SOMEONE asked me the other day if I wore 'real fur'. I resisted the temptation to inform her that there is no such thing as real fur, it's just fur. If it wasn't real it would be called fake fur or imitation fur. I suppose you could call it animal fur but then that would be pointless because all fur is animal fur because nothing else has fur. Apart from a few caterpillars and one or two large spiders that is, and I don't suppose there's much of a call for caterpillar coats The modern trend to use the word 'real' to describe what is obviously real, or genuine, annoys me. It's real butter here, real cream there, real leather shoes, real flowers, real fruit bits in your yoghurt. As opposed to what, you may ask, bits of cardboard coloured to look like fruit? I suppose you can get away with saying that foods come from real farms, because so many companies attach the word 'farm' to their trade name, giving you an impression that they are situated in fields of buttercups when the reality is that they are based on a factory estate near Worksop. Mostly, however, it's just a sad reminder that a great deal of what we consume isn't really real anymore. So we say 'real meat' when we mean just that, instead of meat which has been rescued, reconstituted, recovered and reshaped with additional ingredients known only to science. I sometimes think I'm the last person in the world to mind about things like this, but someone has to. On this occasion when this person asked about the real fur I didn't go off on my lecture though, it might have sounded pedantic or patronising. It's already earned me the nickname of Miss Smarty Pants. No, I told her, I don't wear FUR. For all sorts of reasons. 'But you do wear fake fur?', she said, missing my pointed refusal to use the word real, and I agreed that I did. She then went on to tell me that she had read somewhere that anti-fur people were also against fake fur because they thought it led other people to believe that wearing fur was all right and also that people might not always realise it was fake fur and not real fur. The word real was really beginning to grate, so I asked her if it was like a person who smokes a marijuana cigarette then being tempted to go on to harder drugs, you start with fake fur then you are led to go on to the REAL thing. 'Yes,' she said, because she's never let irony dent her perfect make-up. 'That's what they say,' so I'm wondering if it would be better not to wear it at all?' I really wondered where this conversation was going. I've never noticed that she has much of a social conscience. She's the sort of person who, if you said that you wouldn't wear fur because of the terrible price that has to be paid for obtaining it, would agree that it was terribly expensive but worth it in the long run. It turned out that she had spotted a fake fur jacket she coveted but didn't want to be targeted with tins of paint, but I was able to convince her that the likelihood of anyone confusing pale blue fake fur shaped into a figure hugging blouson jacket with any kind of animal was totally unlikely. The only problem was that they make you look fat. No, I didn't say that, of course, I leave it to the mirror. Long before the days when it became a definite no no to wear fur I hated it. When I was a child my grandmother had an assortment of rather grand ladies we visited who always seemed to be dressed to the nines at all times of the day. We would go to tea, an ordeal because it involved sitting on flimsy chairs holding flimsy bone china tea cups with handles which even a child couldn't get her fingers through, and trying to look interested for an hour. It was all right if the cakes were good, but more often than not the adults got there first and the eclairs gave way to horrid things with seeds in them or rather lumpen fruit cake. One of these ladies was given to wearing fox fur. And when I say fox I mean the whole thing. Children today will rarely get the chance to experience the sight of a middle aged woman draped in the entire body of a fox, minus, one hoped, its innards, but I did and it probably scarred me for life. It must have taken the wizardry of an ad agency far cleverer than Saatchi and Saatchi to persuade women that going out in public wearing a garment more suited to a Stone Aged man was somehow glamourous, but they did. This particular lady had a full sized fox stole complete with head, legs and tail. She would hang it round her shoulders so that its little head, with ears, shiny black nose and beady eyes, hopefully not the originals, nuzzling her cheek. Its front paws rested on her shoulder while its back legs and brush hung down on the other side just above her ample bosom. Worst of all it still had all its teeth, slightly bared fangs which to me looked as if they were about to bite her neck. Entirely understandably. I wonder why nobody has ever made a horror film about a draped fox fur coming alive and consuming its owner. It would be pay back time in a very satisfying way. Several of my grandmother's other friends had various animal corpses in the same vein; stoles and neckties with accompanying limbs, capes with dangling tails. Not all of them were fox. One had something which may have been a stoat, a dear little face with whiskers and a rounded nose. Shaped into a coat collar. Another had an animal paw made into a brooch which she pinned proudly onto her lapel, you could see its tiny nails. What on earth would possess people to wear such a thing? Even as a child I wondered. Mind you, probably the same sort of person who had an umbrella holder made out of an elephant's foot and the skins of varied wild, and probably by now nearly extinct, beasts hanging over sofas and in front of fireplaces. So I never had the slightest inclination to want a fur, because I loved animals and still had nightmares about yellow-toothed stoles. My children were equally put off fur because my former mother-in-law was very taken with those terribly heavy beaver coats, which I suppose were considered the ultimate fashion item at some time. Both my daughters remember vividly and with horror being clasped to her chest in a fond embrace with their heads buried in tickling fur, which smelt horrid when it was wet. It's put them off forever. Down the years fashions changed. Some people seemed to think it was all right to wear animal fur if the animal had died in a noble cause, ie to feed humans. Others claimed, and still claim, that it's perfectly proper to wear an old or as they prefer it, an antique fur on the grounds that the animal is long dead. Some don't have a clue, I knew someone who had never really worked out that sheepskin was just that, and not some other material with sheep wool stuck on it. In the late sixties a lot of my friends bought Coney coats, in pale gold or cream. 'Coney's just a fancy word for rabbit,' my mother used to say, which is true. A rabbit coat just doesn't have the same glamour, particularly as it was just around then that there was a myxamatosis outbreak. Coney coats looked good at first, but then tended to moult and get unwelcome attention from cats. And then there was mink, the once most sought- after fur. Mink were classed as vicious predators, worse in chicken runs than foxes are. But this was only because they had managed to escape from breeding farms and make their way into the countryside to fend for themselves rather than waiting to be be fashioned into a jacket. Fake fur is, however, another matter. It looks good, is cheap to buy and in some cases can be washed. It doesn't attract fleas and the dog won't try to do unmentionable things to it. Come to think of it I do have one piece of fur. My lucky rabbit's tail. Unlike lucky rabbits' feet, which were not so lucky for the rabbit involved unless it could invest in a good artificial limb, this item really was lucky for the rabbit. One night, driving home with my son, a rabbit ran in front of us and although he swerved we felt a slight bump and screeched to a halt. As we did a rabbit ran out from under the car, down the road and rushed into the bushes obviously unhurt. Then I spotted a small clump of fur by the back wheel, the tip of its little tail which I thought might pass on a bit of its luck and hoped the rabbit wouldn't suffer too much in a cold winter. So I still have it. But I assure you, I'm not going to make it into a brooch.
