Whether you wear Glassons or Gucci, sweat-shop, opp-shop or Top Shop, your clothes say something about you even if you wish they’d keep quiet about it. Winter clothing is even more problematic if, like me, your thermophysiology tends to the cold-blooded. 

Keeping warm while simultaneously maintaining a toehold on the ladder of sartorial acceptability can be very taxing. Unless, that is, you embrace a whole new fashion paradigm and become an afashionista.

Being an afashionista involves inhabiting a self-invented sartorial Never Never Land where clothes are worn purely for comfort, warmth and practicality and not a single item of clothing has to be smart, sexy, cool, classy or on-trend. It’s the very opposite of haute couture: the land where the natives wear sensible shoes and relaxed-fit clothing with elasticised waistbands in easy-care fabrics. Within this gap in the fashion spectrum high-waisted, pleat-fronted, stone-washed jeans are perfectly acceptable. So are Crocs worn with rugby socks and baggy grey track pants. In the land of Warm’n’Comfy bulky is the new svelte, ugly is the new beautiful. 

I’m feeling a lot better this week. Thanks for asking. The rain-induced bout of Seasonal Affective Disorder and Cabin Fever which I wrote so plaintively about last week has passed. 

Actually, the whole neighbourhood seems to have perked up: the small herd of supermarket trolleys grazing the curb outside my place suggests that local homesteading activities resumed as soon as the rain stopped falling.

This weekend's rainy threatened to cause another kind of upset by plunging the Light Nelson festival into darkness.