I had a frantic Saturday afternoon in Edinburgh's biggest department store
It was a stressful weekend
Curse the lure of their big comfy sofas.
We had only been browsing the top floor home department on a Saturday afternoon at Edinburgh’s John Lewis, when my beau lost his favourite cap.
He was clutching this in his paw and must have put it down, on a cushion as plump as a foie gras goose’s liver, while we tested out the upholstery.
Not that we were there to buy anything. These prices are way out of our league, whether they’re never knowingly undersold or not. I just don’t think living room seating should be the same price as a secondhand car. Still, one can always dream about owning an L-shaped sofa with space to unfurl my tightly sprung little Shetland pony legs.
We were about to get the tram home at Picardy Place when he realised.
“My cap!”. Damn it.
I steeled myself to fight my extreme shopping fatigue and unwillingness to reenter the fray. Back into the mothership, sigh, even though it had taken us about half an hour to leave, since half of the Escher-esque shopscape of escalators were broken. They don’t move, so you have to walk down them, and something about the height and the angle makes it awkward and slow, so you look a bit like a TikTok video of a dog wearing shoes.
“Let’s get the lift this time,” I suggested, once we were on the first floor, though there was a strange lingering stench in it, from a recent evacuee. We held our breath, then retraced our steps.
First, round the menswear department, where he had been looking for new trousers that would suit his five-metres-long legs and, ironically, a spare cap. Then the lower level crockery bit, as he’d been hunting for a new teapot-for-one, before heading up to the sofas.
Up there, we looked under the cushions, and on the tables of the showroom-esque set-ups, but the old beige H&M cap that’s been his trusty friend for a few years was nowhere to be seen.
“It must be here, because who would want to steal a hat with someone else’s head grease and dandruff in it?” I said. “That’s just gross”.
“But it is my favourite cap,” he said. Fair enough, it’s a nice one, though I hope that whoever stole it gets an acute infestation of the nits.
This probably doesn’t count as theft anyway. It’s finder’s keepers in this John Lewis cockapoo-eats-cockapoo world.
I wondered what we’d do if we saw it on a mannequin, or spotted someone wearing it on their way out. Is a ju-jitsu mount too extreme?
It felt like this could easily turn into an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Feeling dejected, we went to the last chance saloon, aka the lost property department, which was thankfully on the same floor as the sofas. There was a serious-looking black book. The girl behind the counter took my other half’s details. Date, name, phone number and a brief description of the item.
She wrote it down. “Kakie klub”.
“It’s a cap, a beige cap, like the ones you wear on your head with a peak,” we said.
She looked at us like we were morons. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you, I’ve got dyslexia,” she said. She changed it to “kream cup”. And we shut our faces.
I was going to ask if we could write it down for her, but that didn’t seem to be an option. We knew then that it was never going to be found.
Since that day, we have been on a replacement cap hunt, but none quite measures up to old trusty. They’re either too shiny, too tight, too tall or too square.
I like to think that the old cap is somewhere, happy, and living its best life, on a recently nit-riddled human’s head, or nestling under a sofa in John Lewis.
The curse prevails, as that wasn’t the week’s only fashion disaster.
I also wore my new white COS t-shirt to the opening of a new tattoo studio in Leith.
It was sunny, and there were gin and tonics, and pizza, delivered from nearby Civerinos at Browns of Leith at The Shore. How civilised.
I cut myself a big slice of the marinara one, and folded it in half, New York style.
Then I enjoyed the rest of my chatty evening, before strolling through Leith Links and feeling uncommonly happy - maybe it was the booze - as the light filtered through the sycamore trees.
“What have you done to yourself?” my husband asked, when I got through the door.
The front of my top was absolutely caked in tomato sauce. It looked like a child’s finger painting of Elmo. and this was only my third time wearing this tee. I ripped it off, and got the Fairy Liquid out, then roughly scrubbed the stains as if they were oil-caked guillemots. Into the washing machine, then, according to Google, I’d try bleach if that didn’t work. Anything. I was determined that this wasn’t going to go the way of the John Lewis cap.
In the end, the stains strangely disappeared when I left the top to dry in the sun.
“The sun has bleached it,” my other half said. Is that a thing? I don’t care, I’m just glad that it came good in the end, as two fashion crises in one week would be too much to handle.
RIP to the kakie club.
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