In Which I Am A Bitch, or The Luxury Chocolate Payback

You know who makes me sick?

Me.

I'm all, like, 'Say thank you to bus drivers!' and 'Let's all just get temporary jobs and watch the world as it goes past and take photos of lost mittens on the pavement!'

But as it turns out, I'm actually an angry, unreasonable commuter bitch, just like everyone else.

Still, I've been punished for it and I've been reading lots of improving articles in women's magazines in an attempt to move forward, spiritually speaking. As an unexpected bonus, I've also found a recipe for a surpringly versatile savoury tart, which is brilliant for picnics and lunchboxes.

But I'm starting at the end, and if you ask me, that's no way to begin a story, even if you're at the chapter in your creative writing course entitled 'Breaking the rules'.

It's 6.30pm. I'm emerging from the hot squeeze of the tube, subconsciously racing my fellow commuters to get as far away from the tunnels as possible. It's a Monday. The most psychologically gruelling of all the days, apart from Tuesday and most of the other ones. It had been a tough day at the fashion magazine sub-editing coalface. Maybe you don't believe that such days exist, but let me tell you, names like Ermanno Scervino don't spell themselves.

I'm hot. I'm tired. I've spent the last 20 minutes in a kind of battery farm of germs, sweat and freaky breath smells. At this point, Jesus does not want me, or anyone using the underground network, as a sunbeam. Among the extremely important and difficult things on my mind are: I must buy a birthday gift for a friend. I'm a gift-giving kind of a girl. But in this instance, I'm an embarrassingly late kind of gift-giving girl. On my way to the mainline, overland station, the portal to the suburbs and their purer strains of air, I walk past an upmarket chocolate concession. OK, I think. I will stop here. I will decompress by browsing their upmarket delicacies, I will buy the present and maybe they will have some samples for me to eat. The proximity of praline and caramel will soothe me and then, who knows, maybe even feed me on the journey home. (Buy a present for someone, buy one for yourself – everyone knows that's how it works.)

(Incidentally, in train-food news: this evening, the woman next to me on the train ate a Marks & Spencer prawn salad, four mallow/chocolate 'teacakes', two foil-wrapped all-over-chocolate digestives and two chocolate/caramel wafer bars between London Bridge and Forest Hill, which is the point at which I got off the train. What is the largest amount of food you have seen anyone eat on a 13-minute train journey, readers?)

I turn into the concession. Peace. Let the chocolate meditation begin. But before I have so much as a single sandal over the threshold (it's an open-wall kind of an establishment, so the notion of threshold is purely a theoretical one but it is the PRINCIPLE OF THE THING), an over-officious assistant bellows in my ear, 'CAN I HELP YOU?', a terrifying mask of make-up looming towards me like a clown who has been crying over the demise of the circus arts on a really hot day.

'No, thank you. I'm just looking.' And also, BACK OFF. I'VE HARDLY WALKED THROUGH THE DOOR (again, 'door' purely a linguistic construct in this instance). Don't you know I want to be furtive and sullen and isolated until the point when I actually need some help, and then I want to be righteously incensed at the lack of customer service available? Where do you think this is, America?

I walk to a different part of the concession. It doesn't take long. It's pretty small.

I browse in untroubled bliss for about one second, until a shadow falls across me, and a voice says, 'Can I..'

'I'M

JUST.

LOOKING.'

I say this in a manner which I must, with an accuracy that pains me, describe as really bloody rude.

My second assailant whispers an apology and scurries away. I turn around to see that it is a meek, paunchy bespectacled man who looks about 14 rungs below Timothy Lumsden from Sorry! on the ladder of downtrodden. I feel terrible – so ashamed of my behaviour, in fact, that I leave the shop immediately. There is no reason why I should feel more remorse about Timothy Lumsden than I do about Melted Clown Face. Perhaps it was the startled-faun style of his retreat. Perhaps it is an unsettling matter of gender politics. Whatever. In a characteristic act of stereotyping, I imagined him in a back room somewhere, weeping over the staff basin while bingeing uncontrollably on an unfit-for-sale box of damaged violet creams.

So the next day, I resolve to go back and be unflinchingly pleasant and cheery. I would win him round with the Miss Jones who makes jokes with the binmen and says bless you when people sneeze. Yes, you're right, she is kind of annoying, but she gets on much better with shop assistants. I would buy the present. Maybe Timothy Lumsden is on commission, in which case I'll buy even more of his luxury chocolates and eat the extra myself, in an act of selfless reparation. Although, let's be honest, he probably won't even remember me. A fast and wide river of people runs past his shop every day. What's a single one to him?

I think he remembered me.

I return to the shop. He is there. No sign of Clown Face. My browsing is fresh and concerted. The shadow falls. Here he comes. Be nice, Jones. Be. Nice

'Can I help you at all?' he says.

'Oh no thanks. I'm just having a look at the moment,' I say, beaming. 'Thanks very much, though.'

'Oh, just having a look?' he says, with his sitcom nerviness. 'OK then. You're just having a look.' And off he goes.

Phew. I think it went OK.

But then, I hear his voice behind me as he approaches another browser. 'Would you like to try some chocolates?'

That is a remarkably direct way to get my attention. I turn around. Strip lighting bounces of a silver platter he's carrying, which is loaded up with FREE CHOCOLATE TO OFFER PEOPLE LOOKING AROUND THE SHOP.

I am looking around the shop. Offer me a chocolate. Go on. Offer me a chocolate.

Naturally, I can't say this. I am proud, and also on shaky terms vis-a-vis demanding free stuff from a man I was incredibly rude to the previous evening. I turn my back and aim hard for nonchalance.

