Christmas Shopping

Spent the day wandering around Spitalfields market, looking for Christmas presents for the family. Books, food, alpaca hats and scarves, cds, t-shirts and jewellery. Seems to be a brisk trade in fine art stills from cult movies, though I haven't seen these hanging in the houses/flats of anyone I know. Mixing with the wrong crowd. Thought about getting pate de fois gras for John (mother's chappie), but someone gave me an effectively vivid description recently of a duck being force-fed at gunpoint which has put me off pate for a bit. Remember, now I think about it, staying in France and local farmer (Monsieur Duleau) describing the whole pate process in glowing terms whilst pouring out absinthe (then illegal) into glasses. He watered it down by pouring eau minerale over a sugar lump balanced on a fork, the required amount of water being enough to melt the sugar into the glass. Tasted of aniseed. The next (and last) time I had absinthe was as part of a three-glass science-fiction cocktail in a downstairs bar on Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg. The process was very convoluted, like an alchemical experiment, involving flames and tubes, but I did get drunk about forty times faster than usual, so, after all, it was quite efficient.