"As you were."

Are you familiar with the UK clothing company, Toast?

They work hard on ethical sustainability and promoting the work of designers and artisans (see the web page on their approach).  Their clothes are good for the long haul, and improve rather than deteriorate with wear. Their garments are made of natural fibres, their colours are subtle (mostly) and their fabrics are comfortable, supple and soft (mostly). Several members of my family have slowly collected Toast garments — ha! pieces of toast — which they cherish.

They produce an unusual catalogue with poetry and stories in it as well as articles and pictures of what they have for sale. 

I like looking at their website, because their things are beautiful, and that's what I was doing today when my eye fell on this dress.

It spoke to my heart. This is just the kind of dress I love. Everything about it. 

I look at it wistfully, and then I have to take a reality check because, the thing is, time moves on.

When I was nineteen, or twenty-six, or thirty-two, at a pinch even forty, I'd have looked great in this dress. My body is kind of frog-shaped — wide from the front view but flat in the side view, and squashy; handy for slinking through narrow spaces and doors that won't open properly, or behind the piano when we're trying to move it. I have a very long back. I have big hands and feet and broad shoulders/ribs/pelvis. Good for growing babies. When they X-ray my chest, my lungs exceed the picture.  

In frilly, flowery, fluted dresses with lace and bows, I don't look sweet, more like a man in drag. But dresses like this Toast one, kind of Brontë style, are just right. Or they were.

But it's all different now. I am somewhat round-shouldered, with the standard elderly lady lizard neck, and my bust sits a couple of inches above my waistband. So long as I stick to what you might call vague clothes — loose, soft, knitted, stretchy, not shaped — everything looks reasonably normal. Put me in a dress like this one, with its woven fabric (not knitted) and its slightly raised waist and the effect is tragic. I know. I have personally discovered this to be true, at considerable expense.

When I look at clothes, I am on the inside as I always was — I like the same things, I am drawn to what always used to suit me. So then I have to keep my head, pay the beautiful dress inner tribute; and leave it where it is.