#SundayColumn #MajorsCorner #SchoolGirlsClothes Sept 21 2014

It cannot be said that we at the Home of Homes, my club, have failed to follow the cut and thrust of the daily news.
This can sometimes lead to harsh language amongst the members, especially when it comes to social changes long assumed to be rock solid. I can recall the battles over women joining our club as full members back in the late 1990s, which brought about almost inconceivable observations concerning weak minds.
The scars are still with us. Why just the other day, one of the “anti-women” mems refused to queue at the buffet table behind a “pro-women” advocate. He scowled at the back of the heavy-set club member in question before saying to all and sundry in a strong baritone voice: “I will simply wait until the large quadruped has had its fill.”
I do hate to rat on my chums but these insights must be shared. As I once said, my column spares no one.
It has been my task on more than a few occasions to be an ad hoc umpire between factions in the senior reading room, not a role that I asked for, but who else would do but a mild mannered major such as myself?
This very morning I entered the stately chamber and fell into my wingback by the bay. All around, a sea of newspapers faced me, with the low hum of mass muttering much in evidence. Suddenly the One-Armed Colonel threw down his paper, which might I say takes some doing when one has only one arm; still he managed it.
We immediately noticed a dangerous colour around his high cheekbones. Several retired doctors looked uncomfortable, as they might be called upon with no hope of collecting their fees.
I waved for a large martini, which brought a semblance of normality to the colonel’s flushed visage, and he was helped back into his chair. He sat moving his lips, evidence of high emotions below the surface. An epic struggle was under way amongst the synapses. A second very dry martini brought calm to his trembling legs whose wild gyrations had gone unnoticed till then.
After soft blandishments from the closest mems, we began to get a picture of what had done such damage to his nervous system. It was “the absence of dress codes in the schools of today,” he said.
He produced from his ruined paper a crumpled picture of young women just this side of starkers wandering through the halls of a high school with signs saying: “Don’t tell us what to wear” and “Like bug off, teach, it is my body.” They were dressed, if that term can be used, in what appeared to be cast off East German gym suits that they claimed were conventional shorts.
It is not so long ago that wearing something along these lines would earn one two weeks in the local prison for lewd behaviour with a promise from the judge that the punishment would be far fuller in the future.
At my old school, if the nurse put on red lipstick, we boys went into a frenzy of lust, causing our dietitian to double the amount of saltpetre in the milk for the next meal. I don’t know what we would have made of the young, almost short-less teenage girls today. Probably have become not unlike drooling hordes from the Russian steppes.
Would it not be better to have inexpensive uniforms and remove the bad apparel decision-making every morning? Then all would be dressed alike. Are they not at school to concentrate? It is hard enough, as I remember, to actually be a teenager without overt temptation.
Here is an old man’s observation: Girls are different from boys.
When my wife and I go lawn bowling, I am told that from behind, it is difficult to tell us apart. Cruel as that is, it may have some truth to it. However that is not the case at 16.
Please tone it down, parents. Do not be afraid to say No. You are not your daughter’s friend but you should be her example.
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