Deborah Ross: Surrender to the fleece and the game is up

If you ask me...

If you ask me, I need help, and need it right now, this very minute, so maybe you could pop round, once you've read this, to stop me from doing what I think I'm about to do? I live near several major bus routes, and a tube station, so it wouldn't be that difficult, and I'd so appreciate it. I'll put the kettle on, shall I? But, please, don't leave it more than 20 minutes, half an hour tops, or you may be too late.

I need help because, I think, I'm about to surrender to... there's no easy way of saying this, so I'm just going to come out with it... the fleece. I know I'm about to surrender to the fleece because I fondled a bottle-green one in Marks & Spencer the other day and thought, "Hmm, comfy". I've also heard they are extremely washable and emerge from the washing machine practically dry. Can this be true? Can it? As it is, all our laundry is dried over the radiators in winter, which means the socks go hard at an angle of 90 degrees, and have to be creaked back into shape. Now, can you imagine how attractive a fleece sounds to someone who has to creak their socks back into shape? Can you?

But? I know what surrendering to the fleece means. I know it means that, style-wise, it's the end of the road. Game over. Finito. As things stand, I'm already a good way down that road; have already surrendered to "fatty jeans", which come in at the opposite end of the spectrum to skinny jeans, and are not only good and loose and elasticised at the waist, but also represent the total triumph of comfort over style. And make-up? I wear it so rarely that, when I do, I have to get it going again with dribbles of water or, failing that, spit. Some days, all I do is creak socks, spit, and twang my waistband, which I'm sure isn't how Cheryl Cole spends most of her time, or Kate Moss, although Olive from On The Buses might have.

And I know how it'll go. I'll buy a fleece to "just wear indoors" but, once on, it won't come off. I'll become desensitised. I'll start wearing it to the office and drinks parties and the cinema and everywhere bar London Fashion Week – give me some credit – where I would almost certainly be shot on sight with my corpse becoming a source of great wonder: "Wow, seriously? She left the house looking like that?" It happened with the fatty jeans, it'll happen with the fleece, and fatty jeans plus a fleece? You can see why I need help, right? And you are on your way over, aren't you?