Am I the only woman in the western world who owns just the one handbag? I think mine was fashionable round about 2003, when I bought it. Since then, it has steadily amassed so much crap that I think if I were to decide to clean it out, I would need to enlist the services of Rentokil, just to be on the safe side. Needless to say it is the size of a small suitcase, and weighs as much as my left leg. The muscles I have had to develop in my neck and back in order to keep it on my shoulder, have left me with an uncanny resemblance to Quasimodo. Since I appear to be going deaf as I get older, I may as well just get the eye patch, and then the transformation will be complete.
A friend of mine has several dinky little bags to match her several dinky little outfits. My bag is brown, therefore it already matches all my clothes – although the effect is not quite the same.
I have never quite understood why some people are prepared to go on a waiting list in order to buy a handbag. Is it really that mortifying just to choose a bag that is actually for sale in the shops? Yet again, I am probably missing something here. Whereas waiting lists seem to increase some people’s desire for certain things, I find that they have exactly the opposite effect on me. I remember a time last year when a mother urged me to put my children’s names down on a waiting list at a local tennis club. I knew there were other places they could learn to play tennis, should they wish to do so, so I asked her why I should bother with one where there was a waiting list, of nearly five years (apparently). “It’s for the discos” she hissed, “The social side is very good for teenagers!” What? Sign your children up for a sport which they may not be interested in, just so they can snog the ‘right sort of people’ when they hit the teenage years? Apart from the golf club style snobbery, this plan is so obviously flawed, that I cannot believe all these parents are following it so slavishly. Surely everyone remembers the horror and embarrassment of being asked to “be nice to” the gawky teenage son of their mother’s friend? Just imagine being forced to go to a disco where all the totty had been hand-picked by your mother? I have told H that if I ever try and do that to our kids, then he has full licence to smother me with a pillow. Although maybe I ought to retract that, as he probably doesn’t need much encouragement to wilfully misinterpret the pre-requisites.
I am drinking a Nepenthe Sauvignon Blanc (£7.99 Ocado) which is crisp, but not too sharp, in the way that some sauvignon blanc can be. It is a Drunk Mummy favourite.
I can remember, in the Eighties, there were waiting lists for the cleverly marketed and much-hyped Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc. Unsurprisingly, I was never on such a list, but I do remember being given a glass by someone who had been. With his newly-acquired status as one of the chosen few, he poured it out with the sort of reverence normally reserved for religious rituals. I think I must have failed to give it due veneration (probably necked it too fast) because I was not offered a second glass. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think I belched.
