Christmas Shopping
After W finally arrived home from getting her hair cut this morning (it somehow took 4 hours), I raced out of the house with our eldest to go Christmas shopping. Caught between running for the bus, or running for the train, we chose the former in the knowledge that if we didn't make it, we would also miss the train. We made it with seconds to spare.
Town was crazy. I know there are only a few days left until Christmas, but still... crazy. It's funny – I noticed a few moments ago that a friend who works in GAP mentioned about the – how do we put this – “alternative” people that were out today, with their other halves. Her thought was “Oh look – they found somebody”. While many might think that prejudiced, I kind of agree with her – everybody needs somebody – and the same was true of the people we say out in their thousands today. Sure, there were the usual hipsters with expendable income, but there were also the normal people – the ones you don't normally see “out shopping”. It made me smile.
After half an hour searching fruitlessly for a “Onesie” (I probably spelled it wrong – think “huge one-piece pyjamas”), our eldest started to complain. Apparently the same shop we were looking in (a huge PriMark) had the thing she was looking for a month ago, and her brain couldn't compute that somebody else had bought anything in the past month. Eventually she changed the subject;
“I'm really thirsty”.
“Ok – I have to get cash though – I can't buy a drink on a credit card”
“But I'm really thirsty”
“Yes – I'm going to get cash now – then we'll get you a drink”
“But I'm really thirsty now!”
I'm not sure how I didn't lose it with her in the middle of the street. Her “end of the world” shenanigans got compounded when we were stood in a queue for a cashpoint, and I watched four people in a row feed their details in, only to see a variety of error messages. I turned around and told the rest of the queue. As I walked away, I watched the next person carry on like a lemming. They appeared behind me 200 yards down the road at the next bank a few minutes later, and I couldn't help smiling (well... as much as I could smile with a twelve year old complaining non-stop at my heel).
We finally arrived in a packed cafe ten minutes later, ordering some toxic coloured slushy. She finally shut up.
The rest of the afternoon was uneventful. Queue after queue among thousands of pushy, rude, ignorant customers in various stores. I really don't know how retail staff do it – how they stop themselves from reacting. I saw somebody kick over a stack of DVDs in one store, turn around, and swear blind that they didn't do it. Most entertaining person of the day was a drunk tramp, stumbling towards the shops, screaming abuse, while security staff appeared from several directions to divert him from their squeaky clean fake stores.
Favourite moment of the day was our eldest daughter spotting a woman with a big piercing in her ear, and staring. As we walked away she wouldn't shut up about how disgusting it was. I'm wondering if her prudishness will disappear as she gets older, and discovers short skirts, “inventive” underwear, tattoos, and the many and varied piercings that follow naturally from the skateboard inspired clothes she seems so happy wearing.
So. Here I am. It's now heading towards midnight, and I'm home alone again. W is out with an ex colleague in town, and I'm looking after the children. Rocky 3 is on the TV, the presents I bought earlier are wrapped, the house is relatively tidy, the washing up is done, and I've drunk most of a bottle of wine.
Roll on tomorrow.