Clothing dilemma's

I went to Lakeside yesterday (if you don't live in Essex and you're not familiar with it, you may instead be familiar with the hilarious joke: "What's an Essex Girl's favourite w(h)ine?  I wanna go to Lakeside!"  Hur hur hur etc.)  Anyway it's a shopping centre, for the uninitiated, and I went with my best friend, her little girl who had just turned ten, and her little friend.  We started out in Debenhams, with the girls rushing off to the '9-16' clothes department where they tried on some pink 'princess' sandals.

While they were trying on their pink prizes, I noticed a cute sequinned cardigan in the corner.  "Oh, I'd wear that!" I joked to my friend, and we laughed at the absurdity of such a notion.  Then I looked a bit more closely.  "You know, I think I could get into that"  I said, picking up an 'Age 16' one and trying it on.  It fitted.  Not only that, it was actually a bit loose.  Which somewhat begged the question: just how big do Debenham's designers think sixteen year-old girls actually are?!  I've never thought of myself as having the physique of one - I am five feet eight inches tall, with long limbs (hilariously yet hopefully inaccurately described by another friend's child as "a bit like a monkey's").  I am also - as we have previously established here - thirty-three years old.  But I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I bought the cardigan, and a T-shirt, and another top; in fact I preferred these clothes to the adults' ones.  A sign of early-onset mid-life crisis?  A psychologist might certainly think so, but hopefully even he/she would be hard-pressed to actually tell the clothes I was wearing were really intended for children.

Later on that day we found ourselves in Primark.  But don't panic - I didn't buy anything from the kids' department in there.  That's mainly because said department consisted mostly of string vests and leopard-print harem pants (yes really...for six year olds!) and a selection of garish T-shirts no doubt intended to look cute, proclaiming "Trouble Follow's Me!"

Yes.  "Trouble Follow's Me!".  On a children's T-shirt being sold nationally.  My reaction to that revealed my true age: I stomped around the store in true "I don't believe it!" Victor Meldrew style.  My beleaguered friend and the kids hauled me out of the shop before I embarrassed them by complaining to the manager, then tried to distract my attention with a coffee and a cheese sandwich.  Which I must admit, at the time, worked perfectly well.