'Would you like to try some chocolate?' he says to another drifter. They take some.

Offer me a chocolate, Lumsden. I am the only other person here. Seriously, offer me a bastard chocolate.

He does not.

I make my selection from the shelves. I think to myself that he's probably left the tray of chocolates out on the counter for people to help themselves. That's what they do in the Bromley branch. I'll get my free chocolate when I pay.

As I stand at the till brandishing my credit card, the silver tray is nowhere to be seen.

Like I said, I think he remembered me.

I hope he told Clown Face the next day and she put an extra sugar in his tea as a treat.

That reminds me of this:

The devil in disguise

Imagine, if you possibly can, a scenario where I am a quavering, morally vulnerable simpleton.

I know. Inconceivable. But try.

If this were the case, I would be a woman on the brink of the darkest oblivion, as a great challenge has been presented to me. The devil is attempting to contact me via the Southwark Street branch of Marks & Spencer. Specifically, he has placed his sign among the free plastic forks. Look upon it, if you are strong enough, and regard how his horns can be seen in the prongs:


Compare, if you will, the other forks in the flock.


What evils would he have me commit in the church of Marks & Spencer?

Must I lick every individual roll in the fresh bakery area and put them all back on the display?

Use my credit card and get cash back when there is a very long queue and I'm only spending 17p on a banana?

Plunge my idle hands into the bins of crisps and scrunch them all up into tiny crumbs?

Switch around some of the special offer stickers so that exactly the meat and fish products I like are included in the 3 for £10 promotion?

Furtively open a tub of chocolate cornflake mini bites in the shop, eat a couple, put the lid back on and walk away?

Of course, those things would never happen. Apart from, like, the second one. And maybe the third and the fourth. And, if I'm honest, I've thought about the fifth one A LOT.

Because, as you all know, I am morally unimpeachable. Utterly upright. Powerfully principled. An air-puncher. A high-fiver. A winner.

So that's OK then.

Happy Easter and that

It's Easter and, just like Jesus, I have been resurrected this weekend. In blogging terms, of course, not, like, as the saviour of mankind. Although I never say never.

Two and a half weeks may be my longest period of non-blogging since Miss Jones blogging records began. That includes holidays. And I haven't even been on holiday this time. Although, as anyone who lives there will tell you, every day in south-east London is like a holiday. I have no good excuses for not posting, apart from mild busy-ness and a fear of repetition. This never stopped Barbara Cartland from a prodigious work rate though, so really, buck up, Miss Jones.

Let's focus on some positives. This year, I have three Easter eggs to eat, and I didn't even have to buy any of them for myself.

This is not one of them:

It's not strictly an egg, of course. It's a Baby Basil Hollow White Chocolate Duck. Is Basil the name of the duck or an adventurous addition to the flavouring? I don't know, the modern world baffles me.

Anyway, BBHWCD – as all his crazy pals in the confectionery packing depot probably nickname him – had been jilted by the tills at London Bridge Marks & Spencer, with an affliction so severe you could see straight into his pretty, empty little head. Who knows what cruel conspiracy of fate was responsible?

Perhaps he simply had a congenital physical imperfection, and that's what led to his last-minute spurning – we've all been there. Perhaps he was an innocent bystander caught up in a skirmish over the last packet of Cranberry & Orange Hot Cross Buns. Or perhaps someone in the queue loved him a bit too much, squeezed him a little too hard, until a hot clammy digit found its way right through his skull. Again, we've all been there.

We may never know.

This is a sombre note to end on, but I feel Easter should be a time of reflection. Reflection and consumption. I could never bring myself to eat BBHWCD, though. White chocolate is disgusting.

Fresh fish and garibaldis

I'd like to take a moment to reassure you about a matter concerning our female senior citizens. You could be forgiven for thinking that proper, classic Old Ladies, like the ones you see on telly, don't exist any more. You might think life among the over-70s these days is all pilates and walking the Great Wall Of China and the Open University.

I have had two encounters in the last week that have reminded me this is not the case.

Encounter no 1: It is last Sunday. I am in a small-ish branch of the Co-op, queuing up to pay at a checkout behind a woman who is a good 40 years my senior. I must describe this lady's appearance, since it aces a checklist of elderly-female physical cliches.

Comfortable, heavily worn shoes, bowing outwards, boatlike, in the middle of the foot? Yes.

Plastic see-through rain bonnet, tied beneath the chin? Bien sur.

Bare, mottled legs, despite the month which, by the way, was February? Ja, naturlich.

Those bare legs heavily bandaged around the calf area, in a way that broke your heart a bit? I have run out of languages now, but yes. Basically, yes.

Shapeless mac-style overcoat, that swelled around the top of the back? Yes again.

As we stood next to each other, from the corner of my eye I could see her performing that series of twitches and tics that precedes a stranger striking up a conversation with you. The subtle opening and closing of the mouth that makes up a false start. The looking at my face, looking down at my groceries and looking up at my face again.

Among the healthy and nutritious items in my basket, which collectively showed me to be a woman taking care of her health and aiming to encompass all the major food groups, but relaxed enough to enjoy the odd treat, were some Digestive biscuits (a pure, naked Digestive is so satisfying, don't you think – that lovely wet mulch they make in your mouth...).

'Ooh, where did you find those?' she said, pointing down at my biscuits.

Despite a lifetime of instruction to respect my elders, the sarcasm impulse was extremely strong here. Yet I fought it, as I felt her true goal was chat initiation rather than biscuit retrieval. The biscuits were not hard to track down. It wasn't that I had pressed down hard on a grapefruit in the fresh produce section, whereby the entire shelving unit had swung round, admitting me to a secret chamber where they keep all the fun food.

