Fishnetted

At a recent milonga, I remarked to N how nice B was looking that evening. A moment's appreciative inspection, then he shook his head. "Yes, but she's too young for fishnets."
I thought I must have misunderstood. "You mean ... there really are some great things that should be reserved for older women?"
"Yup. Fishnets have to be earned. You gotta get your stripes."
Wonderful! And I'd like to know if there are any other items of apparel or personal decoration this applies to.
In the meantime, men who appreciate fishnets but don't, for one reason or another, want to wear them on their own legs, can buy this tie here.

I dare you!
The image at the top, by the way, comes from a lovely site called Fishnets and Fedoras. As does this one, taken in a Florida shopping mall.

Concealment

I had two revelations in Buenos Aires last year. One concerned knickers, the other make-up.
Despite my mature years I am, as I've remarked before, a cosmetics novice.
In my teens, once I could escape my mother's oversight, I plastered on foundation, white lipstick, and all manner of eye make-up, including blue shadow, thick black liner and false lashes. Yes, I'm sure I looked awful. But it didn't matter much because in my early 20s I dispensed with the whole make-yourself-pretty-for-the-boys routine when I discovered feminism. Or it discovered me.
For the next couple of decades I wore no make-up at all. Not a skerrick. Until a doomed love affair made me reach in desperation for Shiseido tinted lip gloss and Dove SP15 tinted moisturiser. I felt glam with a subtle shine on my lips, and liked the way the moisturiser took the shine off my nose without caking me in gunk, while also protecting me from the worst of the sun.
A few years more and I had graduated - or been lured, if you like - into real lipstick. Just once - when I had to do an onstage gig under strong lights - I bought and applied some Revlon foundation. Otherwise I stuck to the Dove, which I still buy in the supermarket. 
Then in the last two years tango has enticed me once more into eye make-up, though thankfully to nothing like the extent that I slapped it on in my youth - mascara and, from time to time for special occasions, subtle liner and real grown-up foundation. If I suffered the odd zit I would dob on a spot of extra foundation and hope for the best.
Until S demonstrated, as we getting ready to go out to a milonga one evening, the wondrous powers of concealer.
So the other day I bought some in the Kirk's sale - Elizabeth Arden Ceramide Ultra Lift and Firm Concealer, reduced from around $45 to $29. (The EA website claims it was "Voted Best Undereye Concealer in Parents Magazine's first-ever 'Mom Knows Best Beauty Awards'!". I'm glad I didn't know that before it reached my bathroom shelf or it probably wouldn't have got that far.)
I'm almost sure that the sweet-faced young woman who used my own face as the stuff's selling point had perfect dewy skin. Sadly she'd smothered it under layers of pancake. Why do young women so often do this? Because, like me when I was that age, they don't feel good enough as they are. It's sad. And it's also a horrible commercial conspiracy, and not for a second do I regret the years I did without it, and faced the world naked.
Anyway, she sat me on the stool, made a few dabs under my eyes, worked at them conscientiously with a nifty little soft-bristled brush and handed me a mirror.
My wow alarmed her - for a moment she thought I didn't like what I saw. I  was so smooth, so blemish-free. I handed over my EFTPOS card.
I will  never apply the stuff as liberally as she did. Admirable though the effect was, it was an effect only, it wasn't me. They might not be de rigeur but I like my age-related freckles. And I don't want to get to the stage where I can't go out of the house without concealing them. I can't say I've been aware of the product's vaunted "ultra lift" properties, but I'll keep an eye out.
I wanted to conclude this blog with a close-up of skin bearing too great a load of make-up. There are plenty of images on the internet of people we're meant to have heard of caught wearing no make-up, but I failed to find even one example of what I was looking for. Significant? I think so.
You wanted me to wrap up with the knicker revelation, though, didn't you. Sorry. Another time.

Private lessons

Our first private lesson with Maria Plazaola on Wednesday. Running late (as we often seem to be here), we took the longest taxi ride ever out into the suburbs, where the houses had gardens and there were lots of children and dogs on the street.
Maria is a divine dancer, whether leading or following. She danced with Carlos Gavito for several years; they were stars who travelled the world. Hard to imagine what she went through when he died. You can find any number of clips of them dancing show tango, but here, although rather inexpertly filmed, they are dancing classic milonga-style.
And she couldn't understand why we were both so nervous during our first dance with her!

