Supermarkets

When I was younger my mother used to take me food shopping at our local Sainsbury's. Being the 1970's, there were no huge towering shopping centres. Sainsbury's, like all other high street retailers at the time, had shops – surprisingly, in the high street. There is always a danger when reminiscing that one can look back on the past through rose tinted spectacles, but in relation to retail it really was a much more innocent age. There were no locks that required money to be put in them to release a shopping trolley, there wasn't even any security to stop you leaving the shop with one. People back then didn't steal shopping trolleys because no one had a use for them, except the homeless, and they wouldn't go into supermarkets because they had no money.

I can clearly remember an old man of about eighty years old, sitting on the pavement, wrapped in rags with a dirty mug in front him begging for change as we entered our supermarket one day.

'Kick him!', my mother barked at me.

'But he's an old defenceless man Mum', I retorted.

'You spineless shit!', my Mother spat back, and in one action lent over and smacked the old man hard across the face.

This memory has stayed with me for quite some time, and I recently recalled it during an all night drugs binge at a local flower shop. It haunted me. Why did my mother smack an old crumpled man? It later transpired that the old man was a local tax inspector who sold fish at the weekends to top up his civil servants wage. One Saturday he sold my mother an old fish, which he assured her was fresh only the month before. My mother cooked the aquatic bird for my father who measured paper in Surrey five days a week. The underwater undergarment was foul and poisonous and caused my father to walk with a slight stoop for quite some time.

If my mother had parted with this information earlier rather than waiting until I was fifty-six, it could have eased my anxiety in manhood.

During my teenage years my friend Joth Quickney went one further. Having seen two sleeping tramps, or “Pivets” as we liked to call them, he raced over to them and produced a bowl of melted cheese which he just happened to be carrying. The two “Pivets” screamed with delight, and thinking their cheese boat had come in, stood up to receive the promised goods. Joth then opened his shirt to expose his nipple, lent forward and promptly dipped it into the rue. He then handed them the bowl and told them to make a song up about it within two hours otherwise he would fool a blind man into staring at the mixture. Fifty two minutes later they came back with an impressive song which was actually quite complicated and involved some two part harmonies. I forget the tune now, but Joth loved it and sang it for approximately two years after that.