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Shopping Day - 12:49 p.m. We Can’t Stop Shopping We had avoided shopping. We knew that if we started we probably couldn’t stop. Now we can't stop. The problem is twofold. First is the fact that there are many more things to buy in London than anywhere else in the world. In Australia, we don’t have that much to choose from because, demographically speaking, we are still a minority (a fact that Teddy is doing his best to rectify) and although some things are made in Australia with us in mind, the range is limited and the items expensive. Imports are all very well but why spend double for something that you might not really want in the first place? The second problem is the cognitive implosion that is created by converting £££ into $$$. The “good Aussie dollar” is a weakling compared to the Pound but Mr. Oaf has a mental problem with the idea that to calculate what a ticketed item in England might cost in Australia, you multiply by 2.4 ( or by 3, if you include the vagaries of foreign exchange and charges on your AMEX). Thus, something that is £10 is about AUD$30. Simple. Not so fast. The amount in Pounds, to Mr. Oaf, is about what he thinks you should pay for things. For example, if a CD is £10, Mr. Oaf thinks, “what a bargain! CDs should be $10!” and then purchases three CDs by the High Llamas, not realising till later that he just spent $90. Or $75 on an “artist’s video”, or $15 on a magazine, or $100 on some piece of fluff that will be discarded as soon as a new play thing comes along. Our Shopping Spree (A Partial List) Spats Topcoat Overcoat Stove Pipe Hat Burberry Nike Trainers Burberry Luggage Dissecting Tools (Various) Painting by George Stubbs Wigs (various) Periwigs (large and small) Duck Call, Duck Decoys and Duck related ephemera Sheep Spotter’s Guide Granite Statue of a man in a hat DVDs of obscure foreign films involving Drunken Horses More To Come in America The big, frightening possibility is that things will only get worse in New York. In America the conversion ratio is closer to 50/50, the Aussie dollar worth about 60c US. But unlike in England where everything more or less costs the same as it does in Australia (if the conversion rate was really 1 to 1) and you were paid what the poor English workers are paid, the situation is far more dangerous “across the pond”. We were reading in a magazine about “portion size” in the US. According to this story, the size of an American “portion” (what you are served in a typical meal) has risen by 333 per cent in the last ten years. Mr. Oaf remembers well his first trip to the US many years ago and how he was absolutely flabbergasted by the size of a meal in a restaurant. A waitress or waiter could only carry two meals at a time, and then with great difficulty, balancing massive hamburgers, spare ribs, open sandwiches (that were held in place not by skewers but by swords), gargantuan slices of pie swamped by oceans of cream and ice cream, jugs of wine that passed as a “glass” and tsunamis of beer arriving in frosty steins… How the hell could that kind of consumption have risen by a factor of three? They must be rolling it out in wheel barrows. Consumption in America, like its love of big food, is on a scale larger and grander than anything those of us living on the outer edges of global capitalism can normally imagine – and the beauty of it is that it’s cheap, plentiful and attractively packaged. Our Potential American Shopping Spree (A Partial List) The Whitney Museum Grace Kelly Two Tone shoes Quimby The Mouse comics The Washington Monument A DVD of Ace In The Hole A big slice o’ pie.
bears in history - future bears 
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