It's time I thought about this.

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/jul/26/extinction-rebellion-fashion-week-should-be-a-declaration-of-emergency?CMP=share_btn_tw


Here's the thing that got me thinking. me and clothes shopping, we go together. What lifts my spirits more? Not a lot, is the answer, but now I need to think about it, like we all need to think about it, if we are to protect the planet from all the harm we've already done.
So here goes, and let's make that a bit bit easier for me, let's just start with the shopping bit first, as this is going to take some time.

How did I ever get so addicted to shopping, where did it all start? Ridiculously, I can remember the first time I was sent to the shop, on my own, to buy something. "The" shop in question was on the corner of our road in Southall, then Southall Middlesex, My! How times have changed. It would have been called after the family that owned them, unless it was specific, like the butcher's or the fishmonger's. Strangely I remember that the baker was called Fowler's, and I think that has something to do with the smell and tastes lodging in my memory. But it wasn't to Mr Fowler I was sent. It was to the shop on the corner to buy a packet of Robin starch, a little cube of a box with a picture of a robin on the front. I would have been six or younger. As the third in a family of three, I always wanted to do what my brother and sister were doing, So I expect I pleaded to be allowed to go to the shop on my own as soon as I had the language ask and could see over the counter. There was a family story that when my brother Peter was first sent to the shop, he came back with the wrong thing. He was sent for a quarter of tea and came back with two pounds of sugar or something like that. Mrs Whoeveritwas liked Peter, and engaged him in polite conversation so that by the time she got round to asking him what he wanted, he'd forgotten. The story went that she then helpfully suggested a list of items that my mother might have needed, and he chose at random. He chose the wrong thing. This story, and the shame of returning with the wrong thing, helped to focus my mind on the Robin starch so intensely that it's still locked there over sixty odd years later
 Being sent to the shop on your own was a big deal. This was post war Britain and there was a different relationship with shopping then. It really was a time of austerity, although at the time I was unaware. I had some vague idea about rationing and shopping but my parents knew all about it, they had had to go without, so indulging your children wasn't something they even considered. But to a child, shopping was exciting. It was an activity that involved a walk or a bus ride, carrying a bag or a basket and buying what you could carry. You paid in coins usually, sometimes a pound or ten shilling note. You kept your money in a purse. I list these things because they were the source of my imaginative play. I played at shopping. I wanted to shop, to be like my mother.
And my mother knew all about shopping. My mother would teach me how to shop. She was the business.