Neither the lady from New York nor her colleague from the South of England were in the Harris Tweed shop today. Indeed their part of the homely store was closed for restoration work. Consequently the three jackets they had helped me choose yesterday afternoon remained on the shelves, for I had vowed only to make a purchase after hearing how these two characters had got themselves to the remote village of Grosebay on the Isle of Harris.
Without their factual explanation I might have to drive forward fanciful interpretations of my own; Kate says they weren't sisters, which was my first presumption. We heard that Prince Charles and Camilla had visited the shop, perhaps the two assistants had a royal connection (Kate is busily looking up the equivalent of an hotel maitre d' for a clothes shop to improve the use of the word assistant)
The shop is in truth a private house, as far away from the High Street as any shop anywhere in the world. The clothes are all of Harris Tweed, the jackets I care for are by Darutti. The ladies tell me they are of Italian design, by German manufacture, using the most exclusive fabric in the world (they were not in the business of underselling their wares). They told me in one I looked slimmer, in another I was the perfect country gent ready for a day at the races, and in the third the colours in the tweed picked out perfectly the blonde colouring in my hair (at school it was called ginger), as I say they were not in the underselling business.
