From the magazine

The hell of bra shopping

Rachel Johnson
 iStock
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 04 January 2025
issue 04 January 2025

It’s probably haram to quote Cecil Rhodes these days, but he was bang on when he said: ‘Remember that you are an Englishman, and have subsequently drawn the greatest prize in the lottery of life.’

We’ve had peak property, peak journalism, peak publishing, peak medicine, peak travel, peak coffee

Even as a mere Englishwoman, I’ve had the best of everything (hence this unapologetically smug column). A childhood free-ranging across three countries; the best education money could buy (almost as good as a boy’s); Oxford; first job at the FT… I won’t continue to tweet out my CV, but as my cohort should concur: we’ve had peak property (our houses have probably made more money over our lifetime than we have), peak journalism (our papers used to print in the millions, now they’re mainly online), peak publishing (my first book sold for megabucks, now as a white Zionist terf I doubt I’d get a deal at all), peak medicine (the NHS is busy saving my husband’s life a second time), peak oil, peak travel, peak coffee – peak everything in fact, especially peace.

We Boomers have indeed been #blessed. When the ship goes down, I can gaze out at the briny from my seat at the captain’s table with happy acceptance as I sip my last, single-malt whisky.

Now that my gratitude journal has been completed, on to my only beef. We have put a man on the moon in my lifetime and Elon Musk is about to populate Mars with his own offspring, but it has proved impossible to bring womankind the one advance they really want: a good bra.

If men only knew how much time we have spent in search of a good bra, a search that gets harder and harder as we age. Which is why, at Sunday teatime, during the fourth named storm of the winter, my husband dropped me off in Hans Road hard by Harrods.

‘I hope they have the heavy lifting equipment ready,’ he chortled, as I hopped out for my appointment to the former corsetières to the late Queen, Messrs Rigby & Peller.

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