"Poor Sharon's Skirt"

I own a skirt.

At the moment, it's officially just the one.

I've been going through my stuff lately and slowly identifying things that are just taking up space in my home which should be released into the wild in the hope that someone else actually uses them.

It's kind of connected to the yurt thing I was talking about on my other blog - I have too much crap I don't need and I don't use, so I'm trying to think about what I would actually take with me if I had to downscale to a yurt, and then asking myself very seriously whether anything I wouldn't take with me is worth keeping at all.

Recently, two of my skirts bit the dust.  I've been keeping them because I feel I should own skirts.  I haven't been wearing them because they don't meet my skirtage needs.

I wear pants, most of the time.  Actually, jeans.  I'm a denim girl.

What I require from an item of clothing is a very specific (and apparently highly unfashionable) list:

• Hard wearing
• Fit to move around and do stuff
• Reasonably modest (as in, I don't like showing too much skin on legs, shoulders or torso)
• Likely to avoid falling down/riding up/exposing underwear
• With pockets

I don't necessarily need pockets for shirts and blouses, but pants and skirts need pockets.

So, what I want from a skirt is something sturdy, below the knee, likely to keep my underwear safely under my outerwear at all times, and equipped with storage options.

I currently have one skirt that matches that criteria, so I currently have one skirt.  The other skirts failed on the "hard wearing" or "has pockets" front, so I never wore them.  After several years of never wearing them, I have decided to set them free.

I would like to replace them with skirts I actually would wear, but I can't find any in the shops.  They're all either too flimsy for my liking or too short.  I just want a good, serviceable denim or cotton skirt (with pockets) that goes past my knees.  Apparently I'm asking for too much.

As for the remaining skirt, I've decided I really should try to wear it occasionally - if for no other reason that I'm sick of hearing surprised cries of "you're wearing a skirt!" every time I do wear it.

Part of the reason I rarely wear skirts is the fact that I rarely find a skirt I actually want to wear.  The biggest part of the reason is the fact that I hate having my clothing pointed out to me as if I'm doing something unspeakably radical just because I'm dressed "like a girl" for a change.

Yes, I'm wearing a skirt.  I'm allowed to do that.  I understand women fought for several decades in the middle of the last century to give us the freedom to wear whatever the hell we want.  I sincerely hope that one day men will be able to earn the same right.

I wore my skirt to work last week and managed to be in the building for all of five minutes before someone decided to point it out to me.  This prompted a friend of mine to lament "poor Sharon's skirt!"

Poor Sharon's skirt, indeed.