Tonight:
4°c
Possibly as a response to all the vile weather, and certainly as a response to customers' ever-shorter attention spans, the shops are filling up earlier than usual with woolly new autumn/winter stock.
This is all well and good if you've booked a cottage in the Lake District. But there are still some of us who are prepared to risk being bombed in Mallorca/fleeced in Sicily in the vain hope of getting some summer sunshine.
And, now that we've booked our Chinojet flights (that's what I like to call easyJet these days — the planes are full of middle-class families attempting to be thrifty by ditching their lifelong allegiance to BA) and taken advantage of a panicked Abta's heavily discounted hotel rooms, all that remains is getting wardrobed for the affair. Ah, but where to buy that bikini?
Peer closely between the cashmere and you can still find swimwear for sale. Department stores such as John Lewis, Fenwick and Debenhams are still holding on to theirs, as is M&S, although you might have more trouble in the “younger” chains such as Topshop and H&M, where the bikinis turned into a big tangle of mismatched sizes back in May.
More pictures: The summer best bikinis
My pick of the high street this season is definitely Gap: designer Mireille Gindry used to work at Calvin Klein, and it shows. Unusually for a high street chain, the range doesn't just cater to the perfect size 10, with bikinis to suit most shapes, along with a range of co-ordinating cover-ups.
Most high street chains are still horribly lazy when it comes to bikinis. I don't like the practice of selling them by dress size rather than cup size: you wouldn't buy a bra in this way, so why a bikini?
Just because you are on the beach doesn't mean you want your boobs to fall out of your top because it doesn't fit properly. With the notable exception of John Lewis, if you want a properly fitted bikini, then the high street remains fairly hopeless.
Rigby & Peller is your best bet, or else go online to the Amazon of swimwear, figleaves.com. For anyone who would rather have their teeth pulled out than brave the changing room with an armful of bikinis, websites such as Figleaves are a godsend, especially if they offer free returns, as most, increasingly, do.
I'm not going to include one of those hackneyed “which bikini style should you choose for your body” guides, because I think they're mostly bollocks. Perhaps I have the strangest body shape in London, but none of these guides has ever worked for me. If you're a B cup, you can wear any style; ditto if you're slim.
For the rest of us, there is only one way to choose the right bikini and unfortunately it involves trying on a mountain of them. The only tip I can confidently give is the one that pertains to my own body shape: that after years of mistakes, I can confidently assert that a bandeau-style top, with straps that rise from the centre into a V and tie round the back of the neck, is the only one on God's green earth that won't make a person with 32F breasts look like a porn star.
More pictures: The summer best bikinis
Standard shop: Great deals on swimwear
