Melissa earns £27,000 per year as the PA to a Sales Director at a large international company in London. She lives nearby in a flat she rents with her best friend, Sarah. The flat costs them £450 per month each. Melissa is a likeable, bubbly person who is also known to be very good at her job. Although she has a slight problem with punctuality and is sometimes forgetful, she is generally forgiven for her shortcomings because of her stylish dress sense and personality.
Melissa will be the first to admit, however, that her personal life is a complete disaster, especially on the financial front. She absolutely loves shopping and has accumulated, and used, a lot of credit cards. Everyone seemed to want to lend her money and she bought a car, went on holidays, furnished her flat and shopped till she dropped - all on borrowed money. On the shopping front, she reluctantly admits that being scatty and disorganized, she constantly buys things that she doesn’t really need and never really thinks about what she spends her money on.
She spends lots on cosmetics, shoes and clothes, but she has nothing to show for it because a lot of it is cheap junk. Massively in debt, Melissa avoids opening her bank or credit-card statements because the sight of them gets her down. She has no savings at all and frequently borrows money from her mum that she has no hope of paying back.

Even though I follow fashion (in a far from slavish way), there is no phrase that makes me recoil more than «must-have». If I read that X boots or the latest Y shades have been decreed to be the latest «must-haves», my immediate reaction is mutiny. Why must I have them? Why should I humiliate myself to go on a waiting list for this supposedly desirable item? Most of all, why should I fall for the designer’s manipulative tactics, which are intended only to swell his or her bank balance at the expense of mine? Far more satisfying is to pop into the clothes shops in my local mall and buy a copy of said designer’s gear for a tenth of the price. Waiting lists? Huh! They’re for mugs.

Actually, designer brands in general are for mugs. They are for people too insecure to trust their own taste. These people calculate that everything with a certain label must be cool, so shopping there is a safe bet. If you shop in the mall by contrast, you have to use your discernment to find the one garment out of three that looks great. If you go to a really cheap shop, the ratio is more like one in 20. But boy is it worth it. Like spotting a little golden nugget in a muddy riverbed, the find gives rise to immense satisfaction. Which is why, according to a survey published this week, the young rich are deserting designer shops for second-hand stores and flea-markets. They prefer to rummage for one-off bargains than to waste their money in some posh department store.

For me, shopping is a social thing. It means time to gossip, drink coffee and keep up with friends and trends (and trends in friends). My consuming compatriots and I browse, select, try out for size and discuss-and only if the item is perfect do we buy. All of which is by way of explaining why I have never really understood the fascination with online shopping. Who wants to go it alone, sipping a mug of home-made coffee, buying items that you have never even touched, let
alone tried on?
But it doesn’t end there. Sitting alone, buying a ridiculously expensive item becomes strangely easier-you end up doing the kind of thing you’d never do in front of a friend who has shared your fears on the state of your credit card bill. True, online shopping avoids the pain of crowds, parking and sore feet, but you miss out on the atmosphere and social stage, and you are, potentially at least, more vulnerable.

People smile a great deal, and we seem to know instinctively that some smiles are more genuine that others. But is there any scientific (1) …. for this? Recent research suggests that a mechanism in the brain can help us (2) …. whether a smile is really heartfelt – or whether it is just being put on for show.
(3) …. to various long-held traditions, a genuine smile involves the eyes as well as the mouth. In the nineteenth century a French anatomist set out to prove this. He used electrodes to stimulate the facial muscles of volunteers, thereby creating false smiles. He found that real smiles were always (4) …. with the contraction of a muscle around the eye, but that his artificially induced ones were not.
During more recent research, volunteers were shown a variety of human facial (5) …. and their reactions to there were monitored. When they were shown a happy face, 35% of the volunteers immediately started looking at the eye area, checking for the tell-tale crinkles that would (6) …. that the smile was genuine; but when shown a sad or neutral face, they did not. So why did the human brain evolve to distinguish between real and false smiles? It could be that this ability to (7) …. a quick assessment of a smile has an important role to play on successful communication. A genuine smile (8) …. as a gesture of conciliation in conflict, and it’s important to know whether we are really being offered a truce or not.

(1)