Today my lunchbreak was about dresses for weddings. Dresses to wear to weddings, to be precise, as opposed to wedding dresses.

The wedding in question is to be held on the 27th of February in the backyard of a bach at Cooks Beach (which is here).

It’s my cousin Stu’s second wedding (those of you with memories like elephants may remember me talking about him before – he and his now ex-wife couldn’t agree on where was home – he wanted it to be here in New Zealand, she wanted it to be there in England, they couldn’t agree so they got divorced) and it differs in many ways from his first, which the Other Harf and I also attended as we just happened to be living in the UK at the time.

How different? Well, It’s going to be hot, summer, in New Zealand, with more than four members of his family attending (last estimate: 30 members).

So the dress. I went into boutiques manned by bony, over-coiffured, overtanned middle-aged women half my size (there’s a few of these boutiques in Whangarei, for some unknown reason) – I found some beautiful, gorgeous dresses, but oh! How they had lovely prices to match! *puts dress back on rack*

I went to Farmers (zilch!).

I went to Himalayan Trading Post (all out of my size, should of nabbed that lovely black and white dress when I saw it).

I went in Wild Poppies, a cute and reasonably reasonable dress shop in the Strand Arcade. Tried on several dresses, most of which flattered some parts of my body and exposed others in a tragically unsuitable way for a 40 year old “woman”. Of course, as I usually do when trying on dresses I managed to get into them no problem at all but it was an all-out, sweaty, swearing contortion act to get the frickin’ things off (it’s those “Kiwi girl” shoulders versus relatively narrow underbust ratio that gets me everytime).

Then I just happened to nip into a shop on the way back to work, fed up, frustrated and a tiny bit sweaty. It’s a shop I don’t normally go to. I browsed, I meandered, I picked dresses up and hummed and hah’d.

And there it was. Perfect. Pretty, cool, summery, flattering, feminine, wedding-y.

But most importantly? Half price on sale!

Bingo!