Online clothes shopping for fat men

When you weigh an ounce or two more than 20 stones (that's 280 pounds for our Western neighbours... or nearly 128 kilos for our Eastern ones), you eventually come around to the conclusion that the local Dunnes Stores just isn't going to have a good supply of summer clothing that covers your beer belly.

The "smallest" size I can wear these days in tops or teeshirts is XXXL. Now, either the news reports about the slobbering spread of obesity in the Western world isn't getting through to the store buyers, or there are a heck of a lot of slightly built, fit building workers still roaming about. I say this because any given day there is hardly room to manoeuvre around displays of S, M and L sizes in the Menswear departments.

It's like finding a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket to see an XXXL label on a teeshirt in our local shopping centres. I almost knocked Herself over a couple of weeks ago on seeing two (count them!) at the bottom of a pile of polo shirts.

So I've turned to the Internet for summer clothes. Lately I visited a UK-based site, bigteeshirt.co.uk, where I purchased the above classy number. I'll be wearing it this June Bank Holiday weekend as I tend the barbeque and no doubt shall be the life and soul of the party in it for.... oh.... two whole minutes, maybe.

Apart from the printed tees, the site supplies various coloured styles and other clothes up to 13XL sizes. (I'd like to see a label that says XXXXXXXXXXXXXL....!)

The "Anorexia" tee is available at £12.99 (€16.54) with postage and packing extra. In all I chose 5 items: "Anorexia"; the Duke Spirit Linen Mix, the Espionage Cotton tee, and two Izod Cotton Polo Shirts. The whole came to £72.95 (€93.00) inclusive of postage and packing.

By the way, €93.00 would purchase fifteen and a half summer tee shirts of good quality in my local Dunnes Stores outlet. Money sent abroad because they don't cater for my size. Think on, Department Store owners!

Everything came through in good time and good order, with the slight exception of the Izod shirts. The Website also caters for the TALL man as well as the wide, and Herself has been looking askance at me in my brightly coloured cotton dresses. I show her the maker's label and say:

"This is the style in Pakistan!"

But she isn't persuaded. So the moral of the story is to read the Sizing charts provided on the site and do as much online examination of the product as possible before placing an order. I'll definitely be shopping there again.

One might well ask why it is I'm paying for UK Sterling-priced products given the weakness of the US Dollar against the Euro. Well, the US-based sites I visited seem not to be aware of the rest of the world as a potential market. "There is no postal rate for your area" one online ordering system told me. "You'll be contacted with the details of the additional cost once your order is placed."

"One pig in a poke, please!"

Or, if they do, they equate the distance travelled in the post to be roughly equivalent to a trip from Earth to Mars, making the postage and packing rates wildly expensive.

If anyone locates a reasonably-priced US site that sells tees to places outside the USA, please let me know.

E-Bay is another place I've looked, again with mixed results. One guy had an offer of six teeshirts from his online shop for £40 Sterling and wanted another £40 p&p to send it 100 miles to Ireland!

We're not getting thinner, only poorer, it seems. I'm off now to get the garden into order for Sunday's barbie.

Have a great weekend!

Who do you do?

If you could be someone else for a while, who would it be?

Second Life, the "3D online virtual world", claims to have 50,000 people finding out the answer to this any given day.

The online world, which is free to explore, allows visitors to create a fantasy representative of themselves, called an avatar. Avatars come in basic patterns which can be modifed in appearance and dress. To explore the world, one sends one's avatar from place to place, on foot, driving, even flying, and in the process you get to see what other people have made in the form of virtual villages, shopping malls, gardens, apartments and houses. Avatars may "speak" with each other, dance, attend events. There is also a Second Life economy, based on imaginary land ownership and the Linden Dollar. Visitors may earn some play money for their online excursions or spend real cash to extend their character's possessions into buildings or to purchase an island of their very own.

Real world educators and charities have used Second Life to spread their message and to earn some real cash from donations. Bands have played Second Life concerts. I have visited a space centre and an ecological project where I've been lectured on wise use of fossil fuels. I've also had my male avatar kissed passionately by another male avatar quite unexpectedly, and been chased by a maniac in a steam roller! My character, Si Lytton, has also come fourth in a bull-riding machine hall of fame, failed miserably at managing to ice skate and spent 20 minutes sitting with a robot having a conversation about shoes.

Visit it. Take a look. See what you like or don't like.

You need to download some software to create an avatar and visit Second Life.

I'll be at Cheerz Bar, learning to dance.

Unravelling the arcane world of Amazon.co.uk

Herself was sent an email from Amazon.co.uk to say her sister had kindly purchased a Gift Certificate in her name. Luckily, it has a 12-month expiry, because we'd never shopped on Amazon or any other online store before, and naturally ran into several Newbie pitfalls at first.

First among these was imagining that the Gift Certificate could be used to purchase any item on the Amazon site. It can't. In fact, it can only be used to purchase items available directly from Amazon (and only amazon.co.uk, as it happened). So the information on the site about the number of "New and Used" items turns out to be irrelevant -- you're going to buy it new and that's it.

Even then, buying new can have its own traps. Usually within an ace of completing the purchase process, a "There's a Problem" message appears. If you're buying from amazon.co.uk it appears that even stock shipping from a Jersey island amazon outlet is off limits.

However, problems notwithstanding, we have managed to muddle our way to getting a 4 Disc DVD set of Brideshead Revisited (looking forward to viewing that again after all these years) and also a music DVD, including tax, postage and packing, all for only £24.96 sterling.

For the fiscally challenged such as we, there is an unrelated-to-amazon option of purchasing vouchers from agents of the Permanent TSB 3V system which substitute for a Visa card when purchasing online. As the list of mouth-watering goodies online has now started to pique my interest, I think I may look more into this option. There is a shop selling such vouchers five minutes walk from the office.

Oh my poor bank balance...!