On 3 January I took out pairs of shorts and carried them downstairs to the entranceway planning to take them to the tailors to get taken in. On the same day I put on shorts for the first time in the summer, it was so warm in the house and my long black pants on my legs felt scratchy. I still had some drawstring shorts that I could use even though for the most part the waists were too large.
To advance the change in my clothing, two days later I took the bag full of shorts planning to head to Pyrmont in the bus but ended up going by car.
I’d already phoned ahead to confirm that the tailor would be open. Once there I told him what I wanted done then tried on each pair of shorts so that he could mark with a pin where to take them in. Two pairs were too large for adjustment so I put them aside, but he took six pairs to do as well as one pair of drawstring shorts which needed new elastic. One pair of shorts also needed the crotch patched, and it all came to $270 (as long as I paid cash) so I gave him $70 promising to bring the rest with me when I picked them up. He asked me to come back on the 14th. I left the store with the rejects and went back to the car in Woolworths, buying laundry liquid while there.
I’d asked the tailor about fixing my slippers, which had become too loose with certain socks I’d just bought. In fact with all of my socks I have to use my finger to slip the slippers back on my feet as I’m walking upstairs though it doesn’t happen so often when coming down to the ground floor (though on occasion it does, and one threatens to come off a foot). The tailor averred that you need a special machine and that I’d need to go to a shoe repair shop, pointing me to a place in Pyrmont. I said I was going to Broadway Shopping Centre so took the slippers with me when I left – he had to run to the door holding them as I’d left them on the bench inside – and showed them to the man at Mr Minit when I got to Ultimo. He consulted with his colleague at the back of the kiosk but was unable to do the work so I picked up white elastic and needles in Coles while getting groceries.
Once home I looked for thread but my brown spool (which I’d thought was in a drawer in the hall cupboard) was missing so I went down to the IGA on Botany Road and bought some. At home I tried to sew the elastic onto the slippers but needed a thimble so went out again and again went to IGA. Once home I unsuccessfully stitched elastic to a slipper, found it was too loose, then cut it off and tried again. The job was perfect, meaning I had slippers I could comfortably use on stairs.
I started a new sartorial avenue on 21 January when I wore an old T-shirt from Japan bought at the time I was sick with a mental illness. I don’t remember precisely when the purchase happened, of course, time is like that it obscures ephemeral events like when you buy a piece of clothing or when you take a drive in the suburbs on account of mere recreation. Which store sold it to me? What road did I take? None of that detail survived the stretch of years, months, weeks, days, minutes, but the memory of that era of my long and eventful life persists in the dream-world even in waking hours, reminding me of how frail a life is.
Wearing T-shirts is not always a trivial matter as when you’re overweight you can easily look ridiculous and nobody voluntarily wants that sort of outcome from dressing in the morning. I’d lost 40kg so it was possible to wear one without looking like a tomato. Another advantage of T-shirts is that they don’t require ironing, the weather at this time being rather cool so it ended up being a toss-up between shorts or trousers. A T-shirt and shorts was unexceptional, so on the day in question I ventured to dare the combination. I had a number of outdoor errands to run, and had planned to go to Pyrmont to visit the tailor’s in the morning.
I don’t know why the tailor hadn’t thought of repairing the slippers in this way and that it took an amateur to find an elegant solution. How things turn out!
Things also turned out well on 13 January when I put on size-32 jeans I’d washed the night before (along with three other pairs of pants last worn in the 90s). To don them I had to make new holes in a black belt I’d had for God-knows how long, this task achieved with mum’s hole-punch kept in my desk drawer for just such emergencies.
Here’s a photo of me with my jeans on. On the same day I picked up my shorts and brought ‘em home, then the next morning to wear one I clipped the tongue of an old black belt after putting two holes in it to fit my waist.
While driving home from the garage in Arncliffe where I buy petrol I tore the colourful N Michoutouchkine shirt that I’d inherited from dad. Near the shoulders at the back it’d become very thin from wear and washing so I cut off the buttons (to reuse) and threw it in the bin. I might’ve taken it to be repaired but it was so frail that I thought money’d be wasted.
