Retail "therapy" - pleasure or pain?

Oh did y ou go to House of Bruar suitable attired? Have just received my catalogue full of seductive tweeds and tartan from top to toe. I just would not be able to trust myself in there. I would aim to come out looking like Susan Hampshire in Monarch of the Glen!!! (Might look more like Gillie)

annodomini, I always preferred to shop alone, and generally still do. The exception, to my surprise, is shopping with DD. Like me she is a yes/no shopper and understands and, generally, approves my taste, and I, hers.

Fortunately she doesn't particularly like malls, so when we go shopping it will usually be somewhere with independent shops and the smaller chains and not be undercover.

Just been into the city for my grandson's school Christmas Fair. He goes to the Cathedral school so the stalls were set up in the Chantry and garden. Outside, on the Cathedral Green, there is a Christmas Market set up and it was all very jolly with lots of people milling about. But - I couldn't help thinking of all the money that will be spent on tat that people mostly neither want nor need at a time when there is a financial crisis in this country and disasters galore elsewhere. Happily my family know to buy me a goat (or similar), twin a toilet or send a donation to another worthwhile cause for my Christmas gift (they usually buy me gifts for birthdays.). I'm not being 'Bah, humbug', I love Christmas, but I really don't like the gross commercialisation. On the bus there must have been at least a dozen teenaged girls of 14 or so, all chatting about what they were going to buy. Lovely, all of them, but I did wonder if they spend time and energy thinking about the good they can do rather than the goods they can buy. (I hope so.)

I don't enjoy it as much as I used to. But if I'm feeling miserable then its T.K MAX for me not the clothes but upstairs stuff. Kitchen gadgets, ornament, Xmas goods, and ooooh the cosmetics. Love it . I follow that up with a short drive to waitrose or m&s. just after my dad died this year my sister took me to the Q.V.C shop in Warrington. Oh It did take the edge off the sadness for a little while. I know it's just me because my sister hated it. However she has taken me back on my 2 last visits. How's that for sisterly love

I enjoy the pleasure of shopping on line - but don't like the pain of the credit card bill when it arrives!

I tried shopping in the town when I had my hair done this week and just hated the jostling, staff not knowing offers at the till [WHS I'm afraid], and queuing for 1 item. I would like to browse in a bookshop though if there was one. Waterstones near me is small and has hardly anything suitable for the GC - either too babyish or too teenagery and as for Pirates! Absolutely zilch when I tried last. And then there's the parking charges..........

Long live home shopping!