Chasing Christmas

Despite Covent Garden (remember – no nuns!! LOLZ!!) delivering a good portion of Christmas my hunger for being festive still hadn’t reached full cessation. Harrods was the obvious place to try next. I’ve never been to Harrods but I was pretty, pretty sure a big posh shop would be brilliant at Christmas. And it was..you can’t really tell from the  pictures [1&2] but the outside did look Christmasy. Admittedly it didn’t look ‘Victorian London Chocolate Box’ Christmas. But – and I think this is why I was always going to be left slightly disappointed – in London it is 2011 (or it was at this point) and crucially hasn’t been like Victorian London since it WAS Victorian London. And perhaps on sets of film and television shows depicting the work of Charles Dickens and other stuff. For clarification: I WAS NOT visiting the set of a lavish production of A Christmas Carol. I was visiting London of 2011.

Inside of Harrods was pretty good to be fair.  Note the picture [3] of a woman weighing up which chocolates to get someone. The chocolate room was pretty festive. Chocolates are festive aren’t they? Plus all the boxes had pictures of Victorian London on them. And the boxes were Christmassy colours.

Even more amazingly the Christmas room was very Christmassy; I definitely didn’t expect that. Who would have thought that a room full of Christmas decorations and other Christmas memorabilia would be Christmassy? Amazing. Oh…and Tess Daly was in it. Just shopping, not like Sean Connery was in Goldfinger. She was just shopping with her kids and her mum (How do you know this? Well the kids called her mum and she called the older woman mum; though I didn’t graduate from Detective College I did attend all the lectures of the first two semesters before I was thrown out for being ‘too good’). She complained about a decoration being £150. You can use that anecdote as your own if you want, just tell it like this, “I was in Harrods just before Christmas and I saw Tess Daly, television star, there shopping – she was outraged that a decoration was £150…” Just improvise your own ending, perhaps “You’d think that would be nothing to her with her money” or “tight arsed cow” or “it’s good earning a good wage hasn’t altered her perspective on value”. Or your own. Whatever.

Pencil Sharpeners

As well as searching for Christmas I was also searching for a pencil sharpener. I normally end up going in a souvenir shop in whatever place I am in. I normally end up buying a pen or a pencil. I do buy other things as well – I do not impose a £3 limit on myself in souvenir shirts and anyone who says I do has been reading my book of rules and that is a personal and private document. As well as other lavish gifts for people I normally get pens or pencils. A bi-product of this is having unsharpened pencils. Years of experience has taught me that you can turn an unsharpened pencil in to a sharpened pencil with a pencil sharpener. So I told my girlfriend, “Don’t let me buy more pencils – make me get a pencil sharpener”.

I’ll tell you what you CAN’T find in loads of London souvenir shops – pencil sharpeners. I am no lying. If you want a moody Manchester City shirt – or a real TEAM replica jersey (depending on how you see it) then you can find that [5] but you cannot find a pencil sharpener.

Another thing I have noticed in my life being someone who spends longer than the average person in souvenir shops is that stuff with names on them tends to reflect the popularity of names, clever clever merchandisers. A consequence of this has been me having to accept that I am not going to see combs, keyrings or pens with ‘Philip’ on them. And I have accepted it. It’s a shit name and people don’t call their children it any more. Separately I have issues with two ls Phillip (eww). But what the fuck is this? [4] Philipp? No ‘Philip’. No ‘Phillip’ but they have ‘Philipp’?! Fuck off.

Key-sy Does It

I saw Tim Key’s Masterslut show tonight. It really is a superb show. Pathetically I was put off – after buying tickets – when I read it was a poetry show. Now to me that means a person reading long and uninteresting (to me) prose out in a sombre atmosphere. Or ‘comedy’ poems being laughed at by people for some reason that is beyond me. Key’s act is like neither of these preposterous ideas in my pathetic little noggin. It is brilliant, original and funny. Which funnily enough is the exact opposite of this blog so if you are reading this because you like it (this blog) you might hate Masterslut.

Just go and fucking see it – if he tours it near you like, not sure if the run in Laaaaaaaaaandan has finished.

Oh nearly forgot – remember I told you about the ticket mix up? Well when we got there they were really apologetic and had managed to get us a couple of seating tickets. Phew eh?