CLOTHES ARE NOT LOVE! That sales assistant is not your friend!

So here I am, bored out of my mind hanging around what used to be flat 107. But the essence is slowly vanishing. The end of term has slowly creeped up on me and bitten me on the behind leaving me with a very nasty bruise and a sad little feeling at the pit of my stomach (like when you eat gone off mushrooms) except this time it ain’t no fungi causing me grief.

My little family of flat mates are slowly departing back to their corners of the globe (or the surrey/London area because where everyone seems to live!) And I am left feeling somewhat cheated. You come to uni are pushed into a flat of strangers that you don’t know, forced to not only make friends with them but form a reasonably special bond so that you can bare to live with them all year, then only to have them snatched away from you again after a mere 7 months! I feel like I should be provided with some kind of 12 steps program to deal with this kind of cold turkey!

Now unfortunately I am not Kerry Katona and ITV2 will not sponsor me to make a program about how I get over this tragedy, and then provide me with a new wardrobe, hair and complementary Botox, so I have to deal with this upset by myself. Now usually at times like this I would reach for a strawberry milkshake but my good friend and nail technician warned me that too much calcium is making my nails flake so that’s a no-no.  But then I always feel a certain desperation to hit the shops and spend an unsightly amount of money. But what is it about Reiss and Urban Outfitters and Topshop (drooling just thinking about them) that makes me feel so much better in a time of crisis.

I sat thinking about this for about 20 minutes, trying to picture scenarios of depressed lil’ me wandering through Topshop and the euphoria I get at the checkout counter. But I couldn’t. It appears that some kind of mist descends upon me and I just go on some kind of mad rampage.

 I think that the perfect shop sets up the perfect scenario for you. Every sales assistant makes you feel very wanted so that helps to lift you out of your depression. You also take about a million clothes into the changing rooms with you and each outfit has a certain hope and prospect about it. Every time you try on a new outfit each one promises you something exciting and a whole new scenario to go with it:

 ‘This one I could wear for a special occasion’, ‘this one I could wear on a date’

 and so on and so forth until it gets to the point where you don’t actually need to have a special occasion or a date coming up because if you have the outfit then it’s bound to happen. So new clothes= something to look forward to, and isn’t that the secret of a happy life?

(Mr. Benn knew how to have fun in the changing room)

On discovering all of this I felt extremely smug and clever and like I had somehow beat the system and I didn’t need clothes and shopping to make me happy! But then I realised that I was still moping around the flat watching very old re-runs of Catchphrase and I realised maybe not...