The Red Bag

Most women will know what I mean....

The bag, the back-breaking, shoulder-aching, faster way to get arthritis bag.

The red bag was given to me 3 year years ago by Nan. She claimed the bag was a birthday present. My Nan gave me the bag in September, by birthday is in November. She gave me something else for my birthday so this wasn't actually a present. It turns out the fake birthday present was my Nan saving her skin. My Nan had actually had an expensive bag-buying phase courtesy of QVC. While my Grandad is oblivious to most things, he's not stupid.

I love this bag, but the love of this bag seems to have started a frozen shoulder.

This leads me to ponder... why do we love things that are bad for us?

Men, shoes, smoking, alcohol, chocolate, expensive make-up...

Fortunately I am lucky enough to not have a problem with the first item on my list. Several of my friends however, do.


As I clean out my bag (machine washable - Thank the lord!),  I come across receipts, lip gloss - that I thought I had lost, a baby feeding spoon, small change (very small sadly), the odd pen.

As I go through the shrapnel and other crap, it reminds me of a time in little shop I love. In this little shop I purchase quaint Christmas decorations. I go to the till, as I pay the snooty woman behind the counter, says "you can put those bags in the washing machine you know!". I interpret this as get that dirty bag of my gleaming counter - you filthy bitch. I tell the woman than I am well aware that I can wash my bag. Then as I half gallop out of the shop I say very loudly to my Husband "How rude was that!". Keep your gleaming counter to yourself, cow.

Why did it bother me? I don't know. But it brings me back to things that are bad for us. Do we ever have the right to impose our thoughts about the bad choices of others? This may be an extreme way of looking at the sarcastic  clean-counter woman comment. But we all do it, we all tell each other how to live our lives. We tell each other why our choices are wrong. We can't accept it, it's mind boggling to us - we convince ourselves that someone who makes these choices must be mentally unstable. What happens when they're not, when they know the man is no good, but don't care. When they know the fags are killing them but don't care, when they are one pint away from a deceased liver. It's human nature, do nothing about our problems but put the world to rights, on our backsides, on the sofa.

Chocolate,cakes and crap in general is killing me. It's killed off the zips on some of my favourite items of clothing. It's killed my perspective, it's killed my desire for a good knees up with the girls. It's funny, I know this is why, but...I have just sent my Husband to the supermarket for 'pudding'. I console myself with the guise that it's ok - it's Sunday, if you can't have dessert on a Sunday when can you? However, there's no excuse for the other 6 days of the week!!

Back to the bag, what on earth shall I do? My shoulder is killing me, I've had a difficult time sleeping because of it, but I can't let it go. I make the excuse that I need a bag this large, I've been using it like a nappy bag lately too. The bigger the bag, the more crap I will inevitably fill it with!

My bag has been heavier lately, I have been back working after my maternity leave. Therefore I need more crap, after a few days I realise, somewhere in Mary Poppins style handbag - there's a can of soup and almost a litre of water. No wonder I'm in agony!!!


Well, the bag is almost dry and I have a pudding to eat!

Ta-rar!