How to spend a Friday!

Grandma’s cafe opened for breakfast again yesterday morning. My daughter and I were planning to speed-shop her Christmas. There was some debate as to whether her smallest daughter would go to nursery or not. The oldest offspring is now an independent adult, well, sort of, and the teenagers did not break up from school until lunchtime Friday. So it was a question of whether the tiny one would accompany us on the shopping trip or not. And, as my daughter is a modern mummy, she gave her the choice. More nursery? More mummy time? Well, what sensible two-and-a-bit year old is not going to opt for more mummy time. What’s more, she added in more grandma time.

And so they dropped the teenagers off at school and came for breakfast. The consequence of that was that instead of setting off to shop at 9.00, it was closer to 10.30. We trailed around the shops of Uppermill, my daughter being on a “shop small” mission: i.e. support your local shops. Incidentally I took advantage of having a chauffeur (chauffeuse?) to offload several bags of sorted belongings at a local charity shop.

However, as we had parked next to the children’s playground we had to make a detour (“The park, mummy?”) even though it was wet and gloomy. But we did successfully purchase some Christmas stuff.

Then one of the teenagers phoned requesting a lift home from school as he had forgotten his key and besides he had had to sit for almost two hours through a “boring Christmas assembly”. His older sister has been spared the “boring Christmas assembly” as she is now a year 11 student (formerly known as a fifth former) and they had been given the choice to stay or go - surprisingly Brexitish!

So she had gone home earlier and could, in theory anyway, let her brother into the house, but we took pity on him and went to collect him. We did however inflict a supermarket on him on the way home. 

After that we hit Manchester, a city centre in full Christmas markets mode and full of people who had finished work early for Christmas and were consequently rather merry. One of these was my almost son-in-law who joined us for coffee and more shopping. Amazingly we managed to achieve most of our shopping objectives, despite being hampered by a small person who wanted to walk everywhere. We shall remind her of this when she is a grumpy teenager and wants to be driven everywhere.

At the moment she is at the charming stage where she stops to admire other people’s dogs, looks appealingly at the dog owner and tells them very seriously, “My dog called Baxter!” Conversational skills at such a young age!

It’s a good job we did not put the small person in nursery as we did not escape from Manchester until almost 8.00pm.

Christmas is hard work.

Here is a link to an article about a man whose Christmas tree is 80 years old. It must have been one of the earliest known artificial Christmas trees. He has just decided to sell it as he has nobody to leave it to. He will auction it, having discovered that similar tree was sold for quite a considerable sum of money recently. Amazing as it not the most attractive tree.

And here is a link to a set of pictures of seriously underwhelming Christmas trees.

That’s all. I have parcels to wrap!