Dear Reader
I am so sorry I have not been in touch recently. I do enjoy our time together on this blog, but sadly I have nothing to talk about. Partly there's nothing much to report: I'm not shopping.... er, that's it; partly I'm too lazy an old baggage to think of something diverting to write when there's a glass of wine and 'The Killing' available. Mostly I put it down to the fact that since February I have spent quite a lot of time in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Let me tell you about Cincinnati. The pilots who fly there from Newark (hardly the Garden of Eden itself, by the way) amuse themselves by accidentally calling it 'Cincinnasty'. I bought my son at t shirt at the airport, "Cincinnati - nothing to do and all day to do it in", so at least it's a town that doesn't take itself too seriously.
As I grew up in the mill towns of the North West I'm pretty tolerant on the municipal architecture front. "Proud Preston", Lancashire is my home town. It is an unlovely squiggle of ring roads. In the middle is a handful of fiercely scrubbed emblems of Victorian civic pride. There is also, drum roll, Europe's (second) biggest bus station (a brutalist concrete spaceship, so thanks for that Ove Arup). An American friend, passing through and curious to check out my roots, rang to ask if it had been badly bombed during the war. Hardly at all - we made it look like that all by ourselves.
Truth to tell, Preston was never much of a looker to start with, all red brick terraces and parched pea stands. But Cinci used to be a real hotty. When Charles Dickens visited in 1842, he took quite a shine to the place. He wrote:
"Cincinnati is only fifty years old, but is a very beautiful city; I think the prettiest place I have seen here, except Boston. It has risen out of the forests like an Arabian night city; it is well laid out; ornamented in the suburbs with pretty villas; and, above all, for this is a rare feature in America, has smooth turf-plots and well kept gardens."
As I've already mentioned, I'm not in a position to throw stones architecturally speaking. but Cincinnati hasn't aged well. Nowadays, downtown Cincinnati makes Preston town centre look like the Piazza Navona. To give you an impression, imagine a town centre made entirely of large multi storey carparks. That's Cinci. Only some of the car parks are hotels.
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE:
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| Piazza Navona, Roma |
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| Proud Preston, Hub of the North |
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| 4th Street Cincinnati |
It has taken me a while to settle on my hotel of choice. It is The Cincinnatian (there were nasty rumours of bed bugs in the others). It sits slap bang in what I now know to call (thanks to various GCSE Geography coursework crises) the CBD and it is a very odd place. It prides itself on its atrium and reception (see below for a glimpse of the prevailing aesthetic); the rooms are huge but seldom have a socket for a laptop or phone charger; often the minibar fridge isn't plugged in. I have issues with the windows. Call me conventional, but I do like a window to, well, look out on something. The Cincinnatian doesn't hold with that. Any room lucky enough to face outside will have its window set high up in the wall, filled with darkened glass. There will be no window sill - which gives the room a disconcerting, alien look, like a face without eyebrows. Many rooms do have huge windows opening onto balconies, but they look down on the atrium. No natural light penetrates. The cumulative effect is unsettling. You climb into bed surveying the room anxiously, like a patient in a sleep clinic - it looks ordinary enough but something isn't quite right. People are probably watching.
The atrium in The Cincinnatian
However, for the Stopped Shopper, a base in central Cincinnati couldn't be better. There are shops around and about - there's a Saks 5th Avenue sign on the sky line which suggests there is a Saks store somewhere, unless it is a cruel joke and is simply advertising the real Saks on the actual 5th Avenue. But the neighbourhood around The Cincinnatian does little to set the shopper's pulse racing. There's a gentlemen's hat shop - never open - called Batsakes (why?) and there's a Walgreens drug store. The latter serves as an unofficial soup kitchen for the town's more colourf'ul inhabitants in the daytime. After 7pm it doubles as a casting call for a George Romero film.
