10 sleeps to go - The 'Autumn and Winter' catalogue...

It seemed that I spent half of the year waiting for the ‘Autumn and Winter’ catalogue to arrive and the other half looking through it. Everyone had one; my mum, my gran, my aunties and my mum’s friends – which meant that they were all agents and on commission. No, not 007 or Napoleon Solo and ‘commission’ was 10% of sales to be spent on catalogue goods and nothing to do with class ‘B’ drugs.

Of course the great thing about the ‘Autumn and Winter’ was that at the very back were the toys. In summer the back was tools and garden implements; but coming up to Christmas it was all train sets, Scalectrix, rockets and dolls. Beyond that were the hampers and then the index – but I never ventured that far.

From October onward I spent my time gazing at the toys in the catalogue. My letter to Father Christmas not only detailed what I wanted, but the page number, item number, and just how much it would cost over twenty weeks of easy repayments. It was heaven and a precursor of online shopping, without the online bit as it all was made to happen by order form and snail mail in pre-paid envelopes.

Everything was available in the catalogue; from suits to suites, televisions to Tupperware, shoes to shavers. But for me it was always the toys, the anticipation of Christmas and the back of the thick, hard to lift, full-colour book, which held me spellbound. At least it was... until one day I noticed all those pretty ladies in corsets and nightwear.

But I’ll save that for another post.