I price a 45 pound museum jumper against a charity shop reindeer and a tarot reader’s cinema seat lawsuit.
LONDON, England – Christmas arrives in a London charity shop the way the weather arrives in a pub garden, all at once and with too many people already wearing it.
The Rail, Midmorning
I am in the shop on the corner, the one run by a volunteer called Pauline who prices everything by a method she has never explained and I have never dared to question. A cardigan is four pounds. A cardigan that looks identical is nine pounds. The difference, Pauline says, “is the feeling”.
The Christmas rail has gone up. It is jumpers as far as the eye can go, a long dark tunnel of reindeer, snowmen and a woollen penguin with a look in its eyes that suggests it has seen the accounts. I pick out a reindeer with a pompom nose for six pounds and hold it up to the light like a diamond.
I have a reason to be this thorough. The morning’s news on my phone concerns a different sort of Christmas knitwear altogether.
The Price of Wool, Late Morning
ianVisits has gathered up the Christmas jumpers on sale from London’s museums and galleries, and it is a better read than most of my own work. There are ten institutions on the list, and the prices run from 35 pounds to 60.
The Royal Opera and Ballet is the most expensive at 60 pounds, with a winter stage scene and musical snowflakes, which is the only jumper on the list that may need its own understudy. The Houses of Parliament offers a snow globe of central London, with snowflakes and portcullises, for 45 pounds, and also a dog jumper, which I think is the most honest garment in the building.
The London Transport Museum has baubles decorated with TfL services on a green background, complete with roundels, also at 45 pounds. I considered that for three whole seconds before remembering that I could not afford an Oyster top-up, never mind the thing itself. The Natural History Museum does a green jumper with a Staggasaurus skeleton, the London Zoo does a sweatshirt with a capybara in a winter woodland, and the British Library, the RAF Museum and the Science Museum all come in at 35 pounds.
My reindeer cost six. It has a pompom nose. It has no museum shop, no gift-wrapped TARDIS, and no upsell to a children’s version. I am in many ways a small museum myself.
The Reading List, Afternoon
At lunch I make my reading list for the winter, because my editor has asked for one and because lists are how I pretend I am in control. It is below, in order of how much I will actually finish.
- Diary of a Nobody, because it is research
- Three Men in a Boat, which I will start in the bath and finish in the bath
- Cold Comfort Farm, which I have started four times and which has never let me down, only gone on holiday
- Animal Farm, again, because it keeps turning up in the news
- The instructions for our boiler
The Orwell is there for a reason. A farming website has reported that a movie of Animal Farm is irking pork producers, and I have decided that this is the most British sentence of the year, a book about pigs taking over the world upsetting the people who sell pigs. Honor says the book is not actually about pork. I say I am aware of that, and put it at the top of the list anyway.
Quiz Night, The Fox and Spanner
Our pub quiz team is called Beige Is Not a Personality, and we have not won since the landlord misread a question. Tonight’s quizmaster, a man named Roland who treats the microphone like a sceptre, has set a news round, and Dev has come prepared with the day’s reading.
He has found the ianVisits daily roundup, The London Buzz, and it has two stories that I would have assumed were wrong answers. In the first, black cabs will keep their exclusive access to Bank Junction after a trial, according to the Standard. In the second, a professional tarot card reader is suing Vue for 12.7 million pounds, claiming that a defective cinema seat in London ruined his online fortune-telling career, as reported by the Independent.
He is claiming it, I want to stress, and the cinema will have its say. But I like to think of the reading he must have done beforehand. A man who could see the future, and who did not see the seat.
Roland asks the question: “Which London junction has been kept for black cabs after a trial?” Gideon writes BANK in capital letters, underlines it twice and holds the answer sheet up to the light as if it might be forged. We get that one right. We lose the round on a question about the Thames Barrier, but nobody is perfect, least of all a woman in a reindeer.
Last Orders
The reindeer jumper does well. A stranger at the bar asks where I got it and I say, with great ceremony, “it’s from a museum”, which is true in the sense that the whole charity shop is one.
I keep a record of days like this because someone should, and you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat on the days when the Tube lets me get to the keyboard. If you would like to understand what we are doing with the news, this explainer on what commentary is and what it is not is a sensible place to begin, and the page of English news for people with a sense of humour is the pudding.
I walk home at closing time with the reindeer on, the nose lit by every streetlamp I pass. At the door I tell it that it has had a good first night. It says nothing, but I have heard of worse things being said by a man with a microphone.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/