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THE AGONISING SEARCH FOR A BATHING SUIT
I have just been through the annual pilgrimage of torture and humiliation known as buying a bathing costume. When I was a child in the fifties, the bathing costume for the woman with a mature figure was designed for a woman with a mature figure. Boned, trussed and reinforced these costumes were not so much sewn as engineered. They were built to hold back and uplift and they did a damned good job.
Today’s stretch-fabric bathing suits are designed for the prepubescent girl with a figure chipped out of marble. The woman with a mature figure has little to no choice. She can either front up at the maternity-wear department and try on floral costume with a skirt and come away looking like a hippopotamus that has recently escaped from Fantasia or she can wander around any run of the mill bathing suit department and try and make a sensible choice from what amounts to a designer range of fluoro rubber bands .
What choice did I have? I wandered around a run of the mill bathing costume department. I made my choice and disappeared into the small chamber of horrors known as the fitting room. The first thing I noticed about the bathing costume was the extraordinary tensile strength of the stretch material. The Lycra that goes into bathing costumes was developed, I believe, by NASA to launch small rockets in a sling shot. And it comes with the added bonus that as long as you can lever your body into a Lycra suit, you can protect the vital organs from shark attack. The reason is of course that any shark that takes a swipe at your passing midriff would immediately suffer from a jaw whiplash injury.
I fought my way into the first bathing costume. It had my size on the tag. But as I twanged the last shoulder strap in place, I gasped in horror. My bosom had disappeared. I found one bosom cowering under my left armpit. It took me a little while to find the other one. Eventually I located it flattened beside my seventh rib. The problem is, of course, so many modern bathing costumes have no bra cups. The mature woman is meant to wear her bosom spread across her chest like a speed hump. I realigned my speed hump and turned towards the mirror to make a full view assessment.
The bathing costume fitted alright. Unfortunately, it only fitted those bits of me willing to stay inside the costume, the rest of me oozed out the top and the bottom and the side of the bathing suit. I looked like a lump of play dough wearing an undersized cling-wrap.
As I stood in front of the mirror trying to work out where all these extra bits of me had come from, the sales girl put her head through the curtain. 'O. They ARE you' she gasped admiring the bathers. 'Yes, they are all me ' I gasped looking at the extra bits. 'What else have you got?'
I tried on a crinkled cream bathing costume, which made me look like a lump of designer tripe. I tried on a floral two piece costume, which made me look like an oversized napkin in a Ken Done serviette ring .I struggled into a pair of leopard skin bathers with a ragged frill and came out looking like Tarzan on an off day. I put on an orange bathing suit with little black spots and I felt like a diseased pumpkin. I donned a black costume with a net midriff and emerged looking like a jellyfish in mourning. And I tried on a bright pink pair of bathers which had such high-cut legs , I thought I would have to bikini wax my eyebrows if I wanted to wear them .
Finally, I found a bathing costume which fitted. It was a two piece affair with
a shorts-style bottom and a generous top. It was cheap, comfortable and bulge friendly. I bought it. When I got home I finally read the small print on the label. 'Material may become transparent in water'. But I’m determined to wear the damned thing. I just have to learn how to do the breast stroke in sand.
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