Category: Journal

We went to see the new Wallace & Gromit movie on Monday night in celebration of me getting my Gromit mugs. Actually, that’s not true, it was simply to kill time until Fliss‘ dad arrived from his journey down to visit us. Well, that was Fliss‘ reasoning – as a die hard W&G fan I’d been desperate to see it since it came out.

I thought the movie was great, with stacks of attention to detail and lots of laugh-out-loud moments, too. I had been worried that the magic wouldn’t last for a feature length movie, but it turns out that the characters are just so endearing that they can carry it off in style.

I’ll be adding this one to my Wallace & Gromit dvd collection when it comes out for sure. Cracking!

Fliss found Gromit mugs in the city centre Tesco on Thursday afternoon and bought up three of them for me. Actually, one was for my friend Colin, but he later said that he didn’t really care about Wallace or Gromit, he’d just got caught up in my excitement when Fliss phoned me to say she’d found them and said he wanted one. So he gets none and I get three.

Apparently, when Fliss was buying our score of tea and mugs, an “old granny” was buying them too and said she’d come from Chester to see if she could find any of them, so that had me thinking that they must be as rare as I suspected. (Not grannies, Gromit mugs.)

However, on Friday both Lisa and Emily sent me messages telling me that the mugs had been available when they’d gone into their respective Tesco‘s – Lisa had seen them in the Liverpool city centre one, so they must have plentiful stock. Perhaps I just timed my efforts poorly and should have gotten up early to do it instead of going in the evenings; a leason learned for the next time there’s some kind of bonus item that I cant do without attached to a product I can.

Anyhoo – all’s well that ends well – I now have more Gromit mugs and tea bags than I know what to do with.

Recently I’ve been trying to get hold of a “Limited Edition” Gromit mug that’s supposed to come free with a big box of PG Tips tea bags. So far this week I have tried three seperate supermarkets, namely a Tesco‘s and two Asda‘s without success.

Tonight, after travelling to my second Asda of the day I began to think that it’s all a big con, designed in some way to lure innocent Wallace & Gromit fans into buying tea bags that they don’t need.

After the futility endured on my second attempt of the evening I decided to treat myself to a nice jar of Columbian coffee instead. That’ll teach those PG Tips marketeers exactly what they get for fucking with a hard core Gromit fan.

Maybe I was feeling cynical due to the above, but on my way out of Asda I noticed a little girl wearing a witch hat that had just been bought in the store – the label was still on it. Whatever happened to parents and kids making their Hallow’een stuff together, I wonder?

Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of my mum and assembled family trying to put together a costume made from odds and ends that were around the house, brought together with an appropriately sized cardboard box to create a worthy and cost effective costume for me to go guising in. That little girl tonight probably had her costume sorted in the short time it took to collect the tenner’s worth of plastic crap she’d picked off the shelf – hardly the mother and daughter bonding experience that tradition expects.