Shopping & Shopping

To save me from the crushing boredom that is Reading on a weekend, Julie-oh came all the way down from Birmingham to visit this weekend - despite the fact that she'll be here again on Friday for our little sojourn in the countryside of Northern France next weekend.

As with all seemingly kind acts made by a member of the female of the species however, there was an ulterior motive - and I was dragged off shopping yesterday to Bicester Village, a designer outlet place over in Oxfordshire.



As you can somewhat see, it's a quaint looking place - the entire place would look just like an Oxfordshire village, were it not for all the frazzled folks running around with shopping bags.

I couldn't find myself any hats at all (I'm after proper hats, ones that can be doffed, or tipped), and the shirt (reduced from £600 to just £140) in the Versace store that I fell completely in love with, was still a little out of my price range. Paul Smith also had some shoes I could have killed for, but again, £250 (after massive reductions!) was a bit much.

As such, the day was spent traipsing around trying to find a suit for Julie, which meant entering all the women's clothes stores, which closely resembled hyena pits given the large discounts that were available. We couldn't find anything she liked still, so it was a long drive back to Reading empty handed for her (I found a gorgeous top reduced from £50 to £6 ^^)


_{I never realised hyena could look so cute :)}

Today, The Oracle was the destination of choice - and we still didn't find anything there for her.

On the plus side, I got Thornton's chocolate, which is utterly magnificent and hedonistically gratifying.

On the down side, Julie's just driven off with it :(