But today I heard the first strains of White Christmas playing in M&S.
So I accepted a free sample of shortbread and walked out the door and did my shopping elsewhere.
So there!
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About Me
I'm reading
- The Tin Roof Blowdown (James Lee Burke)
- Renoir, My Father (Jean Renoir)
- Life and Death in Pompeii (Paul Roberts)
- Collected Poems (Edward Thomas)
- The Knot (Jane Borodale)
- The Years (Virginia Woolf)
- Virginia Woolf (Alexandra Harris)
Films 2013
- The King of Marvin Gardens
- Scarecrow
- Chimpanzee
- Side Effects
Books Read 2013
- Bring Up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel)
- Barnaby Rudge (Charles Dickens)
- The Female Detective (Andrew Forrester)
- The Chessmen (Peter May)
- Mr Bridge (Evan S Connell)
- Mrs Bridge (Evan S Connell)
- Period Piece (Gwen Raverat)
- The Observations (Jane Harris)
- The Last Runaway (Tracy Chevalier)
- The Dinner (Herman Koch)
- The Thoughtful Dresser (Linda Grant)
- A Week in December (Sebastian Faulks)
- Half Blood Blues (Esi Edugyan)
- Love on the Supertax (Marghanita Laski)
Films 2012
- What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?
- Catimini (Behind Closed Doors)
- The Muppet Christmas Carol
- Liberal Arts
- Quartet
- Anna Karenina
- Shadow Dancer
- Moonrise Kingdom
- Woody Allen: A Documentary
- The Apartment
- Death Watch
- Le Havre
- Goodbye, First Love
- The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
- A Separation
- The Artist
- The Iron Lady
Books Read 2012
- The Glass Room (Simon Mawer)
- What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (John Mullan)
- Harriet (Elizabeth Jenkins)
- The Sisters Brothers (Patrick deWitt)
- Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)
- No Surrender (Constance Maud)
- In a Lonely Place (Dorothy B Hughes)
- An Artist of the Floating World (Kazuo Ishiguro)
- Hollywood Costume (Ed: Deborah Nadoolman Landis)
- The End of Your Life Book Club (Will Schwalbe)
- Life and Fate (Vasily Grossman)
- Jacob's Room (Virginia Woolf)
- Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
- Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris ... (Leanne Shapton)
- Try Anything Twice (Jan Struther)
- Wilfred and Eileen (Jonathan Smith)
- Celia Birtwell (Celia Birtwell)
- Between the Acts (Virginia Woolf)
- Night and Day (Virginia Woolf)
- David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
- The World's Wife (Carol Ann Duffy)
- The Blush (Elizabeth Taylor)
- Mrs Bridge (Evan S Connell)
- At the Jerusalem (Paul Bailey)
- The Expendable Man (Dorothy B Hughes)
- Into the Light: French and British painting from Impressionism to the early 1920s (Ed: Sam Smiles)
- The Best of Everything (Rona Jaffe)
- Cakes and Ale (W Somerset Maugham)
- The Lifeboat (Charlotte Rogan)
- Modern, The Modern Movement in Britain (Alan Powers)
- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Jeanette Winterson)
- A Card From Angela Carter (Susannah Clapp)
- At Mrs Lippincote's (Elizabeth Taylor)
- Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
- A Bigger Message, Conversations with David Hockney (Martin Gayford)
- The Other Elizabeth Taylor (Nicola Beauman)
- The Lewis Man (Peter May)
- Abide with Me (Elizabeth Strout)
- Pure (Andrew Miller)
- Charles Dickens, A Life (Claire Tomalin)
- Half of the Human Race (Anthony Quinn)
- The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes)
- Hockney, the Biography (Christopher Simon Sykes)
- The Crowded Street (Winifred Holtby)
- Gillespie and I (Jane Harris)
- Oak (Stephen Taylor)
- Bricks and Mortar (Helen Ashton)
- The Paper Garden (Molly Peacock)
- The Odd Women (George Gissing)
- Terra Incognita, Travels in Antarctica (Sara Wheeler)
- Ghastly Business (Louise Levene)
Books Read 2011
- How to be a Woman (Caitlin Moran)
- The Blackhouse (Peter May)
