Stopped writing about it and started doing it.
329 days in and it looks like I’m going to do it.
Not so difficult once they shut all the shops and you couldn’t go anywhere.
First casualty of coronavirus was the nails. Eventually got them off, poor wretched natural nails hadn’t seen the light of day for about 12 years, and are now, very slowly growing into something approximating nails. Hey ho! No worries, nobody sees them.
Hair not so bad. I can boast that my hairdresser cuts so well I’m still managing. A tiny bit of snipping at a twisted fringe and I’m still good to go. Just nowhere to go to.
So I’ve lived in some sort of boring routine that’s never involved getting ready to go out.
I’ve put the winter items in the loft, got out the shorts and vests. Managing on last years stuff is no problem.
Only briefly on any sort of show, the odd standing at my door for a funeral, putting a frock on for a zoom call, that sort of thing. Mostly just selecting appropriate running gear or something to garden in.
I thought about making something but balked at the price of good material so didn’t bother.
Planning to revamp the sitting room instead. It’s all I see.

#60 days in

Over the initial hurdles, not pining for Uniqlo every free afternoon, ignoring cries from my friends that they couldn’t do it and why would I want to.

Being part of the crowd has a strong pull, but that’s what my constant need to update has been prompted by. 

Two recent hurdles past. A wedding in Spain, wore nice thing I already owned. Great find of a clutch bag, circa 1970 shaped like a folded magazine, with a 19 magazine front cover on it. It was spotted by another guest, “I work in fashion” who was amazed that it was original, or even vintage. Then back for a funeral, delighted to find a little kimono jacket to top off a LBD, so managed that too. 

Big social occasions tended to be excuses to buy, but apart from being old enough to know that nobody will be looking at me, it’s actually been quite fun rooting around and seeing what I’ve got. 

Trying to work out what the pleasure of a new outfit consists of. Is part of it the pleasure of knowing that you chose well?  If so could there be more pleasure in choosing so well that you still enjoy wearing it many years later?

There are still unworn items nestling in carrier bags, not many, but there are. 

I caught myself eyeing a cardigan yesterday. 

My new haircut and my glowing suntan are both helping the image in the mirror. 

The cold weather is coming, let’s see how I deal with it 

It's been a while

Seriously good exercise living out of a suitcase full of clothes.
Here in the Bretagne countryside these not a lot of point in being on trend so It's been relatively easy to dress myself in a muted palate of utility clothes and have a bash at the smart French woman look when going to a market.  So it's been shorts, jeans chinos and a linen dress so far and that's been quite satisfying. Not bothering to style my hair has helped, and I've used the same pair of earrings most days. We kept up standards by applying a bit of lipstick every so often, but the best fashion accessory has been my runnner's tan, which makes everything look a bit better.

Flat white old Clarks shoes without socks have been good. Ditto an old striped jumper, ( at least 3 years) and some Gap shorts. A lot of beach use for a very old pair of Rockport sand shoes, these benefited from a spin in the washing machine before I left. I'm trying to enjoy them looking a bit past it. Nearly there. Two outings for the Maori bone carving round my neck, one evening meal, one trip to the airport.

Out for an evening meal on a grey day with showers. No chance of wearing the sleeveless long striped dress as it was too cold. That was the only dressed up thing I had, so put my dark denim jacket with my jeans to look like a matching suit and went with that.  I reminded myself of the passage in the book The Girl with the Pearl Earrings when I slipped in a pair of grey pearls as an earring change. Not sure it had the same impact as a Vermeer, but there was just a little lift to the ensemble. Is this this tiny adjustment I'm going to have to work on from now on?

Getting near the end of the holiday and not much left to experiment with clothes wise. Should have brought a big scarf to drape about. That always works. Just a couple of vests and the striped frock left. Cream shorts also waiting for a sunny day, as are the short karkhi ones which are a nice shape. Saving a clean white shirt to wear home as it will make me look suntanned.

