Suits you

So, in a stunningly spontaneous turn of events last week, I bought a suit.

Now, I don't actually need a suit - everyone at work starts gossiping conspiratorially when I turn up in a shirt instead of a t-shirt with a smutty picture on it; they'd probably explode if I rocked up in a suit – but a weird thing happened while I was browsing around Topman and 10 minutes later I'd bought a classy suit.

Please excuse the MySpace-esque self portrait. And yes: OMG, the labels are still on…

I didn't mean to - honest. I'm going to blame dear old Skip; a few weeks earlier I'd gone shopping with him to help him buy a fancy new coat (I'd watched a few episodes of How To Look Good Naked and felt like channeling my inner Gok Wan), and while in Topman this suit jacket caught my eye and he made me try it on. After a minute or so posing Grattan Catalogue-stylee in the mirror, I shrugged it off, muttered something like "we're shopping for you, not me" and hung it back on the rail. I didn't want or need to spend money on it, and they didn't have my size anyway (story of my life).

And then I went back last week and it caught my eye again, and they had my size in both the jacket and the trousers and I thought 'oh, I'll just try it on' and … well, I'm weak, OK?

Anyway, I don't know what it is about buying a suit that brings out the chatty Kathy in the till monkeys - maybe they've been told to be super-nice to suit buyers because they are clearly PEOPLE OF GOOD TASTE WITH LOTS OF MONEY (wrong on both counts in my case) - but the guy on the till was talking away to me like we were best buds, in contrast to the previous week when I'd bought a shirt and he barely said two words to me. On the plus side, at least it wasn't like the last time I bought a suit, when the jaunty lady at the till asked me why I was buying it and I replied "because I'm going to a funeral," which led to something of an awkward silence, and certainly put a downer on her attempt to coerce me into getting a Debenhams store card.

So there we are chatting away, him asking if there's any particular reason I'm buying a suit and me shrugging my shoulders and replying "um, no … I don't actually know why I'm buying it, I think it's just because I like it" or something similarly inane, and then he says "oh, it should come with a suit bag, but we don't have any suit bags." And I'm like "what?" Turns out that Topman should give you a free suit bag with every suit (because you're a classy and valued shopper, obviously), but they'd run out. So, bless him, he scrawled on my receipt that I hadn't got one and told me to pop back a few days later and they'd just give me one (a suit bag, you filthy-minded heathen).

At the time of writing I've popped back and they still don't have any. I'm beginning to think they're mythical, like unicorns and Paris Hilton's dignity.

Anyway, although I haven't worn the suit properly, I'm very much looking forward to giving it an airing at the first available opportunity. I'm thinking Christmas Day, because I do like to make an effort for the fat man and baby Jeebus, and to be honest it's more of a casual dressy suit rather than a funeral/interview jobby, which quite frankly is a roundabout way of saying that Sparky Pa will probably take one look at it, frown, and say something like "well, it's not what I would've bought…"

To top it off, I was chatting to Best Mate Jo the other day, and I told her I'd bought it. She was well excited at this incredible sartorial development (obviously she can tell I'm just a rough diamond waiting to be polished), and was even more excited when I showed her the above picture, although she did ask if it was made of leather (it's not - it has a slight sheen to it and that picture is rubbish; professional Topman image HERE, though obviously it looks better on me). She then confessed that she'd bought a posh frock recently, and we immediately decided that we should debut our glamourous new selves during a night on the town at some unspecified future date.

Unfortunately, the first restaurant to spring forth from both our minds was, terrifyingly, KFC. We are nothing if not class personified.