Foraging

Yesterday my friend Joan came round for a visit, forging through the freezing drizzle in her new Christmas hat.
She's an animator and she has animator anecdotes that are in a different genre to my musical ones. That's one of the interesting things about Christmas socialising: picking up little stories in your shopping basket. For instance, at Gina's the other day I was told by one of her neighbours about a Marc Jacobs Coca Cola bottle that someone didn't know what to do with.
Put it on eBay? Take it to Oxfam?
'Drink it', I suggested.
 Joan had set up an experiment with pinhole cameras and monochrome photographic paper, with her neighbours. They had all made pictures of the slow trajectory of the sun across the sky and then shown them at Christmas drinks parties. Will Self, the writer, had been at one of them, and had got very upset at the thought of Joan using Photoshop to bring out the best qualities in the prints she'd made from the photographs.
After mulled berry juice in the warm gloom of the kitchen, we went on a tour of the best charity shops in Barnet, foraging and browsing for hours.
Joan was going to a masked ball last night and she bought a lovely midnight-blue dress and two vintage beaded handbags. One of them was dripping with strands of tiny green beads and looked as though it had been dredged up from a coral reef. I bought a sheath dress covered in a print of wisteria (good! I never manage to grow the bloody stuff!) and a tiny silver pill box with a dog's head on it.
I saw other people doing the same as us; there was a woman in a fluffy jacket with beige dogs printed on it who appeared in the same shops, sometimes before us and sometimes after us, buying different sorts of things.
Joan's students are having a competition to see who has the most revolting Christmas-present jumper and we found a humdinger for Joan to wear, potentially: but it was just too ghastly.
Afterwards we returned home with our spoils to show the Offsprogs, as though they were our mums, and scoffed mince pies.
How very different to the fierce and greedy scrum of the sales!