Clothes

The clothes issue has developed into a crisis.

We are going to go and watch a friend of mine getting married on Friday, which will be a lovely thing to do. We are going to take the camper van and visit my parents the night before, and stay in it afterwards, when we have had too much wine to go anywhere. I am very excited, it is ages since we have been away, and I am looking forward to it very much.

However, the whole thing necessitates a bit of preorganisation which I should have considered ages ago, and of course  hadn’t bothered about because of the general excitement of the rest of living, and suddenly it turned out this morning that we were setting off tomorrow, and it all turned into a bit of a crisis.

From my point of view the first and most important difficulty was turning up looking smart and civilised. Mark has a collection of reasonable suits, and so was okay, and I have got some nice dresses which I have worn often enough to be comfortable, but the problem was the children, who, irritatingly, have grown.

Lucy was all right except that her smart jacket was a bit tight and slightly short in the sleeves, but if she pushes them up a bit or hunches her shoulders nobody will notice. However Oliver’s suit jacket was so ridiculously small that I shall pass it on to Ritalin Boy next week and it will probably fit him already. I don’t know how I have failed to register this. Mark said that I have already made a fuss about it once, at Christmas, because it was too small when we needed it then, and I told him then that I was going to order a new one, and he had assumed it had been one of the expenses that had contributed to the difficulties he had discovered with his credit card in January. I don’t remember a thing about this at all, and think that he may be making it up.

Of course Oliver has got his tweed jacket, but it isn’t really right for a wedding, and a waistcoat, which just isn’t going to be warm enough, and he has got his overcoat. I thought that this would probably solve the problem, and told him that he could wear a smart jersey over his shirt and tie, and his overcoat on the top, and he looked at me blankly and said: “Which smart jersey?”

We had a look through his jersey collection. There was one with glue on the front, and one camouflage hoodie. There were two elderly fleeces and a knitted cotton jumper with a broken zip. There was one with a hole in and a couple that were too small, his school jerseys and his cricket jersey.

By then Mark was at the farm fixing the camper van, which is another crisis we had discovered at the last minute. It turned out that neither the brakes, nor the heater worked, both of which seemed to be fairly major difficulties, so he had gone off to take it all to bits and make it usable again. I tried to call him a couple of times before noticing that he had left his credit card on the desk unattended, and after that stopped bothering and just phoned John Lewis.

To my horror they explained kindly that they hadn’t got a hope in hell of delivering to me before we set off at lunchtime tomorrow, nor the day after at my parents’ house on account of it being Easter and astoundingly every delivery man in the country has taken the day off. It didn’t matter how much I offered to pay them on Mark’s credit card, they were adamant, it was too late.

I went off to work in a state of anxiety then. Mark phoned to ask if I could come up to the farm to put my foot on and off the brake pedal, so when I got there I told him all about it.

He was hardly interested at all. He was busy lying in a muddy puddle underneath the camper van twiddling things with spanners and swearing. It was snowing a bit, and there were wheels and rusty things all over the place. I suggested that he could hurry up a bit so that we could get off tonight and go shopping in the morning. I thought that perhaps I would like to go to the Trafford Centre. We have been there once but it was so very full of things happening that we all got a bit dizzy and had to go away again, but I would like another go.

He was a bit short about hurrying up, and explained that he was trying to glue together forty year old rust, and said that we would be very lucky to go anywhere at all, never mind set off early, and in any case had I forgotten that I had made the children a dentist appointment for the morning?

Of course I had forgotten this, and when I had finished being helpful with the brakes went off back to the taxi rank and looked up hotels,  just in case, since I had conveniently got his credit card in my pocket, but eventually just as it was going dark he called to say he had finished and got everything working.

He came and joined me on the taxi rank then, and we had a reconciliation where we were sorry for not being interested in each others’ difficulties, and decided to set off before lunchtime and call in to Marks & Spencer in Kendal on our way, to see if they had some nice boy’s jerseys.

It is nice to be married and have somebody help sort out worrying things.

LATER NOTE: whilst I was writing this he poured a glass of wine and put Gershwin on the CD player. When I came down we danced round the living room. I just wanted you to know we are still happy even after a worrying day.