What the Fuck is Wrong with People?

Alternative Title: Christmas Shopping is for Nut Jobs... FACT!

I braved the streets of Bath today in an attempt to get some Christmas shopping done... foolish I know, what with it being a Saturday and so close to Christmas and everything but I am so vastly disorganised and unprepared this year that I had no choice... I knew it would be hellish, I knew it would be full of slow moving old people, innappropriately placed tourists, stressed parents, irritating children and well... cunts...

It would seem that I was correct.

The Hellmouth had truly opened up and was spewing forth the nastiest of nasty Christmas demons for me to ward off with a neatly placed clothes line smack down or sly little side step... which of course I managed to carry off with grace and decorum as in everything I do...

Essentially I plugged myself in to my generic MP3 player and had Muse's back catalogue playing at deafening levels thereby deadening at least one of my senses making it easier for me to focus and not whig out when fuck tards think it is acceptable behaviour to stop right in front of me to take pictures of the fucking Abbey, halting pedestrian traffic and causing a bottle neck to occur... amazingly, I found this quite amusing. I was actually smiling to myself while everyone around me seemed to be getting more and more stressed and stroppy... I strolled through the streets, aware that I was not on any kind of time limit... I live here and had walked into town and therefore did not have to worry about my extortionately priced parking ticket running out...so I had enough time to wait for people to walk past with push chairs, to get out of the way when people were trying to get on a bus, to wait in a queue, to not throw myself infront of an oncoming car in a desperate rush to get to a shop on the other side of the road... in fact I was able to conduct myself like a reasonable human being... which leads me to the question.... WHY THE FUCK WAS NO ONE ELSE ABLE TO DO THE SAME?!?!?!

What is it about this time of year that turns usually unassuming, mild mannered, Renault driving, beige slack wearing, 2.4, middle class normals into frenzied, wild eyed, crazy haired, consumer junkies?... Why do we place so much value on consumerism at this time of year?... Don't worry, I'm not about to go on some "true meaning of Christmas" rant here... because frankly it's been done to death and also... I like presents...

I also like a good excuse to eat my body weight in food and consume more booze in the space of 2 days than would be socially acceptable for the rest of the year combined...

I just wonder why this time of the year sends people so fucking mental... I'm sure I could use my vast Psych training to surmise some crap about social group influence and crowd mentality and such... but still the whole thing is just mental... that's my professional opinion... it's just mental...it's Gorilla Grod's plan to turn the whole world into Apes mental, it's Aqua Man marrying a woman without gills mental, it's Uwe Boll being allowed to live, let alone make movies mental...that's how mental this time of year makes people and no amount of Psych training prepares you for it... not at all!

Nonetheless I managed to get some actual shopping done, braved the hoardes of demon possessed crazies and enter a couple of besieged shops armed only with my credit card and a swagger...this worked well ... for a while... then I decided to go in to a mainstream high street store... big mistake apparently!

Apparently tourists like to congregate in doorways in large impassable groups, women with push chairs like to run over my fucking feet with their spawn filled evil machines, men carrying perfume for their wives/mistresses like to barge past small, lone women, knocking them in to old people who move too slowly to get out of the fucking way and nasty little children like to wipe their grubby paws over the merchandise making it sticky to the touch...

I may have lost my cool a little bit at this point and made a swift(ish) exit... to smoke heavily and get disapproving looks from sour faced old women about the way I look or chose to live or some irrelevant shit, hey at least I didn't just run over your feet with my adorable little devil spawn buggy....I called Cathryn to come to the rescue...which she duly did... because she is a decent human being... and also we've been told we can't talk to each other at work any more (apparently we don't do enough work) and using MSN to talk to someone who is 2 feet away from you is getting tiresome... I needed some quality time with my girl... so she rode in on her white charger (or Fiesta) and took me for coffee, pizza and more cigarettes...which calmed me greatly.....

Of course because I bailed out so early, it does mean I have to go and do it all again next weekend.... bugger!

Oh and erm... Merry Fucking Christmas...or some junk...