when I was home alone last week

…was the exact same thing four days running. With a few accommodations for hygiene.

Black trackies with a raggedy hem, cashmere bed socks and a grey tee from the White Company. A big wool sweater from Brora of Scotland — a Christmas present my husband discarded on account of holes, shapelessness and the fact the pug likes to nap on it. On my feet were black Dansko clogs, real bruisers.

At night, I exchanged the trackies for my husband’s pyjama bottoms, flannel trousers in a spiritless plaid.

There’s something particularly British about these pyjamas. They’re standard-issue from Marks & Spencer, that most English of emporiums, and you close them with a length of string that’s threaded through the waistband. No buttons, no elastic and no matter how well you tie the bow, there’s always a vast gaping aspect to the crotch.

That gap is less of an issue for a woman. For a man, though, there’s the constant risk of exposure, a furtive glimpse of guy hair and dangly bits. To me, it represents nothing less than the very essence of Britain: the dowdy, unassuming fabric and the inevitability of a coarse reveal.  It’s the homely and the sordid, all in one.

I’m not really a slattern; weather was a factor in all this. It was arctic in Britain — in all of Europe. Rome had its first blanket of snow in 26 years, people were dying of hypothermia in Paris and it was so bitter here in Cambridge that the wheels of my bike froze when I tried to ride into the center of town. Exposing one’s flesh, even indoors, was to be avoided.

Mainly though, with both my husband and daughter away for a few days, I didn’t want to bother with the whole business of fitting myself out. I deliberately chose apparel that was more than anti-sex clothing; it was anti-self clothing. I didn’t want to be thinking about myself and the stuff that usually informs my life: my family, my house, my daughter’s university prospects, clients, parents, bills, the sharp pain down the side of my left arm, the tragic, terrible vacations we take, the dog and her operations, and, most of all, how I looked.  Instead, I just wanted to spend my time thinking about what I was working on, attempting to, well, inhabit the world of the people in the book I’m trying to write.

I’m not sure why I write; the truth is that other than naming and branding things – I do that for clients — there isn’t much else I like doing as much.  Which is not, of course, the same as being any good at it.

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