I love the look on his face. I'd had just told him my best joke - the one about the deaf drinkers - and he couldn't stop laughing. But that's not why I've called you here.Like most women tapping away in the blogosphere, I read Sal's Already Pretty daily. I like her thoughts, her writing and the way she poses in the middle in the road. I also like - very much indeed - her Land's End shirt dress.
In fact, it got to a stage where all I could think about was the Crimes Act (1900), whether I had any rides left on my bus ticket and how I could get a Land's End dress like Sal's and wear it with the same confident prettiness.
It might seem like a simple thing, to like a dress and just get one but the day my life gets that simple is the day I adopt someone else's complex personality.
So I hung around the Land's End website for a while. It's very welcoming in a home-cooking American way. They have bedsheets and school clothes and slippers as well as the dress. I'd lurk and pine and covet, then I'd go and check my bus ticket or confirm the maximum penalty for manslaughter and not buy the dress. (Twenty five years if you're interested.)
But the other night I stared at the dress for so long I became hypnotised and clicked purchase before I'd even decided to actually buy it. (This is why I'd never go and see a hypnotist. I'd be the woman who gets turned into a chicken and can never be reversed.)
It arrived yesterday in a big white bag that said LAND'S END so there was no turning back. My dress, the dress I had see on another woman I've never met and wanted not because I needed another dress but because of how it seem to make her life wonderful, was here.
My new dress is black and pristine and we're both rather shy of one another. I'm not sure how to wear her and I'm not entirely certain she wants to be worn by me. I feel like we should be formally introduced before I can start wearing her properly. Anyway I've hung her on the outside of my wardrobe so she can talk to some of my work dresses and see my shoes.
Maybe we'll get a little more used to each other over the coming week.
