Blog 118. Here Comes Santa Claus

“Don’t be a grump.  It’s payback time”.

Thus spake Mrs Shacklepin as we transited from a windswept overflow carpark, trudged through mud and gravel, and overtook droves of yummy mummies pushing prams to the entrance of The Big Garden Centre.  Naturally, I terminated my mild verbal observations immediately and pondered on the reference to ‘payback time’.  I had wondered if that bacon and egg breakfast had been too good to be true, and I had been right to be suspicious – how could I fall into the trap yet again?.

We were visiting The Big Garden Centre to find an angel.  One might reasonably expect to find such a heavenly being in the local church, given the right conditions, and it would probably have been a milder experience; but, no, it wasn’t a real angel that we sought, it was one for the top of our forthcoming Christmas tree.  You guessed that already, didn’t you?  I normally avoid The Big Garden Centre near our town like the plague because it is always such an ordeal to go there. I had not visited for years, encouraging Jane to go without me, perhaps taking a little friend for company, so that she can look at the plant pots, the tiger lilies, the cushions, the candles and the bags of John Innes No 3 without hindrance.  There was a time when The Big Garden Centre sold stuff only for the garden (hence the name) and it was congested even then.  Over the years, however, bits have been added to the place so that now it is less of a Garden Centre and more of a vast emporium set in the countryside: a children’s playground; a self-service restaurant that specialises in roasts (OAP discount); a pet centre; a water feature; a butcher’s, a baker’s, a candlestick maker…all have been added.  You name it, this place now sells it (except, possibly, Yorkshire fittings and spark plugs).  On the day we visited – the 22 November, take note – The Big Garden Centre had added ‘A Winter Wonderland’ to its attractions, hence the yummy mummies (most of whom were not so yummy) and, of course, us.
Well, I have to say, ‘A Winter Wonderland’ it most certainly was.  We entered a vast warm black tent that could have housed several tribes of Bedouin and still have room for Ali Baba and his forty thieves.  Life-size dioramas with moving robotic animals and androids formed the centre pieces of many little grottos. They were tucked away between vast shelves packed solid with every shape and kind of glittering, brightly lit, Christmas tree decoration you could imagine; the whole experience underpinned by Christmas music played on a continuous loop.  It must have cost the proprietors millions to buy the stock.  There were Santa Clauses, there were fairies, there were ballerinas, there were tin soldiers, there were reindeer and there were stars.  All the ornaments, including the baubles (which were the size of cricket balls), were far too big for the average suburban Christmas tree: they would look fine on a Christmas tree in Chatsworth or Windsor Castle, but would bring down that five-foot Douglas Fir balanced precariously on a stand in 5 Railway Cuttings, Little Minging.  However, that seemed to deter no-one, for the place was packed: packed with mothers, grandmothers, tiny children and a fleet of pushchairs – the last advancing two and three abreast like a miniature re-enactment of Boadicea leading the Iceni chariots against the Roman Ninth Legion. I, of course, was the only man there unless you counted the security guard.  Jane and I dived into this tortuous cavern and twisted our way through grotto after grotto, tripping over toddlers and appearing gratuitously in several family photographs.  We searched and searched for the perfect archangel, seraph or seraphim for the top of our Christmas tree; we would even have settled for an ordinary common-or-garden cherub or cherubim (we are not snobs when it comes to the Heavenly Host), but could we find one?  Nope.  I can only assume that they were all up there with Jesus, shaking their heads at the way the boss’s birthday is celebrated these days and looking at the date.  Eventually, we concluded that we would have to compromise.  Would a fairy or a ballerina fill the role, I asked?  The memsahib was not happy with such sacrilege; it really had to be an angel.  But we had to make a decision.  We finally settled on a figure that might (with a bit of imagination) be an angel: it was a model of a pretty young lady with golden wings (good start), though the long red velvet dress with gold edgings and low bodice with spaghetti straps suggested a less than chaste or pious outlook.  Maybe she was a fallen angel.  Whatever, we went for it.  Then came the hard bit: how to get out of this Winter Wonderland?  The long and winding road that leads to your door might never disappear for The Beatles, but it almost did for us.  Of course, there was a reason for that: the proprietors wanted us to pass through all those other bits of The Big Garden Centre that I mentioned earlier before we reached the checkout.  Up hill and down dale we metaphorically trekked; past the confectionery department offering Penguin Poo; past the fairy lights and the reindeer flashing like Souter Lighthouse; past the inflatable Santas; past the butcher and the cushions and the candles, the Barbour jackets and the little rabbits…Curiously, the route did not take us past a single tree peony or plant pot, for which I was grateful, though I think even Jane was fed up by that time, and anxious to get out.  We parted with £17 for a cheap doll with wings and we were offski, back through the mire to the car.  One ordeal over; one dodgy angel up (or she will be soon).

