Sweet Charity

I've always been a bit of a bargain hunter - I love boot fairs, sales and those high street shops where you can get ten tops for under £5. I suppose I have a lot of clothes, my mum says I do, but most of them are not expensive at all. The only item of clothing that I think you need to spend a reasonable amount of money on is jeans - the cheap ones just don't fit right.

I live near two towns, they are both about 5 miles from my house but very different. One is very small and more like a village with a high street, it's relatively affluent and it's where JB and I spend a lot of time. The other is your generic town, high street shops and the riff raff that goes with it. What they have in common though is that they both have charity shops.

Because the smaller town does not have many shops and only one or two clothes shops I tend to go into the charity shops for a browse. Quite often JB and I will buy books or something however recently I have braved it and bought some clothes.

I know some people can not even handle going into a charity shop let alone buying anything but I don't care. It actually doesn't bother me that someone else has worn it, I mean I do have a washing machine. Anyway, I feel particularly pleased with myself as I've bought some real bargains recently. The first item was a skirt for work; A-Line, knee-length with a pattern of large flowers. I wore it to work the next day and as soon as I walked in I was asked where I had got it from. Of course I just shrugged and mumbled something like, 'oh...erm...I can't remember.'

Then I got a pair of Next linen trousers for £7, perfect fit and would have cost well over £25 from new. And yesterday I found a H&M summer top for £3. I think this charity shop is particularly full of gems because of the area it's in. You see, all the rich people give their nearly-new, hardly-worn clothes to charity. The charity shops in the other town are just full of Primark or supermarket clothes and they are more expensive than they would have been new!

Of course most of the clothes won't be any good but you never know, hidden in those rails might be a fashion find of the century.