What’s NEED go to do with it.

Today is Black Thursday.  It’s not a religious holiday related to Xmas, Easter or Passover although it does involve worship; whore-ship of Mammon. (Who was/is mammon?  Note to self: look up Mammon on’t internet when less pressed for time.)

Am pushed for time today because every store in Oxford Street is in massive sale mode with up to umpteen percent off old stock to include all the woolly jumpers they’ve not been able to shift due to the unseasonable weather and bottom of the range electrical goods that will do for the spare room or least favourite son-in-law’s birthday present later in the year, if you can remember where you put it.

I’ve had loads of emails urging me to buy a new phone (from my service provider), sign up to an acting jobs website and save £30 (might do that) and umpteen others offering me once-in-a-life-deals on perfumes, fruit cakes, train journeys to Eastern Europe (go home, Carrie, your great-grandmother came from Kiev), cheap tickets to all the West End shows I never wanted to see in the first place or have seen and detested, like Mama Mia, and ….. oh, losing the thread along with the will to leave the flat because I have to go into town.

I don’t NEED any of it.  I don’t need a new evening bag for the posh dinner I’m going to tomorrow night.  I certainly don’t need the one I saw on Wednesday in John Lewis that cost three times the amount I paid for the frock I’m going to wear though it (the bag not the dress) was glittery and had a clasp that clunked satisfactorily.

I also don’t need any clothes – I’ve enough to keep me warm even if some are a little last century vintage.  I don’t need any more make-up as I’ve a drawer full of half-used eyeshadows and I don’t need new serving dishes even though the ones I have do not match, being of assorted designs, but they do hold food and anyway what is the point of a serving dish; they just make more washing up, don’t they?

I don’t need more jewellery; like my crockery some of my earrings don’t match and I don’t need any more scarves, gloves or woolly hats because I bought loads of them last year in the January sales in preparation for our trip to The Northern Lights where, incidentally, it wasn’t all that cold.

As my best friend said yesterday, “For the price of a short holiday one could feed an African village for a week.”

Of course I like sparkly, glittery clothes and neat little gadgets and baubles and smelly stuff and hand creams and books and ……. hold on!

Books!

Oh, am tempted.

But I don’t need even more books.  Have loads unread by the side of my bed and on my Kindle and anyway best friend has lent me The Goldfinch which has lots of pages in it and will keep me quiet for the rest of the week and, by the way, lovely lady downstairs has lent me a slinky black evening bag for tomorrow’s do.

Need, of course, is the word that should be associated with poverty, with homelessness, with people who are hungry or cold or frightened or ill. 

I’m going to Oxford Street because I feel that I need a manicure.  The girl who does my nails needs my money.  I like pretty nails.  As a bridge player my hands are often “on show” as an actress we are often asked to show our hands at castings for commercials and as someone going to a posh do tomorrow (have I mentioned that?  Do I sound excited?)  I don’t  want to look out-of-place nor embarrass our hosts because someone might say to them “Who was that funny lady with the ugly fingernails?”

Also, I need a manicure because my nails are cracked and split and in the worst state they’ve been for ages.  It took me a while to figure out why.  Did I have a severe calcium deficiency, perhaps?

Doh!  Split nails is what happens when you type a blog piece every day for 28 days in a row on a new keyboard.

So, I shall go to Oxford Street and come straight back home again without deviating to the fancy gift departments that will beckon me.  Probably.

What I shall definitely do is donate to Cancer Relief and Shelter this week.  I’ve had a little bonus in the post.  It won’t feed a village for a week, it won’t send an Afghan girl to school for a year, it won’t be enough to fund a dialysis machine for a month but every little does help.

Happy Black Friday Weekend (yup, that’s what many of the signs say in the shop-windows) – may all your purchases come with a gift receipt.