Christmas scene, Tuesday, Dublin city centre. "Tell 'im to f---k off, it's Christmas," roars man-sized Troll into mobile. "Yeah, tell 'im it's f---kin' Christmas for Crissake," spits Lip Gloss City beside him. Tsk, tsk. And eight days still to go Great.
Draped over a sofa in "Café Revive", I consider the spoils of an hour's shopping. One desk-mountable "Executive punching bag" ("Stress got you punchy?"). And one fridge magnet : "That's QUEEN Bitch to you!" beams a 1950s-style woman. Brilliant.
What with the seasonal stress and crowding, I have transformed the table into Fortress Me by laying several newspapers out at full-width. The only blot on the landscape are Troll and Moll, now glowering at someone's head-wrecking baby who has no business being out in the first place. Doesn't his mother know it's f---kin' Christmas?
Just time then, for a glance at the headlines. "Happy kitschmas" (vicar defends old Catalan tradition of including a defecating peasant in the crib). "Jesus was asylum-seeker" (the three Wise Men were part of an assassination plot, says C of E bishop). "Christmas documentary questions the virgin birth" (Mary was raped by a Roman soldier, BBC suggests, and was only 13 when she had Jesus). "Parents banned from filming nativity plays" (paedophiles could get their hands on the footage, says Edinburgh council). Magnificent.
Right on the zeitgeist is the vicar who told a children's carol concert that Santa, Rudolph and Co would be blown to bits if they actually travelled at 3,000 times the speed of sound. Probably blended with the reindeer pâté being sold at Fortnum & Mason as "farm-raised relative of Rudolph".
None of it mitigated by the news that Rudolph and Co are girls - no, not big girls' blouses. . . You didn't know? That only the female reindeer have their antlers at Christmas time and ergo, Rudolph is a woman? So on top of everything else, we have to pull a big fat guy around the world in record time? Ho ho ho.
You need cheering up? Right, log on to your Christmas e-cards. Look, here's one from Nestlé's: "Happy Christmas from Nestlé", it says, followed by a festive picture of a cup of coffee in a Nestlé-branded paper cup next to a Kit-Kat. Marvellous. And looking like a winner in the Guardian's competition for crappiest corporate e-card.
Not much done, a lot to do. Getting desperate for coping advice so turn to the Sunday glossies.
Here's Beauty Notebook. "Maybe you don't think beauty has much in common with getting rat-arsed. . .", it begins. ". . .Intoxicate your lids with Fudge's Daiquiri eyeshadow".
And if too much champagne gives you heartburn? Add a drop of amaretto and teaspoon of sugar.
Simple solutions for stunning gift-wrap? Fetch brightly coloured tissue paper, then some white paper which has had a simple tracery design cut into it, cut into lengths about 1 cm long then fold in concertina fashion and. . . sorry, lost you there around the tracery bit.
Advice on gifts? Christmas hampers are out, I hope you know. "They are cumbersome, inflexible, weighty and scratchy to carry across fields and stiles. . .", says the intrepid Financial Times. So why not make your own feather-light food parcels with "sheets of rice paper and gold leaf, biscuit cutters and a handful of chocolate coins, packets of saffron threads and dried porcini"? Or not.
"Go nuts this Christmas", urges the Telegraph, devoting a full page to its "Object of Desire" - a nut-hammer. Indeed. By now, I too am baring teeth at the head-wrecking baby. Baby senses hostility and shrinks in horror from that dark, evil witch with the executive punching bag, queen bitch fridge magnet and big table all to herself.
WHAT are we like? A Guardian style writer empathises with a reader's "persecutory guilt" about galloping conspicuous consumption. "For the worst afflicted, it feels necessary to combat the festive season by sitting on a hard-backed chair reading Proust. . ." But, she asks, is the greater good served by attacks on festive joy? Did anyone lie on their deathbed and wish they'd cut back on the tinsel or spent less on Aunty Maud? No, she decides. Proust, after all, will come into his own in January.
I'm an undecided. Everything is relative. That's why I'm not sure if the frantic, pre-Christmas glutfest is optimum scheduling for an uncomfortable documentary on the sweat shops and export factories of Bangladesh, source of much of the logo-ed booty piling up under glittering trees everywhere.
Race to the Bottom came about after Ronan Tynan and Anne Daly read a two-paragraph report about 51 workers - mostly women and girls, some as young as 10 - who were burned to death behind locked doors and barred windows in a Bangladeshi factory fire.
The catastrophe changed nothing. Big stores and brands continue to play developing countries against each other, squeezing out more and more for less and less. In places where families of 10 depend on a woman's earnings, workers choking on filthy air bring home far less than survival wages.
"We were cheap labour once," recalls a Derry woman. For a steadying perspective, tune into TG4 at 9.05 tonight. But no doubt the majority channel has plans to repeat it - in Proust-time.