This morning's post produced another small flurry of Christmas cards. I was pleased to find one from an old school friend with whom I have just, miraculously, stayed in touch for over thirty years while she clawed her way up to a partnership in a City law firm, and produced three children, the oldest now at university. I don't know at what age City partners are expected to make way for the next up-and-coming generation of solicitors, but I reckon that if we can keep it up for another decade she'll be retired and with the children all launched into the world, and we might finally have time to go out to lunch or to some museums. I fancy Carlyle's house. Still haven't been there yet, so what's another ten years?
We also received the sort of utterly pointless card that gives the ritual sending of cards a bad name. It was not strictly speaking for us, although the envelope had the name of our house on it and the postman put it through our letterbox, since it was addressed to the couple we bought the house from. They moved out nineteen years ago, and she has been dead for two years. For many years I used to take post round for them which arrived here, which they seemed to appreciate since as he pointed out, their friends were getting on and sometimes got a bit muddled. After about a dozen years or so of redirecting mail I began to feel that anyone who still hadn't twigged that they'd moved couldn't be a very close friend. But who on earth wants a card addressed to him and his dead wife at a house he left nearly two decades ago?
The Systems Administrator produced a little clutch of cards from a coat pocket, left there since the office reunion on Thursday night. I exclaimed that Eileen had sent us a Christmas card, and we hadn't given her one, but the SA said matter of factly that Eileen always sent a card. I have never, ever written a card for Eileen and George, and the SA never sends cards at all, so she must be resigned by now to the one-sided exchange to keep doing it.
I went to Waitrose to do the last stage of the Christmas shop. Actually, I spent virtually the entire morning in Waitrose. I began to work out that it was going to be busy when I had to hover in the car park just to get a space. Fortunately because it was Waitrose all the other customers were very polite about holding back and letting whoever was waiting for the space have first dibs at it. There were no trolleys by the store entrance and I had to go and retrieve one from the car park.
Waitrose was bedlam. There were already queues stretching back literally half way up the aisles. I only went in there for a gammon joint and some nuts, since their gammons and nibbles are better than Tesco, but once I'd looked at the size of the queue I decided I was buying everything on the list. I certainly wasn't going to wait in that queue so that afterwards I could go and wait again in a Tesco queue. Finding everything on the list took a long time, partly because I don't know where most things in Waitrose are, and partly because the aisles were blocked by the queues for the tills.
The basics were starting to run out. Staff were replenishing shelves of brandy sauce and other festive fare as quickly as they could, but there was almost no tinned cat food left, and only one packet of firelighters. They were the unwrapped sort that make your fingers smell when you lay the fire, and they were right at the back of a top shelf where I had to ask a member of staff to reach them for me, because I couldn't. I waited until somebody tall came by, and he could only just touch them
I thought I was going to be defeated by the fresh orange juice, which I wanted to mix with cava on Christmas morning. We always have orange juice and fizz then, while opening the presents. The fruit juice section was close to the checkouts and jam-packed with queuing trolleys, and I had to ask the woman to move whose trolley was blocking the orange juice and who was too busy telling someone on her mobile phone how bad the queue was to think of getting out of the way, as I reached over her mountain of shopping trying to pick up bottles of OJ with my fingertips. The bottles at the front of the shelf were all best before 23 December, and I cursed inwardly, thinking that I was not going through these queues again just to buy orange juice. I searched the bottles at the back of the shelf, which Waitrose do not want me to do because they want to sell the shortest dated ones first, and managed to find two that were good until Christmas day.
The only example of bad behaviour was in the cheese section, where two small boys were playing with the packets of cheese on the bottom shelf as if they were toy bricks. I stared at them in distaste and some disbelief, thinking that they couldn't be out by themselves at that age and that someone ought to be in charge of them. A woman standing nearby didn't look as though they were anything to do with her. I caught the eye of a man standing just down the aisle, my expression conveying my opinion that children were revolting, playing like that with food that other people were going to buy, and they turned out to be his. Having previously watched unconcerned as his offspring trashed the cheese section he finally told them to move out of the way. Sir, my taxes go towards paying child benefit and child tax credits and god knows what other entitlements towards the costs of raising the next generation. The least you can do is keep them under control in public, particularly where food's involved.
I think we have enough. Well, I'm sure that we have more than enough. We have sufficient food to keep us going for a fortnight. The question is more whether we have all the right food, or whether some vital part of the ritual meal will be found to be lacking at the eleventh hour. I don't think it will be, but if it is we will jolly well have to improvise and start a new tradition, because I am not going back into a supermarket between now and December 27.
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