I cried because of a handbag

I think I mentioned that I bought myself a proper grown-up handbag in Sydney, and it has been lovely! Solidly made, exactly the right size, comfortable, and looks good. Or it did look good, until number two son left his takeaway lid on the table, and I laid my handbag on top of it, and now one side has a large ineradicable grease stain that looks exactly like a rectangular takeaway lid and left over singapore noodles. It is a lovely cobalt blue, and the stain is much darker, and very obvious, and I cried.

In fact I sobbed, for quite a while. It was that thing where my house is tatty, my car is dirty, my clothes are too tight, my career is going nowhere, and I spend my time driving other people around and making largely inedible meals ... but my handbag? My handbag was Perfect.  So I may have overreacted to its Ruin.

This was yesterday morning, and because I like to run away from my problems, I picked the furthest away town that was consistent with getting home in time to pick number one son up from his university extension course, and went to Yass for the rest of the day. Yass is a town of about ten thousand people about an hour away from Canberra. It is very cute, and I had a delicious mushroom burger for lunch and sat in the cafe reading the newspaper, and wandered around the middle of town, poking around the shops and admiring the historic buildings. (I'm from Canberra, anything built before 1950 is historical).



There was an excellent ramshackle antique / junk shop that seemed to be made of several buildings knocked together that took a good hour to poke through. I bought some champagne glasses that nearly match the one that was smashed a couple of weeks ago, and didn't buy the carved bathroom stand in the photo below! I saw it and said "good god" and random old lady said "fight you for it" and her husband looked worried for just a split second even though they must have been married for fifty years.

Anyway the weather was exquisite, and the landscape to the north is beautiful in the sun (the sky seems bigger than here) and I felt much better by the time I got home. I tried some internet remedies for grease stains (cornflour) overnight which didn't work, and halfheartedly googled replacements but it's a Coach men's messenger bag, and they don't seem to have the blue anywhere, it's boring black or brown or navy. I think I will just have to accept that I am a plastic handbag person.