It’s Friday evening so naturally I’m shopping at Morrisons, Bromsgrove.
Wild party animal that I am.
I’ve stopped off to have fun do the shopping on the way to pick up The Lovely S from work; she doesn’t finish until 20.15.
My boundaries of disbelief are under threat from a couple of directions.
Firstly, Morrisons management.
They’re twisted.
The store has two aisles near the exit that are designated as ‘express’ check-outs.
But they’re the two slowest aisles in the store.
The tills are designated as ‘Hand Baskets Only’ – and that’s great because by and large that’s the way it works.
But they’re still the two slowest aisles in the store.
Why?
Because the management (did I mention that they’re twisted?) put the slowest members of staff on the stores payroll on these tills.
Really!
Twenty six minutes to process the contents of four shopping baskets.
I kid you not.
Twenty six minutes!
But…
But this evening I didn’t mind.
Oh no.
I didn’t mind because (and this is the second reason my boundaries of disbelief have been tested this evening)…
I was in front of a group of…
SuperChavs! (innit).
Look, what I’m about to say isn’t sexist, I’m just stating what I saw.
Five Chavettes – actually, SuperChavette – queuing behind me.
13 years old.
Lamb dressed as mutton; floating on a cloud of whatever cheap, nasty, tacky perfume they could spray on for free at the Boots Tester counter.
Garishly coloured, spangly tops; black. skin-tight slacks, open-toed sandals-with-heels.
Accents I can only describe as ‘Brummie-Lite’.
(‘Wotcha do a’school to die Shaz?’ that kind of thing)
Fake tannery underneath layers of makeup applied by builders’ trowel or powder-puffs the size of a bathroom sponge.
Hair styles that must have taken hours to gain the appearance of being so sculpted.
Each of these SuperChavettes carries a bottle of Lambrusco or similar whilst muttering almost silently how unworried they are about getting ID’d.
Guess what?
They got ID’d.
‘I’ve left it in moy car.’ Said the Senior SuperChavette.
‘That’s fine,’ said the checkout supervisor who had spotted the girls from a distance and intervened across the top of the store’s Slowest Checkout Operator.
‘I’ll wait here while you go out to the car park and get it.’
Unfortunately I couldn’t hear precisely what happened next because I had to finish packing my seven items of shopping and leave – I was beginning to look like either a sinister stalker or an escapee from the community mental health team.
But as I was driving out of the car park I did see all of the SuperChavettes leaving the store.
Sans bottles of wine.
Friday evening in Bromsgrove, ah we really know how to rock the world.