Ms Dior, I presume?

Brought sartorial elegance to the Post Office today.

I was a little surprised Scott Schuman did not jump out and snap me in the act of standing in the queue, but I considered he must be busy, what with hanging about the old town in Milan, Rome, or Bologna, so is unlikely to be looking out for me in Bletchley.

Well if he's not coming to me, I must go to him!

On the street! (Actually I'm lying. It's the front room. But I have known people to stare when I photograph my own legs on a street corner.)

Anyway, shut up about that. See! Kenneth Cole boots!


Not exactly the 1950s Left Bank Paris look I was pitching at, but a bargain from the car boot sale! Only two English pounds! The woman said the wobbly heel was intentional. She said it makes me walk very Marilyn Monroe. Yes, Tiger, thanks for pointing out that my calves are too fat to squeeze inside them. But the zip ain't bust yet.

Cartoon jacket circa 1984.


Rather ingeniously, I strapped a leather belt round my midriff to hold it all together, because I think the jacket (one pound) is actually size 20. Now, can you imagine the swing I've created on that hemline? It's very Dior New Look 1947! I cut off the shoulder pads. Shark said she was never going out in public with me ever again.

Scarf!


A present to myself from Lamma Island tat shop. Beautiful, soft and warm. Not what you normally expect from acrylic. I told Squirrel she was not to use it as dolly bedding.

Now see what visage of elegance you have missed, Mister Schuman?

And as I have told Squirrel, Shark, and Tiger before, I try to remain in that blissful state where I know, but don't care. I try hard not to allow English tutty-tut-tut to penetrate my thick brass layer, so can more or less wear what I like.

Simply enjoy it, mes enfants! Or console yourselves. In six weeks I could be back to the old jeans and dribble, then find, to my misfortune, Mister Schuman lurking in Bletchley Post Office, waiting to snap for his new and hilarious collection, Mess of the Month.

I have packed!

I read recently a pointless article which suggested women should have no more than thirty outfits a year.

I thought, thirty? That is a joke, surely. Last time I hit Hong Kong for six months I wore four outfits. It shrank to two. I could have got away with one. (Admittedly, the ensemble would have been my bedsheet-shroud, worn in a state called borderline clinical depression.)

But clearly you ladies need my help. You do not need thirty outfits for a year. Have my fantastic rules for capsule dressing. I have gained this knowledge over many years of refusing to travel with more than a cabin bag, regardless of how long I'm going for, plus an incredible self-defeating miserable streak which means I refuse to buy any clothes when I get there!

Ready? These are the key elements in and out of the cabin bag.

1. OUT. All aspirational clothing. Example: Phase Eight fantasy dress. Pale green, floating chiffon, beaded straps. This is a beautiful dress. Under the circumstances, I had to have it. (Circumstances = RSPCA shop, never worn, two pounds, sold to me by an indifferent crusty smelling of cat pee.) In my mind's eye, any man with half a brain would swoon, seeing me dressed in this pastoral idyll. Declaring undying love and offering to marry me on the spot would be a modest step.

Reality? I look like a fifty-year old woman dressed as a pixie.

2. OUT. All control freakery clothing. Example: Jean Paul Gaultier trousers. Soft sueded silk, golden bronze sheen, wide leg, tight on the hips. No, I MUST stand like this so the leg is shown to best effect. DO NOT come any closer with that butter knife. MOVE AWAY so that I can glide forward, at an even pace, to show the fabric movement to best effect. Be quiet. I am STYLE.

After I have crawled up a sweaty Hong Kong hill in 90 degree humidity trailed by three kids while clutching an overfilled sandwich box with tomato pasta leaking down my left leg, pausing only to have a terrified Squirrel climb up my backside thanks to sight of a chihuahua, the JPG trousers will be indistinguishable from a floor cloth. Keep them in the wardrobe. I would rather they were eaten by moths.

3. OUT. Self-improvement clothing. Example: Laura Ashley skirt. Classy simple cut, plain, moss green. Also, button missing, which anyway I couldn't do up because the waistband is too tight. Thinks: When I move into a different country, I will exercise my waist! I will do that each morning before breakfast! Then I will search for and sew on the perfect decorative button!

No I won't. Self improvement is over-rated. Put it in the charity bin bag.