Plaza Dorego etc redux

Sunday evening we went to San Telmo to dance at Plaza Dorego as we did last time we were in BA. But it was entirely different. Back then, the "dance floor" was a series of far-from-seamless rubber mats covering a good area of the plaza, unpredictably wavy but good enough. This time it was reduced to about three, which barely approximated the size of a decent table top. In May the crowd was friendly and enthusiastic, half photo-snapping and applauding tourists, the other half prospective dancers. This time tourists outnumbered dancers, and there were precious few of either.
You can't cabaceyo here - the lighting, such as it is, is too dim - so you make instant decisions and take your chances. Consequently, I had several nice tandas with a young man who sang in my ear, and an appalling one with a manhandling bully. In the end, even the younger man turned into a liability, becoming all too pressing about going on somewhere else.
All in all, a weird atmosphere. A said later that it might have been the result of election day, so we'll give it another try some time. I do love dancing outdoors, it's so picnic-y.



Yesterday was Ideal, for which I have a real soft spot. It was afternoon, so we expected just a sprinkling of tourists and a few lounge lizards, yet it was non-stop action and some really nice dances. One, admittedly, from an archtypal lizard ("Muy linda; elegante"), but a very musical one. 

We ate, then went on to Club Gricel, another milonga I enjoyed last time. But the move gave rise to a new rule: if things are going well at one milonga, don't leave it go to another - it's highly unlikely it will be as good, let alone better.

Ugh





















Talk about giving antipodean style a bad name. A row of these abominations was lined up in Auckland Airport's international lounge, in clear view of every departing tourist.
It's an unfair contrast, but look at my smashing new suede and patent tango shoes, purchased from Scarpe Mahara on Suipacha, just today. With any luck I'll christen them tonight at Salon Canning.

Packing. Again.



Suzanne's packing prepations

One of the advantages of flying to Buenos Aires is the generous luggage allowance - two 23kg cases each. Especially useful for those staying nearly six weeks, and expecting to dance most nights.
I've found myself paying most attention to the tango component of my luggage, which includes four pairs of high-heel shoes. And that's not especially useful, since, with the best will in the world, we shall spend more time not dancing than dancing. So hanging-about-the apartment-and-on-the-street clothes and shoes should predominate.
Picking and choosing these isn't helped by the wavering weather forecast - 26c today, 17c predicted for Tuesday, and colder at night.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - I always pack too much. When travelling, this has often entailed posting home a parcel of stuff with a great sigh of relief from Hong Kong, Montpellier or San Francisco. Since we're staying put this time, I doubt I'll need to do that. But I'm sure, sooner or later, to be annoyed at how much stuff I carted across the world and then didn't wear. I've read of women who travel with only one carry-on bag containing a pair of black pants and two white tee-shirts. Do these paragons of reason really exist? 

And mine

Last tango before Buenos Aires

And to complete this trio of images (which, whatever their intrinsic value might be, are also a substitute for "proper" written blogging due to lack of time), here's one of (ahem) me.
Posting me pictures is something I usually avoid. The exceptions so far have been either a) because I'm in fancy dress and with friends, or b) visible only from the neck down. Here's exception c) - the back view.
I always cringe when blog authors - and fashion bloggers are especially prone to this - liberally post fetching pics of themselves in outfits de jour (no, I'm not naming them, I don't want to start a war). It's so narcissistic.
But you're getting this one because it was taken by Des on Sunday then skilfully photoshopped and the caption added. Because it's tango. Because it's so untrue-to-Plain-Jane-real-life ethereal. And because, although highly unsuitable for dancing, it's the dress Suzanne made me.

