Primark

Yesterday I fought my way through the annual Christmas-Panic hordes in Primark (not the most glamorous place to shop, true, but on a student budget of £25 per week for food socialising and everything Primark is the only place within my reach and who can argue with white shirts for £2.50 and jeans at £6?) Seriously, take a sane person, plonk them in the middle of a hot, packed Primark store, simmer for 30 minutes and voila! A recipe for insanity. Seriously, Primark on a Friday afternoon is not a place you want to be. Trust me on this. The people in there are vultures. Pop a garment back on the rails for two seconds and POOF! It's gone. A suspiciously powdered-to-the-point-of-looking-like-a-tangerine woman was so eager to have the floaty black sequined top I'd picked up off the sale rack and I was so scared of her razor sharp, two inch fake bright pink nails (at least I think they were fake) that I just gave it her out of my basket.

The queues for the changing rooms were horrendous.

But the queues to pay were worse.

The queue had spilled over beyond the barriers and had snaked across the shop floor. It wasn't even that the line was really long: the real problem was that the vast majority were in possession of two or even three basket crammed full of crumpled up garments, PVC shopping bags and plastic shoes. I surveyed in disbelief as one woman, a panicky look in her eyes, grappled with a trolley in which two bundled up children looked extremely flushed and uncomfortable, two baskets brimming to the max AND a pile of additional garments which she'd stacked on top of the pram.

I have never witnessed such a scene.

An hour and a half later, I emerged from the store with my purchases (two pairs of jeans, some shirts and some socks- measly in comparison with everyone elses' bulging five bags) vowing never to return until well after the post-Christmas sales rush.

Maybe I don't miss Primark when I'm in Durham so much after all.