Polka Dots of the Mind

Polka dots in all the shops and polka dots on the front cover of Bitch Lit, due from Crocus Books in September, a collection of stories about bitches, intended as an antidote to chick-lit.

There are of course many things of greater importance in this world to ponder, but I find myself pondering this: how did polka dots, hitherto a kind of symbol of innocence, become a symbol of bitchiness? Thing is, when I think of polka dots I think of children's telly. I think of my brother sliding on his bottom on the shiny kitchen floor in his spotted brown playsuit, I think of my mother with her hair done up washer-woman style in a spotty scarf, I think of buckets and spades and the dotted bathing suits my sister and I had the year we were eight and ten, and the sand in our sandwiches, and between our toes, and all that whining for an ice-cream, and the feeling sick when you got one because you'd had too many sweets before. Not exactly sophisticated associations.

Though I suppose there was always that element of in-your-face cheek: that fifties itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikini, named after the site of an early nuclear test and expected, or so Wikipedia tells us, to cause a mega-explosion of scandalised attention. And anyway there are not many symbols that can't be given a different spin, and this anthology is precisely all about subversion, in particular subverting the chick-lit view of women. I'm in the Bitch-Lit anthology, and we were sent to Primark to fight the crowds for polka-dot tops to wear for a photo-shoot, and the garments we found were of a whole different kind from the ones in my memories: black with white spots, plunge-necked camisoles and silky corsets with lace. Polka dots subverted for bitches and vamps.