Add to Cart #4

Hello and happy blessed July to you So Gooders! It’s been a great month for wearing linen sacks, eating melon, drying laundry outside and of course, buying little life-enhancing bits. Right then, what did I Add to Cart*? Allons-y, Allon-zo.

*Add to Cart, my monthly shopping round up, is free to read for all! If you like it consider subscribing - I write about life through the lens of shopping, it’s more about all the good things that surround us every day rather than trying to influence you. I’m not a capitalist officer, I swear!

I have a complexion that is pure gambas - grey or pink, but seldom ever brown. I have been pressing my nose to the glass all my life when it comes to tanning, or just generally being a beachy, summery girl. My one tiny gateway is that I can still wear all those suntan lotion fragrances. I love Estee Lauder Bronze Goddess (the Eau Fraiche! It has to be the Eau Fraiche as the perfume is a completely different smell) but my big old bottle was finally coming to an end. I toyed with the idea of Jil Sander Sun, or the Nivea Sun perfume (both of which are meant to be excellent) but I am very wary of buying things without smelling them first, and too impatient to faff about with mail order perfume samples. There is a great perfume shop in the next town over from where I live run by an extremely intense woman called Lynn. She is all mahogany hair and smokey eyes and big jewelry. She is absolutely sick to death of everyone that comes in and and fucks about in her shop, and she is like a big glam boss you have to beat in order to have a proper look around and spray things on yourself. She makes me think of the big sign at Pak’s in Seven Sisters that says you can try on 3 wigs MAXIMUM, no exceptions. I get it Lynne! You need to protect your peace! If I’m in the right brave sort of mood, I go in and am firm with her then I get sniffing. This caught my eye because it was new on her very well stocked Guerlain shelf (she has ALL OF THEM, from Chamade to Vol de Nuit to Eau Imperiale. And there’s a tester bottle of everything. ) Terracotta is a reissue of a scent Guerlain brought out on the back of their extremely popular powder bronzer - at one point it had a whole range of glittery brown lotions and sprays that went with it. It had a big round bottle that looked a bit like a roman coin, but now it is in the classic Guerlain bottle with the curly shoulderpads and the little pointy hat. It smells of Jasmine and Ambre Solaire in a way that hits you right in the frontal lobe, bringing you right back to your family holidays in Spain and your mum all dressed up for dinner out. It’s optimistic and very floral, a bit more brash than the Estee Lauder BG. I love it and have been asked what it is loads. Assuming you can’t get to the formidable Lynn at Fascination Perfumery in Lytham St Annes, the cheapest I could find it was here.

These look like a horror/treasure unearthed by Lucy Sweet, but stick with me guys. Vimto is a thing that looms much larger Oop North than it does the rest of the country, and no wonder, it is made in Manchester where they have a Vimto statue. It had never massively registered for me, but people are, as they say, Mad for It up here. Cold Vimto, hot Vimto - even Mulled Vimto at Christmas! I don’t mind it but I prefer regular Apple and Blackcurrant squash (or Rose’s lime cordial, please). These electrolytes though - hubba hubba. Yes, they taste of Vimto, but in a quite faint way - like they are made from the ashes of Vimto. But more importantly: they taste a little bit salty. This is what I need in a hydration tablet, and I am getting through these at quite a pace. I hope they see sense and make them a permanent flavour.

I have discovered a new Asian Supermarket that has really alleviated my homesickness for London’s Chinatown (more specifically the See Woo on Lisle Street). We went on one of those mad hot days last week and stocked up on everything: sauces and vinegars and chewy noodles and tteokbokki and dried red dates and wind dried sausage. I got quite into Chinese cooking for a period when I worked around the corner from Chinatown and had the excellent Fuschia Dunlop cookbook ‘Every Grain of Rice’ as my guide - it includes a picture glossary at the back which makes is so much easier to shop for unfamiliar ingredients. Anyway, my new place has a very good little kitchen and homeware section, with the absolutely perfectly sized Spider of my dreams. I have been using it to fish things out of pots for the month and it is such a beautiful, useful, cheap thing. You could collect and hang them on the wall in ascending sizes like Russian dolls.

