Spend it like Beckham

David Beckham is clearly as much of a whiz in the shops as he is on the pitch. The Manchester United ace reportedly blew £10,000 in a 10-minute bout of consoling retail therapy at his local Armani outlet after the humiliation of only playing as a substitute in the Champions League match against Real Madrid.

Even more astonishing than the speed and the sum involved was that Becks ended up with only six items to show for his money - a jacket, three shirts, and two pairs of trousers.

All I can say is that he must have the same unerring instinct for pricey clobber as he does for putting a free kick straight into the back of goal. My own attempt to spend it like Beckham in a 10-minute dash around Emporio Armani in Brompton Road suggested it is actually quite hard to blow 10 big ones in even the most elevated designer store.

Here, for instance, was a beige biker-style jacket in butter-soft leather, costing a paltry £579. A bit beyond my budget, but a mere drop in the ocean to a man who is, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, worth around £50 million.

The trousers all seemed to cost a couple of hundred quid, though I could presumably have increased the cost by asking to have them let out to accommodate my bigger-than-Beckham waistline. I alighted on a distressed leather coat adorned with straps and zips in a particularly horrible shade of brown. The price tag came in at just under £1,000, so I'd have had to buy 10 of them to even come close to Becks's total.

When told about Beckham's latest spree, the cashier serving me said: "If he spent that amount here I reckon we'd all have heart attacks." Was it possible to blow 10 grand in 10 minutes at Armani? "The suits can be expensive," she said. The really pricey stuff is in the women's section. But Posh doesn't wear our things - she's a Dolce and Gabbana girl."