Posturing

Another Ackland Street moment ... shoppers and tourists paused to check out the young bride and her groom dodging the trams to get to the other side of the road. She was decked out in the full pavlova - full, white and frothy, with bare shoulders. It took me a second or two work out what was so jarringly wrong with her look. She couldn't stand up straight or walk properly.
The poor girl had almost certainly spent much time, energy and dosh on sourcing the frock for her Big Day, but apparently no one had told her that her efforts would come to naught if she couldn't sharpen up her posture. So here she was, stomping down the street, neck first, shoulders rounded, looking, in spite of the fairytale dress, like she was about to dig spuds.  
It takes one to know one. When I started grammar school aged 11, I was swiftly diagnosed with round shoulders, told to miss assembly every Wednesday and go instead to the gym. Here were gathered the halt and lame. The flat-footed edged their way along floor's white lines, curling one foot at a time; the stooped had their shoulders briskly pulled back to their "proper" position by the nurse and spent the time it took for a hymn, a prayer and various announcements, promenading the perimeter to the accompaniment of stirring band music.
You can imagine how helpful this was for improving my posture. Which, I realised years later, was almost entirely due to crippling lack of confidence and large shoulder blades. That well-meaning nurse would have achieved better results by sitting me down and talking to me. I might, if I trusted her, have confessed that there was no way on god's green earth I was going to stand or walk chest first, because I didn't have one, and the best way to disguise this shameful condition was to hunch and keep my head down.
I didn't come of age, posture-wise, for several more decades. One day, I realised it had corrected itself, that I now stood and walked tall because I felt I deserved to. And my big shoulder blades fell naturally into place. Pilates helped. And so has tango.
So, there's a market niche here - teaching prospective brides how to stand and walk in order to carry off that glamourous gown.

BA story

It was our second visit to Confiteria Ideal in a week. I know this isn't where true afficionados go to dance - too many tourists, too many teachers touting for trade - but all that faded grandeur is irresistably delicious. And this particular night we were here with a large crowd waiting to hear the renowned Orchestra Tipica Color Tango. (They were magical - give yourself a treat and listen to them here. And do try to ignore the couple who begin dancing front left; we couldn't, I'm afraid. They provided us with hours of morbid fascination, on this and other occasions, and appear in just about any Ideal YouTube clip you care to download.)

Anyway. Our table was towards the back of the dancefloor, and while we danced away the time until the band appeared, I noticed a slightly melancholy-looking man sitting alone at a table at the end of the room. I cabaceo-ed him, and we danced. He was a nice leader, steady, smooth and unflashy (unlike, for instance, the idiot who, on our first visit here, wound up our tanda by whipping me into a life-threatening back-bend. Or the chap a week later, at Porteno y Bailarin who propelled me onto the empty back dancefloor and, as part of his intimidate-a-foreigner repetoire, sat me on his knee, then, as we walked back to my table, shrugged and said, "Mas o menos". Porteno y Bailarin, by the way, has used shoes lined up on the low wall between its two floors: they are bound for tango dancers in Cuba. But I digress).

Claudio, the melancholy man, was Italian. I have no Italian, and he only rudimentary English, so when the tanda was over and believing him to be rather lonely, I invited him to our table with the express purpose of introducing him to C, who speaks a little Italian.

So there we were, Claudio and I with our backs to the dancefloor, M and S gazing up in a welcoming manner from the table, and C extending her hand, when I became aware of something bearing down on us with all the unstoppable weight and intent of a steam train.

It halted inches from Claudio. "This is my husband!" it announced in stentorian tones.

"Nice to meet you," I said, giving it the benefit of the doubt in spite of this unorthodox greeting.

It ignored the hand. "This is my husband!" it repeated. "When I dance with other people, I tell them I am married ..." And she turned accusingly to Claudio. He had picked up the alarm signals quicker than me, and by now he was hanging his head with his face was turned away from our table, a position from which it never returned throughout the exchange.

"I brought him here to introduce him to my friend who speaks Italian," I explained, indicating the hapless C. Hers and the other jaws at the table had now dropped as far as they could go.

Claudio's wife was - there's no nice way to put this - bad bottle blonde, with a lumpy miserable over-madeup face. I've tried since not to discount the theory that Claudio might, at various points in their marital history, have given her very good reason for this stern level of  oversight, Yet even if that's true, this was probably not the most productive way of handling it. Surely such public humiliation would drive a man into the arms of another with all speed.

"You can introduce him to who you like," Mrs Claudio continued, steely-eyed, "but I am just clarifying - he is my husband!"

Her grasp of English was impressive, and finally I got the message. With a two-handed gesture of surrender and possibly even a shrug, I said, "I just came here to dance," and retreated to my seat.

Claudio was now frog-marched back to his solitary table where he was given a bracing disciplinary lecture and once more abandoned. Mrs Claudio went back to her own table, which wasn't so far away that she couldn't monitor his activities, and spent the next half an hour snacking angrily. For the rest of the night, Claudio stared mournfully at the dancers or played with his cellphone. I never saw him dance again. 

