Hold back the river...

I'm off to Henley Regatta this afternoon (under duress, as I am more a jeans and boots girl rather than frock and hat) so being super-duper organised, I started getting ready yesterday afternoon.  Little bit extreme, I hear you say.  How bad can she look to need 24 hours to prepare?  Well let me tell you.  

When you get to the ripe old age of 53, it is no longer enough to give your face a swipe with a wet flannel and hope that your dress will still fit. This particular assumption has caught me out many times before, so I laid out the dress which I thought might be ok, and tried on the whole outfit, hat and all.  What spoilt the overall picture was the fact that I had just returned from the patch of dirt to check up on my vegetables (the allotment has been renamed Death Row for obvious reasons) and I couldn't really be bothered to get completely changed.  The vision greeting me was one which should never see the light of day.  Jeans undone and pushed down to knee level (halted in their tracks by highlighter pink wellies), dress on but not zipped up, hat perched on top of frizzy hair like a blackbird on an unruly hedge, and clutch bag tucked under arm.  

Luckily, I am fairly forward thinking, and could see that this would be fine for Regatta. But what about the shoes? Slipping the wellies off, revealing slightly grubby socks covered with tiny schnauzer faces, I then tried on my black kitten heels (suitable but probably too wintery and slightly too tight with the socks still on) and then my black sandals. What swung it was that if I wore the sandals, then I'd have to do a full pedicure on my trotters. Blow that, life's too short, so kitten heels it was. 

So that was the outfit sorted.  All I'll need to do later today when I escape from Binland is slip into my girl clothes, slap on some lippy and teeter out to the car.  

Talking of cars, the husband has decided to drive today.  This is a job which normally falls on my shoulders, so when he asked me whether he could drink with the pills he is taking, thinking on my feet, I told him that alcohol of any sort was strictly forbidden. This is not true, but I wasn't going to miss out on the chance of getting squiffy with Miss R on a Friday afternoon.  

After the husband's head injury on Wednesday, he's removed the bandage hat, so there's less scope for mickey taking and general insults.  It's a shame, because I haven't laughed that much since he grew a moustache for Movember a couple of years ago.  

So I now get to see the nine stitches.  Sorry, that's NINE STITCHES as he says. Talk about milking it.  He looks like he's been bare knuckle fighting he's that battered.  This is going to be a very good look later this afternoon at Henley Regatta in his blazer and flannels, and I would imagine that he will be mistaken for a security guard (not a very good one looking at his injuries) several times.

But he's still the gorgeous boy I fell in love with all those years ago.

Notwithstanding the bald patch, the scar, the bruising and the stitches...