This won't take long

26th November 2023

Don’t bother taking your coat off, you won’t be staying long.

It has definitely been a slow news week at LCDDB. Even two very British rainy days on Tuesday and Wednesday only effected slight alterations to the state of our road, what with them being miserably drizzly rather than a heavy deluge (fortunately). The worst thing was the mucky footprints left on the railings by our resident pair of wood pigeons, who sneaked on when Harry wasn’t looking. I say footprints, but the clumps they left behind looked like they’d been clog dancing in the nearest patch of mud.

Although the sun returned on Wednesday, it was joined by colder weather, which lasted the rest of the week, culminating in temperatures in the low tens first thing and, when we had another grey day again yesterday the feeble attempt at precipitation came with a mix of snow and tiny hail stones.

What else was there to do, then, other than a spot of shopping. When I say that we headed to Campiglione and Girasole, you will by now know what follows without me telling you – but where’s the fun in that? We stopped first at Click Café to stock up on coffee and were seduced, with little encouragement, into buying one of the very fine panettoni, made by Perrotta, a company based near Naples, that the nice man had on display.

We shunned the ones with fancy flavoured icing and outré alternatives to candied fruit, plumping for, as he said, a traditional one with the toothsome pieces of moist apricots (of the Pellecchiella del Vesuvio variety as it says on the box), of which we have such fond gastronomic memories from the last time we bought one. It will be put away for the Christmas period (which, I believe, starts round about the 24th December and not sometime at the end of October). As we left, the nice man commented that it was very good, slightly warmed with gently melting butter…

From there we went to the shopping centre itself and L’Erbolario for some more of those products that I buy to keep myself looking young and vibrant (you may omit the obvious retort), and as the evening was still young we filled in the time before returning to MSP and stopping at the pub to collect my cap (see previous entry) and have a plate of tortellini boscaiola by giving OVS the once over. I know you will wonder what I was doing, slumming it at a competitively priced mainstream clothing store after the dizzying heights of Nero Giardini last weekend, but I did have my personal shopper with me – and there was 20% off everything thanks to Black Friday, even though it was Saturday.

No surprise then that I left with two shirts (one made from recycled fibre to ease the conscience just a tad) and a pair of trousers. That, as Stephen remarked, is now me set up for the coming winter season and covered for all eventualities short of a black-tie invitation - in theory, anyway.