Swede Teas

I’ve just spent hours Christmas shopping. HOURS. My feet are sore, I’m more drained than I’ve ever been in my entire life, and I’ve only got a small bagful of stuff. So, obviously, I’ve got to go again. And again. I kind of half-wish that the government had banned Christmas this year, to save money. A bit the way Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas back after the Civil War. Wouldn’t that have been great? Then no one would have felt they had to buy loads of stuff any more, or send any boring old cards, and there’d have been all the joy of secretly, illegally buying presents, and secretly celebrating, in a small way. Sort of like prohibition, with illicit Christmas parties going on in the cellars of innocent-looking shops.
At about 3 I met up with Glenn for tea, because he wanted top see me, and I do not want to end up sleeping with him, and tea is a meal it is pretty well impossible to:
a) get drunk at
b) extend late into the evening.
It isn’t romantic, either. I wanted a cream tea, but the nearest we got was scones and jam and a pot of tea, along with a smuggled tub of clotted cream in my handbag. (I’m going to leave the remains under my bed for Mirabelle to find, in a bid to enrich her environment, as Topiary has suggested . (The best way to enrich her environment and stop her being bored, of course, would be to buy a mouse from a pet shop and release it into the flat. But that would be cruel to the mouse, so I can’t do it.)
Glenn was wearing a truly gross black T shirt reading: ‘For my next trick I need a condom and a willing volunteer’. I asked him where the lovely cat-fur one was, and he said he’d borrowed it from a friend of Jasmine’s, just to please me.
Also, as we were eating he told me that most jam is about 60 per cent swede. Even strawberry jam. It’s used as a filler, as soft fruit is so costly. He knows this cos a farmer near him in Cornwall grows Swedes for jam. Isn’t this depressing? Next he’ll tell me clotted cream is made of pig fat or something.