More falling off the wagon

So, I had a plan for today’s blog entry. There’s a shop in the UK called Primark which, when I left, sold cheap nylon clothes you wouldn’t be seen dead in and now sells cheap nylon clothes which suddenly all my friends keep turning up at the pub in, saying with a triumphant smirk ‘£3.50 at Primark!’ [that’s $7 to you and me]. So for a while I’ve been planning to just go and just have a little look.

Obviously once I started this blog, I vowed to eschew the kind of cheap disposable fashion Primark sells. Then, yesterday, my mother-in-law told me that, along with Tesco and Asda, Primark had been in the news for paying workers in India £8 a month (http://www.waronwant.org/Fashion+Victims+13593.twl) and therefore having one of the worst human rights records in retail. Clearly actually buying anything there was now completely out of the question.

So I decided I’d go to Primark in Cheltenham today, look around, find it all really tacky, then leave and blog about how virtuous I’d been in resisting the lure of the cheap sinful fashion.

Can you guess what happened next? Yes, it’s true, I somehow found myself walking out of Primark with two £6.50 tops clutched in my sweaty paws (they were in my paws – at least I managed to insist on no plastic bag). I put it down to the preceding six weeks during which I’d forbidden myself, a self-confessed clothesaholic, to even enter a clothes shop. Against this background, Primark was like an open wine bottle to an AA member – just a bit too easy.

The good news is, I tried the tops on when I got home and they look really synthetic and cheap – which is exactly what they are. So I’ll be returning them tomorrow for a refund. Hopefully that’ll get rid of the dirty feeling. And at least I’ll be able to look Dot in the eye when I pop her into her organic cotton babygrow in the morning.

And actually, now I've just read the waronwant.org website, I don't think it's funny that I gave in so easily. It talks about women being paid a third the living wage in Bangladesh to work 96 hour weeks. So that's it. Really this time.