Coping with sheer terror of being lost in Penneys

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s kind of strange that the older one gets, the more one seems to slip back into situations of childhood angst. Last week, during one of our colder snaps, I discovered in the heart of the city that all of my 22 caps or so, were all resting peacefully in a variety of home locations, as I prepared to venture outdoors.

There was a blackening sky enveloping the city and a cut in the air that would give you a longing for unromantic woollen vests and heavy stockings, but the most vital piece of equipment of all was missing, namely a humble woollen cap.

The solution seemed simple enough . . . a trip into the Penneys store in the heart of the Eyre Square Shopping Centre, but it’s a place that I haven’t been for many’s the long day, and as soon as I crossed the entrance mat, that childhood fear of being lost in a massive shop, surrounded by all kinds of clothes, handbags, other female garments that I know very little about, and associated paraphernalia, was just too much to absorb in one breathful.

There’s a friend of mine who has often explained to me in great detail his fear of flying – that awful feeling of sheer terror, panic and a sense of being in a place where everything has gone out of control. Penneys didn’t exactly do that to me, but in a spot where I just wanted to buy one cheap woollen cap, it was akin to seeking out a solitary oasis in the vastness of the Gobi Desert.

Being a typical man, the prospect of having to ask any female shop assistant for direction was a pretty alien concept, but after my first unaided search led me into me into what seemed a Croke Park sized section of the shop, help had to be called in.

Without the aid of my fogged-up glasses, I saw a sign in the distance that looked like ‘lingering’. When the glasses had been dried off, the sign of course read ‘lingerie’ before I decided to try and make an innocent enough looking exit from this section before being spotted by some devout female neighbour from my home setting.

Even as a child, I hated being brought into clothes’ shops where my mother and an ageing draper would invariablly agree on foisting upon me a trousers, jumper or jacket that was always a size too big, on the basis of: “Sure, won’t he be growing into it anyway.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.