Christmas in Bath is adorable. Lights are strung across alleys, the entire city seems to be running on Glühwein, and the population swells as befuddlement after befuddlement of old folks gets bused in from surrounding villages to 'do a bit of shopping'.

And yet.

All this makes it a phenomenally stressful place in which to actually live. My seething temper, never far beneath the surface, regularly erupts as socially-inept hordes fanny their way around the shops, regularly pooling into gaggles of mediocrity. Entire clutches of children – the very verb that would best describe what ought to be done to their necks – roam like vapid, brutish meerkats, while oxygen thieves insist, against all the laws of common sense and physics, on attempting to push triple-decker prams along cobbled streets.

The very epicentre of this fuckwittery, it would appear, is Marks & Spencer. Take one part Wether's Originals, one part KFC and three parts mermaid, compress to a quantum singularity, and you have the apparent effect of one regular-sized M&S to attract the old, the chav and the plain suggestible.

Today, a mother-and-daughter duo were walking side-by-side, their combined bodies plus a hip-mounted basket each taking up the entire width of the aisle, as the mother repeatedly vouchsafed to her daughter "I wish it was in brown! Yeah, I wish it was in brown!" Seriously, she said this four times, each time taking the time to stop, make eye contact with her spawn, and clutch – there's that word again – her by the arm just to make sure she really got the frigging point that – all together now – she wished it was in brown. Needless to say, I killed them both.

Feel free to judge me.