It rained this morning, slow, steady, persistent rain, that will do the garden some good (7mm altogether) but left us stuck in the house. The Systems Administrator spent a couple of hours trying to diagnose the problem with our broadband, which is apparently running at one fifth of its normal speed. There was no Eureka moment so I think the Mystery of the Missing Broadband remains unsolved.
I went and did some of my ironing, since rather a lot of my clothes were lying in a rumpled pile on the spare bed. As I ironed I was forced to confront the unhappy truth that I might need to buy some new ones. We don't go to many evening dos or other events requiring special glamorous outfits, so most of my clothes start life as quite nice daywear, and over the next ten to twenty years descend through a hierarchy, from being kept for best to being worn for gardening. Best Clothes occassions are generally those outside the house, visits to other people's houses, holidays, or days out with friends. A key feature is that I probably won't spend at least half the time with a cat sitting on me, bestowing stray hairs and pulling threads. After a few years of ranking as Best, clothes are allowed to be worn for tidy occassions at home, such as when we have guests, where a degree of sartorial effort is appropriate but the clothes will get the cat treatment. They are now Everyday Clothes. After a few more years the clothes are deemed too grotty to be worn to receive visitors, but will still do for wear at home, maybe not on Saturday night when the Systems Administrator has done a full roast and we are eating at the table with candles, but fine for watching the gardening programme with pizza. They are now Shabby Clothes, and suitable for long walks likely to involve mud. Finally they become Gardening Clothes, which is a tradition with an honourable precedent. Sir Roy Strong claims never to buy clothes specifically for gardening, and to just wear his old ones, and as he has a much more adventurous sense of fashion than I ever did, I believe this has involved some astonishing appearances.
Unfortunately several things in the ironing pile have reached the point where they really don't count as Everyday anymore. A couple of linen shirts have faded beyond the point of chic, one with an additional bleached patch in the middle of the front where I managed to get a drop of fountain pen ink on it. The ink scrubbed out, but so did most of the colour. A third shirt tore through at the elbow the last time I wore it. I managed to patch that quite neatly using an old handkerchief that was a remarkably good colour match (the boss at work just goes for the elbows out look, but I don't think I'm sufficiently upper class to carry that off). A pair of moleskin trousers are getting dangerously close to wearing through in an embarassing place. As you have gathered, I don't do throwaway fashion, or at least I do, but only in the sense that things that have dropped to pieces get thrown away. The local charity shops don't see much from my wardrobe.
Originally most of them were quite good quality. I got briefly excited when Tesco began to offer T shirts for under a fiver, but they went saggy and faded to remarkably nasty colours terribly quickly, while pima cotton shirts I bought twenty years ago are still doing fine service, albeit that nowadays their role is generally to be layered under something else. I was about to say that good quality fabrics wear better as well as feeling nicer and hanging better, then remembered my occassional brushes with cashmere, and had to revise that statement. But you can't go wrong with good quality cotton.
No comments:
Post a Comment