Richard Baum

Despite being about to move house, the thought of venturing into town and joining the eighteen billion other people thronging Market Street in search of a deal still doesn’t appeal.

I should really be taking advantage. As well as purchasing the house itself, we need pretty much everything necessary to fill it, and now is probably the best time to snap up a bargain. I need just about every item of furniture for every room. We have relied on Tamsin’s parents hand-me-downs for about as long as we can stomach it. The sofas are so old that Joseph slept on the long one in that stable.

And yet I always find it a bit suspicious that I can walk into DFS and bag a sofa for £200 that cost £1,400 on Christmas Eve. That sounds less like a bargain and more like a misprint. Why would anyone ever buy a sofa at full price? And why do DFS go so mad so quickly? They are doing to sofas what Nick Clegg so stridently doesn’t want to do with nuclear disarmament - showing all our cards at once! Why not go down from £1,400 to, say, £1,000? Someone would buy it, even if they knew it’d come down some more. Anyone pathologically insane enough to be out shopping at 6am on Boxing Day will buy anything at all with a price crossed out with a big black marker. Anything. At. All. Stick a day-old donner kebab in front of them, cross out £2.50 and put £1.99 and they’d snap it up like a Faberge Egg for a fiver. I saw them on the news last night. Running into Primark at the crack of dawn. The sad fact is that I really do believe they’d sprint straight past a bus load of burning schoolchildren just to be the first to buy a knitted purple cardigan at 70% off.

My reluctance to dive into sales mayhem is only partly to do with fear of crowds and the people in them. It’s also because I am very risk averse when it comes to anything to do with the buying and selling of property, and of course anything I buy for the house is inextricably linked to me having to buy the house itself.

One of the main reasons I am not trundling around town like a retail lemming is because I’m still convinced that something will go wrong with this house purchase of our’s. Nationwide seem reluctant to issue us with a mortgage offer despite being in possession of our passports and wage-slips for enough time to fraudulently create six dozen versions of me. My solicitor has gone AWOL, and the sellers are twitchier than a bird-spotting convention tripping over a dodo nest.

I am convinced that if I buy a sofa, or a dining room table, or four wardrobes, I’ll have nowhere to put them when the whole thing falls through.

I have of course already accumulated a lifetime’s worth of needless guff over the past couple of days, under the guise of “Christmas presents.”

I don’t know whether to be happy or sad that, genuinely, I want for very little in this life. It is harder to suggest to loved ones what they should get me than it is to get stuff for them. I wish they’d leave me alone sometimes, I really do.

This, combined with a troublesome impatience which prevents me from waiting for anything and forces me to buy everything I want immediately, has made this Christmas even more difficult than normal for those buying me stuff. And as a result I have received some presents that were really lovely, and others that only social convention prevents me from throwing in the bin without even bothering to look at.

I received a great box set of biographies of every 20th century Prime Minister. That was fab, if a little odd that Bonar Law’s is thicker than Churchill’s. Tam and I got a lovely mirror for the new house (should it ever come). I’d say they were the two highlights. My mum got me everything Jeremy Clarkson has ever committed to paper in his life, which probably means that this blog is going to get even more inappropriate than it is now. And I got the Borat book, which was probably the most offensive thing ever published before I wrote the phrase “burning schoolchildren” above.

One of Tamsin’s gifts to me was a t-shirt with Animal from The Muppets on it, which prompted a friend of mine to comment “She is either calling you an animal, or a muppet.”

I also received a uniquely useless “Plug-in USB illuminated aquarium,” which I will be recycling as a birthday present come the spring. And I got a puzzle which I am utterly incapable of doing. I tried, I really did. But it fell apart in my hands and I just don’t have the necessary brain power to do it back up again.

I do have to go into town later, for the football. I may well venture towards the shops, if only to gawp at the bag-laden masses and try desperately not to become one of them. It’s going to be hard, I know it. I saw a Les Dawson DVD for a fiver on December 22nd in HMV. It’s probably on for a quid now, and it would be a crime not to get involved.

Whatever you’re doing today, I hope it’s fun!

Rick