A Supermarket Tale

A London Sainsbury's Supermarket

I never seem to pick the right queue at the supermarket check-out.  I pick the one that just opened and I wait minutes while the cashier settles himself in.  I pick the one with just one person ahead of me while all the others have two or more and as soon as it's my turn a cashiers shift change occurs. Then there is the one where the stick-on barcode has fallen off and the computer says, "No" and I have to wait until a human finds the price.  Or, the woman ahead of me spends five minutes hunting through her handbag for her loyalty card and then another ten finding her debit card.  OK, maybe those times are slightly exaggerated, but it's true -  I never choose the route to the quickest supermarket exit.

So, this morning as I approached the check-out with my basket the usual choice had to be made.  I saw they had about five registers open.  They all had two or three people plus the one being checked-out.  As I headed for the nearest one, I heard a manager telling a cashier to open register 21.  I checked the numbers.  I was at 26.   I turned and took a step toward 21, but was cut off by a fast moving woman with a full trolley.

Now, what?  I could continue on and be number one behind the woman with the full trolley or step back into my original target queue where there were two women waiting with fairly small collections of items.  I processed for a few seconds thinking what ever I do I'm going to pick the wrong one and I stepped back to where I had been.

Beating the Crowd at Borough Market

Tomatos Galore at Jubilee Market

"That's it!  Get me the hell out of here," I said to Rob. 

We had been for one of our long walks a few weekends back and had stumbled upon what we later learned was the Borough Market.  Rob loves to cook and I love to eat so in we went.  It was a Saturday morning and the market was packed with Londoners and plenty of tourists.  I hate crowds, not so much because I get claustrophobic, but because I hate people getting in my way.  I like to walk at my pace not the pace of the human cattle herd.  And, when that inevitable single human herd member totally oblivious to the rest of the herd around them stops in the narrow pathway to read a text, chat to a friend or read a map, my blood pressure spikes and I fear for their life.

We had already found it impossible to get anywhere near most of the stands to sample the goods.  A photo was impossible because a head was always popping into the picture.  I'd been using my arm like a crowbar to pry a path through and then that human cow did it.  She was 30 something, maybe Italian and right in front of me.  We were crammed in a narrow aisle between two opposing stands and a pillar and the next thing I knew, dead stop and the mobile in her hand comes up to her face.  A text had arrived!