Two new shops have opened in Sandycove. One is called "Bliss", the other "Reverie". If you can afford to shop in "Reverie", you have probably whipped yourself into a state through overwork, in which case you are in dire need of "Bliss". It's a perfect combination.
Now I intend to go one step further and open my own shop beside Reverie and Bliss, called "Anxiety". Anxiety will be where you go to confess when your marriage is in tatters or when you exceed your credit card limit (whichever comes first) because you have spent too much money in Bliss and Reverie.
Anxiety will offer frothy cappuccino and even frothier counselling, no appointment necessary. This discreet service will also dispense serotonin reuptake inhibitors (anti-depressants, darling) in a range of colours, green and white the most popular. For a straightforward fee of £50 for five minutes, the accompanying advice will be: "Go buy yourself something in Bliss and Reverie; it will give you a boost."
For £100, you will receive specialist attention from our psychological staff, which will consist of Maureen Gaffney clones (the clones are at the 16-cell stage as I write, and are already acting as agony aunts to the embryologists). For £150 an hour, psychic readings will be available with three standard lines of advice: "Leave him/her", "Throw him/her out" and "Move the furniture around; you'll feel better". In case you were wondering, Bliss (the brain-child of new mum Claire McKeon) is a place you go to be pampered into jelly with beauty treatments.
I can hear the moans of pleasure as I sit in my garden. You've got to hand it to Claire - the name "Bliss" is so much more escapist than a more realistically named beauty salon in Artane, "Let's Face It". (No, thank you, I'd rather not.) Reverie sells gorgeous French antiques and objets de Visa. It is owned by a self-confessed shopaholic who knows what she's doing. In Reverie, hard-working women can pore over fabric swatches and fantasise about living in the French countryside and not having to work too hard, although the closest thing to a reverie I have heard in Reverie, was a woman muttering darkly, "I wish I hadn't come in here. Now I'm going to have to redecorate my whole house."
Bliss and Reverie are harbingers of 21st-century shopping, when we won't purchase objects; we'll purchase mood. Already, retailers are cottoning on to it - in some cases, literally. In Temple Bar, there's a shop called "Lavender and Linen", which makes you think of starched white cotton and delicate lace, all sweet-smelling and making you feel terribly well-organised and together with stacks of perfectly aligned linens in your press awaiting the next crisis. Who can feel too much anxiety sleeping between crisp, lavender-scented sheets - or even thinking about sleeping between crisp, lavender-scented sheets? Until now, the theme for naming shops has been the opposite. Instead of appealing to how you want to feel after you have spent money to make yourself feel better (blissful, transported to the French countryside, smelling of lavender), the 1990s notion has been to appeal directly to how women feel when they have the overwhelming emotional need to shop.
And so we have clothing boutiques with names such as "Frantic", "Frenzy" and "Reckless". In Stephen's Green shopping centre, there is "Crisis". In Bray, "Wired". In Greystones, "Escape". Donaghmede has "Moods" (Pre-menstrual? Post-menstrual? Menopausal? You name it.) We'll soon see shop names change as the New Age spiritual trend takes over. Already, in Dublin, there are clothing shops named "Visions" and "Spirit for Women". And as the Republic becomes a shopping-mall state (like Ohio and the 49 others), our malls will have more to do with states of mind.
At places such as Liffey Valley and Blanchardstown, families are encouraged to park the car, bring the Laser card and spend Sunday in search of material transformation. Shopping malls have become the vestibules to the land of hopes and dreams. Last week, there was actually a wedding in a shopping mall in the UK. The bride was honest. For years, she had sought sanctuary in shopping and what are weddings all about, after all, if not shopping? So why not make the mall your sanctuary? Who knows you better than your mall? Who else is there for you, no matter what? Mating is conducted entirely in the mall in the US and the UK - but not yet in the Republic, where many will not let in unaccompanied teenaged boys. As a teenager, you wander the shopping mall buying clothes in the hope of catching a man, flirting between shops. You continue this in your 20s. Then, as time is nearly running out, Mr Mortgage-and-Children comes along and then there's even more shopping to do: the dress, the shoes, the jewellery and the wedding list, not to mention the honeymoon, the house, the kitchen and the furniture. A wedding in a shopping mall encapsulates everything that we already know about our future: we will be what we buy. The shopping experience is all about aspiration, acquisition, hope and desire. So it makes sense that shopping malls should be the new spiritual centres.
Why not have christenings and baptisms there too? Godparents - could be renamed "gift-parents", since that is what they actually are. No one takes them seriously as spiritual guides for the child anymore. Today their sole function is to remember birthdays and give extravagant gifts on other occasions when required. As fully-fledged gift-parents, they would take the gift-child's hand in the shopping mall, there to lead the gift-child to Xanadu and pay the bills forever after. First Holy Communion could be renamed, the First Holy Shop, with special edition white Visa cards, embossed in gold, given to the lucky children (credit card balance to be paid by the gift-parents). The children, dressed in white, would wander around looking beautiful and asking for money - wait a minute, don't they do that already?
Weddings would continue as normal, with a huge wedding gift list kept in the shop of choice. Guests would continue to be forced to spend generously on wedding offerings or else suffer eternal social damnation. The trend in the UK is for couples to announce their weddings and send out invitations which state the shops that keep the couple's wedding list, but which leave out one crucial detail: the place, date and time of the wedding. These couples don't intend to get married at all. They simply live together, collecting the material assets of a stable relationship, in the knowledge that it probably won't be long before they're splitting everything down the middle.
Dividing a household in two has become a right of passage for young adults, many of whom are old hands at it, having seen their parents do it. There's a simple rule: he gets the stereo system and the CD collection. She gets everything else. (One salesman in the audio equipment business told me that his best customers are newly separated men, who regard a top-of-the-range stereo system as the only furniture they need.)
In the future, shopping-mall weddings will be officiated at by women, who could wear the Mother Bernadette priestly garb (stylish black-on-black outfits designed by Donna Karan, with the letters DKNY emblazoned on the collar (clerical collar, that is). Priestly garments would be sold in a special shop -
"Called by God, Dressed by Donna" - a snip at £150,000. Some say that shopping malls are at risk from virtual shopping via the Internet, which is becoming so popular that shopping malls could become functionally obsolete. These soothsayers forget shopping malls will always remain oases of calm where shoppers can browse and reflect. Someday the shops may be empty - as the churches are now - and people will still visit them, just to think and spend some time alone.
Internet shopping too has its spiritual dimension. My husband keeps getting email messages from someone named Lana, who says: "Remember you are loved, Peachhead". He explains patiently that there is a famous Allman Bros album called Eat the Peach and that Allman brothers fans are called peach-heads. Lana sent him an email recently saying, "Sadly, the Allman bros lead guitarist has left the band but is being replaced by Butch Trucks, the son of the drummer", to which my husband's response was "Y-eeeee-s!".
All of which leads me to ask, what is this sad, 43-year-old, baldy man getting on the Internet that he can't get at home? Spiritual sustenance and a sense of belonging and interesting cyberwomen who call him pet names. He is now the member of the Alvin Lee fan club, but even though he joined two months ago he is heart-broken that they haven't yet love-bombed him or sent any virtual hugs, but on the other hand, they haven't billed him either.
