this afternoon

I went from feeling fairly OK about myself, to feeling like a bloated and corpulent sow within just one solitary stinking hour.

It was all grossly unfair. There I was, doing some innocent bra/jeans shopping, just trying things on in the changing room, and there it was: a gargantuan ape of a creature staring back at me from the mirror in the corner of my cubicle. Not only was it foul to the eye, but it also appeared to require inhuman swathes of material to cover its porcine frame - and even then it was left able to only crush one leg into the insufficient acreage of denim. Horror of horrors, its face looked familiar.

I left the shop with no bras, no jeans, and in a thunderous mood. Only when they've got us under their hideous fluorescent lightbulbs, half naked and tottering about with one leg in our jeans, in a cubicle of roughly the same dimensions as a shoebox, loathing ourselves and our now astonishingly close resemblance to an ox, do they have us where they really want us.

Retail therapy my bum.