Or petrel blue, as my mother always called it

My school uniform was a dark teal skirt with a grey knitted sweater, light grey shirt and bottle-green-and-silver striped tie. Our secret shame was that the skirt wasn't a skirt, it was a pinafore. (Before I go any further let me clarify for Americans. A pinafore is what you would call a jumper. The sweater was what we would call a jumper. All clear? Good.) We only ever exposed its top half when mandated for school concerts or when sunbathing under the Home Economics room windows.

The pinafore was such a bone of contention that I remember it being a topic for our Irish Debates class in second year. I have no idea why we felt so put-upon by that extra swathe of mostly-invisible material, but it was seen as a vast injustice to us, when other schools, such as Loreto Foxrock and Mt Anville had real honest-to-goodness skirts. In fact, I think the teacher was hard-pressed to find anyone to argue the opposing side in the "That we should have a skirt instead of a tunic" dialogue. I remember her putting up some sort of feeble nonsense that girls of our age were developing (cue hand movement in the vague bustular region) at different paces and it was for our own modesty that this area was more hidden by the pinafore. Perhaps the girls at Mt Anville all lived in daily embarassment as their breasts grew overnight and the buttons on their shirts gaped and then popped undefended, but we were unmoved by their potential plight.

I know at least one girl who had taken to wearing her gym skirt instead of her tunic in protest - which rebellious behaviour went unnoticed until the end-of-term concert when she was found to be (gasp!) tunic-topless and relegated to the very back row. As she was not anywhere near the five-foot-eight or more of everyone else in the back row, this rendered her basically invisible for the whole performance. That showed her, I'm sure.

This morning I wore a teal top that I bought on sale somewhere or other last week, thinking that finally I should be able to wear teal without feeling like I was back in my uniform.

So yes, I can. But then it goes and dredges up stuff like this...