Retail Therapy

There's a woman lives upstairs who looks like Catherine Zeta Jones. I've seen her coming down the stairs a few times; perfect make-up, shiny nails and the sort of hair-do she's obviously spent an hour attending to in the bathroom mirror. I met her again this morning as she came tippy-toeing down the stairs doing that sideways walk you have to do when you're descending a staircase in a pencil skirt, not that I've worn one of those since my last day as a school prefect.

Anyway, there she is in her little suit and crisp white shirt and I'm looking at her wondering why I wasn't born with the glamour gene, and anyway, how does she get that shirt so crisp? Does she buy disposable ones? Is it a European washing machine? I've even started spraying starch on mine and they still feel limp, though the damp doesn't help.

And I open the front door and give her a glimpse of the hallway with it's ever-so-glamorous wall-planner and the big map of Australia with lots of colour-coded dots (you know, yellow for where we've been, red for where we want to go) and then I'm forced to reply to her chirpy "good morning!" while simultaneously manhandling Ella and a full bin-bag, but never mind, her day will come, something I think every time I see those twenty-something childless women in their high fashion shoes and matching bags. Ha! lets see how crisp her shirts are then.

(Still, I caught her five minutes later hoiking up her tights in the driveway so there is a god).

I was on a mission into the city centre today (though the Sydneysiders never call it that; they call it the CBD) for retail therapy and lunch with Steve's partner Scott, who's been abandoned to his balcony view of the Harbour Bridge since Steve's headed back to Manchester (again) for a friend's wedding.

With this is mind (and with no need to carry a bag large enough for nappies and wipes), I took my Burberry handbag, my lovely Burberry handbag, bought well before the chavs took over and made the Burberry label unfashionable - I brought it to Australia to get my money's worth because I feel like an idiot carrying it in Britain - I suppose it's a bit like an Aussie wanting to wear their Ugg boots outside.

So having dropped Ella at nursery I drove into the city, across Hyde Park and parked underneath the cathedral. Then I headed straight for David Jones as I was sure I'd be able to buy some sort of clothing to rescue me from the Marks and Sparks tee-shirts I'm still living in.

Now I haven't been into the city centre branch of DJ's before but I realised straight away that it was much posher than the one at Bondi Junction. It's set across four floors, but you need nerves of steel to ascend them because they've positioned progressively more glamorous shop assistants on every floor (and progressively more glamorous customers to match - think razor-blade cheekbones and leopard-skin shirts, a look some women in Sydney are very fond of).

So the ground floor is the perfume and make-up (and you can imagine what the make-up dollies look like) while the first floor is ladies fashion (preppy young ladies in crisp shirts, though no sign of CZJ), the second floor is Australian Designer Labels (don't know what the assistants on that floor look like - I don't think you're allowed off the escalator unless you're wearing a minimum of three carats of diamonds). And then you reach the third floor, which I think is called something like Matronly Fashion, but if you're posh you're still down on the second floor so you won't be offended by the matronly-types selling matronly clothes, think Hattie Jacques meets Julie T Wallace and double it.

In summary, I found absolutely nothing I wanted to buy in DJ's, which goes to prove it's not a patch on House of Fraser or John Lewis. By half ten I'd developed a headache through concentrating on not slipping over on the highly-polished floors, the sort of headache requiring a skinny flat white and a warm croissant, and after that I headed to the lovely Queen Victoria Building and the Billabong shop, via a very sharp exit from a shop called Supre which was selling an alarming array of bright pink and yellow clothes and a top that looked a bit like the one the girl wears on the test card, you know, where she's chalking the noughts and crosses.

My heart very nearly sank in the Billabong shop when I saw the average age of the assistants was fifteen and they were busy being chirpy and asking me how my day was ("good thanks") and enquiring whether there was anything they could help me to find, which is incredibly irritating to most British people but entirely normal to the Aussies. The poms ought to wear a union jack denoting "leave me alone" when they go into clothes shops - or is that just grumpy old me?

Anyway, there were a couple of possibles in there - hurrah - one of them a halter-neck top, though when I got it on I realised it was too low-cut for even a strapless bra and required the wearer to support their entire bosom by tying some cotton behind their neck; I won't go into detail, though suffice it to say that by the time I'd got enough leverage to hoik my bosom up, the cotton was so tighly-secured that I could no longer lift my head and had to admire the look with my head held at a ninety degree angle, which kind of spoiled the effect.

By the time I met Scott (in pouring rain) I was glad of a break in the proceedings, especially as it involved lunch at number one Martin Place (see photo), a lovely building that used to be the post office. Remind me next time I go shopping that it's Manchester I need, not Sydney. In Sydney the fashion is all too young, too skinny, too bright or too old and despite what you might think, I'm still somewhere in the middle.