I mumbled a reply and waved an arm in the direction of the appropriate aisle.

'Oh,' she said. 'Only I fancied some Garibaldis.'

Really?

I mean, honestly? Does anyone EVER genuinely fancy a Garibaldi biscuit? Two slices of barely sweetened cardboard, riddled with currents that cling to your teeth with the tenacity of a cockroach.

I was confused by the logic of the next sentence. It sounded very much like she said she wanted something to do that afternoon while she was listening to 'the play'. I ascertained that this was a play on Radio 4, a new series apparently starting that afternoon. But could she really have been planning to pass the entire half-hour chain-eating Garibaldis? I mean, I've met some elderly people who could really put it away when presented with a free buffet, but still, this seemed unlikely. Perhaps she meant she would eat just a couple, then allow high-quality radio drama to soundtrack the arduous task of removing dried fruit from her molars.

After she'd paid for her shopping, I watched her putting her purse away in a pocket that seemed less than secure, then struggle to divide her bags between her hands, and seize control of a complicated stick-slash-crutch that looked more like hassle than help.

Garibaldis, radio plays, rain bonnets, bandages. I left the Co-op feeling as though I had just been to some sort of Senior Citizen Stereotyping Theme Park. Although, in the interests of bursting bubbles, among her shopping was a jar of marinated olives, which seemed slightly racy to me.

Encounter No 2: It is Thursday evening. I have just finished work and I am in the food hall of John Lewis, Oxford Street. Basically, Waitrose. I am looking at the shelves of pre-packed fresh fish. A women comes to stand next to me. Again, elderly, but smarter this time. A long, camel-coloured trench coat and a tiny daffodil in her buttonhole which may have been saluting cancer care, or the nation of Wales. I am ashamed to say I do not know which. There were no false starts to her stranger chat. It was straight in. A kind of stream-of-consciousness babbling of phrases from the old-lady handbook about money and prices and wartime and bringing fish home from the market – among them, this:

'You had bread and a scrape and a bottle of water, and you were in bed before your father got home or you'd get a thump.'

It's possible, of course, she was rehearsing an Alan Bennett monologue.

'And children never used to be obese,' she said. I had to agree with her. I don't know why I'm surprised about that. I'm nearly 40, that kind of thing's only going to happen more and more from now on.

But as she chattered away, only requiring the most occasional nod or non-committal 'mmm' from me to carry on, I'm sad to say I began to look for an escape, my eyes darting around, then alighting on a display somewhere across the shop, which I simply had to visit for a reason I would think up on my way over there.

Neither of these encounters gave me a thrill of inter-generational bridge-building or elderly-eccentrics I-Spy. They made me think, 'If you reckon things are hard now, they're only going to get harder.'

My M&S malaise

You could learn a lot about just how hatefully privileged and comfortable my life is from the fact that one of the things I worry about is the future of Marks & Spencer.

The last few years have been tough. Through the endless reports of their imminent financial ruin, we have had to shop hard and stay strong and listen to Bon Jovi a lot in order to Keep The Faith. And as if that wasn't upsetting enough, there is the question of what kind of personality crisis is being played out in store.

Clearly, Someone Up High has decided that M&S must no longer be the preserve of slippers and, like, preserves. Yet, they can't seem to decide whether they want Enid Blyton as their CEO:


Or Barbara Windsor circa 1969.


I don't want my raspberries to be ripping or my nectarines to be naughty. I just want them to be clean and ripe and cut into nice little pieces that I can eat with a plastic fork without taking my eyes off the computer screen or the telly. That is why I shop there. Also, for the excellent tights.

And then there's the horribly misjudged conception of the 'Reverse Percy'. Is it just me who thinks they have taken the much loved Percy Pig confectionary item - beloved of office workers and pork gelatine enthusiasts everywhere - and given it a makeover with overtones of dark sexual experimentation. I don't care at all for the way they've chirpily written 'It's just wrong!' on the packet, above a cartoon of Percy shielding his eyes.


Also, they are 'super-sticky'. Ew.

This air of 'We're not just here for drawliners and long nighties. Honestly, we are a right laugh. Some of those guys in product development are really crazy' is a bit embarrassing for everyone.

So let us say that I was experiencing some feelings of anxiety about the well-being of Magic & Sparkle. And then this happened:

The invasion of the other brands. Urgh! Common old Nescafe. Garish Kelloggs. Strongbow. Strongbow!

Clearly, I am at risk of sounding like some demonic pure-brand fascist – 'Any item of merchandise here not born of St Michael can CLEAR OUT! And yes, Walkers Crisps, I am TALKING TO YOU' – but it's more that they taint my impression of M&S food hall as some kind of supermarket shangri-la where everything exudes the same soothing brandlessness, miles away from the everyday labels of your daily grind. It's like they have let the outside in, where previously it was some magic kingdom of modestly achievable luxury. (Toilet paper with fleur de lys on! Get me!)

All this horror is to say nothing of the plastic, stemmed glasses full of wine with a foil peel-off top, so you can feel like some kind of urbane wine-bar sophisticate as you cruise back out to zone 5 on your packed commuter train, serenaded by one-sided phone conversations and mobile-phone R&B, while the aroma of Burger King Whoppas and despair dances in your nostrils.

I have never taken a photo of these since it would be a step further towards acknowledging their existence that I am simply not prepared to take.

