak like modified oiks. You weren’t thinking of doing that too, I trust? Well then.
BOTTLE FEEDING
In a moment of irascibility – I do have the occasional irascible moment – I chanced to remark that people who drink out of bottles should have them kicked down their throats. I was treated, for my pains, to a pious little homily about how some reasonable people might on certain occasions drink from bottles. I feel therefore that I should clarify my exact position on the subject. I am compelled to agree that there are some exceptions to my rashly-stated rule. In the case of small babies, for example, the practice of drinking from bottles appears to be so well established in tradition and custom that an exception must be made. In the case of a person dying of thirst in the desert who comes by chance upon a bottle of water, I feel that Dire Necessity can reasonably be pleaded and that, after a suitable period of penance, she may very possibly be re-admitted to the human race.
For the sake of completeness, I should add that it has been pointed out to me that the piratical practice of swigging rum from bottles (usually followed at least by the common courtesy of wiping their mouths with the back of their hands, frequently neglected by the pub bottle-drinker) is also hallowed by custom and tradition. To this I must reply that pirates do not count. Pirates are exceptions to many rules, even such simple and uncontentious ones as the rule that men wearing earrings should have their ears cut off. Hard cases make bad law, and pirates are well known for being hard cases.
