It was an accident waiting to happen. The Big Issue salesman was perched on one of those flimsy, three-legged folding green canvas stools. On his knee, snug in a blanket, was a large spotted dog.

His left hand held a sample of the publication; his right a cigarette.

He was tired, evident by his drooping head, closed eyes and floppy hands that were lifted, opened and tautened respectively as he fought the desire to slumber.

Not even the Town Crier in full voice at Carfax or shoppers passing close to his knees, shoppers that are usually reliable targets as they entered the Queen Street branch of Marks & Spencer, could banish the tiredness.

It seems perverse, but I watched for several minutes expecting the flimsy stool to collapse as the man's weight shifted.

Would the dog yelp or dash for safety as the weight of its master fell about its ears?

Would it cause mayhem and terrify the children, thus making the owner liable for police retribution by failing to keep a dog under proper control? Would he drop the magazine?

Would he burn himself on that unguarded cigarette?

Would anyone help him back to his stool?

Should I rouse him by buying a Big Issue?

It would be neighbourly, but a colleague had already sold me one.

Surely two copies would be excessive. Perhaps I should leave.

Happily, I did not hear any human flesh crashing to the pavement or dog barking as I headed into the Westgate Centre.

Yet it was an accident waiting to happen. I wonder if it did.

"Why so early?" I asked the friend who called on me to don my Father Christmas suit this week. "It seems ages to Christmas - especially for youngsters; every day is like a year."

The reason was their mothers' and children's group winds down for the term today and this was the final opportunity for their festive bun fight.

It would be wrong to say everything went well. Asking three- and four-year-olds to decide what they wanted in their stockings was like pulling milk teeth.

There was every chance preferences would change a hundredfold before December 25.

Such was the mastery of disguise, the children accepted the man behind the whiskers was the real thing - that is apart from Jemma with a J', as she announced herself, four years old and three feet of doubts and questions.

"You're not the real Father Christmas," she declared.

"What makes you think that?" I replied, preceding these words with a convincing Yo, Ho, Ho!' "Because Father Christmas is making toys with his elves in Lapland," she replied. (I resisted correcting her that the workshop was at the North Pole.) "Who told you that?"

"I phoned him yesterday," she said, wide-eyed and with great conviction, while her mother, standing behind, shook her head vigorously, indicating Jemma's fertile imagination was clouding the truth.

"You're not fat. Father Christmas is."

Then, like some prosecuting barrister pressing home the advantage, she added: "You're thin!"

The bathroom scales might argue that point, but I wasn't prepared to contradict.

Neither did I withhold her gift because she was a pesky unbeliever. In fact, I warmed instantly to Jemma with a J.

In a previous incarnation, I was a journalism tutor, working for a group of which the Oxford Mail was part. One young hopeful was a football nut' from Liverpool.

To escape academic subjects during breaks at weekend schools, we would test each other on vital facts like naming 12 goalkeepers to play for England since 1960; the First Division club (now the Premier League) with the most Scotsmen in its team, and the FA Cup finalists (winners and runners-up) since 1923. Rivalry was intense.

He has gone on to greater things, but I wonder if today he would prefer to have only this kind of sports trivia to affect his sleep.

He is Brian Barwick, chief executive of the Football Association.