I have finally done it.
I have hunted through our wardrobe and decided what I would like to wear for the troubling, and fast-approaching, court case, in which, as you might recall, I have been summoned to be a Witness For The Crown.
Obviously I do not want to let the dear Queen down, and so even though it is not for a week or so, it is important to be Suitably Dressed.
I am not good at this, and was concerned that I might finish up looking like a set of traffic lights crossed with an exhibitionist gypsy at a wedding. It would not be the first time. I am pleased to announce that I have found some appropriate garments. It is a massive relief.
Obviously it involved an awful lot of faffing about.
I have got some beautiful clothes. Mostly I never wear them because it would be a terrible shame to splash bleach or cake mix all over a cashmere jersey. One would not want to snag silk on the log splitter, or smear sheep-poo garden fertiliser over a linen jacket. I save them for going to nice places, which I don’t do.
Nobody does at the moment. Even school is closed.
Going to court has turned into the sartorial occasion of the year.
I spent ages staring into the bathroom mirror, trying on corduroy skirts and lambs-wool cardigans and linen shirts.
The woollen cardigans were dumped within seconds because I am going to need to concentrate, which I will never do if I am making frantic attempts not to scratch my neck
The skirts were lovely but made me look fat, not that anybody will care, and I can never go within a mile of linen without it leaping into a crumpled ball and making me look like yesterday’s laundry.
There was a grey wool dress, which I was pleased to note was not too tight. This had been an embarrassing issue the last time I tried it on, and I had scrambled out of it hastily and dumped it guiltily in the attic. It has remained there whilst I have tried to forget it, for a couple of years. It was not too tight now, rather to my surprise, but the neckline was too low for looking respectable in a witness box, and the sleeves did not feel right.
A very great deal of agonising followed. Regular readers will know that I do not have the first idea how to match clothes, and the contents of my wardrobe look like something painted with a child’s paint box. I was surprised to realise that almost everything was purple. I do not know how this has happened as I do not especially like purple. I hope it suits me.
The proceedings were not helped along by my habit of buying absolutely everything a couple of sizes too big, for comfort and so that it will not matter if my waistline suddenly inflates by an inch or two. I had considered that I was fairly portly at the moment, but it appears that I am not much worse than usual, because everything seemed to drown me.
No matter what I tried it all seemed to have been designed by a manufacturer of flour sacks.
In the end, in desperation, I tried on some trousers.
These proved to be the answer.
I settled on a pair of purple corduroy trousers, which were thick enough to be warm, and which had been so expertly designed that they actually made my legs look as though they were a reasonable shape, which they are not.
I admired this development in the mirror for some time.
I agonised for a while over whether a deep pink jersey would go with them, but in the end decided that since I did not know, I had better not, and finished up with a beautifully soft ivory cashmere sweater that had been a Christmas present. I added a purple-and-mustard silk scarf that we bought in a bazaar in India once, and my black Jaeger jacket. I am not surprised that Jaeger has gone broke, it is their own fault for trying to design exciting clothes for young people instead of sticking to twinsets for old bats. We are the generation with cash and young people wouldn’t go to Jaeger if they were giving away vodka and grapefruit juice on the door.
The jacket, fortuitously, had an amethyst brooch on it, which I left there, and I know myself to be the owner of some amethyst earrings somewhere.
The whole effect was not at all bad, and I stared at my respectable reflection with a flood of tidily-dressed relief.
The trousers are too long, because I have only ever worn them with boots, so I am going to have to turn them up, and I do not know what I am going to wear on my feet. I don’t think this matters very much because nobody can see your feet in a witness box.
I have got some pale grey furry boots.
I do not know if they will look all right with purple.
I will worry about it another time.
