So today I was so desperate to get out of the house that I sat in Starbucks for an hour sipping a latte.

A LATTE.  This is very bad on the money-saving front.  That £2.25 would have bought three days worth of food in the halal shop.  At least I didn’t buy any cake.  This was mainly because now that I am an Uber-Mother and Domestic Goddess, I have been trying my hand at baking, and yesterday made pineapple upside down cake, which I am now in the process of polishing off, on my own, before it goes off.  Let’s just say that three weeks after giving birth (or, as I prefer to think of it, having Piglet wrenched out of me, since I played a pathetically small role in the whole process) I had lost most of the baby weight, and since then it has been steadily creeping back on.  I then spent the next half an hour wandering idly round the “London Designer Outlet” (compulsory inverted commas, like allegedly that’s what it is.  Most exciting brands therein are Kurt Geiger and er, North Face.  We’re not talking Roland Mouret here), glancing in shop windows and sighing dramatically at the sight of my not-very-thin midsection, wondering if taking up baking as a hobby was such a good idea.

I also had a little wander into Kurt Geiger.  Because obviously shoe shopping is the sensible thing to do whilst berating yourself for having the extravagance to purchase a latte.  To my delight, they had the perfect Mum shoes in there-flat heeled knee high brown riding boots, which I had been considering buying for some time, due to their practicality whilst pushing a pram, and country-chic, preppy look with a tweed jacket.  And they were reduced.  To £140.  All I can say is, thank God the “London Designer Outlet” is not a real designer outlet.  I then spotted a pair of cheaper black suede over-the-knee boots which I also wanted and still couldn’t afford, despite their being less than half the price of the riding boots.  If it’s any consolation, I already have both a pair of brown knee high boots, and black over the knee ones, but the devil is in the details (the brown boots have a heel and laces, and were purchased in 2006, when knee high boots were already starting to look dated, and the over the knee boots have a pointed toe in the style last seen on Caprice circa 1999).

Before long I am going to look like Caprice in 1999.  But fatter.  Either that or I’m just going to have to wait for all these things to come back into fashion.  Because, like the recent resurgence of the crop top, this is likely to happen just as I have got too old and fat to enjoy it.