Where I lived in Sarf Landan there was a gentleman's outfitters which I used to pass occasionally while out shopping and pass daily on the bus as I travelled to and from work. It vanished some years back and is now a sandwich shop.
At this particular time it never really drew my attention until one day a cardigan appeared in the window. It was from the Tootal Manatease range and of a style which had never really appealed before. Five button, elaborate, chunky four hole buttons designed to be manipulated by the arthritic and constitutionally clumsy.
It was displayed buttoned up with one of the sleeves pinned up such that the top button was not visible, very provocative. It was a pale blue colour, acrylic, patterned, ribbed and spectacularly naff. It was also £25 which I considered outrageous back then.
It is all the more surprising therefore that I became utterly obsessed with this specific cardigan. I used to make detours to walk past the shop to see it, I used to tempt myself to buy it. I even had fantasies about owning it and wearing it.
When I passed the shop on the bus I used to look out to see if I could catch a glimpse of "my cardigan" and even when I couldn't, I got a frisson of excitement from being near it. All most weird and almost incomprehensible now. I put it down to my working spectacularly long hours at the time and imbibing a little too freely of the alcohol to make it tolerable.
On one occasion I actually went to the shop with money in my pocket to buy the thing but failed even to enter the establishment through sheer fear that I would have been found out. Perhaps I would have been made to try it on and given myself away through obvious arousal or syncope at the sheer excitement of having the thing on.
After a few weeks it disappeared from the window but I always remembered it.
Some months later I took a look round the sale in a department store not too far from where I lived and shock, horror they had that variety of cardigan on sale. Not in my size and not the colour of the special one, but near enough. I bought one and very nice it was too.
Fast forward some years and someone invented the Internets and Ebay. All that was then required was for me to check every day for eight years and suddenly, there was my card. And so, dear reader, I bought it. Here it is.
I have others in beige, almost like it but this will always be the one that I became obsessed with for a few weeks, really obsessed, all those years ago.
