I go to the big city.
Feeling low, in the later stages of tooth abscess, I decide to do some shopping. I park my car in the heart of Norwich and go hit the boutiques.
I find clothes shopping alternately fun and traumatic. The shops bit I like, the shoppers bit I am less keen on. I flit from store to store like a butterfly with a credit card who needs new trousers.
Many of the stores I leave immediately. I have an absolute hard and fast rule that I will never give my custom to a shop in which one is not quite sure whether one is looking at the men’s or the women’s items. So I tend to stick to large department stores, where the floors are clearly labelled.
It is a beautiful day – hot and sunny. I need to purchase some sunglasses. Every year, I buy a pair of cheap sunglasses, knowing that by about September I will have sat on them/scratched them/broken one of the arms off, etc. I find a pair that I like and pay the assistant. “You’ll need those outside today,” she flirts, as I hand over the money. The whore. I shall report her to Head Office. But she is right. Spring is in the air!!! Outside the shop I take the sunglasses out of their case and don them, increasing my cool factor by about 100000000.
I wander around town for a bit more, doing nothing in particular, enjoying my new sunglasses, strutting my funky stuff. People look at me, impressed.
More people are arriving and I decide to head for home. In the car-park I decide that I will take the roof off the car. It is that nice a day, plus I have new sunglasses. I zoosh out onto the dual carriageway, weaving around in my sunglasses in my open-topped car. I put some music on.
After a while, I realise that I should have cleaned the sunglasses before putting them on – they are slightly blurry. I reach a set of traffic lights and pull up in one of the lanes, smiling at the cars beside me and their non-sunglassed occupants. I take off my sunglasses to give them a wipe.
From the middle of the left-hand lens I remove a big sticker that says ‘protection level: medium’.
The lights turn green. I drive off.
