Despite being relatively colourful in the rest of my life, every day, for work, I wear black. Black trousers, black top or shirt, black jumper or cardigan if the weather demands it, black trainers and a black jacket. I usually wear black socks and underwear too. Occasionally I’ll be daring and go for a white shirt under a black jumper but by and large, I have an all black uniform for work. It’s not an official uniform of course, more just one I impose on myself because it’s easy and means I can get dressed in the dark without having to worry whether particular shades of colours work together or any of that nonsense.
This isn’t particularly newsworthy in itself – I’ve done it for a number of years now, it’s just “work clothes” and I don’t have any particular affection for them – but I’m mentioning it now because I’ve just seen the anti-me. Well, not the anti-me because she wasn’t wearing all white, so some really crazy alternate universe me who was wearing a (semi-fitted) suit, with matching coat, of bright pink. Stupendously bright pink. Eye-splitting bright pink. Ridiculously painfully bright pink. I didn’t want to get too close to her for the sake of my retinas and also in case it caused some kind of time/space warp thing but it did make me wonder: I wonder if she gets dressed in the dark too.
We only have one outside wall but, at the moment, it’s damp. I’m investigating the different causes and suspect that we’ll need either new gutters or repointing and sealing of the wall itself (probably both). Since we only have one outside wall, I thought I might as well go the whole hog and get cavity wall insulation on it too at the same time – hopefully to prevent the condensation forming on the inside of the wall (where the cold moisture in the bricks meets the warm house) and to improve the general warmth of the house. (I thought about getting cavity wall insulation on the other sides of the house too but thought the neighbours might complain about me filling their living rooms with shredded fibre glass.)
I grew up in a house filled with flowers and greenery: there were dozens and dozens of plants around the place and as far as I can remember, fresh flowers of some description around the house each week. For a while, my mum worked in a florists and my dad has always been a keen gardener so the flowers either came from the garden (in season) or via my mum’s job. Plants and flowers felt like home.
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