12 February 2017
My niece has recently become a Teenager, so I take her on a celebratory shopping trip. I take my seventeen-year-old daughter with me too, for protection, and also my sister, who is nominally in charge of the new Teenager. When I was this age, I would have been happy enough with a trip to W H Smith® for a 30-pack of felt pens. These days teenagers demand a little more effort from their relatives, and we establish early on that felt pens are not going to suffice. A great deal of makeup is purchased. Over-priced junk food is consumed, followed by over-priced vitality-enhancing superfood gunk drinks. We also visit a shop where a lady called Victoria has discovered the Secret of how to fleece females of all generations, by persuading them to enhance their assets with over-priced snippets of lace. My sister and I are old and wise enough to see through the snippets of lace, both literally and metaphorically. They are inadequate in size, lacking in mechanical strength, and inappropriately positioned with respect to their supporting structures. The teenagers are, however, still young and optimistic enough to believe that their own bodies will transcend the usual demands of physics and be absolutely fine in Victoria’s garments. Another teenager, who is employed by Victoria to go around making customers feel optimistic, shows us little cupboards and drawers full of skimpiness, where we can choose yet more snippets of lace, padding and wire reinforcement to help us transcend the laws of physics. These things are unpatentable! I want to shout. They are insufficient! Instead I thank the employee for her help and scuttle into the shadows to weep. Since various parts of my body are now themselves inappropriately positioned with respect to their supporting structures, I suspect no amount of padding and wire reinforcement is going to turn me into the kind of Secret that Victoria wants to reveal to the world. My niece reminds me that my role here is not to question the purchases. I am here as the Chief Financial Officer, because (a) I have a credit card and (b) I can subtract. The subtraction part is important, because I have imposed a Spending Limit, and the niece is apparently not good enough at maths to be sure when she has accidentally exceeded it by a lot. How convenient.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
July 2019
Categories |