Retail Therapy

Saturday 16^th January 1999

and general ramblings

A few weeks ago the washing machine started making really nasty crunchy noises and showed a desire to wander across the kitchen floor.

This is not good.

The final straw came when it left black stains in the pattern of the perforations in the drum all over my white shirts. The thing had to go. Time to buy a new one.

Now I'm quite happy to spend large amounts of money in many modestly sized bouts but spending large sums all in one go makes me nervous. Nervous like checking the bank balance on Monday. Putting off shopping on Tuesday. Checking the bank again on Wednesday then finding something better to do, well there were four thousand news posts to get through. Sleeping most of Thursday then finding something else better to do.

Until Friday - this is it. It has to be done. Can't avoid it. Really.

Set the alarm clock for 8. Alarm goes off, switched off, radio on, fire and kettle on, cup of tea and back to bed.

And back to sleep.

Til midday.

It's got to be done. But better check my mail... and there's the news of course.

Okay, three thirty sees me at the station, change at Stratford for the tube. Out at Oxford Street and dawdle window shopping but eventually gird my loins and brave the front door of John Lewis.

Loins are a plus in John Lewis.

After carefully examining all the window displays and reading all the prices. Need a telly too, nice Sony 42" flat scrren: a snip at eleven and half grand. "Never knowingly undersold" say the signs: I wonder how much Harrods Souk are charging for it.

There are quite a few nice things about John Lewis top of which is that it's possibly the gayest place to shop. Forget your Harvey Nicks, retail camp was born and lives here.

And senic too. It really cheered me that my first sight once through the Dread Portal (TM) was a pair of 'butch but beuatiful' italians walking around the perfume counters hand in hand. Please don't tell me that Italian boys, especially of the southern variety, are prone to hold hands even when not gay. This I know already. But it made me smile. And they smiled too. Nice start.

Washing machines are curious things. You have one that you've been happy with for eight years and three homes but nothing among three or four dozen varieties comes close to being the same.

For one thing the "designers" have been let loose on them. Not a strait line to be seen, all buch and chunky curves. C'mon, it's a washing machine. Clean clothes is what I want not something that looks like a grinning maw looming all over the kitchen.

And the controls. You can get six speeds of spin cycle, twenty wash programs, machines with dryers, machines without, machines with, as we surely know, more computing power than any handful of Apollo missions and LCD displays to make sure that you know it. I didn't actually see one with a remote control but then my eyes glazed over rather than see details of the row priced at a grand plus.

Okay. Got to get my money's worth but there are certain things that I'm determined to have. Temperature control is one. Look, I'm a queen right: I know better than any bloody machine - even one endowed with 'fuzzy logic' - what temperatures I want to wash at. So that rules out most of them; the cheep and the swish.

Every one is now marked up with a grade for wash performance, A-G and G is bad, spin efficiency, A-G again, and 'ecofriendlyness' yup, A-G and if you settle for G you're probably a major international polluter right along with Exxon and Milford Haven.

It really makes it quite easy. Only one model satisfies both my washing whims and my environmental concience. It's an Indesit (and at this point I _really_ don't want to hear anyone's horror story about their last Indesit purchase, right!) slightly fussy but tollerable and best of a it's a BBB - perfick, like me not quite hitting the mark in any department.

Now to buy it.

This isn't really quite as easy as it might be.

First there's this really cute south asian lad who really looks like he needs... a sale. Sorry, swwet though he seems he's in glassware and can't help. Uh, but glassware's over the fare side of this extensive basement. What's he doing here? Oh, on his break. Does he always spend his breaks trolling the sales floor? No, I didn't ask.

Then there's the moderatly cute (sub rugby player build) type who obviously sees a sale pending in the couple newly arrived. Ignoring me he heads strait for them. Makes great play of how his wife loves hers - yes we've heard all this before and didn't beleive it then. But the young couple, much concerned about suitable spin speed for nappies, are drawn in and as their eyes grow dim you can see a sale being made - slowly and not to me.

By this time my big money worries are really surfacing and I start fidgetting, tossing a screwed up Marlboro packet from hand to hand. Now my coordination isn't very hot at the best of time and it isn't manny throws before I miss, the packet ricochets off a handy industrial strength tumble drier (needs a 30 amp supply but the woman who bought it was happy to get the electrician in - anything to stop her husband complaining about wet clothes on the radiators. Doesn't she have a washing line?) and right into the back of the head of a diminutive woman looking for a blanking plate.

