Sales, biographies and diamond pattern waistcoats

With our streets still looking like our freezer in need of a severe defrosting we've had a quiet weekend only venturing out for a short trip to the local shopping centre yesterday and the gym today for our Sunday worship (body worship in this case). The trip to the shopping centre was the first time Ka and myself had plucked up the courage to face the shops since before Christmas and it turned out to be a marginally successful trip with an exchange being made and a few items being found in the sales and a few chance encounters with other friends battling through the mob. I managed to get a rather excellent suit jacket, reduced from £90 to £26 after hesitantly asking a reluctant sales assistant for a chest measurement. Asking her if she reckoned the jacket would fit I ended up having to talk her into throwing her measuring tape around me. As it happened the jacket was a perfect fit and will prove perfect for when the wife takes me out to dinner. In the same store I also got a spiffing navy jumper with a blue diamond design over it's front. Ben Sherman, reduced from £30 to £15. In fact, after purchasing it, I realised it reminded me a lot of a waistcoat that came with the suit I hired for my High School formal. The occasion when you all go out, at the end of your last, or second last, school year and hire a suit, dressing like move stars for a night. Most people getting the smart black tuxedos which I did indeed get but me, having to be different, decided for an additional diamond pattern coloured waistcoat. Maybe the jumper wasn't such a great buy after all - I seem to remember that waistcoat made me look like one of those comedy snooker players. All I needed was a large pair of square spectacles. It certainly did not have much of an effect on the night as I failed to get a dance for the duration of the formal but then I never got a dance at those High School functions anyway (violins please!). In retrospect maybe that's why I wore the waistcoat anyway, because I knew I had no chance. The only vague chance I had that night was with a bottle of MD 20/20, lime flavour, and that was shared between four of us.
Ka managed to buy a couple of pair of shoes in the sale too, surprise surprise. Soon we'll be needing a Carrie Bradshaw wardrobe for the amount of shoes she has. As I sit at my computer writing this blog the shoes are stacked in the open wardrobe above me, the large shelf trembling with the shoe strain. Ka will say the same about me though with books.
I've just finished 'The Moon's a Balloon' the late, great David Niven's autobiography, written around thirty eight years ago. My Dad lent me it to read just before Christmas as I had always been curious about this book which had lasted for so long at the top of my Mum and Dad's living room unit. Niven was an actor through the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties and played opposite many of the old greats including Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn and the like. One of the old school before I was even born. What a life Niven led. Now he did have plenty to write about. I wonder if he ever had the fashion sense to get a diamond pattern waistcoat?
There's always a slight influx of biographies and/or autobiographies at Christmas. This year Ka got me the Chris Evans book and Auntie Tricia got me the Jack Dee autobiography. Jack Dee I've always liked because of his great dry sense of humour and his fantastic smile. A few years back I would not have even considered reading a autobiography by Chris Evans but ever since he took on the evening job at Radio 2 he's got me through many a late night Tuesday shift with his banter. Of course that'll be no more now that he's taken Wogan's show on in the mornings so I'll just have to hope they'll have a half decent replacement for the evening shift. Either that or I switch on the old iPod.
My Chrimbo present from Ka this year was a belter. A beautiful deep purple iPod Nano. There's no Deep Purple on it yet but maybe I'll look into remedying that. It's both funky and functional with stunning graphics to help you navigate through your music library. The library I've just started to build up in the past week. Fantastic. I'm just off to put more tunes on it.