A letter from a reader

At 64, strangers had started asking me if I was all right. I was perfectly fine. I was just wearing grey

The most I have written in years is the note on the fridge saying which bin goes out, and Graham has not read that either. I am not a writer, and telling another woman what she ought to put on in the morning is not something I go in for.

But a woman at an egg stall in Albany laughed out loud at my blouse last week, and it was the nicest thing that had happened to me all year. So I am writing it down once, properly, because I would like you to know why.

It started at the Woolworths at Epping. I was standing at the checkout, thinking about whether we had milk, and the young girl stopped scanning and leaned over. She looked quite worried.

Are you all right, love?

I said I was fine. I was fine. A fortnight later the chemist asked me the same thing, in the same voice, and then a nice young man on the train got up and offered me his seat and asked whether there was somebody he could call for me.

I told Graham about it over tea. He looked up from his plate for some time. He said, well, Di, you have got a face like a bank manager with bad news, and you always have. Then he asked if there was any more gravy.

He was not wrong about the face. Thirty years on the front desk of a doctors' surgery teaches you to keep it very still. But I had always had that face, and nobody had ever wanted to ring someone for me before.

What I had not noticed

That night I opened the wardrobe and had a proper look. Grey. Stone. A sort of oatmeal. Two navies and something the shop had called mushroom. I do not remember deciding on any of it. Somewhere around sixty the bright things stop fitting, or stop feeling right, and you replace them one at a time with whatever will not cause any trouble, and one day you are the colour of a wet footpath.

I do not think it is the clothes on their own, and I do not think it is the face on its own. It is the two together. A woman in grey who has stopped smiling at nothing in particular does not look like a woman wondering about milk. She looks like a woman who has just had some news.

And the thing nobody tells you is what that does to your day. People lower their voices. They are terribly kind. Nobody makes a joke with you in the queue. I had gone months without a stranger being cheerful at me, and I had put it down to the state of the world.

Then Jenny brought the eggs over

Jenny from over the road keeps four chooks, and she brings us a carton most Sundays. She came across that week in a blouse I had not seen, all over big bright flowers, a thing I would have crossed the street to avoid. She said she had worn it to the chemist. The same chemist. He had come out from behind his counter to ask where she got it, for his wife.

I said, what did you say to him? She said, I said Thompson Sydney, Di, it is a small Australian boutique, they have got about eighty of these and every one is sillier than the last. Nobody has asked me if I am all right since August. Then she looked at my oatmeal and said, nobody is going to, either, if you get one.

I looked it up that night to prove a point. I scrolled past a leopard with a very serious expression, and some flowers, and a very nice paisley I would normally have bought. And then I got to the hens.

The one I chose is called the Violet. It is a plain white button-up blouse with a proper collar, and marching about all over it are these big painted folk art hens, in yellow and blue and red, with spots and stripes and very round surprised eyes. Each one is standing on its own little line, as if it had been told to wait there.

Graham has spent thirty years keeping Jenny's chooks out of his tomatoes. He looked at it on the hanger and said, I have only just got rid of them, and now you have brought nine inside. I very nearly sent it back to shut him up.

Then I put it on, and I will say this for it, it is a very easy thing to wear. It is relaxed and loose, so it just hangs there and gets on with things. The sleeves are long and they roll up without any fuss, and it finishes at the hip with a soft curved hem, so I wear it out over whatever I have got on. I have done it right up, and I have worn it open over a singlet. It took me less time to get dressed than the mushroom ever did.

What happened in Albany

Graham had an apprentice called Darren, years ago, who moved to the south coast of Western Australia and has been telling us to come and see it ever since. So last week we finally did. On the Saturday morning Darren took us down to the farmers' market in Albany. It was bright and blowing a bit, the way it does down there, and I had the Violet on with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of plain blue shorts.

I went to the egg stall because I always go to the egg stall. The woman behind it was called Bev, and she had the kind of hands that have done a lot. She looked up to say good morning, and she looked at my front, and she stopped. Then she laughed. Not politely. She laughed so that the man at the honey stall looked over.

She said, which of them is laying? She came around the table and went along them with one finger, counting, and told me the blue one at the top had a look of a bird she had to get rid of in March. I do not know how long it had been since anyone had looked that pleased to see me. I stood there with a carton of eggs and I noticed I was grinning like an idiot, with this face, the bank manager's.

The boy at the coffee van said, good morning, ladies, and it took me a moment. A woman in a big oilskin coat stopped me by the bread to ask where it came from, because her sister would kill for it, and then told me all about her sister. Graham, who had gone off to look at a man's tomatoes, came back and found me talking to three people I had never met. He said, you have been here twenty minutes, and I have been married to you for forty years, and I have never seen you this popular.

That was the part I had not expected. I thought I would be embarrassed, and I was for about a minute. But a blouse like this does your hello for you. People have already started smiling by the time they get to you, and you cannot help smiling back, and then you are a woman who is smiling at the market, and nobody on earth is going to ask if she needs to sit down.

When I paid, Bev gave me my change and looked at me over the carton, and she said it. I swear to you she said it.

Are you all right for eggs, love?

Three things I have learned since

One. People give you back the face you walk in with. I honestly thought the world had got a bit gloomy. It was me. I had been walking around for years like bad news, and everybody had been very decent about it.

Two. It only takes one silly thing. I have not thrown out all the grey, and I did not need a new wardrobe. The hens do all the work on their own, and there is nothing fussy about the blouse itself. It is a white shirt with a collar and buttons. It just happens to have poultry on it.

Three. You are allowed to be funny at 64. Somebody decided that women our age should be elegant or be invisible, and I went along with it. I had forgotten that the clothes could be in on the joke. I have laughed more in that blouse than in anything I have owned since the seventies.

About the price

I sat on the other side of a lot of invoices in thirty years, so I will tell you straight, the price made me suspicious.

The Violet is $70.95. It was $142.00.

My first thought was that for that money it would turn up looking like something off a tea towel. I have paid more than that for a mushroom cardigan that nobody has ever once mentioned.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is nobody in the middle taking a cut, and they run a spring sale to move the season's stock. I read the reviews before I ordered, the way I imagine you are doing now. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if anything made me trust it more. One woman from Denmark, down the coast from Albany, had written, “My husband said he would not be seen with me in it. Two ladies at the bowls club have since asked for my number, so he can suit himself.” That was the one that decided it for me.

Jenny has told me hers is better. I have told her hers does not lay.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were out on the back verandah with a cuppa and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If somebody has asked you lately whether you are all right, and you were, go and stand in front of your wardrobe and have a look at what colour you have become. Then give it ten minutes of an evening. There are about eighty designs in the collection, hens and leopards and flowers and some a good deal quieter than mine, and you only need the one.

Not because a blouse will change your life. It will not. I still have the face. But the girl at the Woolworths at Epping looked up last Tuesday and said, oh, I love your chooks, and I had not realised how long it had been since anybody at a checkout had told me they loved anything.

Two practical things. The spring sale is on now and the middle sizes go first. And with summer and the Christmas lunches coming, I would not leave it too long.

Nobody has asked me if I am all right in weeks. They ask me which one is laying.

Dianne