Oops! What a bunch of silly clowns we were! We would forget our noses if they weren't screwed on. In fact, on Buy Nothing Day we actually forgot our own clown face paint! Fancy that! The embaressment! Whoa! So we decided our first port of call for the day would be the John Lewis mega store where there were many many (many many) many many people shopping.

My little clown heart goes out to how generous the John Lewis company is in when it comes time to celebrate Buy Nothing Day. The Oxford Street store celebrated by actually giving away free make-up to clowns! How great is that? They had a special place for clowns to get prepared at a stall with "make up testers" written above it.

There were many fabulous colours to choose from. Mostly, we choose white and red. We did really go a little bit overboard away I'm afraid and the lovely men from the Security Gaggle came up and told us "Hey, be nice clowns. Let some of the others have a turn on the make-up, you'll have to leave now". How right they were. It was Buy Nothing Day after all and we wouldn't want to be little clown piggies. Besides, our faces were almost completely white and we had stars and rainbows and pretty spirals so we said "Okay Security Gaggle, we'll go now and make room for others to also Buy Nothing".

Even leaving a shop like John Lewis can be a great fun game. Here's how you play: When the man in the security gaggle says "You'll all have to leave now" the fun comes when we clowns all call out to the other people in the store and say "You'll all have to leave now!" That game I'm sure could provide hours of fun and liven up even the most boring day out shopping. Try it.

As we were leaving, it occurred to us that some people in the store didn't actually know it was Buy Nothing Day, so on our way out we told them and encouraged each of them to celebrate it in their own special way.

Then....

Next we decided to break up into small groups - gaggles of two clowns and go and see which stores we could have the most fun in. Major Red Alert and I, being very vain clowns (we're vain because we're beautiful) decided to touch up our make up and make ourselves even more fabulous. So our next venue for celebrating Buy Nothing Day was, of course, the Boots Pharmacy. What a great bunch of people the management of Boots are.

Perhaps inspired by their John Lewis brothers and sisters, Boots also had decided to give away free make-up to clowns on Buy Nothing Day! Once Major Red Alert and I had our finishing touches in place (and the nice security men asking us to leave because I think they wanted a turn on the make-up themselves), we left and rejoined the rest of our gaggle. All together again, and beautiful, we swapped stories and tried to decide where to buy nothing next.

Group Hug!

The next place we bought nothing was in the fantastic coffee shop known as "Starbucks Coffee." There were many many friendly folk in there. They were so friendly we decided to play lots of games with them and even had a fantastic clown Group Hug! Oh What fun it was!

Pssst! Don't tell your mummies about this, but you can make a rude joke in Starbucks by colouring out some of the letters on the cups. I showed everyone in the store this trick. Take a look at how clever it is:

(pics at  http://paganarchy.net/blogs/sean.php/2005/12/01/buy_nothing_day show "Starbucks Coffee" morph into "Fuck Off")

That's so clever! I wish I had thought of it!

Okay my friends, that's the end of Part I. Stay tuned over the next few days to read more about how on Buy Nothing Day our clown gaggle put a final end to global long-term over-consumption. You'll be glad you did!