Crossed fingers

The weather is upon us.

We have fire-hose rain and bellowing winds, all of which will probably make Lucy’s next driving test an interesting experience in the morning. 

I am not sure if it is her fourth or fifth driving test, but she is horribly nervous again. We are all horribly nervous. It is not a happy event.

Mark has been out with her this afternoon, and said tonight that she is an enthusiastic and perfectly competent driver. They have driven round and round the test routes, and he says that she is faultless. 

I wish you were allowed to give people drugs before their driving test. There is a chap in Bowness who takes cocaine and drives round the village at night sometimes, screeching around corners and accelerating across roundabouts as if he were late for a restaurant where they were serving free money handed around by naked waitresses. 

The cocaine has convinced him that he is the best driver in the world, which he is not. In fact I am secretly of the opinion that he is a dangerous nutter, but right at the moment, I can’t help but think how convenient it would be to be able to dose Lucy up with a generous sniff. 

Obviously we are not going to do this. She will have to make do with coffee and a bowl of muesli, and everybody’s fingers crossed for her, just the same as usual. 

It was quite nice that they went out. I had the house to myself, and unusually, I didn’t have anything much that I needed to do.

I drifted about contentedly for a while, tripping over the dogs and contemplating my world, until it dawned on me that I was wasting a rare opportunity to do exactly what I liked. 

These arise so infrequently that I don’t really think much about what I would like to do. There are always things to be wiped, or picked up, or folded, or mended. It is not very often that I can occupy myself exactly  the way I choose.

I had to think for a few minutes about what I might choose to do, and suddenly I recalled that I would very much like some beautiful new clothes. I have a sewing machine and some scissors and a dressmaker’s dummy for fitting, all of which are sitting unused at the end of my desk.

I was filled with excitement at this unforeseen opportunity, and I thought that the thing I would like to do best would be to make myself something very properly indeed. Not something cobbled together in a hurry, which has been much of my sewing until now, performed in skirtless emergencies. I thought I would like to produce a garment that would make people say: “What a lovely dress,” instead of: “How unusual.”

I hunted through my sewing cupboard until I found my one and only pattern. I bought this on Amazon years ago, when I was feeling optimistic about my capacity to organise my time better, and it has been waiting, unopened, ever since.

It is a pattern which can be used either for a dress or a jacket, and looks a bit as though it might have been invented in the nineteen seventies. I was not in the least deterred by this, as I think the historical effect will be muted considerably by a tidy hairstyle and not using a fabric with a gigantic floral pattern.

I did not know if I wanted to make a dress or a jacket, or which fabric I wanted to use. I had got several choices in my cupboard. There was a cream with a leafy pattern, or a stripy twill, or a soft blue needlecord, and they all seemed to be just as pretty.

In the end I did not make either of these decisions. Instead I turned my attention to the pattern. I don’t think I have ever used a proper, shop-bought pattern before, and was surprised to unfold acres and acres of cigarette-paper thin tissue, with utterly incomprehensible spiderwebs of black marks all over them.

I sat down at my desk to try and puzzle my way through the instructions, which went a lot better when I realised that I did not have to translate them out of French, because there was a version in English on the other side.

I discovered that it would all need cutting out.

This turned out to be a wonderfully soporific way of spending an afternoon, a bit like being in primary school again, although I recall that I was not very good at cutting straight lines in primary school, and it turns out that this ability has not improved much over the years.

I cut out the whole lot, in the biggest size, because I thought that in the unlikely event that I am not the biggest size, I can always cut it down. I don’t know what the biggest size was, it said that it was a 22, but given that this was a Spanish size from the nineteen seventies it could have been anything, I will try it all on the dressmaker’s dummy later.

Cutting it out took me most of the afternoon, and then when I had finished I thought that I would follow the instructions and iron it, so that it was flat and perfect.

Fortunately Mark and Lucy turned up whilst I was halfway through this, because I had forgotten to turn off the steam bit on the iron, and it had all got a bit crinkly.

I have saved the rest of it to give me something to do tomorrow whilst Lucy is doing her driving test. It will help to distract me from the agony of worrying about her.

Fingers crossed. Again. Poor Lucy.

Have a picture of the beginning of a conservatory.