DAY 11

Back on the fashion wagon in a triumph of uncoordination.  I am actually in my 3rd outfit of the day.  Here's how that happened.  I knew I was intending to go for a run late morning, therefore there was no point getting showered and dressed properly.  I lot of writers do their best writing first thing in the morning in their pyjamas.  Then they get swept away on the tide of their narrative brilliance and it's 5pm and they are still in their pyjamas. Respect.  Can't do that myself.  If I'm in my pyjamas and not asleep in bed I feel either furtive
or ill.

So the compromise position is: lounge wear.  If you look in posh catalogues you'll see that descriptions of lounge wear are larded with such adjectives as 'pampering', 'luxurious', 'soft', which of course means 'hideously expensive and made of pure cashmere'.  Nowhere will you find words like 'clapped-out', 'saggy' and 'threadbare'.  But this is the kind of stuff we lounge about in really.  It's one step up from pyjamas, but a notch casual.  In my own case, it's almost indistinguishable from 'slobbing about wear' (detailed in previous posts).  The only difference is that if it's lounge wear, I haven't showered.

So: SoulCal trackies with grey cashmere hoodie.  The latter is slowly metamorphosing from genuine posh lounge wear (it was in the M&S Autograph sale and still expensive.  Wiped out an entire Christmas collection of vouchers in one go) into slobbing about wear.  It's probably my favourite garment at the moment.

2nd outfit of the day was my running gear, and now outfit number 3, which I was bigging up in my first sentence there.  First, a big shock: I'm wearing a skirt, an actual skirt.  My basic stance towards skirts is hostile.  Too many years of navy blue school skirts, I think.  Coupled with being banned from wearing trousers at primary school, which I felt keenly as an injustice.  Penis envy, schmenis envy.  Never wanted one.  But I did want to wear trousers.

My skirt today is a sort of pale stone colour, which is what we call it when we can't bring ourselves to say beige.  It's 8-gore needlecord and A-line.  Curiously, in my unhappy Domestic Science lessons at Grammar School before I was allowed to do Latin instead, I was haplessly attempting to make a brown needlecord 8-gore skirt.  I never finished it. Perhaps this is all about closure?  It's from Gap, via some charity shop.

I have teamed (as fashion types say) the skirt with black boots and grey woolly tights in an Argyll pattern.  They really don't go. And they really really don't go with the navy blue-and-white striped long sleeved T-shirt I'm wearing, or the denim shirt I put on over the top.  The latter is by Wrangler.  Denim shirts had a moment a year or so ago, which I'm afraid means they are over.  But Tush to that (as the Book of Common Prayer psalms often remark).  Happily, there's no such thing as being on trend in Lichfield.  Provided you  haven't got your trousers on backwards or your knickers on your head that counts as fashion savvy round here.

And then when I went out, I wore a brown coat.  Ta da!  And I carried my library books in a plae blue tote.  By Jove!  I think I've cracked it!