Surviving the End of Year Sale Rip Off

Like hundreds of thousands of other Brits, I am Not Well right now. Thank goodness not with the norovirus, but with a cold that has turned itself into one of the most severe I can remember coming down with in quite a while. Throat like razor blades, constant painful coughing, choking and spluttering mid sneeze, hot and cold, exhausted, and pretty miserable with it. I only push stoicism that far. I may be British but even Brits have their limits and these days I do a perfect line in feeling sorry for myself. Actually, even without a cold I am pretty good at feeling sorry for myself. A tragic loss in the family has resulted, among other things, in a new propensity of mine to weep whenever anyone on TV weeps, no matter how stupid. I wept watching Look Who's Talking. I wept watching the Strictly Come Dancing Final. I am an unstoppable faucet. Only time will slow the flow. Bang a cold on top of that and I am headed straight for Fetid Duvet Land, surrounded by endless dirty teacups and soup mugs.  OK, enough of that. So, I'm not well. And now is a really bad time not to be well, because now is Sale Time. Shops everywhere started their sales on or around Christmas Day and all retail hell has broken loose. This year like every year I have pursued a really successful approach to Sales shopping. I don't. That's it. I buy an item in a Sale only if it fulfils these criteria: a) I saw it earlier in the year, b) I fell totally and hopelessly in love with it, c) I saw a need for it in my life, d) my eyes popped when I saw the price tag. That's it. Any item that does not fulfil all of the above criteria, does not get bought. So, when the Toast catalogue declared its sale I hopped right in, searched out the sweater they were asking ridiculous money for that I really really wanted for my birthday (handily located in January) but was not going to ask anyone to mortgage their house  to buy, not even in the name of love, found it at 50% off, bought it. End of. Except of course, that being ill changes your perspective on sale shopping and therein lies the ultimate sales psychology. Sales are for people who buy stuff as a reward for themselves, for whatever reason, but in my case it would be because I feel awful, and I imagine quite a few shoppers out there have reasons not a million miles away from mine. In my snotty state, hot water bottle on lap, Paracetamol within reach, dirty tissues scattered across the carpet, I Go Online and suddenly items I do not need, would not normally give a second's glance to in fact, suddenly possess an allure. They look shiny and new and massively reachable with their knocked down price tag. I on the other hand am not shiny and new. I am dirty and sick and feel and look disgusting. But if I buy that dress/sweater/bag/sofa etc etc, I will cease to feel that way. I will feel as shiny and new as the item I have just bought.  The temptation is extraordinary, and it takes superhuman strength, something I do not possess in abundance right now, to spot it for what it is. It is not me talking. It is my Sorry For Itself alter ego. It's the same damn voice that reaches for milk chocolate digestives, actually. I know this voice really, really well. So, I'm willing to bet, do you. And so do all those sales marketeers, guys. That's the voice they are appealing to. So. I put that FABULOUS red shift dress with the leopard print collar that I don't need and probably does not fit, into the online basket, and then I left it there. A bit like a really, really rude email that you compose and then save but don't send. I went away and refilled my hot water bottle, made myself another cup of soup (ah, sachets...even foodies like me have a use for soup sachets when just heaving yourself off the sofa feels like a climb to the Summit of Mount Everest), go back to my trusty IPad, look again at it. The scales fall from my eyes and I am back to normal. This is an Impulse Buy, it is emotionally motivated, and I know if I buy it I will not only regret it but will feel ashamed of myself for buying it. I close down the website, and await the knock of the door that will herald the delivery of the Toast sweater that I really, really wanted.

How to survive the Christmas break after the death of someone you really, really love

