Shopping in Liverpool is a lightweight story apart from the brief reminiscence about how Li had kidnapped Marion when he was still a bitter Renegade with a price on his head. Mostly it is a fantastic shopping list of the sort of Christmas presents it would be nice to buy with unlimited funds to buy them with.

With Liverpool’s finest shops at her disposal, Marion heads first to John Lewis’s. I am talking, of course, of the original Liverpool store on Renshaw Street, with the famous ‘statue exceedingly bare’ above the main entrance. They have, in recent years, moved into a state of the art glass fronted superstore in the newly refurbished Paradise Street area. I wonder if I’m the only one who is a bit nostalgic for the old Liverpool with the tatty old bus station and the little park with the Yellow Submarine statue at the bottom end, and Lewis’s in the old art deco building that was such a reminder of a more refined way of shopping. Checking it out on the net, it seems they dumped a lot of jobs with the move, too. So perhaps the old days were better in other ways, too.

Williamson Place, where Marion found a jeweller who could fulfil her Christmas present order has also changed a lot. It now has a modern fountain in the middle of it. Marion lived in Liverpool in the early 1990s, and these trips back there are all around about 1995 or so, before all the redevelopment of the city centre that preceded the 08 City of Culture.

Marion’s shopping list that she recites in her sleep does rather suggest a bit of an obsessive behaviour pattern in her, especially when it is set beside her shopping madness before she left for Gallifrey, buying up cornflakes, tea bags and chocolate biscuits as if they are going out of business. Put it down to a little eccentricity on her part and not signs of a serious mental condition. Too many people these days seem to be labelled with things like OCD, when they just have an endearing little quirk. And after all, who doesn’t panic a bit when stilton, puddings and Christmas crackers all loom ahead on the shopping list.

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