No jacket required

So the weekend before last saw me taking deep breaths of (of polluted air) on Oxford Street where I’d gone to try and buy a jacket for my interview.  I could literally feel the panic rising – a pressurised shopping trip is never my idea of fun.  But I had 4 hours, a sense of determination, a rough idea and an array of shops – it was all going to be fine, right?
 
Wrong.  Despite shopping til my feet bled (okay, ached) I found precisely 1 jacket which fitted me and it was over budget and didn’t go with anything I owned.  I glumly conclude that I must be an even more odd shape than I had realised.  Almost all of them were too big on the shoulder and too tight on the hip.  Now, I once had one of those expert sessions where they measure everything (not quite in between your nostrils as Harry Potter did for his wand but pretty much everywhere else) and analyse the data and tell you your body shape.  I turned out to be hourglass (obviously the supersized hourglass – don’t run away with the pleasant thought of me as some bombshell).  But my jacket experience suggested that I was more like a pear.  Or a Weeble if you remember those:

Although clearly I would NEVER wear pink.  (I hate pink).

 

It was a depressing experience.  I met P for lunch afterwards (Turkish – yum.  And yes I practised my Turkish on a very tolerant waitress.  Who was probably from Peckham) and he looked alarmed: “But what are you going to WEAR?”.  I told him that if they didn’t want me just because I didn’t wear a jacket, I didn’t want them either.  Such bravado.  And I wore very smart knitwear with my skirt.  Moreover, dear Reader, I’ve been asked back for a second interview (at which I will not be wearing a jacket).  I’m not sure if I want the job but I clearly didn’t put them off by not wearing a jacket.