don't panic

Today apparently was Panic Saturday, but I must have missed it.  I had an errand to run in Colchester, and needed to go to the supermarket to get tomorrow's lunch (I haven't got as far as Christmas lunch yet) and was apprehensive about what the traffic would be like.  Colchester has not really got the hang of traffic.  The blame doesn't lie entirely with the council (though they don't help), in that Roman walls, a surviving Medieval street plan, a river and a bifurcating railway line all crammed together do not make a happy home for motorists.  However I needn't have worried.  Traffic in Clingoe Hill was running freely, as it was along the inner bypass and around the dreaded North Station roundabout, and wherever people were panicking and shopping, it wasn't Waitrose.

I have not only finished my shopping, I have wrapped it up.  The task is made easier by the fact that I don't have many people to buy for, but I didn't start until the second half of November.  A few edibles were bought in person, but almost everything came courtesy of the internet.  Three cheers for search engines.  Apart from the sheer horror of battling your way the length of Oxford Street on the Saturday before Christmas, most of the Systems Administrator's presents are hobby or interest related, and I doubt there's a high street in the land where I could have bought them.  And since they are supposed to be a surprise, I can't say any more about them.

I haven't usually finished my wrapping this far in advance, and the only reason I've already done it this year is that I thought I might as well take advantage of a day when the SA was out to use the kitchen table and wrap in comfort instead of crawling around on the bedroom floor getting a stiff back and fluff on the sellotape.  And I was looking for lightweight, wrist-saving jobs because I couldn't garden with my sprained arm.  Which is now much better.

Panic Saturday still hadn't really got going in Colchester's out-of-town stores this afternoon, or at least the SA went to Homebase to buy some cheap wooden bookcases, and returned in record time, barely longer than the duration of Dvorak's string quartet in G major.  I know that because the SA came into the kitchen to say that he was going out just after I'd blasted out the opening bars at an unexpectedly high volume, and his car rolled up outside the kitchen window barely into the first movement of the American quartet which comes next on the album.  I assumed that the SA was returning empty handed after such a short trip, and that Homebase must have run out of bookcases, but it turned out that there was still virtually no traffic on the road and that the SA had been almost their only customer.

I was in the kitchen to make tomorrow's pudding, but I can't say what that is either in case my mother is reading this.  It's a surprise.

Addendum  The electric zapper got a mouse last night, and another the night before.  That's three on consecutive nights.  The garage must have been absolutely overrun.  Perhaps it still is, three down and who knows how many more to go?