Do you know the difference between and optimist and a pessimist? I have asked this before. An optimist gets up in the morning, leaps out of bed, throws back the curtains and says,
“Good morning, God!”.
A pessimist crawls out from under the covers, peers out through the curtains through gummed-up eyes and says,
“Good God! Morning.”
I wonder which of these stereotypes the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) fits when it states that the UK will be the worst performing major economy over the next two years, after Russia? Well, I’m not having that sort of talk – why, there’s that settlement on the far side of Jupiter that’s forecast to do much worse than us. What’s more, I see no sign of any recession as I walk around the streets of our provincial towns. The ‘Social Housing’ up the road (21st Century euphemism for ‘Council Houses’) are bristling with BMWs and Audis; my neighbour has just spent a weekend in New York with her eighteen-year-old daughter for a quick bit of retail therapy (as you do); you cannot get a builder or tradesman for love nor money – they are all booked up for months ahead; a chap I know spent a lovely holiday in the Maldives this year (I have always found Marsden Bay to be bracing and perfectly adequate, myself); we enjoyed lunch with an old friend in Cirencester the other week and the restaurant was packed solid on a Tuesday; and last week we treated ourselves to a breakfast in (brace yourselves) Wetherspoons, and found the place heaving with young mothers and their offspring. Don’t get me wrong: I do not begrudge people enjoying themselves and spending their hard-earned cash; I just find it hard to reconcile the consumer spending I see around me with gloomy forecasts by international agencies. The thing is (I am going to do my old person’s thing here), when Jane and I were newly married forty years ago we could not go out to eat or take a holiday at all for many years; we could not even afford to buy a coffee on the High Street and we certainly could not afford to take our child out for a meal. I remember Jane telling me, on one memorable occasion, that we only had £1 left in the bank account to last us until the end of the month. The mortgage rate was 15% and whenever that rate went up by ½ % it meant another £100 on our monthly outgoings. Finances were tight then, in the 1980s. My point is that things are bad now, but they have been far worse and we will weather the storm, as we have done before. The baffling thing, to my mind, is that a recent poll suggested that the majority of people blame the present government for the UK’s economic state. If, by that, they mean that paying most of the working population 80% of their salary to sit idly at home for two years during Covid has bankrupted the country then – strictly speaking – they would be quite right; but, given the hype at the time, any other government of whatever colour would have done the same thing. In the words of Dickens’ Mr Micawber, something will turn up.

