Dear Diary, I bought a thermal vest in June

(and everyone in my house is sick)

(This newsletter contains affiliate links, but they’re to thermal vests, so you’re probably not going to want to click on them anyway…)

A thermal vest. In June. JUNE.

It’s for the Taylor Swift concert, obviously, because pretty much everything I’ve bought lately has been for the Taylor Swift concert.

The sequin skirt that looked so cute with the denim jacket I’d planned to wear it with, and so totally frumptastic with the huge puffer coat I’d actually have to wear it with. The sequin leggings that were supposed to be my cold weather backup plan, but which turned out to be such a bad fit they were more like sequined Edwardian bloomers. (Did the Edwardians wear bloomers? Not like this they didn’t…) The Taylor Swift t-shirt that no one will see because of all the freaking layers I’ll have to wear on top of it…

And, of course, a thermal vest. (By which I mean one of these, and not one of these, for the benefit of those on you in the US, who’re thinking that might look quite nice, really…) Because here’s the forecast for this weekend:

7 - 13 degrees on Saturday, folks! Which basically translates as “you might see the giddy heights of 13ºC, but you’ll definitely see 7ºC — especially once the sun goes down. And that’s without taking that windchill into account!”¹

Seriously, when I tell you we literally had temperatures similar to this back in December — DECEMBER — I’m not joking. Winter never really left us here. There are kids in Scotland who think “summer” is just made up, because they’ve only ever seen it in the movies. Scurvy is making a comeback. SCURVY.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to wear that top I bought for the concert,” my mum texted me on Wednesday afternoon. “Because my thermal vest will show under it.” And, honestly, “my thermal vest might show” wasn’t a sartorial issue I really expected to encounter when I was putting my Eras Tour outfit together, but, later that afternoon I threw my winter coat on to go and collect Max from his after school club, and by the time we got home I was actually shaking from the cold, because I didn’t have enough layers on under the coat.

FML, seriously.

So I bought the vest, and will be wearing it with multiple layers over the top — probably including a puffer coat, because it’s going to be after 11pm by the time the concert ends on Saturday, and that 7ºC will feel like much less that that once you factor in the wind chill. (And also because I’m an absolute princess about the cold, not even joking. The slightest whiff of a chill in the air and I cannot cope…)

I’m not going to lie, I’m a little bit disappointed. I’m not a BIG bit disappointed, obviously, because worse things happen, lucky to be going at all, etc, etc. It’s just that every time I pictured this concert, I pictured sunshine and sequins, and me looking like someone attending a pop concert in June, rather than someone who got lost on the way back from the school run last December, and has been wandering around in her Big Coat ever since. And while I know it doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things, and no one will look twice at me and what I’m wearing anyway, the fact is, I’m a bored mum who wears leggings every day, and I was looking forward to having an excuse to wear something a bit extra for once, rather than just wearing the same thing I always wear in the winter. You know?

(Also, I’m really jealous of all the people I keep seeing on my Eras Tour Facebook group who’re busy bedazzling bodysuits and sewing sequins onto shorts, because how come they can wear whatever they want and not feel the cold, but I have to dress like I’m on an Arctic expedition all the time, or I want to cry?)

Anyway.

With all of that said, I wasn’t just trying to make myself seem more reasonable when I said I was lucky to be going to this concert at all: I really do think that — partly because of how difficult it was to get tickets for it, but also because our entire household has been stricken with the lurgy this week.

Max and I fell first, over the weekend. This seemed to be just our regularly-scheduled cold/random bug, though (We’ve both been catching colds approximately every two weeks since January, as have quite a few people we know. My totally non-scientific theory is that we never made it past winter flu season here, because we never made it past WINTER…) so I wasn’t too worried, even when I had to spend most of Monday napping, because I felt so rough.

“Plenty of time to recover from this by Saturday,” I thought, popping another throat lozenge. “I’ll be fighting fit by then, for sure!”

Sure enough, by Wednesday, I was feeling well enough to start wearing makeup again… so naturally that was when Terry started throwing up, and shaking violently with the cold.

Awesome.

Also, my book is here…

We still don’t know if what he had was just a much worse version of whatever it is Max and I have had, or if it was something completely different, but, whatever it was, it completely wiped him out — and this is a man who claimed to feel “fine” when his kidneys failed, so when he fails to get out of bed one day, you know he’s feeling bad.

Fortunately, though, he was back to normal by the next afternoon, so it looks like whatever it was, it was just one of those 24 hour things. Now, however, Max and I get to play the super-fun game of “will we get it too, now?” and its even less fun sequel, “will it stop me going to the concert?”

I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do with myself next week, once this freaking concert stops being my entire personality. What do normal people do when they’re not making friendship bracelets and panic-buying sequined clothing from Vinted?

And, more importantly: do I freeze in my sequins or look like I got lost in my big coat?

Find out next week…

1. Edinburgh is a notoriously cold city, and Murrayfield Stadium, where the concert is being held, is basically the epicentre of The Cold.