Yesterday afternoon I picked up the pair of trousers that had been mended by the tailor, and looking at the patches later I was delighted by how much better her fix was than mine would have been. She reported with discontent that the wool skirt lining had not been replaced yet; she was preparing commissioned clothing and this was time-intensive. She was sewing at her oft-gouged, blond wooden table with a hanging lamp overhead, listening to a podcast on her smartphone, stacks of clothing in the open cupboards to the right.
Today was equally analogue. Despite the general dearth of rainwater, it's been interestingly stormy lately: strong alternations of sunshine and rain, heavy grey clouds and gaps, lovely fragrances of roses and other blossoms (amongst them the first elderflowers), a single bolt of lightning and roll of thunder yesterday afternoon. But despite the cloud cover I was out of doors a lot.
After going to the bank, I went to the post office to buy stamps and two cartons — the lady at the desk seemed pleased that I was buying them in analogue fashion instead of from the Automated Teller Machine-like machines in the lobby. Then I walked to the library and had a confabulation with one of the staff about where to begin when reading about daily life in the 1960s. She found a fashion retrospective, a German book about gender roles in the 1950s and 1960s, and a psychological work about the way in which the Nazi era was worked through in the 1960s.
The fashion book was very illuminating. (The book about gender roles I want to revisit with a fresh mind.) But there are different paths I could go down when I dress next Saturday for 1961, and I'm not sure whether to choose, as a distant inspiration, teen-style fashion like Jean Seberg's in À bout de souffle with Jean-Paul Belmondo, diva flair like Anita Ekberg's of La dolce vita by Federico Fellini, or minimal elegance like Audrey Hepburn's in Breakfast at Tiffanys. If it's the latter, I might try purchasing and wearing gloves, my prediction being that they will be a pain in the neck.
Afterward I bought a bottle of English dry gin and of sparkling water at a drinks supermarket, then a pot of mint, a terra cotta pot, and potting soil at a florist's.
Then I walked off again to the street market, which was as busy as ever. There I bought strawberries, cucumbers, walnuts, and lemons. Early peaches and cherries were already for sale; punnets of strawberries produced in Germany; lettuces frisée and flat; watermelons; and a ton of apricots — alongside the usual bell peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, etc. I took time, too, to gaze at other things, like börek (filled Turkish savoury pastry), sesame breads, candy, olives, and rolls of fabric.
On the way back from the market, I bought flowers from another florist: white and pink chrysanthemums, pink peonies, one violet anemone.
Finally I went to a train station to ask at the Ukrainian refugee welcome centre what they needed, then popped into a grocery store and returned with their recommendations. There were around three ladies there, sitting at the tables or tentatively looking to see what they'd like to eat or speaking with the volunteers — one of them invited me to go ahead of her to speak to the volunteers behind long trestle(?) tables with plastic bins of food and drinks. And there were three volunteers.
At home, I read Frieda Weekley's introduction to D.H. Lawrence's first version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It was first published posthumously in 1944 and then reprinted by Penguin in the 1970s. The pertinence to the historical experiment is that, in 1960, the obscenity trial that was investigating whether to allow an unexpurgated edition to be printed in the United Kingdom, ended in a landmark decision to permit publication.
Weekley's main argument appeared to be that she and her husband led far more courageous, clever and worthwhile lives than 90% of humanity (and she kind of damned her husband with faint praise by saying that it would 'be simplifying things too much to call him a socialist or a Fascist'). I did want to rinse my brain after she remarked how happy she was that D.H. Lawrence was born a "commoner", with his family's healthy miner vigour, as if she were the Queen of England, the monarch of all she surveyed. It was surprising that the introduction did not entirely feel unreadable.
I only made it through a few pages of the actual story of The First Lady Chatterley's Lover before deciding that pretty much everyone was a heinous and psychologically inconsistent character.
[In fairness, the British curator and television presenter Lucy Worsley makes the novel sound a lot better in the mini-series A Very British Romance.]
Afterward I showed the healthy impulses of the archetypal female caretaker, crossing the boundaries of social class to fulfill the needs to the nation did housework: wiping down the dishwasher and the laundry machine, mopping the kitchen floor, dusting in the hallway, and washing a large blanket in the laundry. Fortunately both machines are no longer anachronistic. A sock that I've been darning over multiple weeks has three holes in it, two of them darned and one of them un-darned, and I am beginning to doubt my life choices. But then I started embroidering a do-it-yourself tablecloth with a helpfully marked pattern from a crafting set we bought maybe even two decades ago; the petals of one flower are done, and the centre of another flower is almost done.
For light entertainment, I read two or three fashion magazine pages about menopause and old age for women — a stressful subject the way it was laid out — plus medical advice that looked scientifically adventurous to my layperson's eyes. (Eating two teaspoons of flaxseed per day to reduce the risk of breast cancer ... not sure how much to believe that one.) It still amazes me that a fashion magazine in the 2020s does not seem to accept the fact that men who are interested in [stereotypical] women's fashion exist, and that transgender or gender non-binary people who are interested in women's fashion exist. It's all geared toward people who identify as women, and as I turn the pages I always picture the editorial board as a group of lithe diplodocuses (or some other species of dinosaur) in stilettos.
The last task was to cheer up after last week at work, which did have its ups, however. Mama and I met in the kitchen to eat a bowl of ice cream, and my two youngest brothers and I later had a gin and soda each, with strawberries.
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