January Sales

 

I've never been a great one for shopping although I imagine like most people I love a good deal or at least to believe that I am getting value for money. I suppose for that reason and in my previous pre-retirement life, the January Sales were always an opportunity to top up my wardrobe, linen chests and glassware too.

In retirement, I still detest shopping but my relationship with stuff has also altered. I now appreciate the importance of reducing rather than accumulating and in recent years have tried various tactics in the fight against extraneous collecting. 

In my wardrobe I dutifully embraced the "turn your coat hangers" method, with the intention that anything that had not been turned and therefore not worn would be recycled or donated at the end of a six month period. In so far as it worked, it was only with those items that I would probably have reduced in any event. I've also deployed the "one in, two out" system, but had to accept that buying a coat and jettisoning two socks in exchange was inevitably stretching the rules. 

Ultimately I retreated into a nerd like state from which I have clearly developed and devised a spreadsheet listing the items I would have in my ideal wardrobe against an inventory of those actually hanging there. Using it, I essentially prohibited all unnecessary purchases in the path from present to future. Awfully clinical, boringly logical but it is a system that has worked for me over the past couple of years.

However, and just when I was beginning to feel a trifle smug that I had actually cracked this decluttering lark I hit a hurdle and in my case it was indeed the January Sales. I didn't even intentionally set out to buy anything. In fact I only went into the outdoors shop to accompany the eldest on his mission to replenish his supply of climbing chalk. It was there, however, that I spotted them. They didn't actually have my name on them but they looked so comfortable I had to try them on.  I may not be Cinderella but Prince Charming would certainly have been in no doubt as to whom those hiking boots belonged. As for the price tag, I mean it would have been foolish, rude even, not to pick them up and take them to the till.

There is no defence. I already have a perfectly decent pair of boots albeit perhaps not as warm as I might like but a change of socks and that is easily remedied, so I can't use that as a legitimate excuse. No I have succumbed to the lure of marketing. I have added to my shoe rack, not reduced. My burden of stuff has become weightier but, you know what, they really were a bargain!