I am feeling very pleased with my world.
I have started putting some actual effort into the dress I am going to wear for Lucy’s wedding.
So far this detail has become so buried underneath a welter of other junk, like menus and seating plans and flower arrangements, that it had become lost to the eye. Nevertheless, I have spent several days listening to forgettable details about everybody else’s outfits, not least Mark’s and Oliver’s, which I have got to remember to collect from the tailor. Hence I had decided that I should consider my own.
I knew what I was going to wear, it is a comfortable burgundy dress that I wore to the theatre last Christmas. Most of my usual theatre-going friends were not there, and so won’t have already seen it, and Mark, Lucy and Oliver almost certainly were not paying attention and will have forgotten it anyway, so it won’t matter.
Splendid as it is, it was purchased from a low-budget Internet site, and it would place me in no danger of outshining the bride. Indeed, I would have struggled to outshine the waitress, and so I have been frowning thoughtfully about it during quiet half hours on the taxi rank.
There have been a lot of these lately. We are having one now.
Lucy has expressed a wish to have a pagan sort of wedding, by which she meant the sort of event where you say things like We Salute You Spirit Of The North, and where you have sprigs of rosemary to symbolise eternal fidelity, and all that sort of thing. We are a bit short of standing stones and similar monuments in Windermere, and in any case it never stops raining, and so we are deep in contemplation about the best way to turn the local Italian restaurant into an appropriately outdoor-themed witchy venue.
I am entirely in favour of this sort of do-it-yourself event, and have joined in with enthusiasm.
It is not a fancy dress event, and actually I have always had a vague idea that people who attended them were as likely to undress completely as to dress up.
We will most certainly not be doing that, although I agree it would reduce the faffing about. I would remind you that it will be November.
We will be dressing to look splendid.
Hence I felt that my last-Christmas dress might benefit from some modification in order to blend in harmoniously with the spirit of the occasion. I would like, I decided, to look appropriately pagany.
With this in mind, I have been searching the mighty Internet, and last week I purchased some no-longer-needed rabbit-fur trim from an erstwhile manufacturer of furry shoes.
There are ten metres of this and it is lovely, although I can’t help but feel a bit remorseful about the rabbits. Not very remorseful, because they do taste nice, and I must confess to having killed and eaten quite a few myself. Regrettably, however, there is not time in the next three weeks to kill ten metres-worth of rabbits and cure their skin, even if I sent both Mark and Oliver off to the farm to do it, and in any case the freezer is full at the moment
Today I have started to trim my burgundy dress with it.
I am trimming the hem, the sleeves and the neck.
Sewing on rabbit fur is a very lot of faffing about. I mean a really lot of faffing about. You have got to get the fur to lie out of the way whilst you sew otherwise it all gets caught in the stitches and looks rubbish. Also it gets everywhere. By the time I had finished I was very furry, and so was the carpet.
Nevertheless, the effect is quite fantastically magnificent, and smells rather wonderfully rabbity.
I have not finished it yet. So far I have got the hemline sewn. It looks like a splendid cross between a sensible middle-aged dress and a design brief from A Game Of Thrones
I am going to look just like Cersei Lannister. Well, like Cersei Lannister in the winter bits at the end, not the summery bits that look as though they should be in Italy, and certainly not the bits where she gets in trouble with the High Sparrow and has to do the naked walk with the dung being thrown at her, although I concede that we have got very similar hairstyles.
Really I suppose I will look more like Jon Snow except I haven’t got a wolf or a beard. .
It looks so splendid I have been wondering about emailing the erstwhile shoemaker and buying the rest of his stock, except I haven’t been able to think of anything I could sew it on to.
I might do it anyway.
You never know when you might need to dress up as a rabbit.
