If there is a solidarity on Earth tighter than “bored middle-aged mothers in a clothes shop”, I don’t know what it is. Whether in Primark, Urban Outfitters or H&M, the crowd is always the same: some teens are in gangs and they are having a fine old time; others, sometimes in sibling pairs, are with their mum, presumably because they have yet to find a way to detach her from her credit card. It’s like that bit in an action movie where you need a guy’s fingerprint to open a vault, so you cut off his arm, except, regrettably, in this case, they have to take the entire body.
Some of us are too hot; others are too embarrassing to be believed and have been told that multiple times between each clothes rack. But the main thing we have in common is that we are all incredibly bored. It’s one of those things about youth that I don’t miss at all, along with paralysing social anxiety and blackheads: the ability to parse the difference between one T-shirt and another for hours; to look at the same pair of jeans for 15 minutes straight, your imagination running riot over what they might look like across every jumper combination and landscape. This is not a spectator sport, yet spectate you must, because ultimately you will have to give a view, so that, whatever you say, they can do the opposite.
Last time, I tried on a load of stuff myself, just to be subversive – a velvet revolution, if you like, except whatever that highly flammable material was, I don’t think it was velvet. What I really want to do is amass the mums and create a norm of spontaneous chat, some cross between a salon and the earliest days of the trade union movement. It’s so obvious from looking around how much we would find to talk about. We don’t want to be mean about our kids, obviously – we want to talk about ideas, describe our feminist awakenings, swap recipes; maybe someone could bring finger food. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to do this.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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