A woman got onto my train yesterday evening in a fur coat. A three-quarter length, definitely real, fox-fur coat that looked as though it would have been nicer when it was on the foxes. On a train. In England. Am I the only person who is shocked by this? When did it become socially acceptable to wear fur in this country? Sure, it was the day of the snow but we're talking half an inch in London, not some three-day whiteout blizzard in Moscow. English weather very rarely throws up the sort of conditions that a raincoat and a woolly jumper can't cope with. It certainly never calls for fur.
And - to be clear here - I'm not really talking the morality of it, or not exactly. She does, legally, have the perfect right to wear anything that isn't endangered. Or indecent. Or leggings*. And we have the perfect right to be offended. For what surprised me was that nobody else batted an eyelid. There were no crowds of children following her pointing and laughing, and nobody spilled so much as a cup of coffee on it, let alone a tin of red paint. Surely, as a nation of so-called animal lovers someone ought to have at least tutted, and loudly. Or at the very least, as a nation of reverse snobs whose monarchy go around looking like people who've come to walk the dogs, we could object on taste grounds. I did as much glaring as I could on my own but everyone else ignored her and she sat on, complacently, totally unperturbed. This can't be right, surely? Did I miss the memo? Is it now okay? On public transport? Tell me it ain't so...
* The law may not be entirely clear on this point.
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