i exited the lift on the fifth floor of myer, ostensibly to research the prices of certain books and CDs, but suddenly i was ensnared in a maze of festive food. the happy little christmas elves were setting up the christmas department: shelf after shelf of chocolate, and marzipan, and gingerbread, and stollen, and chocolate covered marzipan, and chocolate covered gingerbread, and marzipan stollen… after my head stopped spinning around and i regained the ability to walk, i noted that there were yet more shelves of condiments and fruit jellies, but i was already halfway to the counter with a bag of lindt christmas almonds: roasted almonds in nougat and milk chocolate, with cinnamon and coriander. (the nougat is a thin crunchy shell. the chocolate is warm and spicy. the almond, eh, it is an almond.)

the backstory is, i bought a bag of these three years ago, actually two bags, because the first one was so amazing that i had to have another in the pantry, for later. but this was the time of the pantry moths, and when i finally opened up the bag, i found that each chocolate had become luxury accommodation to at least one burrowing pantry moth worm. gah! the horror! it was late january, so christmas chocolates were no longer available, not even in the 50% off discount bin, and in fact i would not see this christmas almond variety for two more years.

so you see why i had to immediately buy some, and eat half a dozen of them while listening to CDs at the listening station. oh public headphones, how you make my ears itch!

david jones food hall made me twitch; their christmas display included a handsome white tin containing a kilogram (“1’000g”) of stollen, for just under , and a very large chocolate covered gingerbread pretzel (a comparative bargain at .95). those wacky germans! i really wanted the jar of fortnum&mason christmas spiced preserve, “extremely full of plums, redcurrants, strawberries and raspberries” — which made me think that lola had written the label copy — but then i noticed the ingredients list kicked off with cane sugar. pah. perhaps i should have made do with the long-stemmed strawberries at the fruit counter ( a kilo, and it looked like a quarter of that would be stem)

in the end, the number of christmas treats i came away with, apart from that bag of christmas almonds, was “zero”. instead i signed a credit card receipt at a record store, for new music! that isn’t yet another pearl jam bootleg! now i have discs and discs to listen to: eels, fiona apple, and in a surprising turn of events, pete murray, because i figured out that what i actually had had against him was his chin dimple.