Boosting the G.D.P.

When my sister dropped me at Southampton airport on Wednesday morning, an old guy waiting for a bus collared me. ‘How’s the house?’ he asked.

I was staggered that anyone should recognise me after what, one or two viewings of Grand Designs Revisited. It’s not as if I’m a newsreader or a weatherman. Maybe it was the pork-pie hat I was wearing. ‘I admired your persistence,’ he continued. ‘I really liked what you did. How is it holding up, the straw and all?’ He told me about climbing into haystacks as a child and feeling the heat rising up from within all that natural insulation.

He hurried off to catch his bus and left me feeling rather bemused. A little taste of stardom – but it goes quite a long way. Later, when I’d passed through the Departure gate and had some of my more suspicious-looking purchases checked and re-examined – the pack of batteries, the gold-plated Scart-to-Scart video lead, the car-lighter USB adaptor (all of which could probably be fashioned into a detonation device for a bomb) – I was collared a second time. This time it was a woman with a clipboard, who wanted to ask me some questions to help determine the impact of tourism on the U.K.’s G.D.P.  

She asked me what I’d done during my brief stay. Had I visited any museums or art galleries? Er, no. Had I been to the cinema or theatre? Er, no. Had I dined out in a restaurant? Again no (unless my dad’s take-away curries from Asda or my own fish-and-chip supper for three counted). No, all I’d done was to sit and talk about gardening and the War with my mother, about music and films with my father, and about our reminiscences of childhood with my sister. And to shop. Which was embarrassing to confess, because when I’m in France I’m pretty scathing about our national obsession with shopping – as if I’m above such inane activity. And what do I do as soon as I touch down in England? I shop. Not once, not twice, but thrice in four days.

'My head's about to explode!'

Monday morning I went to Romsey and did a charity shop dash for an hour. The French don’t go in for charity shops; they seem to have an aversion to things second-hand. I miss them. I miss the occasional excitement of coming across the unexpected. In the Oxfam shop, for example, I unearthed a double CD by Weather Report for just under four quid that I hadn’t even known existed. Live & Unreleased. In the Salvation Army shop, I encountered a young auxiliary, who was a dead-ringer for Little Britain’s Vicki Pollard. She kept announcing incoherently that her head was about to explode, because she had to serve me while in the middle of putting some clothes on a rail. I paid her a quid for the three-volumes-in-one of George Melly’s autobiography. And in Help the Aged, of all places, I found a fabulous ska compilation for another quid.

Later that morning, I took my dad to the vast Asda at Chandler’s Ford. He hadn’t been since the last time I took him six or seven months ago. My parents order their groceries on line these days, so they never have to leave their house. But he needed some little round coloured stickers for the wall chart in his office. A red dot, I would think, denotes a day of inactivity. I bought myself that dodgy Scart-to-Scart lead and a pack of recordable DVDs that cost about a fifth of what they would cost in France.

Finally, on the Tuesday morning, I went to Southampton’s ugly city centre to deposit some cheques and to buy presents from the HMV Shop: a boxed set of Norman Wisdom films for my dad’s 84^th birthday; a boxed set of reggae for my sister, who loves Bob Marley, but wouldn’t know her Toots from her roots; a couple of films for the missus; and a couple of ‘modern’ CDs for The Daughter. And a little something for myself.

We sat in the sunshine afterwards, eating exotic wraps from Pret-à-Manger and watching the human beans walking on by. As if to remind me that I was back home, a newspaperman periodically barked out something unintelligible that sounded like a foghorn in the night. I suggested to my sister that it would be an ideal job for someone with Tourette’s syndrome.

After all this shopping, what forgiveness? Fortunately, I’d travelled ultra-light and just about managed to stuff everything into a bag that would fit into the FlyBe hand-luggage gauge. At least the woman with the clipboard would have appreciated my efforts on behalf of the nation’s gross domestic product.