All this makes me wonder if I am witnessing the last desperate commerical throes of the M&S empire. It compounds my suspicion that they are in terminal decline. And then where will I buy my 'more chocolate than biscuit' biscuits and luxury sherry trifles for one? Oh woe, oh vile middle-class, clasping-the-affordable-cashmere-to-my-bosom woe.

And yet. If this represents some kind of midlife crisis for M&S – desperately trying to appear fun and 'groovy', cavorting with unsuitable brands, committing label infidelity – it may be OK. If they've been trading since the 1880s, and they're at the middle of their life, that means they shouldn't close until at least 2130, right? Which means I won't have to worry about that eventuality in my lifetime. Just like climate change. I'M TOTALLY JOKING.

So now I just have to work on our relationship. But I've remembered that as Halloween starts to creep up on us, I always fall in love with M&S all over again. Last week I saw these and I knew that everything was going to be alright.


Yep. Still got it.

Correspondence Part I

Here is a breakdown of my average postal delivery in one week:

4 x letters from estate agents telling me they have just let property on my street. It is an extremely long street. This does not impress me.

6 x assorted loan offers from various financial companies.

1 x article my mum has cut out for me from the Sunday Times on ways to either a) increase my income or b) meet men*.

2 x letters from Virgin Media imploring me to give them my Broadband business BUT I NEVER WILL, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? EVEN IF YOU GAVE IT TO ME FOR FREE, I STILL WOULD NOT BECAUSE OF YOUR HATEFUL AND INCESSANT STREAM OF UNINVITED CORRESPONDANCE.

Any 2 of the following: bank statement, payslip, bill.

2 x catalogues from smug middle-class, 'quality' clothes companies with adorable, rosy-cheeked children in brightly coloured wellies on the cover, companies I have never ordered from, yet who arrived in my life just as I started ticking the 33 and over age box, as suddenly and unwelcome...ly as back fat and monstrously hard skin on the soles of my feet did at around the same time.

Number of items of genuine, personal, non-financial, addressed-to-me-by-hand correspondence: appoximately 0.2 (based on receiving one item around every 5 weeks).

So you can imagine my giddy excitement when I came home to find a crisp, cream envelope that bore my name and address, written in an elegant hand, waiting for me on the communal shelf in our communal hallway.

I took it into my flat, sat on my sofa and looked at it for a little while, enjoying the promise of genuine human contact contained within. Whatever was inside would inevitably prove to be a disappointment, so I allowed myself to bathe in the potentiality before I uncovered the hollow truth. Life taught me to be pessimistic at a young age, when Jim'll Fix It did not respond to my letter.

But I was wrong. Inside was a card written to me by a shop assistant who had sold me some perfume in Jo Malone about six weeks before. I had thought the time we spent together discussing woody florals and uplifting citrus meant nothing to her. Oh, foolish, foolish girl.

Aww. R had sat down, after a hard day of spraying perfume on white shards of card for indecisive idiots like me, to write to her valued customers, no photocopying, no Dear Sir/Madam, no automatic franking machine, but instead tender strokes of biro and stamps. Stamps! I was, whatever flippant showing off is to follow, genuinely pleased to receive her card and impressed by her superior approach to customer service (NB: she does not have a Saturday job in Bromley, as far as I am aware, and is over the age of 20).

Now I'm not entirely sure how to respond.

Should I write back?

'Dear R, how lovely to hear from you. I hope you have been well. You must be very excited about the new English Pear & Freesia fragrance rolling out across stores nationwide in September. I know I am! I've had the week off work, so I've been able to up my pitiful blog-post rate temporarily. Too bad no one told the weather I was on holiday! Looking forward to catching up with you soon and don't work too hard! Fondest regards, Miss Jones x'

Hmm.

On the another hand, perhaps I should surprise her by waiting outside the shop until I can see, through the window, that she has her back turned, then sneak in and put my hands over her eyes and say 'Guess who?!' (I may disguise my voice at this point. I do quite a good Loyd Grossman. Or one particular group of ex-colleagues used to love it when I did the voice of the pineapple from the old TipTop advert.) Then when she prises my hands from her eyes – her voice rising in borderline panic/irritation – and turns round, I'll give her a massive hug and ask her if she wants to pop out and get some lunch with me.

Maybe I could take her in a tuna sandwich and a latte.

This is ridiculous, of course.

She might be a vegetarian. I should make it egg mayonnaise.

* I should say that I would be very sad indeed if she stopped doing this.

Sales-assistant soulmates

I don't think, in this country, that we are renowned for our customer service. If I am served in a shop by someone who cannot even acknowledge me, so busy are they holding an uninterrupted conversation with a colleague about an out-of-order ex-partner, I am seething but unsurprised. When someone offers me true, USA-style, teeth-and-talent-show salesmanship, it seems so contrived or commission-chasing that I have to beat a retreat to some static display in the furthest corner of the shop, where I can hide from anyone asking me if I need any help at all.

However, I am happy to report that on a Saturday afternoon in Bromley, you can experience delightful customer service from an unexpected corner of the population. The youth. The Saturday girls, the college-holiday boys, the McJobbers, the saving-to-go-travellers. Those who should be the most surly and the least giving of any kind of a shit had become, on Saturday, in Bromley, sincere, sunny... flawlessly nice. It was like the Pleasantville of retail. The Stepford of sales. Like robots who have developed genuine thoughts and feelings. Almost like....wait, is it... yes, almost like human beings.

