Shopping: Stellar Magazine
Title: Shopping
Author: Jonathan McCrea
Date: Mar 26th 2010
Publication: Stellar
I’m in trouble with the missus. Last Friday night, she teeters into the front room after a shopping marathon with boxes of shoes piled so high I can’t see her face. “That’s really thoughtful of you, but I can’t wear stilettos, I have weak ankles”, I joked. She plonks the boxes onto the floor to reveal a face like Medusa: one is not amused. “I’ve been out since 9 o’clock this morning. I need shoes to go with my dress, just tell me which ones you like.” She fixes at me with a mix of despair and irritation. “And it would be nice if you could actually help me this one time without being a dick.” With that she thunders upstairs. She’s a fiery one.
There’s a bit of history here, you see. I shop like most men shop. I see something, I try it on. If I don’t look like a paedophile or a science teacher, I buy it. I have never bought something that I’m likely to return. And, like most men, I’m singular in my habits: I buy one thing at a time. I don’t go looking for outfits. If I need a shirt, I go looking in the shirt section of a place that sells shirts. This is logical to me, but alien to my dearest girlfriend. She can happily go looking for a jacket to match the shirt she hasn’t bought yet and come back with a pair of earrings. You can imagine that the rare occasions we go shopping together can be an experience.
My idea of hell: being dragged around the over-crowded floors of contemporary ladies fashion only to end up lurking around the changing room like a peeping tom. God it’s boring. We all know men have precious little patience when they’re looking for clothes, and it’s even worse when the clothes aren’t even for them. This is why they put little play rooms in department stores for men with an Xbox and Sky Sports. Most guys think its genius; I think it’s quite humiliating. They might as well have a romper room with a plexiglass cage filled with coloured balls.
So to stave off the brain-numbing tedium I end up entertaining myself by coming up with Simon Cowell like put-downs for anything I don’t like. “No, I’m sorry, but the neck is too high – you look like a Mime”. “Your frame is too slim for the trousers, it makes you look like a clown with an eating disorder. It’s weird that I become this sort of self-appointed svengali of modern couture with absolutely no knowledge or authority or knowledge whatsoever. I just can’t help myself. “Too much going on top, you look like a gay panda”. “Too flappy, it’s like something you’d find on a body fished out of a lake in a BBC period drama”. You get the idea. In my defence, I never criticise the woman herself, only the clothes the woman is wearing, but that is a technicality that holds little weight when we’ve been in BT2 for nearly two hours. The knock-on effect of all this is obvious, we end up having a row. As per Murphy’s Law, this is almost always witnessed by an ex, a cousin or an authority figure from our past. The most recent of which was the headmaster from my old school. He even asked if everything was alright. We were mortified. Like I say, we don’t shop together much.
So back to Friday night and the tense shoe parade. She’s got the dress on now and is trying on sandals, round toes, stilettos and a strappy yoke that looks like something Xena the Warrior Princess would have worn (I keep this observation to myself). They actually all look great on, but I feel something isn’t working. I’m trying to be diplomatic when I’m rumbled. “What is it? You’re not telling me something. You have that annoying look on your face”. I’ve been told this many times: it’s one of my many flaws. I’m rubbish at poker, and I’m a crap liar. I’m a heart-on-my-sleeve kind of guy. Try as I might, I can’t help being one of those people who have expressive faces. Just don’t ask me if you’ve put on weight.
“I love the shoes, the shoes are fine” I paused, but I knew I was already committed. “It’s the dress, it sort of … washes you out”. The silence that followed was eerie, like being in the eye of a perfect storm. She ended up buying two pairs of shoes in the end. Well, when I say she, I mean me. It was the only way I could get her to stop throwing them at my head. I told you she was fiery.
The end result was that I was spectacularly wrong about the dress. The dress was, as they usually are, magnificent on her. She looked like a goddess. On the day she got more clucks then a rooster in a hen house and she was delighted with herself. It’s such a shame about the earrings though.