I’ve worked out the secret to Christmas.

It’s order everything from M&S, make sure you have access to a 20% discount, then apply heat where relevant!

If you’re particularly fancy (or a gay) then you can combine this with some of Nigella’s easier Christmas recipes. I am talking EASY.

Check this one out:

1. Buy some dried fruit (that preferably includes cranberries, etc)
2. Pour dark sherry over all of it
3. Cover

Then you just spoon it out over vanilla ice cream.

Snap!

By the way, the ‘Steeped Christmas Fruits’ (a term that is ‘ripe’ for gay jokes) is probably the Kwanzaa miracle to which this post refers.

I only know of the word from Futurama anyway.

The rest of the post is about how I fail at things:

So I was waiting out the front of M&S before 7am this morning (proof here) like a pensioner to pick up the last few things on my list for Christmas dinner.

These ‘last few things’ happened to include ‘the giant turkey that clearly escaped from Jurassic Park’ and ‘more than 6 bottles of wine’.

(And apparently the M&S computer thinks 7:15am is too early to buy 6 bottles of wine because it said it was outside their liquor license hours. That was an embarrassing thing to have to get the duty manager to fix whilst the people behind me were trying to buy their breakfast on their way to work.)

What I am trying to say is that there was an insane amount of heavy carrying to get the stuff the mile back to our apartment.

This next bit is where I get annoyed:

I struggle out of M&S carrying five enormous bags and a large cardboard wine carrier. I’m in my work clothes as I had an important meeting with the MD later in the day.

I pass a cab rank with two available cabs but decide that even though I am in excruciating pain it is not worth a tenner. (It’s only a mile but you have to loop back; there are lights and one way bits and all that which makes it pricey. And if I had any change left I would have just pissed it away.)

We’re in a severe recession after all.

So it’s 7:30am (pitch black at this latitude) and I’m struggling through a half-billion pound enormous outdoor shopping mall (like Sylvia Park), sweating like a rapist in my last remaining work clothes.

Then the cardboard wine carrier breaks.

All the wine bottles tumbled to the ground and started rolling in all kinds of crazy and dark directions. (Who builds a shopping mall that slopes in three different directions??)

So there I am, clawing around in the dark for wine in an empty shopping mall on Christmas Eve with my turkey and 6 litres of ice cream sitting on the bus stop outside McDonald’s like some kind of semi-posh pikey.

The wine then had to go in with the rest of the groceries where it managed to crush 4 loaves of bread. (I make a lot of bread sauce.)

Oh, and I had to shower and get completely changed. The only shirt I had left was short sleeved so I celebrated the last day of work by dressing as a paedophile but managed to cover it up with an old, stained sweater. (I’m taken, ladies.)

Gosh I hope Paula doesn’t read this before I have managed to feed her the food I almost destroyed.

Merry Christmas all!