Tuesday December 11, 2007
We rather expected Taunton to be heaving with pre-Christmas shoppers yesterday. It wasn’t. Even in W.H. Smith, which is normally a solid mass of people circulating en masse in the feeble hope of finding a way out was close to empty by W.H Smith standards.
Much the same applied in all the other normally crowded places. The longest queue I saw was at the paying-in desk at the bank; says something about consumer confidence, does that.
It seems that my “Christmas, what Christmas?” feeling is widespread.
Doom and gloom will attend the breakfast tables of the retail trade this year, I suspect.
Mind you, when they trot out such awful bad-taste tat in the name of Christmas, it could be argued that they deserve everything they get. In one store they were trying to sell resin and artificial fur models of sleeping cats and puppies, complete with electric motors to simulate “natural breathing action.” About as gruesome as you can get, and very little to do with Christmas.
We brunched at Starbucks, bought Christmas cards, and I was lodged in Caffe Nero while Graham sought out some cushion inners. There wasn’t a lot to be seen of Christmas in Caffe Nero, either.
I tried a Yo, Ho, Ho!on the way home, followed by a resounding chorus of The Holly and the Ivy, but my heart wasn’t in it, and Graham’s certainly wasn’t.
“I don’t think I’ve managed to summon up the Christmas feeling yet,” I said.
“Me neither.”
“We’ll have to try harder.”
“If you say so.”
It’s not that we’re doing the “Bah! Humbug!” act this year. It’s more of an “Oh? Really?”
The author, webmaster, and minder of the cat