Talking shop

God I love clothes. I know, I know, appearances can be deceiving, beauty is only skin deep, it's not what's on the outside that matters yadda yadda. But let's face it, all those yawnsome platitudes were just made up so that mothers would have something to say to their fat teenage daughters. The truth is, we are judged on our appearance, and we judge others on theirs - and we make those judgements because, nine times out of ten, they're accurate. If we were consistently wrong, we'd soon learn, and adjust our prejudices accordingly.

Looks matter. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do. Last night I went to Westfield and watched a selection of the most boringly, uniformly dressed teenage girls traipse around Topshop and H&M, buying armfuls of clothes that looked identical to the ones that they were already wearing. There is a scene in the film Clueless where Cher is walking along the corridor talking to Dionne on her mobile phone, and after about ten seconds, Dionne joins her, walking in the same direction, and they hang up without drawing breath, and I remember watching that, slack-jawed, in the nineties, thinking how fun it looked to be that connected, that technologically savvy. Yesterday in Westfield, the teenagers didn't even appear to hang up when they were together. It's as though mobile phones are a cooler way of communicating than actual face-to-face, so they just never hang up. The benefit for the outsider is that they talk much more loudly into their phones than they would to each other, so the full inanity of their babble is revealed. And I suddenly realised that the horror of having children isn't the sleepless nights or the terrible twos, or the toddler tantrums or panicking about primary schools. It's the fact that, without fail, every single teenager in the world is an Absolute, Unmitigating Dick. I definitely was. How do parents humour these morons, who can't speak without splattering their sentences with 'like' and 'y'know', and who couldn't formulate an interesting or unusual phrase if you offered them VIP passes to Glastonbury, unsupervised? I can't imagine not killing them. Matricide beckons. And that's when pregnancy's still a far-off semi-thought. God I hope I never need to adopt - the agency would have a field day. For their reference: that was a joke. I promise I will never murder my children, adopted or otherwise. Although that whole euthanasia thing is interesting, with that BBC presenter killing his lover back in the day. I'm with The Graun on that one - it's all well and good supporting Right To Die etc., but not helpful doing it without proper legal strictures in place.

Aaaaaaaaaanyway. So then I stood, jaw still slack, outside Abercrombie, where there was a cordoned-off queue and a doorman, operating a one-in-one-out policy. I assumed there must be some sort of special event on. But no. These people were queuing to get into the shop. That's it. Queuing to shop. Even for a born consumer such as myself, this was shocking, and I felt a sudden urge to get all revolutionary on their asses, knock down the barricade and drag them all into M&S shouting 'There are ALTERNATIVES! And in other shops, the sizing isn't so OUTRAGEOUS that a NORMAL PERSON has to wear an XXXL!' But I didn't.

Then I went to dinner at Grania's for seriously delicious chicken stew and buttery cabbage and then pancakes, and the clothes discussion continued. I think I slightly freaked out this guy called Jim with the extent of my self-imposed rules for shopping, in that, when considering a new purchase, I will break down the item's price by estimated number of times it will be worn, and thus calculate if it's worth it. For example, I find a new belt that costs £15. I decide I will wear it approximately ten times in the next year. Thus I will be paying £1.50 a time to wear it. For £1.50, I would hope the belt would add a fair bit of value to my outfit - it wouldn't have to be the feature piece, but it certainly couldn't go unnoticed. If I decide that £1.50 is a fair price for each of the belt's outings, I will buy it. Jim's rules were different, as he doesn't buy clothes unless he has run out of something, which is a concept of purchasing that is laughably distant for me. Running out of anything... Nope. Not going to happen. Possibly tights, but that's it. I explained that my tenuous defence for my clothes addiction comes from the fact that, in my early twenties, I was really quite overweight, and the novelty of being able to fit into something, let alone actually look good, is still so fresh that whenever I try something and like it, a panic overwhelms me and I worry that, if I don't buy this garment, right here, right now, I'll regret it forever. Admittedly, I have been fitting in to high street stores for several years now, and I'll be the first to agree that argument doesn't quite stand up any longer, but it's my story and I'm sticking to it.

God I'm hungover. Can you tell? I can't seem to shut up, and nothing I write is of any real interest. Ukulele tonight. Hair of the dog may be necessary.