Primary

Some days, I just want to dress like a child – all brightly coloured plastic accessories and playful prints. I know edgy is all the rage and shit, but primary colours make me happier to leave the house in the mornings.

Peplum dress: Flea market. Bag: Longchamp. Heels: U.R.S

Sterling silver ring: Meteropolitan Museum of Art. Rhino pendant: Present.

Congenial nature: Inherited.

This flea market dress from Melbourne reminded me of a Barbie doll I saw once, with cute little coloured triangles all over her dress. Except that mine is all sparkly hairdressers.

I know it’s camp, but I don’t care. My colleagues give me lots of flak for dressing the way I do – sometimes I know they’re just waiting to see what I come in so they can laugh at it (READ: Flowery Doc Martens or leopard print tights).

I could give a flying rat’s ass. (I’ve always wondered about this mixing of metaphors. I mean, under what circumstances exactly would a rat’s bell end fly?)

My dress sense is whimsical, to put it politely, but I don’t care because at the end of the day, I only dress for me, in the cost bracket that I can afford and in a way that makes me comfortable.

I don’t like wearing what’s trendy just for the sake of it – I mean, hello Prada, Perspex shoes, stripper much? – and if that makes people feel I’m weird, then to quote my friendly neighbourhood Nobel laureate Richard Feynman: Why do you care what other people think?

Had lunch with Priya today and though she refused to let me take a photo of her face (I don’t understand why, this girl’s got the sparkliest eyes you’ve ever seen – yes damn you, spell check, “sparkliest” is a word!), how cute is her peacock feather fascinator-cum-headband?

For awhile now, I’ve been colouring with a fantastic 75-colour pencil set from The D, but a newly acquired colouring book inspired me to purchase even more colouring implements – pens and a box of Crayola crayons.

I haven’t used Crayolas since I was six or seven but just cracking open the box brought memories flooding back.

The scent of the cardboard and wax brought to mind juicily-coloured drawings and scribblings and the aroma, peculiar to this brand, reminded me of many things: colouring on the glass-topped coffee table when I was a child, snatching at my favourite shade in Kindergarten back when we didn’t get “sharing”, the smell of an old, grey Saab I used to get ferried around in many years later.

They say olfactory memories are the most deeply embedded and you can easily see how that’s true – when I showed Priya my new box of Crayola, the first thing she did was inhale it deeply.