Glühwein

Into the office, this morning, which was otherwise deserted, so I sequenced up Kraftwerk's '3D Catalogue' - sans 'The Mix' and 'Tour de France' - on the Sonos and settled down to some admin and the occasional email exchange.

By early afternoon, I was all done apart from a couple of really tedious tasks that I have deferred to next week as a kind of Christmas present to myself. I don't expect Next Week Me will be that grateful, though.

I had one last Christmas present to buy so I picked up Hannah, who'd been out for lunchtime drinks with some old school friends, and we drove east along the A65 to Country Harvest. It's an odd place, opened, if I recall correctly, by the guy who started Jumpers in the late eighties. My first wife worked for Jumpers for a while and was a buyer for his pet project 'Jumpers Country'.

I suspect he had a better grasp of the way things were going on the high street as he agreed to a management buyout just months before the bottom dropped out of Jumpers' sales while he opened Country Harvest, which was Jumpers Country writ large. That was aimed at the people who still had disposable income and was a great success until he sold it and bought a castle in Scotland where you could fish and shoot for a thousand pounds a day. I guess he always had an eye on the larger wallets!

Years later - around 2005, I reckon - Charlie's first job was at Country Harvest, where she worked in the restaurant, and it's been steadily trucking along all this time. (The current owners also have Avanti in Kirkby Lonsdale.) Most of their stuff isn't to my taste but the food hall is excellent and it's there that we went for what turned out to be a successful shopping trip.

While we were in there shopping, I also saw a large bottle of Glühwein, which I bought for the Minx. Here's Hannah modelling it in the car for a photo I sent on to the Minx.

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-9.4 kgs (I think: the scales didn't update my phone!)
Reading: 'Frank Derrick's Holiday Of A Lifetime' by J B Morrison