- On Canaan's Side (Sebastian Barry)
- Lady Audley's Secret (Mary Elizabeth Braddon)
- Sky Burial (Xinran)
- Westwood (Stella Gibbons)
- On the Other Side: Letters to my Children from Germany 1940-46 (Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg)
- Brook Evans (Susan Glaspell)
- The Pattern in the Carpet (Margaret Drabble)
- The Christmas Truce (Carol Ann Duffy)
- The Last September (Elizabeth Bowen)
- Nemesis (Philip Roth)
- Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (Barbara Comyns)
- The Translation of the Bones (Francesca Kay)
- Some Tame Gazelle (Barbara Pym)
- A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel)
- The Pregnant Widow (Martin Amis)
- Manja (Anna Gmeyner)
- Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (Penelope Mortimer)
- The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson)
- Doreen (Barbara Noble)
- The Dolls' House (Rumer Godden)
- My Ántonia (Willa Cather)
- Fidelity (Susan Glaspell)
- Hostages to Fortune (Elizabeth Cambridge)
- A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle)
- A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin)
- A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan)
- Making Conversation (Christine Longford)
- The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow (Mrs Oliphant)
- Farewell Leicester Square (Betty Miller)
- Miss Ranskill Comes Home (Barbara Euphan Todd)
- Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary (Ruby Ferguson)
- The Home-Maker (Dorothy Canfield Fisher)
- NY JS DB 62 (David Bailey)
- The Very Thought of You (Rosie Alison)
- The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)
- The Surprising Life of Constance Spry (Sue Shephard)
- Flowers on the Grass (Monica Dickens)
- Brodeck's Report (Philippe Claudel)
- Stanley Spencer and the English Garden (Steven Parissien)
- The Group (Mary McCarthy)
- One Fine Day (Mollie Panter-Downes)
- The Tulip (Anna Pavord)
- Hancox: A House and a Family (Charlotte Moore)
- Alone in Berlin (Hans Fallada)
- A Homemade Life (Molly Wizenberg)
- Collected Poems (Philip Larkin)
- Excellent Women (Barbara Pym)
- So Long, See You Tomorrow (William Maxwell)
- All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
- Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
- Specimen Days (Michael Cunningham)
- Letters to Monica (Philip Larkin)
- The Whicharts (Noel Streatfeild)
- Decline and Fall (Evelyn Waugh)
- Dissolution (CJ Sansom)
- The Hare with Amber Eyes (Edmund de Waal)
- Fattypuffs and Thinifers (André Maurois)
- Earth & Heaven (Sue Gee)
- Miss Buncle's Book (DE Stevenson)
- The Berlin Novels (Christopher Isherwood)
- Mrs Parkington (Louis Bromfield)
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
- Just Kids (Patti Smith)
- Haunts of the Black Masseur, The Swimmer as Hero (Charles Sprawson)
- The Long Song (Andrea Levy)
- The Return of the Soldier (Rebecca West)
- Good Evening, Mrs Craven, The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes
- The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
- Songs of Blue and Gold (Deborah Lawrenson)
- Wild Romance, The True Story of a Victorian Scandal (Chloë Schama)
- Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)
- Children of the Archbishop (Norman Collins)
- Corrag (Susan Fletcher)
- Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)
Books read 2010
- The Owl Service (Alan Garner)
- Operation Heartbreak (Duff Cooper)
- South Riding (Winifred Holtby)
- Tamara Drewe (Posy Simmonds)
- A Game of Hide and Seek (Elizabeth Taylor)
- Summer Will Show (Sylvia Townsend Warner)
- The Outward Room (Millen Brand)
- Family Roundabout (Richmal Crompton)
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)
- The Lacuna (Barbara Kingsolver)
- Beside the Sea (Véronique Olmi)
- Frost in May (Antonia White)
- Troubles (JG Farrell)
