Let’s just get this very British intro done and dusted first, shall we? It is HOT. So hot in fact, you can’t walk 500 yards without thinking you’ve wet yourself due to unprecedented amounts of sweat mounting between your thigh chub. Cheers to being a woman of summer! It’s a glamorous job but someone’s got to do it.
If there’s anything this unexpected wave of oven-breath-like-heat has taught me it’s that a) I have no summer clothes and b) I have no office appropriate summer clothes. I don’t do bras *free up that nippy duo* which means introducing everyone at my work to the outline of my udders – air con I love to hate you. You drive my dandruff nuts and my make my udders shudder but my armpits sure would be clammy without you blowing a gale on them.
I’m not overly comfortable in a pair of shorts and even skirts give me a physical reaction at times, like when your spine just decides it needs to rattle within your body a little bit, yeah that! But dresses I can do. Maxi dresses, middy dresses, bardot dresses, frilled dresses you name it. The more it resembles a thin bed sheet the better because less fabric means more ventilation, which means half the chance of sheer incompetence-related panic. Or leakage, but we won’t go down that road in case some boys are reading this and they still haven’t quite got their heads around the fact that we are capable of bleeding every single month and yet, AND YET, we still survive. It’s miraculous. Something for them to think about next time they’re rolling on the floor with one eye on the ref. Try having a whole football team doing a Mexican wave inside your uterus eh, then we’ll talk about foul play. So yeah summer weather is great and everything but it brings with it a whole heap of issues surrounding clothing oneself: dodgy tan lines, rogue tampon strings, leakage, sweat mistaken for leakage, puffs of enigmatic air that lift your lovely floaty dress up above your belly button exposing the blonde baby hairs glistening away on your arse cheeks.
Anyway, apart from that I have welcomed the sunshine into my life with open arms. I’m embracing the accidental wet hair look, I’m shaving my legs again, I’ve gone from baking powder white to a warmed up pancake batter beige and I’ve got the June heatwave to thank for that. I’ve even started body brushing! Which, by the way I’m definitely counting as cardio because hello tiny bathroom, 4 AM sunrise, rigorous buffing movements in circular motions – it is practically a body pump class by the time I’m done mmmmk.
This is a little gem of a dress that I found in Zara (I know, that was predictable). I pinned it down before I went on holiday and convinced myself it ‘would be nice for Bali’. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it never made it to Bali but it was a well rehearsed excuse and I wasn’t about to talk my way out of that one. Ooh is that a month of reduced egg sandwiches ahead I can see? I think it is. In my defence, the fabric was way too hot for Bali, I practically would have evaporated if I had worn it out there to swan around in the rice paddies and up the volcanic peaks, but now I’m finally giving it the life it deserves outside of the confines of our sliding, shoe-spitting Ikea wardrobe.
Below you’ll see me letting it run riot in a bed of roses, (Theresa May would have lost her sh*t in there with that lot) and introducing it to the London buses so it’ll know a fellow red pal when it sees one. Before that all it knew of the world was slip-proof hangers and a pile up of frayed pjs. How satisfying is a slip proof hanger though? I mean really. Life is good when it’s slip proof isn’t it?
It’s one of those easy salsa emoji numbers you can throw on during the day with flip flops and change up with heels and Pat Butcher earrings by night or for a little somethin’ somethin’ at Ladies Day. The only downside is you won’t be able to dance with your arms up in it or you know, lift up a dog on the tube escalator ‘cos the old off the shoulder neckline makes it pretty difficult to get anywhere above shoulder level. If you look really closely you can probably see it cutting off the circulation slightly on my arms – no biggie, body brushing has got my back so it’ll take more than a bit of bingo wing crushing bardot to break me. Those shoes however… great cheap find from Primark but my feet looked as pink as the underbelly of an albino hamster by the time we were done and they felt as if a jelly fish had just wrapped its tentacles around my toes and started playing them like they were keys on that BGT winner’s piano. He was SO good wasn’t he, I’m so happy he won. He made me feel bad that I can’t even whistle though, or play three blind mice on a cranky recorder.
I feel like I’ve been staring at my screen writing this in the notes on my phone for eternity and the woman next to me probably thinks I’m penning a deep text to my ex about how he was really harsh for calling me an albino hamster that time and that he should have peed on me when I got stung by a jellyfish. Awks. Love you bye.
PS: random thought as I looked out of the train window to consider dinner choices. Has anyone ever actually witnessed a pie cooling down on a windowsill? Because I feel like this is one of those life long lies that we’ll never get to the bottom of. Maybe I’ll start leaving pie on our windowsill and reinstate the urban myth. Second thoughts, I’d end up with a flat full of hulk sized seagulls if I did that.
PPS: It’s probably back to sh*tty old winter weather now so this post is utterly irrelevant to both our lives and I’m definitely back to baking powder white. Big. Fat. Yay. With. A. Dollop. Of. Gloopy. KFC. Gravy.
Photography by Olivia Foley
