Damn you Bella Freud

John Sturgis

I was just arriving at El Vino on Fleet Street for a leaving do when my phone rang. It was my wife, sounding frantic. ‘Where's that box?’

‘What box?’

‘The box that was outside our bedroom door.’

I didn't just do the bins effectively, I did them with grace. I did the bins, I thought, in the manner of Roger Federer

My mind started working quickly. It was a Thursday evening. The box in question, small and nondescript, had indeed been by our bedroom door. It had been there since Saturday evening or Sunday morning and I had passed it any number of times until earlier that day, shortly before 6 a.m., I had finally picked it up and taken it downstairs, giving it a little shake on the way to confirm my by-now firmly established belief that it was empty.

‘It's in the recycling…’ Even as I said it I could sense that this was the wrong answer. ‘…and would have been collected by the lorry about 12 hours ago. Why?’

There followed a sort of primordial scream and then a string of profanities. I knew by now that I had done something bad – but it was another minute or so before I was able to extract a clear account of exactly what I had done and quite how bad it was. I had recycled a brand new Bella Freud jumper which had cost £232.

Well, I say I’d recycled it. In fact, I had almost certainly sent it to landfill, as a non-recyclable item sifted from the bottles, boxes and tin cans that went with it into the truck's rear end. Oh dear.

Further heated discussion followed. And so it was that I found myself, the very next morning, hungover, very hungover, logging onto the Bella Freud website and spending £239 (with shipping) of my own money on a replacement. This upsetting episode caused me to note several things.

First among them was the fact that, in the sphere of fashionable women's wear, this kind of outlay doesn't buy you much physical product. Anyone in a comparable situation shaking a box containing one of my jumpers would be left in no doubt that there was something substantive inside. Bella Freud jumpers however are mere wisps of a thing – and all but impossible to distinguish by shaking from the tissue paper in which they come wrapped, I now know.

It also left me questioning my wife's candour on the issue of her wardrobe spending. Despite the apparently high turnover of items arriving at our house by post – seemingly two or three parcels every day, year-round – I have repeatedly been assured that she manages to create the stylish look we all associate with her on a budget so tiny as to be almost non-existent; and that all but a select handful of these arriving parcels are, after due reflection, returned for a full refund.

The jumper incident contradicted so many things she had led me to believe. It also left me questioning my own judgment. It had been the case, I concede, that, in the earliest days of internet shopping, I may have occasionally been a little careless about distinguishing between which items of packaging should be kept, returned, or still reflected upon. But that was many years ago. I had learned. And it had been years since I’d made such a mistake.

Consequently, I had begun to see myself as not just good but preternaturally gifted at ‘doing the bins’ and all the issues therein. Particularly in regard to a harmonious marriage. I could, I thought, read a parcel, working out its value from where it was placed, a foot to the left or right of which particular door, whether it was for the bin or to be guarded carefully.

I didn't just do the bins effectively, I did them with grace. I did the bins, I thought, in the manner of Roger Federer with his elegant strokes rather than the bludgeoning efficacy of so many of his lesser rivals. I had come to believe I could determine whether a box was empty or not by simply shaking it lightly. Nothing so crude as actually opening it and looking inside the thing for me, oh no. I had become complacent in my bin genius.

I was like a goalkeeper who is routinely unbeaten in a long string of lesser games only to drop a massive howler on the biggest stage: one thinks of Loris Karius for Liverpool in the Champions League final against Real Madrid in 2018. But he had the excuse of being concussed. I didn't even have that.

This was, my wife continues to assure me, the single most expensive garment she had purchased in some time. I am aware from my occasional forays into the fashion pages that for some a £232 jumper is not particularly extravagant – and that it's possible to spend ten times this on an item that's no doubt even less substantive. But I was not among their number. And neither, I had hitherto believed, was my wife.

It's a few weeks on from this horror now but I still find myself remembering and cursing. Now the replacement Bella Freud jumper sits in her bedroom drawer – like the most infuriating and expensive parking ticket ever issued, only made from merino wool. A permanent reminder of my Freudian slip.

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John Sturgis is a freelance journalist who has worked across Fleet Street for almost 30 years as both reporter and news editor

John Sturgis

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