I feel I owe it to my readers to explain that little repast in Wetherspoons – I do, after all, have certain standards to maintain. For the benefit of any non-UK readers I should explain that J D Wetherspoon (to give it its full title) is a pub chain founded by an entrepreneur called Tim Martin in 1979. It specialises in providing traditional, good value food and drink in premises sympathetically converted from old buildings. There is a branch in our town, Melbury, that has been created from a beautifully refurbished 19th century pub, previously a dive favoured by rapscallions and n’er-do-wells. The end result is astonishing and the pub is now popular with families of all ages, the rougher elements having been told that they are no longer welcome. Regular readers will recognise that Wetherspoons would normally be (how can I put this) somewhat ‘of-the-people’ for my tastes (I am not a regular pub customer anyway), but I have to admit that the food is excellent value, the staff cheerful and efficient, and the surroundings usually well found. You can get fish and chips for £9.90, steak & kidney pudding for £8.40 or ham, egg and chips for £7.90 – all with an included alcoholic drink. And get this: the food is not of poor quality or skimped on quantity; it is good stuff. Just to put these prices in context, we have seen a ploughman’s lunch (cheese, pickle and a hunk of bread) offered in other pubs for £15; fish and chips for £18. Jane and I went for breakfast in Wetherspoons because it has become a sort of tradition whenever our car is being serviced: we put the car in to the garage to have its innards looked at, walk into town, and pig-out on the fat boy’s breakfast. My breakfast cost me under £5, with unlimited cups of coffee, and was thoroughly enjoyable. The only fly in the ointment of this culinary extravaganza was the young toddlers running riot in the pub as I tried to eat; breakfast (as I have said on many an occasion) is a meal to be taken quietly, without conversation, preferably while reading The Times. Still, you can’t have everything.

Have you ever wondered how people survived in the previous centuries, when they didn’t have electricity? Vote for the Green Party and you’ll find out (only joking).  No, seriously, how did they get by with just candlelight?  We are currently taking part in a series of experiments with our electricity supplier to see how much electricity we can save by avoiding using the grid at peak times: the supplier will pay us for every kWh saved over a one hour period, measured against our usual consumption at that time.  Never being ones  to waste an opportunity, we went mad and switched off absolutely everything except our modem, sitting there trying to read and write by the light of two candles. It was virtually impossible.  Lights (especially LEDs) take very little power, but I spared nothing – even the fridges and freezers were shut down for the hour.  The last time we did this, we gained (like the UK entry in the Eurovision Song Contest)  nil pois, which astonished me as we would normally have the electric oven running full chat at that time for dinner in the evening.  So this last time it was ‘make or break’ and if we still make no savings then the deal is off.  Those candles don’t grow on trees.  In case you are wondering, by the way, I spent the time writing this blog on my iPad; Jane was somewhere in the room, but I was never entirely sure where.

See if you recognise this:

“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean”

No, it’s not a poem about the British population during lockdown.  It’s from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge.  It goes on with:

“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung”

Recognise it now?  It is where we acquired the phrase, “Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink”.  It is a grim and stirring tale; so stirring, in fact, that the University of Greenwich has deemed it necessary to warn its students about its horrors.  Apparently the students will read about “human death”, “supernatural possession” and (worse) “animal death”, which could be deeply traumatising for them. Oh, bless.

I see that menopausal women on the staff of the NHS are to be given time off on full pay to help them cope with their condition, and if you think I am going to comment about that then you have another thing coming.

Well, the plimsolls are back.  I refer, of course, to Jane adorning her feet again with gym shoes, or ‘trainers’ as I believe they are known in the vernacular.  I thought I had weaned her off these hideous excrescences of the cordwainer’s craft but, no, they had only lain dormant in some cupboard somewhere, in a state of stasis as it were, like Dracula.  She has taken to wearing them because she has started to suffer planter fascist-itis, or some such, on her foot – a consequence of her sloughing around in a pair of furry down-at-heel slippers in the house (another item of footwear that I deplore, though – naturally – I never mention it).  She needs a heel on her shoes, you see, on account of the fact that she has a high instep (this is my feminine side coming out).  She actually did revert to a smart pair of court shoes and skirt earlier in the week, befitting for the wife of an officer my rank and seniority.  The court shoes helped ease the pain and – as I pointed out to her – emphasised a very elegant calf.  Alas, I thought I heard her mutter something about a little encouragement going a long way with me and shortly after that the elegance was terminated.  The pumps are back and she is bouncing around the kitchen in denim jeans like some demented gym mistress.  I shall have to say something, it’s no good.

Tempus fugit, and the weather is exactly the same as when I concluded the last blog: black as your hat in mid afternoon, wind Force 4, rain coming down in stair rods.  Pity poor sailors on a day like this.  I’m off downstairs for a nice sensible cup of tea in front of the fire with the gym mistress.

No, you can’t put that tree up yet.  It’s still November for heaven’s sake.

24 November 2022