4. OUT. All emotionally charged clothing. Example: Ghost skirt. Black. Bought c. 1983. No, I am never giving this away. I don't care that it is deeply out of fashion, and ain't never coming back on a retro moment. I sewed it up eight times, the waistband has gone saggy and the hem fell off. I have lived, died, joyed and sorrowed in this skirt. Get off it. It is mine. Bury me in it. The scouts will have to prise it from my dead fingers for jumble. I will defeat them. I will eat it before I die. It is staying here in England where I have hidden it for safety.

5. OUT. High maintenance clothing. Example: Brown silk Episode dress. Very very brown. But there are lots of shades of brown, are there not? So this dress requires exactly the right shade of complementary accessories by way of delicate sandals and precision jewellery if its true nature is to be revealed. Do not try and pass it off with cheap white sandals and a plastic handbag. NO WAY.

PS. Also needs: perfect complexion, superior make up, polished nails, effortlessly languid hairstyle (requires two hours each morning to achieve) plus haughty stare. Equates to four hours dressing, plus extra time for practising sulky face repertoire in front of mirror.

Solution: Leave it in England in a cupboard. Here it may spend the painful hours considering the wisdom of its list of demands.

1. IN. Anything dark. Does not show stains, dribble, ketchup, Indian meal, sweat from 32,000 people in Mong Kok street market.

2. IN. Anything old. By the time I have worn it for ten minutes, it will look ancient.

3. IN. Anything shapeless. That way, no one will see how the push up bra fails to push.

4. IN. Anything in stretch fabric. Elastic waists, bits that can be held up with safety pins, hems that can be held aloft by sticky tape. If I grow thin, fat, fat, thin, no matter. I can take that clothing with me.

5. IN. Anything made of fabric which has all the qualities of steel. The ferocious Mrs Chang's Chinese laundry is just down the lane. Her wash cycle is modelled on a blast furnace and her tumble drier was a prototype for the Hadron Collider.

Now ladies, I hope these simple rules are useful when you are considering your capsule wardrobe for any circumstance. As always, you can rely on the supremely organised and well-dressed Grit to see you right.

Having sorted that, here are some pictures of Sparky the hamster. The children observe how couture I am today, and say it will make very little difference if I smuggle her over in my bra.

Free bra

The best thing about having the kids taken off me for a day by The Hat* is that I rummage through a cupboard, find the voucher for 25 quid John Lewis bunged me last year (and I thought I'd thrown away), then I drive carelessly into town, try on boring bras and come home having paid the balance in pennies. Cheers, John Lewis!

* Her parting words, as she loads my kids into her bashed up Vauxhall, are a narrative of how she rammed the car into a tree. She says she wasn't even sitting in it.

Lady, you made a difference

I am posing in my new shoes. My new shoes! On the mosaic ceiling, upside down, my lovely new shoes!


Here they are, waiting to cross the road!


Yeah! Liberated! See them run!


And a BIG THANK YOU to the lovely lady who gave them away to the charity shop in the first place. XX

'Good honest fumbling people caught up in tiny tragedies'

I don't know whether you've ever seen the film, Woman in a Dressing Gown. I saw it, aged about ten. I remember nothing about the affair with Sylvia Sims, so don't ask. I just remember the total futility of that central wifely role.

It was all doomed, doomed from the start. I remember wishing she'd never married at all, but instead drove a white two-seater while wearing a turban. Then she could drive downhill, fast, on hairpin bends. Occasionally she could go swimming for lengthy periods underwater, like Marina in Stingray. Except Woman in a Turban would talk while swimming, because mute is irritating. Watery mute is a sea version of Skippy.

But apart from wanting life to be so different for Woman in a Dressing Gown, what struck me was that every way she tried to get herself out of the mess, it came ready attached to a big sign, reading FAIL.

I feel like that. Even though we take the most fantastic geology walk across Burnham Beeches. It's led by someone who actually knows what they're talking about, and who gets the kids measuring the height of the water table. Look!


In home education terms, it's a complete and total success, and my only regret is not keeping a geologist in a cupboard. I can get them out whenever I want. They would be available whenever I needed to demonstrate the creation of an orogenic wedge.

Anyway, I end up hoping no-one notices at Burnham Beeches, because sometimes I'm walking in a funny striding way, and sometimes I'm furtively clasping at my groin to stop my trousers falling off.

