Bah Humbug

I've been Christmas shopping. I love wrestling through crowds of ignorant people to buy over-priced crap, and circling car parks for hours trying to find somewhere to put the car. Shopping in Woolworths is currently a full contact sport. You really don't want to be going in there with children by the way, your life expectancy plummets.

Yes it's that time of year again. A walk from one end of the high-street to the other now includes about a dozen father Christmases shaking collecting tins at you, and a selection of assorted weirdos bent on saving you from eternal damnation. I was so pleased to see that the Lapland theme park in The New Forest was shut down last week after violence erupted. Father Christmas was reportedly assaulted by angry visitors, and an elf was 'smacked in the mouth' according to one security guard. I so wish that had been caught on film. I saw a very pissed-off looking elf sitting on a toadstool outside Santa's Grotto at the Swindon Outlet Village yesterday. It was the highlight of my afternoon.

In an effort to buy something achingly funny for Christmas for my brother on Saturday I purchased a pair of National Geographic, Night Vision Goggles. I thought we could play murder in the dark on Christmas night or something. However, if you're reading this Nick, don't get excited/disappointed, I took them back. They were horse-shit! I don't know what I was thinking. I saw "Night Vision" and assumed that you could see in the dark with them. Alas no, apparently in this sense "Night Vision" is a euphemism for "Plastic Joke-Shop Glasses with a Light on the Front". I've written a suitably sarcastic email to National Geographic pointing out that they should be ashamed of their marketing methods, and I've dropped a line to the ASA.

Swindon Town Council were planning to errect a 40ft Christmas tree in the centre of the town's Magic Roundabout this weekend. It turned into a farce however because the tree they received was too big for the base they had built and it broke. No doubt Swindon police managed to cause chaos and close the road for hours. I didn't notice. I must have been fighting other happy Christmas shoppers in Woolworths at the time.

Also this weekend, I made an awesome fish pie with two, yes two, types of fish and prawns. And I made the white sauce from scratch. It doesn't get much better than that.