DAY 39--Cheap Jewellery

This, I hope, is a timely post; coming as it does ahead of Valentine's Day.  It may help to steer chaps away from one of the top 10 worst Valentine's Day gifts--cheap jewellery.  I can't help thinking that the people who compiled this list on the internet were a bunch of innocents.  Cheap jewellery? stuffed toys?  What about razor blade stuffed gateau? A dead kitten?  The clap?  But perhaps this is just me, the novelist, dreaming up worst case scenarios as usual.

I am actually a big fan of cheap jewellery, provided it's stylish cheap jewellery.  Diamonds are a girls best friend, true.  But only in the sense that you can flog them and buy tons of other stuff that you actually prefer.  I have never hankered after diamonds for themselves.  Here's the assortment of cheap jewellery I'm sporting today:

I took this photo myself as you can probably tell.  It was the second attempt.  The first unaccountably gave me several chins.  The green and purplish seed pod necklaces were given me by the chancellor.  He bought them on a trip to our partner diocese of Matlosane in South Africa.  I wear them with pride.  The other wooden bead necklace (the one with a big hoop) came from Internationale, and I fear faces may have been ground in its production.  I wear it with shame. You can also just glimpse a more delicate bronze bead necklace, which I believe came from Accessorise  a few hundred years ago.  It has matching earrings.  I know, tsk tsk, matchy-matchy.  There's actually quite a bit of brown-purple-green coordinating going on in today's outfit if I'm honest.

A small girl once asked me (when I was in a similar tangle of beads) why I was wearing three necklaces.  I replied, 'A girl cannot have too many necklaces.'  She seemed to absorb this wisdom, and perhaps she will live her life by it.  You can tell small children anything.  I spent a lot of my time trying not to lie too egregiously to my boys when they were little.  My younger son has never forgiven me for telling him that vanilla pods were dried tarantula's legs.  But he loves me anyway.