My favourite items at the moment...

My loooovely housemates had a little surprise in store for me the other day. Coaxed to the Bullring despite a hangover from Hell, I was greeted upon my arrival with a...

PIZZA HUT BIRTHDAY PARTY!

No joke, salad bar, ice-cream factory: the lot. I am not lying when I say I was moved to tears.

And to top it all off, they bought me a prezzie too... This gorgeous rucksack.

 

 

Upon asking where it had been sourced from, I was answered with an ambiguous "somewhere" - which gives me a sneaky feeling it may be from U.Outfitters. (Getting stuff from there as a present is a delight - don't get me wrong. I just disagree with their business morals. I do not disagree with this bag - it's amazing.)

As well as this bag, I've treated myself to a new "school bag." Getting a new school bag was always one of the few perks of going back to school.

Year after year I would pester my mum for the latest must-have bag - which were mainly, in hindsight, horrendous. I endured the Warehouse epidemic, the Jane Nor fad and I even have faint memories of being the envy of my friends with a (somewhat dykey) Animal rucksack. But any way - here it is...

 

Only £18 in the monsoon sale. YUM.

Now, just because it's snowing does mean you shouldn't look G. I've been LIVING in my pink Timberlands. Great grip, eye-catching.. I get a lot of sticks from the housemates for looking like a single mum called Shaneekwa but I love them. They're so sturdy. And make me feel a bit less white. :)

Sack Sales on New Street

Now we all love a bargain. And there really is no better shopping feeling than finding a treasure in the Topshop sale or old-school designer in a charity shop.

But "Sack Sales on New Street" has taken the bargain hunter experience to an entirely new level.

 Looks promising doesn't it

 So, you go in and on the bottom floor you are greeted by a sound system playing stupidly loud music. (A pet peeve of mine.) The ground floor is dedicated to all the second hand clothing that these entrepreneurs have obviously fished out and deemed worthy to be labelled as vintage. A lot of it was actually nice.

But then they had to put a sour edge to it, didn't they? Looking at some of the very 'in' Levi's shorts laid out, i smelled a rat. ..They'd been clever here. Upon closer inspection, only about a quarter of them were ACTUALLY genuine Levi's - the rest were nasty denim shorts that had cheekily had (probably fake) Levi's labels stitched on the back. And people will pay for this... Quite frankly it seemed a bit naughty. And a few pairs were absolutely filthy. The fact that there were dirty items immediately made me doubt the quality and, indeed, hygiene of the rest of the shop.

But, nevertheless, i powered on. Having heard about this place through a friend, and having been to a sack sale in the USA, i had high hopes. Basically, you are given a binbag and you can fill it for a tenner, half a bag for a fiver. (Btw, you must excuse my lack of capital i's. My i button has annoyingly broken so i have to copy and paste a lower case one in every time. The most frustrating thing ever.)

This is what i found up the stairs. Literally piles and piles of clothes, seemingly designated into sections such as dresses and denim.

There was a LOT of shit.

And i mean really shitty stuff - stuff you wouldn't even see the tramp that lives on Dawlish Road wearing. (My friend bought a hideous sequinned gypsy skirt simply because it made her laugh.)

i was not going to give up though. i threw myself into the musty piles in true retail-magpie fashion and managed to claw a few little gems out. But only a few. i did find a nice army jacket tbf, and it's made up of more beigey tones than my other one... So i can see it working with black jeans and worker boots. Other than that, there were plenty of funny old slogan t-shirts that have tie-dye potential for wearing to the gym!

But seriously, only go here if you have a lot of spare time and you have plenty of hand-sanitizer. 

i left the place feeling (and almost certainly smelling) like a dirty crack-whore who had been foraging around in a bin. it's good fun - but i dare say that the irritating music and the fact that the clothes were dirty made me yearn to be in a trusty Cancer Research shop fishing out fresh-smelling second-hand clothes that i could be sure that a prostitute hadn't died in.