I haven't worn this particular pair since last year. All the others are irredeemable, in the wash. So I drag them out the back of the wardrobe, put them on, and they don't fit. Or rather they do, so long as I like wearing a gastric band on the outside. Clearly, I have a magic wardrobe which shrinks all my clothes. But I'm not giving up. I'm bloody wearing the things now. More than anything.

So I do the sensible thing and cut the waistband at the seams and breathe again. But when I walk the jeans fall off. Apparently they need a waistband to stop them sliding down the enormity of arse I carry around like a spare mountain slope. But string comes in very handy, doesn't it?

Well that's a good start. I put some icing on the fashion statement by dribbling breakfast blueberry juice down my left bosom. That would be alright I think, because there isn't time to change and I can hide it. Yesterday I bought a fab-antas-tic coat at New Look, the epitome of all that is brilliant (and cheap) in high street fashion!

I get the coat out the bag, pull the label off, slip it on, and it looks FAB-ANTAS-TIC!

Except for the heavy weight and curious rattling noise at the back of my neck. What can that be? Oh. It's the shop guard. The enormous circular disk that shop owners pin to clothing. The one that indicates to everyone that this particular desirable garment? You nicked it.

So I try and hit the security pin with a hammer to smack the ruddy thing off. Only it won't come off.

So here I am, we're late for leaving and people are yelling at me. Dig is striding about because I am a nuisance. The kids are hollering and screaming. And I am Woman in a Dressing Gown. On my hands and knees on the kitchen floor, my trousers held up with string, blueberry juice sloshing around in my bra, bludgeoning a coat with a hammer.

But I am Grit. I can only conclude that the geology with hydrology walk round Burnham Beeches was a total and fantastic success. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger learnt a brainfull of inspiring rock, water and wood stuff. My trousers stayed up, although I rattled a bit. And Dig never succumbed to the itch to push me into the lake by-accident-on-purpose and run off with Sylvia Sims.

With nothing to lose, here are my thighs

The left thigh I can hear sloshing about, filled as it is with bitter tears and a sluice of self-pitying misery. The right thigh is a concrete lump I may have levered off the side of the A14 heading to Ipswich.

Clearly, the only thing to be done beneath both is to entomb the flaccid dangling bits up to knee-height in cheap plastic boots the colour of a table leg (as you can see, table legs are considerably more shapely). Whatever their condition - OK then, pallid winter white, knobbly bits and cellulite - you might also see that I still keep my knees gripped together like a good grammar school girl.

Yes, all is hopeless, as usual. But it is Spring. The blackbird says so, turned mad by unfamiliar warm wind and weak English sunshine, banging its face against my window. Of course I'm taking some of the credit for that because the blackbird's not getting all the glory. The loss of birdbrain directional control was probably helped by Grit thrashing about up a ladder with the Windolene because, as I said, it is Spring. And I have been cleaning up house.

Which brings me back to the thighs. Because it is Spring I must robe the revolting puffy things that stick out of my torso - but which I admit are incredibly useful for locomotion - in something other than those once-black-now-grey jeans which you can also see in this very fine photograph.

I have thrown those black jeans out twice, putting them into the bin both times. And then I have gone and got them out again. Both times.

Once, in a Sydney apartment, last year. The same apartment where I set the fire alarm going and peeled off my face. Just as we were leaving - and a good five hours after I rolled up the black jeans and stuck them in the bin - I fled back inside again in a panic attack, wrenched the jeans out from under the coffee grinds, and stuffed them in Tiger's luggage.

Of course she screamed about that particular shocking violation, but tough. I couldn't fit them in my trolley because I was carrying 15 books and 10 CDs on the history of the British empire that I'd picked up cheap in Port Stephens. Which was why I was throwing out the jeans in the first place. And because they are ragged, pitted with holes, thin, and worn out.

I wondered whether that moment had revealed a fear of abandonment and need for security. I think it might. Or maybe it says I am just very tightfistedly mean. I should put my hand in my bank account, go to the shops, and buy a replacement pair.

I like to think neither are true, and that somewhere along the line I actually once liked wearing these jeans. I can go one better, and wonder if I even thought I looked quite good in them, in the right level of daylight dimness, peered at through squinty eyes.

