BOGOF

Despite the fact that my size is rapidly approaching the point at which if Jabba the Hutt spotted me eating at the same restaurant, he might lean across to one of his underlings, nudge him with his elbow and quietly say “He looks a bit portly”, this week, during my usual shopping extravagance-a, I decided to buy a packet of biscuits.

Well, they’d gone down rather well with the coffees a couple of weekends earlier and so I thought that it might be nice to restock the old Milk Chocolate Digestive supply as another soggy weekend at home loomed.

How was I to know that the sun would come out...?

What do you think I am, some kind of weather forecaster…?

The sort of person who has 24 hour access to weather reports on television…?

Oh yeah…

Right…

Anyway, I added one of those familiar tubes of delight to my shopping trolley as I strolled about the place randomly adding Unhealth Foods to it and chunnering to myself about how they’d suddenly changed all of the carts to be ones where you need to have a coin about your person and how that would probably cause me a problem one week or other, and how much I wished some of my fellow customers would put some clothes on instead of going shopping half-naked and presenting their unpleasant little (and not so little) fast-tanned bodies and their inky messages to the world unbidden.

Mind you, some of the ones wearing clothes didn’t strike me as being all that much better a sight to be seen.

God! We’re not the most sartorially astute of nations, are we, boys and girls…?

My father, bless him, always, ALWAYS, used to put on a jacket and tie to go out shopping and wouldn’t have dreamed of having things any other way.

So, after filling up my cart with all sorts of the usual rubbish that will one day no doubt come back and bite me right in the aorta, I wheeled my wagon over to the checkout and unpacked it so that I could repack it moments later once it had been bleeped and helped part me with another massive chunk of hard-earned.

Suddenly, however, everything in this rather too familiar and sad routine ground to a halt, and I was pulled from my daydreams by the checkout assistant pointing out to me that the packet of biscuits were slightly open at one end and the seam had been folded back to reveal the biscuits within which, I imagined, after such exposure were probably as soft and as soggy as my socks feel on a warm afternoon, and may indeed have been mauled and fingered by person or persons unknown.

She offered to sort out a replacement and, much to the annoyance of the now glowering queue behind me, I accepted the offer and, moments later, another girl appeared, only to then vanish almost as slowly as her legs could carry her in the direction of the biscuit aisle.

Mere minutes later, she returned brandishing a single packet of these chocolaty treats like some found Excalibur, only to then announce “They’re ‘Buy One Get One Free’ – Does he want another pack-att…?”

I noticed at this point that she hadn’t had the wherewithal to bring a second packet just in case I had indeed wished to take advantage of their kind offer, and also that there was some kind of job demarcation thing going on here so that she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) address me directly, and so the whole tedious process had to be extended still further by the duplication of the question.

Looking at the growing crowd waiting impatiently behind me, I cheerfully declined their offer of free biscuits, at which the crowd behind me seemed rather taken aback. Were they behind a madman? “It’s buy one get one free and he didn’t want the free one!” their eyes seemed to scream at me, or, at least they would have done if they had wanted to make eye contact with this obvious loon.

I did wonder, briefly, whether they couldn’t have just charged me half price for the packet I had, but decided not to pursue the idea. This was, after all, not the place for discussions of advanced mathematics. Instead I merely explained (even though it wasn’t really necessary to) that I only wanted the one packet, paid up, and went back to my car feeling more than a little nonplussed.

“Two packets of biscuits...?” I said to myself “What on Earth would I want two packets of biscuits for…? Madness!”