The (devil) Skirt.

Every so often Lea wakes up with the bizarre notion that she should wear a skirt. It's not something that happens very often, but when it does she prance's off to the shower happily, in high spirits at the mere thought of the prospects the day holds, a different sort of day. A skirt day.

Convined that she is going to look different and head-turningly good, Lea forgets the unnecessary details of the last time she rejected her good old cargo's, for the skirt. She forget's, for example, her decision to wear a knee length flowery skirt to one of the windiest beaches in New Zealand, and how at the time, she vowed never to wear a skirt again.

Once the idea has taken hold, Lea finds she can convince herself of anything. She is positive that the skirt is the medium through which she will unlock her previously hidden sassyness, ignoring the fact that drinking and skirt wearing, invariably leads to her staggering around like a man in a kilt, rather than anything that might loosely be defined as ladylike.

She forgets how, barely 3 months ago, her decision to explore Amsterdam in a crutchless, pale blue almost-mini-Skirt, had her faced with the conundrum of how one clambers out of a canal boat, up a 1m high wall, whilst retaining an ounce of grace.

On day's such as this, when siezed by youthful femininity and skirt-wearing-sentiments, Lea thinks back to her fore-mothers, and how they valiantly managed absolutely everything from housework to bicycle riding in their pleated masses of skirts. If they can do it, she thinks, so can I.

And thus she sets out, along that familiar road with YellowBetty, and soon comes to notice a gap in her logic. All at once, thrown into an anxious fit at the restiction of her legs and the social inappropriateness of riding a bicycle with an ever rising skirt, she remembers exactly why it is, she doesn't wear skirts. In fact, she gains a momentary insight, into why women fought so hard for the right to wear pants in the first place.

It only takes one day of trying to remember to keep her knees together, her feet down and her hands out of her pockets for Lea to banish the skirt to the back of the wardrobe once again.

There the skirt waits, patiently, until she forgets all over again...