Entry for 19th November, 2007

I bought an engagement present for one of my colleagues today. Even though I am currently teetotal (4 days and counting), I thought I’d buy the happy couple half a dozen bottles of wine. So, I trecked along to the supermarket, made my purchase and carted the wine out to the car in one of these fancy cardboard wine carriers that hold six bottles. These wonders of origami are the luggage of choice for the alcoholic middle-classes – cunningly devised by the supermarkets to allow lonely housewives and stressed businessmen to tote four times their recommended weekly number of alcohol units out to the BMW in one fail swoop.
However, I normally buy my wine in Sainsburys where there wine carrier is sturdy enough to carry diminutive chef Jamie Oliver and five courgettes grown by him on his allotment. Not so the wine carrier from Morrisons. The Morrison’s wine carrier is a flimsy creation. I should have known better than to trust a supermarket not endorsed by young Jamie, as I discovered to my cost as a bottle of Chateaneuf Du Pape and a cheeky Burgundy were dashed to smithereens as I tried to load them into the boot of my car.
In my current state of sobriety, it was all I could do to stop myself from sinking to my knees and licking the delicious fruit of the vine from the tarmac of the industrial estate car park. Instead I allowed the product 1.5 litres of pure joy and French sunshine leech away into the drain.