I did the Christmas shop this morning Christmas shops are not what they used to be, now that supermarket opening hours have extended so far. The useful Budgens in Elmstead Market is even open for a couple of hours on Christmas morning. It's not like the old days when the queues in Tesco used to stretch half way back up the aisles as the population panicked that they would not be able to buy anything for two whole days.
The traffic in Colchester was so light that I began to wonder if I had missed the Government warning to remain in my home and await further instructions, and I had a choice of parking spaces in the Waitrose car park. I think I was just quick off the mark, though. By the time I was waiting my turn at the till, staff were having to organise the queue of people behind me. If you could just tuck your trolley over that would let people get past, thank you madam.
The Systems Administrator did not come shopping, having a prior engagement for lunch with friends at the George and Vulture. They'll do you Welsh rarebit and a Barnsley chop, in a menu plucked straight out of Dickens. The SA did suggest we could do The Shop tomorrow, but I'm busy in the morning and thought that leaving it until the afternoon before Christmas Eve might be pushing our luck. Christmas lunch is such a highly ritualised meal that it's difficult to leave anything out or substitute something else as you would on any other day of the year, and I didn't fancy embarking on an eleventh hour pan Colchester supermarket trawl in search of a decent piece of ham.
When we both worked full time we did the weekly shop together each Saturday morning, but now that we have lunch together most days we don't need joint food retail time as well. Whoever is cooking generally shops. On Christmas day that will be the SA, who is good at roasts, whereas I struggle to get more than two dishes to be ready to eat at the same time. When I'm cooking we have mainly boiled things that can be kept hot almost indefinitely while they wait for other things to be done, or one pot meals. Not roasts. So I can look on The Shop as my contribution to the festivities. I think going supermarket shopping together is quite romantic, though. We do when we're on holiday, and I was touched to bump into a widowed friend with her new chap in Waitrose the other day. Going to concerts is one thing, but trawling up and down the pasta and pulses aisle is a sign of true togetherness.
The Christmas shop was almost but not quite successful. Waitrose do not seem to sell chestnut stuffing. At all. There wasn't even a shelf label for it and a gap in the chiller cabinet where it should have been. I grappled with the enormity of this omission for some minutes. The SA has said in the past that it's better if I do The Shop because I have more definite ideas about what we ought to eat, and that's probably right. There ought to be chestnut stuffing as well as sage and onion, which by tradition is always the dry packeted sort. After some deliberation I bought a packet of sausage meat and a packet of dried chestnuts that will keep until 2017 if not opened, so that as a last resort I could make my own. But I think tomorrow I will brave the queues in Tesco with a hand held basket and see if I can get some there. It would be easier for the SA on the day than having me fussing around the kitchen with an experimental stuffing recipe while the SA tries to cook about seventeen other things at the same time.
There was a year we bought red currant jelly by mistake instead of cranberry but it is best to draw a veil over that episode.
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