The reluctant countdown . . . . 6 1/2

Another trip into town, and my presents list is looking quite ticky. Hurrah! And thence to a well-known out-of-town purveyor of food, drink and Hannah Montana wear age 7-8 to purchase another few noughts'-worth of stuff.

With the shops closed for one whole long day on 25th Dec, obviously, it is imperative that one stockpiles as many bottles of fizzy drinks to tide the family over as, in fact, the family consumes during the entire course of the rest of the year. Stands to reason. As does acquiring a half-hundredweight sack of icing sugar. Just in case I run out.

So the food list is looking pretty ticked as well. The spare fridge (in the garage) has been cleaned out and pressed into service again - an excellent place to hide things I don't want the rest of the family to get their greedy hands on, too - and this weekend promises to be spent largely in the kitchen, doing all the baking which more organised domestic goddesses have been busy preparing for the past three months.

But where the blazes do I have to go to find Haggis???? What on earth is going on? Within easy living memory, Sainsbury's stocked a serviceable, workaday Haggis practically all the year round. Then suddenly, they stopped stocking it at all. Even in the winter. Even in December. And even, heaven help us, towards the end of January, when it might be supposed, with Burns Night on the 25th, that the entire Scottish Diaspora, not to mention swathes of Sassenach Haggis-fanciers, myself among them, would be scouring the aisles for the great chieftain o' the puddin-race. Ridiculous. I sent emails to Customer Services, and Customers Services replied, saying that Haggis was a 'seasonal item' and it was up to individual stores' sausage buyers to assess the demand. I reponding with rather a lot of inarticulate hurrumphing, to - evidently - no avail whatever. I shall have to call in at Proctors tomorrow and see if they have any.

Anyway, miraculously, I am still not grumpy at all. So it's time for another little extra countdown clip before I galvanise myself into unloading all the shopping from the car.

PS: I do, of course, realise (well, OK, the cogs have slowly ground into action and I have worked out) that, counting backwards, what comes between 6 and 5 is 5 1/2, but . . . it's still six days before Christmas, so 5 1/2 would look aesthetically strange if numerically accurate. Is my explanation, anyway. And I'm sticking to it. (And it's my blog, OK?!)