Nothing bought, managed it.

Haven't got to the bottom of the shopping yet

Right, let's get back to shopping, because it's a few years into my life before the idea of my having anything to do with actually shopping for my own clothes.
From what I've read, a lot of the sustainability stuff seems to direct me back to how stuff was when I was little. When we moved from West London to a small village in Cambridgeshire it was the 1950's, and things were a little different. There was a village shop, and as I remember my mother placed her order there by writing down what she wanted in a small notebook. This was handed in to Mr Sargeant, and he would pack up what she wanted in a box and deliver it to us, with the price of each item written in and added up. She would then settle her bill. everything was very personal, it was about getting good service and being a loyal customer. Later on, my mother ceased to be so loyal, when she discovered that she could get what she wanted by going in to "town" as we called it, and buying from Mr Sainsbury. This meant that she had to carry it all home on the bus, so this is where I came in again.
I have a picture of the Cambridge Sainsbury's on the wall in my kitchen, it reminds me of my mum, which is why I think I got it.This Sainsburys was not the supermarket you'd find there now, it was on a different spot, and it was magical. There were paralell long counters with seperate sections for things like butter, cheese, bacon, and meat. You had to queue up seperately to buy at each counter. This resulted in a complicated system of queues which meant sometimes there were three or four lines down the shop, with no clear indication which counter they were for. To save time my mother would plant me in a queue, with the instruction to call her if I got to the front before she'd been served in the queue she had joined. For years I squirmed as my mother did her best to instruct me in the art of shopping effectively.
Initially , when I was only allowed to queue but not purchase, I often found myself confronted by the sales person, and having to call my mother.
"It's all right!she's with me,"she would call across the shop,
"I'll be with you shortly"
Once she decided to allow me to graduate to the buying status it was even worse.
" Don't go to that man, he's useless. Go to the man in glasses. He knows me. "
Shops seemed to be full of people my mother laid claim to knowing her. This was shorthand for picking out the best stuff. Going to those who knew her was much better than the other option.
So I learned to shop through relationships, people to know and trust, people who served you well.

Going on holiday, I may be some time.

As each day goes by, well, all four of them, I swing between thinking this is just a habit or it's a genuine addiction.
Yesterday I did my run, then went off to the Tate Modern to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, which had been recommended to me. I thought it would keep me out of the shops. It was huge fun, but I found myself getting ridiculously annoyed with the people around me. They constantly needed to take pictures on their mobiles, posing their children and keeping up a loud running commentary as they did it. I'm not normally a grumpy person, but in retrospect I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't behaving like a person who had just given up smoking,  I was behaving like an addict showing withdrawal symptoms.

But now I have to turn my mind to the serious question of what to take on holiday next week. The good news is that because I'm going to stay in rural Brittany with friends, I do not need to buy anything to look specifically elegant, glamorous, or anything else. So I'm getting off lightly. I choose and carefully place selected items on the bed in the spare room. There is one item that is new, but not newly bought. Namely a cream Uniqlo t shirt, because at the beginning of the season I bought two of these, yes, that's the sort of thing I used to do. It strikes me that the discipline I use to pack a case for a holiday is exactly the sort of skill I need to use when sorting out my clothes. More practical, less emotional. I must suppress the anxiety that makes me question whether I'm taking the right things. If this is what you've got, then this is what you'll have to wear, so you'd better get used to it. Ridiculously I am now in the position to go out and buy anything I want to wear, and I can more or less afford to do so. Now the planet cannot afford for me to do so, so I will have to stop.

Let's get all my clothes in one place, in a virtual sort of way.

