Got that. Right, I can proceed. So, the flat cap I earlier referred to has a plaid pattern (and before you make the assumption: we're not Scottish) and is at present perched on my head. Perched, because it's borrowed and well, my head must be slightly bigger than its owner's which means, due to slippage, it resembles a beret, except without what I call the apple stalk and the classic style of the French. Throw it on, worry later (or not at all) is my fashion motto; I wish it was my motto for life.
Conservative dresser, no. Flamboyant, no. Snappy, definitely not. Trendsetter, are you joking! Comfy, yes. Colour coordinated, mostly, and with no all-black or all-white ensembles, or heels. It's low or flats; a pair that doesn't say look-at-me, look-at-me and which connect instead with surfaces softly. Unobtrusively going about my business, though I don't really have a business to be going about and I'm not entirely convinced I'm as unnoticeable as I like to imagine, but if I was I'd be the perfect observer.
Though I am, if I say so myself, quite good at taking things in that other people miss, but that's generally because I don't have my face to the phone and because I guess I was taught to be aware: aware of my place in my surroundings and aware of those around me. Or maybe that wasn't taught but developed out of self-consciousness, which apart from the inferior yet nonchalant fashion sense is still (painfully) with me.
Anyhow, I really should get on with it: the carping I intended to do. That's what the flat cap is worn for, which although it should weigh no more than a feather is as heavy as a palm-sized beanbag. Ah, school days. Why am I saying 'Ah'? What was 'Ah' about stupid P.E.? I hated the unfolded apparatus with ladders and climbing ropes, and laid-out obstacle courses with hoops, nets and balls. The only sport I was okay at was running and we didn't do a lot of that, not pure running; there was always other props involved like a bat or a ball, and when you don't have an accurate eye or understand where to throw if by fluke you catch a hit it's never going to be an easy ride, no matter how much outside training you do in the back garden with your dad.
This cap, nice though it is, makes me nit-pick forgotten issues and avoid bigger, far less trivial subject matters, as it's easier to find fault retrogressively since there's nothing you can now do to change it. There's also something stopping me from broaching this sensitive topic even with this feminist cap on because it will seem like, no, it will definitely come across as a rant against man, of the male kind, not man as in the human race. But since I've started, I must try to give you a sense of what this cap would have liked me to voice, and voiced sooner:
Why do some men, plurally and generally, feel its within their rights to in some way target women, as if 'Woman' is a legal tender that passes between hands, many hands. A grope, a kiss without consent. A vicious assault either because the woman already was or to make her vulnerable. When does it end? Where does it stop? Because they doesn't even have to be an actual act, but unless there is one there's very little any woman (or anyone) can do about it. That kind of man has to show what he could be capable of, in spite of already engendering fear. Why are some men s.o.bs? And when will a woman's sobs be heard?
Picture credit: Title unknown, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
