Day off and a new old jacket

Queen's birthday weekend here in Oz which means Monday public holiday and a general sense of low-key relaxation with no particular family rituals, gift giving or urge to travel that some of the other public hols bring with them. I am tooling around at home. Mended a jacket, lovely old jacket that I've had for years. Lent it to some gay boys once in Adelaide and lost it for a few years but they grew apart, one of them got married, and I got my jacket back. Had a big soft plush black and shiny fur collar when I first got it, and I was always a bit confused about how it made me feel. On the one hand the whole jacket seemed so 1940's so regal, so elegant, on the other hand I'm not a fan of the fur trade where fur is used simply for adornment, cruel, unneccessary killing etc (although kind of think it makes sense if living somewhere cold and eating animals anyway, and killing them with respect and gravitas and gratefulness, in a subsistance, sustainable kind of way - but that aint exactly how fur gets done for the western rag trade), and even though the collar bunny had been long dead, wearing it in effect was glorifying the look and adding to a general climate of fur=groovy, which I wasn't so sure I wanted to do. Plus if I'm honest I suppose there was a lingering sense of dread that I would find myself at dinner next to an animal cruelty activist who would stand up and point at me between courses saying in a shushed whisper 'can you see what she's wearing??' and me and dead bunny would find outrselves social ostracised,left alone with the tiramisu, the horrified stares of other restaurant goers and the bill.

So... just a couple of weeks ago the housemates and I had a fairly major non-seasonally-specific clean, and went through clothes, knick knacks, books etc (more on this later- it was fun, and I have photos) and so in a moment of decisiveness I grabbed the stitch unpicker and decoupled jacket from collar (there was an ordinary collar underneath fur) and sent the collar to the local second hand clothes shop and the jacket into the wardrobe. Collar is now someone else's ethical problem! Jacket was then my mending problem, as it's life as a glamorous nightclub accessory had resulted in a little tear up the side. Some careful, slightly random, made-up darning later (there was also a bare unravelled patch that I kind of had to weave back into being a fabric) this morning and viola! I have a new old jacklet for these rainy Sydney wintery days. Am feeling very industrious, thrifty and re-useful, as passsed by many nice (but lets be honest fairly shittily made and entirely synthetic so liable to melt near open flames) jackets earlier in the week and didn't buy them. I'm all for 'classics' from any era that stay cool in their own right irrespective of any fashion tide. as a result I will not be buying a royal blue pinnafore with giant buttons on the boobs, or a 2007 trench coat anytime soon (apologies for those in other fashion timezones, this is a particularly east coast australian phenomenon I imagine).