My wife decided to venture into our local city centre this afternoon to do some Christmas shopping. Now maybe it really is a ‘man’ thing but nothing short of a major emergency would actually get me to ‘choose’ to do this on a Friday afternoon a couple of weeks before Christmas. It’s hard enough to make the decision to venture into the centre in the middle of May but at Christmas? This makes her either seriously deranged or something of a heroine and I can vouch for her sanity.

Shopping, no matter which day, week or month, has to be planned like a military strategy. You can’t just decide to ‘do it this afternoon’! It has to be an incisive strike – in and out before anyone else realises you were even there. You need to get into training for this. The car has to be checked to ensure there isn’t going to be a breakdown. Clothing has to be picked out carefully so other people can see you coming and get out of the way. Elbows have to be sharpened. Anti-depressants probably help. I have been known to drive into the centre with a campaign planned, enter the multi-storey car-park and drive straight out again because I couldn’t find a spot in the first few minutes and the stress levels were already hitting DefCon3.

I remember being in a Woolworths a few years back, just a few days before Christmas, which was grid-locked with people. It was as if everyone in the local town had been crammed in there and the doors had been locked. I’d almost prefer to have my tonsils ripped out with a pair of heated curling tongs than go through that again.

So that’s why there is a picture of the Lara Croft look-alike. (Although she is a rather attractive young lady). Venturing into town Christmas Shopping is like a video game with all those hazards you have to face to reach your goal, grab the thingy and get back out again. And I can play one of those at home if I want to without having to go through the real pain of being there.