The Season of Goodwill is finally upon us!

Fantastic festive weather we're having here, although not quite the same as portrayed on the snowy white cards around the shops. In fact it's more of a force ten gale mingled with that disgusting drizzle stuff sort of day today. And it's making the cheap Christmas lights that are strung up down Lord Street like scrappy left-over millet sprays spark and fizz. (Great fun when they explode over old biddies heads though.) Everywhere was full of male shoppers this afternoon looking lost and pathetic. Mainly standing in embarrassed looking groups in lingerie departments.

I love this time of year. Everyone's full of the Christmas spirit, (or in Fleetwood's case...just spirit, mainly rum and vodka) battering each other's shins with their wheelchairs and their baby buggies. Taking each other's eyes out with their brollies (why is that the majority of brollies are owned by sadistic midgets?). There was a queue in Littlewoods earlier that stretched out of the door and over the tram lines. I was going to hang around to see what happened when the bad tempered Welsh tram driver with a distinctly anti-Christmas attitude came hurtling down the tracks, but I couldn't be arsed because of the rain. The little red trains chugging pointlessly round the windows of numerous shops are good fun though. As are those horrible dolls with bandaged umbilical cords and down-syndrome eyes that are being sold everywhere. And the rubber snowmen with American voices that are so entertaining when you've got to wait for three quarters of an hour to buy a pound of sprouts. They're not at all repetitive and annoying and screechy and unpleasant and the one in Woolworth's that ended up wedged down a screaming child's throat had absolutely nothing to do with me.

What I particularly like are the naff presents that people are going to receive this Chrimbo if the baskets full of crap that were being carried around are anything to go off. Vile pottery ornaments of bluetits that look as though they've been eaten by a cat and then sicked up. Tartan socks and Rupert Bear scarves with barely noticeable stitches pulled in them. Bottles of cologne that are made from whale's scrotums...and you can tell. And the amounts of booze being sold! The people round here ought to just fill a trough with meths and go to sleep in it over the course of the winter.

That's what I intend to do anyhow.