Christmas shopping

After friday nights knees-up in the north east we headed back down the A1 with me still hyper-active and headachey after the massive infusion of vitamin c and assorted chemicals from the several pints of what is described as "fresh orange" behind the bar at The Terrace.

Suzanne decided it would be a great idea to call in on Harrogate, seeing as we were passing, in order to do some (more) christmas shopping, she's panicing now as we haven't yet bought anything to eat on christmas day, no turkey, nothing, personally i couldn't care less, a few slices of reprocessed wafer thin turkey sandwich meat on a slice of brown bread would do for me, for her it would be then end of civilisation if we didn't cook a bird the size of a small horse then throw most of it in the bin two days later

So we stopped off in Harrogate, the posh peoples idea of what a county town should look like, we all have an impression of the typical "Harrogate Lady", the sort of lady who lunches with friends rather than working, a lady who has actually never worked as her stockbroker / banker / lawyer husband leaches enough money from the rest of society to keep them in their five bedroomed four bathroomed detached new-build with a double garage with electric doors and a nice conifer in the front garden.

But its not actually like that at all.

Harrogate is not very posh, its a bit like Leeds with only 5% of the shops but 100% of the chavs.

I found myself accidently in TK Max at one point - now I thought TK Max was a cheap shop, apparently it sells end of line stuff that the posh shops don't want anymore, it specialises in selling designer names at discount prices (I lifted that phrase straight out of their shop window), for which you need to read "last years fashions that didn't sell at silly prices".

In fact its still not cheap, £35 for a Pierre Cardin plain white shirt is still expensive.

OK, for those of you who buy the labels its probably cheap, but the label on a plain white shirt is inside the collar and unless you are the sort of twat who introduces yourself then turns around and gets people to read the name inside your shirt collar, then £35 is a lot of dosh to pay for a fekkin plain white shirt, especially as you have to fight your way through TK Max's unique product presentation methods to find it.

To get a job at TK Max you first have to demonstrate your complete lack of any spatial awareness, presentation skills, or desire to sell anything. Your job as a sales assistant at TK Max will consist of yoru supervisor giving you shitloads of shirts, trousers or jackets and telling you to "put them out there". If you can accomplish the task within 20 seconds and return to the stockroom for another shitload of stuff to "put out there" then you get the job.

TK Max believe in maximising their sales floorspace by cramming as many racks of stuff into the area as possible, and then cramming as much stuff onto those racks as possible - sorting by size, colour, or clothing type is an alien concept to them - pile it in there and get the punters to sort it for you seems to be the motto.

Having fought our way through crowds of tracksuit clad Harrogateans most of whom were chomping on pastries and pies (the pigeons in Harrogate are the fattest I've ever seen) we finally made it home to find the first of my christmas presents to myself waiting on the doorstep - a collection of all 19 films made in the 1930/40's by the great British comedian Will Hay, I watched on of them "Wheres the Fire ?" on Saturday night - bloody good present if I say so myself, I'm going to enjoy those over christmas.

I have one more present to arrive yet - the complete 142 episodes of Bilko on dvd, with a bit of luck it will arrive before the weekend and then the family can go amuse themselves over the holiday as I sit glued to the tv.


And finally - I put the wheelie bin out last night ready for its regular Monday morning collection, we've got a backlog of rubbish with the wheelie bin full and two more sacksfull of trash to go out there too.

The bin was uncollected this morning.

Then I noticed that no-one else int he street had put theirs out - the collection was on sunday morning as the binmen try and get ahead of themselves in readyness for the christmas weekend - bas'tads - so now I've got a full wheelie bin and two more sacks of rubbish to take to the tip in my car. Bugger.