Do you know how long it took staring at the ceiling to come up with an alliterative title?
Being an ex-pat Yorkshire-ist in Scotland, parting with money in return for good and services is not something I find comes naturally. Even the weekly expedition to collect food from Lord Sainsbury is a source of excitement (I can't be the only one who has a ritual trip down the white goods aisle, just to check if some unheralded scientific breakthrough has suddenly made slow cookers plummet in price).
So when society (and the expectations of those I wish to keep as the nearest and dearest) turn around with a stern look on their face and dictate that I go and spend money, I'm way out of my depth. As you might have guessed - I've been Christmas shopping (I'm also going to have to tread carefully, because I know that people I've bought things for read this blog, so if it begins to read like a heavily redacted expenses claim, I'm very sorry).
First thing's first - no christmas music. Not yet anyway. I don't like Shakin' Stevens for 50 weeks of the year, so I'll be damned if I'll listen to them for more than a few days. And Noddy Holder's pension must be large enough already, without me propping it up. (As an aside, can you imagine how catastrophically shite life would be if it genuinely were Christmas every day? Nothing would ever get done, snowballs would be something you legitimately order in a pub, and we'd never get to Boxing Day. The very fabric of society as we know it would fall apart).
Then, because of the way we do commerce in the country, I have to go into shops and actually buy things. Going into buildings is something I consider myself to have a good grasp of, as is the concept of buying things; but combining the two is tricky for me. Largely because of the people who work in shops.
I appreciate that working in retail is terrible. You meet the dregs of human society trying to get as much as possible in as short a space of time, but I do nearly all my shopping on the internet - so I'm not used to people trying to help me part with money. My idea of shopping is to approach a row of shops with a clear idea of what I want, and then try to find all the shops that will sell me said item - and then buy the cheapest, as I would if the shops were web sites (see what I said earlier about natural parsimony). But when I get collared by Dave, and he tries to derail me into buying a soap I neither need or want, I tend to either go glassy eyed and dribble, or do something daft. Today I walked into a major cosmetic and hygiene product retailer (you know, the one promoted by the Veggie Society who are also slang for an alcoholic), and was immediately taken by a bout of overconfidence. "Girly" shops are not native territory for me. Indeed, if the shop doesn't smell of either Nikwax or WD40, I'm probably not welcome. But I'd just had a poke around The Bear Factory without major mishap, so swept into this soap emporium, and immediately collared Dave to give a man who considers Swarfega to be the height of cleaning technology a brief tutorial as to what I should be buying. It quickly became very apparent that the questions I asked had very little bearing on what Dave wanted to tell me, and he'd forgotten more things about tea scented soap than I'd ever learn. The tipping point came when he turned to me with a completely straight face, and asked where I wanted the products I was buying to be on the spectrum of pampering to cleansing (I had no idea these were diametric opposites). My resultant giggling fit (for I do have them sometimes) forced me to leave the shop with no cleaning products whatsoever, not even a tissue. Dave: I can only say I'm sorry.
Apologies if you were expecting a blog post about bikes. Turns out that being a lazy-ass post-grad (hyphenated any way you like) eats more of your time than you'd expect, so I went out for my first ride in a month yesterday. Normal nerdiness and bike puns will resume, I promise.
