Affairs

Welcome to the Roaring 30s.

You know what was chic in the 30s? Not dying was chic, although with World Wars flying all over the place, sometimes it was difficult to avoid this. It is still chic to be not dead, although while I was well known to be dead it briefly came into fashion. People would turn up at parties all the time looking like death. But what was really chic was affairs. Torrid, vapid, rampant affairs right across groups in your social strata*.

I imagine a lot of you down there exist in small towns so there really only are three or four people that you could have an affair with whose ancestry was far enough away from yours not to be considered incest.

Even then you would run into the problem of people always knowing your business, or being related to too many people. Or even worse, being forced to become a swinger - which was only coined, popularised and desecrated much later.

You say swinger to a Danish person and they'll think it's someone who dances well. I remember the scandal erupting in Copenhagen where someone walked in on passionate the love making of a man and his wife.

- HOW ODD! - People sent by silent morse code to each other, wondering what their own wives would be like in bed.

The Danes are so beautiful they can get away with this, though. Someone with my nose needs to be more careful with how they perceive the world.

No, it has always been chic to have affairs. I had one in the 30s that lasted 3 years. Just the one affair, one tryst that just never ceased. 3 years to the day I decided that red heads would not be chic again for another 70 years.

How glorious it was in those days. You would see your husband or respective partner with hislover and have a great big row - despite the fact you were on your way to see yours and your lover had just come from seeing theirs. Alcohol and torrid affairs - champagne for breakfast and lovers for lunch.

I guess what I am saying, my dearest readers, is that the imminency of life and the departing of this world has been taken from us and as a result we are forced to live dull, unexciting, quiet lives. To add insult to injury, with the abundance of education on offer, we can be acutely perceptive of this dullness to the point of articulating it perfectly.

I say "we" but I assume you understand I mean "we" excluding myself. The vaults of the museum I had purposely perfectly preserved a party from the 1930s so as I never get un-lived. Every museum has one, although the Natural History museum preserved a dinner party from the 1950s and that one is a gods-honest bore.

I say, might I ask, if one doesn't live in my perpetual party, what is it that one does these days to live up there?

D

*So long, of course, as you kept to your social strata. Scandals are so unabashedly un-chic.