If you walk along 29th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues,...

If you walk along 29th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, in New York, you pass one store after another that sells everything you never needed. The problem is that I find so much of it irresistible. I have no need for any of the products in any of the  stores. Yet I am almost hypnotized by what is for sale in this street. One of the stores sells glittering, beaded handbags. The sort you would take to a ball or to the opera. I don’t go to balls, although I have had the odd fantasy of going to a ball, in Vienna, in the ball season. And the last time I went to the opera was over a decade ago. One of the bags had what looked like the face of an owl on the front. It was particularly hard to walk past that bag.
 
A few doors down you could buy bags with the fake gold-coated skeletal bones of a human hand on the front. They looked so weird and were weirdly compelling. I had to drag myself past that shop.