Afternoon:
14°c
Ever since that Panorama investigation, I have avoided Primark. However dire my bank balance, it is still not so dire that I need clothe myself in cheap dresses wrung from a small Indian girl's tears.
I was still telling myself this one day last week, when I found myself getting off the 274 at Marble Arch and walking like an automaton into Primark. I'll just have a look, I said. It's my job, I said. How I wrinkled my nose distastefully at the clothes, which were heinous. Scratchy heart-print tea dresses in the vague style of Luella Bartley, clingy T-shirts in chavvy shades of blue and lime
Up the escalator I went - just to have a really thorough look. Did I tell you it's my job? Suddenly, there they were. A pair of sweetie pink jelly sandals for £3. Before I could say "stinking, rotten, lousy, no-good hypocrite", I was paying for them at the till, while my cashier and the cashier next to her sustained a long and very detailed conversation about the kebab one of them had dined on last night.
I'd love to say the sandals left a sour taste in my mouth but I'd be lying, because I like them too much and they were only £3 and small Indian girls can't have been involved in their assembly because they are just moulded pieces of rubber, after all, so where's the harm? Only I know very well where the harm is, and that I must never alight at that bus stop again, or even glance over the road when I am visiting Selfridges. Because that way, madness lies.
* I've just been for a wax. Possibly, there being a credit crunch and all, the salon was a little overstaffed. "We both do you? Will be quicker," assured Lady A, in treacly Turkish tones. They seemed to enter some sort of tacit competition. Lady A finished way before Lady B, which was fine, until she started peering up and down my leg with a disapproving look. Then, with a flourish of her paper strips, she started waxing my feet. Who knew? All these years, and I never realised my feet were hairy. Truly, it is a wonder any man has ever wanted me.
* Richard Ashcroft is a god. I've seen The Verve in London, New York, Glasgow, Brighton, Glastonbury and Wigan, and still have every ticket stub. After worshipping him for 12 years from afar, it was more than a little unnerving to be sitting in the same room as him, eating the same bresaola and drinking the same chilled wine. Just as I was about to pass out from excitement, I clocked his suit. It was white and stripy. In an instant, he went from deity to dodgy dresser. Which only goes to prove one thing: never meet your idols.
Reader views (2)
The perfect excuse! Richard was only wearing what Gucci designed for him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/fashion/14iht-ffrida.html?hpw
- R, USA
I totally agree with your comments about never meeting your idols. In my youth I worshipped a certain folk singer, who shall be nameless. I met him a few years ago. He had terminal bad breath, was dressed in a dreadful suit that looked as if it had been through the Sally Army shop several times, and his shoulders were covered in so much dandruff I though it must have been snowing.
- Maire, London
