On the train home from school today, two thoughts: (1) I’m hungry. (2) I want to go shoping. Happy for me, then, that when I got home, there was a Delia’s catalogue in the mailbox and a slice of carrot cake in the fridge. Over cake and a glass of milk, I coveted some polka-dot slippers and a pink dress and some pins in the shapes of letters and a pair of jeans with buttonable pockets and a Ziggy bag that says “Be Nice to Little Things” and some underwear with a pink-and-orange car print, and eventually had to restrain myself, saying, in what I hoped was a fairly severe tone: “You cannot buy anything. You. cannot. buy. anything.”

However, the catalogue is still on my coffee table, in case I am wrong.