Sucked in to social media sales patter, I now own not one, but two pieces of tat

Even before the bracelet I’ve bought online lands on my doormat, I already know it’s a piece of cr**. I had high hopes for it when it first appeared in my Instagram feed in one of those ‘oh-my Godhow-have-you-managed-to-stay-alive-forthis-long-without-one-of-these’ type posts. It was silver (or at least, it was silver coloured; the ad was light on details of the actual metal involved), and it was a sort of hybrid bangle charm bracelet affair. What sold it to me, though, was the fact that its single charm was a tiny Native American dream catcher.

Now. If you read this page last week, you’ll know that I’ve been persecuted by bad dreams over the past couple of years. Friends have recommended I seek professional counselling — as I would myself if it was happening to one of them — but for reasons beyond my ken, I fancy my chances more with a tiny, possibly silver, gee gaw from Instagram slung around my wrist.

As it happens, I’ve had some success with dream catchers. The only genuinely pleasant dream I’ve had in years happened on the first night of a holiday in Lahinch last summer. When I woke up, in that lovely, fuzzy happiness that used to follow sweet dreams, I noticed a dream catcher hanging on the bedroom wall. I’m not superstitious but I’ve never passed a straw I didn’t first clutch, so I spent most of that day reading everything I could find about the history of these strangely beautiful craft works, originally woven by Native American women to keep bad dreams at bay.

I ordered one that very day — but the six nights of rocky horror shows that follow didn’t fill me with confidence and sure enough, when I did hang my very own dream catcher over my very own bed, I might as well have been trying to catch the ocean in an crisp packet for all the difference it made.

So I don’t really think that wearing a tiny version of an already debunked ancient charm will sweeten my nights. But I like silver bracelets and it’s a pretty little trinket and you never know — YOU NEVER KNOW — so I follow the instructions down to the Aladdin’s Cave of silvery coloured things and although it starts off as quite an expensive piece, by the time they’ve applied the introductory offer, the membership discount, the ONE DAY ONLY incentive, and sterling’s hilarious collapse, it only ends up costing me €22.

I press ‘buy now’ — and immediately, it’s as though an alarm has gone off in the internet: ‘lads, we’ve found a rube’.

Within seconds, I have been invited to buy ear-rings that are so cheap, they might have started life as curtain rings. If I don’t like them, there are any number of rings, necklaces, birth stones, gem stones, lucky charms and utter, utter tat available to me. And that’s when I realise that the charming bracelet I have just bought must be a piece of s***.

I suppose I should be relieved then when it doesn’t show up, but because I am an idiot, I go back to the site where I see that I hadn’t hit the Godspeed button or something like that, so I complete the purchase of an item that I am now certain is absolute tat.

So now I have two of them. They arrive a day apart, in little plastic packages like free gifts you’d find stapled to the front cover of the Bunty. I’m wearing one — because I’m determined to get the value out of it — and the other is still in its package, waiting to be ‘gifted’ to some even more gullible person. I haven’t considered my daughters, as their scorn would be unbearable. And even my niece, at 11, would probably already throw her head back and laugh at me and it.

On the plus side, the internet is now firmly of the view that I am a fool, distracted by shiny things and anxious to be parted from very small sums of money, and the consequent ads for sparkly things are way more interesting than the never-ending informercials on intermittent fasting that used to dominate my online life. The world is now telling me to forget about losing weight and cover my flabby arms with ridiculous cheap jewellery instead, and that suits me fine.

As to the stuff of my dreams, as expected, wearing a tiny, tinny approximation of an ancient tribal talisman around my wrist at night has made no difference whatsoever. But at least my waking hours are now filled with shiny things.

All things considered, it’s been (a little) money well spent.