A tale of two dresses

After spending the weekend terrifed that I would burst, Hulk-like, out of a small hole on the inner thigh of my jeans, last night was designated 'go to the shops' night. This always involves me tussling with stroppy bus drivers and so it proved. Nevertheless, jeans had to be bought.

Still experiencing my heart intermittently palpitating in terror at the thought of what I was going to wear on this cruise, I thought I would look around the department store I was in. A colleague sensibly suggested that I try to buy something every 2 months so I didn't have a last minute panic. Reader, can you tell from that she's slim? Because I always spend the period of time leading up to an event (any event) doing series of complicated calculations in my head about how much weight I could/might be able to/would like to lose. And therefore only at the point where I absolutely have to, for fear of running out of time, do I shop. In a panic and full of self-recrimination. Please see current wedding dress avoidance behaviour for proof of this.

But actually, I have rather shown myself that this just doesn't work. If it were possible, I would have managed to lose a lot more weight before wedding dress shopping in 13 days time. Whilst I'm certainly not giving up dieting - or giving up hope that I will be slimmer - I am accepting the grim reality that if I am disciplined and diet, I can maintain being this overweight but not achieve much more than that.

So I thought I'd check out sale dresses. And I bought one. (£170 reduced to £103). It's a dark teal/green silk long dress. It's a pretty dress. It's okay on me - hopefully. The colour's good and the rest is - okay. With a decent strapless bra, a shrug-type device, heels and 4" chopped off the bottom to make it full length on my hobbit limbs, it will do.

So in my lunch-hour today, I went to buy a strapless bra. And I bought another dress. (£350 reduced to £140). (And a bra). It's very 30s (the dress, not the bra), taupe satin in a loose sort of fishtail design with a cowl front and back and sort of Grecian loops of material falling down the arm. And I think it almost looks nice - it's not at all the sort of thing I thought I could get away with and it needs sucky-in knickers but - it kind of looked quite... nice. It's about 1" too small to comfortably do up (at the side - really, who can do those up? You have to be double jointed) but I think that's achieveable - should be able to get into that in a year, it's not challengingly tight. The only scary bit is that I can't really wear anything on my podgy arms because of the Grecian loops. Is it even possible to get more toned arms whilst remaining stubbornly porky? This is not a rhetorical question.

Lesley suggested I borrow outfits for the cruise. Alas, all my friends are at least 3-4 sizes smaller than me - bless their ickle, slender cotton socks. Or so I thought. My old co-conspiritor from LL days reckons she's got some stuff from her bigger days that I can borrow (she kindly offered me 12s - 18s - but I well know it will be the bigger end of the spectrum). I can't borrow anything full-length as she's about 5" taller than me, but I'm keen to investigate this potential source of largesse.

But with two dresses behind me - even with one more full-length, two cocktail dresses and two "elegantly casual" dresses to go, I feel I can rest on my laurels a bit now. Of course, in a way it would be nice if I were too slim for these in a year's time but experience shows me otherwise. It might invoke sod's law (not SoD's law which is a tyranny of rage, disbelief and despair) but I'm not holding my breath. Except to get that zip all the way up.