Dear Lorraine

First of all, I really enjoy your site - it "says it all" without any smut or obscenity, and with a great deal of understanding for us perfectly normal types with an enthusiasm for mackintoshes.

My own enthusiasm goes back as far as I can remember, and it is equally aroused by women in mackintoshes as by mackintosh hospital sheets, although I cannot find as much of a rationale for the latter. I do however have a suspicion that my pre-war at-home birth was undertaken with a ladies old mackintosh on the bed. This suspicion arises through the fact that when I was four years old I was evacuated because of the war, and in the ensuing preparations (my mother was leaving also), an old mackintosh was thrown out which I had never seen before - it had come from a cupboard of bedding which also was home to a bedpan, and it was quite stained in places; I saw it on the dustbin lid, and commenced to drag it around and play with it until my mother took it away with considerable embarrasment and deposited it in the dustbin after tearing it up first.

Well, some of it's here! But we think it's pretty scarce globally these days. We import our stock from India, and it took a lot of searching out. LE

I would like to know how others with a mack-sheet interest respond. Of course the rubber cot-sheet is another fairly obvious point of departure.

On the same topic, where have all the aformentioned mackintosh sheets gone??? Hospitals these days seem to favour "soaker pads" (horrible terminology!), but surely having had such widespread use, there MUST be some around. Anyone have any clues?

Cheers

JOHN

Hi John

Thank you very much for your letter.

Thanks specially for appreciating the tone of the Club pages - I am driven into it by the School Rules - site being paid for by the business - and it makes me feel very silly from time to time. But on the whole I must say I'm more comfortable with it than the more lurid alternative. Anyway, very nice of you to say what you say!

I know it's very tempting to look for early mac-related incidents to account for one's blessed state, but I do think we also have to remember that there isn't much cotton or polyester fetish around - and yet these materials are so commonly encountered by babies! There must be something special about mac materials on top of the accidents of our encountering them - don't you think?

I think myself it's the smell! I think the best way to think of mac materials is to think of them as simply aphrodisiacs - fantastic aphrodisiacs, for a small number of very lucky people, knocking oysters for example into a cocked hat (or something).

This would make early experiences with them memorable indeed! You couldn't be expected to sleep on a mackintosh sheet, if they had this effect on you, without having a very lovely experience!

And to actually be born onto one - well, what an open-hearted welcome into this sometimes more ambiguous world ....

LE