I know that looking good is no longer true, mostly thanks to the elastic going and that time I suffered the temporary bowel control issue. But simply considering that one afternoon, probably several years ago, I may have thought to myself, They look nice! has made me never want to part from them, ever. These moments are rare. So rare, that it may explain a wardrobe filled with clothes that no longer fit, are 20 years out of fashion, or are held together with sticky tape. Because once, I liked them.

Perhaps I can hope that they will die on me while I am wearing them. That might be a suitable way for us both to go. But maybe I need to be brave. I will try and pluck up enough courage this time to part with them for good. To spring clean my thighs, and go to M&S to buy another pair of Per Una jeans.

Hmm. I really don't suppose, M&S, that you would care to donate a similar pair free to robe the plump and blotchy Gritty thighs? Then just for you, I may label that photograph Thighs by M&S.

And I don't look like her on the right. But you can bet I wish I did.
JGXDW62J7ZN9

Grit takes control

Enough of this Slough of Despond.

I have marched back upstairs, snatched that disgusting acrylic jumper by the baggy neck, wrestled it to the kitchen table and cut off both its arms with a pair of five-inch scissors. There. Grit stands triumphant, splattered in fibrous black threads and declares, on behalf of Grit and all womankind, I shall not be bullied, pushed around and insulted by an old rag of a fabric whose sole pleasure in life has been to wrap itself around me like a curse.

And if anyone asks about the whereabouts of the ruddy thing, I shall blame it on February.

Seasonal visit

Perhaps it is the time of year. Perhaps now, with the subtle, soft, changing of the seasons, there is a certain slant of light that penetrates the windows and reflects inside, bouncing about the mirrors and the doors, and sparking ideas about the promises of spring. Or perhaps it's the sight in the bare-earth garden of a single, clean white periwinkle, the little minor alba, unfurling its five starry petal fingers to the sky. Or perhaps it is me, aware, looking at the calendar, watching one month curl into another, January slipping to February, and wondering where the time might hide.

I would like to think this slight shift of me and the planet as it spins around and reveals to us dwellers of the northern hemispheres a glimpse of spring and summer to come, that it might all presage greatness and move me to great things. From pin points make big decisions. From single beams of light and sudden revelations, chuck everything up, and go and climb mountains and chase dreams.

Not a bit of it. Grit climbs the attic stairs to make her seasonal trip to the old wardrobe; flings open wide the doors and briskly pulls out a few old black acrylic jumpers so they tumble onto the floor, and thinks at this black lump sight, 'I must clear that out'.

And then, shoulders drooping, suddenly brought low and bullied by this sullen lump of manufactured fibre, it's time to decide that sorting out this bunch of old clothes probably needs a whole day, and she probably doesn't quite have time for it right now, what with the need to cook pasta for tea, so shuts both wardrobe doors again, and leaves the clothes on the floor to find their own way back in.

New, improved Grit. Part 1

It is Grit's Big Day. Today I'm going to be told by an expert how to dress, so that I don't look like a lumpen mound of wool and hedge clippings.

Let's face it Grit, I say as I stare into the mirror before I go, leg warmers went out in 1982 and we don't want them round here anymore. Ditto the string and knitted jumper that makes me look like a bag lady from a Hyde Park bench. And the old knee-length coat where the pocket linings have crumbled. Every time I reach in to retrieve a handkerchief I have to fumble about the hems. It looks like I am checking whether I've soiled myself again. That, or I may be sexually frustrated and need to feel my own knees. Either way, fumbling about my nether regions while my arms have disappeared and I am bent double in a yoga position is not a good look outside the public library when my nose is running.

I've decided that as far as clothes go, one of my problems is that everything comes from the charity shops. Every item has been pre-worn and pre-discarded, usually for a pretty good reason, which I don't find out until first wear. Now sometimes I get lucky. Take one Monsoon skirt at £3, one Boden cardy at £1 and one Per Una top at 50p from the RSPCA. But these are the exceptions. Mostly I wear junk. I wear anything loose, floppy, torn, stained and baggy. Partly because it saves me the time of tearing, soiling and spoiling any garment I own, and partly because anything baggy or binned is unlikely to cost me more than £3 an item.

