And then three came along at once

First up: I promise this will be the last post I will write about THAT pink skirt. Or “That Stupid Freaking Skirt”, as Terry now calls it.

You see, as it turns out, pink skirts are a lot like buses. You wait forever, and then three come along at once, but they’re all different sizes, and you know you can’t keep ALL of them, so… I’m getting ahead of myself.

One of these skirts is the original, faulty skirt, may it Rest In Peace.

(Yes, I know you can’t see the damage in this photo, so you’re probably thinking I just made the whole thing up or something, but trust me, it’s there – it just doesn’t show up well in photos.)

Another one is the replacement I found on the Topshop website not long after writing my LAST post about That Stupid Freaking Skirt.

Actually, it was Terry who found the replacement. I was on the phone with my mum at the time, going through a verbal re-enactment of What Happened With the Dry Cleaner and What Might Possibly Happen Now and also Should I Maybe Try to Buy the Purple Version of the Pink Skirt Too? (As it was my mum who had taken the skirt to the cleaners – ha! – and gone to collect it and the doomed bedspread, it was her who they’d been communicating with, so she had become a lot more involved in the saga than she’d ever wanted to…) Sick to death of hearing the words “pink” and “skirt” being repeated over and over again, Terry calmly opened up the Topshop website, had a look at the page with the skirt, and…

“You DO know you could just buy this stupid skirt from their website, don’t you?” he asked, pointing to the screen.

Sure enough, one of the skirts had come back into stock. Just one. And it was one size smaller than mine was.

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Reader, I bought it. Or, actually, Terry did, because after a hasty conversation with my long-suffering mother, (Who had carefully examined the body of the existing skirt, and could now chose it as her specialist subject on Mastermind, if she wanted) she confirmed that she thought she could probably alter the smaller size to fit. “BUY! BUY!” I shouted at Terry, hysterically, in the manner of one of those people who work in the stock exchange. Then I got a bit carried away and started shouting, “Now sell! SELL!” And that’s why my career in the stock exchange never took off, I guess.

So, the One Size Smaller Skirt was ordered. Then the next day, Topshop’s customer service department finally replied to my email and said they’d managed to track down a replacement for me. There was just one problem:

It was one size LARGER than mine was.

Ah.

As it turns out, my size was completely sold out everywhere, which left me with the burning question: should I go one size larger or one size smaller? Which would be easiest to alter?

“Smaller!” said Terry.

“Larger!” said Rubin.

“Get them both, and we’ll work it out,” said my mum.

So that’s what I did. Obviously I won’t be keeping them all: I mean, I’m not THAT crazy. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that the larger size was going to be the easiest of the two to alter, so the other two will be returned to Topshop, and I’ll be left with just the one skirt. To Rule Them All.

(This could be a question on a maths paper, couldn’t it? “If you have three pink skirts, but one gets ruined and two get returned, how stupid does Amber have to be to keep buying more skirts?”)

(The answer to the question is 142, by the way.)

(That’s why my career as a mathematician didn’t work out, either.)

And so ends the saga of the Topshop skirt, THANK GOD. And thank Topshop, obviously: I’m very, very grateful to them for coming to my help and finding me a replacement skirt – I know they don’t generally like to ship items from their stores, so thanks also to the kind person who wrapped mine up and popped it in the mail for me. Needless to say, I promise to guard it with my life, and not wash, wear, or do ANYTHING which might risk its beauty.

Um, the blue/purple one will be here on Tuesday. Don’t tell Terry.

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