Purple haze

Bless her, R must have tried on approaching a dozen dresses yesterday – and E joined us at half time (when it would actually have been quite nice to suck an orange but which actually found R and I in semi-stupified silence in Starbucks necking a quick drink). E must have tried on the ‘short’ list of half a dozen before we moved on to fresh frocks – I am a purple meanie who just sat/stood outside or dashed off for additional sizes.

But the long and the short of it is that we have a dress. I haven’t actually bought them yet because I’m hoping for a shopping event over the bank holiday to get the price down a little if I can. It doesn’t tick all the boxes – it was E’s first choice but only R’s second (and mine too actually) which caused a people pleaser like me a bit of anxiety – I did suggest they wore different dresses but E and R didn’t think that was a good idea. I have to say that they did both look amazing in it – it’s quite 50s but in a very elegant way rather than a cute way - and R looked like an off-duty ballerina dressing for dinner with an admirer after a performance and E looked like a wealthy, glamorous socialite or film star. I was in fact so struck by how they looked in it that I snuck away at lunchtime today to try it on myself as a possible cruise dress: I looked like a frumpy housewife. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a housewife (I currently rather aspire to this) but frumpy? Never.

The frumpy me that stared back out of the mirror today was the icing on the cake of this week’s weight struggle: I put on just over a lb. After that monster cycle ride, talk about rude! I’ve decided to squeeze in an extra milk ‘fast’ day today in the hope of a much better result next week. Especially since we have friends staying with us in Suffolk this weekend and P has been cooking up a storm of SE Asian food which does tend to have sugar in it even if I stay away from the coconut rice and Singapore noodles (and I won’t be able to entirely) and there will be plentiful wine. I’m doing starter and pudding – I’m doing a mango and lime fool with coconut and lime macaroons which is, at best, damage limitation as it’s not actually swathed in yards of pastry or similar but still, has the evil sugar in (both naturally occurring in the mango and added in).

By the time I have to confront SoD again, I will have done 3 milk ‘fast’ days and I’m hoping that will both compensate for a very little extra excess on Saturday (we’re also doing a long hike) and make up for this week’s disappointing result.