I would like a new dress. I don’t mean I would quite like a
new dress but can do without if necessary. Or I would like a new dress but will wait patiently until my birthday when I will write a helpful list for the husband and keep my fingers crossed. I mean I would like a new dress in
the way that teenage boys would like to have sex or Victoria Beckham would like a new pair of Louboutins or Osama Bin Laden would like not to be dead. I would like a new dress in a way that obscures the future from view, turns it into some sort of abstract and irrelevant concept that has no meaning. Erases the world from rational thought and blinds one to logic. Such is the power of Chloe. But I digress.
The accountant took me aside not long ago with a stern and
pained expression on his face and
informed me in the severest terms that his latest household expenditure
spreadsheet showed a deficit in finances
and cutbacks were necessary.
“No more clothes!” he instructed in the manner of a
Victorian patriarch informing me that he would be foregoing a new greatcoat and
that I likewise must reign back on petticoats. And when I protested he said "Fine,
if you must buy something make sure it is from P******" (I cannot print this name for fear of being sued for what I am about to say. Perhaps I have been a lawyer for too long). "I've heard it is a
great shop, everything costs about fifty pence".
"Yes," I opened my mouth for the
tiniest fraction of a second, to protest, "that's quite right, if you
don't have any new fangled principles about child labour holding you back, it’s
a marvellous shop!"(As I said, sued, although it can hardly be libellous if it is true, but again I digress).
But then.....cunningly
shut it again. "You need to be sensible here," a voice in my head, that I swear was not mine told me
-"Fortunately for you he has never heard of Chloe ( current
favourite) or Diane Von Furstenburg (2nd in line) and if he even
notices that he has never seen the new frocks that are currently as we speak winging
their way to you (unlikely at best) he will be easily persuaded that they are
P****** lines, discernment re quality of cut and material not being his strong
point. Why waste time have a socio- political argument needlessly when you could be browsing net-a-porter?"
And on the basis that I will never buy anything from the
aforementioned, anonymous high street shop my conscience is entirely clear. I do earn my
own money after all.
And if he spots the related transactions on my credit
card statement (horror of horrors but occasionally he claims to have opened the
envelope by mistake) I may be forced into a corner where my first instinct will
be, I am ashamed to admit, to advise him that net- a- porter is a new budget
supermarket that I have just discovered.
Although mind you even with six children £700 is an expensive food shop, but I
will cross that explanatory bridge when I come to it. And hope and pray that
his French is as bad as I think it is.