And a Happy New Year!

After a week at the beach up north, dressed rather less often in my togs than I'd hoped to be, I saw the New Year in  back in Wellington, in the afore-mentioned Keith Matheson skirt. I usually spurn New Year as a social occasion, not to mention frills and diamantes as decent apparel for anyone over the age of 10.
These days, though, usually means BT - Before Tango.
BT, there was nothing like telling me I had to stay up past 12 to bring on an intense longing for an early night. It's different though when you can tango your way to this daft, man-made deadline. You don't have to kill time to the countdown, the toast and the exchange of kisses with desultory conversation or pointless drinking. In fact, you want the time to go slower so you can dance some more.
At one point J approached me with a diamante in the palm of her hand. Yes, it had fallen off the skirt. But I fumbled the handover and spent several minutes searching on my hands and knees under the furniture before it reappeared in someone else's hand.
I was also wearing new shoes. I stayed in S's mother's house up north, and S had warned me of a seductive shoeshop en route. Naturally, when we hit Matakana, I screeched to a halt, located the shop - Heavenly Soles - and plunged in.  I emerged some time later with new tango shoes (not, as I'll get around to telling you some time, a matter of pure indulgence this but a practical necessity if I want to keep on dancing til I can get some custom made in Buenos Aires).

This is my third pair of footwear from Minx, and all three are danceable in. Their shoes are fun, various and reasonably priced, and designed in New Zealand by this clever young woman - Cushla Reed.

I can't speak for her entire range, but those of hers I own are also very comfortable. Three or more solid hours dancing in unbroken leather, though, was bound to take its toll. I'd been distantly aware that all was not well in the toe and heel department but it wasn't til I got home to discover three big, luckily still unbroken, blisters that I realised these body parts had been sending me urgent and repeated stop-dancing messages. But their source had been too remote from my dancing pleasure centre to register. Tango - the ultimate pain killer, good for whatever ails you.

Does my arse look big in this tanda?

Ms Hedgehog blogs mainly on tango, and her most recent is on what it does for female bums. She says that:

[R]egardless of your shape, whether you have a fat bottom, a thin bottom, a round one or a flat one, squareish, prominent, pear-shaped, athletic, negligible, or enough for two, following well in tango is going to make it look fabulous. Callipygousness in motion. If you want to feel good about your bottom, this will work.

I agree. Watch any good follower and within seconds you'll be hypnotised by her bum. And I speak as a straight woman. God knows what it does to men.

A ponytail comes of age

I haven't yet tangoed through a summer, so it's a very recent discovery that, even in a climate as untropical as Wellington's, if you have 50 people dancing in close embrace on a small floor, the temperature fast goes through the roof. Mine, anyway. Right now this feels like as big a challenge as was learning to dance backwards in high heels at the beginning of the year.
As a general rule, I don't sweat. I wish I did - it might slow down the overheating process. But get me clamped (however nicely) in someone's arms, with the right side of my face against their head, and we're almost instantaneously glued together.
Men, by and large, do sweat. Plus, as leaders, they must work damn hard. So, after one tanda, I leave the floor with my hair plastered to my scalp, and my face damp, and an unbecoming scarlet.
Longish hair is therefore a problem. Last Sunday, P paused, mid-dance, and plucked some of mine from the region of his mouth. I didn't feel great about this, so last night I pulled it back into a ponytail. Which is cooler for me, too, since it isn't hanging down my back.
It's ... um, a very long time indeed since I publicly accompanied a ponytail. From babyhood, my hair was chopped to just below ear-level, parted on the left and the right captured in a ribbon. The classic 50s girl-child look.
Then, one day when I was about seven or eight and was going to the church fete, my mother announced that my hair was long enough for pigtails. With a degree of pulling and pinching, she managed to scrap it into two stubs and secure them with rubber bands (that's right - scrunchies had yet to be invented). She called my father to admire them, as I stared awestruck into the mirror above the fireplace.

From then on we were growing my hair. (If you knew my mother, you would understand that she was commander-in-chief of this project while I was a mere foot solider.) I progressed through plaits, and then, after intensive lobbying, was finally - around the age of 10 or 11 - allowed to graduate to a ponytail.

Sadly, it was by then too late for one of those perky little numbers so beloved of 50s girls. My hair was too long and straight and heavy.

