Christmas spending. And a bit of serious stuff.

Today my daughter dropped her small daughter at nursery and we set off to “finish” our Christmas shopping. Finish was a bit of an exaggeration. We might need to continue tomorrow. I should say we spent hours trailing around the centre of Manchester, not finding what we were looking for. And we had a quite specific list. Quite what happens if you have no list but simply look for inspiration, goodness only knows!

We bought an awful lot of stuff as our daughter has a bit of a tradition that the children should all have new pyjamas for Christmas. We all have our little traditions. Mine mostly involve stuff to eat - the menu for Christmas day always has to include pigs in blankets, sprouts cooked with chestnuts and pancetta, as well as all the other Christmas stuff. There has to be jelly and, as well as Christmas cake, there has to be my mincemeat cheese cake! And there are certain kinds of sweets that must go in each person’s Christmas stocking. But the Christmas pyjamas thing involved training round Primark looking for bargain nightwear.

I rarely go in Primark. Indeed I used to tell my students not to shop there because of all the clothes being made in sweat shops in the third world. But then more prestigious shoos also have their clothes made in sweat shops in the third world. Short of making all your own clothes, it’s very difficult to avoid that bit of exploitation. We did try to keep spending to a reasonable minimum but there are still some holes in our shopping plans. And we haven’t started on food yet!

I read that people in the UK are set to spend £2.4bn on new outfits for the Christmas party season this year. Just new outfits, not presents! Presumably, if you go to lots of parties you can’t wear the same outfit to all of them. Indeed a survey shows that many items of clothing may be worn fewer than three times. That means that if you spent, for example, £60 on a dress (a very reasonable amount by some of today’s standards) and you wore it three times, that meant it cost you £20 per wear. The more often you wear an item, the better value it gives you. I have to confess to some things that are very poor value per wear! What the various charities are doing is urging us to buy secondhand, to borrow or to hire our Christmas outfits. These days, as I no longer go to Christmas “dos” from a workplace, I no longer need so much glitter and bling, and try to recycle many Christmassy stuff from one Christmas to the next.

Around midday we took a break from our shopathon to have coffee and cake and to feed the baby, who has to accompany us wherever we go as he is only three months old. I had a slice of some kind of lemon sandwich cake, which was advertis as vegan. I am not vegan but it looked quite nice. It tasted all right but whether it had stood on the shelf in the cafe just a little too long or vegan cakes, made without eggs of course, are not quite so fluffy and light as non-vegan cakes. I come across some very good recipes for vegan cakes and desserts. And yet some people seem to continue to have difficulty catering for vegans in the pudding department, as this article explains.

On a more serious note, analysis of the aftermath of the election continues apace. I found this in something from the London Economic, quoted by a friend of mine, on Tuesday 17th Dec:

“The Labour Party has reportedly picked up 20,000 new members since the general election result, tipping the total number back over the half-million mark. The party will undergo a significant rebuilding process over the coming months as a new leader is elected. Members will decide who the right person for the job is, although the shortlist of candidates will be decided by the party’s 202 MPs and, potentially, its MEPs.”

 Names are being bandied around, amid fears that the party will lurch to the left or lurch to the right. Less lurching and more sensible discussion is surely called for.