Buying bras

M&S. That's it, isn't it. You want bras. Go to M&S. It's such a bore. Going to M&S to buy a bra is right down there with doing the weekly food shop, picking up your dry cleaning, or getting your teeth professionally flossed. You have to wear them...it's important to get them fitted properly...flesh coloured ones are the easiest to pull on at 6am in a dark Winter...M&S have the best value, and the occasional frilly bit in the cleavage kids you into pretending you spent hundreds at La Perla. Yaaawn. Wandering between the rows upon rows of padded, non padded, balconette, extra large, teenage starter, black, black, black, white, white, white, flesh, flesh, flesh, occasional red or garish purple and pink, makes me lose the will to live. I don't know. If I'm having to wear one of these things day in and day out, shouldn't there be just a bit more joy in the purchase of them? I don't feel that way about buying a dress or a suit or a pair of trousers or a skirt, I even enjoy buying my gym gear more than this. Why feel this way about buying a bra? Recently I signed up to Secret Sales, and since doing so I made two bra purchases - a Triumph red bra, 60% off, and a Berlei balconette affair, 70% off, rendering ridiculously priced boulder holders into a bargain basement array of chesty prettiness. And my oh my. Opening the boxes was a treat. There they nestled in expensive looking tissue paper, with their delicate lace and their beautiful satiny texture and their message of, Breasts We are Here To Love and Hold You and Make You and Your Wearer Feel Fab. I fell totally in love with them. Much in the way I would with my favourite Assertive Business Suit and my favourite Feel Sexy at Parties outfit. I know some of you are thinking, why don't you just splurge at Agent Provocateur if you feel this strongly? Answer: because I, and I'm guessing quite a few others, neither fit their bras, nor would want to, not least because you need to take out a mortgage to buy them. Nope. Women with, let's say, more upstairs, want to feel as beautiful wearing these things as women who are all brawn and thongs, and we don't want to be paying obscene amounts to feel that way. When I was younger my Mum would take me with her to a small boutique that smelled of violets, on the corner of a main road somewhere between Woodford and Wanstead, which sold lingerie. Not underwear, mind. Lingerie. Bras that hung from beautiful padded hangers. Pants that hung from hangers, even. Individual dressing rooms with vases of flowers in, to try your bras on. Coffee coloured ones, and soft baby blue ones, and beautiful rose pink ones. The place exuded femininity. Not sex. Womannness. It is one of my favourite adolescent memories. A woman of a certain age dressed in discreet coffee coloured two piece jersey outfits, would look at your chest and pull out, confidently, bra upon bra, each one a gauzy, beautiful confection, and send you off to the dressing room to try them. I would alight feeling like Cinderella going to the ball. Contrast that with your shopping trolley in the aisles of M&S. Pick up your t shirt bra while buying your Maris Piper spuds. Most of these boutiques have died a death, thanks largely to large stores selling value undies. Those that still exist are staffed by the same kind of lady wearing the same kind of outfit, selling beauty and confidence. The last one I went into, which was one I stumbled on quite by accident, was when I wanted to buy a beautiful bra to wear in hospital. Try and understand this. I was going to have a major operation to reconstruct my foot. I was going to spend four days attached to tubes feeling disgusting, being washed and fed like a lab rat. I wanted to wear a beautiful bra to remind me of my humanity, of who I was. The woman behind the counter understood this perfectly. You want comfort, she says. And one that isn't too brash. But has a subtle beauty to it. She brings out the perfect one. I wore it in hospital. And it did  worked like a charm.  Mass producing bras homogenises femininity. I choose boutiques smelling of violets.