play with the bag: Liz Claiborne jeans size 14

So I bought this pair of jeans years ago for a pound. I tried them on, and they hung down from my middle like a fallen black sack. I put them in the cupboard. After a year I came across them while looking for something else. I tried them on again. Hey presto! While they were in the cupboard they magically shrank to exactly the right size! It is a magic cupboard, obviously, and I am going to try it again with a size 16 Per Una.

And I wore the Liz Claiborne jeans. A lot. They had just enough room not to feel too tight, and the pockets were big enough to hold spanners and nails and tape measures and hammers and all the household stuff a woman needs.

(Incidentally, no-one has yet bought this pocket-heavy woman a tool belt, even though she has repeatedly asked for one, so that she may avoid puncturing holes in her arse and thighs when she sits down on the nails stored in her pockets.)

But then, one morning, while wearing the thinning and fading Liz Claiborne jeans, I foolishly walked past the oven.

Readers of gritsday might know that the oven door fell off in 2004. It left a lethal metal stickouty prong at thigh height. Which tore a massive, unmendable gash, up and down the full length of the Liz Claiborne jeans left leg.

Because Grit is a swift thinker, she strapped up the jeans leg with an old scarf and went about her daily business.

Now she knows why pirates have bandanna-type scarves tied around their thighs. It is not so they can look dashing and daring and perhaps a little erotic like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. It is to stop their trousers falling off.

And this explains why the zip and other body parts to a pair of clapped out, worn down, torn and broken Liz Claiborne jeans ended up being sewn to a canvas bag.