Floating down to Camelot

The time has finally come. My old boots are finally getting thrown out. The bin men will take them away shortly. I clung to them desperately for so long after they started to fall apart. When it became clear that they couldn't go near water without leaking with a sieve, I bought a new pair, after trying on pretty much every pair of boots on the island. I didn't like my new ones. In fact, I HATED my new ones. I did a few short walks with them, grumping all the way, then put them in a cupboard and returned to my old ones. By then, they were leaking even if they as much as glimpsed a drop of dew from 100 yards, but I still clung to them. In my mind, the New Boots were hideous monstrosities that weighed a tonne and had enormous solid heels ten inches thick. I tried repairing the old ones, but they were a lost cause. I scoured the internet for second-hand pairs of the same type, but found none. In the end, I pretty much stopped walking entirely.

Then, after months of impasse, I tried my new boots, and realised that they weren't the hideous, heavy monstrosities I thought they were. I tried ten miles in them, and had no problem. I tried 16, and had sore shins, but it was a walk entirely on hard surfaces, so perhaps that was only to be expected. Grudgingly I had to admit that perhaps I'd misjudged them.

I'd done very little walking this year, but yesterday I did 21 miles in my new boots. No problem at all. No sore shins, and no blisters.* I hate to admit it, but my old boots would have given me blisters on my first walk after a long hiatus. So the time has come: the old boots are going out to the bin men, and will be no more.

It seems a bit harsh, really, after all the good and loyal service they've given me. I feel I ought to be taking them out to my favourite part of the Coastal Path and giving them an honorable burial. Not only would it honour them, it would also baffle future archaeologists.

* Well, actually, I DO have a blister, but can't blame the boots. Not only do I wear boots until they fall apart, I do the same with socks. I ended yesterday's walk with a blister on the sole of my foot. The fact that there turned out to be hole in my sock in exactly that place is, I suspect, significant. Pellinor is now tutting and shaking his head and saying "I told you so," since he doesn't approve of my holey socks, and thinks I should chuck the entire lot out and get a drawer-full of new ones.

( The old boots: Rest in Peace )

Is it just me, or does food shopping get ever more complicated? I tried to buy tinned sweetcorn a while ago. Presumably we hadn't bought it for a long time, or maybe Pellinor happened to do the shopping the last time sweetcorn was on the list, or maybe the World of Sweetcorn, formerly simple, has recently acquired new complexities. I expected a choice between Brand Name, Another Brand Name and Own Brand. Instead, I found what seemed to my poor overloaded brain to be at least 127 subtly different sweetcorn choices. Which one is normal, old-fashioned sweetcorn? I wailed. Which one is the ordinary, classic, common-or-garden, original, newbie sweetcorn? No help was forthcoming.

It's even worse with toothpaste, where each brand name comes in about 105 different versions, all claiming to do something that sounds like a Good Thing, but none claiming to do all of them. Overwhelmed, I just buy whatever happens to be on special offer. And this week, I ended up bonding with an elderly lady over our shared Olive Oil Angst. Side by side, we surveyed the 20 foot wide display of all manner of olive oils, as we tried to work out which one was normal olive oil for cooking. I used to laugh about old ladies who stood around in shops loudly complaining about the price of carrots nowadays, or the shocking new-fangledness of the quiche. Now I seem to have become one.

What supermarkets need is some sort of walkthrough for confused newbies. ("New to tinned sweetcorn? Here's where to start!") Or maybe a clearly coloured shelf sticker that denotes the normal, regular, non-confusing version of a thing.

And while I'm busy grumping about shopping:

Why do so many clothes shops make it impossible to find clothes? Go into somewhere like Debenhams to look for trousers, and you have to look in 105 different places. At least it makes sense in Debenhams, because of the way the shop works: lots of different brands under the same roof. But M&S does the same thing now, with all their different ranges. I just want to browse trousers! I don't care if they're Per Una trousers, or Indigo Collection trousers, or M&S Classics trousers, or any of the other ranges they now sell. Why are they going out of their way to make things difficult? Well, yeah, I expect they're deliberately forcing customers to walk every inch of the shop in the hope that they get tempted by other items en route, but it's still very annoying.

