i’ve got this horrendously addictive personality. once innocent activities, food stuffs or hobbies often rendered subject to my frequent compulsions, becoming a displacement activity for whatever it is i’m avoiding this week until i’ve done them to death and can’t face going back. until the next time. regular stuff, quotidien stuff, nothing too illegal and a long way from depravity. i’m talking checking websites every hour, smoking, drinking hot water with a slice of lime, baking cakes, searching for new music on the internet, eating sushi for every meal, watching the wire, even knitting.

currently, and this might be letting on more than any of you want to know, but currently its raw vegetables and humus- i have to eat them every day.

oh, and shopping.

this might sound a little dark; sound like an aa style confession. hell, maybe over-honest blogging’s made it into my ocd chart too but for all that freud said about the eroticised object - that thing which fills your thoughts. that totem after which everything will be alright for a while. that thing which, in the movie of your life you get your hands on the the camera focus pulls your surroundings into a nugatory blur while you… you finally know what it means to find peace. just for a second.

call them displacement activities, fetishes, penchants. hell, call them hobbies for all i care, what has started to bother me is that i get so caught up in the idea of my current golden calf that i do, like in my on-going internal biopic, lose all focus from around me on why i started doing it in the first place.

my bete noir this week? shopping. i lost my wallet this weekend. and when i say lost i mean, someone nicked it, lifted out of my bag and away into the damp sunday lunchtime throng of covent garden. there wasn’t much money in it. sure, all my bank cards are gone, my oystercard, driving license, gym membership, a bunch of useless receipts and some tatty bits of paper which mean nothing to someone out to steal my identity or savings (bad luck suckers - i have none) but meant something to me. but with them gone all i could think of was all the things i couldn’t buy. that extra 10% off a pair of shoes i would have got at libertys if my purse hadn’t been stolen at the beginning of the day. the dress i had to put back because when i reached for my money to pay at the counter it wasn’t there any more. the nice lever arch files i was going to buy to store the bank statements which chronicle my spending like a case study of scattergun outgoings to high street chains and up-market department stores.

what freud said about the fetishised object is sort of right. but only sort of. he said that the object of fixation replaces at a point in the individual’s early development their true sexual desire. now i’m not claiming to frantically shopping all over town with no real rhyme nor reason, because i’ve lost sight of what really turns me on, not least because it would stand to make me a terrible slut. but as i sit here after experiencing what was a genuine panic at seeing the sales listings in the newspaper and realising that i might miss out on 75% reductions on a dress i saw in a magazine that i’ve no occasion to wear, or untold (and now untapped) bargains in a shoe store over my next four days without plastic.

i recognise this shopping cycle i’ve got into, where i buy something not because i need it but because i want it, and since i’ve bought it i’ll need something else to go with it. not just clothes, kitchenwear, bed linen, books, make-up or guitar strings. i stopped buying magazines last year because they’d only show me beautiful pictures of things i really wanted and probably couldn’t have.

but when i have to stop. because my means are temporarily taken away from me then i get to see what a terrible brat i’ve become. so now i’m glad that my wallet got stolen because and my means of aquiring my heart’s frivolous desires along with it because now i can look at what i was really after all along. what i’d really be upset about losing, and its not anything which requires a pin number.

i love you sailor are the side project of a friend of a friend who we spent a lovely spring night in hoxton with. mat kearney is a multimillion unit shifting american singer songwriter and a thoroughly lovely guy, but me being a little bit… well - like that, i’ve fallen head over heels with his unsigned band of friends demos.

i love you sailor - hawthorn