Raining cats and dogs

It’s been a wet start to the year. I can’t recall a wetter January. I thought it might have been the wettest on record, but the Met Office assures me that it was not. It was, apparently, wetter than average – but not record-breaking and not worth constantly moaning about.

When I was about seventeen, my estranged dad gave me £200 to learn to drive. It was one of the very few things he ever gave me. I first met him when I was nine; he turned up on our doorstep, his face obscured by a mound of toys. I suppose when you don’t know your daughter or what she likes, it’s best to be on the safe side and buy everything. There would be a few more sporadic monetary displays of affection to come, but this one was an important one, and I fucked it. I was young and foolish and didn’t realise that learning to drive would have been such a brilliant thing to do. Instead, I used the money to fund my Monday nights at the local nightclub and top up my supply of nice tops and jeans.

I was thinking about this big life regret the other day as I cycled my daughters to nursery in the pissing rain, again. If I scan through the memories of my adult life, I can find hundreds of reasons why I didn’t learn to drive at various points. Right now, I can’t get a bloody test. I have spent hours on the government website, even logging on at 6am on a Monday (when new tests are released), joining the virtual queue only to be told three seconds later that all tests have gone. I’ve even bought a test in Kent to swap using an app that was supposed to find me a test nearer to home, but it didn’t. The government has introduced a new policy that only lets you change your test twice, so hopefully that might change things.

As it is, spending six weeks cycling in the rain is no party, which is why I ended up buying new clothes. In Next, of all places. I was picking up some socks for my daughters and walked past a fluorescent pink jumper. It was so colourful: a pink wafer nestled between a few rich teas. I then walked past a crisp white shirt with a bib collar. I wanted them both right there and then, but I waited until I got home to avoid a potential impulse buy. The next day I still wanted them, so I got them. They both make me happy. The jumper is only 3% wool and the rest polyester, which is bad and probably makes me a terrible sustainable eco blogger – but it’s so bright and cheerful.

In other news, Rob and I went out for dinner twice recently. I dug out some clothes I haven’t worn in a long time, put some make-up on and – huzzah – not a drowned rat in sight.

Feature image: blouse, Next; jeans, Sezane; shoes, ASOS.