therapy

Retail therapy: shopping for gratification. It solves nothing, but can feel good. It’s symbolic, spending the hard-earned. My good woman and I don’t intend to spend, but our first full day on holiday is a release: we let go.

We’re camped in a ‘villa’ at Echo Point, Katoomba, the Three Sisters a breath away. I wander down to the vast lookout ramp before the busloads of tourists: the whole blue expanse of the Blue Mountains is on view here. It’s impressive, brings tears to my good woman’s eyes when she ventures down an hour later.

After breakfast we walk two kilometres into town, buy a hat each. My good woman deposits her old hat next door at the op shop. Up over the hill near the station is the Savoy, another art deco coffee palace. I order scrambled eggs and mushrooms on toast, my favourite eating-out breakfast. My good woman has a macchiato, three layers of coffee that could kill a cockroach.

We buy tickets for the trolley bus tour. We two are the only people on the bus. Our Irish-accented guide breaks into his spiel before we broach the roundabout. If it weren’t for the lovely brogue, I’d tell him to shut the fuck up so we can stare out the windows.

We’re supposed to gawp at the retail delights of Leura’s mall and the splendour of the golf club resort but it doesn’t blow my skirts up. We alight somewhere and wander off to a lookout point, stand in the heat, gaze sixty kilometres into the blue-hazed yonder.

In the late afternoon we drive back to Leura. It boasts a leathergoods shop, rare these days. As a former leatherworker in a distant alternative existence I can’t get enough of the smell of it. My good woman tries several bags but resists the urge to buy. I have no intention of buying till my eye finds a small tan man-bag, enough for wallet, coin purse, phone, maybe camera at a pinch.

The bookshop next door is just as good. I emerge with a book bag and two books.

It’s late afternoon. We leave tomorrow morning but know that we will be back in the leather shop and book shop as we head off from the mountains to the beach. My good woman wants to buy me a belt; I want to buy her a bag.

We are not big spenders, and right now we’re inclined to keep our hands out of our pockets, having borrowed $600k two days ago when our new house in Carnegie settled. Nonetheless it feels to good to indulge ourselves today.

Rock on.