12 Dec 2008 |
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The Bags Women Carry By Uche Nworah Guys, come on, you know what I’m talking about. You can’t say that you haven’t been noticing the big bags women carry around these days. Gone are the days of the clutch bags, enter ‘carrier’ bags, some of them even have roller wheels like the type I saw at a friend’s house the other day. It appears that it is the bigger the bag, the better. Talk about fashion mismatches, then it must be the sight of a slender-framed woman carrying a big hand bag, with enough space inside to swallow her three times over. For this piece, I won’t even mess with exploring the contents of such bags, that is a story for another day. Perhaps you are like me, looking for how you can win back your spouse’s love, after long years of her romantic dalliance with her bags-to-die-for. Back then in the UK, I used to compete for bedroom space with my wife’s many bags. When her own side of the wardrobe got filled up with what I chose to call her ‘monster bags’, she found a convenient space for them on top of the wardrobe. With each new purchase, the bags kept inching further and further towards my own side of the wardrobe. I couldn’t complain because I knew my protests wouldn’t get me anywhere. Which man wouldn’t want peace to reign in the house? With each new sale came new bags, and boy, there were loads of them. I remember being woken up one morning at about 3AM by her and her friends, and was ‘forcefully’ conscripted to chauffer them through the Blackwall tunnel to Beckton Business Park in East London for Next’s December 26th sales. By the time we got there, there were already hundreds of bargain hunters queuing up in the London cold waiting for the 5AM start. You need to have seen the stampede that ensued when the store finally opened, the sound was like that of a landslide. You will never imagine what the sound of hundreds of desperate feet criss-crossing paths on marble floors will sound like unless you experience it. Suffice it to say that I have never experienced a more ‘shopping crazy’ crowd in my life. In seconds the ladies section was swamped like locusts on a Greenfield. I chuckled as I saw hordes of women, and men running, pulling, shoving and pushing, each claiming to have been the first to spot the various bargain items on display. It was a most funny sight, one that I used to tease my wife about. As expected, wifey battled her way through and successfully came back home with some bags, plus other bargains. How about the Harrods Christmas sale? Mr Al Fayed starts the wait with his ad teaser which usually proclaims that there is only one sale. There have been lots of newspaper reports of women fainting and being trampled upon in their quest to achieve a year-long ambition, of buying a Louis Vitton bag which has now been reduced to clear. For many women, this is a lifetime opportunity, and nothing, I mean nothing will stand in their way. I have seen several of them who succeeded on TV grinning like they have just won the lottery. They display their loot (the bags they bought) like prized trophies. Our Nigerian sisters don’t miss out on this too, many who find themselves in London over Christmas hunt down the shops in search of bags and other crazy deals. But what is this thing about women and bags, big ones at that? Believe me, I am not trying to start a gender war here. We already have enough of those going on in the world. But after a recent conversation over lunch with some friends including a female acquaintance at Yellow Chilli Restaurant, I felt the urge to attempt an expose of the psychology of women and their bags. Udoka (not her real name) runs her own consultancy business. Her work takes her all over the world and she recently arrived back into Nigeria after a 2 weeks sojourn in Johannesburg. As we all chatted about this and that, I noticed that she kept looking into her bag, zipping and unzipping it in search of one item or the other. Even while she was sampling the house special – Rice Fiesta, her bag still kept coming off and on. Eventually she picked up the bag and clutched it for a while at which point I wondered if she was afraid that robbers would invade the place and snatch the bag from her. It was later that it dawned on me that she was trying to draw our attention to her latest acquisition, the way a man would want to show off his newest car. When it was obvious that our minds hadn’t quite caught on to what she was trying to do, as we didn’t pay her any compliment. She now volunteered the five hundred thousand naira question. “Do you like my bag?” she asked. “Oh, nice”, I must have uttered. My friends also replied with an okayish murmur. This could be likened to committing fashion blunder. Her look seemed to be telling us, “How can you not notice a woman’s bag?” I saw her flinch, not quite happy with our casual responses. We should have been singing the praises of the bag, telling her what a beautiful work of art it was, how the bag will bring an end to misery, poverty and suffering in the world and so on. As I tried to switch the conversation to other things, she wasn’t quite done, next she asked us to guess how much the bag cost. Now, don’t go thinking that I’m the last man out of the land of natives for not knowing how much women’s bags cost. The thing is, I have never bought a bag for my wife before. She also doesn’t tell me how much bags cost but I know that they could set a brother back by a couple of hundreds of dollars, good ones that is. My friends at least volunteered some reasonable guesses, but when Udoka noticed that I was hitting a blank wall, she unzipped ‘the’ bag, and out came a spanking new receipt, she did it like a magician turning the famous rabbit and hat trick. As I pored over the Louis Vitton receipt issued by an LV shop in Johannesburg, I almost screamed blue murder when I saw the $2,500 price tag. Now I’m thinking twice about that Christmas bag I want to get for wifey, or what do you think? http://thelongharmattanseason.blogspot.com/
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