Add to Cart #2

With special shopper Katie Clapham of Receipts from the Bookshop

The first time I plucked up the courage to go and meet Katie Clapham IRL, she wasn’t there. I was visiting my husband’s family in St Anne’s on the Sea, and we were toying with the idea of moving up North. I saw Katie’s bookshop on someone’s Instagram stories, and had an urgent thought: this is a person I could do friendship business with. That was my main worry about moving, you see. Would I just be the ostracised southerner? Would I relate to anyone up there, or would they just take one look at me, decide I was an unbearable macchiato quaffing dickhead and steer clear? I feel about 25% posher than I am up North. I open my mouth and I sound like Joanna Lumley. It’s divisive! But Katie seemed like a funny, cool person. Knowing that my happiness hinged on having some local mates, I went to her bookshop, Storyteller’s Inc, and was told quickly by the now iconic Business Mum that she only worked Fridays. SO I came back on Friday and said hello and then we had the below exchange and that was in November 2023! We have been mates ever since.

NOW, I will tell you because she won’t: Katie has excellent taste in everything. Her clothes and her hair and her glasses and her lovely husband and her bags and her jokes: all top drawer. I have instantly ordered anything she has ever recommended and not been disappointed. This is not hyperbole, I promise. For instance, I have just started wearing glasses, and at dinner with her last week I complained about them always feeling a bit smeary.

She whipped a ZEISS lens wipe out of her handbag and we both gave our specs a good wipe and it was like I could see properly again for the first time in six weeks. So that’s my contribution to Add to Cart this week: the lens wipe of dreams that will make spectacle wearing a clear visioned joy. If you get a big box of them, the front bit opens out to present you with all the wipes, so you feel like you are in a shop, but at home! Yes, it’s a lot of packaging, no one’s perfect.

Katie’s writes a Substack called ‘Receipt from the Bookshop’ that is about books and retail and people. It is extremely charming, so charming in fact that it has been turned into a REAL BOOK and is out on the 4th of June in the UK. You can buy it here, and it will not disappoint.

OK, so without further a doo doo, here she is. Katie Clapham from Receipt from the Bookshop with her very best buys.

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One of the problems with working from home on a permanently connected computer is that all of the tabs that don’t have your job in them can have shopping in them. It is incredibly easy to buy something dumb on the internet almost every single day, and even though I much prefer shopping in person, and have an entirely different personality when I do (I have to buy something to keep the shops alive!) there are not many great shopping opportunities readily available to me on a regular basis. Because I want to stick to the theme of this series, and keep it to things that I’ve bought recently (I need some boundaries on this or we’ll be here all day) most of the things below were purchased online and I hate that for me, but it does make it more convenient for you…

Hettie Mary Janes (John Lewis)

When it comes to my feet, I’m nearly a never-nude. I know some people are so desperate to get their toes out they wear flip-flops with their puffer jackets but to me there is nothing exhilarating or comfortable about sandals, sliders or any sort foot-thongs. Every summer I try and become a sandal person again, and then quickly revert back to the safety of a low-profile trainer, or a charismatic flat. Last year I got these Hettie Suede Mary Janes from John Lewis, in a sort of pale sandy colour, and this year I’ve bought another pair in dark chocolate brown. They’re high-cut, soft enough to wear sockless and, vitally for me, have gold hardware - which actually makes them better than the ME+EM ones I thought I wanted that were four times the price. When it finally warms up a bit, I’ll wear the sandy ones with dark denim or black cropped trousers, and the new dark brown ones with any bright blue denim or perhaps my pale pink jeans. I wish they’d also do them in red and then my summer shoe life might be complete.

Naturium Vitamin C Complex Serum and/or Avène SPF Fluid Radiance SPF50+ (Boots – I tried to buy this in person but they didn’t have it in, I had to order to store)

When I realised my Merit Great Skin Serum was giving me more grief than glow (spluttery pump release, always under or overshooting my palm and jizzling down my wrist, plus it made me feel like I had to follow it with the Merit Uniform SPF that I had already decided I didn’t like because the shade wasn’t right and it pilled), I was on the lookout for a new morning serum. It’d been a while since I used a Vitamin C, but by all (Instagram) accounts it still seemed like the essential ingredient in the breakfast-for-your-face that I was missing. I read plenty of reviews for serums that ‘might take a bit of getting used to’ and, considering I am sometimes cursed with the sudden cigarette burns of eczema, I went for Naturium Vitamin C Complex Serum because it sounded fairly gentle in comparison. I also got myself a new untinted SPF at the same time, hoping they’d both sit well under my Milk Hydro Grip Gel Tint. Well, I don’t know how to explain this but I put the Naturium and the Avène on and then … I didn’t need the make up at all!? My skin just looked instantly lovely, and I can’t tell if it was the serum or the SPF or the combination of both! In fact, I’m glad I’m documenting this here, because sometimes I look at old photos and wonder what products I’d been using at that time. I am never consistent with brands or ingredients so even things that are phenomenal might get forgotten once they run out. Why isn’t there an AI for that?! Scan this gorgeous photo of me and give me a breakdown of the products I used that day! And don’t you dare suggest that I had actually just been drinking a sufficient amount of uncaffeinated water…