As is the habit train stations have of only selling crisps in extra-large bags. After an early start and a long journey, I might feel in need of a small snack, but I don't want a large one. If they sold normal sized bags of crisps, they would probably get some money out of me. By only selling large ones, they ensure that I walk straight out again, feeling grumpy, negative thoughts in their general direction, and my money remaining unspent.

At least half a dozen times in the last week, I've heard "going Christmas jumper shopping" mentioned as an essential pre-Christmas task, when one buys "this year's Christmas jumper." Is this a thing now? Have I entirely failed to notice, let alone engage in, something that everyone else has been doing for years, or is it new? No-one talking about it implies that it's new.

In other clothes-related news, the skirt I'm wearing today seemed like a very good idea when I saw it half price in M&S a few weeks ago. Today I am regretting that choice. Between work and the cemetery there's a strip of gravel scattered with stumpy dead thistly plants. At least, it was half an hour ago. Now I suspect it's a strip of gravel scattered with nothing at all. I have individually - and painfully - prized off at least 957 very prickly bits of shrivelled leaf and twig, and I'm still wearing half a forest - a vengeful one that stabs my shins when I walk.

I was idly flicking through a women's weekly magazine in a library staffroom the other day, because I had nothing else to read. (You see, my current reading book (The Far Pavilions, by M M Kaye) is Too Heavy for me to want to carry it to and from work, and, yes, I was in a library and therefore surrounded by books, but had forgotten to grab something before going on my break, and couldn't be bothered to venture out into the public-infested areas to choose one.) (Said women's weekly magazine seemed to be spectacularly lacking in content - and I don't by this mean "content I'm interested in," but "any sort of content at all. (It did, however, give me one vital piece of advice: if you want to write something neatly, do it in pencil first, and then go over it in ink! Wow! Thank you so much, magazine! I would never have thought of this without you!))

Anyway... the magazine included a page of "fascinating" facts, one of which was that the average British woman owns 111 handbags in their life.

Now, I am fairly sure that I have reached the age of 43 having owned 3 handbags, sequentially. While they are not handbags in the sense of being bags that one carries around in one's hand - I prefer long straps that I can wear diagonally across my body - they definitely count as handbags, in that they're small bags that contain little but keys, a purse, a phone and a surprisingly large number of pens that no longer work. (Women's clothes are annoyingly lacking in Pockets of Useful Size, so things that men can carry in pockets, women usually need to put in bags, especially in the summer.)

I would also be very surprised if any woman reading this is on course to reach their quota of 111 by the end of their life, not without some frenzied buying in their twilight years.

No source was given for this figure. It could be that it's an entirely random figure, designed to make the handbag-poor go, "ooh! I need more!" and rush out and buy... or, alternatively, to make them feel smug at their enlightened freedom from the tyranny of handbag-buying... and, either way, to make them go, "ooh, interesting!" and write LJ posts about it, and decide that perhaps the magazine has content, after all.

But if there is any truth in it, and if it is indeed true that most women of my acquaintance have far fewer than 111 handbags, some women clearly live in houses so packed to the rafters with handbags that they can barely squeeze past them to get to their handbag-strewn beds.

According to the internet, the average height of women in the UK is 5 foot 4 and a half. I am therefore exactly dead on average. Why, then, is it that trousers sold in normal High Street shops are always so long on me that their hems trail in the mud? I don't think my legs are unnaturally short, in proportion with the rest of me. Sleeves are usually too long, too.

Entirely unrelated to the above (unless ancient heroes wear too-long trousers), I'm rereading Rosemary Sutcliff's The Hound of Ulster at the moment, and am struggling to think of any "hero" of myth or legend who equals Cuchulainn in sheer obnoxiousness. He's a rude, selfish, bad tempered, self-centred brat. I wish he'd been torn to pieces by a hound at the age of 15.

The sudden onset of summer has made me feel the lack of a summer dress. I could also do with a couple of lighter, summery skirts. Therefore I spurned the pretty summery countryside with its cooling coastal breeze, and headed into the heat of the town centre to tramp reluctantly through clothes shops. M&S did not contain a single skirt. I found a grand total of three dresses in the entire shop. Over half the entire women's section was taken up with trousers, all of them seemingly well nigh identical, but differing from each other in baffling and arcane ways. (This I have learnt.) All the other shops had very few skirts, but loads of dresses, although I liked barely any of them. Almost half of the female shoppers were wearing summer dresses or skirts, so I wonder why M&S has decided that there's no demand for them.

