All I want for Christmas is... a tractor across two parking spaces

The busyness of shops in December has set Frieda Hughes’s brain to thoughts of wanting less, although perhaps what’s needed is a change of direction

Christmas Shopping

The science of making us want more

Is escalating Christmas, and I find myself wanting less.

If you add a skiing holiday, then I’ll stay at home with huskies.

If you’re going in that direction, then I am going in the other.

Crowds make me long for the spaces in between.

If you want the latest smartphone, air fryer, slow cooker or hair dryer,

Then my old ones will do. If you want to queue

For a pre-Christmas clothes sale designed to bypass

Those areas of your brain that govern restraint,

Then I’ll clear my wardrobe of all the people I once knew,

And no longer am, and give them away.

And then, on a forecourt, I see the machine

That some would rather have in their stocking

Than a pair of legs or a chocolate orange.

It overpowers thinking, turning hectares into square metres.

It inflates egos and will crush the opposition.

There are farmers out there with their Christmas lists flapping

For a John Deere Quadtrac 8RX 410, or next year maybe

The 9RX 830 which stunts this poem with the inability

To scan upon reading or end prettily.