Half Price Diamonds and Sweaty Balls

I went out shopping today for the sales. Where mugs like you and me can buy things at half price one day after we've just given it to the wife and kids... having paid full price for it. I say I went shopping. I actually drove my wife to the shops, and therefore the kids had to come as well.

It pained me when I went into the jewellers, not just another branch of the same chain, but the very same shop where I'd bought her some items of silver for numerous pounds, and saw the very same items for half the bloody price.

She was wanting to get a "winter coat" in a particular shop...which was closed. It opens tomrrow at 6am. Bugger that. We'll go when we want. If at all.

She did seem a bit miffed when I disappeared for half an hour and came back with a coat myself. Now, mine was not a winter coat, well it is, but I don't call it that. I don't have winter coats and summer coats. I have coats, and several of them. In recent years, I had a fetish for shirts, and had amassed more than sixty of them. Since I do the ironing in our house it was a real bastard. I don't understand the need to have a winter wardrobe, and in the summer you take out all the bigs coats and jumpers and put them in another cupboard. Why not.... just not wear it. That's what I do. In saying that though, my wardrobe is twice the size of my wifes as I have shitloads more clothes than her.

Anyway, shopping at Braehead Shopping Centre today. Brilliant. Especially as I wasn't after anything in particular. I felt as though I could just walk round watching other people go mental.

I did have to stand in a frigging queue in Argos though as the returns desk was buggered so had to join the main queue, then when I got to the front, the lassie told me she didn't do returns, so I had to stand aside while she served a myriad of other people while I waited for the young boy with the flock of seagulls hair handle a return for some Indian guy and his whole family. The Indian guy was overly polite to me, apologising profusely to me for keeping me waiting and I did feel a bit as though he felt as though he thought I was thinking it was his fault for me standing waiting, so I tried to put him at ease by basically blaming the shop staff myself, shaking my head etc. He was a lovely bloke, but he did leave his five year old son to carry huge Next Sale bags which were almost bigger than him and kept falling open, spilling clothes on the floor. That was funny.

Then another girl came on the tills who could do returns, but she ask me forward to do mine? Don't be stupid!. She took the first guy in the queue behind me...who had a return to do, then after that, she served a couple who were standing randomly in the shop, not even in the queue and had just walked up to her. Bastaaaaaardd.

And after they left I took my chances and just walked up to her without being called, but then her friggin till roll ran out and she wandered off for another two minutes searching under desks to find another.

Before I left the house, I had put on a white shirt with a light brown v-neck woollen sweater and thinking I would look quite stylish in the cold weather, left the house. I hadn't bargained for standing still in shop for thirty minutes under strong lights. By the time I left the shop I was sweating buckets. That was the first shop I went into. I had another four hours to go in that shopping centre. Later on I could feel the cold sticky fabric under my armpits and I couldn't figure out whether it was better to hold my arms out to try and let a bit of air in or just give up and rest in the sweat soaked fabric.

I don't even want to describe what my balls felt like. The sweat was pouring off them. I had an extreme urge to shove my hand down there and just unstick them from where they were attached to both thighs. It was almost like wearing a kilt with no underwear. Mucho sticky. I always wear boxers under my kilt. I went without once, never again.

Anyway at home, now and feeling a bit "stuffed up". A result of walking around in a sweat soaked shirt in cold weather. Ah well, I do have a nice new coat though.