I like my hat

I did something I haven't done for a very long time, and went to London to go shopping for clothes.  Normally I buy clothes by mail order, supplemented by the odd foray into Colchester.  It astounds some of my friends that I even buy shoes by post, without trying them on, but that's generally fine, once you've worked out which companies make shoes for people with feet shaped like yours.  Boden shoes are for long, thin feet, which is hopeless for me (but they are catering to the upper middle classes, and as Ogden Nash put it 'This English woman is so refined, She has no bosom and no behind').  Toast's shoes usually fit, and The Natural Shoe Store will even give advice over the phone, accurate so far, about which styles come up large and which small.  If they don't fit you can always send them back, and it's almost easier to decide that at your leisure in the privacy of your own bedroom than with the shoe shop assistant hovering over you.   However, today I wanted to buy hats, and it is pretty much essential to try hats on, except for woollen beanies.

We are going to our nephew's wedding in the summer, and I have purchased a new outfit.  Dr Johnson warned us to beware enterprises requiring new clothes, and for the twelve years since leaving the City I have managed with the supply of smart clothes I possessed when I left.  We don't go to many social events where one has to dress up very much, and I bought some nice things when I was in possession of a fund manager's salary, though never very many of them, because we didn't go to many events that required dressing up then either.  But I had to admit that, after twelve years, the stock of party clothes was looking shabbier than it used to, and that our friends and relations had seen them all quite a few times, one way and another.  So I bought a dress, not so smart I'd never wear it again, but smart enough, as long as I save its first outing until the wedding, and a jacket, ditto.  (The jacket when it arrived turned out to be delightful, but with horrible buttons, so I bought some buttons as well while I was in London.  I am astounded at the price of button thread, and grateful to John Lewis for employing people in their haberdashery department who could remember whether the thread was supposed to be lighter or darker than the buttons (darker is the correct answer).

To go with the dress and the jacket I decided I should have a hat.  Post-City I'm not in the Philip Treacy league, but John Lewis seemed within my scope.  I warmed up by buying the replacement buttons, then found the hat department, which was full of grim faced ladies trying on hats as if the success of their offspring's nuptials depended on it, and not enough mirrors.  I joined the throng.  I have extremely thick and curly hair, so finding any hat large enough to go on my head rather than perch uneasily on the top is always a challenge.  (Alternatively I could look at it as simplifying the hat buying process by eliminating half of the potential choices at the outset).  I worked my way round the hat display, discovering which ones wouldn't go on my head, which made the question of whether or not they suited me academic.  I also discovered that the light coloured, wide brimmed hats uniformly made me look like a mushroom, while black seemed rather funereal for a summer wedding.  John Lewis mainly offer hats in neutral shades, but that was fine, given that so is the rest of my outfit.  I toyed with the idea of a fascinator, trying on the ones like miniature cocktail hats, and then a very perky number made mostly out of black feathers that wobbled whenever I moved.  I rather liked that, but wasn't sure whether it made me look like an aunt or more like a burlesque dancer.  More pragmatically, I was concerned that wearing a metal clip round my skull all through a June day while drinking a glass or two of champagne would probably give me a headache.

Eventually I settled for a sort of asymmetric attenuated top hat with a swooping bow, in a swirly pattern of black and natural straw.  In terms of the cost per time worn, it will probably represent the worst value of any garment I purchase this decade.  It would take every unattached person I know to get married and ask me to the wedding, and for the Systems Administrator to take me to a ladies day at the races, and for me to be inexplicably invited to a Buckingham Palace garden party, to bring the cost per wear down in line with the rest of my wardrobe.  But it is a nice hat.

Then, encumbered with the hat box, I set out to find a cardigan to match a dress, a Sisyphan task so futile I won't bore you with the details.  Buying clothes by mail order has a lot to recommend it.

shopping for books

I wasn't going to write again about shopping so soon.  I was going to write about how I have planted the Colchicum bulbs that arrived last week without chopping lumps out of any of the other bulbs which are planted there already, which is a minor triumph.  And how the Robinia hispida has flopped all over the lawn, and I forgot to buy any stakes when I was at the garden centre, after my trip to the dump (aka tip, aka household recycling centre), which has got a new member of staff who looks disconcertingly like Ronnie Barker (have you noticed how things are disconcerting, but concerted?).

Then I read a few pages of the Telegraph website while drinking a mug of tea and digesting my lunch, and found another wail about independent bookshop closures.  It is not a very well informed complaint, since the savings on Amazon are not a matter of saving 10p as the author says in her article, but of paying between 30 and 50% less.  And it's just silly to say that an independent bookshop is the last place where you can talk to strangers without resorting to dating websites.  I talk to lots of strangers every time I go to work (OK, that is at an independent retailer, albeit not a bookseller).  If they look as though they might appreciate it, I even recite bits of poetry to them.  Or if you want to talk to strangers you can join a club or society for something you're interested in.  I talked to several strangers at the wildlife fair last week.  One of the silliest reasons given for keeping post offices open (there are many good reasons) was that queueing in the post office was one of the only times in the week that some old people got to talk to someone.  If that is true, it is an urgent reason for making proper social provision for old people, not for forcing the Systems Administrator to go and queue in the post office to to insure the van, instead of taking the preferred option of buying a tax disc over the internet.

