When it’s driech and chilly outside, there’s a hangover in the post, tomorrow is Monday and winter is starting to be a thing that might happen again – then it’s time to wear happy clothes…
… eat some takeaway, put on the Mamas and Papas and get some good reading.
Tonight I’ve been reading short stories by Doris Lessing from 1965 and, as usual, I’ve fallen in love, anew, with how very clever she is.
How I Finally Lost My Heart is a fierce, scathing story about our ways of cutting, categorising and controlling the uncontrollable, and it’s also very weird and very funny. A woman recounts her past loves, with cliches and numbers, categories of romance, Freudian analysis, the lot. Despite her cool, detached, pernickity approach, what has happened to her heart over the years is a different story – it is bruised and sullen, a ‘ton weight’ that she carries around like stone. She is now in pursuit of a new man, and talks of the relentlessness of it all, and the heart that she is so enslaved by, until, accidently, she manages to do what she’s always wanted – she rips her heart right out. ‘No heart, no heart at all. What bliss. What freedom’. She is a little taken aback and a little wistful about all the loves out there that will now never be. ‘What was I going to do? I sat down, lit a cigarette (with one hand, holding the matchbox between my knees) held my hand with the heart in it over the side of the chair so that it could drip into a bucket, and considered’.
If you like your fiction gory and surreal, she’s your gal.
My lovely new Bonjour t-shirt came in at a very lovely £1.50 from a charity shop, and putting it on very much improves any day at all – and especially dismal hungover Sundays. If clothes had occasions to match, then this t-shirt is the most appropriate thing to wear for when you’re going to eat a butterscotch sundae.
Here’s a little hall of fame of all the other most bargainous things I’ve managed to find in charity shops, with the kind of occasion they’d fit perfectly…
The Denis-the-Menace jumper (it has silver glitter thread running through it!) cost 50p in a jumble sale. Best shopping trip ever. Appropriate outfit for ice-skating, with a sweatband on and some mint-green leggings.
50p a pair. Same jumble sale. That was a good day. The stripy River Island heels are obviously appropriate yacht-wear, and the Faith 1940s style heels are clearly for a weekend in an old hotel in Paris with a terrace and room service champagne. HA. My life in no way matches these plans.
This brooch cost £1.00 in a charity shop in Inverness, and is perfect evening-wear for the bridge club.
Lastly, here’s what I’d be wearing on an autumn day if money were no object… (and because I love these collage things).
Sunny coloured coat, fairisle socks and (another) big red heart. Dreamy.
Amy Jardine 