Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton-based writer and columnist. He has been writing a column since 2017.

OPINION

In 1605, Thomas Middleton wrote a play called A Mad World, My Masters. Four hundred and nineteen years
on, little has changed.

I wanted a jacket for walking in winter, a jacket that would keep me warm as I set out but that I could unzip and even tie around my waist as I worked up a sweat. I thought perhaps a jacket made of polar fleece.

The world divides into those who like to shop for clothes and those who would rather have their fingernails removed with pliers. I believe the two camps may actually be separate species. We in the pliers’ camp look across the divide in wonder.

It seems to us that those who like to shop for clothes already have all the clothes they need for several lifetimes, and we don’t understand why they want more. Or why, when they shop, they go haphazardly, like herbivores on the plain, wandering from store to store in the hope of finding something nice, testing cloth between finger and thumb with a poulterer’s pinch and holding things briefly up in front of themselves, before tossing them aside.

We in the pilers’ brigade are like the carnivores on the plain. On the rare occasions we buy clothes, we do not wander. We identify a target and conduct a raid. The aim is to be in and out and gone.

So it was that in pursuit of a jacket I settled on one of those outdoor clothing shops that have proliferated in recent years. They sell hiking boots that have more technology than Apollo 11, and trousers that wash and dry themselves in seconds and can be turned at the touch of a zip into a pair of shorts or a four-wheel-drive recreational vehicle, all of which are invaluable qualities in the wilds of the supermarket carpark.

I do not like these shops but then I do not like any clothes shops. My worst horror is the changing cubicles. Everything about them depresses me, from the walls of particle board to the bristle carpet, the prisoner bench, the detritus left by previous occupants and that lingering aroma of eau d’underwear. And as a pair of trousers, I am trying on comes to a juddering halt at the thigh, I just want out.

I might mention here, in the hope that other retailers may follow its example, that I have found the perfect store for sports shoes. Once a year or so, looking neither right nor left at the displays of shoes, I march straight to the cash desk where stands the store’s proprietor. I announce that I want a pair of shoes for walking on the roads or for playing squash or for scrambling on the hills and he listens, and he nods and he sits me down and measures both my feet and goes away and then returns with a single pair of shoes that he places on my feet himself and even ties the laces of. The shoes fit my needs and my feet, and I buy them. Now that is service and that is shopping.

Anyway, I parked outside the outdoors store and breathed in deep and marched through the sliding doors and met a stroke of luck. For there on a table just inside the door and prominently displayed lay a pile of fleecy jackets, zippered, light-weight and on special. They were two for $99.

I found one in old-man colourless, and posed briefly in front of a mirror. It was not a thing of beauty, but then I am not a thing of beauty either. It would do and I was done. I took it to the counter where a young, unnaturally cheerful assistant scanned the ticket.

“That’ll be $138,” he said.

I pointed out the sticker saying two for $99.

“But that’s for two,” he said helpfully.

“I don’t want two.”

“You have to buy two to get the deal. One is $138. It says that in the system.”

“How about I pay for two but only take one?”

“You have to take two.”

“Can I give the second one to you?”

“I’d have to ask my manager.”

I felt the pliers clamping down on a nail. “Don’t bother,” I said, bought a second jacket I didn’t want or need, and ran. With Thomas Middleton chuckling in my ear.