- 44 Scotland Street (Alexander McCall Smith)
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder)
- London Belongs To Me (Norman Collins)
- Waterlog, A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain (Roger Deakin)
- The Swimmer (John Cheever)
- The Mitfords, Letters Between Six Sisters (ed Charlotte Mosley)
- Tea with Mr Rochester (Frances Towers)
- The Hare with Amber Eyes (Edmund de Waal)
- Family Album (Penelope Lively)
- Because of the Lockwoods (Dorothy Whipple)
- Treasures of Time (Penelope Lively)
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)
- The Help (Kathryn Stockett)
- The Lollipop Shoes (Joanne Harris)
- A Dance to the Music of Time (Vol 3: The Acceptance World, Anthony Powell)
- The Greengage Summer (Rumer Godden)
- Oleander, Jacaranda (Penelope Lively)
- I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
- The Millstone (Margaret Drabble)
- Hearts and Minds (Amanda Craig)
- Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
- George Eliot, The Last Victorian (Kathryn Hughes)
- Brooklyn (Colm Tóibín)
- The Go-Between (LP Hartley)
- Thank Heaven Fasting (EM Delafield)
- Illyrian Spring (Ann Bridge)
- The Way Things Are (EM Delafield)
- Old Friends and New Fancies (Sybil G Brinton)
- Impressionist Gardens (Clare Willsdon)
- In the Gardens of Impressionism (Clare AP Willsdon)
- The Peachgrowers' Almanac (Elaine di Rollo)
- Every Good Deed (Dorothy Whipple)
- The Virago Book of Food, The Joy of Eating (ed Jill Foulston)
- The Flower of May (Kate O'Brien)
- Mildred Pierce (James M Cain)
- The Life of Cardinal Wolsey (George Cavendish)
- Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)
- I Know My Own Heart, The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840 (ed Helena Whitbread)
- Croc Attack (Assaf Gavron)
- Palladian (Elizabeth Taylor)
- The Thing Around Your Neck (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
- Don't Tell Alfred (Nancy Mitford)
- Love in a Cold Climate (Nancy Mitford)
- The Winds of Heaven (Monica Dickens)
- The Pursuit of Love (Nancy Mitford)
- A London Girl of the 1880s (MV Hughes)
- The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen)
- Their Finest Hour and a Half (Lissa Evans)
- The Widow Barnaby (Fanny Trollope)
- Flowers for Mrs Harris (Paul Gallico)
- Telling Tales (Alan Bennett)
- The Innocent (Ian McEwan)
- Changing My Mind (Zadie Smith)
- Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
- Chronicles, Volume One (Bob Dylan)
- A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
- The Painter of Signs (RK Narayan)
- The Matchmaker (Stella Gibbons)
- Travels with Charley (John Steinbeck)
- An Education (Lynn Barber)
- Late and Soon (EM Delafield)
- London's War, The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore (Julian Andrews)
- Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stegner)
- Still Missing (Beth Gutcheon)
- Selected Diaries (Virginia Woolf)
- To Bed With Grand Music (Marghanita Laski)
Followers
6 comments:
I know, makes me want to scream.
I've just been reading Agnes Jekyll on the subject - 'God made the first Christmas, and man has ever since been busy spoiling it. Year by year the propaganda of the shops grows increasingly active'. She was writing in 1922
Well done! K x
Awful, isn't it! And if they'd only leave it until Christmas week it would be fun and we'd all enjoy it.
Wouldn't it be lovely if one could order a mass shopping boycott of the worst offenders!
I'm trying to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to it, but it's nearly impossible. P.S I enjoyed the Thomas Lawrence today. Not a bauble in sight unless you count the agate sleeve cuffs. Many thanks.
Oh, I'm so glad you liked it, Lucille. I must go back for another look.
Oh aren't you wicked...and delightful!
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