welsh hills again

It is a truism that women of a certain age become invisible.  You hear it again and again.  The phenomenon even spawned a response in the blogosphere where older women posted photographs of What I Wore Today, trying to reclaim the right of the older woman to be interested in clothes and style and what she looks like.  Occasionally I would stumble upon one of these posts, rarely perhaps and only because it was written by someone I read for other reasons, such as the thoughtful and erudite posts of Materfamilias.  Recently Mater posted about a certain disaffection with the idea  of these posts and it got me thinking about why I had never wished to join in. I like clothes.  I am interested in the way I look.  But I also find clothes deeply boring and am far more interested in what I do than in what I wear.  What is going on here in my head?  Do I think the older woman is truly invisible and if so do I care? When I was young I was reasonably ...

A great blog from Around my Kitchen Table about invisibility in older women and the sacking of Arlene Phillips has got me thinking. Get over to her blog for some fascinating thoughts on both of these subjects and apologies to her for nicking the idea as a topic for a blog. It just struck such a chord with me and is something I found myself thinking about quite a few times as I have grown older. When you are a teenager the last thing you want is invisibility, unless your parents are being excrutiatingly embarrassing. My best friend and I used to walk our family dogs after school every evening and when we were about fourteen we used to wear our shortest shorts (this was New Zealand so it was warm!) or tiniest skirts and the aim was to see how many wolf whistles or beeps of car horns we could get on our circuit. Looking back there seems an innocence about it. Look at me, look at me! our behaviour said but we hated it if anyone actually stopped or tried to talk to us. That was not the gam...