Thursday, October 29, 2009

Skinny Dipping

I’ve just got back from three weeks holiday, upon which I did my usual ‘I’m going to be a better person when I get home’ list. I do it every time. I never stick to it. I don’t know why I bother.

It’s like new year’s resolutions. I don’t make those, because I think they are there to be broken, but give me a few weeks in the sun and I’ll start making lists of all the things I want to achieve when I get home.

This year’s three week trip around Thailand was no different. By the end of it, I had a list as long as my arm. I couldn’t wait to get home and start implementing the strategies that were going to lead me out of my overdraft and into heaven. Strategy one – don’t buy stuff.

Then I got home. How exactly was I supposed to do without these overpriced black boots with buttons and purple bits? I didn’t have to answer that question, because I bought them and I don’t care who knows it. I love them.

Strategies have not been implemented. I’m still impulse buying as if it’s going out of fashion. I needed some water while out with my man the other day so we popped into Holland and Barratt. It was no mean feat for me to walk past all the supplements promising to make my hair shiny and my nails strong, but I managed it. We got to the drinks cabinet at the back and I naturally bypassed the normal water and zoomed in on the eye catching ‘skinny water.’

‘Skinny water?’ Gareth asked, perplexed. ‘So, that’s water then, but with less calories than water, which has no calories.’

‘Yes,’ I stuttered, noting the clever way they’d written ‘skinny’ as if the word itself had been on a diet.

‘It’s, er, good for you,’ I said. Witty retort, Kim, witty retort.

‘It’s twice the price of water,’ he replied.

My hand wavered. This is exactly the reason I’ll never get out of debt. Because I am a marketing team’s dream.

Those fat cats, sitting on their skinny chairs, chewing their skinny pencils, they know that people like me are lured by words like ‘skinny’.

Not today. I didn’t buy the silly water at twice the price of water.

Thus, my overpriced black boots with buttons and purple bits are entirely justifiable. All I have to do is not buy a hell of a lot more skinny water.

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