Thank you, Donald, for the book you’ve sent me. I do like autobiographies, even of drug addicts. I’m going to quote to you a paragraph I’ve just read in it so that you see I am reading it. After a spell in jail, the author of the book joins his usual junkie group and soon notices something. The clothes he had bought when coming out of jail do not fit with those of his mates. Fashion has changed in a short time and he had not kept up to date in jail

“As soon as I meet them, I’m aware that my clothes don’t look right. Since I’m just out of jail, I have no idea what the look is and no money to buy it anyway. I wear a jumper I found for a few quid. It’s dark, which is good. It has one stripe across it, which is bad. In fact, from the way the lads glance at it, I know it’s very bad. [He steals, gets some money, the first thing he does with it is buying himself new clothes.] So now I can afford to reinvent myself. My clothes go dark and tonal. I wear black Caterpillar boots and a pair of deep-blue canvas trousers and a blue rollneck. I throw away the jumper with the white stripe. Neil starts to make jokes about it and that makes me feel like one of them.”

I don’t recommend the book and that’s why I don’t mention its title. It is too crude and hurts. But it does reveal traits that help us to understand one another across the generation gap. One of those traits is fashion. The young person has to be alert to follow the latest fashion which is the identity certificate and the passport to the group. That’s why fashion changes constantly, even if we elders do not realise it, to change along the group’s identity, its image before society, its continued allegiance. So fashion has to change, and change quickly. The passport has to be renewed.