All kinds of thoughts go through your head when you attempt a feat of truly epic fashion rationalization. Okay, maybe not all thoughts, the ones that have any relation to reality and the state of your bank account have been locked in a dark corner of your mind, replaced by the sort of strategy and low cunning that would have made Machiavelli proud.

Which is why, faced with yet another image of someone snapped wearing Givenchy’s studded headband (a mere five hundred dollars, three hundred and forty pounds, or three hundred and seventy Euros, depending on which currency you like to torture yourself in) my rational, sane, inner self is banging on the door of my mind closet, screaming to be let out...while my crazed, Veruca Salt, “I want in now, daddy” alter ego is doing creative math.

Such stunning feats of arithmetic as “y = the amount I spend on lunch...if I skip lunch every day in March I’ll have saved y times 31”...not enough for the headband but impetus for a similarly malnourished April”. Of course, it’s not going to happen, I’m a girl who enjoys her food too much for that kind of self-deprivation. Even if I wasn’t, sometime around the third week of my ordeal, sanity would escape from its imprisonment and shut the project down. But, sometimes, this kind of mental math helps to clear the desire from your system...after all that time and thought you put into planning to get the object of your desire you suddenly realize that you don’t actually need it, and you move on. At least I hope that's what's going to happen...