For my 50th blog I am returning to a draft from September as it seems appropriate now there is less than 30 shopping days to Christmas.
Shopping can be an ordeal. Can? Is!
One Saturday was one of those days. Everything I needed wasn’t on the shelves. I only needed, among other things, two 11W bayonet fitting lightbulbs. I could find bayonet in everything other than 11W, and what little there was in 11W was anything but a bayonet fitting.
Add to that the impossibility of finding black chinos that didn’t look too much like jeans, so I could double them up as autumn office trousers. Last year Gant sold them (Reader, I bought a pair to get married in) but I had to buy a size larger than I am now, there is a dark navy blue but it’s blue and not black. I’m not asking for the impossible am I? Isn’t black the New Black any more?
Although I don’t need new crockery and pans, I am thinking of replacing them. The plates etc we have, we had since we set up home and decided our relationship was not going to be temporary. We chose it together, and bought it together. For those of you who knew London in the 70s, we bought it from the Houndsditch Warehouse (it wasn’t a bad emporium either). We had been discussing over the last year before Laing died about getting in new. The white crockery at John Lewis over the past years had attracted our attention and was now more suited to us as nostalgic older men. It feels too soon to do all this, far too soon, but the Tefal range with the interchangeable handles was the sort of thing we thought we would want. I could have bought it but I couldn’t justify it.
I also tried, but couldn’t justify spending on a keyboard for my iPad mini. At times like this I need Laing’s counsel, his ability to cut through the noise that was clouding my judgement, or, as has been the case in the past, he would give me for and against arguments, ask me how I felt, and say I should think about it, and then surprise me by buying it and leaving it as a present on my desk. I miss him surprising me like that, and surprise me he did when he got me my iPod, my first iPhone and my iPad mini. Every gift he bought me in our latter years was a pleasant surprise. I think I missed that out in my search for the definition of love.
So that Saturday was a bit of a disaster. I couldn’t be bothered to drag myself from Westfield over to Canary Wharf, it is a bit of a haul by public transport when you’re starting odd at the “wrong” end of Westfield, and to be honest, the numbers out shopping were building up which told me it was time to leave. Had Laing been with me, the journey wouldn’t have been so much of a bore, we could have talked or read the Guardian, him with the news section, me hunting out photos of Leigh Halfpenny’s gorgeous legs in the sports section, flicking through the travel and review sections. I’ve bought the Guardian a few times since Laing died, but I cannot read it like I used to. Some feelings are still too raw. At least I can browse it on line and add my own take on life.
