For those of you who, like me, still enjoy their Shakespeare and their scripture.  I do so like the Old Testament.  "Thou shalt not read the Bible for its prose", said Auden, but that's precisely what I do.

I digress. 

Grooming.  Yes.  Miles Davis even wore clear nail polish (if we believe everything we read), an affectation at which I would draw the line.  But the shower, the shampoo, the removal of unsightly hairs, the squaring off at the nape of the neck ("very, very conservative, James"), the nail trimming, the application of Extract of Limes, the overall feeling of health (if not wealth) are all-important.  All right, 'clean living under difficult circumstances' - for English teddy boys as well as mods (read Ray Gosling's introduction to the now OOP book of Roger Mayne's photographs).  What's more appealing, too, than a sweet-smelling, soul-loving young woman? 
I was watching an old Bette Davis movie mid-week, made in 1944 or thereabouts, and was marvelling at the shower arrangements in the bathroom there.  The glass door could have come straight out of a luxury home in England in 2009.  Remember the public bath scenes in 'Quadrophenia'?  My wife lived in a house in the 1970s that had no bathroom.  'Clean living under difficult circumstances', then.  Northern Soul fans I knew circa 1975 lived in a two-bedroom house where there were two adults and nine children. 

'They were mods, but looked a bit grubby'.  A misquote from 'Soul Stylists'.  How could they possibly have been mods?  Oh, and Japanese Ivyists must surely be the cleanest of all...