Yummy art of retail therapy
India Knight loves shopping. But not any old kind. She disapproves of sales ("the stuff no one else wanted"), Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon ("Hell being other people") and bad service (being treated like "poos in frocks").
Her supermarket shopping is done online - Ocado is best. She makes her own bread, with organic flour, natch, which miraculously her children seem to prefer, and she thrills to the rustle of the packaging when her mail-order parcel arrives.
So here we have, after two largely autobiographical and extremely funny novels, India's own shopping tour, embellished by a memoir of her childhood and her growing-up.
The hard stuff is in boxes: the names, addresses, phone numbers, websites and occasionally prices of her top shops, mostly in London.
Her passions are eating and being pampered, though, like all truly dedicated consumers, she's pretty hot on the chintzy stuff, too. An essay called the Food of Shame includes a eulogy to Neuhaus chocolates from Brussels (where she grew up), which comes hard on the heels of a mini-masterpiece called Pants of Steel. It begins: "Let's not beat around the bush: if you eat like a pig, you look like a pig." The pants in question are called BodySlimmers, by Nancy Gantz, because the podge disappears instead of being redistributed.
Knight likes expensive, luxurious products but isn't a snob. Argos is a favourite haunt. Although she is uncompromising about quality, she doesn't believe it has to cost a bomb. Anusol works wonders for under-eye bags, apparently. She tells a story of having worked on a glossy in the 1990s and falsely matching the brand name of the cosmetics worn by the model simply to the advertiser with the big, expensive ad on the back cover. If the ad had been placed by Dior, the model would be wearing make-up by Dior. She frequently uses words such as alluring, foxy, minx and sexy, and puts her semi-slapperish dress-sense down to a combination of her mother's extreme beauty, with which she could never compete, and her father's love of porn mags, which were always left lying around.
Items elsewhere are described as being yummy, delish, the ant's pants, yumerama, swoonerama and so on. She's an enthusiast of volcanic proportions, a hedonist with attitude who makes you laugh. Yet her recommendations are judicious. This is a gift of a book, both to have and to give.
