DIY fashion

My poor parents must've despaired when I started raiding the cupboards for old tins of emulsion, food colouring, various bits of hardware like ancient plugs and chains, and eggs....

Having tried various methods with hairspray and even vaseline, I found that the only way I could make my fine, peroxide white (and naturally wavy) hair stand up in stiff straight spikes was to use egg-white. It worked a treat but I'm not sure my mum was too pleased about the amount I got through, she could've been making lemon meringue pies instead. You can just about make out the green in the back of my hair here too – I hadn't yet discovered Crazy Colour out here in the sticks, so food colouring was the only option. Unfortunately it ran when it rained, but then with hair coated in egg-white going out in wet weather was best avoided anyway.

It was fun getting it to defy gravity and coping with all the comments that ensued when walking through the town. “Have you seen a ghost?” “You wanna have a word with your hairdresser!”, “You had an electric shock?” and far more abusive remarks too, of course, which you can well imagine I'm sure.

Great fun was to be had too in making these trousers pictured . They were just plain black straights which my older sister had turned out, and I laid them in the bath and splattered them with emulsion paint... just what was left in the bottom of any old tins I could find. I tried to make them a bit arty, with thicker paint around the hems where the colour intensified. I was really pleased with how they turned out, although they were a bit crusty-feeling and had to be washed very carefully (and preferably infrequently).

Also pictured here is a little child's satchel which I'd had since I was about five, now decorated with an old Union Jack flag salvaged from the 1977 Jubilee 'celebrations', and a piece of string vest for some strange reason, which I'd previously found in a charity shop, dyed pink and worn as a top but which had gradually fallen apart. The jacket came from an army surplus store and needed no embellishing; it was perfect in its khaki colour, with plentiful pockets and zips, and even came with an A in a circle on the sleeve which looked a bit like the Anarchy symbol.