My colleague Kate Holmquist wrote a feature last week about the world of women's handbags. She wrote of "bag porn" and of people "visiting" handbags several times before knowing they were "the one". A week earlier I would have scoffed at this, pitying anyone shallow enough to develop a love affair with a bag. These things sneak up on a person though. Like crow's feet. And enjoying Questions and Answers.
I'd just been paid and was solvent for once - if you don't count the recently remortgaged mortgage account - and had wandered into the bag section of a popular Grafton Street emporium almost by mistake. I normally avoid this section, venturing no further than Sunglasses, which acts as an effective barrier between me and the likes of Mr Vuitton. I also stay away from the shoe section. Ditto the underwear department, for that matter. I haven't visited Lingerie since the day I was browsing the comfy underwear sub-section of that department and a friendly woman approached to tell me she liked reading this column. Mortification doesn't begin to describe it.
In short, I've stopped thoroughly browsing this well-known store on Grafton Street for budgetary reasons, confining myself to the make-up department, where you can only do so much credit card damage. I also allow myself a quick spray of freebie cologne in the toilets, which, as facilities in Dublin go, are first-class.
Anyway, I wandered into Bags because I had a notion about buying myself a grown-up birthday present. It was just a matter of finding out how far up I really wanted to grow. Grown-up bags seem to be festooned with pockets and buckles and fringes these days. They are quilted and ruched and trussed up and distressed down. But when I think of spending more than €50 on a handbag, the main thing I need it to be is practical. No embossed bells, no matte-gilt whistles. It just needs to be large enough to hold all the garbage I accumulate during a working day and strong enough to hold said garbage. It also needs to go with everything and last forever, because if I spend that much I want to get maximum wear from the thing.
And now, on the eve of my birthday, I had a new criterion. I wanted to love my bag the way other women seem to love their bags, treating them as though they were their little, leathery offspring. I'm a laydee, to borrow the Little Britons' catchphrase, which means I'm supposed to like laydees' things.
The saleswoman in Bags knew I was an interloper, but she was too well trained to let me know she knew. Scuffed shoes do not accessorise well with Gucci anything, and as for my new peaked cap, my fashion adviser had already told me it was clashing, in textile terms, with the velvet on my second-hand jacket. Mostly, though, it was the way I kept looking at the price tags in disbelief that gave me away. I may have been going for the "posh handbag lady with money to burn" look but, laden down with groceries, all I managed was plain old "bag lady".
As soon as I saw her I knew she was The Bag. All that lovely navy/grey leather with cream trim, which I knew would only grow more lovely with age. Those dinky interior pockets, including one for my mobile phone. The brightly coloured elastic detail to which I could attach my keys and thus avoid rummaging in The Bag for 10 minutes at my front door. How do I love thee, oh deeply practical magnetic buttons? Let me count the ways.
Then I looked at the price tag. At the risk of inciting Irish Times letter writers who were disgusted by the price of Tom Doorley's lunch in Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, I'll admit my bag cost somewhere between €10 and €500. If pressed, I will also admit that if he was into bartering, Mr Guilbaud might have accepted my bag as payment for lunch for two - with wine - at his fine establishment.
As the saleswoman modelled the bag for me I rang my mother and explained what I was about to do, in the manner of a gambler contemplating putting the house on the dog in trap one. In a calm voice, the kind used by police talking to deranged men in hostage situations, she made the excellent point that this new bag-lust could merely be displacement therapy for all the batter burgers I haven't been eating since the latest weight-loss attempt.
Before she could burst my bag-shaped balloon, I pressed the red button on the phone. I stroked the bag and nodded my assent to the saleswoman. I watched as she went directly to the storeroom to fetch what she described reverentially as "a fresh one". I paid. I slung The Bag over my shoulder. "I like your bag," a stranger said to me as I waltzed out of the shop. "Love it," I corrected her. Grown up, at last.