For some reason, I thought that the city centre would be quiet this afternoon so close to Christmas. My logic dictated that everybody would have finished their shopping by now and that an air of calm will have enveloped the town. I had a little bit of work to do this morning so hid away in the office while Mandi went food shopping and got caught up with a few bits of admin before compiling the Christmas tunes I have selected for the Christmas edition of The Sunday Alternative. The Strictly Come Dancing final is on tonight and Mandi has been following it this year which has given me time to record the podcast (in theory) while it is on downstairs. Sunday is going to be busy this week so I won’t have time to record the podcast in the morning unless I get up earlier, which is never going to happen on a Sunday morning. Mandi has decided she wants to go to a Christmas carol service tomorrow, despite us both being atheists, so we need to be at my dad’s earlier so we can get there without rushing.

Once my work was done I took Jack to the park and spent an hour playing with his ball while I came up with another idea for a different version of A Christmas Carol. While Jack was sniffing around and going to the toilet in the bushes I wrote the idea down in my notebook and wondered just how many different takes on a 171 year old story I can come up with. Maybe I should give up on all my other ideas for various projects and just turn myself into a one man production line of ideas and bring out a different version of A Christmas Carol every year. I still fancy the idea of performing readings of the version that Dickens himself wrote especially for his public reading work, but I never remember it until it is too late. It is good that the audio books are still selling reasonably well and I am really proud to be a part of the canon.

My prediction about town being quiet turned out to be wrong, although I was lulled into a false sense of security due to the tram being almost empty. As usual the place was a nightmare not helped by the fact that I had to disappear off on my own to buy another gift for Mandi. Although I knew what I wanted I wasn’t sure where I should go to buy it and more importantly get the best version of it. While buying her present I was appalled at the behaviour of the customers in John Lewis. If you go in a nicer shop you expect the shopping experience to be more relaxed which is why I was disgusted to see people behaving as if they were in somewhere like Primark or TK Maxx fighting over items and pushing through each other to throw money around. My consolation is that it’ll all be over soon and we’ll be trying to find the best price on Easter eggs.

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