I’m no fan of shopping but this summer I’m going to look like the real Dealz

Ihaven’t missed shopping. I’m sure there are many of you who have been clicking and collecting like mad yokes for the last week and can’t wait to go charging around Penney’s or Brown Thomas or wherever next week. But that was never going to be me. It’s not that I don’t like nice clothes — I’ve just never been very committed to the acquisition of them.

So nobody will be more surprised than I at this latest extraordinary development in my life: reader, I have bought my summer wardrobe.

I didn’t bother kitting myself out at all last summer, obviously — and it was with a heavy heart that I put my pre-loved summer clothes back into their winter bag having only worn a couple of dresses, less than a handful of times. But on their first outing of this year it was decreed (though not by me) that my old Daisy Dukes are either extremely amusing or borderline obscene, given my aparently impressive age. So all of a sudden, I was in the market for new clothes.

But where to go? Online was Russian roulette, and the risk of purchasing a pair of shorts that would go “right up my a***” (that’s a technical couture term) was high. But the doors of the general providers of denim shorts for middle-aged women were all still closed. And I’ll bet you’re thinking I bought them in Lidl, but I didn’t.

I got them in Dealz. In fact, I got a whole new wardrobe there.

Dealz and me, it’s complicated. On paper, I should love the place, since it’s apparently bursting with bargains. But in the same way that I’m not committed to clothes, I’m also not particularly interested in stuff, and as I get older, I find any sort of clutter increasstocked ingly annoying. In other words, I have a very low tolerance for tat, and with apologies to Dealz and all who sailz in it, I always imagined their shops would be full of it.

None of that should have made any impact on my life though, since I didn’t know even where any of their shops were. But something happened last year that changed that.

For as long as I can remember, there had been a Penney’s in Rathfarnham Shopping Centre. I really don’t know what it was doing there. Rathfarnham is not one of your shiny, modern, confusing temples of retail — it’s a modest collection of suburban shops that serves the local area. And for more than 50 years, there has been a massive Penney’s in it. I think the owners of Penney’s possibly bought it while drunk, and then forgot about it soon after, because for the past few decades, it seemed to be only as an afterthought or with all the stuff they couldn’t squeeze into Dundrum.

Still, I have fond childhood memories of the place and you could occasionally get a school tracksuit bottoms there, and I liked the whole oddness of it: it was a bit like finding a Starbucks on the moon.

And then one day last year, there it was, gone. And in its place, a gigantic Dealz. Well, I’m never crossing the threshold of that place, I decided, in my usual pointless cutting-nose-to-spite-face way. But I had to go to the bank last week and I’d gone to the trouble of parking and I was wondering what else I could do while I was down there and there it was, right beside the bank, and…

Eight euros. That’s what my new denim, modestly-hemmed shorts cost. And they had lovely, floaty cheesecloth tops for a tenner and it seemed rude not to buy two, and I forgot that my flip flops are so old now they are literally no colour, so I got a sparkly new pair for a fiver. I wasn’t expecting clothes in Dealz — and to be honest, I’m not sure they should even have been selling them — but I bundled them all home, more excited than I’ve been about anything for ages and tried them on and they’re all too big for me but I don’t care. I accessoried my new outfits with a pair of reading sunglasses from Lidl – aha! – for €2.50 and I was summer ready.

I realise this is a bit of a leap, but my ambition now is to win an Oscar, purely so that I can attend the ceremony in an outfit I got in Dealz. There I will be, beside Sigourney Weaver in Dior and Margot Robbie in Givenchy. Fiona Looney in Dealz. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve to put on my middleaged shorts and write a screenplay.