Club Foyer> Chillout Room >Rainwear towns

In celebrating interesting rainwear one is driven constantly into (conceptual) torture: that is to say, into stretching the very idea of what rainwear is.

Plimsoles, for example - I mean gymshoes, tennies, sand shoes, or sneakers - are allowed in these pages, as I understand it, on the grounds that they may facilitate evasion of rain in circumstances that allow the wearer to hot-foot it for shelter. The bathing cap enters, we are told, on grounds that it could - 'could', mark you - serve to protect the head from the rain should anyone press it to that service (the desparate hope must be that no-one will plead for allowing in the hot-water-bottle or totally unexciting items such as the dustbin lid, tea-tray or passing tortoise on exactly the same grounds).

In the case of Fleetwood and its standing as a rainwear town another racking is demanded. Waterproof clothing is unquestionably at the heart of the town's maritime heritage, trawling the North Atlantic for cod, with the crew, in all weathers, for 8 or 12 hours at a time gutting the catch on the open and usually heaving deck. Sometimes it rained, and protection from the rain was necessary. But almost all the time a drenching sea-spray swept the deck and it was protection from that which was the prime requisite.

There is no mystery about how the protection was provided: the fisherman's yellow oilskin is an icon of their all but vanished trade. But was it rainwear? Will we be allowed to assert that it was? Even though its major service was against the sea?

Once grant that and you have in Fleetwood one of the major rainwear towns in the North West and a major player in the wider national game.

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