Christingle comes early

I am not usually a believer in starting Christmas activity until the second half of December, not feeling very festive until then. So last year we did not get to the Chessington World of Christmas (CWC) until December 17th. This year however, on the feeble excuse that I needed a new litter picker, we paid an early visit, to find that late on a Saturday afternoon the place is in full swing. Not sure if Santa had checked in, but pretty much everything else had, including the Lomax village noticed last time.

We found some splendidly kitsch fairies with toadstools which might have done rather well as a Christmas ornament in our front room front window. But after some humming and hawing decided against. Maybe we will look again next year.

I thought this year that I would illustrate part of the very large and impressive shed which contains most of this stuff. A shed fully part of an operation fully licensed for the sale of plants and plant food, for consumption on or off the premises.

Presumably CWC is sucking a lot of money out of the system that would otherwise have been hoovered up by shops in Epsom town centre. I would not have thought that it would be worth Wilkinson's while now to attempt to compete in a serious way and they will just do a few baubles for those too lazy to leg it out to Chessington. One might even need to go as far as the West End to get a comparable display - where Fortnum & Mason certainly turn themselves into a bit of a bazaar for the occasion.

The problem with the litter picker is that the trigger often jams before the jaws are fully closed, making the picking up of leaves from the new daffodil bed much more of a pain than it should be. One can make some progress by varying the grip and the hand, but it is not very satisfactory; and, after all, the things are designed to be used by geriatrics. I have noticed that the chaps from the council use a rather different model with rather different jaw action and on the basis that the council ought to know about litter picking, I had thought to get one of those, but as it turned out CWC only sold the same model that I had already. However, their models did not jam in the shop so at £12.99 I was taken for another one - but this time I will keep the details of the purchase so that I can amuse myself by writing pompous letters to the wholesaler should this second one start to jam. I shall report further in due course.

BH not too impressed to find that CWC was out of stock of bulb fibre. All kinds of bales of fibres for this and fibres for that, a lot of which I had never heard of, but nothing so simple as bulb fibre. But she was able to buy a planter to plant bulbs in, with the result that my tomorrow's project is drilling some holes in the bottom of it, the designer of this particular planter clearly not being very up on plant drainage.