Tinselitis: Slight Return

Christmas is coming, and the goose is getting morbidly obese, and all that shite. I've left the Christmas shopping extremely late this year, on account of being potless and always at work at either my dull day job, or my glamorous art career. (If you can call it 'glamorous', or a 'career', come to that!)

I made a good start this week, but man, do I hate Christmas shopping and all the annoying crap that surrounds it. Like standing in queues and being cold, and avoiding other shoppers who decide to suddenly change direction, or worse still,just stop dead in front of you, leaving you a braking distance of about four inches. Listening to the same bloody Christmas records over and over and over again, and getting annoyed at the records that aren't Yuletide songs, but end up on these bloody festive compilations just because they had a Christmassy video, and that bothers me, for some reason. Songs like Stay Now by East 17, The Power Of Love by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Keeping The Dream Alive by Freiheit are lyrically nothing to do with the festive season!! Alright?!! Stop bloody playing them!!

I know a sound like a curmudgeonly Scrooge-type, but I hate the forced friendliness that retailers insist their staff use on us, the stressed out customers. I like the normal 'get what you want to buy, take it to the counter, pay for it, and fuck off' system thats employed the other ten months of the year. I don't want to have yuletide smalltalk with shop assistants. They don't really give a toss whether I've finished my Christmas shopping or not. I was in WH Smiths the other day, purchasing a video game for my youngest daughter. The game is based on a popular cartoon character, and the girl serving me was a big fan of this character and was filling me in on the history of him. All well and good, but by that point in my shopping hell, I really wasn't interested, I just wanted to go home. But, lo and behold, the game's barcode wouldn't scan, so she had to bugger off for ten minutes to find it, leaving me standing at the counter like a spare prick. It would've been unbearable but for the girl on the next till who was wearing a rather revealing blouse (apologies for the Sid James-type sexism that will follow) and kept bending down to get carrier bags and showing me her 'goods', so to speak. Smiths have a campaign at the moment in which they donate some money or something to help plant trees every time someone refuses a carrier bag, so I was getting annoyed at the do-gooders who wanted to save the environment, because it meant the girl wasn't bending down to get a bag. I was thinking 'bollocks to the environment!' (I know I'm sounding like an old lech, but you really can't argue with the truth.)
Anyway, the more sombrely dressed girl who was serving me came back with the appropriate barcode and proceeded to tell me all about an old college friend of hers who asked for her mobile number, but she wouldn't give it to him because he didn't phone her up the last time she gave him her number. I don't care, just take my money and let me go home!! For fuck's sake!!

Also, during a shopping expedition, I bumped into my eldest daughter, who was buying gifts for her schoolfriends, and she also happened to be with her boyfriend. Now, the other day, after finding out she had a boyfriend, I jokingly said to her (acting like all the fathers of girls I've been out with, and once, I even met the father of my girlfriend for the first time after I'd already impregnated her. That was fun!) that if I ever met him, I'd rip his balls off. I was only joking, really! Anyway, she told him what I'd said, the devious little cow, so when I bumped into them in the BullRing shopping Mall, he promptly turned about face and fled. Surely I'm not that scary! I feel bad now. I've still not finished my shopping, either.

Anyway, despite all this, I do like Christmas, and I hope all of you out there that actually take the time to read the cobblers I write, have a great Christmas and an even better New Year, and remember, enjoy alcohol responsibly!