I HIT the New Year sales at the weekend. Not for me the 4am queue of bug-eyed caffeine junkies on Boxing Day. More the post-scramble, dignified mosey around to see what gives.
Actually, it’s difficult to mosey when the crowds are . . .well, like the sort of crowds you get at sale-time, but I did not allow myself to be hindered by the tidal swirls of humanity around me.
Not having the need for a complete new kitchen finished in faux oak and granite or a leather corner suite in shades of apricot with hidden devices that send your legs up above your head in a most unseemly fashion (it happened to me once in someone’s house and I still can’t eradicate the unhappy memory), I set out to find some nice white cotton sheets. I know the idea of sales is to splurge on great armfuls of bargains, but that’s all a bit racy for me. So away with your wicked temptations – it’s a decent pair of sheets for me, thank you, that’s all I ask.
Presumably it’s the start of a new year that causes me to come over all domesticated and new broom-ish like this. Those cheesy slogans must have wormed into my psyche. You know the things, like ‘New Year, New You’ that go with the advertisements for magic potions, treatments and regimes that will turn us all into Carol Vorderman clones. Well, I can’t get my head round the ‘new me’ bit. I’ve tried and I seem to be firmly stuck with the old one, unfortunately. So I do the next best thing. If I can’t overhaul myself, I’ll overhaul the airing cupboard. Life gets exciting like that when you reach my age.
I actually need more than one pair of sheets, but let’s not overface myself, I thought, as I headed for the snowy wastelands of the bedding department. Soon, well, certainly within an hour, I’d narrowed down the choice to eight colours and four types of ‘cotton’ from a veritable rainbow in Egyptian, percale, easy-iron, non-iron, for-ever-iron, stay-creased, gloss finish and ploughed field. The next hour saw me narrow the choice still further by adopting a more ruthless approach, but somehow I couldn’t ignore a beautiful coffee colour that kept popping up to the top of the pile of whites. There was nothing to choose between them on price, and how off-the-wall and daring it would be to have coloured sheets. Geoff might be a little scandalised, but I could introduce him to them gently.
Ignoring a voice in my head that nagged ‘Are you sure this is entirely practical?’ I took the coffee-coloured sheets to the till. Then I remembered I’d need pillowcases to match, so back I went to get them.
It was on my way to Pillowcase Corner that I spotted the duvet cover. We locked eyes. It was true love. It leapt off the shelf, whipped my credit card from my purse and waited, smiling up at me, while I paid.
Who needs sheets, especially coffee-coloured ones, I thought, as my new duvet cover and I headed off home, the two of us feeling madly, impetuously frivolous, just like you’re meant to at sales-time.
The sheets mission may not have been accomplished – but hey, who cares? And anyway, the duvet cover is white.
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