why I love Christmas

On the way back from the work Christmas meal (one of them) we got stuck behind a slow-moving learner driver whose school was (ironically) named 'XLR8'. No doubt they were right to keep the speed down; certainly it doesn't seem the most suitable name for a driving school, as if you would get in the car for the first time and the instructor would say: 'The first rule of driving is - accelerate!' And off you'd go.

Christmas is really here again it seems. I went to London in search of the odd gift. I had a specific type of hat in mind, but it must have suddenly gone out of fashion, or alternatively had become so incredibly fashionable that everyone had bought it, because it was very hard to find. Plenty were visible, but always on the heads of fellow shoppers, and I couldn't just rip them off their heads. Could I?

In my increasingly wearisome travels I found it necessary to adopt a rule of thumb: if the dummies don't have heads, the shop probably doesn't sell hats. It didn't help much. One thing I did discover was that it is a lot easier to find the way into shops than it is to find the way out. It's almost as if they planned it like that. While I was trying to escape one place, a man with a European accent asked me if I was looking for something for 'a special lady'. Such was his unctuous tone, it was almost as if he was asking if I wanted 'a special lady', which he, for a fee, would procure. I reacted in 'how very dare you' horror, telling him I was looking for a present for my Mum - as if there were a clear distinction between my Mum and 'a special lady'. He persisted, and asked to look at my fingernails. What mad universe was this? I fled, screaming - to Dorothy Perkins.