There it is, the beginning of April – three fantastic months of non-repeated, freshly sourced, blogged, reviewed and photographed T-Shirt wearing.
Despite the short currency, my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE T-shirt challenge is moving along fantastically, and has already proven to be an amazing experience.
For instance, I’ve received tees from all around the globe (some as far as Malaysia!) which is a huge and greatly unexpected achievement for so early in the project. I've raced topless out of the house desperately trying to catch a T-shirt that was in transit, leaving my challenge poised on a knife-edge and at the hands of train station patisserie staff (have a re-read of Day 80)
But does all this pale in comparison to the potential next chapter in my apparel adventure?
Does the email staring back at me from my inbox force my challenge up to the next level?
Do I return to America?
***
Just a moment ago I received an email from a Virginia-based printing company keen to get involved with my challenge.
'Great', I thought.
"We have bins FULL of T-shirts in a variety of sizes...", the email said.
...come again?
Bins. Full.
'Full' is written in capital letters.
'Bins' is not, but I know Americans; they don't do things by halves. To us, a bin is a little waste-paper basket beneath our desks that either contains used post-it-notes or used post-it-notes and snotty kleenex depending on where we are in the year.
To them, a bin is a giant immovable tank the size of a luxury condo, hollowed out and packed to the brim. Packed to the brim with T-shirts.
The email goes on...
"Would you like some?"
This is incredible! Absolutely! Yes I'd love some! Send me whatever you can spare!
"Well, that's the problem..."
What's the problem?
"We'd love to send you a ton of T-shirts from our unimaginably huge metallic portal of infinite garments, however we do not ship internationally."
I find myself in quite a bind. With 270-odd Days left on the calendar and currently around 50 T-shirts to see me through them, a discovery like this is tremendously difficult to ignore.
This isn't the first time that a body of water has come between me and what would almost certainly be the answer to all my problems, and it won't be the last. Nevertheless, I am in possession of the ocean's greatest weakness - the passport! Unless I can come up with an alternate means of getting this beautiful bounty across the pond and into my wardrobe (say, by persuading each and every one of my friends to take their summer holidays over in the States and have a swatch of tees posted to their hotels for them to pack, and if needs be, wear, for their return flight), I see no other choice but to go over there and get it myself.
