You’ve thought about this handbag for months. So long, you thought about it in shortbread, and then it sold out, but then you were happy when you saw it released in coconut (the husk, not the meat). Because you can never take care of fussy things, especially light-coloured leather fussy things that need careful attention, and you don’t know why you would start now. You’d like to say that your baby, or your rough and tumble job, ruins everything but in truth you’re reasonably good at that yourself.

You have a difficult relationship with expensive things because you want them very much, but you often ruin them, or worse, lose them which induces a spiral of self loathing. You’re a slap-dash person, but combined with the kind of perfectionist trait that makes you really beat yourself up at imperfection – I mean like really flagellate – without the underlying fastidiousness of the more “pure” type-A, that generally means they get it right the first time. In more chaotic times, you once left a handbag in a hotel room, and in it the pearls your mother gave you for your 2 and by the time you realised and rang the hotel they were gone, and you feel sick about it to this day.

Besides, the handbag wasn’t expensive expensive. It wasn’t overseas luxury-conglomerate-with-a-seven-barreled-corporate-name-expensive, curiously with both a champagne and a cryptocurrency in its ranks. More than a week’s rent, but less than a short overseas trip; and it’s not your fault rents are so crazy. I mean, you had a baby, but are you ready for the kind of responsibility where you wear a week’s rent around your shoulder? Where you could leave it on a bus? (It’s harder to leave a baby on a bus.)

But you’re going to get it. You tell everybody else and yourself that it’s all about the cost-per-wear. You will have this bag for life. Which is all true. And then you know what else is true? You find a lump in your breast, but you know that most lumps at your age are benign – a cyst. You book in to see the doctor but for various reasons it gets a bit delayed (a move, then - Delta, because you’re not good at being a grown up) and buy the handbag in the meantime, because if you’ve been thinking about it this long it must be a sound purchase.

The lump is most likely benign. But then you get the results back from your ultrasound and it means a biopsy which gets arranged that afternoon, and gosh, things are moving quickly, and about the time that you hear that there is a bit of a wait on CT scans in public – nothing so long that it would affect course of the disease, but when dealing in units of existential dread this is a very long time – you decide to pay for the CT in private. Because six months ago, when you asked yourself if you were grown up enough to get an expensive handbag, surely you were grown up enough to get private health insurance, but then you decided it can wait. When you convert the cost of the CT into handbag units that’s two handbags –  you could have got shortbread and coconut. (You resolve to be better at money. And try not to think about what your insurance premiums will be like when you get around to them.) 

And then you start converting your savings and expenditure not into handbag units, as you have done, but weeks-of-rent units, so you know how much room there is to move once your sick leave runs out. 

But it hasn’t spread, so far as the CT scan can see, so that’s something at least, and your parents cry (one in front of you, one privately) when they hear. And when you attend your medical appointments, everyone remarks on what a lovely handbag you have, and you say thank you, like it reflects well on yourself, when in actual fact you think I probably wouldn’t have bought that if I knew what was coming.

But you secretly like it because it reminds you of a simpler, carefree time, where the worst thing you could have done was really a bit vain about accessories that will last your hopefully long life; not sit on a lump for nearly three months without health or income insurance. The grown-up bag now reminds you of being too grown up. And the inside of the goddamn thing is still a mess.