January blues

I strolled out to the shops last week to try and beat off the post-holiday blues - yes, already!! Christmas is over. New Year fireworks and hangovers are done. It's January and it's grey and rainy. Time to think about booking the summer holidays, but too long to wait till summer. Time for a spot of retail therapy: the January sales...

Has anybody else tried it lately? If you want a dishwasher, a toothbrush, a new bathrobe or a pair of kitchen scales now is probably a great time - although not so great now as a week ago if you live in Britain, following the VAT increase. Here in the Netherlands things are in transit. Before Christmas it was time to buy winter boots, leather bags, luxury products of all kinds that never appear on the shelves at any other time of year. Party attire was good too but not too practical now January has bitten and the parties are over. Out with the old and on with the new - but where is the new stuff? It's sales time and time for shops to clear the decks.

I guess I was too optimistic - I just wanted some good old-fashioned elegance, plus a bit of colour to brighten up the new year, preferably at bargain prices. Why not? I toured the fashion outlets. What did I find? Baggy old trousers, saggy old tunics, grey ones, mud-coloured ones, dry-clean ones that look like a bargain till you read the small print on the label and find that you will have to spend a fortune getting them cleaned, mis-shapen sweaters, drab T-shirts, jeans that look like someone else already wore them for a year and then got fed up with them...

But I guess I will have to wait. Here, in late February, the shops will come to life again. Whilst we shiver in the snow and long for a sunbed on the beach in Tenerife, the local shopkeepers will taunt us with their new fashions, leaving me gasping with amazement - did I really wear that sort of thing last summer? Did I really have all that bare flesh exposed? Could it possibly ever have been that warm? But will there be the warm, woolly sweaters that I need right now? Will there be longjohns (if you're under 30 don't even ask...)? Will there be sheepskin mittens on the shelves? No. For a couple of months yet there will be nothing I could possibly even consider wearing till May.

And now, when I am out there, wandering the shops in the high street, a potential customer in these hard times of economic crisis, they have nothing to offer me except the dregs of last year's failures, extra small, extra extra large, too stretched, the wrong colour, the wrong cut, a broken zip... Oh well, maybe I'd better go back to the daily grind and wait till spring!