Christmas Eve. There is a Christmas farmers' market today, and the rain has stopped, but we head north instead to Carrefour and collect a few more bits for dinner tonight and tomorrow. The queues are horrific, especially at the butcher's counter - easily fifteen people deep. At Prinos greengrocers I watch a young mother hand her daughter, aged maybe 4, a juicy peach as a reward for watching the shopping basket in the queue and am not sure whether I am more shocked by the casual acquisition without payment of a large out-of-season fruit on behalf of a child or by her handing the girl unwashed fruit to eat. I tell Joe, who says he just watched a woman in the supermarket put in her cart a carton of coke with attached free toy bus. She then tore the bus out of its plastic, handed it to her young son, and returned the coke to the shelf.
Lovely walk back. The rain has freshened things up and we pass bouganvillea, and flower beds, trees laden with oranges and palms swaying in the breeze. Very busy with traffic backed up and store aisles jammed with shoppers.
Christmas for me begins with the broadcast live of the nine lessons and carols from King's college, Cambridge. Or does when we're in this part of the world, anyway. In central Canada it would be at 9 a.m. but here it starts at five pm, always with a single boy soprano singing the first verse of Once in Royal David's City. They've been holding the service for 90 years and every year since 1932, with one exception, the radio World Service has carried it live. Time to sit down, pour a drink, and know that Christmas has begun. King's College chapel itself (not that it shows, this being radio) is lovely - a Gothic chapel dating back to Henry VI, and memories of it mingle with the music.
And on a more secular plane we pick up, later in the evening Ricky Gervais in some slightly edgy comedy with Swedish subtitles on the Swedish chanel.
JAWORSKI TRAVELS