IT FOLLOWS me around like an old dog that I can’t shake off. It’s back again, that jacket. It’s a love/hate thing. I bought it in a sale at the end of last summer. It is a cream, mesh jacket – maybe I fell for it because it reminds me of my dad’s old string vest.
Also, it was half price. Just £45 for the jacket from a chic brand named after an African tribe.
Who could resist it?
“It would have been £90 before the sale, so it is a real snap,” I argued with my inner Scrooge in the shop, swirling about and trying not to think of my old dad, his face lathered in shaving cream, giving his chin the once over in his string vest at our bathroom mirror back home.
The woman in the shop agreed it was a find. Women like her always do.
She didn’t say: “If it reminds of your dad’s old string vest, then possibly it is not the best look.”
I bought it.
The fates were cruel that day. I had not noticed the worn paint proclaiming “bus stop” on the road outside. I thought it was old signage and did not apply so I had parked with one wheel across it. The parking ticket on the windscreen took the thrill out of my bargain.
The authorities, too, promised me a half price deal – just £45 if I paid in 14 days. So the jacket was not really a bargain, if you took in the price of the parking ticket. It sort of took the taste away.
Still, c’est la vie. So I took the stringy jacket and stuck it at the back of the wardrobe because it was not quite the style for winter in Belfast.
However, it did sing the right kind of song for summer in Paris and I whipped it into my bag and took it there to our reunion of 25 years a fortnight ago. And such was the warmth and the laughter and the Champagne flowing and the wine downed, that I swung out of the little French cafe on to the streets of Paree and darn forgot absolutely totally about the jacket.
It was so warm you see. You didn’t need one.
But that jacket must have had a homing pigeon for a father. He must have been a direct descendant of one Paddy the pigeon from Carnlough who won a medal for bravery in the Second World War.
I had forgotten I had lost it but said jacket found me and flew home again in a big parcel.
“Thought you’d get rid of me,” said the package from Paris.
There are clothes, lost and found, that stay with you through life. Our boy had a little blue and grey jacket that was close to his heart. We lost it on the way back from a magical trip to Dublin to stay with his aunt when he was seven. We tried but it was never to be found.
I had a skinny jumper, a gift from my godmother, that, I thought made me look quite the It girl, in the days when It girls were like Babs from Pan’s People.
It mysteriously disappeared and I spent weeks hunting about the house for it and crying: “Mu-um, did you see my skinny jumper?”
Then, when I was hunting for an old tennis racket in the garage, a year later, I found it, rolled into a ball and stuffed in a corner. It had clearly been through a hot cycle in the washing machine for it had shrunk to a size fit for Barbie.
My mother confessed. She had not wanted to face me so she hid the evidence.
I have also spent a lifetime looking for another little green velvet jacket that was so beautiful that people stopped me on the street to stroke it. There was never another like it.
There was never another pair of stilettos like my first and last pair worn as I strode elegantly across the cobblestones at university. Well, skip the elegantly, it was more of a freakish wobble.
There will never be another pair of pyjamas like my favourite ones that are so cosy they sing to me from the bedroom.
“It’s only 7 o’clock at night,” sigh the others, but the siren song of the old jammies cannot be ignored. Stuff the jacket, fetch me my fluffy bottoms!
