Ikea and recommended reading

Oriana Fallaci’s novel Inshallah

I think this version is in Swedish. We saw this today. What else can you find on an Ikea flat pack bookcase?

Branded

Neils Boorman – former brand-a-holic has released a book about his passion for brands and how he lived brand-free for a year.

Like many compulsive types, once addicted to designer labels – he took his brand free existence to extremes, too. According to this BBC story, he found that shopping for non-branded and preferably locally produced clothes, food or anything was tough work.

By banning myself from the shops I hoped to cleanse myself of a destructive addiction. But the prohibition became a kind of experiment, I wanted to find out if a person living in modern Britain could survive away from the chain stores and supermarkets that dominate our lives.

The first months of my brand-free life were hell. My local High Streets were populated entirely by mass-market brands and I was forced to scour the back streets for alternative spaces to shop.

I appreciate the experiment and how hard it must be to break the cruel dependency of fashion and brand addiction. He’s covered some of his experience on his blog.

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I don’t live a brand free life. Far from it. I love Finnish design and enjoy my Arabia dishes and Iitala glassware (and Nokia phone). I like brands because it means that suppliers have a reputation and a brand loyalty to maintain – so in theory they keep an eye on quality and sizing and fit should be relatively consistent. A lot of my clothes come from XXXXX, from XXXX when I’m in the US and shoes from XXXXX. I recently bought some onesies from Baby XXX, after having been given some as gifts and discovering that they seemed to be the softest an wash the best. But I scour the stocks and do my best to choose the items with as little writing or brand ID as possible on the clothing. Keep the label on the label. Why should I pay money to advertise their clothes for them?

I not just my own money I don’t like to spend on advertising other people’s products, I don’t even like to do that with gifted items. For instance, VolMom gave me a Baby XXX hat with “XXX” written on it. Cletus won’t be wearing that, if there’s another hat within reach. And my mother-in-law gave me a little baby jacket from xxxx – an Irish designer (I’m told). She pointed out that it was “a xxxx” in such a tone that implied I should be impressed. Though I know she meant well and the jacket is very nice – now I’ve noticed the “xxx” embroidered over the heart, I have to say I like it a whole lot less.

My aversion to obvious branding is a little obsessive. But I can directly link it back to the designer craze of the early 80s – the jeans, the shirts with alligators and men riding ponies. I can remember other kids in school making fun of me for not having them. I guess I decided I’d prefer to wear no (obvious) brands at all. Well, other than for the Vols and England football.

Wimbledon

Today I went out for the first time without Cletus. I’ve been needing to do this for some time. I haven’t been away from him for more than 30 minutes – except the time I had to have my legs scanned for clots at the local hospital.

I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to do. As I’m breast feeding, I couldn’t go too far or stay away from Cletus for too long. I thought about going to a museum, but by the time I got to any of the ones in central London and looked around for a few minutes – it would be time to head back. I could have gone for a walk – but that’s generally something the Vol-in-Law do together.

I’m not much of shopper, really – but I decided to go to Wimbledon. In Wimbledon, they have a mall. It’s not a big mall, it’s not terrifically crowded, but it’s a mall. They also have a high street with the usual retail suspects, plus a department store, bookstores and art supply stores and so forth. And Wimbledon is full of consumerist, aspirational to upper middle-class types – so the shops are pretty good. (The stores for the very wealthy are bit up the hill in Wimbledon Village)

Up until recently, a trip to Wimbledon meant a ridiculously long walk, a ridiculously long bus ride, or a really, really short trip by car but with high parking costs and low convenience probability. But within the past month, a new bus route has started which I can catch almost outside my front door (well, it’s maybe a two minute walk) and takes me to the heart of Wimbledon in under ten minutes if the traffic’s not bad. So I took the bus.

I poked around the shops and browsed the book store and bought some books. And then I took the bus home.

It’s great that a new, easy to access, urban center is open to me now. But what was even better is that I left Cletus and when I came back there were no marks on the baby, he didn’t seem traumatised, and I was even happy to see him.

Baby shopping

VolMom called me last night to ask me how things were going and whether I’d done any more baby shopping.

Had we bought a crib, had we bought a moses basket (ha! She’s been on UK websites -that’s Britspeak), had we bought a baby carrier, pram, stroller – well, had we bought anything?

Nope.

“What are you going to do,” she asked – “carry that baby around in a potato sack?”

I repeated this to the Vol-in-Law.

ViL: Potato sack? Where does she think we are – this isn’t Rubesville, Tennessee – this is London. We don’t just have those lying around. I don’t know where we could even buy a potato sack.
Me: Yeah, we’ll have to carry the baby around in a designer laptop bag.

Needless things

The Vol-in-Law and I have put off buying any baby things. While many of my May co-confinees have apparently painted and decorated nurseries, we’ve done nothing.

We did buy a couple of books. But as far as a newborn’s immediate needs we’ve bought nothing.

Plenty of time. But I decided to go out shopping today. And I still have nothing that a new baby needs, but I’ve satisfied my own need to know that there are plenty of cute things out there for a baby boy.

I told the ViL that I had bought only frivolous items – and he rolled his eyes. But even he had to admit that the items I selected were “precious” and he was very impressed indeed by the low, low prices I paid (I did have quite a bit of hunting through the picked over sales racks).

Deer sweater – I got the biggest size they had, but unless we have a small kid or there’s an unseasonable cold snap in August (not completely unknown) we may not get much use from this. But it was sooo cute.

England swim trunks in two different sizes – ’cause they were just too cute to grow out of

Just in case I need to take baby out into the rain… Actually, if there’s one thing I like it’s good quality outerwear – and why shouldn’t Cletus take after me and also own too many jackets?

Alright, this looks like something a real baby might actually wear…