Boxing day thoughts!

It’s quiet at our house today. My daughter and family have gone to visit her in-laws. So, a day of calm. Also a day to assess the leftovers and decide what to do with them.

I went out running rather later than usual. There were rather a lot of runners out and about - more than usual - running off the Christmas lunch presumably.

Some people were up very early this morning. Loads of them were queuing outside the Trafford sentence at 4.00 am. The Next store apparently opened its doors at 6.00 am. This despite this bit of weather forecasting:-

“Shoppers hoping to take advantage of the Boxing Day sales are likely to face a deluge of rain across parts of the UK, the Met Office has said. Christmas Day’s clear skies will give way to cloud, wind and rain on 26 December, with the south-west of England experiencing the heaviest downpours.”

I read that shoppers are expected to spend more than £4bn in the Boxing Day sales but experts say that is less than in previous years. “Boxing Day has been slipping down the hierarchy of shopping days for a number of years,” said Diane Wehrle, an insight director at the shopper monitoring firm Springboard. “Last year the volume of shoppers was 30% bigger on Black Friday.”

Diane Wehrle went on to say that “the rise of more complex families, with ex-partners and more in-laws to visit, meant more people used the bank holiday to visit relatives, with 27 and 28 December now much busier shopping days.”

So my daughter is right to have gone to visit her in-laws.

But what I want to know is where do these people who will spend £4bn today get their money. Surely they spent enough on Christmas presents!

Personally, I resolved on Tuesday morning, as I picked up a bottle of milk from the local co-op that I was not going into a shop until Saturday at the earliest.

In today’s papers online I also came across this:-

“A new $15m tourism campaign featuring Kylie Minogue is aiming to lure Brexit-weary Britons to Australia with the perennial promise of cute marsupials, white-sand beaches and locals who “speak your language”.
The three-minute musical advertisement aired on televisions in the UK before the Queen’s message on Christmas Day, with Minogue and another well-known Australian export, Adam Hills, addressing the nation from Sandringham – a beachside suburb of Melbourne, Australia.”

I can understand the idea of appealing to people who are sick and tired of Brexit but, really, would you choose to emigrate to Australia as the country goes up in flames?

Here’s a story from across the Atlantic, a story about migrants or rather about some people trying to help would be migrants. The woman in the news item ended up in trouble because there was a box of ammunition in her husband’s car, which she was driving that day to deliver Christmas presents to children in refugee camps. It is against Mexican law to enter their country with guns and ammunition. She had no idea the ammunition was there. Fair enough! Part of the problem, of course, is her living in a society where having a gun is normal and, therefore, having a box of ammunition rolling about in a car is also normal!

Crazy world! I’ll get back to sorting the leftovers!