Tonight:
9°c
I have a love-hate relationship with eBay. I love buying on it, I hate selling on it. Once, I tried to sell a pair of sunglasses. I photographed them from every angle, uploaded all six pics plus a description of forensic thoroughness, only for someone to email me asking how wide the lenses were in millimetres. Selling on eBay is a vocation only for the long-term unemployed.
That is, unless you hit upon the cynical idea of going around clothes shops buying up the best stock and selling it on at hugely inflated prices. If I were a little less cross, I might be able to think of a witty acronym for the 529 sellers on eBay who are currently punting pieces from Matthew Williamson's sold-out collection for H&M. Designer/high street collaborations were supposed to democratise style, offering high fashion at high-street prices.
While Williamson's range for H&M was hardly cheap as chips, it was a darned sight less expensive than his main line, which, with its £2,000 dresses, will forever be the sole preserve of Sienna Miller. So it's a little irritating that a floor-length ruffle dress is currently listed on eBay for £399, double the price it was supposed to sell for.
Despite H&M limiting sales of each item to two per customer, it seems as though those first through the doors snapped up everything they could, with the sole intention of making a massive profit. May they be plagued with tedious questions about ruffle lengths. In millimetres.
• It's 8.40am and I'm stomping along in a huff because the gas people are digging up Avenue Road again and the traffic is murder. Out of the corner of my glowering eye, I notice a woman sitting on a bench by the Regent's Park canal.
She can't be a day under 70. Dressed in a vest and shorts, she is playing a violin while beside her rests a picnic basket and a glass half-full of champagne. Well, why not? See, this is what I love about London in the sunshine.
It makes roadworks melt away, pensioners take to their fiddles and bad moods dissipate like bubbles in a freshly poured glass of Krug.
• Some girls consider it their life's work to bag a footballer, hanging out at Movida in the hope that one day, their knock-off Gucci mini-dress will be the real thing, paid for by a Chelsea star.
But has the plaintive caw of Elen Rives, that erstwhile bird of prey who so magnificently snared Frank Lampard, caused them to stop and think? "I'm 34 and old now. What am I supposed to do? It's too late for me."
Finally, someone has shattered the shiny, brittle veneer of WAG-dom, a vocation with a shelf life so short that it makes a Premiership footballer's seem long by comparison. Don't go there, girls.