After over an hour, I had found one dress which I liked very much indeed. I tried it on, and - once I'd extricated myself from somehow getting my head stuck between the lining and the dress itself - found that it fitted very well at the waist and the bust. Unfortunately, it gaped under the armpits so enormously that I could have used it to smuggle guinea pigs. Oh well. It's probably just as well, since it was twice the price of all the dresses I didn't like.

So it's off to the pattern books and the haberdashery I go. Since this means that my acquiring of a summer dress will be delayed by at least a week, summer can now be guaranteed to disappear utterly next weekend, and not be seen again until 2015.

I discovered the other day that I have never owned or worn a pair of shoes in my life. Woe is me! Should I start appealing for charity donations?

This knowledge came from a shoe website to which I repaired to after Summerfest, since my casual, non-work shoes (or what I had always thought of as shoes, anyway) had died at the hands of the mud bath and were fit for nothing but the bin. I am an unnatural failure as a woman (at least in the eyes of the media) since I hate shoe-shopping and do it as seldom as I can, so I had no spare comfy shoes to replace them.

I decided to take the risk and buy online, since I wanted something as close as possible to the same make and style as before. However, the website I chose offered me the choice of several main categories: shoes, boots, sandals and flats. I have never owned or worn anything other than "flats" in my life, but it was news to me that they did not in fact count as shoes at all, and that the presence of a high heel was essential if a piece of footwear was to count as a shoe.

On this week's list of new books, there was a book that claimed in its blurb that at any one moment in time, half the world's population is wearing blue jeans. I am therefore inspired to do a poll.

( Blue jeans )

I've just watched Becoming Jane on DVD. In light of my recent comments on historical inaccuracies, I really ought to be berating the film right now. However, I'm afraid my thought processes while watching it went something like this: "Ooh! Velvet coat! Ah! What a gorgeous jacket. Weskit! Baggy white shirt! Hat!!! Ooh! Greatcoat!" The only main interruption to thoughts of this type came in the dancing scenes, where they went, "Ooh! I know that move! I know that dance!" It's rather hard to watch a film when 90% of your mind is drooling over the costume.

In my opinion, it's very hard to beat that late eighteenth century / early nineteenth century look for men in terms of sheer attractiveness. There's just something about the big shirts and tight breeches, along with weskits, cravats, and gorgeous jackets and coats. About the only thing that rivals it, in my opinion, is that mid-Elizabethan look modelled by soulful looking young men in black.

When we were in London, I saw the most gorgeous coat I have ever seen, being worn by someone wandering through Covent Garden. It was full length, coming in snugly at the waist, but full and billowy below it. It was made of a rich red velvet, and had a small amount of lacing at the small of the back, and also half way down the sleeve. I didn't get to see the front clearly. I have googled various combos of likely-sounding words, and have found several other nice red velvet coats, but nothing as good as this one. If anyone ever comes across a coat matching this description, I would be very grateful if you direct me towards it. (Though if it turns out that this is a posh designer thing costing £5000, I will grr greatly.)

Ingredients:
1 bolt of cloth
2 cats
Pins
Some thread

Instructions:
Spread cloth on floor and attempt to smoothe it flat.
Say, "Get off, cat!"
Smoothe cloth flat again. Pick cat fur off cloth.
Lay make-shift pattern piece on fabric.
Say, "Oh, Honey! Leave it alone!"
Retrieve pattern piece from cat's mouth. Dry off slobber and try to get rid tooth marks.
Put pattern piece on fabric again. Reach for pin.
Hear the clatter as Other Cat pounces on pin tin and scatters them all over the place.
Say, "that's it!" and throw cats out of room. Shut door and try to ignore anguished wails and ear-splitting scratching.
Retrieve pins. Fail to find all of them, but know that you'll find them when it suddenly seems a good idea after wine one night to push all the furniture to one side and dance Horse's Bransle, in bare feet.
Worry for a moment about the above, then shrug. Tomorrow is another day, and Pellinor's feet are bigger, so it'll likely be him, anyway.
Pin pattern piece on fabric.
Fail to notice the door open as cats march in again, having opened the door themselves. Instead, notice the reel of thread as it disappears behind the couch, batted there by cat.
Say, "I need a drink!"
Sadly remember that the six gallon vat of peach wine is not quite ready yet.
Give up, and do LJ instead.