Shopping

I went shopping with Biffo the Sunday before the Sunday before Christmas. The squirtels were tucked snug away in hollow trees in fairview park, the whooping swans were cheering themselves on across our pale skies and all across the land heterosexual men were teaming up to go shopping.
I am from the ninja school of  buying-shit, I operate alone and I'm in and out like a shadows ghost. Things vanish from shelves, money appears in tills, salespeople are disturbed by peripheral flickers and the lingering waft of Boots Original 24hr anti-perspirant. Standard kit for ninjas. Fact.
But thats when I'm buying shit for me. I don't need emotional support or deadlines or a play-date to force my hand when I'm shopping for me. Christmas shopping requires backup.

Shopping in a team, or more accurately; a squad (a squad of two) is Combat Mission style shopping; shopping like big gruff manly men with objectives, strategies, operation critical time-windows, danger and alcohol. Lots of alcohol.
The Foggy Dew, 1630 hours, mission debriefing, I arrived an hour late and for the first time ever Biffo was there first, waiting for me. This was a very emotional moment for me, he was half way through his first pint which meant he had been there at least ten minutes, ten minutes sitting there wondering what had happened, why was he the silly twat drinking on his own waiting for some tardy fucker to show up ? Had the whole world gone topsy turvy? Yes you sonofabitch, you are that twat. It only took me fifteen years or so, but I've fucking got your number, you fucking chronographically challenged weirdo. I then ordered a brace of pints before realising I had no cash money on me and demanded that Biffo cough up, thereby losing the moral victory I had fought so hard to achieve.

Any mission worth executing starts with pints, which are immediately followed by a ham and cheese sandwich, naturally. A tactical fork was called for; me to the ATM, Biffo to the Mercantile for sammiges. I found him nursing another pint, the Mercantile doesn't do sammiges. What's this town comming to?  Another one down and  we broke cover for Grogans and the guarantee of lovely home-made cheese and ham delectables.
Grogans never flags, never waivers, the best pub in the world, marvellous pintage and vittles. I discovered that a ham cheese tomato and onion sammige is called a 'toasted special', I was dumbfounded. For about ten years I have been calling for "a toasted ham cheese tomato and onion thanks very much", the time wasted, the chagrin, the unnoticed funny looks, now imagined, that will haunt me in the quiet hours.
Finally we were prepped for the task at hand. Out the door with us says Biffo, time is short.

To the batcave record shop. Theres a tradition in Biffos' family, going back about two years, whereby every Christmas I am conscripted to buy techno for Biffo's brother, which is then kris-kringled to him by the appropiate family member. This makes Daddybear the easiest person in the world to buy presents for at Christmas as all a person has to do is phone me and grunt "Daddybear, techno, thanks". Really they're taking advantage of my addiction to buying techno, but I don't mind as I am addicted to buying techno.This year it is Biffos turn to ask me to buy techno, so a trip to the record  shop is pretty high on our agenda.
But I'm in a forced recovery with this itch, financial ruination has kept me out of the record shop (singular - I don't cheat on my record shop or comic shop, unlike some slutywhores out there), and my few relapses this year have been online purchases that weren't distributed to the retailers. So I was pretty shocked when I found the entire techno section completely missing. Apparently the guy that took care of that stuff went to work somewhere else and his knowledge went with him. It was a bit of a relief in a way, now I no longer owe loyalty to a record shop I can buy everything I want online with minimal fuss, which was what I decided to do, so we were able to mark that mission objective as an unqualified success.

The walk from Grogans to the record shop, all thirty meters of it,  had left Biffo hungry again. Yamamori ? Yeah sure I said, because I'm always hungry, even when I'm full. It makes no sense as I'm only small, but I am also a man of mystery so there you go.
We had lovely Yamamori food and a bottle of wine and were very  loud because of drunkness and high spirits.
At this stage a plan had to be drawn up as it was getting seriously late and televisions aren't sold in every tobacconist or brothel like in the good old days. Thats what we were after, by the way, a TV for Daddy and Mammy Biffo. The Emergency plan was this: we both could remember there being a Philips place at the junction of Georges st. and Dame St. We were well aware that it might not exist or possibly might be closed so the back up plan was to hit Dixons in the Jervis centre.
Sure enough the Philips place was closed, but at least it exists so we both felt vindicated on some level. Biffo hailed a taxi, despite the Jervis being a five minute walk away. I expected this, Biffo never walks, when he comes out of the pub around the corner from his house he'll jump into a taxi, avoids giving a destination by saying something like "we'll start by taking this next left" and then calls a halt to proceedings outside his gaff, pays the minimum fare and hops out.
Anyways, Dixons.
Jervis st. was still open , praise be to Cheebus and his mighty flowing robes of woven justice, and once inside the telly shop Biffo decided that now was a good time to find out the size of the cabinet back home that the telly would have to fit into. Je-aysus.
One shouty-in-an-electronics-shop phone call later and we had the width of the cabinet. TV dimensions are given diagonally from top corner to opposite bottom corner, a fact Biffo was blissfully unaware of, so unless we bought a really small tv we had a really good chance of fucking this up. That is unless one of us suavely carries a tape measure in his handsome pocket on a regular basis. Damn straight. In a Bond moment that would bring a tear to Roger Moore's eye and make Pierce Brosnan literally shit himself, I kung fu measured every hench-tv in a five mile radius, wielding that baby like some sort of infant.

I have a habit of not insulting people from a racial minority on first meeting them, for fear of the insult being wrongly taken as some form of racism. It is a subtle form of racism in itself, in that I am treating them differently based on their ethnicity, but in a country where d'ignorance is a virtue I can be fairly confident that I am helping push the balance back towards neutral. Biffo has no such pretensions, so when a small beardy easterner sales assistant bravely stepped up to assist, Biffo asked him if he was a sheep shagger.
This is exactly the sort of comment I avoid, in this case doubly so because he looked exactly like one of those  shepherd types from the mountainy bits of Pakistan that you see in movies. Or that I saw in one movie once, to be precise.
The beardy fella took it in good humor, fair play to him, we must have had the advantage of novelty as you don't get many half-cut goofballs in electronics shops. Turns out he didn't have our chosen telly in stock anyway, so we nipped over to Argos and got one there instead. There were no further adventures in Argos as they are well accustomed to half-cut goofballs, twits and sociopaths and have taken steps at a design level to effectively neutralise and contain buffoonery is all its myriad forms.
We took the telly across to T.P. Smiths to wet the babys head, as the saying goes. Tis tradition so it is.

I made it home eventually, a successful shopping mission in the bag, though I had no actual purchases to prove it. Back when I lived with Biffo this was pretty normal everyday stuff, and I do miss it at times. What I don't miss is the next mornings, and lack of practice is making them worse. Also not being able to drink away the monday morning blues is just unfair.