I realised this week that I needed to replace my jeans. It’s not a big deal; they’re over-the-counter consumables, reasonably cheap and I generally buy them at the same place. In fact, I’ve been wearing the same size for years so I could, conceivably, buy them on-line. However, Marilyn’s always keen for a wander through Harris Scarfe, giving her a chance to check out what they have on sale.
I knew what brand and what style I wanted and was delighted to see they had a special offer of 3 for $70. I had only planned to buy two pairs but another pair can only be a good thing. They came in three colours, too, which seemed to be serendipitous. I took a pair to try on and was surprised to find I was no longer the svelte 36 that I had been for years so had to settle for 38. Still, it’s only 2 inches and that’s nothing. The 36’s I had been wearing had obviously stretched with use and led me into a false sense of what I believed to be true.
When we got home, I started to take off all the labels and Marilyn suggested I try on each of the colours to be sure they were all the same before I de-labelled them. To my surprise, one pair didn’t fit. I checked and they all had a 38 label but, when I measured them, no two pairs were the same. Two pairs were close enough but one was clearly a 36. I was surprised. We hear a lot about the evils of the Chinese clothes manufacturing industry but, in all the years I’ve been buying clothes made there, I can’t recall ever encountering a problem like this. In any case, it was easily resolved.
By chance, a question on a quiz show we watched in the evening was ‘how many litres of water does it take to grow enough cotton to make a pair of jeans?’ The answer is 180. I don’t know what to make of this information but it seems clear that we shouldn’t be trying to grow cotton in Australia, the driest continent on Earth. And, maybe I shouldn’t have bought three pairs of jeans.
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