The way to shop when you have a limit on money and you don’t want to be bothered every morning picking it out and matching up items in your wardrobe is to buy everything alike.
Before you leave the store you check the back of your neck collar to see what size shirt, sweater, and dress you are. Then you reach back and roll the top of your drawers back and write down that size too. That will also be your britches size. Then you look on the inside of your right shoe. Generally there will be a chart in the shoe department where you can figure out about the socks. But you will probably need socks only every third trip or so. They stretch with your feet.
Then you go to the girls department and tell the lady you need the sizes bigger than the ones you have in your hand. You follow her to the racks and say for her to leave you alone now please.”
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
