And so it comes to this (again) …
Life’s a funny old game, isn’t it?
I hesitate to come out of the woods with my hands up in order to confess that I’m a curmudgeonly old sod but the honest truth I’ve never really been one for personal celebrations or indeed “jolly, festive occasions” generally.
My parents insisted that I had a (“coming of age”) party upon my 18th birthday, this against my oft-stated wishes.
I retaliated by “falling unwell” during the morning of the date in question and remained in bed throughout it – and afterwards made myself a solemn pledge that, if I ever grew up, I would never again have a birthday party again.
To be fair, I didn’t quite manage it!
On my 40th birthday my then wife organised a surprise dinner party that completely fooled me. I returned home from work that evening to find three guest couples already there waiting to celebrate the occasion and was trapped.
But, to be fair, in the event I actually quite enjoyed it.
That admitted, for the past thirty-two years I have tried to keep my Christmas Days and New Year’s Eves low-key and without incident.
They’re both “just another day”.
I’m in bed by 9.30pm latest every New Year’s Eve, just as I am on all 364 others (save during leap years, of course, when it’s 365!).
Which brings me to the nightmare of Christmas 2023.
I spent last Friday shopping amongst the Great Unwashed in a large, well-known city, on the south coast of England. It was a slog of epic proportions.
I don’t encourage being given Christmas presents by anyone, simply because I already possess everything that I would ever need or want and –if ever I’m proved wrong on this – I simply go out and buy whatever-it-is.
That said, last Friday I decided to buy myself two pairs of trainers, I therefore went into a high street sports clothing shop for the purpose.
It was rammed with shoppers. Choosing the first pair of trainers took me ten minutes, choosing the second just three.
I took shelf examples of both to a shop assistant and asked for pairs in size 9. He took at least 15 minutes to return with these in two boxes.
I then went to the payment counter. Three ladies on duty and at least a dozen people (some accompanied by children) in the queue to pay.
Five minutes at the back of this queue convinced me that I would struggle to get served in less that half an hour, so I left it, found another staffer and asked if there was anywhere else I could pay because I was under extreme time pressure. He suggested “Upstairs: very few people go up there …”.
So I did. This time there was only one lady at a single till – and nine people in the queue to pay, the first of whom was seemingly describing in great deal her last holiday break in Lanzarote and taking ages about it. I immediately turned to my right, placed my boxes of trainers on a nearby shelf, found my way (with some difficulty) to the ground floor and walked straight out of the store.
Next, I went to buy myself a restorative double expresso coffee “to go” at what might be described as an artisan-type café.
Due to the crush of people inside, it took eight minutes to place my order and another twenty more spent, standing to one side, to receive my now tepid brew!
You couldn’t make this sort of thing up.
With a good deal of foreboding, I then found my next stop was to be a well-known supermarket close to the dreaded A27 arterial road.
Here the number of shoppers was so great that (1) it was almost impossible to find a space in which to park; (2) trying to steer a large trolley down the aisles was virtually impossible. Chaos and resulting frustration was rife all round.
When some 90 minutes and counting later the time came to pay, the queues to the check-out were five to ten deep at every station.
At the first which I joined a somewhat “vacant” but kindly-looking elderly lady seemed to be bidding to gain an entry in the annual Guinness Book Of World Records for a new an unassailable record as the world’s slowest shopper.
So I moved to a different check-out.
When, eventually, I reached the heady position of third in the queue at this one and was able to begin placing my purchases on the conveyor belt, the family at the front of the line, who had just bagged up their Christmas shop, had some sort of a problem in paying.
Worse, once they had departed, there was something of an hiatus whilst first a manager and then an IT expert were called to the scene. Our queue was then told that “the system had gone down” and was refusing to re-set itself … so we would just have to wait. As it turned out for another quarter of an hour – as, at all the other checkouts around us, people were paying without incident and leaving to go home to their loved one.
The five and a half hours in total that I spent shopping that day – judging solely by what I saw and experienced – convinced me that:, for the good of the nation:
FIRSTLY, the population of the UK (current total as googled just now some 67.7 million) should be reduced by a minimum of 40 million: I leave it up to the politicians to debate and decide how this should be achieved;
SECONDLY – and here I write as someone aged 72 – no person over the age of 60 should ever be allowed to go shopping on their own (unless accompanied by a carer under the age of 40 possessed of at least four “O” levels);
And lastly, THIRDLY, anyone who thinks that that the UK’s economy is bust or worse and/or that its peoples are poor, existing on the bread line, starving and/or otherwise deprived in any – let alone every – respect needs their head seriously examined. I state this because, judging solely by the quantities of festive food, drink and other items being bought in the supermarket that I visited last Friday, taken together with the proportion of morbidly-obese citizens (70%) clogging up the aisles, clearly looking forward to nothing more than another festive week of sitting on the sofa, stuffing themselves silly and watching rubbish TV programmes, right now the UK is doing pretty much okay, thank you.
