WITH only a little over a week to go before Christmas it’s time to buy those little items you might have forgotten.

Here is my annual guide to making sure you don’t miss anything vital. Taking a day off is a good idea, although there’s nothing wrong with waiting until the weekend.

It’s best to begin with a swift stock-take of your drinks cabinet.

Are you out of anything you particularly like? A favourite brand of seasonal strong ale, for example? A nice whisky, brandy or other spirit? If so, pop out to your shop of choice, buy the items and bring them home.

Then drink them during the course of an hour or so. Drink responsibly and don’t overdo it, however. Aim for a state somewhere between “I’ll approach my shopping chores in a sensible, methodical manner” and: “I could take out my own appendix with a spoon right now and not feel a thing.”

It will then be time to go out and do the rest of your Christmas shopping. Take your debit or credit card, as that’s what you’re going to be paying with.

On no account attempt to obtain cash from a cash machine. There are two reasons for this. One is that if you have the intelligence to comprehend these words or any other words in any other newspaper, and if you want to preserve your Christmas cheer and good will toward your fellow human beings, you should stay away from any cash machine within half a mile of a shop.

Leave them instead to the people who only seem to come out at this time of year, perhaps because it’s at this time of year that their families unlock the hatch of the loft where they’re generally kept.

If this seems a harsh generalisation, all I ask is that you recall the last couple of times you were stuck in a Christmas cash machine queue because somebody was randomly stabbing at the keys like a drunken seaside pier organist trying to pick out I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.

Or perhaps there was a small, mystified group of them gibbering over the machine like the creatures in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Now then, can you remember seeing any of those people before or since? You can’t, can you? That’s because come Boxing Day they’re herded back up the ladder into the attic with pointy sticks.

Attempting to be patient with such people will erode your Christmas spirit. You can’t turn that frown upside down if you’re fantasising about using a flamethrower on several hundred people and then running over the crispy remains in a tank.

The other reason why you should use plastic instead of cash, of course, is that you don’t want to keep track of what you’re spending. The last things you want at this happy time are pesky, intrusive thoughts about how the hell you’re going to survive January without starving to death or eating your dog.

If you’ve followed my advice about taking some refreshment before setting out, though, any worries you have will be significantly lessened.

You’ll also be in for more of a treat on Christmas morning, as the presents you give will be as big a surprise to you as they are to the recipients.

When it comes to food shopping, speed is the key, even if it comes at the expense of strict accuracy. Make sure to buy some more drink, though, and encourage your houseguests to do the same.

If you get them started in on the sherry at, say, eight in the morning, they won’t notice if your turkey happens to be a plate of value beef burgers, your cranberry sauce is strawberry jam and your mint sauce is lime marmalade.

 

  • IT’S very unfortunate that 19 leisure centre staff have been without pay for weeks thanks to a glitch in the handover from the council to the private sector. We should retain a sense of proportion, though. I daresay that if senior executives at the council or Greenwich Leisure Centres Limited went without their salaries for such a length of time, they’d be very tolerant and forgiving about it. There’s no way they’d hunt down whoever was responsible and have them escorted out of the building.