Perfect day

You are in an online virtual clothing shop and you don’t know where all the different departments are. You have six minutes to get yourself kitted out in line with a theme that has been chosen for this round of the game, such as ‘Summer camp’ or ‘Evening in the city.’

You’re still not absolutely sure what your left and right fingers do on the touchscreen of your tablet, which is how you move around the shop, (too often I get stuck behind a plant or a shelf full of shoes) and before you do anything else you have to find your way to the salon to choose a skin colour and a made up face, and then move to a chair to choose a hairstyle, because if you forget all this, you will stay a rich metallic grey head to toe and be faceless and bald, which I think you'll agree is not a good look unless the theme is ‘Alien.’

At the end of the six minutes there is a fashion parade of all the participants, who all vote. At this stage you can also choose which poses you want to adopt (some of which are absolutely ludicrous - e.g. lying on your back and kicking your legs - which of course being a classy broad, I shun.)

This is me playing DRESS TO IMPRESS with Cece in Colorado. We are on FaceTime on our phones so we can chat and I can yelp for help - and we are both in the same online space on our iPads, with random unknown teenyboppers also online. (I have just looked up this word teenybopper which hails from the 1960s and 1970s to check if there is a modern slang equivalent which encapsulates everything I want to say but there is none, so there you go).

I have had the honour to win first place once, and second once, and third on a couple of occasions but my overall record is not good. And do you know why? Although I love clothes and fashion and playing games, I am out of my depth with teen culture. For example when the theme was ‘Wicked weekend away’ I thought it meant one thing (you can imagine) but everybody else who was playing realised it referred to the film Wicked and the characters in it. Hey Ho. When the theme was ‘Elegant’ I realised that these kids don’t know what elegance means because I easily should’ve won and I wasn’t even placed. Hey ho again.

But I love this game! And I love playing with Cece. When I can’t find my way around the shop, she comes and rescues me and directs me to where the shoes or the skirts or whatevers are. And she is so patient.

I played this game yesterday afternoon, at the end of a perfect day. In the morning I’d ridden to the end of the trail with a flask of coffee and took photos of the beautiful autumn trees 

possibly to paint later. In the afternoon I sat and painted. 

Then I played with my fabulous granddaughter 5000 miles away.

How lucky am I?