Which leads to my second problem. This is a problem, like most mothers, with priorities. £17.50 for a furry pink hippopotamus from the gift shop at the safari park? It's a bargain. Shark has smiled at it in delight and clutched it to her like a conjoined twin. £2.50 for a new top in Mark One? You must be joking. I'm not paying that for a top. I can get one down the Cancer Research shop for 50p in the sale.

And this leads on. There is a deep lack of coordination about me which, I'm sorry to say, offends me. Jumbling up colours and shapes and sizes guarantees a total mess. In fact it is as off-putting as the last time we furnished Shark with some trifle and extra custard. I may as well stick a banana on my shoulder and a cherry on my head and have done with it.

And so to my next problem. Which is time. I don't have any. The time I do have I spend in blog-therapy and spew out my id. I don't have time to look at clothes, plan, shop. For three years I didn't have time to shower. Once I considered nappies because I didn't have time to pee. I'm hardly likely to spend a leisurely afternoon shopping for outfits now on my schedule. And I'm nervous about going anywhere for more than a few hours alone because by the time I get back I'll still have to do the laundry and dishwashing, mop up the spilled paint, sort out the H-bomb destruction in the front room and attend to dehydrated children at death's door because Dig will have forgotten to give them anything to drink.

But things have clearly got to change. The children can get their own drinks, the house can stay a tip and I'm going to wear a pair of trousers that fit. And this time, I mean it. By the most surprising turn of events we are all off to stay some days in Lisbon. And I am not walking through a five star hotel lobby dressed like Hyde Park Lil. Unless, of course, it's in fashion.

New, improved Grit. Part 2

Well this personal shopping malarky is fun. I get sat down in a super plush room like I might be choosing a bridal gown. Not that I ever have chosen a bridal gown, but if I had done, I imagine that this is the sort of room I'd choose it in.

The room is all red plush curtains and gold loops and thick red carpets and smelly scent. It's even got those gold curvy French-style balloon back chairs you might find in a ladies boudoir, if you ever stumbled into one. In fact it is all so deeply luxurious it has super ego written all over. I think I might have to come and live here, even if it is at the back end of a corridor behind a cardboard sales panel at John Lewis.

Here I meet my personal expert, Mrs Fashionista. Mrs Fashionista is dressed in a bright pink jacket and black trousers. Black and colour together. Can you do that? She looks like some sort of colour coded inmate. For a moment I am not sure about this process. I want to run away.

But Pink Lady Fashionista sees my doubt. Perhaps she sees me taking a step towards the door because she comes over all 'There there' and 'Has it been a long time?' and after five minutes of this treatment I want to sink into the boudoir chair and blub and call her my mum.

Pink Lady Fashionista listens to my tale about how children are all woe and hard work and about not having showered properly for seven years yet alone tried on a skirt, and she blithely suggests it'll all be made better and brighter with a new top. Then she thrusts Vogue at me and is off to track down some clothes to try on.

The first outfit is hideous and I say I might pewk if she brings it near me again. She says it's not hideous, it's my boobs which are saggy and I need a proper bra, at which point I tell her she's not my mum anymore, now go off and find something else and less of the boob talk. There's nothing wrong with this bra. It cost me £2 in a sale three years ago and I'm sure it was grey and pink when I bought it.

The second outfit makes me look like a heavyweight English pudding. Admittedly when trying on skirts I should take the socks off, but the colour - a deep dark brown - makes me look connected to the earth a bit too closely for my liking.

The third outfit starts with some black jeans. I like black. Black, black and more black. I like it, except when teenagers wear it, and then it is horrible. Black should be reserved for miserable, old ladies like me who like to think it is smart when really it is just black.

The first choice of top to go with the black jeans is lovely, and I like it. It is a subtle dark green thing with sequins. I can feel the inner girl jump out when the sequins sparkle. Because of it I may need to go home and lock myself in the bathroom in a complete restoration and redecoration project.

