Free Making It Up As I Go Along by Marian Keyes Page B

chocolate, and say, ‘No
blue coats.’ They’ll look at you like you’re a halfwit who can’t even
remember what they put on that morning.
    ‘But there must be. It has a hood
–’
    ‘A
hood
?!’
    There will be a moment when you think, ‘Why
would I want a blue coat with a hood? Wouldn’t I just be better leaving without
it?’
    Stand your ground, I urge you. Stand your ground.
Make them go back in.
    After a while they’ll come out dragging a
rag along the floor. It will be your coat. Feigning astonishment that anyone would wear such a
thing, they’ll ask, ‘Is
this
it?’
    Shame will have you teetering on a knife edge.
You really will consider denying it and just running away. Don’t. It is your coat. You
bought it because you loved it. Don’t abandon it.
    Very accusingly the receptionist will say,
‘It was under a pile of other coats.’
    Do NOT apologize.
    The Final Humiliation: Putting Your Coat On. The
receptionist will go behind you and pretend to help you into your coat, but inreality they will be pinching the armholes closed so you will flail around, like
you’re doing the upright backstroke, wondering why you’re so useless.
    Just take your coat from them and say,
‘I’ll do it myself.’
    There we are, I hope this hard-won experience is
in some way helpful. May I just state again that I love my hairdresser, so obviously not all of
them are horrible.
    mariankeyes.com ,
January 2013.

Personal Shoppers
    Personal shoppers. Yes. As Mam would say, it was
far from personal shoppers I was reared. All the same, I managed the superhuman feat of shutting
down the voice in my head which tells me,
You deserve nothing
, long enough to make an
appointment with a personal shopper – we’ll call her Alex – in a Large
Department Store in London (hereafter known as LDSIL).
    I don’t know the kind of people who
normally use personal shoppers, but I suspected I wasn’t one of them. I thought they might
be very busy lady executives, or people who go to a lot of charity balls, people who simply
didn’t have time for traipsing around the shops.
    I actually
like
traipsing around the
shops. But I was interested in forging a long-term relationship with a personal shopper for one
specific reason: shoes. Yes, shoes. Other things, also, hopefully, but specifically shoes.
    Because I have very small feet … sorry
… hold on! Right now, can I stop people who want to tell me how lucky I am that I can buy
all my shoes in the cheapo children’s department. I am a short-arse and I need heels, I
need height. Children’s shoes are a) horrible, b) made of plastic, c) too low, and d) have
pictures of the Wiggles. I am not lucky at all.
    Every spring and autumn, when the new shoes
arrive in the shops, I launch myself on the trail for the white truffle of shoes, the holy
grail: the size 35. But I don’t live in London, and Irelanddoesn’t stock any shoes smaller than size 37. (‘There isn’t the
demand,’ they tell me, while I reply, in despair, ‘But
I’m
demanding
them.’) And the chances of me accidentally being in London the lone day the pitifully few
size 35s arrive on the shelves are slim. My cunning plan was that a trusted personal shopper
would be my person on the ground to bag the 35s.
    However, we were midway between new shoes
seasons, so I decided, for a bonding first date, to ask Alex to help me find a dress. A dressy
dress, but not too dressy, one that could go from the office to the red carpet, not that
I’d be going anywhere near a red carpet, but just in case. A dress like an Issa dress, but
not actually Issa, as I already had a shamefully high number.
    So we met, and although she was very thin, she
didn’t call me darling. This pleased me. We went to the store café and she got me an
orange juice and quizzed me about what I liked and what my look was and what my size was, and
none of this was as easy as it sounds. Then she went away and I stayed sipping orange juice and
trying to do a sudoku and in