I went shopping on Saturday. Joined the fractious crowds on Oxford Street as they desperately rushed from House of Fraser to John Lewis, seeking out the 70% or more discounted juice extractors, African print dresses, and toilet roll holders which are destined to spend their life at the back and bottom of various cupboards around their houses. On a related tangent, a friend who comes from Zimbabwe, a country with a more ascetic lifestyle (through circumstance, not choice) commented last week that she has found that people in this country ‘own so much stuff’. Which struck me, because as I am house-sitting at the moment, and brought only the necessities for living with, my quality of life hasn’t diminished in the slightest. It may be time to get down into the basement and throw some of that ’stuff’ away…

Now I normally would not have ventured out shopping on Saturday. I was still walking like a cripple, and the resulting pain, and the fact that not being able to ride my bike meant that I had to catch a bus, should have been deterrents enough. However, it was the last weekend of the sales, and I have to buy new smarter work clothes for my new smarter job.

En route to shopping, I was reading The Guardian Weekend Magazine, where I found out that after three years of telling us not to wear black, the fashion editor has declared that it is now back in vogue, and is, as the Private Eye Neophiliac column will no doubt be soon recounting, ‘the new black’. I was pondering on this as I rode the bus, and thinking about the fact that I had read earlier in the week, in Heat magazine, that green is now out, having been the colour to wear for the last, ooooh, two weeks, and we should all be switching to blue for autumn. Which would have felt premature, if the weather hadn’t been decidedly Octoberish this weekend.

So I met up with Insightful, and she spent the next two hours plucking things off rails and carrying ever heavier piles of clothes for me to try on. Along the way, one of our conversations went like this.

I: So I am not sure what to buy, I really like the whole hippy look. R: (in mock horror) No, no, no. Boho is out. It’s all directional for Autumn/Winter. I: (laughing at stupidity and vacuousness of R’s comments) Well I am going to do Boho now. R: (pondering) Yes. It’s actually a good idea. All that stuff is in the remainder bins, and you’re so far behind the times you’re actually probably ahead of them, with the way fashion spins round these days.

Now this may give the impression that I am a fashionista or at least a fashionistawannabe. This is not the case. I am just awfully good at recycling garbage that I read in the pulp press. But the theme of recycling takes me back to the whole ‘we own too much stuff’ one. Because I am struck by how regularly we are supposed to update our wardrobes, and as so many of us can’t afford to do this without buying the cheapest thing on the high street, and as they are invariably made out of fabrics which are ecologically damaging in their production, and which come from the Far East and therefore have high carbon miles attached to them, fashion really is one of the worst perpetrators of environmental degradation. The need to follow trends is so pointless and I sometimes wonder how otherwise intelligent women can talk about these things as though they really matter.

My friends and colleagues may think it’s scruffy, but I am still wearing clothes I bought four, five years ago. And in one case, a dress which I was given, second hand, by The Queen of Cakes when we finished University in 1997! Although that only really gets worn around the house on spring-cleaning day. I usually buy clothes which are similar in style anyway. This isn’t because I am stuck in a rut – more that I am aware of what suits me, or at the very least doesn’t make me look horrendous. And it will continue to do so, no matter what colour or accessory we are being told to wear this season. And can you imagine if everyone out there was wearing green?

And I guess I just hope that the people who do update their wardrobe every season, have the sense to take the stuff they don’t need to a charity shop, or give it away on the fabulous yahoo usergroup, freecycle. Thousands of users have already joined up, and the purpose is to give away anything you no longer need. No money is allowed to change hands. Failing that, even flogging it on eBay is better than throwing it away.

I returned home triumphant, having bought two jackets and two tops. It is total coincidence that the tops are both blue, and one of the jackets, black. Now I had better go and take that pile of Heat and Grazia from the floor by the toilet, and pop them in the recycling…

It is celebration time in Recidivistland.

