Pret-a-porter

Every so often, I get this strong urge to reinvent myself, to stop wearing jeans and t-shirts all the time, learn to do something about my hair, and be altogether more chic. Someone once tried to persuade me that the difference between us and animals is that we can accessorise. Sadly, this means I am an animal. And, as I have mentioned before, I hate shopping. And I hate having my hair done. I know lots of women who regard the whole hairdressing thing as a delicious luxury. I can think of few things worse than sitting immobile for two hours, at the mercy of someone who CHOOSES to muck around with hair and wear rubber gloves. If you read a book, you're not very friendly. If you don't read a book, you have to talk to them, and they say witless things that make you cringe more than having a comb scraped across your scalp. Actually I have a friend who is a hairdresser and she's not like that, but she is rude enough to live in Canberra.

The only girly things I'm any good at are shoes and lipstick. I truly believe that you can't have too many pairs of shoes (so what if you already have Mary Janes, you don't have black PATENT ones yet, do you?) and that having six different red lipsticks is perfectly sensible. Of course, I do choose my lippy carefully every morning, but I usually can't be arsed to reapply it during the day. I think I'm what they call 'low maintenance'. Or just plain scruffy.

So anyway, this autumn afternoon, I am not loving my work, and resigning myself to a life of jeans and t-shirts, and the occasional dull work suit, albeit with an ever-changing selection of shoes and lippy.

The tan or the black and cream?