I had an unfamiliar experience today.

I had ordered a new dress to wear when we go to Manchester. I had almost forgotten about it, but today it arrived.

It was rather splendidly wrapped in a cardboard box tied up with a ribbon. It looked expensively perfect, and so I looked at it guiltily and didn’t open it.

I told Mark all about it when he called at lunchtime, and he insisted that I open it and try it on whilst he was on the phone.

It was carefully wrapped in a couple of layers of tissue paper, and inside it was gorgeous, dark blue and silky, heavy to lift out of the box, and falling between my hands like a soft warm waterfall.

I tried it on.

Readers, I had ordered it in a size fourteen, because I have become thinner since I desisted from chocolate button consumption, and it was far, far too big.

It hung off my shoulders and dangled limply to the floor.

Mark was on the telephone asking questions, and so I did the thing where you stand in front of a mirror and take a photograph of yourself with your telephone. Models and body builders and teenagers do this. It took some considerable faffing about, it was much harder than I thought it would be, and on the resulting picture I look like an elderly lady who is wearing an enormous dress and a confused-looking scowl. It is a good job I did not want the picture for sending to Tindr or some other similar agency. I would even have swiped past myself.

You see how up-to-date with current cyber-trends I have become. I have had Tindr explained to me, and I am almost sure I understand what it is about.

I sent it to Mark who agreed that the dress was too big and kindly asked if I was worrying about something.

I had to wrap it up carefully and put it back in the box to be sent back.

I was quite astonished about this, because although that theoretically I have become thinner, I don’t feel any thinner, and when I look in the mirror I look just as rotund as ever. I looked again when I had taken the dress off just to check, but I still looked portly, just a bit more wrinkled than I used to be, presumably being because of spare skin that used to hang about over my fatter bits.

I sighed regretfully about the dress, because it was beautiful and I would have liked to wear it, but it made me look as if I was wearing an enormously oversized shopping bag, I have got a couple of these in exactly the same blue colour as the dress, and I use them all the time because they say Cambridge University on them and I would like the lady on Booths checkout to think that I am intellectual.

Obviously they don’t because they all know perfectly well that I am a taxi driver, if ever they even noticed the shopping bags probably they would think that somebody had left them behind in the taxi.

I considered this all afternoon, the dress, not the shopping bags, obviously, and began to wonder if perhaps I ought not to get very much thinner. I do not want to get any fatter but perhaps I ought to contemplate a renewed interest in eating. It is very easy not to bother about food very much when Mark is away. Almost all cooking except porridge is tiresomely complicated and leads to a good deal of washing up, and my taxi picnic has dwindled to the easy-preparation size of a mackerel wrap, some lettuce and an apple, which is perfectly edible and easily achieved even by the most determinedly idle.

Hence when I baked a fruit cake for Mark’s imminent return I baked another one, the sort without sugar or butter, for me. I made some sushi, and added one to tonight’s lettuce.

I will be suitably rounded again in no time at all.

I might have been a bit premature in sending the dress back.

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