As in a warning about spoilers to be found elsewhere. See last paragraph.

Had today off work, decided that a Monday was the least painful day to try some Christmas shopping, so went up to Oxford/Regent Street. It wasn't much worse than a normal Saturday (so slightly worse than hell itself then) and I actually had a fair amount of success.

Books in Borders (with £5 off thanks to the voucher in Saturday's Guardian) for brother and mother. More books in the BBC Shop (always worth a look as they often have recent BBC releases at cut prices and older releases that you can't find elsewhere anymore) for father and, um, myself.

Then to the Apple Store to buy wife's present. That place is like some sort of strange cult. They were even running training sessions for iTunes upstairs. iTunes for heaven's sake, one of the simplest-to-use pieces of software ever written. I wondered whether they could identify me as a Windows using apostate via mystical means? And when I got to the front of the queue I realised that the only PIN I could remember was that of my debit card, so good as I'm not building up a debt but bad as in I can't play games with the interest free period and keep my savings intact for another month's worth of interest.

And to make pink_weasel very happy I bought the Christmas Radio Times. Out came the pink highlighter as soon as I got home. I hope we get some good DVDs for Christmas because other than Doctor Who the telly looks dire this year. And speaking of RT and DW, there's a ten page feature that spoils the Christmas special in just about every detail. Still, some people will like the pictures of David Tennant in his jim-jams. Oh, and a chance to win one of the actual Daleks from the '05 series...

Went up to town today for a bit of shopping. Took one look at the wall of rucksacks in the tube station and decided to walk from Victoria to the West End (nice little stroll past St James's Park and the Admiralty, etc.). Then at Forbidden Planet there was a huge queue 'cos Simon Pegg was doing a signing, but they'd put the queue out the back so it didn't interfere much at all with normal shopping (well what passes for normal in FP). But if the queue for Simon Pegg was as long as the one I saw today I dread to think how long the queue will be next week when Neil Gaiman is signing...

I nearly made it out of FP with wallet intact. Then I saw something that I had to have. So I spent £25 on a tee-shirt. Gulp. So, quick quiz. Who can guess what's in the tee-shirt?

pink_weasel is out doing karaoke tonight so I'm home on my home listening and sometimes watching the fireworks. We're nice and high up so I can see loads of displays. Tomorrow is the big display at Crystal Palace and I hope we get a good view of that as well.

Wales 3 - New Zealand 41.