DAY 20

Friday is the chancellor's day off.  On Fridays we like to drive to some town or other, buy a coffee, then trawl round the charity shops.  I foresee that this pattern may hold less charm for me as the year goes by.  Wandering round Kenilworth in the rain not buying clothes has a limited appeal, as I discovered today.  Yes, I could browse the bric-a-brac, scan the rows of books, rummage through the household linens.  But what about all those racks of tops, those dresses and jeans in my peripheral vision?  What designer bargains would hang there, undiscovered by me?

Oh well.

Today I'm wearing a skirt.  This skirt is making its first appearance in this blog.  It's a denim skirt I got In Asda (?) when we lived in Walsall.  This makes it somewhere between 6 and 12 years old, probably.  Originally it was just below knee-length.  This is a cruel length on me.  It's almost exactly where my legs are chunkiest, which creates an unfair impression.  Just above the knee I'm less chunky, but at this point we are straying in to mutton territory.  However fab your legs, after a certain age you need to keep them off display.  That's my view.  I also think that after 40 your hair should never look younger than you are.  A harsh ruling, but one which will save you from the dreaded 16 from the back, 61 from the front syndrome.

So a delicate balance has to be struck when it comes to skirt length.  I don't want to create the impression I have legs like telegraph poles, but neither do I want to be yodelling 'Hey, check out these wheels! Not bad for an old girl, eh?'  I therefore took a pair of scissors and cut a couple of inches off the hem.  After several washes, the raw edge now dangles threads, which admittedly is a look much too young for a 50 year old woman, but who says I have to be consistent?

With this possibly tragic skirt I'm wearing grey stripy tights.  The stripes are horizontal.  Let's lay to rest once and for all the myth that horizontal stripes are fattening.  The opposite is true. Check here if you don't  believe me: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/12/slimming.stripes  I'm also wearing a long sleeved slinky purple top with a grey crossover front jumper and a brown plastic flower necklace.  The necklace was from Pat the Midwife (she was taking a rare break from buying me tasteless crap; which is something we compete over.  I'm current reigning champion with last Christmas's Mr Creosote vomiting sauce dispenser.)  I'm also wearing my tan boots, a green chunky cardigan, a purple scarf and a cream blanket.  NB. In Kenilworth I substituted a brown fake fur coat for the cardigan and blanket.