Swimming Stuff

I’m going to recommend a few things here that are making my life better as a person who now goes swimming regularly. This wet pouch from Decathlon is so thick you can put a sopping wet costume into it and forget about it, which you inevitably will when you get home, and it can lie there marinating in your gym bag at the bottom of the stairs, not seeping into anything, because it really is entirely and genuinely waterproof. These squeezy silicone bottles mean I can take my good shampoo, conditioner, bond repair and gloss to the pool instead of buying expensive little travel sizes – the showers are private and very decent at my gym so, yes, I am going to do my Abby Yung routine there! But I’m not going to dry my hair – because who has time for that. I have a lot of hair, so I wrap it up in this excellent XL microfibre towel which takes the majority of the water out on the way home. The other absolute game-changer in my swim kit are some prescription goggles that were also from Decathlon but now do not appear to exist online - sorry. The point is, prescription goggles are a thing. It’s an approximate prescription, but it’s entirely sufficient to see the clock on the wall of the pool, and the faces of the other swimmers, and it stops you wasting a pair of contact lenses that you’d have to ditch before your shower anyway, unless you particularly enjoy that feeling of peeling them off your parched eyeballs while trying not to think about the layers of an onion.

My swimming costume is from Boden and is my preferred style (sporty, high neck, zip access and not-a-fucking-halter) and I size up and get it in tall fit to accommodate my long torso. It could still be a bit longer, and have better bum coverage – why is that too much to ask!? – but I was going to get another just to rotate them in the wash a bit, until I discovered the bra pads are removeable, and they completely bunch up in the wash and are a nightmare to straighten up through those pathetic little holes they pretend are for people who want to personalise their chest area. Just sew them in or don’t bother putting them in at all! We will buy accordingly!!!

A Teal Pen

This is a niche reason to recommend a nice website, but just allow me this moment of surreptitious self-promotion, please. Because I have a book coming out next month that has a turquoise cover, I wanted to find a turquoise pen to sign it with. My search took me to a pretty little online shop – and soon to be physical shop! – called The Stationer, and I spent a very happy hour browsing the entire site, and putting together a little order that made me squeal in delight when I received it. I got my teal pen, and I got this little highlighter/dotting pen to make little bullet point lists. I also got a couple of notebooks – I do use them! I am a writer, you know! And some little index cards that admittedly are a bit too nice to use but if I ever have any very good notes, I might copy them out onto them. I topped the order off with a few stickers and some little birthday cards and it was a very jolly box indeed. Unfortunately, I’ve now spent so long practicing my signature with my new teal pen, it’s probably going to run out before the book is even published. I’ll have to order some more, which is fine because I’ve since seen some other Japanese magic pens that I might need, and a very essential panda writing set. What I’m saying is please buy my book this is a good place to buy gifts for the stationery pervert in your life.

Rivals Crisps

Even though I would never have an actual prawn cocktail (I’ll just have a pina colada, please) the best flavour of crisp is prawn cocktail, and the best version of prawn cocktail crisp is something extra bougie that costs at least £2 a bag. Marks and Spencer’s used to be the best at prawn cocktail crisps and they were called something like ‘Marks and Spencer’s The Best Prawn Cocktail Crisps’, but they’ve stopped doing them in my local food hall, so I’ve been hunting for an exceptional replacement. Last week I took a punt on Waitrose’s Bloody Mary Prawn Cocktail Crisps, which come in the most pleasing bag with a retro picture of a disgusting real prawn cocktail on the front, plus a pair of sexy legs because apparently these particular crisps are doing a collab with Rivals on Disney+. Yes, the Jilly Cooper adaptation with Katherine Parkinson and Danny Dyer (almost no one else is important)! It has its own crisps and let me tell you, they’re a triumph. Spicy! Not thick! Er.. crispy! Like, exactly what you’d want in a crisp! Rivals is back on TV this week but unfortunately, I’ve already eaten all of my Rivals crisps, and I don’t currently have Disney+, so now I’ve got to decide if I want to buy a few month’s subscription, or do another snack run at Waitrose. I think I’ll have to watch season 2 of Rivals though, because of what poor Danny went through to film it.

Thanks so much for having me here, Claire. I love your Substack so much!!

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Thank you so much Katie! I absolutely loved hearing her talk about STUFF in the same way she writes so brilliantly about books. What a dude. Buy her book, the link is here.

This post was free, but please do plop you finger on the ‘like’ button, comment or restack. It makes a HUGE difference to reach on Substack and I would love for this one to go far and wide.

Claire x