I am having an Anxious Time.
I have returned to the Dress For Glyndebourne project.
Mark telephoned at lunchtime and explained that he is earning quite enough money for me not to look like a prune in a sack. He said that nobody will believe that he is an oil industry magnate if I look like the sort of person who might spend their working life telling fortunes on Blackpool pier, and requested that I amend my wardrobe accordingly.
He does not think that I can turn up to Glyndebourne wearing dungarees.
Obviously I do not think so either, although life would be a very lot easier if I did.
I returned to the fray this afternoon.
In the end I took my beautiful blue dress, last worn to Gordonstoun’s glorious summer ball, along with a pink flowery cotton dress and the vivid pink jacket, and trekked into Kendal to the tailor.
The tailor was not there. She is on holiday until the first week in August.
I gulped.
Fortunately there is another tailor in Kendal, and after a bit of hunting around and trailing along Kendal’s maze of tiny cobbled back streets, I found her.
She was not exactly optimistic.
She dismissed the cotton dress out of hand. It would cost so much to alter it, she explained, that it would be cheaper to purchase a couple of new dresses instead.
She was more optimistic about the long blue dress.
She pinned and clucked and frowned and considered, and eventually agreed that she could make it fit me, more or less, and I was to come back for a fitting in a week’s time, to make sure it was absolutely perfect.
She took the jacket as well, although she said that would take too long and would not be ready for Glyndebourne.
I thanked her profusely, and left her with them.
Next stop was Marks and Spencer.
One of the things about which Mark had been most determined was the underwear. I could not, he explained, wear a beautiful ball gown over the top of sagging grey underwear.
I conceded this, although without much enthusiasm, because I really do not like shopping very much.
I do not purchase underwear in Marks and Spencer, because it is rubbish. I have got expensive tastes in underwear, which is why it gets worn and worn until it is grey and sagging.
All the same, I needed to work out what size I was, which I am unlikely to do if I am attempting to purchase from Rigby and Peller’s online sales department.
I spent an uncomfortable and frustrating half an hour in Marks and Spencer, wiggling out of underwear in an undignified sort of way, before establishing my correct size, or at least, the size of Marks and Spencer’s underwear that would fit me, and resolving never to go back there again. I like the sort of underwear that comes with a free glass of Prosecco to make your husband feel mellow and encourage him to get his credit card out, not stringy bits of nylon on plastic coat hangers.
I was sick of shopping by then, and went home.
I had got an hour before work, and occupied it in sewing a few more curtain seams and manufacturing some new buttons to go on my dungarees.
I made some for my shorts as well, covered with the bit of leg that I cut off when they became shorts in the first place.
I was very pleased with this innovation.
I sewed them on the taxi rank, where I had a brief and noisy interlude with a horrid man from Liverpool who dropped a beer bottle, which smashed in the road.
He just walked away from it, and I do interfering, so I chased after him and demanded that he pick it up.
He was very, very cross about this, and bellowed in my face, spitting and actually frothing at the mouth, but I am about as easily intimidated as a terrier in pursuit of a cornered rat, and in any case, felt myself to be in virtuous possession of the moral high ground.
He picked it up in the end, rather to my surprise, although he yelled quite a bit more whilst he was doing it, until a very large chap came out of the pub across the road and obliged him to desist.
He called me Posh, obviously under the impression that it was an insult. I was relieved to hear this, if I can manage to appear posh in my most battered working dungarees and accidentally dyed g T-shirt then there is hope for Glyndebourne yet.
Perhaps I need not feel too concerned after all.
