Getting tight.

The clocks have gone back and BAM just like that I am a hedgehog again and all I want to do is hibernate. This year in particular I have really noticed the brain change. Grace and I usually get up at 6ish (very ‘ish’!) She eats and slopes back to bed and I do my chanting meditation and think about ‘stuff’ and what to write and how plan my day. But since the clocks, I am dopey and dizzy and can’t surface (and my eyes have been a shambles of oedema and ache.) I know it isn’t just psychosomatic, although of course there will be an element of that. When darkness plonks itself down like an unwelcome wedding guest at 4.00pm in the blinking afternoon I turn into a middle-aged, fairy tale princess (possibly more ogre) trapped in my flat trying to spin flax into gold on my computer.



However that is enough whining. I don’t yet have to panhandle for food or sleep in a doorway and I am very grateful for that.... just annoyed by the slight feeling of melancholic claustrophobia that the change in season brings.

That and tights. Freakin’ sodding tights. I hate the things. When I was a kid at boarding school the small girls were not allowed to wear tights until they were seniors. At the time I thought this unfair. There we were, the little ones, with our red wind chapped thighs and frosted knees whilst the older girls had thick brown nylon to protect them from the chill. There was a kind of mystical sophistication that we all thought would come as soon as we donned our first pair of Pretty Polly tan tights. But it was all a terrible con

Spiderman having a backwards gusset moment

First of all you spend several minutes holding the tights up in front of your face desperately trying to work out which is the front and which the back because if you don’t get it right you get twisted up like a fish in a net with your gusset on backwards. A backwards gusset was developed as a form of torture during medieval times when everyone wore heavy woollen tights. A backwards gusset is the equivalent of being in the stocks. A backwards gusset means your tights will be too short and rub in awkward and painful places, you will be forced to walk like a duck...and, in cheap tights, you will also spark like a mini Guy Fawkes. Tights pah! Unventilated and sweaty ...and please don’t tell me you haven’t been in a post shower situation with slightly damp skin trying to drag those suckers up? Hell sir! And now its winter and rather than facing the large moth-eaten bag of old tights with their baggy knees and holes in crucial places, some of them still in the balls I made to throw at the wall, I invest in expensive luxury, thigh slimming, ventilated-gusset, designer beauties only to immediately put my fingernails through them as I pull ‘em up. Two pairs already balled and thrown from wall into wastepaper basket.





wot's a 'tights'?



Tights. Nope. Gonna be wearing pyjama bottoms under my dresses from now on.