To spray or spay?

Curses upon my celtic ancestors. While my parents burnish and glow with sunlight, I am a lobster salted with nutmeg.

Twenty minutes in the sun and you know exactly the shape of my bikini because it will be burnt into my epidermis for the next seven years. Did I mention that I live in Australia, home to beautiful beaches (that I rarely see before seven pm)?

This is a very lomgwinded introduction to my current preoccupation (where current may last five seconds to five - wow! Shiny!)...

Ripped jeans. I know, in and of themselves not terribly interesting. However, the trend of large rips, gaping holes and awkward torso-exposure (that's me tactfully describing the expanse of flesh often sloshing between top and strained waistband) has me wonderig about tanlines.

Do these girls wind up with a tanned rectangle on their right thigh, browner knees and a stripy left shin while a tanned bike tyre graces the top of their posterior? Or do they sneak sunscreen on the exposed bits? Hang on, they don't even know where to purchase sunscreen.

Maybe they tape over the already-tanned bits before getting their oompa-loompa on (clarification: getting fake tanned, not some bizarre sex act. Who ARE you people?!), although on reflection being fake tanned (stripping, donning strange underwear, exposing intimate body parts to a stranger) - let's stop now.

Please.

I don't need you to push my buttons, I'm perfectly capable of doing it all by myself.

Soooo... I have a skirt.
NO! I hear you gasp. SURELY NOT!!! SHE HAS A SKIRT!

Ok, smartasses, I have many skirts. I have a dauntingly large collection of clothes and "I have a skirt" really doesn't begin to come close to the truth of the matter. It's a bit like green bags. They breed under my kitchen sink, and are always trying to eat the (far superior because possessed of infinite capacity) string bags. I love my string bags.

However. I digress. (It's called FORESHADOWING, dammit!)

I have this ONE PARTICULAR skirt which started life as a pair of jeans.
In Savers.
Which I bought when I was staying at my grandparents' place.
Then, because I couldn't work out how to use the sewing machine in residence (I'm actually pretty damn competent with sewing machines, and don't you forget it!) I handsewed the appropriate length of inner seam to make said jeans into a miniskirt.

Awesome.

I wore this mini (pretrashed, incredibly comfortable, etc, etc) all through my uni days. Winter: tights, riding boots, mini, wide belt, top, jacket, scarf. Moody girl poet coming to get with you. Or kick the sh!t out of you. Sometimes it was a fine line.

Summer: thongs, skirt, top. Look at me! I'm bohemian! I will kick my thongs off and lie on the lawns of Melbourne Uni like a lazy, lazy Arts student taking too many English subjects because CLEARLY I'm going to be a writer. Or a journo. Or an editor, because
everyone else is a crap writer and NEEDS me.

And then I discovered a button collection.

Somehow I came up with the brilliant idea of sewing many buttons to this skirt. Lunch hours - sewing buttons. On the train - sewing buttons. Should be essay-writing - sewing buttons.
The resulting masterpiece is always a conversation point - an excellent defence mechanism when attending some gathering of people I don't know or feel like trying hard with. They talk about the skirt, I talk about the skirt, and hey presto, time to circulate. Anyway.

Eight years from the original buttoning (well, sometimes I lose one, so there have been refurbishments) I wore my button skirt and learnt something new.

Don't take string bags shopping.

Just think about it. Many buttons at hip level. Capacious string bags thrown casually over shoulder. String looping and twisting and tangling around buttons. Eff. It wasn't good. The button jar will be raided shortly. And perhaps some new pieces of armor will be created these holidays.