Don't Sweat It

Sitting next to me on my desk is a large bottle of the pleasantly named 'Pocari Sweat', a sweet tasting 'ion supply drink'. Feeling the need for some ions, I just went down to the shop and bought it. Rather a lot of it, in fact. Pocari Sweat comes in two sizes- 'just about enough' and 'far too much'. The problem is that 'far too much' is only 25 pence more expensive than 'just about enough'. Not buying the larger one seemed quitea waste...

So now I'm faced with a difficult problem. There's more Pocari Sweat here than I can comfortably drink but if I don't finish the last gulp I wont get that feeling of satisfied completion. I've thought about decanting some of it into another bottle but I'd probably just end up with Ion drink all over the floor. I could put it in the fridge and try to forget it but I'm incredibly good at forgetting things and it would probably stay there for quite a long time.

It seems my only option is to keep drinking...

Moving on:

Today I visited 'Shibuya 109', a fashionable clothes shop. My relationship with fashion has never been a close one. I usually ignore it and it, for the most part, usually ignores me. However in Shibuya ignoring fashion is like ignoring a fire alarm (i.e. hard)- crazy hats, ripped jeans and three hundred pound shoes are the pulse of the district and the swanky clothes shops are it's very heart. 109 is one of the biggest so I took a peek to see where the Shibuyites get their threads.

109 is a huge department store made up of a lot of smaller shops, each with it's own kitsch and funky theme. The women's section spanned the first five floors and was absolutely monstrously diverse with everything from a shop that sold super duper baggy hats to a Hello Kitty clothes store. There was even one called 'Titty & Co'! In women's clothes shops I always feel slightly embarrassed, like I've missed the sign that said 'ladies' and wandered into the wrong toilet, so I hurried on up to '109 mens' on floor six.

While the women's sections were all bright and cheery, the men's section was very dark. Very dark because, of course, men... like... dark? It felt like I'd walked into a cross between the Bat Cave and Neo's wardrobe. The clothes were pretty wacky but the hairstyles were wackier. One member of staff had put so much gel in his long hair that he was taller than me even though my chin was level with his forehead.

The only thing larger than the selection was the price and I found a few fairly bog-standard T-Shirts going for over seventy pounds. I almost bought a sinister pair of boxer shorts which read 'Happy children lets have some fun' but, despite the novelty, thought fifteen pounds was a little too much.

Unlike with Karaoke, the Japanese have sadly failed to convince me that fashion is a worthwhile pursuit . To quote Oscar Wilde- 'Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.'