The lessons to be learned from my Christmas to-do lists

It’s so easy to become seduced by the idea of buying more and more at this time of year, writes Laura Waddell

Ihave always loved reading lists of things and Christmas is, famously, the season of them – checked not once but twice. Perhaps best of all are inventories, full of promise and future pleasures.

“The Altamonts’ cellar, clean, tidy, and neat: from floor to ceiling, shelving and pigeonholes labelled in large, legible letters…”

This satisfying, seductive list in George Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual goes on so long, it turns the page.

Of all the lists in novels (often seen in classics where the upper classes might pack for a trip to Europe, or buy linens, glassware, and local delicacies to have shipped back home, or live in houses large enough for household staff to be replenishing a stock of things like candles and handkerchiefs), this, to my mind, is the quintessential list.

Every Christmastime, it floats at the back of my mind, as I check I have in what I need for a few days of feasting, buying what I ordinarily wouldn’t, like brandy snaps or rum flavoured cream, things that are a little old-fashioned and fussy.

A very partial snippet from the Altamont’s stock: “First, basic ingredients: wheat flour, semolina, corn flour, potato starch, tapioca, oat flakes, sugar lumps, granulated sugar, castor sugar…”. And then it’s on to tinned fish (“tuna chunks, sardines in oil, rolled anchovies…”), tinned vegetables (“garden peas, asparagus tips, button mushrooms…”), sachets of dried vegetables, rice and pasta products, and finally, once the excitement has built item by item, here comes the rich stuff, the likes of preserved meats and tinned fruit (“apricot halves, pears in syrup, cherries, peaches, plums, packs of figs, boxes of dates, dried bananas, prunes…”).

I so savoured this description of excess that it has stuck in my mind years after reading the book; each morsel, one after the other, chewed over. The combination of monotony and excess enduces a trance. It’s not, particularly that I want all of these things for myself. Many of them I definitely do not - no “copped liver, liver pate, boned meat in aspic, ox muzzle…” for me, thank you.

But the idea of such plenty is exciting in the way that the circus is exciting; the mind towering with foodstuffs is a little magical, opening eyes as big as saucers. That’s why, even when not set at Christmastime, long lists like these feel inherently festive. The mind feasts on them. The Altamont’s Cellar might as well be a land in Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, so fantastical and foreign is the concept of having a pantry stocked like that. In the Blyton books there is also excess; the Land of Take What You Please, and extraordinary, tempting if slightly frightening things like Pop Biscuits and Toffee Shocks.

If I pause for a moment to consider that there’s something ethically troubling nagging at the back of my mind – gluttony, envy, the glorification of it all – the intoxication acts as a numbing anaesthetic. Perec’s depiction of this cellar is a more adult version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which ramps up the thrill with each new food the caterpillar consumes. Here, he is eating his way through the Fortnum and Mason food hall, having already ransacked Harrods.

In his book Essayism, Brian Dillon says “I love the lists in the work of Georges Perec: they are many and various and always poised, it seems, between pure pleasure in the descriptive act of noting in series, and a darker sense that the list will never be done with, and may well