Oh Topshop, what a wonderful pair of dark shewd eyes you have!

It is humorous (albeit strategically clever) that Topshop have been reduced to knocking off even their own designs. You may have noticed that since Kate Moss' pansy dress last year, Topshop have been churning out endless lines of "tea dresses". Kate Moss' one-shoulder frill dress has also popped up in Topshop's own collections in its various forms, all doubtlessly "inspired" but looking suspiciously similar. I've noticed too that a sun dress which looked identical to that in Kate Moss' current collection which is retailing for 40+, but in cream was sold on the Topshop website 2 weeks before and demanded a much less challenging price of 25 pounds.

There have been many of these little ironic incidents, and at first I too chuckled with ridicule. But this isn't surprising if you think that Topshop are a giant fashion power which survive on the sole appeal that it copies trends and designs off the catwalk at affordable prices, before the catwalk hits the shops. So here they've demonstrated what they are best at, which is basically copying. It was ironic that high street chains even dared to approach designers to do collaborations in the beginning, because the designers basically copy, or what they call "translate", their own catwalk designs for these stores, something that these stores were already brilliant at, without the need for these designers. It is a cunning commercial plan that saw using a designer's name on a label automatically warranted a mark-up of 50%, more money for Phillip Green's cash-hungry appetite (let's not even mention what they are doing to children in third world countries).

I digress, these collaborations which pull in an incredibly high mark-up have materialised through no fault of the designers or their will to participate. In the end, it looks like an ultimatum: collaborate with us and we will give you 20% of the inflated prices, or we will knock you off anyway and give you nothing.

Lost in the city of Ubar

They say that at any one time there are always five people who love us, and if this were frankly true, please would those five paramours of mine "put your hands up like you just don't care"?

I used to spend handsome portions of the day being preoccupied with this matter. In the end, I could never find those mysterious five. Just who were these teary eyed admirers, and where the hell were they?!

One day, I struck gold, oil and all of the frankinscence in the lost city of Ubar. All of this puzzlement and all of the lengthy periods of time with which I devoted with gusto to the subject left me jilted in a sea of constant brain activity, albeit confused brain activity, segregated from the rest of green mother earth, where the main mode of communication is not to dwell substantially within one's own brainwaves, but to make those brainwaves vocally explicit (but it is worth noting that audience and context are key). All this time I was focused so inward, I let "living" pass me by.

It has to be accepted that struggle with perceived notions of one's own self-worth will go on, like man-o-rexia or diabulimia, growing rampantly like a modern disease in these modern times (promoted by our media worship of the young, rich and beautiful, or perhaps vice versa? The chicken or the egg, which came first?)

But everyone has a chink in their armour as surely as everyone has two eyes (nota bene: they need not to be visible). A dominant mode of thinking that is not so introverted helps. Anything that provides a divertion away from intrinsic worries is surely healthy, right? In the end in retrospect, I chuckle with warm ridicule. All of the time I'd frittered away nervously pondering with uneasiness what others perceived of me, if I had a penny for every one of those minutes, I surely would be a millionaire now (... perhaps in Japanese Yen).

Simian Mobile Disco - Hustler

Promises and letdowns

1) Is life one spiral from birth, where from early on, we and those around us set impossible targets for ourselves that we are rarely going to meet, thus there is inevitable but surely crippling letdown?

2) Must we in the bitter end accept the duller alternative in lieu of the more exciting, albeit ephemeral option in trade for security?

(How will we ever know if the aforementioned "exciting but ephemeral" option will ever befall us? Shall we just close our eyes, hope and believe? Is hope and believe all we will have to survive on? And what if the only two reliances we grasp onto in the end betrays us, and nothing "exciting" ever comes?)

Hypothetically, we swing from day to day "accepting the duller alternative". It's not unbearable, but it is somehow not quite as electrifying as we've come to imagine, even though we are not entirely sure what our imaginative alternative life would be anyway.

Should we have, since the start, lowered the standard bar so we never shall again set those sky-high aims to avoid the constant mediocrity? Haven't we, inadvertently, accepted the "duller alternative", in order to avoid disappointment?

(Moreover, does exhilarating and exciting always need to be accompanied by brevity? Are there any occurrences which are stimulating, yet still long-lasting? Few, very few I imagine...)

Suppose one day (whilst still holding out for something better to befall), we decided to get up and act instead of perpetually "hoping and believing" by relocating to a bustling metropolis, or heck, even to Peru to open a llama farm in the open country. But after a long period of settling in to the point where we could comfortably call the new destination "home", the sense of "excitement" begins to pale and mediocrity settles back in, and we realise that life now is not so different from back then. So is it true that we may as well not actively persue the "better", and has this proven that the "better" always has brevity trailing in its wake? Can it never be lasting?

After the initial rush passes, doesn't everything degrade to the "duller alternative"?

Does this mean that we are presented with no other choice but to always accept the "duller alternative"?