I would lie on my back over the edge of the bed so that head and hair hung nearly to the floor, then, as if taking my hair by surprise, could corral it all into the rubber band. I would get to my feet convinced that this time I had done it - got my ponytail to bounce on the top of my head. But within minutes it had slipped from ponytailness to horsetailness.
I came to hate it, and my thirteenth birthday present was being given permission to have it cut off. But that's another story.
One of things I hated back then, apart from lack of ponytail perkiness, which was closely correlated with popularity, was that girls sat behind me in class playing with it and boys whizzed by in the corridors and playground and pulled it. Both, from a position of rock-bottom self-esteem, I interpreted as a subtle form of disdain, if not downright mockery.
How lovely it is to grow up! Last night at the milonga two boys pulled my ponytail and not for a second did I think that meant they hated me.

Boob-tube debut

I dislike the word boob - it's so pantomime-y - but its alliterative effect when combined with tube is too compelling to ignore. Besides what else are you going to call this thing? Deborah in Madison Rose, where I bought mine this week, flourished bustier, which sounds classier but is, I think, inaccurate. A bustier is structured, often boned. Like this. 

Hmn, classier, did I say? This one from Victoria's Secret makes a liar of me. But compare it to this - your classic boob tube.

An item owing its existence entirely to the invention of lycra (which some might regard as the pinnacle of human achievement; and surely of more benefit to more people than, say, getting a bloke on the moon).
As you can see, your classic boob tube is structured entirely by the body inside it. And my point - yes, I've finally reached it - is that right up to two days ago, I'd always assumed my body simply wasn't up to the job. Well, two jobs really: 1. looking nice, and 2. keeping the tube in place. Both doubts stemming from the one root cause - a marked lack of what Sarah charmingly refers to as "boobage".
So what changed? The proximate cause was that, on Thursday in Madison Rose, I actually tried one on, although not as an end in itself. I was lured into the changing room by a delicious little black dress - Saba this time. I'm not going to describe it because in a couple of days it will be mine, all mine, and I'll photograph it. The essential point here is that it has one of those blouson tops that hangs open to the waist, and requires something appropriate to be worn underneath. Deborah handed me a small black sequined stretchy item, saying it wasn't exactly right but it would give me an idea. It certainly did. I loved it, both under the dress and on its own. 

No, I'm not modelling it, having no wish to let myself in for invidious comparisons with the pink shape above. Admittedly this one is rather more constructed than the pink one. That powerful band of swathing has both a bolstering and a flattening effect, which cancel each other out, but it does maintain a reassuringly tight grip on the torso. Still, I was a bit worried about how it would stand up, so to speak, to tango.
I wore it that evening and lived, unembarrassed, to tell the tale. I worked very hard at not hauling at it nervously on the dancefloor, mid-tanda. And, when the moment came that I couldn't stand another minute without doing so, I ducked out of sight into the kitchen and tugged away unglamorously.
All in all, I enjoyed wearing it. Shoulders are nice, even on women of a certain age, and I felt daringly Becky Sharpish.
And this revolutionary wardrobe step's less proximate cause? Tango, of course. Tango offers the excuse, the occasion, the confidence and the culture for such personal reassessments. I'm looking forward to more shoulderless evenings.

Packing it in

The suitcase is open on the spare bedroom floor and enough stuff - clothes, shoes, accessories, books - for three months is spread across the bed and table. I'm going away for three weeks so much of this will be left behind. This is my preferred method of packing.

I always hate the way people pack in movies - striding about their bedrooms, whipping open drawers and cupboards, flinging things blindly into cases. They're usually upset when they do this - due to a marital infidelity, a pursuing serial killer or a determined police officer - but really, their new life isn't going to be any better for having taken a load of unwearable items and overlooked the one or two that would pull the rest together.

I've no such excuse and I want to get it right. I'm going to China for son J's wedding then on to Vietnam.

It's my fourth visit to China. I first went for the weekend in 1987. I was in Hong Kong for work and, instead of doing whatever it was we were meant to be doing, the photographer and I bunked off to Guangzhou. I didn't go back to until 2007, when J was living in Urumqi. (You can read about that trip here.)
J and S were living in Kunming when I returned in January this year and still are. Technically, they're already married, having registered in Urumqi, so this is the after-match function. It will be held in Dali, a charming old town we visited in January. This was the view from the hotel entrance.

