Has it been stolen? Has it been delivered to one of the nearby houses which is sometimes empty during the week? Or delivered to the wrong address where perhaps someone dishonest lives? Why do I have to wait a full 28 days before I can inform the supplier that it’s gone missing? If I do report it missing, will it then turn up the very next day and make me look like a neurotic, impatient idiot? Have they chosen to dispatch it with some other, lesser, carrier whose delivery staff sneak up to the front door like ninjas and slip away having left a “missed delivery” card but no actual parcel? Why, oh why does the mail delivery system sometimes seem so random, with some things arriving the very next day after I order them and others hanging around in some mysterious parcel limbo for weeks at a time after I get my dispatch note?
Since Christmas I have ordered stupendous (well, relatively speaking) quantities of cheap tat (mostly books that I “just fancy” reading - hence the house full of books we have), possibly trying in some small way to cheer myself up. I’m told I compensate for my miseries by ordering these kinds of things and that, as we do already have a house full to bursting point with such tat, I really shouldn’t be ordering any more of it, but then I still go off and do so anyway.
I’m weak.
I’m feeble.
I admit it, but then I can’t ever resist a good bargain and I always justify it to my conscience by telling myself that I do wait for the price to drop to what I think that it’s reasonable to pay.
It’s the online sales that normally do for me, that and the fact that I’m suddenly free of the zone. The zone is that period of the year after the beloved has started to buy her gifts for me – be it for birthday or Christmas - until the celebration day itself. During that time I am not allowed to buy myself anything at all – with the odd exception (and the odd pre-order that is due out after the date is also allowed) - for fear of duplication.
I’m also told that all this personal shopping diminishes the value of the gifts I receive, especially if I’m receiving parcels I’ve bought for myself nearly every single week of the year, and this means that I don't get the benefit of the things that I do receive as loving, thoughtful gifts.
Ah! The perils of being a collector… and a completist.
I wonder whether it’s all because I really need something to look forward to, and that momentary feeling of excitement as I rush to the door after Barry’s done his letterbox thing is ever-so-slightly addictive? Or maybe I like to punish myself with a slight disappointment when I go down the stairs only to find that whatever I was expecting is still not lying on the doormat.
“So what is all this tat he’s expecting so eagerly?” I hear you possibly not cry. Well, you’ll probably think it’s a load of old rubbish, but it interests me, which I suppose is the nature of these things. The first I actually ordered quite a bit before Christmas, when I was firmly in the zone and it was therefore a wicked thing to do, although I convinced myself that the title was so obscure that the beloved was unlikely to have ever heard of it. It was a book called Second Thoughts, the second volume of Colin Baker’s – the multi-coloured shouty Dr. Who from the mid-1980s - articles for the Bucks Free Press. Towards the end of last Autumn I’d read his first volume after it was recommended to me, and I really liked it, being as it was a little bit like a blog – a smorgasbord of articles on various topics – but in book form. I didn’t know at the time that there was a second volume, so when I spotted it online my finger only hesitated for a moment before clicking to reflect on my zonal state before ordering, although it has taken rather a long time for the shop I used to get it back into stock, which is why I’m still waiting.
Ah online shopping! Too easy to click. Too easy to spend those pennies when it all seems so very virtual. Too alarming when the credit card bill arrives. I have a friend who doesn’t like online shopping because of the delay involved. They prefer the instant gratification of going into a shop, buying something and having it in their hands and available to them straight away, but I think I prefer the deferment, the thinking time, the pause to reflect and punish myself for my own weakness.
The second expected parcel is The Bogart and Bacall Signature Collection on DVD, the only one of those collections it seems that wasn’t on sale in Sainsbury’s just before Christmas and the only one I really wanted. To be fair, I’ve already got two of the rather brilliant films in this set on disc, Key Largo and The Big Sleep (in fact I only watched The Big Sleep on my “day off” last week) but this seems to be the only way you can get hold of To Have and Have Not on disc in the UK at the moment, and the set was cheap enough for me to justify it, and I get Dark Passage as a kind of bonus, too.
I just love those old Humphrey Bogart films!
Another DVD and an Audiobook make up the third and fourth. Optical media! Don’t you just love it? For me, you can keep your downloads and your “clouds”, I need to hold that physical object in my grubby paw! If it’s too virtual, I fear it might just slip away from me. I’m so old-school, so analogue that it probably hurts your brain just to think about it! I’ve not even considered moving to Blu-ray yet (Another format to fork out for?! Please, no…) and our telly is still reassuringly bulky, has a cathode ray tube somewhere within and is curvy of glass at the screen end, although it isn’t in a wooden cabinet, so I have embraced modernity in some ways. I even watched something from a Videotape last week, but I honestly don’t have any wax cylinders which I keep my audio collection on, although I do still have a sneaking desire to acquire a new turntable to play my old LPs on, even though when Pete Townsend’s White City Album finally made it on to CD, it did rather put a dent in that argument.
Oh, and the beloved awaits another new bag. She has many bags, but I can hardly be critical now, can I?
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