I was in a discount store in Uttoxeter yesterday when I spotted two Chinese women. One looked as though she belonged there – aged somewhere in her forties, short and slightly built, pale features, collar length hair that looked a little dry, and dressed in a jaded blue top and denim jeans which might have come from a charity shop. (And I mean no disrespect in so saying because that’s pretty much how I dress.) Her companion, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more of a contrast.
Aged I would say in her mid-late twenties, tall for a Chinese at around 5ft 7, slim of figure with long legs, lustrous black hair cascading to her upper back, and dressed in a cream top with light brown baggy trousers which looked expensive. Unlike her older companion, she was the very embodiment of elegance, style, and sophistication.
In Oxford Street she would have been lost in the crowd, but not in Uttoxeter. Uttoxeter is a basic little town mostly populated by basic little people conducting their workaday lives in a mundane, workaday sort of way. Elegance, style, and sophistication are not the sort of nouns which readily spring to mind when observing the generally good but basic inhabitants of a little market town in the English Midlands. In consequence, the young Chinese woman stood out like a decorated Christmas tree standing tall in a remoter part of the tundra.
And so I observed her every time she came into view. More than that, I relished the occasional sight of a pearl nestled uncommonly in a bag of dried peas. Being an inveterate observer does have that effect, you see, and it was fortunate that neither woman appeared to notice my interest in them. And of course, I wanted to say something by way of compliment, but I didn’t. I took the lesson and kept my council. Whether the resolution holds firm remains to be seen.
(It also occurred to me that both women might have been Mandarin speakers on whom words like ‘elegance, style, and sophistication’ might have been lost, but it seemed unlikely.)
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