This isn't as easy as I thought.
There are clothes everywhere. If you want to get started you have to get your act together and my act is all over the upstairs rooms. I've been living alone for nine years now,since the death of my partner,  and as I emptied cupboard space occupied by his clothes, I have filled the spaces with mine. Although I'm having to deal with the addiction aspect of my clothes buying in the same way as I gave up smoking, the one thing I won't have to deal with is running out of things to wear.
Anyway, I made a start, I was invited out to the Jean Paul Gaultier on Sunday, so I put together a little outfit that incorporated a pair of culottes I've only ever worn once. They are half of an outfit for my second born's wedding. Anyway, they looked fine, I dragged out the sewing machine and took in a t shirt to go with them. I felt like a proper sustainability convert. Just another twenty eight wears for those culottes and I'll have cracked it.
So like everything else I have learnt this.
You start a project, do a flashy little cameo and then......
You realise that there's going to be some serious hard work in this.
I have to review the contents of

1 large full length wardrobe, dresses, skirts and coats
1 cupboard that doesn't open easily with the Christmas wrapping paper at the bottom, and sort of occasionally worn stuff in
1 large wardrobe divided into jackets and trousers (used to be Micky's)
1 other half wardrobe with tops in it
4 long shelves under this, underwear, far too many tights, nightwear
The shelves behind the full length mirror door with t shirts and jumpers (plus my running things which do not count and in no way are any part of this)
Do I have to count the small drawers of the dressing table with gloves, socks, jewellery, hats, some scarves....oh all right I do..
Shoes in a drawer under the bed and there might be other stuff lurking there, if you count gardening clothes. Well, they are clothes so I suppose you so.
Then there's another wardrobe in the back bedroom and a few bits in another awkward cupboard in the middle bedroom.
Oh! And winter stuff in cases in the loft.

There, that's everything. Oh dear, again.

It's time I thought about this.

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/jul/26/extinction-rebellion-fashion-week-should-be-a-declaration-of-emergency?CMP=share_btn_tw


Here's the thing that got me thinking. me and clothes shopping, we go together. What lifts my spirits more? Not a lot, is the answer, but now I need to think about it, like we all need to think about it, if we are to protect the planet from all the harm we've already done.
So here goes, and let's make that a bit bit easier for me, let's just start with the shopping bit first, as this is going to take some time.

How did I ever get so addicted to shopping, where did it all start? Ridiculously, I can remember the first time I was sent to the shop, on my own, to buy something. "The" shop in question was on the corner of our road in Southall, then Southall Middlesex, My! How times have changed. It would have been called after the family that owned them, unless it was specific, like the butcher's or the fishmonger's. Strangely I remember that the baker was called Fowler's, and I think that has something to do with the smell and tastes lodging in my memory. But it wasn't to Mr Fowler I was sent. It was to the shop on the corner to buy a packet of Robin starch, a little cube of a box with a picture of a robin on the front. I would have been six or younger. As the third in a family of three, I always wanted to do what my brother and sister were doing, So I expect I pleaded to be allowed to go to the shop on my own as soon as I had the language ask and could see over the counter. There was a family story that when my brother Peter was first sent to the shop, he came back with the wrong thing. He was sent for a quarter of tea and came back with two pounds of sugar or something like that. Mrs Whoeveritwas liked Peter, and engaged him in polite conversation so that by the time she got round to asking him what he wanted, he'd forgotten. The story went that she then helpfully suggested a list of items that my mother might have needed, and he chose at random. He chose the wrong thing. This story, and the shame of returning with the wrong thing, helped to focus my mind on the Robin starch so intensely that it's still locked there over sixty odd years later
 Being sent to the shop on your own was a big deal. This was post war Britain and there was a different relationship with shopping then. It really was a time of austerity, although at the time I was unaware. I had some vague idea about rationing and shopping but my parents knew all about it, they had had to go without, so indulging your children wasn't something they even considered. But to a child, shopping was exciting. It was an activity that involved a walk or a bus ride, carrying a bag or a basket and buying what you could carry. You paid in coins usually, sometimes a pound or ten shilling note. You kept your money in a purse. I list these things because they were the source of my imaginative play. I played at shopping. I wanted to shop, to be like my mother.
And my mother knew all about shopping. My mother would teach me how to shop. She was the business.