Day 14....a serious moment of withdrawal

This is a sad day, I have had a little bit of a grumpy week, it is after all my prerogative as a lady, ahem. I found myself a little stressed in the workplace and a little at sea personally speaking. The natural reaction to such a predicament is of course to do something to make oneself feel less squiffy. To inject if you will, a little chirpiness into the midweek doldrums.


And so it was that I found myself on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon thinking of shopping. To be more specific I found myself thinking about the wonder that is the Trafford Centre after work. Absent mindedly I ploughed through a presentation detailing the psychology of the social web (I know YIKES), yet thinking about gladiator sandals with intricate jewelling, floaty summer shift dresses embellished in wonderful detail. And then I realised that this was a dream, not a day dream but an actual dream, the sort that won’t come true. The sort that you don’t waste your precious birthday wishes on because they won’t come true. Let’s take a moment to think about some other examples of this;

• That a handsome prince will appear, galloping along on a handsome steed to save you when you get a puncture in the slinging rain....AS IF

• That one day your life will be stress free .....it occurred to me at the age of about 18 that life gets more and not less stressful as you get older (NB we are not forced to grow up).

• My friend Laura purports that marrying Russell Brand is one, I am not sure that I concur

• She also thinks that it is unlikely that one would ever grow wings and fly....here I believe that I must agree.

We digress however from my point. The issue at hand being that I have in fact removed a commonly used and effective form of personal therapy from my repertoire. My emotional first aid kit has a shopping bag shaped hole at it’s very heart, oh the ridiculousness of the situation. I confess to being a little irritated at myself. I have a life filled to its very brim with ridiculousness for heavens sakes. What exactly was it that possessed me to make it just a little bit sillier?

But then, like the introspective ponderer that I am, I began to think. How amazing that something so simple could make so much difference to my inner happiness, and not just to my inner happiness but to the inner happiness of most of the young women I know. We teeter close to the reinvention topics of last week but here I am convinced that I have uncovered something slightly different. We talk about retail therapy in a joking manner but there is something about shopping, or just looking at clothes that is restorative. The future foundation last year reported an increase in the number of women who have shopped alone since the beginning of the recession. Yes there are probably a lot of factors attributed to this shift but I wonder if, in times of increased stress whether the need to make ourselves look better becomes more important to us. When times are good, looking perfect doesn’t matter as much because everything else is great. In a recession, or even after a pants day at work, we choose to exercise more control over those parts of our lives which we are able to.

Subconsciously do we deliver ourselves more control over these parts of our lives in order to balance out the lack of control over other elements of the rat race? Is this why a lone shopping trip can be so calming to our conscious? It’s one to think about over your tea isn’t it? Oh ok, that's just me then.

In other news I entirely forgot to have my photo taken on Wednesday and arrived home to find no amenable flatmate to help me out! Bad times. Therefore see above, a ridiculous DIY angle of my vintage jumper with no view of my delightful city shorts or heels. Never mind eh.