Turquoise cotton jersey

We got up early for school runs this morning: but when we got home again we went back to bed.

This is enormously frustrating, because there are so many things we like doing: and it feels like such an awful waste of life to have this very tiresome choice, either spend loads of it asleep, or be yawning and stupid and grumpy for the rest of it.

I wanted to do more things in the garden, bake some biscuits and make a new T-shirt, and in the end there just wasn’t anything like enough time. Once we were awake I made some mayonnaise and then filled in a long and tedious form on the computer, and then there was hardly time to do anything more than cut the shirt out before I had got to get ready and go to work.

I was not at all happy about being at work. Regular readers will know that having to go to work instead of just doing the things that I feel like doing is a recurring feature of my life and one about which I have got complicated feelings.

The thing is that if I had got so much money that I didn’t need to go to work, then I would obviously be so wealthy that I wouldn’t need to make my own T-shirts or biscuits, and so in that unlikely event I might as well be at work as anywhere else, because it would be dull to be at home with nothing to do.

Therefore there is no point in complaining about the injustice of the thing and I think that perhaps I need to consider more carefully what it is that I actually want, as looked at in that light it would appear that what I actually want is to be unemployed and poor, which is most certainly not the case.

In the end I fidgeted and complained so much on the taxi rank that Mark rolled his eyes and said that there wasn’t any point in my sitting there whilst it was quiet, and to go home and get on with it, and he would call me if things started to improve.

I felt a bit guilty about this, but not guilty enough to stay where I was and wait for somebody to decide that they wanted to ride in a taxi rather than walk in the sunshine, so I rushed off home and started contentedly fiddling with the turquoise cotton jersey T-shirt that had been occupying my musings all day.

I can tell you now that it is jolly well not easy to make a T-shirt. How impoverished Indians manage to make so many in dreadful tumbledown sweatshops I have got no idea. I am only making one, not thousands that have to be perfect for Marks & Spencer, and I have got a dummy shaped like me to try it out on, and another T-shirt to give me the shape that I want, and I am still making a bit of a pig’s ear of it.

If you have never tried to make a T-shirt then I can explain that actually it is quite complicated. The hole at the top has got to be big enough to poke your head through, but not so big that your bra straps show once you have got it over your head and resting on your shoulders. Then there is the problem caused by having lumpy bits sticking out at the front of a person, you have got to cut the shirt in such a way that it hangs nicely over these without either looking like a tent or wrinkling up and being too tight underneath your arms.

Then there is the difficulty of sleeves. They are cut in a semi-circular shape at the top and have got to be sewn into a roundish sort of hole on the side of the T-shirt, which no matter how hard you try is just not going to be the same sort of roundish as the hole on the other side of the T-shirt where you thought that you might stick the other sleeve if everything went well. Also they have got to be the same length, which is harder to achieve than it looks.

In the end Mark phoned and explained that people wanted to get in taxis and that I needed to go to work, so I had to leave it, which turned out to be just as well because when I looked I realised that I was in the process of pinning the sleeve to the neckline.

All the same it is very exciting indeed and I am dying for tomorrow to come so that I can do some more.