Caroline O'Donoghue: Stupid clothes I never need to see again as long as I live

Black florals on a long dress for an adult woman is just bad. It’s ‘I’m spicing up my widowhood, but not so much that my dowager aunt will give me hassle'

Caroline O'Donoghue

All my life, I’ve heard my mother come home from town uttering the same phrase. “There are no clothes!” she says. “There is NOTHING in the shops.”

My mother is not a spendthrift or a woman who pays attention to trends: she’s simply a very elegant person. She is so elegant and understated, in fact, that she despises being mentioned in this column at all, and so I must treat her with the dignity of a member of minor European aristocracy and stop mentioning her now.