This time, of course, there's the question of what the mother of the groom will wear. The odd (very odd) faithful reader might recall my account of a Skype conversation with J on this subject. I'd just bought a black Karen Walker cheongsam-inspired dress, which for a while I pretended to myself would be just the thing. But it's not - you don't wear black to Chinese weddings. I'd look like the Angel of Marital Death. So I have something else. More of which another day.  Meantime, here are some wonderful images of what I won't be looking like.

Then there's the Vietnam leg. It will be hot, and since the plan is to drive to the border and walk across, we shall have to pack light. Each time I travel I think I can do this and each time it turns out that I can't. Yet I still have this fantasy of stepping lightly off a plane in the middle of nowhere with just a carry-on. I was going to say that at least I won't have to take tango shoes and dresses, but that's hardly a plus.

Never mind dancing backwards in high-heels

Four Sydney women recently broke the world stiletto sprint record.  Click here  then scroll down to watch them go.  Heels had to be at least three inches high, and legs (for some spurious reason to do with hair's breadth wins) had to be freshly shaven.

S suggests Wellington tango women would be up to fielding a pretty good team if the event is ever repeated. But then she's the only person I know who wears higher heels in real life than she does for tango.

On the road

Ken Kesey in a campervan - minus the drugs. Which meant a week sans hairdryer, makeup, decent clothes and, god help me, tango. Yet I can report that I had a lovely time, and that there's a lot to be said for putting appearances behind you once in a while. It was already spring in Hawke's Bay and Gisborne, though, and the trees were dressed to kill.

First stop was Greytown, where I plunged into Minx shoes and discovered a sale.












As you can see, I have a lot to learn about photographing shoes on my own foot. Still, aren't they delicious. I would never have put royal blue and purple together, but since they're both colours I wear - albeit separately - I've decided these count as a sensible buy. Plus they work for tango.

The warm daytime temperatures went to S's head. Here he is heading for the Pacific Ocean at Wainui Beach, just north of Gisborne.

The old Gisborne Gentleman's Club - a series of wood-panelled rooms entered through grand doors with elaborate cut-glass handles - now operates as a cafe (the coffee is excellent) and shops. Among the latter I found a room crammed with Turkish stuff, including a lovely array of crazily cheap pashminas.

No, they're not all for me.

Getting high

Never mind the bliss of movement and connection - what about the clothes! Vio's new marketing campaign will strike a chord with those who've got their priorities right.

Here's one for the women

And this for the men

If it works for you, see you there. And if you want to know more, go to Vio's site

Milonga

D (bless him) came with me to tango on Wednesday - the first non-dancing friend to do to so - and, against the odds, took these pictures.

The hall was candle-lit, the only other light source a few glowing wall heaters. And flash would have ruined the atmosphere - for the dancers and the pictures. So the image quality is poor (and, in deference to my own and others' privacy, I have wouldn't posted these if any of us were recognisable).











I love this one - the isolation and intent of the couple dancing, the lone woman watching. Edward Hopperish, D and I agreed (notwithstanding the fact that D suspects Hopper might be over-rated). 


I don't know how affecting others will find these images because I know how much I bring to them - experience of the music, the atmosphere, the feeling of dancing - but for me they capture something. That brief intense intimacy; leaders and followers holding on to each other against the odds. 

Someone said to me months ago that people couldn't dance tango until they'd had their hearts broken. Unfortunately, the reverse doesn't necessarily apply - having had your heart broken, even several times,  doesn't automatically transform you into a terrific tanguera.

D said he felt as though he were in a documentary. He was fascinated. And touched.

Thank you, Vio

For the wonderful tango lesson yesterday. Wherein I learned to focus less on the leader than on me, less on his chest than my own contact with the floor. That the floor is where my balance and control comes from. The floor is what makes me a dancer.

Here's Vio dancing with Sebastian at the recent national tango festival in Wellington.

Yes, I know you've read it everywhere

But I can't resist reproducing it again. It's what the astonished neighbour said on hearing of the arrest of the people next door:  “They couldn't have been spies. Look what she did with their hydrangeas.”

My own hydrangeas are looking dreadful - ergo, I am a true patriot. It's way past the time when they should have been pruned but who wants to get out in the cold and wet for hours with a pair of secateurs when there's tango to be danced?