Advent is here

This time last year I wrote the following words: “It’s the start of Advent and all the calendars have been shifted to December. We’ve decided to retrieve the advent calendar from the loft space at the weekend so there is nothing to show today. “  And that paragraph works for today too! There is still nobody in the shop!

It was quite frosty out when I went for my morning walk. I picked up some orange juice and eggs which are the last ingredients needed for the final food tests I am doing. I am excited to see what results of all this will be.  

I wasn’t really needed on the backlog meeting.  In the weekly sales meeting, somebody mentioned the Uber Eats featuring Robert De Niro: it’s quite lovely.  Another recommended the Charlie’s Bar Christmas ad which, apparently, went viral on Instagram 

At 7pm we wee taking a tube from Waterloo to Piccadilly Circus to walk to Fortum and Mason. We were going to browse their Christmas shop and look at the dancing ornamental Christmas puddings that move up-and-down on wires through the atrium. It was busy but very Christmassy.  The puddings were impressive but the Christmas shop itself - while always full of fabulous things - felt smaller than usual.  Afterwards, we stood outside and checked that they had all the numbers in their windows so they could claim to be an advent calendar.

We walked to Somerset House to look at the skating rink. I thought it would be nice to get the first mulled wine of the year from one of the stalls here but there were very few. There is a bar for after your skate but the whole area felt 100% geared to the skaters. I am sure that was not true in previous years. We walked back to Waterloo via the Southbank Christmas stalls where a mulled wine could be purchased for not much less than £7. It was quite good.


We got home and bought chicken burgers in the Co-op to go with the aubergine and courgette dish that we’d made earlier in the week.