Highlights: The 109-piece Gordon Collection, on offer here as part of Christie's British Art Week, was assembled by a Scottish family following an initial purchase in 1973 of a 200-year-old John Smart miniature depicting the Hon. John Douglas of the 1st Foot Guards. It Homecoming Dresses as lot 57 with an estimate of GBP6,000-GBP8,000. Miniature connoisseurs, however, will be more interested in Nicholas Hilliard's stunningly detailed, 55mm painting of a 16-year-old woman which was once in the collection of the Duke of Beaufort. It could make up to GBP70,000, while "A Gentleman called Inigo Jones" by John Hoskins is expected to fetch GBP20,000-GBP30,000. Those on an appropriately small budget, however, might Short Prom Dresses to content themselves with miniatures such as "A Lady" by Sarah Biffin, a remarkable miniaturist who was born without arms but learnt to paint with her mouth (GBP600-GBP800), or "A Young Gentleman" by an unknown late 18th-century artist of the English school. It is on offer for GBP400.

When I was a child and money was tight, I used to think that waste was what really lay at the gleaming heart of luxury. I looked up to school friends whose houses were heated to shorts-and-T-shirt levels in December - anything flagrant seemed awfully glamorous to me. Even now I love a room flooded with natural light that is also artificially lit. I like an open window next to a roaring fire. I like coming down the morning after a feast to see half the lobsters still untouched and flame-coloured against the white linen. Prom Dresses 2012 of my favourite advertisements of all time was "I'd like to buy the world a Coke". It seemed such a lovely idea.

I know now, however, that I am not allowed to marvel at such squandering any more, so it's off with the lights as I leave a room, off with the radio. It's recycling and insulation and electric cars and trying to make the right amount of food and not three times too much - but oh, the White Prom Dresses of incaution, of excesses, of insurmountable leftovers and insane attention to detail that no one really notices apart from me.

In New York this week, I felt a frisson of this rather self-indulgent wastefulness by luxuriating in - and this is me, remember - no shopping at all. All around, the stores flashed and bulged with alluring gems and gowns at knock-down prices that were practically yearning for me, but I wasn't having any of it. I squandered my opportunities, abandoned my retail responsibilities. Let other girls dwell on gilt and luxury, I thought, I have holiday-making to do. Not shopping seemed marvellously extravagant all of a sudden, especially in New York. I could travel 20 blocks to buy my Chantecaille face cream for 35 per cent of the London price but what would be holiday-ish about that? I could buy American-designed dresses I quite like for Yellow Prom Dresses their London cost - but what would that achieve exactly? That would almost be work.

With no shopping to do, New York was better than ever. The Dutch painting exhibition at the Met was both startling and familiar when not sandwiched between shoe sprees. The dark high spirits of the Richard Princes at the Guggenheim were very reviving, and would have been less so had I been carrying sharp-cornered shopping bags around the circular gallery's tiers. With no shopping, I could dawdle in Central Park playgrounds with the massive ranks of nannies whose company I adore. I like eating sweets with my daughters in front of Upper East Side children who've been told from birth that sugar means certain death.