by Henry VIII joins the Boxing Day rush and discovers a crowd with less mercy than any army he ever led
I have led men into battle at dawn against superior numbers. None of it prepared me for the doors opening at Westfield on Boxing Day.
The Doors
I arrived at half past seven, believing this an early hour, and found a queue already stretching around the building, coats zipped, coffee cups clutched, the collective expression of people who had trained for this moment the way I once trained cavalry, except with considerably more actual enthusiasm than most of my soldiers ever showed me personally.
The Charge
When the doors opened, the crowd surged forward with a coordinated intensity I have only previously witnessed on an actual battlefield, and I found myself swept along rather than walking, carried past a table of discounted saucepans by sheer collective momentum, unable to stop even had I wanted to, which, briefly, I did.
The Last One
I reached for a jumper reduced from sixty pounds to eighteen and found my hand arriving at the exact same moment as a woman’s hand from the opposite direction, and we regarded each other in total silence for a full second before she said, quite calmly, considering, that she saw it first. I have negotiated the surrender of entire garrisons with less genuine menace than that sentence carried.
The Concession
I let her have the jumper. Some battles are not worth the cost, a lesson I learned considerably later in my original life than I would have liked, usually at the expense of an actual nation rather than an actual jumper. She thanked me, genuinely, and told me there was another one in a different colour on a rail near the till, information I would not have discovered without her, and which I now consider a form of diplomatic tribute freely given.
The Til
The queue for the till took forty minutes, snaking twice around the shop floor, staffed by three visibly exhausted assistants moving with the grim efficiency of men who have accepted their fate and simply wish to survive the day. I told the cashier, a young man named Femi, that I had once organised the logistics of an entire royal progress across six counties. Femi said that sounded easier than today, and I did not disagree with him.
The Debrief
Femi told me, once the queue finally cleared, that this was considered a quiet year compared to some he remembered, a claim I chose to believe purely out of self preservation. I left with one jumper, a headache, and a genuine new respect for anyone who works retail during the festive season, a group I now consider more resilient than most soldiers I commanded personally.
I have since started arriving even earlier for any sale I actually care about, a strategy Femi tells me is the only genuine defence against the crowd. Further seasonal chaos of this exact stripe is catalogued permanently over on the homepage. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: six pound croissants sold, again, entirely on principle, the nation’s traditional and expensive response to any change in weather, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
