Z is not the snappiest dresser

I meant to consider buying some new clothes this winter.  It hasn't happened.  I don't enjoy shopping and I'm quite uninterested in what I wear.  My mother and I had an air of mutual bemusement about this, because she loved clothes.  Mind you, I suspect that this didn't help me at all because, rather than involve me in what suited me and what I might want to buy, she took the path of least resistance for years and chose most of my clothes herself.  I suppose she had to or I'd have kept wearing the same things until I grew out of them or they wore out.

Now, if I'm in the mood for shopping and find anything I like and fits, I buy it at once, whether I need it at the time or not.  I might buy whole lots in a day - but then I won't shop again for the rest of the year, very likely.  The autumn before last, I bought two pairs of shoes and two of boots at the same time.  None since.  My coat was my mother's, actually.  She bought it about three months before she died and it was expensive (she knew she was dying, but she was feeling pretty well and cheerfully defiant, so went ahead).  Anyway, it seemed a pity to waste it.  So it's nine years old now (I have had another coat in the meantime, I haven't worn the same one relentlessly all that time, I give it a couple of years' rest and then haul it out again) and still going strong.

When Weeza and Al were little, I didn't have much spare money.  So, when I did go shopping, it seemed a waste to spend what I had on clothes for me.  I bought books instead.  My mother, in despair, used to give me her cast-offs.  When Weeza entered her teens, I wore what she chucked out.

Now, I do have to buy myself things to wear.  But it's so dispiriting.  Rows of stuff I don't like, then I find something I do and I have to go and take my clothes off and try the damn thing on.  And if it doesn't fit and I want to go up or down a size, the assistant has always vanished so I have to get dressed again and go and find it - because I never go shopping with anyone.  That's an even worse penance, for them as well as me.

Once, I had a suit made.  Never again.  Apart from having to make choices, when I didn't really know what I wanted and having to act as if I cared, I then became pregnant, so the project was put on hold, then I had the baby and became really thin (rake thin I always was within months of having a baby) and it had to be taken in.  And the cost.  Blimey.  Mind you, I got my money's worth.  Wore it for decades.  Unfortunately, the moth got it in the end or I'd be wearing it yet.

Anyway, I had to go to Norwich this morning for a meeting, so I thought that afterwards I'd go and have a delve and see if either there was anything remaining at the tail end of the sales or if there was anything new in.  But I couldn't be bothered in the end.  There's wear in what I've got yet.  Maybe next year.