Friday, 22 November 2013

Sore feet but feeling foxy after a hard day’s work…

I’m sitting with my sore feet tucked up on the sofa enjoying a glass of wine, huddled close to the radiator, with the sounds of Angela Lansbury solving some crimes in the background (today Jessica has inherited a football team in an elderly uncle’s will. Chaos has ensued). I’m tired but I feel good, because I feel like I worked hard today; it was my first proper shift working back at Walton Clothing (Mistral) in Berkhamsted, where I last worked more than 2 years ago. Christmas is fast approaching and so today’s tasks involved assembling a five foot cardboard Christmas tree with my boss, Pam (it’s a great tree, I’m considering getting one for my living room instead of a real one. When Christmas is over just slide it behind the fridge, job done) and planning for Sunday’s Festival of Lights in Berkhamsted high street. When the tree lights are lit, carols will be sung and plenty of mulled wine will be imbibed. The last two Decembers haven’t quite been the same for me, because I loved working on a high street in the run up to Christmas in 2011, especially in such an atmospheric town like Berkhamsted with its old buildings and interesting boutique size shops (even their charity shops are treasure troves). I’m so happy to be back there working with the old team and, essentially, playing with pretty clothes all day (little girls who love their dollies grow up into shop assistants who love re-styling the mannequins in the window). A condensed version of this blog is posted on the Mistral website, here.

My mum wants to know if we really do sell jumpers for badgers... I'll call head office in the morning.

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 What’s more it’s so lovely, when the high street is dark and damp, to be inside in the warm surrounded by jewel colours and bright lights, plus a few woodland friends... Our windows in store are adorned with picture book style cut outs of foxes wearing scarves and badgers wearing jumpers, which ties in with the styles in store which are full of animal print (it’s funny how animal print used to mean Bet Lynch in a leopard print boob tube, now it means owl motifs on nice blouses). The fashion for woodland animals on clothing, décor, stationery and so on, is still thriving a couple of years on and I love it. I remember some time ago I thought it was a great idea to experiment with fabric dyes and printing, despite having precisely zero expertise, and faffed around trying to print a motif using a stencil I’d made of a running horse out of a plastic projector sheet. It was very unsuccessful. The paint dripped and blobbed and the end result was not the slick outline of a magnificent beast I’d hoped for, and more closely resembled a hole caused by a donkey falling through a wall. Ah well. We live, we learn, we buy horse print scarves from Primark instead.

 I think we can thank Julian Fellowes and K-Mo (as the Duchess of Cambridge is known to her friends, like me) in equal part for the current love for all things countryside. Royal weddings, royal babies and Downton as our main export have led to England becoming chic again in the last few years, although obviously Madonna knew was coming long before the rest of us. That period where she went everywhere wearing a flat cap and tweed jacket saying things like “’Ellow there, Geldof me old China!” (or something) seemed really weird at the time. Makes so much sense now. Naturally she’s gone back to wearing black bondage gear though and the rest of us have yet to catch up. I do look forward to the transition fashions, I predict bambi print spandex cat suits this time next year – you heard it here first. Bird xxx

 Footnote: Murder She Wrote is long finished and as usual I don’t understand who did it, or why. But it ended with a freeze frame of Jessica Fletcher chuckling gaily like the whole football-manager-drowned-in-a-hot-tub thing never happened, and all is right with the world.



Night night.

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