Jo blogs

And I’m not referring to elfin safety – just to get that out the way immediately.

When we arrived at Father Christmas’ grotto at 10am on Saturday, it had already been a bit of a morning. Leaving the house before midday with a baby and a four year old nearly always involves some degree of stress. On this occasion, we made it out the door at about 9.35, giving us 25 minutes to do a 35 minute drive. Plus we’d been told to arrive five minutes early.

Inevitably, the sat nav sent us to the wrong place. (It wasn’t until we got there of course that I read the bit in the ticket info that told you which post code to use.) We were nearly there when we witnessed a non-serious car crash. Someone made the grievous mistake of dithering too long while turning right. So the guy behind him, in a jeep pulling a trailer, decided it would be a good idea to overtake him while he was turning. The jeep made it round the car just in time but the trailer didn’t.

As it was clearly the jeep’s fault, I wound down my window and called out to the car driver that we’d seen what had happened. “We’re in a real hurry though. We’ve got to go.” I hastily scrawled our number on an old cassette card (I know, I know) lying in the door pocket, thrust it through the window at him and off we sped.

We needn’t have rushed – we were the first to arrive at Santa’s place. There was a female elf hanging about outside. She looked the part – pixie boots, stripey tights, red and green pom pom hat etc – but she seemed rather nervous. She ushered us into the visitors’ centre, aka the grotto, where tables covered in craft materials for making Christmas cards were packed into a fairly small space. On each was a plate with a “selection” of biscuits (five rich teas, one bourbon – sign of the economic times I suppose).

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