Andy Richardson: Act in haste. . . curse of impulse buys

Several weeks later, when the delivery man calls, you realise the sofa is too big for your living room. The TV has to be relocated to the kitchen to make room, it blocks the light like a blackout blind in summer and you have to hop over its arm every time you want to enter the living room because the sofa has blocked the door.

Ever after, the moment you’re tempted into an impulse buy – flowers for your mother-in-law, a holiday to Borneo, a second hand Vespa from Devon or a season ticket for Championship team Wolves – your brain flashes up a ‘red Light’ Warning.

It screams ‘brown sofa, brown sofa, brown sofa’ in the voice of a Dr Who Dalek, and you think better of it, leaving your wallet – and your brain – where they belong.

Dermot O’Leary was talking brown sofa moments on BBC Radio 2 on a Saturday morning. And among the hilarious impulse buys were: two goats in a terraced house from a couple who wanted to get back to nature; a house that needed doing up but took two years to fix and almost led to divorce; and also an ice cream maker bought by an impulsive Shrewsbury foodie.

It was worth £3,000, gulp, had been used four times, made the best ice cream ever – but was damned expensive. Dermot laughed as he read it out. Which muppet would spend that sort of dosh on flipping ice cream? Mug.

I switched the radio off and played Noel Gallagher’s Chasing Yesterday for the 68th time, while admonishing myself for joining in Dermot’s conversation about, erm, idiots who do stupid things. . . And I wondered whether I’ll live long enough to churn enough ice cream to make the Swiss-made machine worthwhile.

The ice cream machine made its entrance a year ago to much hilarity among friends and colleagues who assumed, perhaps accurately, that my brain had gone into meltdown.

I’d outbid a Michelin-starred chef while another cook whose restaurant also features in the Little Red Book offered to buy it off me. “Call me when you get bored,” he said. Two fellas – tens of thousands of customers a year each – and little old me: a guy who’s all about savoury, not sweet, and can now make sensational ice cream whenever the mood takes. Good job summer’s coming, eh. I’d better stock up on vanilla.

Junk food, sales and bargain items and home décor are the most popular shopping-without-thinking items for the cerebrally-disconnected. Though I like to think I’ve widened the net by introducing left-field thinking to the field of ‘impulse buying’.

On a weekend trip to Brighton many years ago, I re-enacted a classic TV ad for Impulse women’s deodorant. The ad featured a guy who’d been trying to make an urgent phone call but was unable to use the public call box – yes, they used to exist – because a particularly attractive woman was making a call. Rather than stand in line, he dashed across to the local flower stall, picked up some summer blooms, then dashed after her with the gift. No agenda. No solicitation for a date. He bought them just because. The narrator drawled: “When a man you’ve never met before suddenly gives you flowers, you know it’s Impulse.”

Or, maybe he’s probably nuts.

On the pebbled beach of Brighton, I spied the goddess Venus and made a similar dash. The only trouble is, Brighton’s full of great restaurants, interesting knick knack shops, independent jewellers – she was nice, she wasn’t that nice – and clothes shops.

Finding a florist when you’re committing an indiscriminate act of kindness is like trying to change a tyre when you’re foot-deep in mud. By the time I’d found one, Venus had disappeared and the flowers filled my living room for a week. Nice. You gotta love lilies.

Not to be defeated, I attempted a second Impulse recreation with a shop assistant at Habitat, in Birmingham. She smiled as I presented the flowers, as though she’d won the Lottery. Happily, she was surrounded by vases in which to put them.

In the present decade, impulse buys usually occur in drink, late at night and involve the internet. People judge the size of the previous evening’s party by whether or not they’ve woken unexpectedly to a full set of Pokemon Go cards, a weekend in Barcelona or a brand spanking new set of night vision goggles. Buy-It-Now.

Ice cream machines and brown sofas also make the list. And that’s because of idiot newspaper columnists and impulsive BBC Radio 2 DJs.