Well, I’m trying to. Me and Justin Timberlake. It’s been a big month in my shopping world. Highs and lows. The good or possibly bad news is that my shopping addiction has returned from the eighteen months it spent languishing in rehab. And after spending most of last year pregnant and most of this year breast-feeding, I was starting to wonder if it would ever come back. Would I ever want to shop again? At one point, I confessed to my best friend that I thought I’d have to give up this column because I simply didn’t care about clothes anymore. True.

For a long time I became one of those people who’d rather look at a tree than a shop. One of those people who think fashion is stupid. One of those people who look at girls wearing jumpsuits and pinafores and leggings and wonder “are they on crack?”

But while part of me felt slightly superior and smug about no longer being at the mercy of the fashion cycle, another part of me was mildly alarmed. When you removed clothes, fashion magazines and shopping from my life, there was a rather large hole called “hobbies”.

When my urge to shop did finally come back, it was with gusto. It all started with my breasts.  When I was pregnant and then breastfeeding, my boobs took on a life of their own. They were huge basically. Not being a big-breasted girl normally, I was a bit intimidated by them. They seemed to mock everything I tried to put them in. I can appreciate breasts looking sexy on other women but on my body, I associate big hooters with fertility and lactation.

Two things happened when my daughter reached about seven months: I stopped breastfeeding and she started sleeping through the night (not of her own accord, mind you, but because I hired a magic baby sleeping lady to teach her).

Anyway, those two things had a huge impact. The sleeping made me feel human and the deflating of my breasts from fun-bags to windsocks made me feel…more like my old self. This was bittersweet at first because I loved being pregnant and I loved breast-feeding and I was a bit devastated those chapters with my baby were ending. Each time I’d catch sight of my little windsocks in the mirror I would cry.

But after a week I got over it and my sadness was replaced with a little twitch. I didn’t know what it was at first, so unfamiliar did it feel. Gradually, it dawned on me. This twitch was a creeping desire to reclaim myself and my wardrobe from the warm, all-consuming embrace of brand new motherhood. I was ready to shop, dammit. And I was ready to get in touch with a side of myself I’d put to bed many many months ago: the sexy side.

My objective, as a happily married mother, was clearly not to pick up. It wasn’t even about my husband. It was simply about wanting to feel sexy. To bring my sexy back from the milky, sleep-deprived months from which I’d just emerged, blinking. But this was easier said than done.

How do you look sexy? I forget. Ironically, my initial inspiration came from a friend in her fifties. At a party recently, she’d rocked up in a killer pair of new black Sass & Bide jeans that were quite skinny but not skin-tight skinny, with studs at the bottom. She teamed them with great boots and a leather jacket. She looked utterly appropriate and utterly hot. I was wearing an old pair of Diesel jeans and a kaftan top that night and I felt positively 2002 next to her modern sexiness.

Jeans are a crucial part of dressing sexy. The right jeans. And while I’d barely been following fashion for the past year, I did know instinctively that all my jeans were wrong, wrong, wrong.  From my Sevens to my Paper Denim Cloths, my Diesels, my Lees my Notifys, my Blue Cults  and my Sass & Bides….they were all bootlegs and all wrong. It’s hard to feel sexy when your jeans are wrong and mine patently were.

That’s how I found myself in the change-room at Sass & Bide’s Paddington store one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago. I’d just had my hair cut which, as every girl knows, is a dangerous time to go shopping. When your hair looks good in the way it only can after a professional blow-dry, almost anything you put on will look hotter than it actually does. It’s a trick and a trap and I almost fell into it hair first.

I bought the black jeans I’d seen my friend wearing and nearly splurged on two other pairs (white straight legs and dark denim skinny legs) before coming to my senses and putting on the baseball cap I’d worn to the hairdresser. Even with my hair obscured and my sense restored, I glimpsed a side of myself in that change-room mirror I hadn’t seen for a long, long time. The sexy side.

It was a huge surprise to remember I used to be an independent entity away from my children and my tracksuit pants. Enchanted with this new image of myself, I bought the jeans and then wandered next door and bought a fitted shirt and some wooden soled high sandals.

This was more than I’d bought in the previous six months combined. Typically, it doesn’t rain it pours. Famine or flood, is that what they say? Having woken my sleeping shopping beast it was only a short stroll down to Scanlan and Theodore, where I hadn’t been for more than a year. Did I just imagine the twinkle I think I saw in the sales assistants’ eyes? Or were they genuinely happy to see me? And my credit card……