Santa

I know just how that New Mr Clarke at Asda feels. Some days it’s a sad and lonely business running a terrible shop with ignorant drooling customers - and based as I am in Westminster I can really empathise with this.

It’s no wonder Wally-Mart, or whoever it was that owns Mr Clarke, prefers to try and sneak out its sales numbers mid-afternoon in the hope nobody will notice. I might have missed them myself but for accidentally switching on an hour early for The Archers.

Gave me quite a shock - for a moment I thought the Ambridge Village Shop was showing a 5.8% fall in sales. I mean, that would never happen. Not unless those charming volunteers who run it had completely lost the plot and (perhaps following a succession of inept and failed management teams) entirely failed to understand the changing needs of their customers.

Anyway, it’s been a busy week at Pat’s Mart. Pavlina’s cousin Sergei has a fake Bulgarian GoPro camera and offered to shoot my Christmas campaign for me. My original plan was to get some cute animals on a garden swing worrying about Mrs Claus being late at the toy factory, but Sergei said that would simply be trite, hackneyed and nauseating.

So instead we have me standing out front in a Santa hat, reading out a list of specials (Frozen Turkey Crowns £9.99, Preparation H £3.49) with Pavlina up a ladder showering me with pieces of torn-up Andrex (£3.25 for six) and jingling some sleigh bells.

It pretty much blew my £7.48 marketing budget for the third quarter, but the result was quite a lot better than Asda’s Christmas ad. I should really set my sights a bit higher next year.