Last time I was there, the itch to shop plagued me like retail athlete's foot. I was working all day. Batsakes was closed (of course) - so Walgreens was all I had left. It wasn't a bad choice - I do love an American drug store. A definition of drugs which encompasses notebooks, novelty plasters, teeth whitening strips, Hallowe'en outfits and bottles of booze covers most of my vices. But I had barely got past the novelty nail extensions, when my browsing was disturbed by the store manager chasing a customer down the cosmetic aisle; wrestling him to the ground by his hair and shouting (whilst banging his head on the floor), "This (BANG) is the last (BANG) goddam time (BANG) you come in here (BANG) and take my frickin' stuff (BANG BANG BANG)". I curtailed my visit after another fellow shopper started standing behind me, making mewing noises and trying to stroke my face.
So Cinci is often where I get into some serious online shopping. It's quite thrilling, sitting in a hotel room three thousand miles from home and knowing that new stuff is being boxed up and sent to you. It's something to look forward to after the red eye - some nice Netaporter boxes waiting at home, rather than an empty fridge and a smelly fox terrier. In this shopping free year my internet shopping days are supposedly over. But it seems I forgot to tell the retailers.
I'm not a complete mug. I usually tick the box on the website that says "please don't hawk my name for cash to your random selection of so-called valued partners". But just as I always press "update now" for every iTunes upgrade, so I always check "accept terms and conditions" without reading the fifteen pages of 8 point type that accompany them. It is clear there are loop holes I am not spotting. My name seems to be on almost every list going. I reckon, based on my previous behaviour, they can probably charge a premium for it - "Oh, HER! Didn't she sink a load of money in that dodgy sale. She'll buy anything! You can bin those other five hundred thousand names - that's my monthly target made right there"
As a result, checking my Inbox is like wandering through the Soukh in a pound note overcoat: extra discount this, special price that, urgent bulletins from every fashion retailer from ASOS to Yoox.
Just the other day Toast emailed to let me on the secret that it's now Spring - a season, in the world of Toast, of droopy, sepia clothes, draped over droopy anaemic women. Much like Toast Winter and Summer then.
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| Droopy Toast lady - does this say Spring to you? |
Netaporter were screaming about "Going mad for bags"; Uniqlo were chirpy, "Hey Girls, check out our summer dress extravaganza"; J Crew had another one off, never to be repeated warehouse sale (like last week and the week before). Clarks shoes, frankly, must be confusing me with someone who gives a damn about comfort and flexibility in my footwear and Amazon, well, I'm thinking of taking out a court order against them. My sons hack into my account to buy gangsta rap, roots reggae, manga books and nunchucks, so the suggestions they send to me daily are rarely all that appealing.
Some retailers have noticed that we're not as close as we once were and they are just plain needy. All those wheedling "what's happened to us, it used to be so great between us, but now you just seem so distant" messages. Oh, Johnnie Boden. It's not you, it's me. I need my space. You deserve better. I'm just no good for you. I just want a break, that's all.
Don't tell Johnnie, but there is somebody else. A couple of them actually. I may have stopped checking out every site, but I haven't totally given up on my favourites. Look in the right place, and you'll find teeny little trolley icons that I am tending carefully. Just shopping, you see, without the buying: like smoking without inhaling.
It is, I agree, a little bit tragic. I search through the sites picking items I like and putting them in the cart. I log in a couple of times a week to review the contents. I fret about whether they're the right size or the wrong colour. I swap around the contents a bit. I add another couple of items, a pair of shoes or some jewelry, say, to complete the outfit. And I get furious when I check in and they're not there. The Preciouses! Gone! "Removed from bag", "Out of stock", these are words I do not like to see.
Oh, I've been weak, I don't mind admitting. Once I clicked on 'check out now' just so I could see the lovelies in real life, give them a stroke, put them back in their box and send them back to Netaporter land. (Free postage and packaging, mmmmn.) Don't judge me, you Farmville fans. You may harvest imaginary corn, I harvest imaginary clothes. It's "Fashionville".
Currently I have rather a cool virtual wardrobe online: Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney..... My digital wardrobe is so much nicer than the manky analogue wardrobe standing in my bedroom. That's full of crumpled skirts and stuff that needs the hems mending. Of course they all started off in a cart online somewhere too. But I turned them from pixels into reality. What a pity I can't turn the reality back into pixels!
