I love waking up early in the winter.
Obviously I only love waking up early if I have had enough sleep during the night. An alarm going off at half past six is a thoroughly rubbish experience if you did not go to bed until three.
We did not go to bed at three. We did not quite make it by nine, but by half past we had emptied the dogs and showered and turned all the lights off. I recall that my last thought was to wonder anxiously whether or not I would be able to go to sleep so early. I don’t remember anything else.
It is ace to wake up cocooned in the warm darkness, with the world black and icy, and silent outside the window. We open the curtains just a little, so that we can see if anything interesting is happening outside, and we light candles. Mark makes coffee, and we sit in bed to drink it together in the soft light.
This is one of my favourite things. I love the tarry coffee smell, and the beeswax scent, and the flickering candle glow. There is no nicer way to start the day.
Waking up at lunchtime, with window cleaners and postmen clattering about, and everybody else’s washing already dried in the bright sunshine, is a different experience altogether.
We were both rushing off after coffee this morning. Mark was still reconstructing a rural broadband aerial, and I had got to go and get Lucy from York.
I thought that since I had got a bit of time I would call in at the Designer Outlet on the way, and return some uncomfortable jeans to Marks and Spencer.
This turned out to be a grave misjudgement.
Today, I discovered, to my mystification, is a thing called Black Friday.
It appears that on Black Friday, things are cheaper, and so everybody goes shopping.
The queue for the Designer Outlet stretched halfway up the dual carriageway.
I did not really understand this, and thought that perhaps it was some kind of traffic problem, perhaps caused by roadworks, so carried on anyway.
When I got there the car park was absolutely full of cars. Every single space had a car in it, every grass verge, every inch of pavement. There were cars in the bus stop, cars along the roadside, cars blocking the walkways.
I did not know about Black Friday. In the end I found a space and squeezed the taxi into it, and went in, staring around foolishly at the wild-eyed hordes rushing past me.
A lady in Marks and Spencer explained it to me whilst she was refusing to change my jeans. It turns out that Marks and Spencer in a designer outlet store is not the same as your common or garden Marks and Spencer everywhere else. They look the same, and they sell the same stuff, but they will not change your uncomfortable jeans.
Mark explained later that Black Friday is an American idea to make you go shopping after Thanksgiving.
It is not one of my favourite things that we have adopted from America.
Some shops actually had a queue to go in. The Ralph Lauren shop had assistants on the doors with radios, and as a person went out, they talked to one another and let another person in.
I couldn’t imagine what Ralph Lauren might have been selling that was so exciting. I tried to see in over the heads of the crowd, but it just looked like T-shirts and jumpers. I have got plenty of T-shirts, so fortunately I did not need to bother.
I called in at Penhaligon’s whilst I was there, because I always do, and they did not have a queue. Unfortunately, not only did they not have a sale on, they have still not reconsidered their new modernisation policy. As a result, I did not buy anything.
They have stopped selling all their lovely scents that I like so much. They do not do bluebell, or lavender, or lily of the valley any more. Instead they have filled their shelves with exciting bottles packaged in blue and gold, and called by enticing names like Pazazz, which is not terrifically helpful if you want to know what they smell like.
I tried several of the testers for these, in the interests of research, but decided that I was not prepared to blow thirty quid on a small bottle of hand washing soap, especially when I did not know for certain whether or not I would like it. I came out feeling virtuous at my economic prudence and went to Moulton Brown instead.
I have not been to Moulton Brown before. I have always thought of them as providers of the sorts of soap that you find in hotel bathrooms, and have ignored them, loftily, from my Penhaligon-scented pedestal.
I bought a bottle of perfectly adequate hand washing soap for a tenner, because of the Black Friday Cheap Shopping Day.
I thought that this was an absolute bargain.
It did not smell of lily of the valley, but it smelled very pleasant, and the lady assured me that the smell would last. This is the reason for buying expensive soaps. The cheap ones can sometimes manage to smell perfectly nice, but ten minutes after you have washed your hands, the smell is gone. A really good soap should stay with you.
I fought my way out of the car park and made it to Lucy’s school just in time.
It was lovely to see Lucy.
She is so very grown up now.
