The last time we bought a family car, a decade ago now, we got an automatic one instead of a manual one. So much easier to drive. A no-brainer, really. But I completely failed to anticipate, somehow, that by switching to an automatic I would forget how to use gears. I deskilled myself by accident.
And now I’ve gone and done the same thing all over again, except my error this time is in a much more serious field. This time it’s about handbags, which are obviously much more important than the trifling matter of cars. Sometime around the end of the noughties, you see, Mulberry brought out the Alexa satchel, and the cross-body bag was suddenly everywhere. After years of hooking a strap over my shoulder and clamping a handbag to my side under my arm, I switched to a cross-body with a strap long enough that you could sling your bag across your body like a sash, so that it bumped merrily against your hip as you walked along without you having to hold on to it.
