Why is it so hard for women to shop ?

Before we start I need to point out that the photograph is neither me nor is it my wife, for starters the scruffy bas'tad in the photo hasn't even shaved .

And it looks like the bloke in the photo hasn't shaved either.

Anyway.
Weddings.
Clothing for the use of.
Shopping for clothing for the use of.

Why is it so hard for women to shop for wedding outfits, or indeed clothing in general.

One week on Saturday we are invited to my cousins "C list" celebrity wedding starring many presenters of daytime TV and some Blackpool based songsters, and maybe a footballer or two, and maybe an Emmerdale actor or two, suffice to say that I am family and the guests will not give one flying one about the few of us family that will be there - IPC Magazines who are paying for the wedding and the publishing rights thereof will already have crossed our names off the photographers list with thick red marker pen.

But for all that you would think that we were guests of honour at this damn wedding, as I have already mentioned, the search for my suit took something under five minutes and that cheap suit will be worn by myself at work, as will the shirt and the tie.

But in our household we have three females who are also all invited to the wedding and who do not seem to shop for clothing using the same principles as me, ie keep it cheap, keep it practical, wear it to death afterwards.

The two girls have eventually got an outift together after three months of shopping, but Suzanne still "does not have a thing to wear". She has had "a thing to wear", she has actually had three "things to wear", three seperate outfits have been purchased for the wedding only for the mind of a crazy woman to change the following day and have the three seperate outfits returned to the shops from whence they were purchased for a refund, two pairs of shoes have also gone the same way.

Last week she decided to wear an outfit that she had bought for a friends wedding in April of this year, which was a remarkably sane thing for her to do, so she took back outfit number three for a refund which she had bought the day before, only to come back home that night and try on the old wedding outfit to find that it didn't fit - I did think about asking her why she hadn't tried the bloody thing on before taking the new outfit back but then thought better of it, I still have to live with her, according to a lawyer that I spoke to some time ago anyway.

So once again she has "nothing to wear" for this wedding, last week she had outfits, this week she has none - on Saturday she dragged me off to the "Designer Outlet" at Glasshoughton, a former colliery site that had pretensions of grandeur five years ago when it opened as a large mall of designer name outlets who promised to sell their overpriced shite cheaper because its was, well, it was an "Outlet" and not a high street retail shop.

What they forgot was that the local populance were the once dirt poor coal mining families who, since their pit closed so that the Designer Outlet could be built just didn't have £150 to spend on a Gucci suit even if it did retail at £700 last year on the high street, so the "Designer Outlet" quickly became the place where names that you recognise from the high street dumped all of the crap that never sold on the high street, literally dumped it on the floor of their rented outlet and leave the populance of skint ex-mining familes to rummage, in short the Designer Outlet at Glasshoughton has become the worlds biggest jumble sale.

We spent a couple of hours there, she saw nothing suitable.

So on Sunday we went to Meadowhall.

Now Meadowhall is a huge shopping mall built in the 1990's when the craze for shopping malls was at its high in the UK, heady days in which each city bid for one bigger and better than the one in the last city - Sheffield got Meadowhall, built on the huge expanse of former steelworks that had once made the city famous throughout the world, so the former steelworking populance who had lost all of their steelworks woke up one day to find a massive shopping mall in its place, although they now had no steelworks and no jobs and no money to spend in their massive new shopping mall.

Still, we went there on Sunday and at least the retailers don't just throw their stock on the floor and let you rummage, its a proper shopping mall with proper retail outlet prices and in the case of womens clothing the phrase "proper retail outlet prices" can be translated to "fookin expensive lady", as in "How much is that my dear man", "Fookin expensive lady" being the reply.

There are five million bicycles in Bejing sang Katy whatsherface and I can inform you that there are five million womens clothing shops in Meadowhall, and we visited all of them, all of them, every single bloody one of them.

I picked loads of outfits for her to wear, she laughed at every single one that I chose, after three hours I shut up and just walked behind her nodding wisely whenever I saw her mouth moving assuming that she'd be talking to me and not just sneezing.

After five hours, five hours, count them, five frickin hours spent in womens clothes shops, five hours later we returned to the car with no wedding outfit, I bought a new bag for my laptop computer, she had bought nothing, hadn't even seen anything that she liked, five million clothes shops in Meadowhall and she can't find a friking wedding outfit for a wedding where no-one will care what she looks like anyway, no-one will be looking at us, they'll all be looking at the C list celebs, we're not even going to be on the photos, I told you that right at the start.

Tomorrow she takes Amanda into Leeds to go shopping for an outfit for my cousins wedding and she has already said that if the shop where she bought the original outift (the first one that she returned for a refund), if that shop still has that outfit in stock then she will buy it again.

I give in, I really do not understand what is going on and I haven't the will power to find out.