The girl who served us in Starbucks was 5ft9in and 19ish years of enthusiasm and best intentions – steadfastly reiterating her apology that the dishwasher wasn't working and all drinks would be served in paper cups – with no sign of flagging, despite the late hour (4.30pm). No one could blame a Saturday-afternoon Starbucks employee for having an attitude problem. A sunny dispostion can't be too easy to achieve when eight hours of intensive milk-steaming has laid waste to your eyeliner and tireless table-scrubbing has ended your black nail varnish. Also people treat Starbucks really badly. Customers! Why not just crumble your muffin directly onto the carpet. Why persist in the charade that you are actually trying to get it into your mouth. Also, if you take away the risk of actually eating any of it it, it is far less fattening.

In Marks & Spencer, we spent quite some time with a friendly, funny boy-cashier, all frayed wristbands and fringe just made for sulking behind – except he was not sulking at all. He was patient and good-humoured and actually claimed to be enjoying our very lengthy investigation into whether the garment Ms R wanted to buy had been mislabelled at point of manufacture as it 'didn't look right'.

There is a slim chance, of course, that this was because Ms R is extremely attractive.

But still, these were only two among several other immaculately behaved orderlies. And on the way back to the train station, Ms R and I reflected on the good character of Bromley's shop-employed young people. We wondered whether they all hung out together out of office hours, like a really well-mannered casting of Skins. We wondered if Mr M&S and Miss Mochachocofrappuccino knew each other at all. And then we talked about what a sweet couple they would make. (She would take his name when they married, obviously. It would save her a fortune in biros.)

What if they were working away on their separate floors of the Glades shopping centre (preferably, for cinematographic purposes, one directly over the other, a gilded thread of romantic potential running through the floor and the ceiling, connecting the pair of them. Although this is probably impossible as I think this branch of Marks & Spencer has more than one floor, thus ruining my motion picture directorial debut) totally unaware of each other? Passing each other on the mall escalators, one going up, one going down, him with his head in Kerrang!, hers buried in... well, I guess you'd have to say The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. That or The Belljar. Him walking into Pret A Manger while she has her back turned, picking up cutlery to go with her soup. Her spinning round to leave just as he's facing the sandwiches, choosing his lunch.

How could we bring the two of them together? I thought about this on the train back to Denmark Hill. Ms R is excellent at drama. I felt sure we could have fashioned some kind of Glades security uniform and send her into their respective shops, requesting their presence at a vital health and safety briefing at which they would be the only two attendees. Then, under the pretence of showing them the fire escape, we could somehow trap them outside or on a roof, necessitating their cuddling up together for warmth, if not survival, as Ms R and I perched on some ledge above them sprinkling them with rain from a watering can and blasting them with cold air from a thing that produces cold air.

Or one of us could distract Mr M&S, perhaps with another mislabelled prospective purchase, while the other palmed his mobile phone out of his pocket, or slipped his name tag off his shirt, and then abandoned it on a table in Starbucks, knowing Miss Mochachocofrappuccino's sweetness and devotion to duty would lead her to track down its rightful owner.

We had got to somewhere around Nunhead when I realised I had essentially reinvented one of the subplots of Amelie.

I am wondering if there is any kind of a market for Bromelie.

Fangs for shopping at Sainsbury's

Vampires, blah blah. All around us, etc etc. We've been here before.

And now they've been in the fruit aisle at Dog Kennel Hill Sainsbury's.

Don't you sometimes crave something sharp to cut through all that haemoglobin? It just makes your mouth so... claggy.

Topshop dispatches part 249

Statement jewellery:

What do you think? Too much?

It's alright, I didn't buy it. I got this instead:

Lost Tribes: The Middle-Aged Women of M&S Marble Arch

If you've recently lost touch with one of your older female relatives, it's entirely likely that they've joined the nomadic, department-wandering women of Marks & Spencer, Marble Arch.

These ladies of a certain age were once innocent shoppers Up West, who were simply Having A Lovely Day In Town, until they wandered into the gilded palace of scones and were seduced by the cosy nightwear, comfortable shoes and extremely competitive basement coffee shop. Soon it was apparent that their every sensory need was being met somewere across the marbled floors of Marble Arch branch and they just never left. Meanwhile, in houses across the capital and the Home Counties, there are lone men opening and closing the fridge door absent-mindedly, dimly aware that something is missing.

I had this revelation as I was trying on shoes at lunchtime today. I was taking a walk around the second floor in some new heels and thinking 'Mm, these are quite comfortable' (of course they are, you idiot. It is only when you leave the shop that the spell is broken and the Grinding Cogs of Screaming Shoe Pain begin to turn) when I saw a mature lady sitting on the edge of a mannequin plinth, watching me intently. I smiled at her in a non-hostile way and eventually she smiled back. Ten minutes later, I walked back in a different pair of shoes and she was still there in exactly the same place and I realised, that is because she has been here for 18 years.

These women can be found roaming the floors day and night, pushing trolleys full of Useful Things and Lovely Treats that they've collected, like Bubbles from The Wire, with hair that is actually not dissimilar (albeit tonged and backcombed, not natural). Some members of the species live in isolation within the colony. Others prowl the aisles in groups of three or four, picking over racks of scarves and sniffing at foam bath like monkeys investigating an exotic piece of fruit, or calling out orders to meet at handbags in 20 minutes. They never sleep and they live off ham and fruitcake that they've scavenged from the food hall while the security guards are distracted.

They speak in many tongues, but they are generally friendly, if initially startling. While you are in front of a mirror, distractedly looking at your feet in grey patent sandals with a gold heel, and bemoaning the Curse Of Meaty Calves that has been visited upon you, you may hear an exotic call aimed at you from 15 metres away: 'TOO BEEEG, DARRRRLING. ONE HALF SIZE DOWN!' And you realise they are reaching out to you. It's exciting, of course, to find that you are communicating with them, but as they come closer and fully engage you in conversation, you start to edge away, realising that you're not like them, you're young and you belong in Selfridge's next door, with its exclusive perfumes and dangerous fashions and champagne bar. Don't you? And you turn and run away through smart trousers and umbrellas and slippers you will never wear, and they stare after you, thinking, 'You'll be back. And one day you'll be staying. You'd better like teacakes.'

