Usually when you see a sixty-year-old woman on all fours grunting you expect them to be looking for a panic button. Well, in Tesco on Friday evening it was in fact to be part of a bigger scene of events that would unfurl leaving me helpless to do anything else but rush home and throw plans of shepherd’s pie and garden mint peas to one side, and scrawl down these few and not every profound words.
I know I’m old fashioned, I still think that chav girls are really wearing lockets of purity, instead of clunky gold chains which double up to form weapons on happy-slapping unsuspecting victims. But, I appreciate that the half-term holiday for parents is like having liquid led slowly dripped into their stomach. During the week of snow and blizzards the schools shut, leaving kids across the country having a quarter term break whilst the whole country collapsed and we waited for Gordon Brown to phone up Spain and effectively say ‘can you pass the salt’. Really what the nation should be saying is “get back to school you little shits and stop throwing snowballs at my hanging baskets.” In this weather I trudged down to Tesco to join in panic buying, thus queuing for thirty minutes to self pack and scan, making no progress because the local Fagin is trying to put a widescreen telly through as button mushrooms.
Whilst it enrages me that people stock buy on bread milk and so on, leaving no essentials for anyone else, I don’t think it is panic buying is it? Panic buying is leaving the supermarket with thirty mars bars, three kit-kats and a pot of goose fat. Yet, interestingly we are the only nation who bond on a negative, who love to have a moan, we get pleasure from it.
“How was your day Dave?”
“Shit, how was your day Steve?”
“Shit, let’s go to the pub Dave?”
Happy.
Steve and Dave leave with endorphins slowly leaking into their blood stream as they moan about the real effects that Sharia Law would have on this Country. Standing in a supermarket queue, is where you can see first hand the irrational thinking we have become victims of. Two guys stood in front of me, discussing Miley Cyrus alleged racist pose in a photograph. What I hate is the (what I call) ‘pub philosophy’ these two men indulged in, which now we insist is polluted into our societies general reasoning for misbehaviour.
“She wasn’t racist, she was just too thick to realise that what she had said could be construed as racist.”
I don’t want to come across as overly lefty and liberal, but I find that highly dangerous thinking. If I went out into the street, grabbed someone and started to stab them, but shouted loudly, ‘you have got to let me off, I am thick as shit.' Would i get away with it?
We can complain about the culture which we live in quite easily, we can write about it in The Guardian whilst we eat our humus, we can analyse it. But can we change it?
The generation that surrounds us now fit into two clear brigades.
THE BUT
‘I’m not judging…but’ and the other category
WHAT NEXT?
‘They're expanding the congestion charge, what next a tax on sneezing?’
They’re ruining the soul of this land. And what these people claim might be true, but we are a brief sneeze in time, and we spend most of it defining ourselves by pettiness.
Snow Patrol wrote a song on their album ‘Eyes Open’ entitled ‘You could be happy’ poetically describing the wish of one person to another; ‘take a glorious bite out of the whole world’ after so many years of unhappiness, this was the author’s final wish.
It seems we do live in this ever expanding culture of depressing the good we witness with the word BUT, and make their own misery on hearing the news with WHAT NEXT?
When humour and nature collide, a natural moment of profound joy is witnessed and is the only real antidote to the gloom (self-imposed or not) we are surrounded by.
Thus I find myself back in Tesco, paying at long last for my items, when the lady before me drops her four-pint of fully pasteurised milk creating a large dairy tidal wave across the floor. This woman had queued for the same time as everybody else, she was in just as much of a rush to get home and put her twenty-three loaves of bread in the freezer, so this spillage was nothing short of a total inconvenience to her whole life, but gave the useless security guards that grace the store an opportunity to rush over with there safety cones bypassing the pensioner that has probably just cracked her third replaced hip (why don't they just fit a slinky in a pensioner?). The man who was behind me at the self-serve checkout, saw the incident, and quickly recognised the proverb; don’t cry over spilled milk. He saw the situation; he weighed it up, and realised he was about to make the funniest joke of the day. The old woman looked up, and before the excited man could erupt with pleasure at his comment, she said without any word:
“Say it, and I’ll but the empty bottle up where the sun don’t shine, and you don’t look like you would enjoy that.”
With woeful sorrow, the man left. But how priceless it was to see a man stripped of joy by a woman covered in cow juice. Marvellous.
Chris McGowan
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