I do like to slag off Toast. So smug! So expensive! Just loving the smell of it’s own wild garlic spirulina farts! I do have a little poke about the sale though, and I bought this absolutely lovely t shirt half price. Of course the sale is off now, so they have removed it from the website - like, I find this sale policy quite…petty? Just have it on sale till you run out! Anyway, I’m including it anyway because they do this model every season and it’s called Cleo. They currently have it on sale in Refreshers colours at full price (£75!!!!!!) but if you wait for the sale it’s £35. The cut is so nice, just the right length and very subtly flared around the problematic gut zone. Easy neckline that is nodding towards a boat neck and of course soft and luxurious feeling woven stripe fabric.

Did you know that the Australian slang for a cooler is an Eski? I learnt this from a friend when we tried out the new cooler on the beach last month - it was utterly brilliant, and having cold beers and cokes for hours on end really was the difference between ‘I love the beach’ and ‘the beach is an uncomfortable, overcrowded dirty slum’. The 48 quart one is the one I got, and it’s a great size (assuming you are driving and not carrying it for miles) - it fits enough to keep you stocked up with snifters and the top turns into a little coffee table. Circa £60, but a jolly colour and very well made - I can see this being my cooler until I’m dead.

I was digitally pushed into trying the giant M&S pistachio bar when it first came out: our very own Dubai chocolate with none of the worrying foreign trickery. It’s called the Big Daddy bar, a giant chocolate bar stuffed with pistachio and salt caramel bits - it’s about a tenner and you could hit someone in the head with it and do considerable damage. I thought it was a bit sickly - just too much goo and chocolate and it didn’t break into pieces evenly, so you were just left there covered in Big Daddy bits feeling a repulsed by the time you were two thirds through it. I have since discovered that this was just an error of scale! In desperately trying to go viral, they didn’t stop to think about could they vs should they. The bar comes in a normal chocolate bar size now (The Little Big Daddy) and my eyes literally rolled into the back of my head with pleasure at this thing. It is how a perfect chocolate bar should be: balanced sweetness with nuttiness and a bit of salt, great varied texture and just the right size to eat on your own in the carpark and go ‘ah, really enjoyed that’ after rather than ‘I hate myself’ after. Seek it out.

It wouldn’t be Add to Cart without my best Charity Shop find of the month. These little French handpainted ramekins are just so beautiful and cheerful. All the Fruits de Mer are there! Clams! Moules! Oysters! Even a starfish, which I don’t think you should eat (though someone, somewhere probably does). The back is also stunning, a brand from Limoges called ‘Le Faune’ with an actual little Fawn piping on a flute. £10 for five, and they are a very good small pot size for a dipping sauce - not that I am allowing anyone to put ketchup in them just yet.

I know it’s a massive cliche, but GOD my kids are uncooperative about suncream. Every morning, it is like I am literally chasing them around with a pot full of battery acid, such are their screams and schemes to avoid being creamed (ooh, poetic!). I made a complicated deal with my eldest that involved me buying him a He Man costume in exchange for agreeing not to argue with me about suncream for the whole Summer. It worked OK for about ten days, but of course he has no real sense of how time works so he’s now resisting again - I have no leverage since he already has the present. Ill thought out on my part. The two year old is not at the negotiating stage yet, so it is a full Nurse Ratched routine with him every single time. Sun Bum has been very helpful because it is a very fine mist aerosol, so is very very quick to apply. I am not running around with two big wet white palms full of sun cream. It smells of bananas (roughly) and has the word Bum in the name, so it’s funny to say ‘Let’s get sun bummed!’, making me feel less like the nagging harridan I worry my kids see me as. It’s also reassuringly priced, and doesn’t stain. The last sunscreen I was using made all my son’s white PE kit tshirts so yellow it looked like he’d been in a POW camp by 3.25. Cheaper on evil Amazon, if you can lower yourself. Recommend!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this instalment of Add to Cart, my regular free feature. I write four a month, including one which is shopping requests - if you’ve enjoyed this and read it till the end, chances are you’ll enjoy a subscription.

Until next week, my little SunBums.

Claire x