The second choice of jumper, is horrible. It is bright blue, unless I am colour blind. Anyway, it is vile on me, even when Pink Lady Fashionista says it is lovely, just put a black necklace with it. Grit says No. Pink Lady Fashionista says It'll brighten you up. Grit digs her heels in. I say I don't like it, I'm not wearing it. Pink Lady says Take the blue. Grit says Go and get a second opinion. She does. Tula, the counter assistant, says the black trousers are nice. 'There you are!' cries Pink Lady triumphantly. 'Now take the blue. it'll brighten you up'. At this point, Grit, being a weedy coward, crumbles under the bullying, and thinks I'll wait until Pink Lady's gone home, then slip the horrible vile jumper back to the Returns counter.

So Grit goes home with black jeans that fit, new boots, a green top thing with sparkly sequins, and a satisfied smile. And for once, the total outfit expenditure cost more than my usual budget of £3.50.

Resolutions

What with the shiny new bathroom I realise there is no longer any place for my Bad Old Ways. The shiny white tiles, sparkling silver taps and polished black floor have won me over. I am making resolutions.

• I will buy proper nice face cream which comes in a little pot and I will stop using the vaseline.

• I will stop using Factor 20 sunscreen as night cream. I have been too mean to buy night cream. Well I'm going to buy night cream now, and I want that in a cute little pot too.

• I will use the Eve Lom cleanser. I wheedled this out of a freecycler in March, probably by claiming it was my last joy in life thanks to an impending hideous disease. Anyway I stopped using it because it is too nice. By the by, not using nice products is a pointless practice I've developed simply to avoid the disappointment of the pot being empty when I cannot afford to replace it. What really happens is that after several years of not using something I throw it out thinking, 'I should have used that'.

• I will look at my toenails and consider them on health and safety grounds, even though it is not summer.

• I will read the side of the Veet tube I bought about three years ago. It will scare me witless with images of peeling skin and I won't use it. But I feel that reading it is a step in the right direction.
  

• I will use body lotions. Clarins would be lovely if only I could afford it. Did you note that, Dig? I say Clarins would be lovely. Clarins, Clarins, Clarins. Moisture-Rich Body Lotion would be especially nice. I think you can get it in town Dig. By the way, is it nearly Christmas?

• The children are banned from playing in the bathroom. I will make a special sign. No Playing in the Bathroom.

• There's no point making a resolution about washing hair. I gave that up in 1989 for good reason and I'm not going back.

• I will throw out the grey face flannels. OK then, because I am mean, I will use them as floorcloths. And I will try not to forget.

• I will buy talcum powder. Scratch that. Apparently it travels up your bits and anyway it will make a mess in my beautiful new bathroom.

In pursuit of all the above and more I have told Dig that he'd better look sharp because one day I will leap up and go to the gym. And I have made an appointment with a Personal Shopping Advisor in John Lewis on Thursday. It's her job to do something about the baggy jumpers.

There. And it's not even January.

The babysitter

Aunty Dee is coming to stay. She's driving down tonight from the North east for babysitting duties. I've agreed, with great amount of complaining, whining and wingeing, to go up to Big Town and to the Posh Do with Dig. I've tried to get out of it. I put up a great amount of argument, pointing out all the drawbacks, miserable consequences, problems and hindrances that will inevitably arise if I go. Usually, people give in, and I win. Double success. I get out of things and I get top dog in the argument. But I meet my match in Dig.

First, the babysitting. There's no-one to babysit. NanJo's gone to university. Aunty Dee lives miles away. An agency's out of the question, and no-one's crazy enough to babysit triplets anyhow. Job done. But Dig gets on the phone to Aunty Dee. Next thing I know she's driving down the M1.

So I try the RSPB meeting. The children missed their meeting last month due to vomiting. They never got to show off their life-size albatross made out of wallpaper, currently rolled up in the umbrella rack. And if we went to Big Town, they'd miss it again. Tiger would be distraught. Shark would sulk. Squirrel would be psychologically damaged. I have to stay at home to take them. Dig says Aunty Dee can be a named driver on the car insurance and she can take them.

Aha! I say. Aunty Dee will get lost on the way. She will crash the car. Everyone will have to go to hospital. The children will be disoriented. Robin, the RSPB leader, will think I have abandoned the children and call Social Services. Dig's counter argument is not as clever as mine, but it is consistent, which is hard to combat. His argument is basically, 'So what?'

Then I try something a bit closer to home. I cannot wear a dress. I don't have a dress that fits. I wear jeans with vomit and paint on them. I have given away all my shoes. A freecycler called Gertie is wearing them. Dig says that since Aunty Dee will be here all day tomorrow I can go out and buy new shoes and a new dress. Damn.