We don't do Christmas. We are Jewish. It's all about Chanukah for us, candles and doughnuts and potato pancakes and dreidls, chocolate coins, naff singing about miracles and oil and the like, exchange of presents and hilarious Chanukah decorations featuring menorahs and dreidls hanging lopsidedly from our kitchen ceiling. Generally Chanukah comes a few weeks before Christmas so it's usually a time when I feel at my most smug. I get to snuggle up on the sofa with my hot chocolate, feet on the pouffe, reading whatever spurious chick mag I have decided to indulge in, while my non Jewish mates huff and puff their way round Oxford Street on a manic round of last minute frenzied Christmas shopping, all the stress of Christmas cooking and Christmas family get togethers ahead of them. Not me. I spend the Christmas period sleeping late, cycling on the canal way with my kids, luxuriating in the joy of doing nothing, or frequenting the Jewish or Muslim owned shops in the area that remain obdurately open for business. But this year is different. This year is different because I have lost my elder sister, who died of cancer in October. And with the approach of Christmas it has become horribly clear that the impression I have been under for pretty much all of my life that my religious heritage gave me an automatic opt-out, has been misguided. You cannot help but be sucked in to the preparations around you but even if you shut your eyes to the Christmas trees and the pervading smell of cinnamon wafting through the entrance of your local Tesco, you contend with the realities that school is out, and for two weeks it is all about Family Time. I have been approaching the month of December with minor dread, as have the rest of my bereaved family. Most of us have taken the practical decision to simply decamp and get the hell away from it all. Those of us who either can't afford that option, or couldn't get it together to organise a getaway, or need to keep working through this time, have done some serious thinking about how you do this family thing when, every time you come together as a family, it reinforces the massive, crater sized gap that the departure of someone you love so much has left, particularly the untimeliness of that person's death. We have come together as a family a few times since my sister died and I will tell you this. It's bloody hard. Even coming together for a joyous occasion is, in these early days, almost impossible to do without being overwhelmed by the sense of loss, the sense of incompleteness, the feeling of being cheated, robbed of a key person in the family circle. So. This Christmas period, though we don't do the tree or the gifts or the turkey, we are experimenting with coming together in bits of family. We are all acutely aware of the importance, and the desire, to stick together. But in these early days, rebuilding the family as a whole, feels too hard. So we convene in little groups, where the gap feels a bit less obvious. And we do things slightly differently, so as not to be reminded by our usual family rituals of what we have lost. No playing the usual family games, a concerted effort to reorganise our food, convening at other family homes, as a way of rebuilding family in a different context. You'll have to confront it sometime, says a mate of mine.Well, yes. It is still very early days after all. But I would argue that we are confronting it. Families have different responses to a bereavement, but I would have thought that however you rebuild, you would have to rebuild differently. That is what we have started doing this December. So. Christmas Day will find me helping out at a homeless shelter in North London, cycling across the heath with the kids, if I can force them out of bed early enough, in the afternoon, and indulging in some pasta and pulses based arts and crafts in the evening with my niece and nephews.  If I don't end up getting capitulating and getting pissed on advocaat, which would be a first in itself as I LOATHE the stuff.

Tights were made for wardrobe malfunction

Seriously, right. The person who invented tights was undoubtedly someone who did not expect to be the one wearing them. Tights are one of those things civil servants dream up. An idea that looks fantastic on paper and then when you actually try it out on real people it is so full of holes you spend the next twenty years kicking yourself for not running a focus group to check out whether it would be workable but by then it's too late so you just let it run and run. Tights. Such a great concept. You put them on, they might make your legs look sexy, kooky, funky, trendy, or just warm. They turn your legs into a fashion accessory. They stop you getting blisters in your shoes. (In theory). You can get them in every conceivable colour - indeed, I type this clad in bright yellow tights that I am clashing merrily with a turquoise sweater dress - and you can get them gossamer thin or lumberjack thick, in wool or silk, with stretch or with tummy-holder-inner, especially if you buy them in Marks & Spencer. Indeed, M&S bosses have clearly decided all their customers are post partum. Nothing else can explain the impossibility of finding a simple pair of tights that does not have the word "slimming" somewhere on the label. As far as I can remember, every wardrobe malfunction I have ever had, has involved tights. It's either about coming out of the loo and realising far too late that your skirt is tucked into then at the back. Or, much more frequently, it's about wearing tights that have insufficient stretch to accommodate a generous lunch and start rolling down to your thighs in the most inexorable and unpleasant fashion. And let's be clear about this. Once your tights have decided to part company with your torso, there is nothing you can do about it. No amount of dashing into public loos to hoist them back up will stop them once they have made their minds up. Not even tucking them into your knickers, tying a knot in the waistband, or even stapling them to your skirt (yes I have tried this in desperation, and of course, Mr Bean like, the staringly obvious consequence was that the nylon tore at the staple leaving me with a waistband around my middle and the rest of the tight around my ankles. Niiice.  A few days back I was wearing a pair of  80 denir (what the hell is a denier, anyway) tights in a fabulous shade of deep bottle green, bought can I just tell you, from Harvey Nichols, and therefore came with an implicit guarantee that since they had cost me an arm and at least one of the legs they were designed to cover, the last thing they were going to do was let you down. But this is what they proceeded to do. Nothing to do with not fitting properly in the first place, or with lunchtime gluttony that they could not accommodate. Oh no. This was about incompatible material. What does this mean? Well, it was freezing bloody cold so along with the tights I wore a wool dress and a fleecy coat, and the material of the tights rubbed against the wool which caused them to, well,  have an encounter with gravity which gravity won, hands down.  This happened, thank goodness, at the end of the working day. Important, that, since the end of the working day is the point when I stop caring what I look like. Up to about 3pm you will find me touching up my make up courtesy of Bobbi Brown before an important meeting, or making sure my hair is appropriately "lifted" just before I have my staff meeting. But come 4pm I give up and tell myself that millions of women who have worked their butts off since 7am that day have mascara down to their knees so why should I look any different. Of course, the mascara is one thing. Tights that are down at your knees is really something quite different. It was an amusing sideshow for commuters stuck in a queue to join the North Circular Road from my area to see me hobbling down the main road, my hands seemingly clutched at my sides, waddling deliberately to prevent further slippage. So what's the answer? Only one really. Wear trousers. Or get used to frostbitten knees.