Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

cold, so I had to leave them at home with their dad. I hope that’s OK?’
    ‘Of course it is,’ stewardess woman said, but I could tell she was disappointed.
    She gave me a form to fill in, on which I entered my (i.e. Celia’s) name, address and other details.
    ‘You’re thirty-four?’ the stewardess asked, scrutinising me intently.
    ‘That’s right,’ I lied.
    ‘You have such lovely skin,’ she said.
    ‘That’ll be all the mayonnaise,’ I replied.
    The testing itself was simple enough, though fairly revolting and no doubt hugely fattening. We had to eat various types of mayo and salad cream, occasionally neat but mostly smeared on either crudités or cheese biscuits, and say which ones we preferred and why. We had to express preferences for jars or bottles (squeezy or non-squeezy), whether or not we cared if our choice of mayonnaise was ‘ethical’; and give our opinions on whether we thought mayonnaise was a healthy thing to be serving our children. I said Ithought that it probably wasn’t very healthy, but I gave it to them because they liked it. Stewardess woman looked very disappointed indeed.
    With seventy quid in my pocket (they gave me twenty pounds for the train fare!) I was off to my next appointment: a group examining the World Outlook for Roll-On, Solid and Other Types of Underarm Deodorants Excluding Aerosol and Spray Types. Christ. And I thought my job was dull. Given a choice I think I’d rather walk dogs than ask people about how much Lynx they use in the morning. After answering questions about whether my brand kept me dry all day, how many reapplications I needed to make during the day and whether I felt my brand a) was reliable and b) reflected my busy and hectic lifestyle, I was sent on my way with another fifty quid in my pocket. Money for old rope, this.
    Perhaps thrift wasn’t so bad after all. I was really looking forward to the clothes swap party which I’d organised for Saturday night. In addition to Ali, I’d invited Kate and Sophie from Hamilton (they might be a pair of supercilious bitches but they’re my size and have killer wardrobes), as well as a couple of girls from Fleet & Partners, the law firm I worked at before I went to Hamilton. Jude also invited five of her friends: we figured twelve was probably the maximum manageable number given the size of our flat.
    I had done a thorough wardrobe cleanout. First to go was everything Dan ever gave me or whichreminded me of him: this included the Marc Jacobs dress that I wore to the Hamilton Churchill party and which he thought looked so good on me, the Missoni scarf he bought me for Christmas and all the assorted tops and shoes and bags he’d lavished on me over the past year or so. I sighed. He really had been a very generous boyfriend. I did not include all the underwear he’d given me (his favoured gift but not really appropriate clothes swap attire), nor did I include the Louboutins, which remained hidden in their box at the back of my wardrobe. I just couldn’t bring myself to part with them.
    What my wardrobe needed, I had decided, was an edgier twist. All the stuff I used to wear to Hamilton was a bit corporate, so I ditched most of that, too. There were about four pairs of jeans which I never wore any more, half a dozen jumpers, the odd jacket … By the time I had finished deciding what I was going to be offering up for swaps, a mountain of clothes, shoes and bags had accumulated on my bed. My wardrobe was looking streamlined. Some might say sparse.
    But this was a good thing, surely? My new life was all about change, and that included clothes and accessories. Plus, style gurus are always banging on about ‘capsule wardrobes’, and whenever you see one of those life coach programmes, they’re endlessly berating their TV guinea pigs, demanding they chuck out their worldly possessions.
    In true Less is More! spirit, Jude and I decided wewould ask everyone to bring a bottle to the party. I’d volunteered to organise the food, having nothing better to do all day. Not wanting the whole thing to seem too downmarket, I had decided that I would make sushi. At some point in my distant past someone had given me a home sushi-making kit, so on Saturday afternoon I rifled through our kitchen cupboards before eventually I found it. I was pleased to discover that inside the kit was a small, unopened bottle of sake. Just the thing to get me in the mood.
    I thought I’d start out simple, with a little salmon nigiri.