Barely 5 minutes till I had to dash out of the house. I flung my wardrobe door open and grabbed my dress. This was a new dress that I’d been looking forward to wearing for weeks. But the weather had always been so cold even my goose bumps had goose bumps. Today, the sun had shifted into top gear, with no wind at all. Even the huge tree at the bottom of my garden was unusually inscrutable.
Jumping into my dress, I grabbed my handbag and rushed out to flag down the bus that was about to hurtle round the corner.
Sitting on the bus with a sigh of relief, I started to feel the mother of all itches scratching the back of my neck. What the heck was it? I pinpointed the area and scratched it. But it didn’t relieve the itch. I shuffled in my seat, trying to coax my dress to stay away from my skin. But the dress was having none of it. A snug fit. Harumph! No matter what I tried, it insisted on irritating the back of my neck.
I hadn’t noticed the bus was getting full. As I looked up, strange looking people were shooting even stranger looks in my direction. They’d never seen Zumba performed on an early-morning bus. Or at least, that’s what went through my mind. They might actually have been looking at something completely different. But the possibility that I might be behaving like some kind of primate in a dress convinced me that it really was me that people were looking at.
Bugger! I had expected to look graceful (and dare I say, pretty) in my brand new dress all day long. Instead, I’d be spending the whole day dancing with St Vitus, scratchy and twitchy, gracelessly adjusting the back of my dress. All because the label was sewn into the back neckline of my dress.
Almost every single item of clothing I’ve bought has a label that prickles my skin. To combat that, I’ve got this habit of painstakingly exterminating these pesky labels that are so stubbornly attached to my clothing. Even the Pentagon wasn’t as secure as their stitching. With this dress, the culprit had got away with it. And now here it was sharing my seat on the bus.
Why do the clothes manufacturers stitch their labels in? And why do they use sandpaper? Why can’t they just attach the darn thing temporarily, so that we can easily remove it? 
Do other people suffer from labels that bite? Or is it just me?
If I had a clothing line of my own, I’d make sure those creatures masquerading as innocent instructions were easy to get rid of. That way, no woman would be caught inelegantly belly-dancing and limboing up and down the aisle of an otherwise unsuspecting bus.