That wise and wonky gentleman, Oscar Wilde once said "I am not young enough to know everything". He may have been spending too much time with the Lower 6th ,which would make one understandably acerbic. I find it fascinating how the Giant Boy knows everything. He does know quite a lot about things of which I know nothing, I admit. And he has skills that I can only marvel at; he can open a door with a key at the first attempt. He knows what wires mean, and can read a meter. I am relieved about that because I was worried that he might have inherited my congenital idiocy. Even people who love me dearly find it trying when I start fumbling, peering, dropping keys and flailing around generally. The gentler souls keep quiet,and adopt a forebearing expression. More robust types start screaming "For Christ's Sake! How long have you lived here? Why don't you get a torch/miner's lamp attached to your head/guide dog, you silly shortsighted BINT!", after about ten minutes. Less if it's really cold , wet or they are in urgent need of a wee. Of course, the milder folk are thinking the same thing. Just not saying it. Isn't it a good thing we don't have thought bubbles coming out of our heads, like in cartoons? Satan would only have to arrange this for a week or two and the entire human race would have wiped each other off the planet.
So the GB knows IT ALL, whereas, as Seneca remarked "I am not wise, and never will be". But I am consulted by my friends on a number of matters, hardly any concerned with plugs. Scarcely a day goes by without my views being sought on some matter or another, and in fact, I am now an Agony Aunt, dispensing arch and mannered advice in a monthly magazine. I can only suppose that the human race has reached a sorry pass if I am regarded as a Wise Woman. I may work this up a little, though. As it seems that we are all supposed to work until we drop,our pensions being dangled for ever just out of reach like the grapes of Tantalus;and yet no-one over fifty can get a job, to avoid utter destitution, I may become a Professional Crone.
Every community needs a Crone or two. Soap opera specialises in them, along with Battleaxes, two perfectly good role models for the older woman. Battleaxing isn't really me, too confrontational and shouty, but I think I would make an excellent Crone. I will need a curly grey wig, and will camp it up with latex warts and so on. But stop me if I go for a hump, won't you? Cackling I can do; all the women in my family cackle.
We are generally civilised ladies, even refined, in some cases. But we all laugh like dockers on nitrous oxide. I went to see "The Woman In Black" the other day. Now, there was a super Crone. She had it all going on, from the ominous appearances as a reflection over the right shoulder of Harry Potter, to the hurtling down corridors shrieking into one's face. They say (whoever They are) , that women over fifty become invisible. Not literally, of course, although that might be fun. In Liverpool at least, this has hardly been the case. Everywhere you went was ruled over by women of a certain age with ,shall we say, DECIDED characters. They all shopped in Blackler's. For those of you who , perhaps, inhabit a remote corner of Paraguay, Blackler's Store in Liverpool was the Mecca for Crones. Sadly it is now a Weatherspoons. But in its glory days, you could buy underpinnings of a style and type now as extinct as the farthingale. For the more robust Crone, there were directoire knickers in knitted cotton that went up to a 56 inch waist.There were fleecy-lined Liberty bodices,with and without boning, underskirts in Germolene-coloured Winceyette, and vast flanelette nighties which boasted their resistance to fire, and also probably a full-scale nuclear bombardment. You could buy navy-blue lisle stockings, if you were a Staff Nurse, or beige ones if you planned permanent celibacy. My Grandmother used to take me with her when she went to purchase a corselette, or some new suspenders. It was Heaven, and I was allowed to go and ride on the rocking horse, whilst Nan was measured by a woman with a tapemeasure round her neck and a chin for every day of the week.
Blackler's appealed to small children and elderly ladies, but did not attract the all-important 13-19 demographic, and so it died. Had I gone first, I would have haunted it, frightening off the new owners as a useful public-spirited spirit should do. I would have materialised , bawling my head off, in Fabrics, as "The Woman In Blackler's; floating above "Zips, Buttons, and Haberdashery", and loomed spectrally out of the cheval mirrors in the Hats section. I would have made that rocking horse go like the clappers every time a shopfitter passed by. And Crones all over Merseyside would have blessed me.
So the GB knows IT ALL, whereas, as Seneca remarked "I am not wise, and never will be". But I am consulted by my friends on a number of matters, hardly any concerned with plugs. Scarcely a day goes by without my views being sought on some matter or another, and in fact, I am now an Agony Aunt, dispensing arch and mannered advice in a monthly magazine. I can only suppose that the human race has reached a sorry pass if I am regarded as a Wise Woman. I may work this up a little, though. As it seems that we are all supposed to work until we drop,our pensions being dangled for ever just out of reach like the grapes of Tantalus;and yet no-one over fifty can get a job, to avoid utter destitution, I may become a Professional Crone.
Every community needs a Crone or two. Soap opera specialises in them, along with Battleaxes, two perfectly good role models for the older woman. Battleaxing isn't really me, too confrontational and shouty, but I think I would make an excellent Crone. I will need a curly grey wig, and will camp it up with latex warts and so on. But stop me if I go for a hump, won't you? Cackling I can do; all the women in my family cackle.
We are generally civilised ladies, even refined, in some cases. But we all laugh like dockers on nitrous oxide. I went to see "The Woman In Black" the other day. Now, there was a super Crone. She had it all going on, from the ominous appearances as a reflection over the right shoulder of Harry Potter, to the hurtling down corridors shrieking into one's face. They say (whoever They are) , that women over fifty become invisible. Not literally, of course, although that might be fun. In Liverpool at least, this has hardly been the case. Everywhere you went was ruled over by women of a certain age with ,shall we say, DECIDED characters. They all shopped in Blackler's. For those of you who , perhaps, inhabit a remote corner of Paraguay, Blackler's Store in Liverpool was the Mecca for Crones. Sadly it is now a Weatherspoons. But in its glory days, you could buy underpinnings of a style and type now as extinct as the farthingale. For the more robust Crone, there were directoire knickers in knitted cotton that went up to a 56 inch waist.There were fleecy-lined Liberty bodices,with and without boning, underskirts in Germolene-coloured Winceyette, and vast flanelette nighties which boasted their resistance to fire, and also probably a full-scale nuclear bombardment. You could buy navy-blue lisle stockings, if you were a Staff Nurse, or beige ones if you planned permanent celibacy. My Grandmother used to take me with her when she went to purchase a corselette, or some new suspenders. It was Heaven, and I was allowed to go and ride on the rocking horse, whilst Nan was measured by a woman with a tapemeasure round her neck and a chin for every day of the week.
Blackler's appealed to small children and elderly ladies, but did not attract the all-important 13-19 demographic, and so it died. Had I gone first, I would have haunted it, frightening off the new owners as a useful public-spirited spirit should do. I would have materialised , bawling my head off, in Fabrics, as "The Woman In Blackler's; floating above "Zips, Buttons, and Haberdashery", and loomed spectrally out of the cheval mirrors in the Hats section. I would have made that rocking horse go like the clappers every time a shopfitter passed by. And Crones all over Merseyside would have blessed me.
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