Losing Jewellery

I had a very confusing experience the other day. 

I decided to wander around Jervis Street to look for some earrings.  Not in jewellers shops, you understand, I’m not in the market for fancy and expensive stuff. 

No, I was doing the trawl around the clothes shops and looking at their jewellery stands.  I’m fond of dangly and colourful earrings that I can’t really carry off.  I buy them and put them in my earring box and try them on every now and then.  Then I decide that they make me look demented and put them back in the box. 
And go to work with empty ears, or just studs which I have deemed appropriate for the office.

Still, they’re nice to have.  Maybe some day I’ll wake up slim of jaw and long of neck with shiny glossy locks that just beg for swingy earrings.  Until then, I'll just admire them in their little box.

I didn’t buy anything.  All the earrings were either mental colours, or big chandeliers like Beyoncé can, and does, wear, or were clearly for clubbers.  Absolutely enormous crosses, that would have come down past my shoulders, stunted of neck as I am.   I’d chosen the wrong shops, obviously.

But during the course of my futile expedition I discovered something. 

Not only have I now reached the point where I don’t understand fashion or clothes, and when I wore almost everything in the shops the first time around, but jewellery has now completely bamboozled me as well.

Once again, I’m forced into a position where I sound a hundred years old.  But in my day (yes, that old chestnut “in my day” – did I ever think the day would come when I actually thought those words, not to say said them aloud?) jewellery comprised necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings.  You could go a bit mental, if you wanted to express yourself when I was a teenager, and wear a sort of shoelace instead of a chain with something on it around your neck, but you still knew it was a necklace.  Grunge's answer to jewellery.

For the first time in my life, yesterday I found myself picking things off the costume jewellery stands of high street stores, and asking myself what on earth it was that I was looking at.

I managed to get past the bars that go through pierced belly buttons, a few years ago, without having to publicise my ignorance.  I’ve never been in the market for a pierced belly button, for a couple of reasons.  One, nobody in their right mind would ever want to see my belly button, so adorning it is foolish and wasteful, and two, I’m never a hundred per cent certain that if I got my navel pierced or punctured in any way, my substantial tummy wouldn’t explode like an inflated balloon, since that’s what it looks like.

So it wasn't those bars for the navel that were confusing me.

But the first thing I picked up was a mystery.  It was an ear cuff, an item with which I am familiar, but there were a huge number of chains dangling out of it.  And the actual cuff part was massive as well, it must have been designed to cover the edge of the whole ear.
A few years ago, as far as I know, the chain would have connected to an earring, so that the chain just ran along the length of the ear.  Now, there are about ten chains, all dangling as far as the shoulder.

Then I picked up an utterly bewildering item, two small fake gold rings, again joined together by a chain.  Presumably, to be worn on the same hand.  Effectively shackling the wearer’s fingers together.  Why would anyone want to tie their own fingers together?

I thought I was keeping up when I understood the cuff and ring with a chain running between them, and then of course they had to go and make them even more complicated.

And those funny collars you buy to attach to your top? You know the ones, they’re always lacy or heavy with fake pearls?  I have a young friend who wears them, and looks fabulous and trendy, and yet professional. 

I know that if I bought one, I’d have it half on, half hanging down the back of my top before I got into the office.  I have absolutely no idea how they work.

Knuckle dusters are another thing.  I presume they're not called knuckle dusters, but you know what I mean, about three rings stuck together with a big yoke across all three, so it goes right across the width of the hand.



I lost clothes years ago, then shoes, when the high platform stilettoes came in.  Now jewellery is gone.  I only have handbags left.  I hope they don’t start messing with them.