My wife thinks I am like Scrooge because I don't like what Christmas has become

The run-up to Christmas seemed to begin just before Halloween ... and since then it has got worse.

Over the course of the last two days I have had to visit several shops and shopping centres and I cannot believe what people are buying ... or in some cases, not buying. Yesterday I fell foul of a shopping 'committee'. You know what I am talking about; it is a group of people – usually related and ranging in age from two to ninety – who go shopping together. Every purchase has to be examined, discussed, handled, put back, picked up again ... and then finally rejected after every member of the group has had the opportunity to have their 'input'. This can take anything from two or three minutes to an hour, during which time the group and all their attendant paraphernalia block the only way you can get through from one part of the shop to another. (In yesterday's instance the detritus this group had with them consisted of a double baby buggy, a shopping trolley, and what I understand is called a rollator [a sort of wheeled Zimmer frame with brakes and a seat].) Having rejected almost everything that they had looked at, every member of the group them photographed each rejected item on their mobile phones so that they could discuss what they had seen when they got home!

Driving has also become very difficult in and around London. Today I sat in a queue approaching a roundabout on a main road for ten minutes because people were queuing around the roundabout and onto the road to get into the car park of a large superstore. The car park was full, but drivers trying to get into it managed to block the roundabout with their cars ... with the result that other people could not get out of the car park! I got caught up in the chaos even though I was not going to the superstore.

I have seen numerous minor accidents where cars have bumped into each other in traffic queues or trying to park in car parks; I have seen (and heard) arguments between grown adults about who had been waiting longer for the single car parking space that had just become vacant; and I have witnesses trolley rage in a supermarket when someone tried to change to a different – and possibly faster-moving – checkout queue just as someone else tried to join that queue.

All of this is done to the seemingly endless soundtrack of 'White Christmas', 'Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer', or some other saccharine-sounding Christmas music.

I know that Christmas was different when I was young, and sometimes it is easy to say that it was better. In the glow of nostalgic hindsight it probably seems as if it was ... but I suspect that it was not. That said, the build-up to Christmas started at the beginning of December and the 'panic' did not really start until a week before 25th December. I don't like what Christmas has become ... and if that makes me a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge then so be it. When 'A Christmas Carol' appears on our screens over the Christmas holiday – as not doubt it will do – I will be hoping that poor old Scrooge gets an uninterrupted night's sleep and misses all the excitement of the ghostly visits.

PS. Oscar Wilde is reputed to have once said that 'One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.' I feel very much the same about some of Dickens’s more mawkish passages in 'A Christmas Carol'. Am I alone in sometimes wishing I could give Tiny Tim a good smack around the ear for being so 'nice' about Scrooge?