I will never, ever book tickets at an Odeon cinema again. I should have learnt from the Moulin Rouge experience, but foolishly logged on to its slow site again this morning to get tickets for Harry Potter.

The first five minutes were spent trying to get the front page menu working so I could select Chelmsford Cinema. When that eventually worked, it took me all the way through to confirming the seats, and then threw up an error. I reverted to telephone booking, and joined a queue for the automated machines because the recorded message said the queues were shorter. It’s true, they were, but it took ten minutes to go through the slow slow slooooow steps necessary to be finally told that the seats that had been available online had now been sold - no doubt while I was going through the steps. It then thanked me for booking seats for the two thirty showing (I was going for quarter to ten). I gave up, and got into the queue for an operator, and at the same time downloaded Netscape Navigator and Opera, just in case the web problem was my browser. It wasn’t. The site was even less suited to these.

Returning to Internet Explorer, I got as far as giving it my credit card details and clicking the Proceed button. Success? No - just a message saying the site couldn’t contact the cinema to confirm my seats really were available. By now I’d got to speak to an operator, but pretty much every seat in the cinema had gone, apart from a couple up at the front. She suggested booking me in on another day. I put down the phone. The upshot is that I’m going to the Bluewater cinema instead. It’s over in the next county, and means using the Dartford Tunnel, but the tickets were booked in four minutes flat. Goodbye Odeon. You wasted almost forty minutes of my time this morning - half the length of some films. Nice knowing you.

That frustrating experience done with, I went to the motor spares shop in Galleywood and bought some new lisght for the car. I took them round to mum’s, and bribed Andrew into fitting them for mye by making him a cup of tea. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure there was anything wrong with the original lights, as putting the new ones in had no effect intil we whacked the side of the car. A loose connection, perhaps. Oh, well, at least it means I have some spare bulbs.

I flopped around in front of Sky with cake and tea until six, then headed out to Bluewater with Paul so we could get some more Christmas shopping done before the film.

They’ve done well with the lights this year. The grazing reindeer, made of sticks and looking like escaped cast members of the Blair Witch Project, had been resurrected and put out on every roundabout. The trees’ branches were traced with little fairy lights, and inside the malls things had been kept to a tasteful minimum, with just some false topiary.

We hadn’t accounted on the shops closing at eight, an hour and a half before our film, but to be honest it was just as well that they did, as most of the restaurants seemed to close at the same time. Even Burger King pulled down its shutters. The restaurants by the cinema were packed, with queues of forty minutes to an hour streaming out through their doors. I thought we were going to have to drive out somewhere - probably to the services back through the tunnel, and then come back again for the film. We got into Ed’s Diner, though, sitting at the counter, which was nice, but left you feeling like you’d had a McDonalds hit. The bean burger was nice, though.

Harry Potter turned out to be a bit of a disappointment in the end. It’s a shame JK Rowling insisted they stuck so close to the book because there is no way a film can cram in that much information. The effects were everything I had expected, but there was some supremely dodgy acting. It was only the presence of people like Alan Rickman that managed to hold it all together.

We came home and listened to Tim Crook tackling the callers of late night London, slowly drifting off on the settee.

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