"I'm not going under"

"My husband left me at the beginning of this year and a had a bit of time in sackcloth and ashes and weeping, you know, in his old T-shirts and my old pyjamas, and then, without even thinking about it, I put on this red cashmere cardigan, and it was really piratical red, and at that moment I thought, to use a cliché - but there is a truth in every cliché - I will survive, and the red was like a sort of red flag: I'm not going under."

Justine Picardie, in The Emotional Attachment: How do we feel about the clothes we wear? Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 29.10.2009