Tuesday, January 11, 2005

In a bad way... and that's just my wardrobe.

As I didn’t sleep well either last night, I called my boss and took the day off. While Hayley was out I then started a major clear-out of my wardrobe. (Is this the beginning of nesting?!)

Now, I don’t consider myself particularly fashion-conscious. My mountain bike maintenance budget way outstrips my sartorial outlay for any given year. But somehow my wardrobe seemed to have mutated into a black hole, only the very edges of which I dared to visit. In its darkest corners beyond the tangle of overladen hangers lay, well, God knew what. It was time to get stuck in there.

Sure enough, after about 3 hours of piling up clothes as candidates for me / charity shops / the bin, I had managed to reduce the extent of my wardrobe by about a third. For the final decision on some of the “better” items I enlisted Hayley’s help, perching her on the edge of the bed as I provided a fashion parade that owed more to C&A than D&G.

Out went at least one jumper fit to be worn in the Christmas scenes of a Bridget Jones movie, along with almost anything in pale blue denim (“You look like an old man from the 70s in that stuff”), one rather fabulous silk shirt with a subtle italic motif (she just smirked silently at that one) and one pair of jeans that I must admit nearly cut off the blood supply to my nether regions when I tried to prove that “yes, of course I can still get into them!”

So now there’s more hanging space and I still have clothes I like to wear. I can’t help thinking I’ll have to do all this again in a few months though, when space is at an even higher premium. And I fear that next time that dubious Arran sweater, so long preserved in the depths of cupboard space, will have nowhere left to hide.