How do you run from yourself?

Or how a frilly shirt signifies so much more sometimes

I was working from home and my eldest daughter was at home sick. I had been hunched over the laptop for some time. The door went. It was the delivery man. I know him well. I’m not a wealthy woman, but I order clothes. Clothes are the things I order. When I am feeling low or anxious or just a bit under the weather with low level frustration, I turn to online retail.

This obviously happened to many of us during Covid. We turned to online shopping to distract us from the horror of real life.

I have always loved clothes and this addiction to buying them has plagued me. Even now, even at my ripe old age, I believe that if I find the right blouse then my life will change. More opportunities will come my way. I will have more sex (nobody has ever wanted to have sex with me because of my nice blouse but I find it hard to remember this fact).

‘Niki is self obsessed and already wants to wear make up,’ my Dad wrote to a therapist when I was about 13 years old.

It was pretty accurate but most 13 year olds are self obsessed. Dad was a Marxist and he used to chant ‘all property is theft,’ whenever I told him I wanted to own my own place one day. We bought our tastless, horse-fuel, muesli in a health food shop (before they were trendy) and shovelled it into a giant hemp bag. It was served by a man who was six feet tall with a long ginger beard and baggy dungarees.

I wanted to roll around in Coco Pops. I wanted plastic toys sticking out of every pocket. I didn’t want a cardboard box and to be instructed to go and make a dolls house out of it with the sad little sack oranges come in as one of the props (in the end I did make a house for my Chicaboo family but it didn’t last long). I vowed that when I left home I would be a consumer of stuff. No more pretend salt (we had herb salt which tasted like fish food). No more lurid knitwear from the charity shop. And I wouldn’t wear towels when I got my period, I’d use tampons like modern, normal people did. This was before global warming. It was rare that David Attenborough went on a downer whenever he spoke about the animals he was studying. There was hope. The eighties were a hopeful time. Not for Marxists but for Capitalists like me.

Anyway back to the present day and the door went and I opened the box and inside was a frilly shirt. The kind that Charles II would have worn if he’d dressed in Boden and been addicted to online shopping too.

‘You’ve got exactly the same blouse already,’ my daughter exclaimed, ‘How come you always buy the same thing?’

‘It’s subtly different,’ I said, ‘It’s got blue stripes.’

I took it upstairs and noticed it was in fact almost identical to four other shirts in the wardrobe. It had fine, blue stripes and a frilly collar. It looked good on a twenty year old French model. On a girl on a bicycle wearing it with denim shorts on a sunny day going to a picnic with other millennials. On me more like an overweight librarian from the seventies. I shoved it on a hanger and closed my wardrobe in disgust with myself.

If I plotted on a graph when I tend to buy frilly blouses then there are definite trends. At the end of a work week. Late at night when I feel itchy and restless and like I should be living a different life. When I think about old boyfriends. When I think about having a drink. When I see how much my mouth droops and realise with horror that I am 50 years old.

A frilly top! I Google it. I Google and then disappear into a kaleidoscope of frilly tops. There are white ones that will make me look like Princess Diana in her youth, when she bashfully tried to avoid the paparazzi. Or like Kate Moss, combined with jeans or maybe just with some very short shorts at a festival or a gig. It will change everything. It will get rid of these feelings that something is not quite as it should be.

I want someone to stare into my eyes and tell me that I fascinate them. That I am the most alluring and wonderful person they’ve ever seen. I want them to look at me, whilst I’m asleep, revelling in the sweet curve of my nose and the way my cupid’s bow is just the right size and shape. I want them to be so keen to talk to me that they wake me up in the night to tell me their secret that couldn’t wait.

‘What is it?’ I will say, looking up with my eyelashes just perfectly parted and I’ll be wearing this frilly blouse, like I’ve been out to a party, a casual but star studded book launch with Zadie Smith and some of her mates in Hampstead or Marylebone.

‘That frilly blouse makes me want to eat you all up,’ this modern day middle aged sex beast on legs, will say.

‘You enchant me. I have to be near you,’ he will utter as he moves closer.

And in that moment, I will know that the frilly blouses, the rampant capitalism, the disapproval of my parents, the wanton and reckless consumerism is worth it because I am actually going to have sex.