It's alright. Turns out that she's from Chelmsford and thus used to that sort of thing. I apologise and refrain from mentioning my own past links to the place; it's inevitable that she'd know my mother and I really don't want to go into that.

Finally I manage to catch the eye of someone who isn't either rushing past or enaged in the heavy sell. He's charming, Irish and definitely un-cute. C'est la vie.

Never the less informed that I don't want to talk about wahing machines, just buy one. That one. Now. No fuss and when can they deliver (Wednesday). His smile doesn't waver.

Stock check. Switch check. And within three minuets I am the owner, if not possessor, of a brand new washing machine due to arive sometime between 7am and 2pm Wednesday next.

Good. I've enough clean shirts to last until then. Even if some of them are embossed with the imprint of the old machine.

And I didn't even mention the suspcious character in a dirty mac making copious notes, appenetly about each model but one can never be sure, in a little black book all the time I was there. Or the OAP couple having the same conversation at each machine they examined "No, B is for spin speed Edith...".

Phew! So that's over. What next?

Fifth floor. Gardening, books and toys, computing, electronics and accounts. Going up!

Now for ages I've been hankering after a new radio for the kitchen so I go and look at the computers. Obvious innit. Apple iMac at only 799 quid - better than some suppliers to industry, how do they do it? Listen to aparently knowledgeable cutie explain it to obviously dumbfounded pair. Note carefull avoidance of mentioning the lack of floppy disc and what USB really means when it comes to buying perrifferals.

Wander off to look at radios, via television. And damn it the designers have been let loose on them as well.

Okay radios. Roberts are doing nice lines is new and retro trannies. Infortunately while the low end starts at about sixty quid the one with pre-sets is a cool 100. They are really nice looking but I can't bring myself to spend that much on something to wash up by. The cheap ones, albeit complete with tape deck or CD, are so ugly! Why does anyone buy something that looks like it got too intimate with the microwave and slumped in the heat?

While the Roberts stuff thinks minimalist when it comes to buttons these monsters have them by the gross, and most of them light up! Ugh, have people no taste? Apparently not.

So, no radio. Second floor, linens and habberadshery, Going down!

Sheets. This is easy. Double sheet, King size duvet cover, six pillow cases. White. Look, I've just bought a new washing machine, white is okay, okay?

There's a flirtatious cutie on linens. Shaved off the goatee since last I was him - if it's the same one, memory rather hazy on this point, if it was its an improvement.

However big island service counter has been turned into three narrow lanes and this isn't an improvement. Don't tell me how much just ring it up and show me where to put the X.

Ten to six and a very nice voice comes over the tannoy telling customers that the shop is about to close. No late night shopping here. Where next? Forbidden Planet, naturally.

This is easy. Spending lots of money in small doses I can cope with so it's a new book, a paperback and an almost for nothing hardback from the remaindered shelf. Somehow FP always manages to be unsenic. You could get three beauties at the till but you don't. Can't see how they do it but FP staff remain resolutely unnatractive. Why is most of the clientel late twenties typs still with their teenaeg acne who get excited over comics and packets of cards liek the ones you used to get with bubble gum as a kid? Ecept sans bubble gum. Pay and escape.

Now it's after six, I'm in town and financially traumatised. I need to eat.

A place that's caught my eye in the past but which I've never used. Alfred's on Shaftbury Avenue, right at the top but confusingly with it's main facade on New Oxford Street. Whisky cured salmon, grilled pheasant and double expresso. I was tempted by the cheese with a glass of Madeira, but was too full. Very good.

Eating on my own is something I used to be shy about but now rather enjoy. Staff are sometimes huffy about a table for one but not here. Get to glance through my new books and smile at the waiters. the flirty one is only so so, the pretty one flirting with the female staff. Oh oh.

So now I'm back home, feeling moderately pleased with myself and typing this instead of packing for the perverts gathering tomorrow. No, not a meet I didn't tell anyone about, the other sort of pervert.

By the way: the radio 4 weather report tonight announced that showers in the north would be politer tomorrow. So if you get wet remember that it's with greater courtesy than aforto.

Now, where did I put those galoshes...

Matthew

-- "Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto" http://www.calmeilles.demon.co.uk/index.html