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A handbag?
Sep. 15th, 2014 02:04 pmI was idly flicking through a women's weekly magazine in a library staffroom the other day, because I had nothing else to read. (You see, my current reading book (The Far Pavilions, by M M Kaye) is Too Heavy for me to want to carry it to and from work, and, yes, I was in a library and therefore surrounded by books, but had forgotten to grab something before going on my break, and couldn't be bothered to venture out into the public-infested areas to choose one.) (Said women's weekly magazine seemed to be spectacularly lacking in content - and I don't by this mean "content I'm interested in," but "any sort of content at all. (It did, however, give me one vital piece of advice: if you want to write something neatly, do it in pencil first, and then go over it in ink! Wow! Thank you so much, magazine! I would never have thought of this without you!))
Anyway... the magazine included a page of "fascinating" facts, one of which was that the average British woman owns 111 handbags in their life.
Now, I am fairly sure that I have reached the age of 43 having owned 3 handbags, sequentially. While they are not handbags in the sense of being bags that one carries around in one's hand - I prefer long straps that I can wear diagonally across my body - they definitely count as handbags, in that they're small bags that contain little but keys, a purse, a phone and a surprisingly large number of pens that no longer work. (Women's clothes are annoyingly lacking in Pockets of Useful Size, so things that men can carry in pockets, women usually need to put in bags, especially in the summer.)
I would also be very surprised if any woman reading this is on course to reach their quota of 111 by the end of their life, not without some frenzied buying in their twilight years.
No source was given for this figure. It could be that it's an entirely random figure, designed to make the handbag-poor go, "ooh! I need more!" and rush out and buy... or, alternatively, to make them feel smug at their enlightened freedom from the tyranny of handbag-buying... and, either way, to make them go, "ooh, interesting!" and write LJ posts about it, and decide that perhaps the magazine has content, after all.
But if there is any truth in it, and if it is indeed true that most women of my acquaintance have far fewer than 111 handbags, some women clearly live in houses so packed to the rafters with handbags that they can barely squeeze past them to get to their handbag-strewn beds.
Anyway... the magazine included a page of "fascinating" facts, one of which was that the average British woman owns 111 handbags in their life.
Now, I am fairly sure that I have reached the age of 43 having owned 3 handbags, sequentially. While they are not handbags in the sense of being bags that one carries around in one's hand - I prefer long straps that I can wear diagonally across my body - they definitely count as handbags, in that they're small bags that contain little but keys, a purse, a phone and a surprisingly large number of pens that no longer work. (Women's clothes are annoyingly lacking in Pockets of Useful Size, so things that men can carry in pockets, women usually need to put in bags, especially in the summer.)
I would also be very surprised if any woman reading this is on course to reach their quota of 111 by the end of their life, not without some frenzied buying in their twilight years.
No source was given for this figure. It could be that it's an entirely random figure, designed to make the handbag-poor go, "ooh! I need more!" and rush out and buy... or, alternatively, to make them feel smug at their enlightened freedom from the tyranny of handbag-buying... and, either way, to make them go, "ooh, interesting!" and write LJ posts about it, and decide that perhaps the magazine has content, after all.
But if there is any truth in it, and if it is indeed true that most women of my acquaintance have far fewer than 111 handbags, some women clearly live in houses so packed to the rafters with handbags that they can barely squeeze past them to get to their handbag-strewn beds.
