You guys have been out ALREADY??

We are off to get the 'stocking fillers'

I once included a ball of string for my missus, wrapped up she thought it was one of those Orange Chocolate thingies 

Blimey John. I know that us girls like a man with a sense of humour, but there are limits!

Yes, it's called "going to work"  Conveniently, the act of going to work lent itself to a detour to the Neal's Yard Dairy cheese shop, at the one time of day which stood a chance of being fairly quiet.  If you'd seen what it was like on Saturday (having promised your mother a selection of their produce) you'd have done the same

One of my colleagues went to Sainsbury's at 6:30 this morning to beat the crowds 

I think our Asda has been open from midnight - presumably that's when Sunday restrictions end - and closes at six, Milly.  It then remains closed until Thursday morning so I'll be going round there about four thirty today to avail myself of the inevitable drastic reductions to fill my freezer and soup pot.  I'd better go and get some bread and milk before the other shops shut, though; Asda will almost certainly have sold out of those long before closing.

Because Scottish trading laws are different, stores can open 24/7, and the largest Tescoids in Dundee does that as a matter of course. I've not ventured near it for over a week, but last year I was working just across the road from it; for the last two days before Christmas they had parking attendants with radio communication so that they could have every vacated space filled as soon as possible. Inside it was bedlam.

On the other hand, Dundee city centre was quiet late Saturday afternoon when we went to the Chinese supermarket to pick up the seafood for Christmas Day starters - always wonderful quality at excellent prices - though I gather that it was pretty wild yesterday.

We've got baby cuttlefish and green-lipped mussels, and also some tiger prawns, Mort, (although the latter will be for a different meal); about four times the size of anything that comes from one of the big chains for about a quarter of the price. I tend to buy my spices and sauces there, too.

Any luck, Ruth?  I think Asda won this year.  All I really got for my freezer was some organic salmon fillet – packs of two portion-sized pieces for £1 a pack.  The soup pot did rather better: they seemed to be throwing all the different types of veg into polythene bags and putting a 20p sticker on each bag.  I got parsnip, broccoli, cauliflower, carrot and potato; a medium cauli and about half a kilo of each of the others for £1 in all.  But overall it looks like the store judged demand pretty accurately.  The really frustrating thing is that this is the first year I can remember when they had a surplus of milk.  I’d already bought some for fear of being left without, and the first thing I saw on entering Asda was a huge cage full of 1 litre bottles for 10p each!


I’m seriously jealous here, Ron; not so much on account of the prawns & mussels as the cuttlefish.  I brought back a large packet of smoked eel from my recent trip to the Netherlands and I’ll be dishing that up to visitors with tiger prawns, gravad lax and smoked trout.  Cuttlefish would have been a fine addition.  If I could have got to Waitrose I could probably have got some baby squid, but the shops round here don’t even have squid rings these days.  Still, most of my visitors will be delighted with the eel, which is almost impossible to find round here (Waitrose do it, but the nearest one is many miles away and the price is well over double what you pay in Amsterdam).