Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:190831 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/8/2019 17:47 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

• The Guardian Sat urday 31 Aug ust 2019

4 Opinion

W

omen love shopping,

don’t they? Everyone knows

we were born to do it; that

left to our own devices we

like nothing better than

spending all day in some

changing room, leaving our

menfolk slumped outside

in abject boredom, praying for it to be over. Except it’s

not true, or certainly not for all women, and almost

certainly never has been. Only 29% of women actually

say they enjoy shopping, according to the retail analysts

Mintel; for most of the rest it’s somewhere between

actively anxiety-inducing (especially for anyone

uncomfortable with stripping in front of a mirror) and

merely rather boring.

Women have been conditioned to envisage shopping

as a lovely treat, a guilty pleasure so intense we must

sneak around and lie about how much we spend, even

though the reality of trudging round shopping malls

falls far short of the dream. But while the idea of retail

therapy as the ultimate drug is so embedded in female

culture that it often goes unquestioned, on refl ection I

don’t love shopping any more; in fact I don’t love it at all.

When did a Saturday mooching round the shops stop

feeling like a luxury, and start feeling more like bad sex;

something you thought you wanted at the time, but

which swiftly congeals to regret and self-loathing? I can

still remember the teenage thrill of trying on everything

in Miss Selfridge , but it’s years since I got any kind of real

high from the high street. Now the sheer scale of choice

feels exhausting, while the business of piling up stuff at

home for the sake of it – yet another cushion, dress or

lipstick – increasingly borders on the obscene.

Perhaps this odd, defl ated feeling is just a middle-aged

thing, a sign of having acquired more than enough over

the decades. It’s almost certainly a rather spoilt thing,

when those watching every penny can only dream of

having all the stuff they need. But for whatever reason,

this week’s warning from Sir Ian Boyd , outgoing chief

scientifi c adviser at D efra, that getting to zero emissions

means not just consuming diff erently – switching to

sustainable cotton T-shirts, say – but consuming far

less, strikes a chord. Too much advice about going green

involves pushing slightly less toxic alternatives to things

we don’t particularly need, to distract us from thinking

about whether they were necessary in the fi rst place.

Sure, a reusable metal straw is better for marine life

than a plastic one. But who honestly needs a straw? (And

yes, I know some disabled people need one to drink;

but let’s not pretend the vast majority of straws aren’t

used by perfectly able-bodied kids at parties, or to avoid

smudging lipstick, or to slurp up milkshakes so stiff

with ice-cream they must be vacuumed out of the cup .)

Making and shipping a metal object halfway across the

world for no good reason is a demented use of carbon,

a solution to a problem that for most people doesn’t

exist. Going green has to be about reducing what we buy,

reusing what’s already there, and reimagining our habits

rather than just rebranding them.

The counter -argument, of course, is that this kind

of mindless shopping might not be pretty but it keeps

people in jobs every step of the way; from manufacturing

to distribution, marketing, managing, taxing and selling.

When Boyd talks about privileging a sustainable planet

over economic growth, that’s a polite way of describing a

future where living standards (in the economic sense at

least) will be lower than they would have been; a world

of prosperity foregone, with real consequences for real

people, and especially those on low incomes.

B

ut Boyd puts his fi nger on an awkward

truth, which is that we can’t go on

blundering towards environmental

disaster while telling ourselves that

this is what makes us happy, when that

simply isn’t true. Too much shopping

is, like comfort eating, little more

than a means of fi lling the emptiness

inside. Fast fashion fi xes that get worn a few times and

then thrown away are arguably forgivable in 19-year-

olds, who still aren’t sure who they are yet and want to

dress up as someone new every Saturday night. But for

those of us old enough to know better, who could eke

out what’s in our overstuff ed wardrobes for the rest of

our lives if only we weren’t cowed by the fear of falling

behind fashion – well, something has to give.

For those who can’t bear going without something

new, Oxfam has launched a Second Hand September

challenge to buy no new clothes for a month; one

way to capitalise on the virtuous, beginning-of-term

feeling that autumn always brings. If you don’t want to

contribute to the already precipitous decline of the high

street, then another way of stemming the tide of junk

is to shop locally or physically rather than online, and

be stern about how much you really need anything that

can’t be found that way.

Spending on experiences not possessions is another

form of economic compromise, since research suggests

it’s the former that actually makes people happy.

Personally I’ve never regretted a penny spent on cinema

tickets , anything done with friends or, to be brutally

honest, cocktails. I would add books, if it weren’t for a

few mistakes with overhyped titles that weren’t worth

chopping down trees for; but really, each to their own.

What matters is accepting both that going green means

more than an excuse to go shopping, and that shopping

less may not actually be the hardship it sounds. In the

end, a life is made up of the things we have done, not the

things we have bought. Understand that, and there is

suddenly so much more of it waiting to be lived.

I

t has been a brutal re-entry into normal

life after summer, and no one is handling it

particularly well. Unlike previous years we

seemed, on fi rst glance, to be doing so well. Air

travel with four-year-olds is infi nitely easier

than with three-year-olds. We were lucky with

immigration and sailed through. And travelling

from London to New York – east to west – the

jet lag is a breeze. And then we all went back to work.

It is often said that parenting is harder labour than

paid employment, and in most respects this is true.

As all parents of young children know, at work you

get to do extravagant things like go to the loo without

someone following you in. For every 10 minutes of

applied concentration, you can spend another fi ve

futzing about on the internet. At the end of three weeks

of unbroken time with my children, a treacherous part

of me was looking forward to returning to my desk

while they did their last week of camp before school.

And we all had high hopes. After a break of this

length, for a second the old routine looks inviting,

something to which one returns with all sorts of

cheerful resolutions. We would get up an hour earlier.

We would eat more oatmeal and fewer gummy worms.

I would, fi nally, learn to execute a French braid. God

help me, on the plane back to the US I started reading a

feminist re interpretation of the Iliad.

This bright new dawn lasted approximately 48

hours. And then the wheels fell off. I don’t mean we

descended into chaos. But the transition back to real life

became suddenly fraught and exhausting. My children,

not usually clingy, rebelled against losing their mother’s

undivided attention and embarked on a series of

meltdowns. And in my excitement to get back to work,

I’d forgotten one crucial thing: that on holiday, for all the

hard labour of wrestling two four-year-olds in and out

of bathing suits , I’d had only one grid up in my mind.

The term “mental load” is a relatively new one, and

as a neologism was desperately needed. The hidden

burden of keeping every last detail of someone else’s

needs in mind when you are also committed elsewhere

is one my mother’s generation had no word for, and

even now, it’s easy to forget why one’s hard drive is

whirring. As the holidays ended, I felt my mind return

to a split-screen formation and the energy silently

siphon off to maintain it. The kids start kindergarten

next week. They need immuni sation boosters and

to be fi tted for school shoes. We have to sign up for

the 7.30am school bus, and I need to brace myself for

their unwillingness to get on it. I’d forgotten to buy

uniforms, and had to run up to the one store that still

stocked them, in the Bronx, with it s 40-minute queue

to get in. Meanwhile regular service at work resumed.

My girls seemed to go through a similar transition:

enjoying camp while fretting about the forthcoming

leap into the unknown. Time stood still over summer.

Now it has fractured and sped up. I think we’re all in a

mild state of shock.

Gaby

Hinsliff

Emma

Brockes

Shop less, live

more: the recipe

for a pain-free,

green future

Summer is

over and it feels

like a ver y rapid

fall from grace

A shopper on Bond Street, London PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY

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