'This one goes out to the one I've left behind'

If you are one of the more sensitive members of the band REM, I'm suggesting you might want to look away now. For on Saturday, looking mournfully out at me from the racks of East Dulwich's premiere charity shop was not one, not two, not… look, basically just keep doing that till you get to five – five! – different REM albums.

If you visit enough charity shops for enough years, you can plot a sagging curve of Britain's former music passions, and when exactly we fell out of love with them.

A few years ago, you could have bet your kidneys on being able to go into any branch of Oxfam and finding at least two copies each of Wet Wet Wet's Popped In Souled Out or A New Flame by Simply Red (yes, I owned both of these albums, what is your point exactly?). Now, apparently, we're no longer tied to the 90s (early Travis reference for you, early Travis fans) because on Saturday I found two unloved copies of Urban Hymns by The Verve. If you'd told any of my friends in 1998 that within 12 years they'd be dumping that particular CD in a charity shop, they'd have choked on their This Life boxsets (This Life video boxsets also currently very big in the Charity Shop Chart Rundown).

What I'm wondering is this: if you're a pop combo past your popular prime, is it worse to see several different albums bearing the band name you spent ages excitably/inadvisably thinking of lying unloved in a charity shop, or several copies of the same album? In the first scenario, one person (presumably) really, really doesn't like you. In the second, you are more casually disliked by a larger group of people, and also that particular album is quite emphatically a dead loss.

If it makes you feel better, Stipey, I bought Dead Letter Office.

Lunch-hour dispatches

1) You join me in Cos, a place I am increasingly resigned to calling The Shop That Got Away.

Actually, that would imply that there has, at some point, been a connection between us, and my recurring failure to find anything I would like to buy in there is just a melancholy case of faulty timing. The fact is, Cos and I simply have no chemistry whatsoever – and we never have. And sometimes, this just happens between a woman and a merchandiser. On paper, we are nothing but compatible. We should gel perfectly. I am the right age, I have the right job, I have the non-standard shape that should be perfect for its boasts of superior tailoring at mid-budget prices. I even have the mid-budget for the mid-budget prices. Sometimes, though, sometimes the sparks you're desperate for just do not fly, and you are left slumped, alone and unsatisfied, in the changing room with your clothes on the floor, and a fine-knit jersey dress around your ankles, wondering what exactly didn't go right this time.

However, it is important not to take this personally, and be plunged into the deep, deep well of Retail Self-loathing. Instead, I am resolved to look at myself in the fitting room mirror and repeat this self-affirming mantra 10 times:

'I am a special and worthwhile shopper and I am remembering how jealous people are of the really cool stuff I always find in H&M.'

Anyway, this particular lunchtime in Cos, I was met by a dummy whose body language I can only describe as hostile.

It was as if she was saying, 'No. You have to leave. I can't go through it again. I'm just so tired. Leave now and save us from any more awkwardness and heartbreak.'

It's either that or

a) she's consumed with silent fury at having to pose in front of the unflattering backdrop of a yellow skip. Seriously, yellow is really hard to wear. The unworkable clash of my pallid complexion and the joyous colour of sunshine and buttercups and Norwich City is the greatest fashion cross I have to bear. The fact that the sight of me in skinny jeans – if they can even be prevailed upon to stretch up and over my knees – is enough to cause permanent blindness to anyone unfortunate enough to see it is water off a duck's back in comparison.

b) when the sun came up this morning, causing her to freeze in the middle of whatever nocturnal activity she was engaged in (all tailor's dummies come alive at night – you will know this if you have ever seen the documentary Mannequin presented by Andrew McCarthy), she was practising the dance routine to Biology by Girls Aloud.

2) This is the future of the Post Office.

It is a machine that helps you post your letters and parcels without the need to queue up for the best part of an hour to be served at a Actual Counter by an Actual Person. While I am a fan of any benign automaton, I can't help feeling that this striving towards efficiency and swifter customer service will deprive us of the endearing/frustrating foibles of a British institution. In order that these vital minutiae of British life should not be lost, I am hoping that the machine will suffer sporadic 10-minute delays while messages are flashed up saying things like, 'Please wait, a senior citizen is telling me in detail about her ulcer'; 'Would you like to buy a DVD copy of Licence To Drive starring Corey Haim and Corey Feldman for £4.99?'; 'Please wait, the customer in front of you wants to send 20 packages of assorted size to the Philippines'; 'Can I interest you in the post office's pet insurance policy. It's extremely competitive.'

In addition, ambient smells should be emitted from the machine at various intervals, in an initiative earlier adopted by the Jorvik Centre, but in this case conjuring up not the aroma of a viking settlement, but the heady scent of the great British post office queue, including Unsuccessfully Radiator-Dried Laundry, Oniony Sweat and Whiskas.

Gift shop despatches

Apparently there are some people in the world whose idea of a good day out does not include either a gift shop, or a cup of tea and a nutritionally void item of baking. To those people, I say nothing because I have nothing to say to them.

Although I could perhaps wrestle my antipathy to the floor for long enough to say:

You would probably go to Kew Gardens with your friends – if you had any, which, like, you totally don't – and you would stride through the shop in your ugly shoes, with your overrated sense of purpose, on your way to the toilet, without a sideways glance and you would completely miss the Never-Ending Wall Of Technicolor Confectionary.

