Jean jeanies, let yourself go
How wonderful to have Christmas Day done and dusted. Now we can get on with the remains of the year, where you spend most of your time trying to remember who’s away and who’s not, and what’s open and what’s not.
The dying embers of the year seem purposeless if the weather doesn’t oblige by being blisteringly hot so you can throw yourself into the sea for a 2018 farewell to all that.
I fully intended to travel south for Christmas Day but decided at the last minute that I was too pooped after the move and would be a danger to shipping, on the road, as it were.
Friends had very kindly invited me to their family noshes, but I would have been a spent force of a guest. So for the first time I passed the day alone, assembling the new playhouse and lying on the couch reading, snoozing and scoffing cherries.
No hangover or post-scoff bloat for me, I thought smugly, priding myself in what I thought was going to be an AFD (Alcohol-Free Day), until I found myself on the blower raising a glass and ranting down the line to a pal.
I accompanied an elegant and svelte friend to the Boxing Day sales and committed the grave error of entering a booth and trying something on.
It confirmed my worst suspicions that I needed to drop more than a few kilos or totes let myself go and get the doors widened.
My excuse has been that, when you’re moving, normal feeding patterns are shot to hell and you tend to eat like a wild animal – except wild animals don’t eat filled rolls and dumplings. For breakfast.
The elegant friend was rather taken aback when a stranger asked if we were twins. I, of course, was deeply thrilled, but I could see svelte Skinny was appalled that she had been closely associated with blousy Fatty.
I know how she feels, being lumped in with a lumpen. It happened to me a couple of times way back when I was accused of being gaunt and having cheekbones. Well, once anyway.
It doesn’t matter how old you get, and how much you kid yourself that you’re past being plagued by boring self-image body issues, you’re still torturing yourself that you can’t fit into those jeans you still give house room to in the back of a drawer.
It is riskier, [climbers] argue, for someone to get into a car and drive than it is to get into their crampons and climb ... With New Zealand’s road crash statistics, they could be right.
Really? You think you’ll be able to squeeze into those bad boys again, I said to two pairs, which had managed to insinuate themselves into my suitcase. Come on, time to get rid of the cling-ons. They were always on the too-tight side and, even if you could fit them now, they are no longer in fashion.
What you should be wearing is a pair of those high-waist, baggy-leg Katharine Hepburn-style jeans you can’t help but notice are giving girls with a bit of a tummy a nasty case of camel toe. Not that you’re being critical or anything. It’s just the way you think when you’re in touch with your inner bitch.
Perhaps if I hold on to them long enough, they will come in handy when I enter the LOL (Little Old Lady) stage when those jeans will not only fit me, they will positively hang off me.
Swathed in denim in an aged care home, I will sit with my fellow LOLs in neat gaga rows where, in our rare moments of lucidity, we will know that we have lost our homes, our fortunes and our marbles, but we are united in uniform. Denim, it’s the thread that never lets you go.