Ahead of his time.

Well I really needed to crack on with Zig’s  little Santa list. It appears that the thing he wants is not available in Oz yet.... Begs the question really about how he even knows it exits.

Anyway there are a number of sites in OZ which will facilitate the delivery of the ‘things’, after sourcing it from either the USA or the UK, but they would not give any indication that it would be here in time, instead they were positively pessimistic about it getting a seat on Santa’s sleigh.

So I went back to John Lewis online where I have been known to do the odd bit of shopping while in London and bugger me, there it was in their toy section. It is all ordered and paid for and on its way, and even after paying them 25 pounds to deliver it, and working out the exchange rate – yeh Steve was working the calculator over my shoulder, it was just a little cheaper than going with the local company.

I am always surprised that buying online here is so much more difficult. We bought everything online in London, appliances, lights, clothes, groceries, even literally the kitchen sink. Often there was no overt delivery charge, I imagine it was just sort of tagged onto the total before a price was given. John Lewis would deliver for nothing to your house or the closest Waitrose store, as they had really embraced the online shopping thing. In fact they had gone so far as to have their department stores set up as displays for what was possible online. I went in once to buy a couple of coffee mugs that were online and I thought that as I was passing I would just go in and grab ‘em, but they were ONLY available online.

I reckon Aussies might be a bit cynical about buying that thing in the brown paper bag. We like to see things and feel and smell ‘em, and let’s face it, it is a pain in the bum thinking about sending stuff back that doesn’t fit of is just plain ugly in the flesh. I have bought lots of stuff online and only ever have I sent one thing back, and that was mostly cos it was expensive and the people I spoke to were a bit shitful. Generally if the stuff is no good, I just hide it away or give it away. And it’s easy here to shop, generally the parking is no trouble and there is so little traffic and when you get home you just park in your garage and walk the stuff straight into your house. In London I would drive through the shitful traffic and spend ages looking for a park, pay an exorbitant fee and then rush in grab the stuff and drive home to park god knows how far from my front door. Instead I could tap away and wait for somebody to troop the stuff up my stairs while I watched the tellie. Lovely!

It’s all about the local culture I guess.

Anyway combining the Aussie ‘never say die spirit’ and the online tapping to Blighty, means that Ziggy is sorted!!

One down and it was a tricky one. Yippee.