Online is fine but no match for real shops
ONLINE shopping has become too convenient. Since lockdown started in March, I have indulged in making internet purchases for everything from face masks to a retro radio and music player. Countless Kindle books, CDs, electric toothbrush, a three foot tall air conditioning unit that arrived the day before the weather turned cold, bamboo blinds to give my office a touch of the exotic and make me feel like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, leg splints, floor lamp, Max Factor volumising mascara (for Maria, not me), Velcro cinch straps, Estee Lauder Youth Dew (it was Maria’s perfume when I first met her) and a set of goalposts. And that is a representative cross section.
Plus two pairs of Reeboks and three pairs of jogging bottoms, which are the unlikeliest purchases considering the state of my left leg. Still, they are comfortable as leisurewear and give the illusion of vitality, as if I’m about to set off on a run round the village rather than a limp round the village.
Pre-pandemic, I would make a single visit to Huddersfield town centre each week on a Sunday with my wife, in a routine that started with Kingsgate, calling at Next, House of Fraser, Sports Direct and T K Maxx. Then to Home Bargains and back to the car and on to Morrisons for a weekly shop.
If there was any retail therapy unfulfilled, we would, every few weeks, make the motorway journey to Junction 32, which is quaintly described as an outlet shopping village, to mainly buy items for our grandkids, but also because Maria last year got a
The internet has served its purpose but without the thrill of the chase,
so to speak
£400 Ghost dress (one of her favourite labels) for £4.50 and I passed up the offer of a perfectly fitting white dinner jacket for a fiver. Which, in retrospect, would have been just the thing for my bamboo blinds and Bogart delusion.
So the internet has served its purpose but without the thrill of the chase, so to speak, if you can call trailing the aisles of Home Bargains for a box of Maynards wine gums and shampoo, or a hairy 70mph trip down the M62, being a thrill.
The only risk of buying clothes online is that you can’t try them on first and you may get a shock when the top, that looked very Vogue on the young lady model pictured wearing it, turns out not to have quite the elan imagined in real life, and you can’t be bothered sending it back.
“It will do for around the house,” Maria said.
Usually, though, the purchases have lived up to expectations and the online offers have been so good it would have been rude to refuse. Even so, it will be pleasant to return to traditional shopping and the possibility of Bogey’s white dinner jacket for a fiver.