Spend Low, Sweet Charity

Why do I feel slightly cagey when I enter the Oxfam on George’s Street in Dun Laoghaire? Am I experiencing a twinge of shame at being seen going into a charity shop? Am I surreptitiously checking that nobody I know has witnessed me going in?

Although I hate to admit it, maybe the well-hidden snob in me has risen to the surface. The same paranoid feelings overpower me when ever I enter the bookies. A rarity of course but strangely I started this article by handwriting it using a Ladbrokes mini-pen. I proceed gingerly. A guilty, cold sweat is forming on my back. It feels like somebody is watching my every move.

As I step over the threshold into used items land my eyes dart all over the shop. Literally. Jackets, dresses, shoes, books, magazines, random bric-a-brac are all vying for my attention. So many pieces of other people’s lives ready for strangers to usurp.

Things for sale in second hand stores always get me asking the same questions. Who used to own this item? Where are they from? What exactly made them give this away? Am I reading too much Kafka? Inside the shop several elderly ladies are trawling through multi-coloured clothing and really enjoying themselves by the look of it. The woman at the till scans me suspiciously as I wonder where in the shop to go first. I am on the receiving end of a thousand yard stare. To her I must look like a map-entranced tourist with that lost, blank, vacant visage.

As I make my way past her, I spot a young chap in a tracksuit trying on a sweatshirt near the back of the shop. He has that same look of guilt I must surely have, smeared across his face. I’m sure he’s just come from the bookies. I decide to bury my head in the book section and attempt to uncover a literary bargain. Stephen King, Maeve Binchy, Harlen Coben and friends are all crying out to be snatched from their shelf and placed in my college bag. After paying for them of course, just in case you were wondering. Nothing leaps out at me however and I choose to exit the building. Now, where the hell is that Mrs. Quinn’s charity shop?