Snorkelling: now, and then

Dear Lorraine,

May I say how much I enjoy reading your site.

I am a married women in my forties and enjoy wearing hooded raincoats, particularly the heavy snorkel hooded ones that have come back into fashion in recent years. I have a lovely knee-length fishtail snorkel hooded parka from Next that I wear whenever I can.

My children - boy six, girl eleven and girl fifteen - all have snorkel parkas. They go to school every day in the winter with their hoods up and coats fully zipped and buttoned up. The fifteen year old has a long Bench coat with a big flap that goes over the face. She does not go out after school or on the weekend with out it done up so only her eyes are showing. She is forbidden to take it off or undo the hood so she can't get into trouble. Luckily she obeys us in this without problems.

The girls she hangs out with dress the same or in an even more extreme manner in ski masks and hoodies under their massive hooded coats.They wear all these clothes when they're out at the shops, cinema or in their bedrooms at home. They play weird music on their ipods but don't do any harm. Their boy friends, not that you ever see what they look like, remain totally burried in "Cabrini" hoodies with the hoods up and black neck warmers over their noses and mouths. The boys wear two or three hoodies at once with the hood up and sometimes a large parka over those.

Most adults would say it wasn't like this in my day.

But it was! I always wore a big blue snorkel parka in school in Glasgow as did most children in the mid-seventies.The hood was always up as far as I can remember, even in June. My brother wore one. Both my father and mother wore big blue snorkel hooded parkas with orange linings. My father worked in the ship yards where almost all the men wore the made-in-Korea snorkel parkas. Sadly now it is the ships that are made in Korea.

I used to love to wear the snorkel parka to and in school, though in class we were told we could not wear the hood up in lessons. I wore one until I left school and went to work, then wore dufflecoats. But my love was the snorkel parka with a long narrow snorkel that kept you warm and hidden. The hoods tended to slope down and only give you a view of the floor a few feet in front of you.The orange lining used to turn a grungy black and the hoods smelt of stale sweat. They were and are erotic! What an odd girl I must be! - or am I ??

Tartan Snorkel Hood