In order not to waste clothes I started regularly wearing T-shirts in the third full week of January. I cannot remember the last time I used T-shirts. I’d kept a dozen or so T-shirts unused in a drawer for over a decade, preferring in the intervening years to wear button-up shirts. Now, I was able to send messages – many T-shirts have ornate designs or words printed on them – while accommodating my shrunken torso.
On the morning of 24 January I put three white T-shirts in a bucket with water and some detergent product (which was in a container in my cupboard) to soak overnight. I was hoping to remove the dark stains that’d developed on the cloth over the years. Years of neglect! Would the shirts come out white and shiny, like they do on the TV ads? I no longer looked like a walking egg when I wore a T-shirt, merely a curiosity, but at least I was putting off spending money on new clothes. I went one step further the next day because the cleaning product didn’t work, and visited the supermarket to buy bleach. I’d looked up a recipe for cleaning online and that evening while the awards ceremony was on the TV I went to the laundry and put water in a bucket. Adding a couple of splashes of bleach, with gloves on my hands (also bought that morning) I mixed the contents up and left it to soak. I did all three T-shirts this way and the next morning early put ‘em in the machine to wash.
The weather promised to be fine so I envisaged hanging ‘em out on the line (see photo below) which happened later that morning before I ate lunch. It was an overcast day but the weather was to be dry, so I took the opportunity to wash clothes.
It’s more fun to dry ‘em this way as no energy’s used. On the last day of January I took an old suit to the dry cleaner’s. I needed it washed because Ming’d started organising a wedding. The suit dates from the 1990s and is blue. The next day I put shoe polish on a brown belt. For the event I hadn’t yet decided which shirt to wear but reflected that I’d be able to find something decent in my wardrobe, the wedding on 22 February. I had my invitation. I also had suede shoes to wear.
I picked up the suit on 2 February and the next day darned a pair of shorts, using a small piece of fabric in my kitchen cupboard where I keep rags. To do the job I employed navy blue thread in order to make it easier to see what I was doing. I used four sections of thread so that I didn’t get myself tangled up with lengths that were overlong. The method turned out to be effective as it allowed me to secure the patch of cloth in place and use a maximum number of stitches. Three days later I laundered them successfully, noticing that the stitches didn’t disintegrate or pull out.
The day before Ming called me from town and asked me to come to help choose a suit for Omer, so at 10 past midday I got out the front door and 45 minutes later was walking up to them where they were having lunch in David Jones’ basement. When they’d finished we got in the lift and went upstairs to the sixth floor, resolving to make a decision. I’d pulled up Google search results but in the end we just tried several outlets and settled on Hugo Boss, who had an ornate black-on-black jacket and matching trousers (with a silk stripe up the side). We then ventured to the Strand Arcade looking for a red bowtie but in the end Omer wanted a blue one from the place he got the rest of his gear, so by just after 4pm I was on the train heading to Redfern, where I caught the bus home.
My job had mainly been to navigate and to hold Omer’s bags as well as leftovers from lunch. Also on the weekend I started darning an old sweater dating from the 80s that I couldn’t bear discarding but that needed care (see photo above). All up I attended to about 35 separate holes using black thread to blend in with the wool, some of which is scarlet.
Originally black and white I’d had it dyed at some point, and even with patched areas it still looked serviceable. On 8 February I put it away in a cupboard in preparation for cooler weather but the next day wore an old T-shirt of dad’s (see photo below) that was one of the ones I’d started wearing after losing weight, the advertised company a freight supplier, so living in Botany – where the railway goods line winds its way across the landscape, terminating streets and necessitating the use of bridges – seemed right.
I’d come full circle. It was at the time of the Sydney Olympics (celebrated on the T) that I’d had my breakdown, when everything had been lost apart from life itself. In the end I lost my family, my job, my house, my car, my sanity, my freedom, and it took me a good number of years to get them back. My life would never be the same and when I emerged on the other side of the ocean of pain and suffering I was able to wear clothes that for over a decade had been too small to fit.
Because I throw nothing away I had “new” things to wear such as the long pants I put on on the morning of 11 March. First time to wear long pants for the year. The night before I’d had two blankets on my bed and on 1 April I wore a long-sleeved shirt then the next day put on a jumper for the first time it was quite chilly and in only a day’s time daylight saving would end. I put on pyjamas for the first time in the first week of May, it wasn’t really cold but I was being conservative as usual, then on 28 June I threw out the slippers I’d fixed having noticed water getting in while watering the plants out on the deck.
