Swedish Pastille Sucking Hero Saves Life of Felines. (H&M)

Member Name: Muffin_the_Mule

Product:	H&M
Date:	28/01/03 (1837 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cats live another day.

Disadvantages: The Christina sections

When I was a child, the younger of 2 boys, my parents didn't have a high combined income. We had enough for the basics in life, like a 20p mix every Monday on the way home from school (no bubblegum though. It takes 1000 years to digest, and is made from the floor sweepings of all the leftover sweets in the sweet factory apparently. Did it ever occur to your parents feeding you this information that 1000 years was about 900 years longer than would matter, and every child's dream was to be the man who swept the floor in a sweet Factory?) Plus simple luxuries like camping holidays in Cornwall.
It only recently occurred to me how cheap these holidays actually were. 14 days holiday, deduct 1 full day driving to and from the campsite from our home in Manchester equals 12 days site rent. The long car journeys were filled with games like "Who can make their fruit pastille last longest without chewing it?" which is subtle adult tactics for "Play this game for long enough and one packet will do the whole family for both journey to the campsite and home again."

One thing we most definitely could not afford were designer branded consequently expensive clothes. It didn't matter too much when I was in primary school, because the place was filled with children who were all from the same village as me, and therefore in the same situation too.
This changed in 1990 when I was 11 years old. When you turn 11, you instantly become aware of all material belongings around you, and how many of them you don't actually own. Octimus Prime. Ford Probe. Pony Linebacker Trainers with 50 laces on each shoe.
My situation was made more desperate because I was the younger brother. My brother was unfairly allowed to dictate what I was going to have to wear in approximately 12 months time when he'd grown out of it and I'd miraculously timed my growth spurts for trousers to fit perfectly in the waist, but still be either 6 inches too long or 2 inches too short in the leg. What my parents didn't realise when adjusting the longer legged slacks is that you weren't supposed to be able to see my white socks with every step I took. My peers informed me so incessantly that 'My cat had died' so often that I actually started to believe them.

Deceased felines apart, I was a walking fashion disaster.
Naturally, as you grow older and start to earn money with weekend jobs, you go from having a 20p mix (by now you were allowed bubble gum, but you still daren't swallow it) through to having a fantastic disposable income, with nothing fantastic to dispose of it onto.
I was 15 years old, I had 2 paper rounds and one 4 hour a week job in Woolworths filling the Pick and Mix, so therefore no longer had the necessity to buy sweets, I just "made sure they hadn't gone off".
The 3 jobs afforded me a respectable income that meant for the first time ever, I could buy my own designer clothes. It was the crossing of a threshold in my life. I'd arrived.
My first proper shirt, a shirt I bought and wore every weekend for approximately 6 months, was an electric blue Yves Saint Laurent bought for a colossal £40. One months wage.
This trend of buying recognisable brands continued for approximately 4 years until I was 19, out of college, earning a respectable full time wage as a floor manager of a sports shop (and therefore getting a clothing/footwear discount. Parents out there, do you see what happens when your offspring are made to suck a green fruit pastille continuously for 8 hours until it dissolves disappointingly before everyone else's? you get obsessed.)
Then, one day I had to change my habits. All of a sudden, my income that I was quite happily throwing back at my employers every month had a more important destination.
My parents moved to a new county and I was left to fend for myself. Instead of buying lovely T shirts and complimenting my trainer collection with another pair of trainers in a colour I hadn't bought for at least 2 weeks, I had to buy thing like food, and pay something called 'Council Tax'.
I don't know about you, but I pay £64 a month for 10 months of the year to the council, and after 4 ½ years, I still don't know what day the Bin men come. My bin goes out Monday night. Supposedly they come Tuesday. Thursday morning you'll hear the rumble of old machinery crushing potato peelings and the odd dead gerbil that daddy 'buried in the garden.'
And my bin is plastic. For £64 a month I want a platinum bin emptied by Geisha girls who fold my old newspapers into pterodactyls whilst humming the theme to Dambusters.
All of this background brings me to my current situation. I am 23 years old, I live alone and I pay £64 to a council who spend it on red bits of tarmac and making my roads bumpier than John Merrick's backside.
I don't have a great amount of disposable income, but I want to look good, whilst still maintaining a level of individuality in my style that is portrayed in the clothes I wear.

I like Topman. I went in Burtons once. I walked past Primark when I saw the hair on the window manikins, although I'm told it's OK.

However, I must confess. I've fallen in love with a couple of Swedish blokes called Hennes and Mauritz. Better known as H&M to the Speak loud and Slow English tourist types.

Being male, I'm going to concentrate on the menswear section. Only because I'm at the start of trying to build what I hope will be a fantastic relationship with a girl and I don't think it would go down too well if I threw in transvestism as a topic of conversation.

H&M have been trading for over 50 years altogether, although I personally have only been fully aware of their brilliance for the last 2 years.
The shops are split into defined areas, Adult, Children, Lingerie and accessories. And each section has subsections.
Think Battenburg cake. Marzipan walls, pink for womens, yellow for men. You get the idea. Do not expect to walk into a high street near you and see a marzipan walled shop. It was an example. So sue me.

The great thing about a trip to H&M, aside the fact you can kit yourself out for next to nothing cash wise, is that its sheer entertainment how spot on some of the designs are, whilst they still manage to relentlessly get it heroically wrong in some parts.
Some designs wouldn't look out of place on the catwalk of a John Rocha collection.
Other items give you enough concern that they force you to check that you've not accidentally wandered into Christina Aguilera's reject cupboard.

The store has enough of a range to allow freedom of fashion expression without having the painful side effect of too many zero's before the decimal point.
a typical example of the prices to expect are best described by my outfit for New Years Eve in the pretentious clubbing capital of Manchester that is Tiger Tiger.
I wore:


Worn Corduroy Boot cut trousers : £15
Stripey Fitted shirt: £10
T shirt: £4

£29 all in. as the punchline to the rubbish joke goes, You can't say fairer than that then can you?

There are also individual in-house brands, amongst which 'Hennes' and 'Divided' are the most prominent. And funkiest. In my opinion. You might like Christina's choices. Who knows.

The only criticism I can level at the store I shop at in central Manchester is the queues at the till when you go to make your chosen purchase. A victim of their own success perhaps, but it does nark you when you get to the front of the queue only to spot something else you really must have too.

To summarise, a family of pastille sucking campers could easily shop here on a budget for clothes to suit all occasions, be it driving to Cornwall or shopping for a Ford Probe. Sweden rocks ass.

Visit www.HM.com to find out where your nearest store is, along with heaps of other arty things in a rather funky but bland website.

Summary: It wasn't about cats.