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An unreal calm has descended over my property dealings. Lawyers and surveyors and mortgage companies are muttering about the state of my damp proof course (what damp proof course?) and the financial status of my buyer, and all seems well. As to finding a house for myself, I’m not going to risk house-hunting until contracts have been exchanged. Besides, the great pre-Christmas slowdown in the market has descended; everyone with a house to sell is waiting for the new year. Nor do I want to find a house too soon. I want to see what it feels like to be free of all domestic responsibilities – no mortgage or utilities bills, no anxiety-inducing cracks in the plaster, no garden to tend.
Maybe I will buy a plushy motorcaravan with shag-pile carpet running up its walls, and drive it around the country to the thumping rhythms of Cliff Richard’s ‘Travelling Light’, parking it outside the homes of friends and family for a few days here and there. Life as an upmarket ‘Lady in a Van’ has always appealed, ever since a wonderful summer twenty years ago when we drove all over Europe with four small children in a capacious yellow campervan in quest of the locations of such famous children’s classics as Heidi and Pinocchio. We got the idea from Toad’s seductive vision of the Life Adventurous in The Wind in the Willows: ‘Here today, up and off somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, excitement! The whole world before you and a horizon that’s always changing’.
But not just yet, Winter is no time for such expeditions. Winter is all about Christmas – a truth emphasised by the repetitious ‘splat’ of gift catalogues dropping through the letterbox. Normally, such things take the short cut to the recycling bin, a waste-paper basket in the porch. But this year is different. If I’m really going to be ready to move early in January, I need to get ahead right now. I settle down to some serious research into the present potential offered.
An hour’s post-prandial leafing through their flimsy, colourful pages is a startling eye-opener into the mail-order moguls’ visions of the secret longings of the nation. What price silver-plated toothpick cases, pocket-change trays or computer mice? Or Jig Roll, ‘an ingenious roll of special adhesive felt that allows you to work on a puzzle almost anywhere, and take the unfinished puzzle away with you’. Or a ‘funky, floppy, Bopper alarm clock, with furry springed pom-pom bells and velvet shoes’. Or 3D snakes-and-ladders?
I turn to an old favourite, the Innovations catalogue, but its technology has gone far beyond my always tenuous grasp on such things, I do not want to ‘Meet SpaceC@m 150 the portable webcam’. Or to ‘check my pulse while on the go’. On what go, exactly? A nephew might like the snake-like light that plugs into a USB port so that he can ‘compute in the dark’, but would he really ‘rejoice in the infinite prank potential of a radio-controlled Fart Machine’?
Oxford’s most refined catalogue comes from the Bodleian Library. For a mere £495, the lucky recipient can relive his or her student days in the same sort of English Ash chair that they swotted in as undergraduates. For just over £40, you can dry up two reproduction Elizabethan wine glasses using a tea towel printed with the declaration all readers sign not to ‘mark, deface, or injure in any way any volume, document, or other object belonging in the custody of the Library’.
The Radio Times catalogue’s bland offerings of personalised teapots and jolly snowmen aprons don’t appeal. Lakeland Creative Crafts exhausts me so much with its suggestions for homemade sparkly Christmas cards adorned with padded floral blooms that I fall asleep. And I do not think that any of the men in my life will be turned on by the Masculine Paper Art Book, a ‘collection of motifs for men . . nautical, sports, music, the great outdoors, etc’. Gender stereotypes are clearly alive and well in Windermere.
The situation is saved by the arrival of the best catalogue of all: Hawkin’s Bazaar, a wild extravaganza of totally unnecessary objects written up with seductive wit An hour later, Christmas is sorted. Among the many treasures ordered are a water-divining kit, a Nuns Having Fun Calendar, a didgeridoo, an egg-laying rubber chicken, and several sets of ‘lovers’ gloves’: two ordinary red fleecy mittens for your outer hands, and one capacious one with two entry points for your lovingly clasped double fist. Irresistible. And all for me.
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