A Visit To John Lewis

My daughter and I met at John Lewis in Welwyn Garden City today for the first time in ages. We really enjoyed it. I'll list the pros and cons.

The first con, in my view, was the John Lewis home insurance ad which aired during The Great British Bake Off last evening. It has been described online as heart-warming. I hated seeing the little brat trashing his mother's and sister's things and the house in general.

The second con is that the car park no longer has an entrance barrier and an attendant in a kiosk. There's now a machine which people are finding difficult to use and this is causing queues.

I wanted a quality hairbrush for my lockdown locks. Mason Pearson and Denman are no longer stocked.

No longer any colourful informal beads and bangles in the jewellery department.

However the pros outweighed the cons. It was a beautifully sunny day and we enjoyed driving part of the way home together in our Honda S2000 sports cars.

We had lovely soup for lunch al fresco. My daughter loved her Jerusalem artichoke even though my sister, who lives in France, calls the vegetable Devil's dung or something similar.

My daughter bought a lovely pair of shiny black boots for work.

We met the artist Abbie Ordway, pictured above, who has a pop-up exhibition in the china and glass department. She looked so pretty in her green-sprigged frock next to her artworks inspired by the natural world.

I bought my daughter a dress to wear for our grandson's graduation.

The con, the frock has to go back. Unfortunately, even though my son-in-law thinks it is stylish, my grandson says it looks 'old womany', my granddaughter likens it to what a tea lady would wear and her boyfriend says it reminds him of curtains. Dread to think what they would have said about the Ralph Lauren shirt dress she tried on, the hankie point one that I said made her look like a washerwoman and another I thought looked like a ship in full sail.