A hint of despair creeps into CHRIS BENNETT’s voice.
FEW things in life are at once more useful and more trying than energetic supermarket managers. Like the honourable members of the legal and medical professions they can get in the way of life, but life would be a lot more threadbare without them.
Close to where I live is a small group of businesses and an admirable clinic, all offering the things one needs but does not necessarily want. The original name of the place was the Munster Trading Post, a name which has, sadly, vanished into the scant pages of our history.
The supermarket has recently undergone a sort of management reshuffle; that, of course, means we all start playing games like Find the Eggs and Guess where the Washing Powder is; maybe this manifestation of the new broom is a sort of exercise in keeping the customers on their toes.
Whether or not the customer wishes to be kept on her toes is another matter.
Supermarkets, and their colossal children, shopping malls, are an interesting phenomenon. During a recent visit to the
It is huge, but it is at least practical, down-to-earth and relatively unpretentious; unlike the V & A Waterfront in Cape Town, which always reminds me of a splendid comment by Raymond Mortimer (1895-1980), an English writer and literary critic, commenting on a Paris restaurant, a subject close to his heart, “The food is too rich and so are the customers”.
Familiarity breeds contempt, or so they say. I prefer the line from a play by the another English writer, the Jacobean playwright Shackerley Marmion, “Familiarity begets boldness”.
Familiarity is comforting and reassuring, and seldom more so than in the case of the supermarket. I like going there because it is a tiny slice of social interaction, a place where I know the names of the captain and some of his crew. Change things around and it makes me feel unwelcome, as though I were an intruder.
You may well laugh at me for taking supermarkets too seriously, and I rather hope that you do, but then at the same time I for one would not choose to live too far from all the boring necessities. Supermarkets are the smoothing irons of life.
As for the shopping malls, well they do at least control the weather. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, as another English writer said, and sometimes too wet.
Over the past weekend I read quite a lot about our new stadiums, or stadia if you prefer. The big question seems to be what to do with them after the football party is over. Well, how about putting a roof over them and converting them into shopping centres? At least that would pay for their keep, which, taking my cottage as a sort of yardstick (should that be metrestick?) cannot be inconsiderable. In fact I imagine it is alarming.
Just leave the eggs where they have always been, please.
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