Sunday 18 July 2010

Smwddio!

I used to buy hand bags. I didn’t need handbags, but I wanted handbags. And shoes. I was a late developer, only discovering the world of designer bags and shoes as I tiptoed towards 30. I could blame my evil twin, but it was my money to spend, and spend it I did. It didn’t matter that I could hardly walk in some of the shoes, they looked pretty and nothing else mattered. Where are they now, these bags and shoes? Someone, somewhere is toting my bag and admiring their feet in my shoes. Sigh. Well I had to be honest with myself and admit that a smallholding in Wales is no place for heels. The folk at Clynderwen & Cardiganshire Farmers agri store wouldn’t appreciate the beauty of my Kurt Geiger mules, the grease smeared men of Gwili Jones tractors wouldn’t take me seriously if I tottered though the door in pink suede LK Bennett kitten heels, and there’s no way I’d get a 25Kg bag of layers pellets into my Furla handbag.

One year later and my retail therapy has taken on a different form. Beauty has given way to practicality. My most recent purchase was a giant ironing board. I love my new ironing board. She’s tall, wide, long, purple and perfect. No really, I got quite excited the day she arrived. You’d understand my joy if you too had spent hours trying to iron 4 duvet covers, 4 sheets and 16 pillow cases on a Barbie-sized ironing board, with one hand on the iron and the other trying to stop folds of linen from cascading onto the floor and into the cat zone. The size of my board had never been a problem before as I’d perfected the art of buying crease-free, non-iron office worker clothes, employed a cleaner armed with a can of spray starch to tackle Dave’s work shirts, and slept between creased sheets. In my new life I spend a lot of quality time with my ironing board. And if I miss my bags and shoes, I can always kick off the muddy wellies, slip on the red suede killer heels stashed at the back of the wardrobe and collect the eggs in the Lulu Guinness clutch bag hidden under the bed.

Oh, and by the way, “smwddio”, pronounced “smoothio”, is not a fruit based drink but is in fact Welsh for ironing. What’s not to love about a language like that.

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