Punching your weight in the quest for new clothes

Today is my birthday. To celebrate, I decided I would go to Selfridges.  This was a brave decision for me. I am the person who reads the fashion sections of the Sunday supplements avidly, flip the pages looking for the box labelled "It's darling" or "This Week's Must Have" and then freak at the price. This week's must have, a Christopher Kane dress, for £995! A Jil Sander coat, for £1195! A Prada bag, for £895! And it's not like these are special occasion must-haves, birthday must-haves, or party essentials even. Sunday supplements show a new Must Have every Sunday! What kind of person reads You Magazine rather than Tatler or Vogue to find out which thousand pound dress she needs to have - and how is she managing to buy one every single week??? You see? Selfridges is quite obviously way out of my league. Anyone who can walk into Selfridges without a care to their wallet, is someone whose daily life looks very different indeed from my own. And I really have no credible explanation as to my choice of birthday destination, except to say, that in the same way that women manage to give birth, then forget the world's most excruciating pain in the form of labour, so that they go on to do it all over again, and sometimes for a third or fourth time or even more, so it is with me and out-of-my-league department stores. Every few years I go back to see if, well, if I fit it yet. I head in there at around 11, taking in the rest of the clientele covertly. Do I look older, shabbier, or, well, Different? I enter the shop in the bag section and quite frankly yes I do look different as practically every woman in the bag section, and I do not see a single man unless he is wearing a Selfridges ID security tag, is on this particular occasion Chinese, and each woman is clutching at least three bags - YSL, MiuMiu (isn't that the noise a cow makes?), Prada. Especially Prada. I affect a nonchalant glide from bags to make up, trying to exude the impression that I am leaving only because I already have my Prada/Lanvin/Stella McCartney tote, and the one I am currently carrying is Preen's latest, not a purchase from Camden Lock in the sale. Make up assistants in department stores routinely freak me out. It never ceases to amaze me how women who are paid to be ambassadors for skincare companies who trot out the next light touch, must have, easy to apply, one step instead of three, travel safe, foundation/lip colour/cheek colour that doubles up as toilet cleaner or whatever, always seem to present with seventeen layers of foundation. What is that about? No client I have ever seen at their counters appears to aspire to wear that much slap, so why do they? I particularly enjoy the valiant sales patter of a black besuited lady at one particular designer make up concession who is attempting to explain the easy wash off  benefits of their latest mascara. I find this hard to swallow coming from a woman whose makeup has clearly been applied with a trowel, and who will probably require several rounds with paint stripper and a pneumatic drill to take it off again.  I take the escalator to womenswear. I walk through the thousand pound dresses a bit like you would walk through an art exhibition. I mean, surely clothes that took that much effort to make and therefore cost so much, are there to be admired and deconstructed, debated and revisited, but not actually bought, right? I think about the birthday money I have been given by relatives. It would probably stretch to a t-shirt in the Final Reduction rails. All right. I sail back out of Selfridges. I have had my fix of Cinderella You Shall Go To The Ball. I hit the high street and by lunchtime I am loaded down with carrier bags of affordable frocks, taken from rails that scream, Melinda This Is Your Level. And indeed it is. I will be able to wear these clothes without worrying about cost per wear. Without worrying about how I will now pay the mortgage. Without having to have taken out a second mortgage to afford them in the first place. A morning of fantasty followed by an afternoon of shopping reality. It's been a good birthday.