I’m a sucker for white linen. Can’t go a summer without a new white linen frock. There’s something utterly lovely about that first day, that high summer heat which permits its wearing. I’ve stopped caring too that it might be a bit transparent.
This linen came from the Cloth House, Berwick Street (it’s very nice quality).
I blame the Timotei advert circa 1980.
Filed under dressmaking, fashion, sewing
I’m running.
Running to keep up with the tottering pile of work….a heap of purply grey and pink polkadot and sludge-green and silver and there’s a party looming and still no frock for me, not even the whisper of a prospect of one and the invitation demands ‘sparkle’. I don’t really do sparkle but I could just manage a bit of glass dangle about the ears…will that do?
I feel a Cinderella moment…..all sorted but moi…
I’ve always felt that I’m on the outside looking in, even as a child – not quite fitting in. It often gets mistaken for aloofness. It’s not. But nothing much changes. I see it in the playground now among parents – the honed-and-manicured-sparklers, the old-before-their-timers, the intellectuals, the goths (metaphorically), the head girls…..It’s fascinating but I daren’t publish the poems which it’s inspired!
Anyhow, this one of a few poems I wrote in the summer after visiting our local lido. It’s along the same lines, sort of…
Lido
All the world’s here,
a glorious cliche.
The bikinigirl who’s here to be seen, to spot a mate or many
she’s not that fussy,
she just likes the attention
and confuses sex with love.
You can see what she’ll look like in 40 years:
the same peroxide thatch
kept free of the water in case it turns green;
the same slightly too-pale lipstick.
The same, just sagging
and brown-wrinkled as an unravelled cigar,
still trying to find someone who won’t think she’s a slut.
The two large girls who have matching tattoos
and matching engorged bodies
and who dive and swim like dolphins.
And their pale boy no, man, who’s been etched like a
fairground attraction
and whose chest is ribbed and concave and
who is helpless in their wet clutch, a plaything.
The woman on the edge who thinks she’s too big for a bikini,
who nears the water the way she nears a cake:
with a release of desire,
and elaborate gesticulation
and dives the perfect arc of smiling brown-lycra-ed flesh.
And we, the too-thin, wide-eyed middle class
wrapped in John Lewis’ finest
thick towelled body armour,
shivering among this seething life.
makemeafrock 