Dear Emma Soames
I know I should be nice to you as I would really love you to review the books I publish – but as I’ve spent several years trying in vain to interest Saga and other ‘oldie’ magazines in my publications – which I still firmly believe are quality books – perhaps there’s no need for me to dissemble.
I have to say that I was alarmed by your article in The Guardian, ‘Age-old rules’ published on 06.04.07. How can someone in the position of Editor of arguably Britain’s most important and influential magazine for older people have so little faith in older women? You are not alone in making my hackles rise. I am always disturbed and not a little incredulous at women who write to fashion journalists starting their letters with ‘Am I allowed to wear x, y, or z?’ But I don’t blame the timid writers. I blame the media’s relentless denigration of older people.
You ask why ‘with age this instinct (to chose the right clothes) fades and takes with it that insouciant confidence’. How can you be surprised that our confidence fades while you tell us we should always take a younger person with us to make sure we don’t buy something that will make us look foolish? I am reminded of the comment (by I know not who) that ‘there is no such thing as the wrong clothes only the wrong weather’ and I am certain that our current sartorial climate is changing for the worse as far as older women are concerned because of noxious gases given off by the youth-obsessed fashion industry.
Until recently there was an old woman frequently seen around Wimbledon, Usually getting out of her equally ancient Mini (car not skirt), always immaculately dressed and made-up as if she was about to attend a square dance – crinolined gingham skirt, white bobby sox, white shirt with a jaunty red scarf at her throat and always a bright flower in her white, carefully dressed hair. Some people might think she looked foolish but although I never met her I am sure she was a woman who knew exactly who she was and I, for one, inwardly cheered every time I saw her!
And as if we needed further blows to our confidence you tell us that our arms are unattractive and should be hidden from view as is our décolletage. Why should we hide our bodies away? Why shouldn’t we be proud of who and what we are? And just who is it that finds our ‘bingo wings’ so disturbing? They’re not contagious. Who are they harming? In ‘Defining Women’ (see enclosed flyer) I suggested we should launch a ‘Campaign for the Freedom of Bingo Wings’. I also enclose one of Mig’s drawings used in the book and inspired by an article that Katherine Whitehorn wrote for The Guardian (06.07.06) in which she mentioned a suggestion that older women be banned from appearing topless on Italian beaches because they ‘looked awful’. Her riposte was that men with potbellies should not be allowed to appear on a beach or anywhere for the same reason!
Much of the advice you gave was helpful and sensible (although, as a woman who inherited bunions from her mother, how I wish it was true that ‘You’re never too old for a fabulous shoe’). Why did you have to go and spoil it by kicking us in the back of the knees just when we are trying so hard to walk tall?