I have a confession…I am 54, fat, vertically challenged and cannot bring myself to buy clothes. It’s not that I don’t want to, but more that I can’t face the disappointment everytime I struggle into something knowing full well that I will look awful in it and have to put it reluctantly back on the rack. What clothes I  do possess are beginning to look  just a bit tatty and faded and I really am in desperate need of a new wardrobe before I virtually end up with nothing to wear!

If you meet the “now” me you may find it hard to believe that until my 30’s I was a tiny little thing and definitely fitted into the petite catagory and, apart from having to take everything up, I could pretty much wear anything.

Even the tiniest of bikinins!

I was a size 8 and loved clothes shopping especially as I lived a few tube stops away from Kensington High Street and Oxford Street. Top Shop, French Connection and Laura Ashley were my favourite shops as was Marks and Spencers but I never admitted to that…far too uncool!

My mum’s side of the family were all “big” people. I always thought of them as “Weebles”  which were little plastic characters from the 70’s who wobbled but never fell down. My nan and great aunts were so round that if you pushed them over then they would just bounce back up again!

I’ve definitely inherited my mother’s genes. Even as a young girl I was blessed with her thick knees. Skinny legs and fat knees..not the best of looks! Gaining weight was inevitable and by my 40’s I had indeed turned into a Weeble and a Weeble I have remained to this day apart from a blip when I lost 4st. Needless to say the blip didn’t last long.

Thinking body shape, I class myself as an apple. Not a neat little apple like a Braeburn, but of the lumpy bumpy giant cooking variety. If I were to go by height alone  I should be shopping in the petite departments but as I am a size 18, almost a 20 there is nothing available that will fit . Apparently if you are petite then of course you must be short and slim. Well, sorry, but that is so not always the case! Clothes look lovely on the rail, but as I struggle into them I know that I will look like a sack of potatoes and flee from the changing rooms as fast as my short fat legs will carry me.

Those fat knees I was blessed with as a child remain and the fatness has spread downwards so that you can’t tell if I actually have ankles. Even my feet are fat. They actually look like rubber gloves that have been blown up!!

Buying shoes are a nightmare. Today I tried on a pair that I saw a granny at the school gate wearing. They even had velcro fastenings. I could have cried! What I really want to wear are beautiful feminine shoes or fabulous boots. Sadly they are a no no also as I can’t find a pair that fit tree trunk ankles and calves!

Choosing my wedding dress should have been an exciting part of planning our wedding. I hated every moment of it. In the end I made do with a dress that I didn’t love. I had to have it altered and having to strip off and bare almost all to the dressmaker nearly had me in tears.

This something like the dress I would love to have been able to wear on our wedding day.

But I ended up being trussed up like this!

I really need somebody to take me by the hand and help me find clothes that work for me. Clothes that suit my frame and make me feel good about myself and stop being negative about everything I pick off the rails and say that I’ll just look awful in. I want to look great and not the dowdy old before my time person I’m turning into. My mother gives me parcels of her cast offs and she is 78 ! Thanks mum, appreciate the gesture, but I’m really not ready for elasticated beige crimplene trousers just yet!

By the way, I don’t have photos taken of me below my shoulders, but just for you here is a rare one of me now. I’m the one on the left next to my beautiful Twitter friends on our girlie weekend away.