But the really ignorant bit of Ms. Caplan's article is when she says that Amazon can't recommend what you should read next, and for that you need a real person.  Sorry Nina, but Amazon's algorithms are incredibly powerful.  It tracks your purchasing history for ever, and it identifies what else other people with similar purchasing patterns bought, and it makes a very good job of it.  Sometimes it comes up with titles by authors I know and like, and sometimes by authors I don't know.  The great majority of the time, when I check those out in the review pages of the broadsheets or hear about them on R4, they review well, and when I get round to reading some of them I generally like them.  The Amazon readers' reviews are also very useful.  I don't necessarily accept their conclusions, but they give a strong pointer to what kind of book it is, and I can decide for myself if I think I'd like that sort of thing.

On the strength of my having bought a lot of Roger Deakin, Amazon told me that I might like Caught by the River, a series of essays about about rivers (link to Amazon here).  When my mum asked me what I would like for Christmas, I suggested that, and she kindly bought it for me.  Being a staunch supporter of her local independent bookshop (and reluctant to put her card details online), she ordered it from her friendly local bookshop.  When she collected it, she had a conversation with the friendly local bookshop owner, who said it looked interesting and she might order another copy for the bookshop.  Er, excuse me.  You are meant to be providing your customers with ideas of things they might like, not cribbing ideas for good new titles from the Great Satan Amazon.  Caught by the River is a lovely book, by the way, and I heartily recommend it.  I liked it so much I even ended up buying a print from the man who did some of the illustrations (over the internet, naturally enough).

I'm glad I've got that off my chest, and now I shall go and pull up some more weeds.

shopping from my sofa

The plastic fastener on the belt that came with the water repellent trousers I wear to work broke.  I'm not surprised.  It didn't look strong enough to cope with the vagaries of this world.  I had to have a belt otherwise the trousers fall down, what with the weight of my telephone and radio and secateurs all shoved into various pockets, and I didn't want to use my nice one long term.

I looked on Amazon.  You can buy practically everything on Amazon nowadays.  When the S.A. needed a new chainsaw, the cheapest place to get one of the desired brand and quality, after much shopping around, turned out to be Amazon.  It might have been different if I'd wanted an expensive belt, a lux, classic addition to my wardrobe that was going to add the finishing touch to my tidiest outfits, but I didn't.  I wanted a cheap leather belt, with a metal buckle that looked as though it had a sporting chance of lasting a few years, to be worn underneath a baggy uniform shirt.  It turned out that on Amazon I could narrow the search to 'jeans belts', and within ten minutes I'd found something that looked just the job.  Even with P&P it could be delivered to my door for under a tenner, and it arrived in about three days, before the next time I had to go to work.  It's true that when it came I found I had badly misunderstood the sizing on the website, so that the buckle came about a foot inside the nearest hole when wrapped around my waist, but the Systems Administrator has promised to drill out some new holes, and shorten the end.  If I'd been buying Mulberry's finest I'd have been crushed, there again, if I'd been buying an expensive belt I'd have gone to more trouble to understand the size chart.  It's fine.

This is partly why I think the High Street is in structural trouble, and our planners had better start getting used to the idea, and thinking laterally and creatively about allowing some changes of property use.  I could have gone into Colchester, and paid to park (about the same as the P&P on the belt), and spent an hour trailing around Debenhams and Marks and Spencer, and peering nervously into jeans shops I don't normally frequent, or investigating Primark, but I didn't have to.  I wanted a cheap, strong, functional leather belt and in ten minutes I'd found one.

At the wildlife fair on Wednesday I asked the Colchester Naturalists when the best time would be to remove some of the sedge that was taking over my pond, given it seemed rich in wildlife which I didn't want to disturb more than I had to.  They said September would be good, so I thought that this autumn I really would get on with it.  This meant that I needed a pair of thigh length waders, a purchase I've shied away from in the past.  Again I looked on Amazon.  Like I said, they sell everything nowadays.  Top of the list of thigh length waders came a pair for thirty quid, that had got unanimous five star reviews from five different customers.  Interestingly, none of them mentioned wanting the waders for actual fishing.  One was clearing out a pond, another a ditch, and a third needed them to do riverbed kick sampling for a B.Sc. dissertation.  Another said he was only going to wear them a very few times, so presumably pond clearance again.  That sounded like my sort of level in the marketplace, as I don't need super-warm neoprene lined ones to wear all day while standing in a trout stream.  They did come with steel insteps, to protect me if I stood on any sharp projections, which shouldn't be an issue in an artificial garden pond, but could come in useful.  The waders arrived today, smelling strongly of rubber.  They fit OK, and have straps with poppers to hold them to your belt, like chainsaw chaps, and altogether look as though they should do the job.

Now Colchester has a fishing tackle shop, next to the slightly upmarket department store at the top of the High Street, and they could probably have sold me some waders.  But they might only have had expensive waders, for people who wanted to spend the day standing in a salmon river, and I'd have had to make a special trip there, and contend with sales staff in what is to me an alien environment.  Much easier just to have a big, rubber smelling box arrive in a van.

It isn't going to get any better for the High Street.  I look at my parents' generation.  My father refuses to use the internet at all, and my mother is deeply suspicious about putting her credit card details on-line.  I have taken to internet shopping quite happily from the comfort of my sofa, while the youngsters will be buying things on the move on their phones.  Look at the house names in most English villages:  Forge Cottage, The Old Bakery, The Old Police House, Church House, School Cottage, The Old Post Office.  Look at the house fronts in the side streets of many small English towns, with their big front windows now covered by net curtains or blinds.  Those were shops, forty or fifty years ago.  And yet the villages and small towns are nice places to live (apart from the inconvenience of no longer having the shop-cum-post office that you spent about a fiver a week in tops when it was still open).  The old business premises aren't derelict eyesores, they're just used for something different.  Planners and councillors take note.