Good News for Clarins

The good news for manufacturers of expensive skin care products is that I have started to wrinkle. You may ask my age, and then scoff, if you like, but it is true. True. I blame it on my sunlit childhood, mostly spent swimming and absorbing as many UV rays as possible. I wore suncream, obviously, but nobody has mentioned this to the crows who seem to have permanently planted their little feet next to my eyes. Anyway, the time has come for me to stop whining about it and start taking Proper Care of my Ageing Skin. Lucky me. Otherwise I worry that HFB will take one look at me, recoil and think: "what's going on here? I need a mother, not a grandmother! Who is this haggard old crone? Ach, she's too cheap to buy proper skincare! What kind of a future am I going to have with this wrinkly tightwad?"

Yes, at the moment, the voice in my head tends to belong to an angry Ethiopian baby.

Anyway, long story short, I bit the bullet on a 'skincare plan' (snort) and since I was spending such a freakingly stupid amount of money, this seemed like the right time to take a form home and join the store's loyalty card scheme. Name and address aren't too challenging. Then you have to tick all the discount sub-schemes you'd like to be part of. 60+ health scheme? Errrr, not quite yet, thanks! But here's an interesting one....For parents and parents-to-be.... hey! That's us! Finally, that's us! We've got no baby stuff yet, and I really love discounts. So I'm definitely joining up. But then I take up my pen to tick the boxes and it says 'if you are pregnant when is your baby due?' and I'm stumped. Should I guess at when we'll be coming home, baby in hand? Or should I pick some kind of joke date? April Fools Day seems appropriate. Scrawling 'What about ME? I'm adopting and I don't HAVE a due date! Do you have any idea how HARD that is? Just because I'm not pregnant doesn't mean I don't need DISCOUNTS' across the application form seems like a little bit of an over reaction, but I get dangerously close.

In the end I tick 'not applicable' and shove the form in the mail with quite a lot of force. It was probably just going to be discounts on folic acid supplements anyway. Who needs that, huh?