What I am going to write:

Dear [Manager]

As required by my contract of employment, I hereby give you one months’ notice of my intention to leave my position as Designer.

I have accepted a position with xxx Company, an opportunity to further my current career goals and achieve growth within the new company through a more senior and diverse role.

It has been my genuine pleasure to work for zzz Company during these last three years. I have enjoyed working with zzz Company’s fine staff of professionals and colleagues, and will miss my associations here. I wish you and zzz Company continued success in all your endeavors.

If I may be of any assistance in the hiring process or training of my replacement, please know that I will gladly make myself available to this effort during the next four weeks.

Yours sincerely

Recidivist

What I would like to write:

Dear [Manager]

Every time I was told I was getting more responsibility, you heaped the work on me, and then neglected to balance this with adequate remuneration, status or recognition. I am more qualified, more skilled and more intelligent than every other member of the team, but, strangely, not more senior. My Head of Department was uncovered as having told a series of lies about me when I approached HR to clarify my position, and yet, even though they have confirmed that they are aware that his comments were untrue, I have received no formal apology or explanation.

I have been offered a job with a company which is going to pay me more and give me the responsibility which befits my skills and background.

Come on, what would you do?

Yours sincerely

Recidivist

I was just re-reading an article from a couple-of-weeks-old Guardian, in which Nick Laird, Zadie Smith’s husband, is interviewed about his new novel. And having once claimed an association with the interviewer, who is now a fairly successful journalist, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of schadenfreude that she seems to have made a right botch of it.

The interview makes for uncomfortable reading because Ms Gold clearly wanted Mr Laird (or Mr Zadie Smith as she so embarrassingly put it) to conform to her preconceptions of him, and because the ‘I’s’ in the profile outnumber the ‘he’s’, leaving the reader wondering whether she understands the basic underlying purpose of such an article – to reveal the interviewee not the interviewer.

Granted, she points out that he holds back in the interview, and wonders to herself ‘when is he going to tell me who he really is?’ (Memo to Ms Gold – it is your job as interviewer to get him to open up, and can you please stop it with the ‘me, me, me’s already). She also, rather bile-inducingly, goes on to say ‘He reminds me of a flower, he opens and closes with the light.’ Not since – oh, let me think… the previous paragraph, where Mr Laird has managed to shoe-horn a reference to Nabokov into a question about his favourite biscuit – has The Guardian’s pretentiousness hit me so hard. In fact, I start to lose patience with him too, when I read the phrase with which he ends the biscuit musing ‘[with] Chocolate Hobnobs – you have to give a little bit of yourself’.

He redeems himself slightly towards the interview when he shows his thought processes have mirrored mine, and he has seen through her completely, in the following exchange, ‘I ask him to describe himself for me, as if he were writing himself into a novel. “That’s your job,” he says’. Bravo, Nick, I think.

But excuse my ramblings above. I just couldn’t let the article go uncommented-on. And having started that rant, it was very difficult to stop. The reason it prompted me to write a blog, however, was for the very tangential reason that he confesses to a weakness for chicken omelettes, the concept of which prompted a slight confusion in me. It just seemed wrong. I carried on with what I was doing, and then, a couple of minutes later, my subconscious surfaced, and presented to my conscious brain, the cause of my mental judder – eating chicken with chicken eggs is just plain strange. Quiches, omelettes, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs – all are paired with meat on a regular basis – usually pork-based, but often beef, lamb, fish, too. Just rarely, in my experience, chicken.

I don’t know if it is because of a kind of biological good manners that we have avoided a culinary marriage of the two. Is the idea of animal mortality harder to bear if it is mother and reproductive matter, dead, on the same plate?

I would like to point out that I am not a vegetarian. Indeed, I am an enthusiastic carnivore. But the idea of chicken wrapped in warm egg – a neat little inversion of how they existed in their live state, was one I just found disquieting.

But, fuck it, perhaps I am deconstructing this all too much?