What to Wear When It Turns Warm

After the relentless grey of the last couple of months a strange bright object has been sighted in the sky.  After a flurry of googling, we have identified it as the sun.  Suddenly it's spring.  And it was sudden.  People went out in the morning in winter coats only to look completely foolish by the end of the day.

So.  What should we be wearing in this glorious weather?  That is quite simple for young women to answer.  They will continue to wear their shorts, only now they can leave off the black tights they've been wearing underneath.  Or, if they are idle young women, they can scissor the tights off at upper thigh level without troubling to get undressed.

When you reach an interesting age--and I think 50 must qualify--the wearing of short shorts probably needs to be confined to sporting activities.  But having noted the opaque tights+shorts combo, I will confess that I've contemplated an old pair of jeans and wondered about turning them into cut-offs.  But then I asked myself this one simple question: Do I want my sons to talk to me ever again? 

Which leaves me with a summer clothing dilemma.  My 'When in doubt, wear black' maxim doesn't hold up well here; especially if you're bored to death of wearing dark dismal wintery colours.  The answer, of course, is to wear white.  White trousers with some bracing colour blocking: that is my solution.  A rummage in my trouser drawer revealed a pair of white capri pants I'd completely forgotten about.  I also found a vacuum packed bag of light-coloured clothing lurking under a clothes rail, full of things not seen since the autumn.  It was all rather exciting, like the childhood ritual of opening the trunk full of summer clothes used to be.

One small caveat, however.  Don't wear white trousers when you are chipping 6 years of filth off your cooker prior to moving house.  Or if you do, make sure you team it with a nice long apron.  

DAY 17

Today there is but one consideration.  It's not style, it's not fashion.  Today is all about keeping warm.  They say, don't they, that you lose 25% of your body heat through your head.  Well, that depends on what you're wearing.  I imagine that if you are stark naked, you lose heat pretty evenly via your entire body surface area.  In fact, you probably lose less through your head, provided you aren't bald.  But in cold weather, a hat is a good plan.  Even indoors if your house is like mine.

That said, I'm not wearing a hat at the moment.  This is because I have finally warmed up by going out to the Post Office to post a friend's phone charger after she stayed here overnight.  It has been estimated that forgotten phone chargers now make up 63% of all UK parcels.

I just made that up, actually.

I'm now cooling down again at my desk.  This is despite wearing the following: black thermal vest, black long-sleeved merino wool base layer, jeans, boots, blanket, chunky cardigan, scarf.  All of these items have featured before in this blog, apart from the cardigan.  I believe this is the last of my chunky cardie collection to make an appearance.  It came, naturally, from some charity shop or other.  It's speckledy grey with three large black buttons.  After many months of puzzlement and twitching it about, I've concluded that it's supposed to be wonky.  In the sense that the placket (I type the word with authority, although it may be the wrong term) is meant to be slanted.  You know, the strip with the buttons and holes on.  We're calling it a placket.

Like other cardigan-coat things in my wardrobe, this one is a little troublesome.  Should it really flap open like this?  I have secured it rather fetchingly with a safety pin.  At school I used to staple up my skirt hem, or occasionally sellotape it.  Another thing they say when they aren't asserting you lose 25% of your body heat through your head, is that 'A Stitch in Time Saves Nine'.  Well, maybe it does.  But I'm all for waiting till the full nine are necessary.  That way you can feel like you've undertaken a real sewing project, rather than a bit of uptight knee-jerk control freakery.

I expect running repairs will feature increasingly as this year goes by.  Gosh, I remember the days when we used to repair tights.  It was usually black tights for Girls' Brigade.  In-wear repairs at the last minute.  It was either that or sealing the hole up and preventing further ladders with nail varnish, which as good Baptist girls we didn't have.