Fragile!

What is the fascination with crockery?

For those of you who have no understanding of or suffer no visceral jolt of identification with crockery, I dismiss you as I would a rabid dog. You (and you know who you are) are lesser breed without the law, lewd fellows of a baser sort and contemptible beneath a Conservative.

I say this by way of justification for the falling away from the paths of parsimony into the slippery chutes of spendthrift indulgence.

I can trace the path of my own destruction and there is, as you will see, a terrible yet justifiable logic behind the inexorable slide to penury.

I am not one to slum it by drinking espresso from the wrong cups. I am also not one to pass by a reasonable buy to fill a perceived need. So, when a person like my good self finds himself in a designer outlet and sees cut price Royal Dolton espresso cup in a classic design reminiscent of early Josiah W in stylish white at a more than reasonable price: there is only one possible outcome. The fact that I ended up with more cups than saucers was merely a note to the power of serendipity to ensure that sooner or later the requisite saucers would ‘turn up’ at some point.

Needing two small saucers, of course, meant that there was ‘purpose’ in all future visits to the designer outlet – a mission, a rugged determination.

Today was no exception. Shops for Toni: shops for me. And one of them of course was the Royal Dolton shop. Here I was presented with my first challenge or temptation. My dinner service is in a now discontinued pattern by Wedgwood called ‘Aztec’. A year ago I had given myself over to an orgy of ‘sensible’ buying when the prices of the Aztec service fell to prices when it is a certifiable crime to pass by bargains of this almost insulting nature. It didn’t have all the sensible pieces that I wanted, but what was there I purchased, assuring myself that, if necessary, I would devise new and strange forms in the presentation of food which would necessitate the use of the odd dishes that I had bought.

This time there were mugs. I had been waiting for mugs to appear at a reasonable price for months and had officially given up hope because the last sale had been of the end of the range. Now, as if by magic, mugs! It transpired that another store had shut down and the stock had been transferred to the one outside Bridgend and was now displayed for me delectation.

I am not entirely convinced that I do not have a selection of mugs in storage, but at half price, surely too good a bargain to ignore? But I resisted and drifted (feeling like a traitor to my mother’s shopping memory) towards the back of the shop and there was a single cup and saucer of the espresso type I was looking for. And the saucer was only £1! Half way there! Another one and I could get away only spending £2! A positive record! But this is where things began to go wrong. ~there were no further saucers at cut price, only at full (half) price (if you see what I mean, this was a designer outlet after all.)

At this point the shop assistants leapt into action: the discussed, planned, searched and gossiped and finally produced not only another saucer at £1, but also a multitude of cups at 50p! They also took 20% off the saucers. It would have been churlish not to have bought an extra half dozen cups and saucers and then in the general euphoria of buying I was moved to buy six mugs as well.

The paths to destruction are paved with porcelain.