You are the kind of person who thinks there are two kinds of jam in the world: red jam and marmalade. You would probably look at this jar of High Dumpsie Dearie, which I have learnt is a traditional recipe for Plum, Pear & Apple Jam, and think, 'Why don't they just call it Plum, Pear & Apple Jam?'

You are probably not even excited by salt and pepper shakers – or a 'cruet set' as people who write copy for mail-order catalogues are wont to call them – in the shape of guinea pigs.

Your heart is made of sawdust and steel – not silk and steel, that would make you Five Star – and nuts and bolts done up too tightly. If we were at school, you would probably borrow my felt-tip pens without asking, and press too hard, and then not put the tops back on properly. You have to push them on until they click, you savage.

Jack your body

I was buying my lunch in M&S at London Bridge on Friday when I noticed a girl, early-20s but it's hard to tell (when I was in Norfolk recently, a bus driver asked me if I was UNDER 19 and it was the greatest moment of my life), roaming the aisles in black and white face paint.

In my usual open, non-judgmental way, I assumed she was on her way to her first Glastonbury, and demonstrating to all the stiffs staying in London exactly what an anything-goes time she was going to have down there.

Then, when I was queuing up to pay for my Mexican three bean wrap and half-price cherries, I found myself standing right next to her. In a way that was both sheepish and slightly attention-seeking, she shouted to her friend who was being served, 'Will you wait for me? It makes me look slightly less weird.'

We had a moment of catching each other's eyes, and she did a bit of eye-rolling and 'I'm so embarrassed.' I told her what I had surmised about her kerazee Glasto get-up, but she shook her head and said glumly, 'I'm Jack The Ripper.'

She worked at the London Dungeons, as it turned out.

'It's alright for her,' she said, nodding at her friend. 'She's a plague victim.'

I can confirm that the friend did look dramatically, and terminally, fake-ill.

'She gets a costume,' Jack said. [She was right. Plague Victim was working a generic olden-days skirt, and a dowdy blouse item.] 'So everyone knows she's playing a character. I just have to put a big coat and hat on over my own clothes.'

I was interested in the gender politics of a woman playing the prolific murderer of prostitutes. Obviously I didn't say that. I just went, 'But you're a girl. Cool.'

She explained that since she was pretty much covered up, with a scarf across half her face, she could loom out of the shadows and slash away with drama-student abandon, and no one would know that under her coat she had been concealing not just a knife, but also breasts (two).

[Has anyone ever written a horror film set in a chamber-of-horrors re-enactment experience? I went through one at Madame Tussaud's a few years ago, when I was there in the evening for a work party. I honestly thought that was the way I was going to die. Incidentally, the evening ended prematurely after someone spilt red wine on Wax Madonna's white suit. A couple of years before that, I had been to a record launch there [Moments Where My Life Sounds More Exciting Than It is No 64] and the management became quite distressed when one of my colleagues pulled Wax Alan Titchmarsh's trousers down. But really, what do they expect?]

Anyway, I was excited by my brush with grim-faced wearers of horror facepaint. However, not everyone is so easily impressed. We ended up paying at adjacent tills, and her cashier looked her up and down, before saying in a voice of sighing and ennui, 'Who are you today, then?'

My first Cartland

Someone in the Lewisham area has fallen right out of love with their collection of late 70s/early 80s comedy records. 

Imagine them dumping the 12-inch bagful on the counter of the Red Cross shop with a mournful sigh, saying 'We just don't laugh together any more.' 

I, however, was in the mood for love, because I found myself buying my first ever Barbara Cartland novel, enticingly called Journey To Paradise. I felt as though this was a female rite of passage that I was coming to embarrassingly late. 

Also, it was only 80p. Although, considering the original price was 30p, I'm not sure it was the sound investment it initially appeared. 

The opening page reveals something of the female peril ahead – '…he is an experienced husband. He will know how to deal with your somewhat exceptional qualities, Kamala' – but it also reveals a scathing review by a previous owner, expressed in brisk, dismissive and I would say rather mature strokes of biro…

They saw me coming

Weak-willed profligacy in the face of emotionally manipulative nostalgia-packaging, thy name is Jones.

Misery has a white spine

A refreshingly frank approach to categorisation in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road.

Time-travelling and twins

I believe in time travel. I did a bit yesterday. Mrs G and I were walking from Oxford Circus to Bond Street at about 6.30, a route which in December becomes a pathway through hades, so we took a diversion to avoid the zombie army of Oxford Street. 

Our shortcut led us through Bhs, which truly is the department store that time forgot. Taste doesn't give it much thought these days either, if the men's gift selection is anything to go buy (this was actually a typo, but I feel it is a serendipitous one).

For sir, may we recommend the animal-print 'Easy Tiger!' brief.

And if sir is feeling more adventurous in the bedroom, perhaps the 'Suspect Package' glow-in-the-dark thong, with handcuffs attached. 

(It is my New Year's resolution to buy a camera that is not broken in a bid to post some pictures that are actually in focus.)

It is no surprise that an awful lot of shoppers seem to have forgotten about Bhs too. The place was as silent as a church. A church selling alarming men's underwear.

Mrs G and I solemnly wondered if Bhs would soon be following Woolworths to the retail graveyard. But wait! What's that coming over the hill? It's the Croydon-born supermodel cavalry. Clearly inspired by Mrs G and myself, trend-maker Kate Moss was also in Bhs on Tuesday evening to do a spot of shopping in the department store coincidentally owned by her close friend Philip Green, still more coincidentally in the presence of a paparazzi photographer. What are the chances?

