Pollyism of the week
As I sit up in bed too frightened to lie down in a horizontal position for fear that my jaw might threaten to explode again tonight as it did last night, I am for some reason mentally and emotionally drawn to the terribly important topic of linen. Yes, linen! A study in why I can’t wear it well, by Polly Grace Gillespie.
I had my wisdom tooth extracted today. Not for fun, but because it sat on top of a nasty abscess. One that had been lurking for a few weeks, but I was too much of a wuss to go see my awesomely wonderful and totally non-judgemental dentist Ravi. The man is a saint and managed to extract my tooth while I watched a show about Michael Van de Elzen in his really cool food truck. He’s a great chef and a nice guy. I interviewed him once and he was not at all like Gordon Ramsay.
What a day I had, and yet I still managed to wander into a popular women’s clothing store to check out summer shirts and wrap tops. These are tops you wrap around you, as opposed to tops you wear while spouting rhyming poetry and swearing madly about the dirty cops in South Central LA.
“Linen is such a great fabric,” the very nice greeter said to me as I sidled into the store, desperate for a reprieve from the heat and the post-extraction face throb.
“Mmmmmmm, yeth, ith ith!” I managed out of one side of my mouth.
The truth of the matter is that linen looks astonishing, chic, cool and marvellous on 50% of people. I bet Cate Blanchett can pull it off. I may even know linen wearers who don’t crease and crumple their outfits, and when they do, they look all the better for it.
I’m fairly convinced linen looks at me, cackles quietly, then turns to the cotton dress hanging next to it in my wardrobe and says in a snooty stage whisper, “Oh God, darling, wait for this. The bottom of me will look like a discarded piano accordion in 20 minutes!”
The linen dress is correct. It takes a 20-minute car ride to the venue of someone very cool getting married and suddenly the dress is six inches shorter but only at the front! And I seem to look a little too much like Jeremy Clarkson after a harrowing rally through Africa.
I think linen is cool and stunning. I once interviewed Richard Branson, and he was wearing simply a tan and a very elegant pair of white linen PJs. Super-cool. Then again, he’s Richard-flippin’Branson billionaire!
As I held my jaw in one hand and my sad wee credit card in the other, I moved quickly away from all the gorgeous linen things and into the good old cotton section. I didn’t end up buying anything except a pair of peach sneaker socks for $3. They won’t laugh at me, but then again, who can trust socks, right?