Right. Some truths are called for. Dig will meet important people. They are big in commas all over the world. They make decisions with businesses worth millions of pounds. I'm a mother of triplets and I'm not going. Dig is cunning. He says I won't be invited next year so I can be rude to whoever I want to be rude to, and the food is good. This is a problem. I like being rude. And I like other people cooking for me. I agree to go. But I tell him that he had better be ready to visit the children in hospital after Aunty Dee has disoriented them and crashed the car. He says that's alright, and don't forget she's a social worker, so she should be able to deal with Social Services when they call.

So tomorrow we're off to Big Town. I've kept quiet about the fact that I got an Episode silk dress for £3 from the RSPCA and that the house clearance in Northumberland turned up a pair of serviceable black kitten heels. At the last minute I can't do anything about the coloured hair, apart from shave it all off, but that's a bit of a drastic tactic, even for me.

Well, I will just have to blog about my dreadful evening from the side of a hospital bed. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Old clothes

I need to kill myself first before I cut my heart out. Because I've done something today that I've put off for weeks, months, and possibly years. Seven years to be precise. I've cleared out my wardrobe.

Now this sounds like a trivial thing. But it's not. First, there's the matter of the location of the wardrobe. That alone is painful. It's in the downstairs bedroom, once a cellar, which is destined to be the childrens new playroom when we move all bedrooms upstairs. There's a strange and beautiful corridor leading outside the bedroom, turning out from the main structure of the house, lit by skylights, starry at night, sunny in the day, all sunk into the ground.

And how did we bring out the beauty of this architectural wonder? We put a wardrobe in it. Not any old off-the-shelf wardrobe at that, but a purpose-built DIY wardrobe to fit the space exactly. Now, even going to the wardrobe is a wounding reminder of a misconceived project. I'm not proud.

The next horrible moment is entering the wardrobe itself. There are three rails deep, like Narnia. Three rails of pre-children living. In there I'll find a cocoa brown sueded dress touring Bologna, sandy peach shorts fooling around a beach in Thailand, a white cotton dress, sitting in the two-seater, buzzing to Scotland. I'll discover a crisply-cut cream jacket, brightly springing out of a taxi in London, and a long and slender dress, chatting over champagne. There'll be summer tops, winter coats, and a clear turquoise dress, getting married. From these silky folds, fuzzy suedes and deep, soft woollens, I'll handle tickets, receipts, jottings, and telephone numbers from travels and journeys Brazil to China; I'll smell vague perfumes from familiar shorelines, strange rooms, places of wonder.

None of these clothes I've worn or even looked at in the last seven years. Most will be two or three sizes too small, and rely on a shape to fill them that I won't recognise. The dresses will have waistlines, the hemlines will rely on slender knees. These shapely-cut clothes will demand curving necks and ankles.

But the clothes that are sorting the wardrobe are a baggy acrylic jumper with holes in the armpit, and a tee-shirt with a red paint stain. The jeans, torn on the leg, were held on the spike that was left when the oven door fell off. The top button won't be fastened. They're servicable for muddy playgrounds, bleeding knees, vomit, baking biscuits, clay-pot making, painting dinosaurs.

When I get past the door to the wardrobe itself there are the horrible practicalities of the gutting process. Five hours of it. The agonising, hand-wringing, decision-making. The 'Could I ever possibly squeeze into it again?' moment, followed by 'Would I want to?'

I thought this was supposed to be cleansing. Not likely. Because of course these are not dresses, or skirts, coats, tops and jackets, they're aspirations and expectations, dreams and plans, desires and satisfactions, restrictions and freedoms, and now they're all bundled up in three lots of bags. The first travelling to the local tip, via an offer on freecycle. The second in the cupboard, destined to hang around ebay, if I ever get to it. And the third the lingering dreams I cannot bear to part with. These will all be pointlessly stored, probably under the eaves.

What the heck. In the new bedroom upstairs there's a basket waiting of acrylic jumpers with holes in, jeans where the top button never does up, clothes that are ripped, soiled, or torn. These clothes won't have many expectations, desires or freedoms. And if they do, they'll be found in vomit, poo, blood, flour, clay, and poster paint.