We could only have missed her by minutes. 

A fact about Kate Moss is that she is exactly the same age as me, to the very day. Should I ever become famous, women's magazines will have a field day with this coincidence, endlessly discussing which of our could-not-be-more-differing lifestyles has resulted in the most True Happiness, as well as the least signs of ageing. I'm pretty confident I've got the second category in the bag, at least.

The love song of Miss Jones

I have fallen in love with far more inanimate objects than I have human beings. I don't know why this is and I don't care to dwell on it. 

But I can tell you that I do have a 'type'. Clothes.

This week, I cannot stop thinking about the most beautiful black sleeveless cashmere cardigan from Whistles which I tried on at the weekend. It is £95. 

Now we are involved in a romantic, but as yet unconsummated relationship. I realised this as I replayed the widescreen film of us in my head for the 356th time, the one where we're walking together through the park, kicking up piles of autumn leaves with my Gap biker boots (which I thought I loved once, but which meant nothing as soon as I met the cardigan), and then fat drops of rain start to fall, and we run laughing through the shower to take shelter under an enormous tree because the cardigan is dry clean only. 

The fact is, I honestly love it. I mean it this time. I've never felt like this before. It's like I'm a better person when I'm with it. I'm the person I always wanted to be. I smile all the time, and only I know why. 

I'm finding myself defending it to concerned and sceptical friends with loyal, red-faced indignation. Yes, I know it's not much to look at, but you don't know it like I do. You don't know what it can do. I know it's out of my league, but we have so much in common. It would get on so well with all my other clothes. All those Primark cardigans meant nothing to me.

Yet still I am afflicted by a paralysing lack of nerve. With its upmarket price tag, I dare not quite reach out and make the move that would bring us together. So I have resolved to wait, and hope that the seductive excitement of the sale season will see me losing my inhibitions, and then it will tumble into, and then onto, my arms. But what if I do wait, and find it's too late? Someone else may snap it up while I was waiting in the shadows, worrying about trivialities like budget. I'll have lost it forever and will be left to think of what might have been. 

If you'll excuse me, I must go and lie on my bed and stare at a picture of it while listening to some soft-rock ballads.

Stratford, Sweden, sweet dreams

I have returned from a few days away in Stratford Upon Avon, with Mrs Jones and David Tennant. Unlikely companions, but welcome, both. I can report that David Tennant has shiny hair, ladies' fingers and enough nervous energy to power most of the developed world. He is also pretty good at playing Hamlet. Patrick Stewart, who we saw leaving the theatre by the back door, may be a colossus of the stage, and one of the nation's most attractive 68-year-olds, but sadly, even he is powerless to resist the kind of leather blouson jacket so curiously beloved of his peer group.

Now I have returned to the capital, as reluctantly as ever. 

Sometimes, like defrosting the freezer compartment or visiting the dentist, there is simply nothing to be done but to go to IKEA. Today was such a day. My windows needed blinds, my pictures needed frames, my heavy heart needed lifting – I felt little optimism about any of the above.

Who are all the people wandering around IKEA in the daytime? They cannot all be like me – driven to part-time work by bereavement and illness, yet now rejoicing in its flexibility, if not its financial rewards. If any of them are unemployed, they should really think about getting jobs in IKEA, then maybe their once-fellow customers would be able to find someone to fucking well help them once in a while, instead of being condemned to wander around like severed souls in purgatory, driven mad by the incessant drumming of rain on the store roof and the repeated grating of one's achilles by the inferior trolley control of whoever walks behind.

IKEA did little this afternoon to alter its reputation as perpetual purveyor of disappointment. In short, and you will not be surprised by this, my windows still need blinds and my pictures still want for frames. My heart remains unchanged, except…

I could not bear a grey, empty-handed trudge back across the tarmac to the tram stop. So I bought a Christmas tree – a declassé plastic number, chemically engineered to engender neither showers of pine needles nor tears of joy and excitement. Its best feature was that it came in a long, oblong cardboard box with a handle down one of its long sides. It made me feel that I might be carrying something wildly more intriguing inside than an ugly IKEA Christmas tree. To begin with, it was a musical instrument (this reminded me of a dream I'd had the night before in which I was dining at The Ivy with my mum and Chris Martin), and I was on my way into town to play at the Royal Albert Hall, or the Royal Opera House, or in fact any of the city's exciting Royal venues. People would almost certainly be throwing flowers onto the stage, and I would receive visitors in my dressing room wearing a silk kimono and a turban. 

By the time I was back at East Croydon Station, I was carrying a lethal weapon, of which I was the sole trained operator, and with which I would single-handedly eradicate a cartel of Really Evil Badness. 

As we passed through Norwood Junction on the train, I was carrying a box containing a tiny Chinese gymnast who I was smuggling away from her inhumanly strict coaches.

I reside in a fantasy world of my own creating, clearly. An hour or so earlier, I had been scolded by the cashier in the IKEA cafe for dreamily dilly-dallying while he was waiting for my pin number, and the bickering couples in the queue behind were waiting to eat their meatballs. 'You're in IKEA now, you know,' he said, with the mildest suggestion of a threat and a faint echo of The Wizard Of Oz (the way you're directed around IKEA by an arrowed path always reminds me of the yellow brick road). 

In the unlikely event that any of my fellow passengers on the journey home had been speculating as to what was inside the cardboard box that actually contained a cheap plastic Christmas tree, the picture of a cheap plastic Christmas tree on the side may have given it away. 

But still, I'm saying that today of all days was a time to rejoice in the power of dreams.