I’d bought a whole bunch of slippers for a dinner party at my place at the beginning of March, so in late June when I needed new slippers I just had a look through what was already in my house, choosing a black pair which were large enough. The new slippers functioned well I found the next morning when I was getting coffee to drink. During the night I’d dreamt again about working in Tokyo, this time I’d come up with a new idea for application reports, my preference being for a combination of application report and specification sheet. At the end of the dream Russians were searching the company for explosives, so when I woke up at around 5am (late for me) I was not sad to leave the dreamscape.
I’d gotten used to slippers in Japan, because of an innate sense of order Japanese people have no problem being asked to put on slippers if they visit someone’s house, it’s even normal to put down a pair of slippers specifically to wear into a toilet for visits there.
I have a regime where shoes and slippers can be used on the ground floor but when people visit (apart from the cleaners) I ask them to put on slippers. For the first floor and the second floor slippers are used but the exception to this is my bedroom where it’s socks only. This regime can have complexity for example when I go out but forget that I’ve not taken my medicine for the morning meaning I have to take off my shoes, go upstairs, then take off the slippers to go into the bathroom. I then have to put the slippers back on, go downstairs, and put on my shoes again in preparation for going outside. Despite this I persist in using slippers, it normally only takes a moment to change footwear and I have fairly clean floors as a result.
Over winter I’d started to put on weight and this troubled me but even so I still was able to use the trousers I’d had taken in at the tailor’s. It was only a few kilos but I am naturally conservative so even one kilo bothers me and I was careful to maintain my regimen of meals. By this time I’d altered it because I was getting hungry at the middle of the day and I now ate a small breakfast when I got up (bread with a spread, say Vegemite or peanut butter), then a full meal at around 9am, a medium-sized meal at around lunchtime, and some cheese at about 4pm. In the intervening hours I drank tea which usually worked especially black tea with milk. My weight wasn’t becoming a problem but wear and tear of clothes had meant that in the cold months I’d thrown out a few shirts which’d become too ragged to repair in a cost-effective manner and though I’d promised myself to visit an op-shop, at the end of June I still hadn’t taken the necessary step of driving, say, to Waverley. I’d bought shirts at Vinnies there on one earlier occasion so I kind of had the shop as a preferred supplier. You could contemplate making a T-shirt with the Vinnies logo and a slogan such as “Preferred supplier to the artist” or something along those lines.
In late August I took a pair of trousers to the tailor’s in Pyrmont when I was out picking up a book that’d been repaired. The conservator’s premises is in Chatswood and I drove back over the bridge to get to my old stamping ground, parking under Woolies. I popped my head in at the barber’s then made my way to the doctor’s clinic when the barber said she was busy. At the GP’s I waited for my second booster, which was Pfizer. I did shopping after making the appointment and before sitting down in the waiting room. Once I had been released – they get you to hang around for 15 minutes to monitor for adverse reactions – I walked back to the barber’s and got a haircut, then jumped in the car and sped home down Botany Road.
At the end of the second full week of September I sacrificed safety for comfort when I abandoned wearing a cardigan during the day. In the end I dropped the cardy off at the dry cleaners and picked it up after having it cleaned on the 22nd of the month. While it was still cool due to cloud cover I didn’t need too much on, so the change reminded me of the new season.
In the second half of the year I was very busy making art and with the art group so didn’t record all clothing events, which accounts for the lack of detail from September to December. The major thing that happened was that I gained 15 kilos after eating sweets left over from a party, so had to put aside some trousers and shorts (once summer arrived). I didn’t buy any new clothes or shoes but at the beginning of 2023 I changed the slipper regime in my house after my friend Ming arrived to stay for a while.
Under the new regime slippers are only worn on the ground floor, and upstairs you just go with socks on. This vastly simplifies my life and is more logical, the space at the bottom of the stairs acting like a “genkan”, which is what the Japanese call the reception area at the front door where visitors are asked (required) to remove their street shoes.
In summer I was still wearing T-shirts or button-up shirts on different days not having bought any new ones for many years and just using shirts out of my old supply. The weather was warmish at times but often cold despite the season and on many days I wore long trousers.
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