Well that was a busy day. First mission to collect my new glasses from the opticians in East Sheen - they feel quite different to my existing ones as apparently I have a different prescription in each eye. They are occupational so I can use them for reading, my laptop and the iMac… I’m wearing them now!
Afterwards I dropped cards (from me) into Richmond and Twickenham Waterstones and also tried to buy cheesy footballs from Iceland but was shocked to discover they were not in stock - Christmas could be off again.
One bit of good news was that after an hour and a half of phone calls to Samsung and a lot of inputting of passwords, the television seems to be able to receive the Sky box again. We probably will never know what went wrong. In the afternoon Colin had a meeting up town so we set off together as I had the last couple of gift vouchers to buy and wanted to see the Christmas lights. In the event I walked well over 15,000 footsteps.
I started in Covent Garden complete with giant hanging mistletoe and baubles, walked down Long Acre via Stanfords, through Leicester Square and around the Christmas market. I was going to get the tube to Piccadilly but I worked out that it would actually be quicker to walk by the time you have to go down all the escalators. I walked to Piccadilly and then up Upper Regent Street which had lovely lights, angels with outspread wings and a bit different to last year. I went into Hamleys purely to look at the teddy bears and admired the small Steiff bears at £140 each! Carnaby street looked very colourful and had decorations in the shade of jellyfish - random. I managed to get a Nike voucher in the huge store on Oxford Circus but Mint Velvet remained elusive as the branches I thought I had found were actually concessions in John Lewis and House of Fraser so I ordered online instead. It gave me a chance to stop for a flat white and piece of millionaires shortbread in JL though!
I was flagging a bit now and as the Oxford Street lights were pretty bad this year, I got the tube back to Waterloo, caught a train departing in just a few minutes and went home.
I continued my bustling and made four containers of home made cranberry sauce before sitting down for dinner. A Strange thing happened in that Bruin bears hat and lights were interfered with - his hat was placed in the middle of the lawn and his lights were very neatly snipped just above the battery case but were otherwise disturbed - could it really be a fox that did this?
Colin was a stop-out and didn’t get back until after 11.15pm!
