Taking part in the feast of consumerism!

Yesterday my daughter and I joined in the Manchester madness that is Christmas shopping. I needed a couple of specific items which are not available locally. She needed a whole heap of things. She works as a primary school teacher and has bunch of children of her own and so has had little time to do much shopping for this Christmas which is almost upon us.

We were very efficient and organised, having worked out exactly which shops we needed to visit and plotted our route accordingly. Many people seemed to be in dithering-shopping mode, wandering around rather aimlessly, seemingly undecided about where to go. We felt quite pleased with ourselves with our forward planning, managing to find almost everything we had intended to purchase.

In spite of all this planning, my daughter’s iWatch (yes, she is one of those people who have all the latest gadgets!) with its tracking app told us that we had taken 14,500 steps and walked over 10 kilometres. All that within quite a small area, so we must have done a fair amount of to-ing and fro-ing. We did also have quite a trek to and from the carpark, being reluctant to pay the extortionate fee for the shopping centre carpark. On the whole a successful expedition!

 Today it was the Food Shop! I have been buying bits and pieces needed for the Christmas Day feasting over recent weeks, putting stuff in the freezer to be brought out to defrost in time for cooking. Consequently my trolley was not as laden as it might have been.

First thing in the morning, out on my morning run, I popped into the local co-op store. There I spotted the manager putting reduced-price labels on sprouts. He explained that he had noticed that many customers rummaged among the packs of sprouts and only bought the ones with a “best before” date of December 25th, when they would, of course, be cooked and consumed. So those with today’s date were being reduced, in an attempt to induce customers to buy them. They are only sprouts, after all, not some animal product that could go off and cause problems if you ate them. So I bought two packs for my favourite sprout recipe, involving chestnuts, lemon juice and white wine!

Later I hit the local Tesco, where masses of people were bewilderedly asking why they could find no sprouts. The store had run out! I felt like a wise creature, having already bought my sprouts, and at a good price! I was less fortunate with the Boddington’s beer, however, of which I was obliged to buy a much bigger pack than I had intended. They never sell four packs, according to the young man I spoke to. “Never mind,”he reassured me as he indicated the twelve pack, “they’ll get drunk!” Well, yes, I suppose they will but not all on Christmas Day. I only wanted the beer for those occasions when the chess-player comes in from a match and fancies one! Not a regular occurrence!

On the radio this morning, I caught the tail end of “The Kitchen Cabinet”, a food programme of sorts. Celebrity chefs swap ideas and praise each other for being really clever. So clever that one of them did not know how to pronounce “chorizo”, clearly thinking, as many folk seem to, that it is an Italian product and should be pronounced “choritso”. One of my pet hates!

At one point they discussed “good Christmas Day breakfasts”, vying with each other to suggest tasty alternatives to smoked salmon and Prosecco. Do people really have smoked salmon and Prosecco for breakfast? Apparently they do. And some of the alternatives suggested were so copious that I wondered how those celebrity food suggesters ever had room for a Christmas dinner later in the day. 

We live in a crazy world of consumerism!